Crowds have a bad reputation. Watching the crowds at Bastille, French thinker Gustave Le Bon cast their behaviour as madness, a loss of individual good sense – and this idea remains seductive to those in power. Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World by Dan Hancox tries to tell a more balanced story of how crowds function, how susceptible we are to being swept along by those around us, and why we may be better together.
A carnival or concert, a political protest or melee, religious congregation, different crowds have different dynamics. The joy and celebration of a carnival is the crowd at play. Singing and dancing together is a vital, ancient part of who we are as social animals. Chanting in unison at a sports match is a release of collective adrenaline, a halo of energy.
The modern age is the age of the crowd. Crowds often show up as a surprise at special moments of world historic intensity –because the suffering experienced alone by its members had not been visible to those meting it out.
When we gather in a crowd, we are changed by it, and we change our history. Crowd membership gives us a freedom and strength we could not possess as individuals. Think of the French Revolution, a popular insurrection born of exhaustion and misery. It was a joyful collective catharsis, though it was misinterpreted by thinkers like Le Bon, who saw in it disorder and nihilistic violence.
These theories about crowd savagery have proven to be durable even today, among elites and thinkers. But hostility to the mob is often hostility to democracy, the book says. The 19th century was haunted by the spectre of a hostile mob: this paranoia showed up in militarised colonial policing, whether in Derry, Ireland or Amritsar, India.
Of course, not all crowds are seeking a better future, says the book, pointing to 2021 Capitol riots in US, or Brazilian demonstrations in 2023 egged on by Bolsonaro or the history of fascist and authoritarian crowds, including Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s beer hall putsch. These reactionary vanguards are usually a violent counterweight to a rising mass progressive movement. They are often facilitated by those in uniform, tacitly supported by corners of the establishment and punished lightly, if at all, by the right-wing judiciary. Meanwhile the vast totalitarian crowd does not look sideways at each other, but upwards at the leader.
Crowd scenes represent the density of urban life, whether Times Square in New York or Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing, or in any of our own metropolises. The idea of cities full of people, of strangers, carries a sense of menace for some, just as others appreciate the safety in numbers, the sensory bombardment of cities.
Cities spooked by uprisings like Tahrir Square have gone out of their way to scotch public conviviality and loitering, with urban design directing citizens directly to shops and homes and offices. Privately owned public spaces are replacing squares and streets, replacing civic mingling with transactional activities or profit making events. The surveillance revolution, police drones and cameras are another constraint on free assembly and social spontaneity. The fear of the crowd lives on in contemporary culture, with screeds about ‘mobs’.
We’re all in it together, the book reminds us. To defend the self-assembled crowd is to defend democracy and freedom, it says.
