The Social Organism

See also Chapter 21, 'Selflessness' in The Republic of Rumi: a Novel of Reality

Iqbal perceived the society as an organism. The following passage in ‘The Muslim Community — a Sociological Study’, a lecture delivered at Aligarh in March 1911, offers a good explanation.

It has been brought to light by recent biological research that the individual as such is a mere abstraction, a convenient expression for facility of social reference, passing moment in the life of the group to which he happens to belong. His thoughts, his aspirations, his ways of life, his entire mental and physical outfit, the very number of days which he lives, are all determined by the needs of the community of whose collective life he is only a partial expression. The interests of society as a whole are fundamentally different and even antagonistic to the interests of the individual whose activity is nothing more than an unconscious performance of a particular function which social economy has allotted to him. Society has a distinct life of its own, irrespective of the life of its component units taken individually. And just as an individual organism, in a state of disorder, sometimes unconsciously sets up within itself forces which tend to its health, so a social organism, under the corroding influence of destructive forces, may sometimes call into being counteracting forces — such as the appearance of an inspiring personality, the birth of a new ideal, or a universal religious reform — which tend to restore its original vitality, and finally save the organism from structural collapse by making the inward communal self to bring into subjection all the insubordinate forces, and to throw off all that is inimical to the health of its organic unity. Society has or rather tends to have a consciousness, a will, and an intellect of its own, though the stream of its mentality has no other channel through which to flow than individual minds. The expressions “Public opinion”, “National genius”, or what the Germans happily phrase of Zeitgeist are but vague recognitions of this exceedingly important fact of social psychology. The crowd, the mass meeting, the corporation, the sect, and finally the deliberative assembly are the various means by which the body-social organises itself in order to secure the unity of self-consciousness.