ORGANIZATION
ADAPTATION IS AN ORGANIZING PROCESS—UNCONSCIOUS ORGANIZATION IN
PERSONS—IMPERSONAL ORGANISMS—ORGANIC GROWTH MAY BE OPPOSED TO THE
WILL OF THE PERSONS INVOLVED—IN WHAT SENSE SOCIETY IS AN
ORGANISM—ORGANISM AND FREEDOM
A process of adaptive “working” such as I have described is a process
also of organization, because it tends to bring about a system of
co-ordinated activities fitted to the conditions, and that is what
organization is. If a theory, for example, is making its way into the
minds of men, and at each point where it is questioned or tested
arguments and experiments are being devised to support it, then it is in
course of organization. It is becoming an intricate whole of related
parts which work in the general mind and extend its influence. The
theory of evolution has its organs in every department of thought, the
doctrine of eugenics, for example, being one form in which it functions.
The same is true of any living whole. Whenever a person enters upon a
new course of life his mind begins to organize with reference to it; he
develops ways of thinking and acting that are necessary or convenient in
order that he may meet the new conditions. In this way each of us grows
to fit his job, acquiring habits that are in some way congruous with it.
A farmer, a teacher, a factory worker, a banker, is certain to have in
some respects an occupational system of thinking. So a group, if it is
lasting and important, like a state, or a church, or a political party,
develops an organization every part of which has arisen by adaptive
growth.
A university, if we look at it from this point of view, appears as a
theatre of multiform selective organization. The students, already
sifted by preparatory schools and entrance examinations, are subject to
further selection for membership in the various academic groups. They
must pass certain preliminary courses, or attain a certain standing
before they can take advanced courses or be admitted to honor societies.
The athletic, dramatic, and debating groups have also selective methods
whose function is to maintain their organized activities. And the
university as a whole, and especially its various technical departments,
acts as an agent of selection for society at large, determining in great
part who are fit for the different professions. It is also a centre for
the organization of ideas. Intellectual suggestions relating to every
branch of knowledge, brought from every part of the world by books and
periodicals as well as by the cosmopolitan body of teachers and
students, are compared, discussed, augmented, worked over, and thus
organized, presumably for the service of mankind.
This organization, of which we are a part, like the process that creates
it, is more largely unconscious than we are apt to perceive. We see
human activities co-operating ingeniously to achieve a common object,
and it is natural to suppose that this co-operation must be the result
of a plan: it is the kind of thing that may be done by prevision, and it
does not readily occur to us that it can be done in any other way. But
of course organization is something far more extended than
consciousness, since plants, for example, exhibit it in great intricacy.
Indeed one of the main tasks of Darwin was to overcome by a great array
of facts the idea, accepted by his contemporaries, that the curious and
subtle adaptations of animal and vegetable life must be due to the
action of a planning intelligence. He showed that although even more
curious and subtle than had been perceived, they might probably be
explained by the slow working of unconscious adaptation, without any
plan at all. No one deliberately set out to color the small birds like
the ground so that the hawk would not see them, but by the production of
birds of varying colors, and the survival and propagation of those that
had in some degree a protective resemblance, the latter was gradually
perfected and established. The same principle of unintentional
adaptation is at work in human life, and we need to be reminded of it
because the place of the will at the centre of our personal
consciousness leads us to exaggerate the sphere of its activity. The
social processes, though they result in a structure which seems
rational, perhaps, when it is perceived, are for the most part not
planned at all. Consciousness is at work in them, but seldom
consciousness of anything more than some immediate object, some detail
that contributes to the whole without the actor being aware of the fact.
Generally speaking, social organisms feel their way without explicit
consciousness of where they want to go or how they are to get there,
even though to the eye of an observer after the fact their proceedings
may have an appearance of rational prevision.
This is true in a large measure even of persons, though less true of
them than of the more impersonal wholes. We are seldom conscious of our
personal growth in any large way; we meet details and decide as best we
can, but the general flow of our time, our country, our class, our
temperament, carries us along without our being definitely aware of it.
It is hardly possible for us to know what is taking place in us until it
is already accomplished: contemporary history, in an individual as in a
nation, eludes our comprehension. A country girl finds work in a city
office, and presently discovers that she has taken on the hurry and
excitement of the town and cannot do without it; a student enters
college and at the end of the year finds himself a different man,
without having intended it, or knowing how it came about. We take one
rather than another of the paths opening before us: they do not seem to
diverge much, but one leads around to the west and another to the east.
