SOCIAL PROCESS
BY
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1918
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1918
[Illustration: [Logo]]
CONTENTS
PART I—THE ORGANIC VIEW OF THE PROCESS OF HUMAN LIFE
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE TENTATIVE METHOD 3
II. ORGANIZATION 19
III. CYCLES 30
IV. CONFLICT AND CO-OPERATION 35
V. PARTICULARISM VERSUS THE ORGANIC VIEW 43
PART II—PERSONAL ASPECTS OF SOCIAL PROCESS
VI. OPPORTUNITY 55
VII. SOME PHASES OF CULTURE 67
VIII. OPPORTUNITY AND CLASS 78
IX. THE THEORY OF SUCCESS 88
X. SUCCESS AND MORALITY 99
XI. FAME 112
XII. THE COMPETITIVE SPIRIT 125
XIII. THE HIGHER EMULATION 137
XIV. DISCIPLINE 144
PART III—DEGENERATION
XV. AN ORGANIC VIEW OF DEGENERATION 153
XVI. DEGENERATION AND WILL 169
XVII. SOME FACTORS IN DEGENERATE PROCESS 180
PART IV—SOCIAL FACTORS IN BIOLOGICAL SURVIVAL
XVIII. PROCESS, BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL 197
XIX. SOCIAL CONTROL OF THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES 209
XX. ECONOMIC FACTORS; THE CLASSES ABOVE POVERTY 218
XXI. POVERTY AND PROPAGATION 226
PART V—GROUP CONFLICT
XXII. GROUP CONFLICT AND MODERN INTEGRATION 241
XXIII. SOCIAL CONTROL IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 255
XXIV. CLASS AND RACE 268
PART VI—VALUATION
XXV. VALUATION AS A SOCIAL PROCESS 283
XXVI. THE INSTITUTIONAL CHARACTER OF PECUNIARY VALUATION 293
XXVII. THE SPHERE OF PECUNIARY VALUATION 309
XXVIII. THE PROGRESS OF PECUNIARY VALUATION 329
PART VII—INTELLIGENT PROCESS
XXIX. INTELLIGENCE IN SOCIAL FUNCTION 351
XXX. THE DIVERSIFICATION AND CONFLICT OF IDEAS 363
XXXI. PUBLIC OPINION AS PROCESS 378
XXXII. RATIONAL CONTROL THROUGH STANDARDS 382
XXXIII. SOCIAL SCIENCE 395
XXXIV. THE TENTATIVE CHARACTER OF PROGRESS 405
XXXV. ART AND SOCIAL IDEALISM 410
INDEX 425
_PART I_
THE ORGANIC VIEW OF THE PROCESS
OF HUMAN LIFE
CHAPTER I
THE TENTATIVE METHOD
ADAPTIVE GROWTH—PERSONAL AND IMPERSONAL FORMS—IMPERSONAL FORMS ARE
ALIVE—INTERMEDIATE FORMS—THE TENTATIVE PROCESS—ILLUSTRATIONS OF
TENTATIVE GROWTH—ORGANIC TENDENCY—THE KINDLING OF MIND
We see around us in the world of men an onward movement of life. There
seems to be a vital impulse, of unknown origin, that tends to work ahead
in innumerable directions and manners, each continuous with something of
the same sort in the past. The whole thing appears to be a kind of
growth, and we might add that it is an _adaptive_ growth, meaning by
this that the forms of life we see—men, associations of men, traditions,
institutions, conventions, theories, ideals—are not separate or
independent, but that the growth of each takes place in contact and
interaction with that of others. Thus any one phase of the movement may
be regarded as a series of adaptations to other phases.
That the growth of persons is adaptive is apparent to every one. Each of
us has energy and character, but not for an hour do these develop except
by communication and adjustment with the persons and conditions about
us. And the case is not different with a social group, or with the ideas
which live in the common medium of communicative thought. Human life is
thus all one growing whole, unified by ceaseless currents of
interaction, but at the same time differentiated into those diverse
forms of energy which we see as men, factions, tendencies, doctrines,
and institutions.
The most evident distinction among these growing forms is that between
the personal and the impersonal. A man is a personal form of life; a
fashion or a myth is impersonal. This seems obvious enough, but there
are cases in which the line is not so plain, and it may be well to
consider more precisely what we mean by “personal” in this connection,
or rather in just what sense a form of human life can be impersonal.
