Evaluate the role of an individual in the development of any society.
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Answer:
The human being and the group. The problem of man cannot be solved scientifically without a clear statement of the relationship between man and society, as seen in the primary collectivity—the family, the play or instruction group, the production team and other types of formal or informal collectivity. In the family the individual abandons some of his specific features to become a member of the whole. The life of the family is related to the division of labour according to sex and age, the carrying on of husbandry, mutual assistance in everyday life, the intimate life of man and wife, the perpetuation of the race, the upbringing of the children and also various moral, legal and psychological relationships. The family is a crucial instrument for the development of personality. It is here that the child first becomes involved in social life, absorbs its values and standards of behaviour, its ways of thought, language and certain value orientations. It is this primary group that bears the major responsibility to society. Its first duty is to the social group, to society and humanity. Through the group the child, as he grows older, enters society. Hence the decisive role of the group. The influence of one person on another is as a rule extremely limited; the collectivity as a whole is the main educational force. Here the psychological factors are very important. It is essential that a person should feel himself part of a group at his own wish, and that the group should voluntarily accept him, take in his personality.
Everybody performs certain functions in a group. Take, for example, the production team. Here people are joined together by other interests as well as those of production; they exchange certain political, moral, aesthetic, scientific and other values. A group generates public opinion, it sharpens and polishes the mind and shapes the character and will. Through the group a person rises to the level of a personality, a conscious subject of historical creativity. The group is the first shaper of the personality, and the group itself is shaped by society.
The unity of man and society. A person's whole intellectual make-up bears the clear imprint of the life of society as a whole. All his practical activities are individual expressions of the historically formed social practice of humanity. The implements that he uses have in their form a function evolved by a society which predetermines the ways of using them. When tackling any job, we all have to take into account what has already been achieved before us.
The wealth and complexity of the individual's social content are conditioned by the diversity of his links with the social whole, the degree to which the various spheres of the life of society have been assimilated and refracted in his consciousness and activity. This is why the level of individual development is an indicator of the level of development of society, and vice versa. But the individual does not dissolve into society. He retains his unique and independent individuality and makes his contribution to the social whole: just as society itself shapes human beings, so human beings shape society.
The individual is a link in the chain of the generations. His affairs are regulated not only by himself, but also by the social standards, by the collective reason or mind. The true token of individuality is the degree to which a certain individual in certain specific historical conditions has absorbed the essence of the society in which he lives.
Consider, for instance, the following historical fact. Who or what would Napoleon Bonaparte have been if there had been no French Revolution? It is difficult or perhaps even impossible to reply to this question. But one thing is quite clear—he would never have become a great general and certainly not an emperor. He himself was well aware of his debt and in his declining years said, "My son cannot replace me. I could not replace myself. I am the creature of circumstances."[1] It has long been acknowledged that great epochs give birth to great men. What tribunes of the people were lifted by the tide of events of the French Revolution— Mirabeau, Marat, Robespierre, Danton. What young, some times even youthful talents that had remained dormant among the people were raised to the heights of revolutionary, military, and organisational activity by the Great October Socialist Revolution. It is sometimes said that society carries the individual as a river carries a boat. This is a pleasant simile, but not exact. An individual does not float with the river; he is the turbulently flowing river itself. The events of social life do not come about by themselves; they are made. The great andsmall paths of the laws of history are blazed by human effort and often at the expense of human blood. The laws of history are not charted in advance by superhuman forces; they are made by people, who then submit to their authority as something that is above the individual.
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