Externalized Complications

La organización social como externalización y teatralización de las funciones cerebrales, reproductivas y familiares —según la descripción de George Herbert Mead, en Mind, Self, and Society (241-42):

The human being is social in a distinguishing fashion. Physiologically he is social in relatively few responses. There are, of course, fundamental processes of propagation and of the care of the young which have been recognized as a part of the social development of human intelligence. Not only is there a physiological period of infancy, but it is so lengthened that it represents about one-third of the individual's expectation of life. Corresponding to that period, the parental relation to the individual has been increased far beyond the family; the development of schools, and of institutions, such as those involved in the church and the government, is an extension of the parental relation. That is an external illustration of the indefinite complication of simple physiological processes. We take care of an infant form and look at it from the standpoint of the mother; we see the care that is given to the mother before the birth of the child, the consideration that is given for providing proper food; we see the way in which the school is carried on so that the beginning of the education of the child starts with the first year of its life in the formation of habits which are of primary importance to it; we take into account education in the form of recreation, which comes one way or another into public control; in all these ways we can see what an elaboration there is of the immediate care which parents give to children under the most primitive conditions, and yet it is nothing but a continued complication of sets of processes which belong to the original care of the child.

This, I say, is an external picture of the sort of development that takes place in a central nervous system. There are groups of relatively simple reactions which can be made indefinitely complex by uniting them with each other in all sorts of orders, and by breaking up a complex reaction, reconstructing it in a different fashion, and uniting it with other processes. Consider the playing of musical instruments. There is an immediate tendency to rhythmic processes, to use the rhythm of the body and to emphasize certain sounds, movements which can be found among the gorillas. Then comes the possibility of picking to pieces the action of the whole body, the construction of elaborate dances, the relation of the dance to sound which appears in song, phenomena which get their expression in the great Greek dramas. These results are then externalized in musical instruments, which are in a way replicas of various organs of the body. All these external complications are nothing but an externalization in society of the sort of complication that exists in the higher levels of the central nervous system. We take the primitive reactions, analyze them, and reconstruct them under different conditions. That kind of reconstruction takes place through the development of the sort of intelligence which is identified with the appearance of the self. The insittutions of society, such as libraries, systems of transportation, the complex interrelationship of individuals in political organizations, are nothing but ways of throwing on the social screen, so to speak, in enlarged fashion the complexities existing inside the central nervous system, and they must, of course, express functionally the operation of this system.