Sociial psychologist Serge Moscovici wrote about the influence of minorities. Although it may seem like an obvious issue, until then social psychologists had only paid attention to the influence of majorities: there we have the Asch experiment, and its terrible sequel, the even more famous Milgram experiment. However, ideas could not change, cultures could not evolve if minorities did not have the capacity to influence majorities over time.
For all those interested in expanding altruistic behavior, it is most convenient to reflect on how to achieve cultural changes in the sense of moral improvement. The influence of minorities occurs in all fields: in politics, religion, science, economy, technology and customs.
It may seem to us that the discoveries of Moscovici and other social psychologists do not bring much new information to what common sense tells us about how people and attitudes change (in the case of those interested in altruism, the main topic is moral evolution) but some points deserve reflection.
The source of a minority's influence is its behavioral style. The concept refers to the organization of responses according to a particular pattern that has a recognizable meaning. The minority must be, in a word, consistent; it must be coherent, self-assured.
Minority members are expected to have more in common with each other than majority members, and so are expected to spend more time together. The more time they spend together, the more likely they are to influence each other and become more uniform in opinion. Influential minorities create community.
Influential minorities compromise and negotiate with the majority.
One observation that these psychologists do not make is the relationship that there might be between monastic structures and moral evolution. Monasticism emerged with Buddhism, some 2,500 years ago (Axial Age). The idea is that a theoretical moral change becomes so demanding from a psychological point of view that the only way to bring it forward is to select highly motivated individuals and subject them to behavioral improvement training (in the moral sense) in a controlled environment. It is likely that, as in so many things, the military training system was imitated.
In this way, a "holiness of conduct" can be achieved within a cohesive minority. The expectation is that this minority will influence mainstream society, improving it morally.
The monastic structure in the West is known above all for the Christian monastic phenomenon that followed the fall of the Roman Empire, which developed very detailed strategies for behavioural improvement (St. Benedict's rule, Imitatio Christi...). It is interesting to note that the public authorities promoted monasticism as a strategy to appease social violence. Here we have a clear example of negotiation, even of symbiosis, between the conventional and the disruptive. The phenomenon is recurrent: it seems that the Chinese promoted Buddhist preaching in Mongolia to control the aggressiveness of the nomads and Napoleon is said to have commented that "a priest saves me ten gendarmes." A more modern case is the tolerance by democratic states of conscientious objection to military service: a conscientious objector is, from a civic point of view, no better than a tax evader, in refusing to fulfil his obligation for the common good.
If the aim of social action is not, unlike political or religious phenomena, to convert the masses, but to gradually influence a moral evolution in the direction of altruism, it is clear that the first step is to create a coherent minority, capable of developing a style of behaviour, even as a subculture, which contains in a practical and unequivocal way the values of social progress proper to altruism.
Altruism can be conceived as a mere transfer of goods and services that occurs due to an arbitrary motivation or as an economic manifestation of internalized moral principles. In the second case, altruism could only exist as a style of behaviour based on a complete conception of human relations.
A style of behavior that necessarily gives rise to effective altruistic economic activity would be based on psychological principles of benevolence, empathy, compassion, and charity, all of which can take shape as cohesive moral principles. This style of behavior, being associated with moral emotions of empathy and benevolence, may have the advantage of providing emotional rewards to its members, typical of human relationships of extreme trust - along the lines of those we traditionally associate with the nuclear family and conjugal love - which would reinforce motivation.
Such an approach would be in the same situation of high moral demand that led to the creation of the first monastic structures. And it could equally function as an influential minority for conventional society. But now it would be a question not of religious traditions, but of social strategies compatible with enlightened humanism informed by science.