We do not know what choices are important and what are not. In only a
few matters do we think out a policy, and in much fewer do we carry it
out. As Emerson said, there is less purpose in the careers of successful
men than we ascribe to them; and one could soon fill a note-book with
testimony that the man and his work often find each other by mere
chance. A man is hungry and plans how to get a dinner, in love and
schemes to get a wife, desires power and racks his brain for ways to get
it; but it can hardly be said that our intelligence is often directed to
the rational organization of our character as a whole. With some men it
is, certainly, but even they often find that they have failed to
understand their own tendency. Martin Luther declared that “No good work
comes about by our own wisdom; it begins in dire necessity. I was forced
into mine; but had I known then what I know now, ten wild horses would
not have drawn me into it.”
Although we are a part of the growth of impersonal forms of life we
seldom know anything about it until it is well in the past. We do not
know when—for obscure reasons that even the psychologist can hardly
detect—we use one word rather than another, or use an old word in a new
sense, that we are participating in the growth of the language organism.
And yet this organism is vast, complex, logical, a marvel, apparently,
of constructive ingenuity. It is the same with tradition and custom. We
never tell a story or repeat an act precisely as we heard or saw it;
everything is unconsciously modified by passing through us and the
social medium of which we are a part, and these modifications build
logical structures which human intelligence, in the course of time, may
or may not discover. The students of folk-lore and primitive culture
deal chiefly with such material. The working or vitality of one element
of a tradition over another consists in some power to stimulate impulses
in the human mind, which is, therefore, a selective agent in the
process, but we are no more aware of what is going on, usually, than we
are of the selective action of our digestive organs. The folkways and
_mores_ which Professor Sumner has so amply discussed are almost wholly
of this nature.
The commercialism of our time offers a modern instance. Nobody, I
suppose, has intended it: it has come upon us through the mechanical
inventions, the opening of new countries and other conditions which have
stimulated industry and commerce, these in turn imposing themselves upon
the minds and habits of men at the expense of other interests. An epoch,
like an individual, has its somewhat special functions, and a mind
somewhat subdued to what it works in. Such a development as that of the
Italian painting of the Renaissance, or of a particular school, like the
Venetian, is a real organism, fascinating to study in the interactions
and sequences of its activity, waxing and waning under the spur of
immediate influences without thought of the living whole which history
now discovers.
A city is a different sort of organism whose development is, for the
most part, equally unconscious. A frontier settlement, we will say, is
fortunately situated with reference to the growth of the country, its
water-power, its port facilities, or something of the sort making it a
functional point. The settlers may or may not perceive and co-operate
with this advantage, but in any case the town grows; trade and
manufactures increase, railroads seek it, immigration pours in,
street-railways are laid, the different elements segregate in different
localities, and we presently have a complex, co-ordinated structure and
life which, however faulty from the point of view of the civic reformer,
is a real organism, full of individuality and interest. Think of Chicago
or New Orleans, not to speak of the riper development of London, Venice,
or Rome. Here are social organisms with only gleams of general
consciousness, growing by tentative selection and synthesis. The case is
much the same with nations, with the Roman Empire, Spain, and Britain.
Any one who follows the large movements of history must perceive, I
think, that he is dealing mainly with unconscious systems and processes.
At a given time there is a social situation that is also a mental
situation, an intricate organization of thought. The growth of this
involves problems which the mind of the time is bound to work out, but
which it can know or meet only as details. Thus the history of the
Christian Church in the Middle Ages presents itself to the student as
the progressive struggle, interaction, and organization not only of
specifically Christian ideas and traditions, but of all the ideas and
traditions of the time working upon each other in this central
institution. Whatever beliefs men came to were the outcome of the whole
previous history of thought. Vast forces were contending and combining
in an organic movement which we can even now but dimly understand, and
which the men involved in it could no more see than a fish can see the
course of the river.
Feeling has an organic social growth which is, perhaps, still less
likely than that of thought to be conscious. The human mind is capable
of innumerable types and degrees of sentiment, and the question what
type shall be developed or how far it shall be carried depends upon
social incitement. If certain ways of feeling become traditional and are
fostered by customs, symbols, and the cult of examples, they may rise to
a high level in many individuals. In this way sentiment, even passion,
may have an institutional character. Of this too the various phases of
mediæval Christianity afford examples. Its emotions were slowly evolved
out of Roman, oriental, and barbarian, as well as Christian, sources.
It is notable that not only may the growth of a movement be unintended
by the persons involved in it, but it may even be opposed to their
wills. The oncoming of a commercial panic, with the growing apprehension
and mistrust which almost every one would arrest if he could, is a
familiar example. The mental or nervous epidemics which sometimes run
through orphan asylums and similar institutions are of somewhat the same
nature. They propagate themselves by their power to stimulate a certain
kind of nerve action and live in the human organism without its consent.