An impersonal form, I should say, is one whose life history is not
identified with that of particular persons. A myth, for example, has a
history of its own which you would never discover in the biography of
individuals, and although it exists in the minds of men it cannot be
seen intelligibly except by regarding it as a distinct whole for which
human thought is only a medium. When an American Indian, let us say,
repeated with unconscious variations the story of Hiawatha, he did not
know he was participating in the growth of a myth; that was taking place
in and through him but quite apart from his personal consciousness. The
same is true of the growth of language. We know that the speech of any
people has a vital unity, offering to the philologist a world of
interesting structures and relations of which those who use the language
and contribute to its growth are as unaware as they are of the
physiology of their bodies. The difference between personal and
impersonal organisms, then, is above all practical, resting upon the
fact that many forms of life are not identified with personality and
cannot be understood, can hardly be seen at all, by one who will
interest himself only in persons. They exist in the human mind, but to
perceive them you must study this from an impersonal standpoint.
Observe the practical value, if we hope to do away with war, of
perceiving that the chief opponent of peace is something far more than
any one group of men, like the Prussian aristocracy, namely militarism,
an international organism existing everywhere in the form of aggressive
ideals, traditions, and anticipations. If we can learn to see this, and
see how we ourselves, perhaps, are contributing to it by our ignorance
of foreign nations and our lack of generous ideals for our own, we are
in a position to oppose it effectually.
We live, in fact, in the very midst of a rank growth of social
structures of which, since they are impersonal and do not appeal to our
interest in personality, we are mainly unaware. We can see that such a
growth has taken place in the past, and there is no reason to suppose
that it has ceased. The development of religious institutions during the
past thirty years has involved gradual changes in belief about such
matters as immortality, salvation, and the relation of God to man, of
which we have not been aware because they have not been the work of
definite thought and discussion, for the most part, but have been borne
in upon us by the mental currents of the time. We do not even now know
precisely what they are; but they are real and momentous, and it is of
such changes that the development of institutions chiefly consists.
It is noteworthy that however impersonal a phase of social growth may be
it appeals to our interest as soon as we see that it has a life history,
as one may find amusement in following the history of a word in one of
the books of etymology. There is something in the course of any sort of
life that holds our attention when we once get our eye upon it. How
willingly do we pursue the histories of arts, sciences, religions, and
philosophies if some one will only show us how one thing grows out of
another.
To say that a social form is impersonal does not mean that it is dead. A
language or a myth is verily alive; its life is human life; it has the
same flesh and blood and nerves that you and I have, only the
development of these is organized along lines other than those of
personal consciousness. When I speak, or even when I think, language
lives in me, and the part that lives in me is acting upon other parts
living in other persons, influencing the life of the whole of which I am
unconscious. And the same may be said of tradition, of the earlier and
less conscious history of institutions, and of many obscure movements of
contemporary life which may prove important notwithstanding their
obscurity.
It is evident that the personal and the impersonal forms must overlap,
since the same life enters into both. If you took away all the persons
there would be nothing left, the other systems would be gone too,
because their constituents are the same. What we may not so readily
admit (because of our special interest in personality) is that persons
are equally without a separate existence, and that if you take away from
a man’s mind all the unconscious and impersonal wholes there would be
nothing left—certainly no personality. The withdrawal of language alone
would leave him without a human self.
Between persons, on the one hand, and those forms of life that are
wholly impersonal, on the other, there are many intermediate forms that
have something of both characteristics. A family is perhaps as personal
as any group can be, because its members so commonly identify their
personality with it, but it may easily have an organic growth of its own
to which its members contribute without knowing. Every family has in
greater or less degree a moral continuity from generation to generation
through which we inherit the influence of our great grandfathers, and
there is none of which a history might not be written, as well as of the
Stuarts or Hohenzollerns, if we thought it worth while.
A small, closely knit community, like a primitive clan, or like a Jewish
colony in a Russian village, has a corporate life of much the same
personal character as the family; that is, the group comprehends almost
the whole personality of the individuals, and is not too large or too
complex for the individual to comprehend the group. Larger communities
and even nations are also thought of as aggregates of persons, but they
have a life history that must be seen as a whole and can never be
embraced in any study of persons as such.
Most of the voluntary associations of our modern life are of a character
chiefly impersonal; that is they tend to a specialization by which one
interest of the individual is allied with the similar interests of
others, leaving his personality as a whole outside the group. The
ordinary active citizen of our day joins a dozen or more organizations,
for profit, for culture, for philanthropy, or what-not, into each of
which he puts only a fragment of himself, and for which he feels no
serious responsibility. It is very commonly the case, however, that one
or a few individuals—zealous employees or unpaid enthusiasts for the
cause—do identify themselves with the life of the association and put
personality into it. And this may happen with those social growths which
we have noticed as peculiarly impersonal—even with language, as when an
enthusiast sets out to revive Irish or promote Volapük.
