THE behaviour of crowds has been part of psychology since the days of Sigmund Freud. Whatever we make of his theories, he undoubtedly probed many fundamental questions concerning what it is to be human.
We can think about crowd psychology to help us to understand the Passion Gospel. Any place where human beings congregate can become the setting for behaviour tha we would not exhibit alone, or among friends. Most of us have experienced tensions between our individual conscience and our membership of a wider company.
We feel different when we are part of a crowd. In a football stadium, I am liberated to gloat (“You’re not singing any more”) or boast (“We’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen”) in a way that I would be ashamed to do in ordinary conversation.
Understanding crowd psychology can help us to negotiate our workplace, or to evaluate public debates in the House of Commons or the General Synod. In crowd situations, the safe place is with the majority. The place of danger is in the minority, standing out against a majority opinion when conscience forbids us to back down.
To be fickle is the archetypal character of a mob, as exemplified in these final days of Jesus’s earthly life. When he enters Jerusalem, he is acclaimed as one of royal blood, as the Lord’s chosen, and as a prophet. Within the week, he will be dead.
Fickleness is a quality that we dislike, because our common life depends on being able to trust and also (to some extent) to predict people’s behaviour. Although we condemn fickleness, we stand guilty of it, in our working lives and our personal lives, and sometimes even in our relationship with God. We find it hard to exemplify the steadfastness that is at odds with fickleness.
For the Gospel of the palms, the crowd was joyful. How thrilling and inspiring it would have been to be there and to participate, throwing our branches and crying aloud our hope and expectation. Perhaps it felt a little like taking part in last year’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations: excitement kindling and passing from one person to the next in an atmosphere of festivity.
This kind of crowd psychology brings moments of sublime Christian joy when we participate in worship. I experienced this earlier in Lent, at the funeral of a priest. I could not have felt the same on my own at home, however sincerely I prayed for the repose of his soul.
In the Gospel of the Passion, the crowd manifests a darker side, the “shadow self” of group psychology. And, just in case we try to say that we ourselves would never behave like that when part of a crowd, a whole series of different groups is highlighted in quick succession, leaving us nowhere to hide.
A company of religious leaders is spurred on by self-righteousness. A garrison of soldiers joins in tormenting a man when, one to one, they might have pitied and consoled him. A crowd bays for Barabbas, turning against the man whom they were praising just days before. And Peter, confronted by accusers, lies through his teeth over and over, for fear of standing apart or being noticed.
Strangely, the people who come closest to standing up against that group psychology are Mr and Mrs Pontius Pilate. She warns him not to wade into the flood of hostility to “that just man” (27.19). And he tries to heed her warning, and to honour his own conscience (27.24). The washing of hands has never seemed to me like an act of cowardice. Even pragmatists can have moments of nobility.
The word that psychologists use to describe the phenomenon at work in the Gospel crowds, football crowds, and political crowds is “deindividuation”. Personal responsibility feels diluted when we are part of a group; shame and guilt responses are blunted; anger, greed, and self-interest simply feel less wicked when others are doing as we do. So “everyone was doing it” can feel like an explanation rather than an excuse.
Christians have a duty to see the individual in every crowd. If we cannot treat every member of the group as an individual, we must, at least, try to behave to the whole crowd as we would to each constituent part of it. One lesson of Palm Sunday’s Gospel is that the Christian calling is not de-individuation, but re-individuation.