THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY--SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
THE series of questions which arise when we consider the individual as
a member of society fall together under the general theory of what has
been called, in a figure, Social Heredity.
The treatment of this topic will show something of the normal relation
of the individual's mind to the social environment; and the chapter
following will give some hints as to the nature and position of that
exceptional man in whom we are commonly so much interested--the
Genius.
The theory of social heredity has been worked up through the
contributions, from different points of view, of several authors.
What, then, is social heredity?
This is a very easy question to answer, since the group of facts which
the phrase describes are extremely familiar--so much so that the
reader may despair, from such a commonplace beginning, of getting any
novelty from it. The social heritage is, of course, all that a man or
woman gets from the accumulated wisdom of society. All that the ages
have handed down--the literature, the art, the habits of social
conformity, the experience of social ills, the treatment of crime, the
relief of distress, the education of the young, the provision for the
old--all, in fact, however described, that we men owe to the ancestors
whom we reverence, and to the parents whose presence with us perhaps
we cherish still. Their struggles, the orator has told us, have bought
our freedom; we enter into the heritage of their thought and wisdom
and heroism. All true; we do. We all breathe a social atmosphere; and
our growth is by this breathing-in of the tradition and example of the
past.
Now, if this be the social heritage, we may go on to ask: Who are to
inherit it? To this we may again add the further question: How does
the one who is born to such a heritage as this come into his
inheritance? And with this yet again: How may he use his
inheritance--to what end and under what limitations? These questions
come so readily into the mind that we naturally wish the discussion to
cover them.
Generally, then, who is eligible for the social inheritance? This heir
to society we are, all of us. Society does not make a will, it is
true; nor does society die intestate. To say that it is we who inherit
the riches of the social past of the race, is to say that we are the
children of the past in a sense which comes upon us with all the force
that bears in upon the natural heir when he finds his name in will or
law. But there are exceptions. And before we seek the marks of the
legitimacy of our claim to be the heirs of the hundreds of years of
accumulated thought and action, it may be well to advise ourselves as
to the poor creatures who do not enter into the inheritance with us.
They are those who people our asylums, our reformatories, our jails
and penitentiaries; those who prey upon the body of our social life by
demands for charitable support, or for the more radical treatment by
isolation in institutions; indeed, some who are born to fail in this
inheritance are with us no more, even though they were of our
generation; they have paid the penalty which their effort to wrest the
inheritance from us has cost, and the grave of the murderer, the
burglar, the suicide, the red-handed rebel against the law of social
inheritance, is now their resting place. Society then is, when taken
in the widest sense, made up of two classes of people--the heirs who
possess and the delinquents by birth or conduct who have forfeited the
inheritance.
We may get a clear idea of the way a man attains his social heritage
by dropping figure for the present and speaking in the terms of plain
natural science. Ever since Darwin propounded the law of Natural
Selection the word Variation has been current in the sense explained
on an earlier page.
The student in natural science has come to look for variations as the
necessary preliminary to any new step of progress and adaptation in
the sphere of organic life. Nature, we now know, is fruitful to an
extraordinary degree. She produces many specimens of everything. It is
a general fact of reproduction that the offspring of plant or animal
is quite out of proportion in numbers to the parents that produce
them, and often also to the means of living which await them. One
plant produces seeds which are carried far and near--to the ocean and
to the desert rocks, no less than to the soil in which they may take
root and grow. Insects multiply at a rate which is simply
inconceivable to our limited capacity for thinking in figures. Animals
also produce more abundantly, and man has children in numbers which
allow him to bury half his offspring yearly and yet increase the adult
population from year to year. This means, of course, that whatever the
inheritance is, all do not inherit it; some must go without a portion
whenever the resources of nature, or the family, are in any degree
limited and when competition is sharp.
Now Nature solves the problem among the animals in the simplest of
ways. All the young born in the same family are not exactly alike;
"variations" occur. There are those that are better nourished, those
that have larger muscles, those that breathe deeper and run faster. So
the question who of these shall inherit the earth, the fields, the
air, the water--this is left to itself. The best of all the variations
live, and the others die. Those that do live have thus, to all intents
and purposes, been "selected" for the inheritance, just as really as
if the parents of the species had left a will and had been able to
enforce it. This is the principle of "Natural Selection."
Now, this way of looking at problems which involve aggregates of
individuals and their distribution is becoming a habit of the age.
Wherever the application of the principles of probability do not
explain a statistical result--that is, wherever there seem to be
influences which favour particular individuals at the expense of
others--men turn at once to the occurrence of Variations for the
justification of this seeming partiality of Nature. And what it means
is that Nature is partial to individuals _in making them_, in their
natural heredity, rather than after they are born.