May we not say, indeed, that whenever two persons associate we have a
new whole whose life cannot altogether be understood by regarding it
merely as the sum of the two? This is clearly the case with husband and
wife, and no doubt, in measure, with other relations.
If we inquire more closely into the interaction and growth of these
forms of life we come upon what I will call the tentative process. This
is no other than what is vaguely known to popular thought as the process
of evolutionary “selection,” or the survival of the fittest, and is also
described as the method of trial and error, the pragmatic method, the
growth of that which “works” or functions, and by other terms similar to
these. Perhaps as simple a description as any is to say that it is a
process of experiment which is not necessarily conscious. That is, the
trial of various activities and the guidance of behavior by the result
of the trial may require no understanding of what is taking place.
The growth of social forms is for the most part roughly analogous to
that of the wild-grape vine which has extended itself over trellises and
fences and into trees in my back yard. This vine has received from its
ancestry a certain system of tendencies. There is, for example, the
vital impulse itself, the general bent to grow. Then there is its habit
of sending out straight, rapidly growing shoots with two-branched
tendrils at the end. These tendrils revolve slowly through the air, and
when one touches an obstacle, as a wire or branch, it hooks itself about
it and draws up in the form of a spiral spring, pulling the shoot up
after it. A shoot which thus gets a hold grows rapidly and sends out
more tendrils; if it fails to get a hold it by and by sags down and
ceases to grow. Thus it feels its way and has a system of behavior which
insures its growth along the line of successful experiment.
So in the human world we find that forms of life tending to act in
certain ways come into contact with situations which stimulate some of
their activities and repress others. Those that are stimulated increase,
this increase acts upon the structures involved in it—usually to augment
their growth—and so a “selective” development is set in motion.
Intelligence may have a part in this or it may not; nothing is essential
but active tendencies and conditions which guide their operation.
You may sometimes see one vine growing upon another, involving the
mutual adaptation of two living forms. In human life this is the usual
condition, the environment being not something fixed but another plastic
organism, interacting in turn with still other organisms, giving rise to
an endless system of reciprocal growth. One form of life feels about
among the various openings or stimuli offered by another, and responds
to those which are most congruous with its own tendencies. The two
experiment with each other and discover and develop some way, more or
less congenial, of getting along. This is evidently true of persons, and
the principle applies equally to groups, ideas, and institutions.
We have, at any given moment, a complex of personal and impersonal
wholes each of which is charged with energy and tendency in the form of
heredity and habit coming from its past. If we fix our attention upon
any particular whole—a person, a party, a state, a doctrine, a programme
of reform, a myth, a language—we shall find it in the act of making its
way, of growing if it can, in the direction of its tendencies. As we
have seen, it is alive, however impersonal, and has human flesh, blood,
and nerves to urge it on. It already has adapted structure—hands and
feet as Luther said of the Word of God—because if it had not developed
something of the sort, some fitness to live in the general stream of
human life, we should not in fact find it there. As its means of further
growth it has a repertory of available activities; and these,
consciously or otherwise, are tried upon the situation. If not guided by
something in the nature of intelligence they act blindly, and may
nevertheless act effectively. In general some one or some combination of
these activities will work better in the situation than others, finding
more scope or stimulus of some sort, and will grow accordingly; the
energies of the whole, so far as they are available, tending to find an
outlet at this point. Thus the more a thing works the more it is enabled
to work, since the fact that it functions draws more and more energy to
it. And the whole to which it belongs, in thus continuing and enhancing
the successful activity, behaves very much as if it were conducting a
deliberate experiment. The enhanced activity also involves changes in
the whole and in the situation at large; and thus we move on to new
situations and new operations of the same principle.
Take, for illustration, the growth of a man at any point of his career;
let us say a youth starting out to make his living. He has energies and
capacities of which he is for the most part but vaguely aware. Young
people wave their instincts and habits about for something to catch on
very much as a vine does its tendrils. Suggestions as to possible lines
of work, drawn from what he sees about him, are presented to his mind
and, considering these with such light as he may have, he seeks a job.
He selects as among his opportunities, and at the same time his
opportunities, in the form of possible employers, select as between him
and other seekers. Having undertaken a job he may find that he cannot do
the work, or that it is too repugnant to his inclinations, in which case
he presently drops it and tries another. But if he succeeds and likes it
his energy more and more flows into it, his whole mind is directed
toward it, he grows in that sense. And his success usually secures to
him a larger and larger part to play in his chosen field, thus opening
new opportunities for growth in the same direction. Life is constantly
revealing openings which we could not have anticipated. It is like
paddling toward the outlet of a lake, which you cannot locate until you
are almost in it. We think that our course must extend in one of two
directions; but further advance shows that there is a third more
practicable than either. A little idea that we have overlooked or deemed
insignificant often grows until it renders obsolete those we thought
great.