Indeed, are not all kinds of social degeneration—vice, crime, misery,
sensualism, pessimism—organic growths which we do not intend or desire,
and which are usually combated by at least a part of those afflicted?
There has been much discussion regarding the use of such words as
“organic,” “organization,” and “organism” with reference to society, the
last appearing specially objectionable to some persons, who feel that it
suggests a closer resemblance to animal or plant life than does in fact
exist. On the other hand, “organism” seems in many cases a fitter word
than “organization,” which is usually understood to imply conscious
purpose. It matters little, however, what term we use if only we have a
clear perception of the facts we are trying to describe. Let us, then,
consider shortly what we mean by such expressions.
If we take society to include the whole of human life, this may truly be
said to be organic, in the sense that influences may be and are
transmitted from one part to any other part, so that all parts are bound
together into an interdependent whole. We are all one life, and its
various phases—Asia, Europe, and America; democracy, militarism, and
socialism; state, church, and commerce; cities, villages, and families;
and so on to the particular persons, Tom, Dick, and Harry—may all be
regarded, without the slightest strain upon the facts, as organs of this
whole, growing and functioning under particular conditions, according to
the adaptive process already discussed. The total life being unified by
interaction, each phase of it must be and is, in some degree, an
expression of the whole system. My thought and action, for example, is
by no means uninfluenced by what is going on in Russia, and may truly be
said to be a special expression of the general thought of the time.
But within this great whole, and part of it, are innumerable special
systems of interaction, more or less distinct, more or less enduring,
more or less conscious and intelligent. Nations, institutions,
doctrines, parties, persons, are examples; but the whole number of
systems, especially of those that are transient or indefinite, is beyond
calculation. Every time I exchange glances with a man on the street a
little process of special interaction and growth is set up, which may
cease when we part or may be indefinitely continued in our thought. The
more distinct and permanent wholes, like nations, institutions, and
ruling ideas, attract peculiar study, but the less conspicuous forms are
equally vital in their way. As to persons, they interest us more than
all the rest, mainly because our consciousness has a bias in their
favor. That is, having for its main function the guidance of persons, it
is more vivid and choosing with reference to the personal phase of life
than to any other. We know life primarily as persons, and extend our
knowledge to other forms with some difficulty.
Another notable thing about this strange complex is the overlapping and
interpenetration of the various forms, so that each part of the whole
belongs to more than one organic system—somewhat as in one of those
picture-puzzles where the same lines form part of several faces, which
you must discover if you can. Thus one’s own personality is one organic
system; the persons he knows are others, and from one point of view all
human life is made up of such personal systems, which, however, will be
found on close inspection not to be separate but to interpenetrate one
another. I mean that each personality includes ideas and feelings
reflected from others. From another point of view the whole thing breaks
up into groups rather than persons—into families, communities, parties,
races, states. Each has a history and life of its own, and they also
overlap one another. A third standpoint shows us the same whole as a
complex of thoughts or thought-systems, whose _locus_, certainly, is the
human mind, but which have a life and growth of their own that cannot be
understood except by studying them as distinct phenomena. All are
equally real and all are aspects of a common whole.
Perhaps the first requisite in the making of a sociologist is that he
learn to see things habitually in this way.
If, then, we say that society is an organism, we mean, I suppose, that
it is a complex of forms or processes each of which is living and
growing by interaction with the others, the whole being so unified that
what takes place in one part affects all the rest. It is a vast tissue
of reciprocal activity, differentiated into innumerable systems, some of
them quite distinct, others not readily traceable, and all interwoven to
such a degree that you see different systems according to the point of
view you take.[2]
It is not the case, as many suppose, that there is anything in the idea
of organism necessarily opposed to the idea of freedom. The question of
freedom or unfreedom is rather one of the _kind_ of organism or of
organic process, whether it is mechanical and predetermined, or creative
and inscrutable. There may be an organic freedom, which exists in the
whole as well as in the parts, is a total as well as a particular
phenomenon. It may be of the very nature of life and found in all the
forms of life. Darwin seems to have believed in something of this kind,
as indicated by his unwillingness to regard the dinosaur as lacking in
free will.[3]
The organic view of freedom agrees with experience and common sense in
teaching that liberty can exist in the individual only as he is part of
a whole which is also free, that it is false to regard him as separate
from or antithetical to the larger unity. In other words the notion of
an opposition between organism and freedom is a phase of the
“individualistic” philosophy which regarded social unity as artificial
and restrictive.