The principle of heredity with variations is a safe assumption to make
also in regard to mankind; and we see at once that in order to come in
for a part in the social heritage of our fathers we must be born fit
for it. We must be born so endowed for the race of social life that we
assimilate, from our birth up, the spirit of the society into which we
are reared. The unfittest, socially, are suppressed. In this there is
a distinction between this sphere of survival and that of the animal
world. In it the fittest survive, the others are lost; but in society
the unfittest are lost, all the others survive. Social selection weeds
out the unfit, the murderer, the most unsocial man, and says to him:
"You must die"; natural selection seeks out the most fit and says:
"You alone are to live." The difference is important, for it marks a
prime series of distinctions, when the conceptions drawn from biology
are applied to social phenomena; but for the understanding of
variations we need not now pursue it further. The contrast may be put,
however, in a sentence: in organic evolution we have the natural
selection of the fit; in social progress we have the social
suppression of the unfit.
Given social variations, therefore, differences among men, what
becomes of this man or that? We see at once that if society is to live
there must be limits set somewhere to the degree of variation which a
given man may show from the standards of society. And we may find out
something of these limits by looking at the evident, and marked
differences which actually appear about us.
First, there is the idiot. He is not available, from a social point of
view, because he varies too much on the side of defect. He shows from
infancy that he is unable to enter into the social heritage because he
is unable to learn to do social things. His intelligence does not grow
with his body. Society pities him if he be without natural protection,
and puts him away in an institution. So of the insane, the pronounced
lunatic; he varies too much to sustain in any way the wide system of
social relationships which society requires of each individual. Either
he is unable to take care of himself, or he attempts the life of some
one else, or he is the harmless, unsocial thing that wanders among us
like an animal or stands in his place like a plant. He is not a factor
in social life; he has not come into the inheritance.
Then there is the extraordinary class of people whom we may describe
by a stronger term than those already employed. We find not only the
unsocial, the negatively unfit, those whom society puts away with pity
in its heart; there are also the antisocial, the class whom we usually
designate as criminals. These persons, like the others, are
variations; but they seem to be variations in quite another way. They
do not represent lack on the intellectual side always or alone, but on
the moral side, on the social side, as such. The least we can say of
the criminals is that they tend, by heredity or by evil example, to
violate the rules which society has seen fit to lay down for the
general security of men living together in the enjoyment of the social
heritage. So far, then, they are factors of disintegration, of
destruction; enemies of the social progress which proceeds from
generation to generation by just this process of social inheritance.
So society says to the criminal also: "You must perish." We kill off
the worst, imprison the bad for life, attempt to reform the rest.
They, too, then, are excluded from the heritage of the past.
So our lines of eligibility get more and more narrowly drawn. The
instances of exclusion now cited serve to give us some insight into
the real qualities of the man who lives a social part, and the way he
comes to live it.
Passing on to take up the second of the informal topics suggested, we
have to find the best description that we can of the social man--the
one who is fitted for the social life. This question concerns the
process by which any one of us comes into the wealth of relationships
which the social life represents. For to say that a man does this is
in itself to say that he is the man society is looking for. Indeed,
this is the only way to describe the man--to actually find him.
Society is essentially a growing, shifting thing. It changes from age
to age, from country to country. The Greeks had their social
conditions, and the Romans theirs. Even the criminal lines are drawn
differently, somewhat, here and there; and in a low stage of
civilization a man may pass for normal who, in our time, would be
described as weak in mind. This makes it necessary that the standards
of judgment of a given society should be determined by an actual
examination of the society, and forbids us to say that the limits of
variation which society in general will tolerate must be this or that.
We may say, then, that the man who is fit for social life _must be
born to learn_. The need of learning is his essential need. It comes
upon him from his birth. Speech is the first great social function
which he must learn, and with it all the varieties of verbal
accomplishment--reading and writing. This brings to the front the
great method of all his learning--imitation. In order to be social he
must be imitative, imitative, imitative. He must realize for himself
by action the forms, conventions, requirements, co-operations of his
social group. All is learning; and learning not by himself and at
random, but under the leading of the social conditions which surround
him. Plasticity is his safety and the means of his progress. So he
grows into the social organization, takes his place as a Socius in the
work of the world, and lays deep the sense of values, upon the basis
of which his own contributions--if he be destined to make
contributions--to the wealth of the world are to be wrought out. This
great fact that he is open to the play of the personal influences
which are about him is just the "suggestibleness" which we have
already described in an earlier chapter; and the influences themselves
are "suggestions"--social suggestions. These influences differ in
different communities, as we so often remark. The Turk learns to live
in a very different system of relations of "give and take" from ours,
and ours differ as much from those of the Chinese. All that is
characteristic of the race or tribe or group or family--all this sinks
into the child and youth by his simple presence there in it, with the
capacity to learn by imitation. He is suggestible, and here are the
suggestions; he is made to inherit and he inherits. So it makes no
difference what his tribe or kindred be; let him be a learner by
imitation, and he becomes in turn possessor and teacher.