In the case of a group under personal leadership the process is not
greatly different. A political party, a business enterprise, a social
settlement, a church, a nation, develops by means of a mixture of
foresight and unforeseen experience. It feels its way, more or less
intelligently, until it finds an opening, in the form of policies that
prove popular, unexploited markets, neglected wrongs, more timely
doctrines, or the like; and then, through increased activity at the
point of success, develops in the propitious direction.
Fashion well illustrates the tentative growth of an impersonal form.
Thus fashions in women’s dress are initiated, it appears, at Paris, this
city having a great prestige in the matter which it has achieved by some
centuries of successful leadership. In Paris there are a large number of
professional designers of dress who are constantly endeavoring to
foresee the course of change, and to produce designs that will “take.”
They compete with one another in this, and those who succeed gain wealth
and reputation for themselves and the commercial establishments with
which they are connected. Although they initiate they by no means have
the power to do this arbitrarily, but have to adapt themselves to vague
but potent tendencies in the mind of their public. It is their business
to divine these and to produce something which will fit the
psychological situation. At the seasons when new styles are looked for
the rival artists are ready with their designs, which they try upon the
public by causing professional models, actresses, or other notabilities
to appear in them. Of the many so presented only a few come into vogue,
and no designer can be certain of success: no one can surely foresee
what will work and what will not. But the designs that win in Paris
spread almost without opposition over the rest of the fashionable earth.
In the sphere of ideas “working” is to be understood as the enhanced
thought which the introduction of an idea into the mental situation may
stimulate. An idea that makes us think, especially if we think
fruitfully, is a working idea. In order to do this it must be different
from the ideas we have, and yet cognate enough to suggest and stimulate
a synthesis. When this is the case the human mind, individual or
collective, is impelled to exert itself in order to clear the matter up
and find an open way of thinking and acting. Thus it strives on to a
fresh synthesis, which is a step in the mental growth of mankind.
Consider, for example, the working of the idea of evolution, of the
belief that the higher forms of life, including man, are descended from
lower. A pregnant, widely related idea of this sort has a complex growth
which is ever extending itself by selection and adaptation. We know that
various lines of study had united, during the earlier half of the
nineteenth century, to make it appear to bold thinkers that evolution
from lower forms was not improbable. This idea found a point of fruitful
growth when, in the thought of Darwin especially, it was brought into
contact with the geological evidence of change and with the knowledge of
heredity and variation accumulated by breeders of domestic species. Here
it worked so vigorously that it drew the attention and investigation
first of a small group and later of a great part of the scientific
thought of the time. Other ideas, like that of Malthus regarding the
excess of life and the struggle for existence, were co-ordinated with
it, new researches were undertaken; in short, the public mind began to
function largely about this doctrine and has continued to do so ever
since.
Just what is it that “works”? The idea implies that there is already in
operation an active tendency of some sort which encounters the situation
and whose character determines whether it will work there, and if so,
how. In the case of the vine it is the pre-existing tendency of the
tendrils to revolve in the air, to bend themselves about any object they
may meet, and then to draw together like a spiral spring, which causes
the vine to work as it does when it meets the wire. Indeed, to explain
fully its working many other tendencies would have to be taken into
account, such as that to grow more rapidly at the highest point
attained, or where the light is greatest, and so on. In fact the vine
has an organism of correlated tendencies whose operation under the
stimulus of the particular situation is the working in question.
When we speak of human life we are apt to assume that the existing
tendency is some conscious purpose, and that whatever goes to realize
this is “working,” and everything else is failure to work. In other
words, we make the whole matter voluntary and utilitarian. This is an
inadequate and for the most part a wrong conception of the case. The
working of a man, or of any other human whole, in a given situation is
much more nearly analogous to that of the vine than we perceive.
Although conscious purpose may play a central part in it, there is also
a whole organism of tendencies that feel their way about in the
situation, reacting in a complex and mainly unconscious way. To put it
shortly, it is a man’s character that works, and of this definite
purpose may or may not be a part.
In a similar way any form of human life, a group, institution, or idea,
has a character, a correlation of complex tendencies, a _Motiv_, genius,
soul or whatever you may choose to call it, which is the outcome of its
past history and works on to new issues in the present situation. These
things are very little understood. How a language will behave when it
has new forms of life to interpret will depend, we understand, upon its
“genius,” its historical organism of tendencies, but I presume the
operation of this is seldom known in advance. And likewise with our
country as it lives in the minds of the people, with our system of ideas
about God and the church, or about plants and animals. These are real
forms of life, intricate, fascinating, momentous, sure to behave in
remarkable ways, but our understanding of this branch of natural history
is very limited. The popular impression that nothing important can take
place in human life without the human will being at the bottom of it is
an illusion as complete as the old view that the universe revolved about
our planet.
