Learning about crowds from my three year old cousin

While discussing the leBon reading the class as a whole generally settled on two things. That yes, a crowd of people influence each other, in the fashion of "peer pressure" and that the author was talking about another time. A time when gathering in a crowd to hear news, or to watch/protest the news of the day. The fact is, the era he was talking about, was an era where Telegraph was the most widely used information sharing technology of the day. Which means that while his writing is becoming more out of touch with the "modern" crowds, it tells us a lot about historical ones. 

Historically, Crowds gathered to hear news, protest/protect each other, and to witness what was happening. Which leads us to the crowd I observed over the weekend, while celebrating my moms birthday. Being of the Jewish faith, we celebrated the Sabbath by lighting candles, and reciting prayers, as members of my family have done for generations. It is literally a historic practice to light the candles and sing on Friday nights at sundown. As we sung the traditional Friday night prayers, my three year old cousin could be heard "singing along." While she is still just learning English/ "big girl words", she seemed to be getting every 5th word in Hebrew while staying along with the melody, as the adults carried on. After, my brothers and I discussed how we never really read our prayer books growing up,but simply picked up the prayers from the adults in our family. While these facts may have been disappointing to my mother, I found them to be a revelation, and the act of a three year old, learning from a crowd to be very illuminating.

My young Cousin was attaching herself to a crowd, naturally. While this was hardly the only time she had her the prayers (her grandfather is a theological scholar) and repetition has a lot to do with it. Her participation serves as very interesting transition into the second half of this blog assignment, which asked us to look at Aristotle's assertion that man is a political animal. While the interpretation on what he truly meant by that can vary. The interpretation I liked best is that,it is the most natural thing of human kind, to seek each other out, form groups, bonds,& associations for protection and fulfillment. Here my young cousin was filling that natural need to be included, to be a part of the crowd. Which when applying this lesson to  a crowd singing "we shall overcome", one can understand the intense pull to join. Humans like to be in the know, to be involved with the world in which we live, and joining a "crowd" is a just a natural part of that.

I found this article to be very educational, but at times confusing.
While I found this article to be a little more direct.