The case becomes more interesting still when we give the matter
another turn, and say that in this learning all the members of society
agree; _all must be born to learn the same things_. They enter, if so
be that they do, into the same social inheritance. This again seems
like a very commonplace remark; but certain things flow from it. Each
member of society gives and gets the same set of social suggestions;
the differences being the degree of progress each has made, and the
degree of variation which each one gives to what he has before
received. This last difference is treated below where we consider the
genius.
There grows up, in all this give and take, in all the interchange of
suggestions among you, me, and the other, an obscure sense of a
certain social understanding about ourselves generally--a _Zeitgeist_,
an atmosphere, a taste, or, in minor matters, a style. It is a very
peculiar thing, this social spirit. The best way to understand that
you have it, and something of what it is, is to get into a circle in
which it is different. The common phrase "fish out of water" is often
heard in reference to it. But that does not serve for science. The
next best thing that I can do in the way of rendering it is to appeal
to another word which has a popular sense, the word Judgment. Let us
say that there exists in every society a general system of values,
found in social usages, conventions, institutions, and formulas, and
that our judgments of social life are founded on our habitual
recognition of these values, and of the arrangement of them which has
become more or less fixed in our society. For example, to be cordial
to a disagreeable neighbour shows good social judgment in a small
matter; not to quarrel with the homoeopathic enthusiast who meets
you in the street and wishes to doctor your rheumatism out of a
symptom book--that is good judgment. In short, the man gets to show
more and more, as he grows up from childhood, a certain good judgment;
and his good judgment is also the good judgment of his social set,
community, or nation. The psychologist might prefer to say that a man
"feels" this; perhaps it would be better for psychological readers to
say simply that he has a "sense" of it; but the popular use of the
word "judgment" fits so accurately into the line of distinction we are
now making that we may adhere to it. So we reach the general position
that the eligible candidate for social life must have good judgment as
represented by the common standards of judgment of his people.
It may be doubted, however, by some of my readers whether this sense
of social values called judgment is the outcome of suggestions
operating throughout the term of one's social education. This is an
essential point, and I must just assume it. It follows from what we
said in an earlier chapter to be the way of the child's learning by
imitation. It will appear true, I trust, to any one who may take the
pains to observe the child's tentative endeavours to act up to social
usages in the family and school. One may then actually see the growth
of the sort of judgment which I am describing. Psychologists are
coming to see that even the child's sense of his own personal self is
a gradual attainment, achieved step by step through his imitative
responses to his personal environment. His thought of himself is an
interpretation of his thought of others, and his thought of another
is doe to further accommodation of his active processes to changes in
his thought of a possible self. Around this fundamental movement in
his personal growth all the values of his life have their play. So I
say that his sense of truth in the social relationships of his
environment is the outcome of his very gradual learning of his
personal place in these relationships.
We reach the conclusion, therefore, from this part of our study, that
the socially unfit person is the person of poor judgment. He may have
learned a great deal; he may in the main reproduce the activities
required by his social tradition; but with it all he is to a degree
out of joint with the general system of estimated values by which
society is held together. This may be shown to be true even of the
pronounced types of unsocial individuals of whom we had occasion to
speak at the outset. The criminal is, socially considered, a man of
poor judgment. He may be more than this, it is true. He may have a bad
strain of heredity, what the theologians call "original sin"; he then
is an "habitual criminal" in the current distinction of criminal
types; and his own sense of his failure to accept the teachings of
society may be quite absent, since crime is so normal to him. But the
fact remains that in his judgment he is mistaken; his normal is not
society's normal. He has failed to be educated in the judgments of his
fellows, however besides and however more deeply he may have failed.
Or, again, the criminal may commit crime simply because he is carried
away in an eddy of good companionship, which represents a temporary
current of social life; or his nervous energies may be overtaxed
temporarily or drained of their strength, so that his education in
social judgment is forgotten: he is then the "occasional" criminal. It
is true of the man of this type also that while he remains a criminal
he has lost his balance, has yielded to temptation, has gratified
private impulse at the expense of social sanity; all this shows the
lack of that sustaining force of moral consciousness which represents
the level of social rightness in his time and place. Then, as to the
idiot, the imbecile, the insane, they, too, have no good judgment, for
the very adequate but pitiful reason that they have no judgment at
all.
This, then, is the doctrine of Social Heredity; it illustrates the
side of conformity, of personal acquiescence on the part of the
individual in the rules of social life. Another equally important
side, that of the personal initiative and influence of the individual
mind in society, remains to be spoken of in the next chapter. Social
Heredity emphasizes _Imitation_; the Genius, to whom we now turn,
illustrates _Invention_.