Here is an example from Ruskin of the working of two styles of
architecture in contact with each other. He says that the history of the
early Venetian Gothic is “the history of the struggle of the Byzantine
manner with a contemporary style [Gothic] quite as perfectly organized
as itself, and far more energetic. And this struggle is exhibited partly
in the gradual change of the Byzantine architecture into other forms,
and partly by isolated examples of genuine Gothic taken prisoner, as it
were, in the contest; or rather entangled among the enemy’s forces, and
maintaining their ground till their friends came up to sustain them.”
The reality of such struggles and adaptations cannot be gainsaid by any
one acquainted with the history of art, nor the fact that they are the
outworking of complex antecedent tendencies. But I suppose that all the
individual builder perceived of this conflict was that men from the
north were making window-mouldings and other details in new forms which
he could use, if they pleased him, instead of other forms to which he
had been accustomed. Of either style as an organic whole with more or
less energy he probably knew nothing. But they were there, just as real
and active as two contending armies.[1]
One may sometimes discover in his own mind the working of complex
tendencies which he has not willed or understood. When one first plans a
book he feels but vaguely what material he wants, and collects notes
somewhat at random. But as he goes on, if his mind has some synthetic
energy, his thought gradually takes on a system, complex yet unified,
having a growth of its own, so that every suggestion in this department
comes to have a definite bearing upon some one of the many points at
which his mind is striving to develop. Every one who has been through
anything of this sort knows that the process is largely unintentional
and unconscious, and that, as many authors have testified, the growing
organism frequently develops with greatest vigor in unforeseen
directions. If this can happen right in our own mind, with matters in
which we have a special interest, so much the more can it with lines of
development to which we are indifferent.
As a matter of psychology the evident fact underlying this “working” is
that mental development requires the constant stimulus of fresh
suggestions, some of which have immensely more stimulating power than
others. We know how a word or a glance from a congenial person, the
quality of a voice, a poetic or heroic passage in a book, a glimpse of
strange life through an open door, a trait of biography, a metaphor, can
start a tumult of thought and feeling within us where a moment before
there was only apathy. This is “working,” and it seems that something
like it runs all through life. It is thus that Greek literature and art
have so often awakened the minds of later peoples. The human spirit
cannot advance far in any separate channel: there must be a group, a
fresh influence, a kindred excitement and reciprocation.
These psychical reactions are more like the kindling of a flame, as when
you touch a match to fine wood, than they are like the composition of
mechanical forces. You might also call it, by analogy, a kind of
sexuality or mating of impulses, which unites in a procreative whole
forces that are barren in separation.
This kindling or mating springs from the depths of life and is not
likely to be reduced to formulas. We can see, in a general way, that it
grows naturally out of the past. Our primary need is to live and grow,
and we are kindled by something that taps the energies of the spirit
where they are already pressing for an outlet. We are easily kindled in
the direction of our instincts, as an adolescent youth by the sight of a
pretty girl, or of our habits, as an archæologist by the discovery of a
new kind of burial urn.
It is in this way, apparently, that all initiation or variation takes
place. It is never produced out of nothing; there is always an
antecedent system of tendencies, some of which expand and fructify under
fresh suggestions. Initiation is nothing other than an especially
productive kind of working, one that proves to be the starting-point for
a significant development. A man of genius is one in whom, owing to some
happy combination of character and situation, old ideas are kindled into
new meaning and power. All inventions occur through the mating of
traditional knowledge with fecundating conditions. A new type of
institution such as our modern democracy, is but the expansion, in a
propitious epoch, of impulses that have been awaiting such an epoch for
thousands of years.
But let us confess that we have no wisdom to explain these motions in
detail or to predict just when and how they will take place. They are
deep-rooted, organic, obscure, and can be anticipated only by an
imagination that shares their impulse. There is no prospect, in my
opinion, of reducing them to computation. The statement, “that grows
which works,” is true and illuminating, but reveals more questions than
it solves. Perhaps this is the main use of it, that it leads us on to
inquire more searchingly what the social process actually is. It has, I
think, an advantage over “adaptation,” “selection,” or “survival of the
fittest” in that it gives a little more penetrating statement of what
immediately takes place, and also in that it is not so likely to let us
rest in mechanical or biological conceptions.