Social spirit

Image of the Three Estates under the Trinity in heaven (Tyrol, 1800) Oratores: I with my teaching, convert many people to God. Bellatores: I, with my might, brought much land and people to myself. Laboratores: Ha! Ha! When God and I did nothing, you two had nothing to eat!

Social spirit (also known as genius of society) is the spiritual unity of people who feel themselves to be one at the level of thought (ideal); the power center of society, creating unity around itself and acting as a kind of pole of social activity and transformation; an organ of collective unity capable for performing a number of important functions in the life of society.

Development of the concept

The concept of social spirit did not play a significant role in philosophical and socio-political thought for a long time, and the phenomenon itself was little studied as something holistic and independent, if not to take into account the reasoning of Gustave Le Bon about the collective soul and Max Weber about the influence of religious confessions on the economic life of society, as well as team building practice in the mid-twentieth century. The concept of social spirit has some common characteristics with such a sociological concept introduced by Emile Durkheim as collective effervescence—causing excitement of individual people, serving to unite the group on the basis of a common thought or idea and motivating everyone to participate in the same action. However, historical and philosophical analysis showed that the implicit social dimension in the spirit was articulated by different authors, but scientific justification for the categorical status of the social spirit began mainly in the first decades of the 21st century in connection with the development of social education.

The concept of social spirit is constructed by analogy with the terms well known in the history of the development of humanitarian thought: Genius loci, Zeitgeist, Spirit of Law, National spirit, World spirit, Genius of the nation and categorizes such concepts as Aristocratic Spirit, Spirit of Chivalry, Team Spirit and so on. It is noted that although some similarities can be seen between animistic ideas about spirits influencing people's lives and the metaphorical designation of complex abstract concepts in philosophical and sociological discourse, it must be borne in mind that these are different concepts related to different cultural and philosophical traditions, to different periods of development of human thinking. Sociological thought, using the animistic concept of spirit as a metaphor to describe collective identity, makes this concept more accessible to the language of human thought. The social spirit appears as the concentration and intensity of sociality, which make it obvious and display it as one of the tools of social development. The need to have a holistic understanding of the social spirit can be justified by the fact that processes taking place in the public sphere of society and having an ambivalent nature (destructive or constructive) are increasingly influencing public life.

Structure

The structure of the social spirit consists of social consciousness (knowledge, norms, etc.) and the collective unconscious (values, ideals, etc., encoded in norms as storage units). These two basic parts do not have a sharp boundary, due to the presence of a special intermediate layer that communicates between social consciousness and the unconscious.

In addition to the internal structure of the social spirit, an external structure is also distinguished, namely, two aspects of the latter one: supranational and subnational: the first unites people at the international level, the second differentiates in the national spirit its constituent fragments, corresponding to various social groups within one nation or state. In the second case, we can talk about the structure of social spirits, united by a common national spirit, for example, the social spirit of the elites and the social spirit of the masses:

• elites tend to strive to maintain their status in economic and political power, therefore they tend to defend their interests, even to the detriment of the majority, passing them off as the interests of the national society as a whole and considering themselves a more competent and significant part of it than "ordinary" compatriots;
• the masses are characterized by a desire to satisfy their needs, determined more by emotions and intuition than by rational considerations, which recede into the backside. This determines the difference in the essential characteristics of the social spirit of the elites and the social spirit of the masses: the first is more reasonable and intellectually balanced, the second is more irrational and subject to collective emotions, such as anger, delight, fear, etc.

In addition to the above-described elite-mass dichotomy, the national spirit unites, like puzzles, many subnational spirits, or the spirits of social groups and associations. More revealingly, the system of social spirits is manifested in trichotomy, in a universal three-part socio-ideological model dividing national societies into symbolical social strata: oratores, bellatores and laboratores. Against the background of this symbolic model, well known since the Middle Ages, one can determine the characteristics of the Genius of each of these societies, as well as the Social Spirit relevant to them:

A 13th-century French representation of the tripartite social order of the Middle Ages – Oratores ("those who pray"), Bellatores ("those who fight"), and Laboratores ("those who work").

• the social spirit of laboratores is characterized by such qualities as partnership and constructive interaction, hard work and diligence in achieving results, practicality of thinking, simplicity and modesty in everyday life, priority of family and traditional family values, respect for church authorities;
• the social spirit of oratores is characterized by the following specifications — education and skill in public speaking, leadership qualities and the ability to coordinate the work of others;
• In the social spirit of bellatores, several different positive properties are manifested — patriotism, expressed in protection from external threats, honor and discipline, leadership and mutual assistance, a disposition to an active and dangerous life.

One of the particularly significant discoveries in the description of the characteristics of the social spirit is the detection in its structure of not only creative and constructive principles, but also destructive ones that determine disintegrative tendencies in national and civil societies.

Functions

An approximate list of the functions of the social spirit includes the following points: firstly, it gives subjective unity to a certain group, when each individual member identifies himself with the group and considers its common goals to be his own; secondly, it acts as a repository of diverse information, experience and values that are the collective property of the social groups that make up national societies; thirdly, it acts as a source of mental (including sensory and volitional components) energy, giving people the ability to endure a wide variety of difficulties; fourthly, it encourages people to feel and express common joy from joint actions, that is, it promotes unity based on common feelings; fifthly, it sets the direction for the development of social groups; sixth, it performs an evaluative function, seventh — the prognostic one, etc.

See also

• National spirit