AN ORGANIC VIEW OF DEGENERATION
THE MEANING OF DEGENERATION—DOWNWARD GROWTH—AN ORGANIC PROCESS—ORGANIC
RESPONSIBILITY—PARTICULARISM IN SOCIAL REFORM—NARROW VIEWS OF
CAUSATION—THE ONE-CAUSE FALLACY—STATISTICAL ILLUSION—LIMITATIONS
OF THE STATISTICAL METHOD—STUDIES OF DEGENERATE EVOLUTION
The words degeneracy and degeneration are rooted in the Latin word
_genus_, and carry the idea of falling away from a type or standard; as
when, for example, we say that a child is degenerate, meaning that he
does not come up to the standard set by his ancestors. They are coming
to be used as general terms for a state or process of deterioration,
most of the words in more common use, such as wrong, evil, disease, and
sin, having special implications which it is desirable to avoid.
It is the nature of the human mind, working through social organization,
to form norms or standards in every department of life, and to
stigmatize whatever falls below these. Such norms are applied with
peculiar emphasis to human personality itself, and to the various kinds
of behavior in which it is expressed, because these are the matters in
which we are most interested. Whether our judgments will prove to be
permanently right or only a kind of moral fashion, it is impossible to
be sure. It seems to be understood, however, that the word degeneration
is used only with reference to standards which are believed to be of a
relatively permanent or well-grounded kind, so that it is hard to
imagine that the implied judgment could be wholly reversed. A man would
hardly be called degenerate for dressing in the fashion of ten years
ago, however absurd he might appear; but feeble-mindedness, disloyalty,
cruelty, irresponsibility, or gross dissipation might be so called,
since it would seem that these must always be detrimental to the common
life.
It is useful to distinguish between definite and indefinite degeneracy,
the former being such as is ascertainable in some recognized way, as by
medical examination or legal process—for example, idiocy, crime, and
alcoholism. The indefinite sort, such as dishonesty, selfishness,
instability of character, and sensuality—of kinds within the law—may be
strongly condemned although not ascertainable in the same way. Indeed
this latter may well be the more harmful, because it is less stigmatized
and isolated, more likely to mingle in the social current and exert a
pernicious influence. A feeble-minded person who is legally recognized
as such and put in a special institution is harmless compared with one
not so recognized who remains in the world to demoralize others and
breed a family of incompetent children; and in like manner the
out-and-out housebreakers and assassins do far less harm than the men of
ability and influence whose deeds are no better but who are clever
enough to escape a definite stigma.
It is natural that under certain conditions growth should be downward
rather than upward. For the most part our natural tendencies are morally
indeterminate, not tendencies to do good things or bad things, but to
strive for life and self-expression under the conditions which are
offered to us by the environment. These conditions may be such as to
appeal mainly to the lower trend and offer little or no stimulus to the
higher. Many children are depraved by sensual vices at an age when they
have practically no power to refuse them. Or intellect and ambition may
be aroused but led to work in directions opposed to the standards of
society. Studies of juvenile delinquents have shown how their life is
often such as to train good faculties in bad directions. Thus a boy may
have a father so unjust that the boy feels justified in resisting and
deceiving him. A little later a badly conducted school may make it
natural for him to transfer this attitude to his teachers, and so
continue to develop a spirit of resistance to authority. At the same
time he not improbably finds that his natural intimates, the boys of the
neighborhood, are banded together to thwart the police, who, at the
bidding of a municipality which has provided no other playground, are
repressing games on the street; and if he can help his fellows in this
they will make him a leader. Thus the best traits of human nature,
ambition, fellowship, self-expression, combine to urge him into what may
presently turn out to be a career of crime.
In general our principles of selective growth and organization, while
they are on the whole upbuilding and progressive, may easily work in an
opposite sense. The current as a whole sets onward, but there are many
eddies and stagnant places. And if a retrogressive movement is well
developed and organized it has the same power as any other to force
individuals and lesser movements to adapt themselves to it.
It is not necessary that an environment, in order to have a bad
influence on a person, should be bad when considered by itself. It is
rather a matter of the kind of interaction that takes place, and just as
two persons, neither of whom is bad in himself, may have the worst
influence on each other, so what would be called a good environment and
a good individual may make an unfortunate combination. A carefully
brought-up boy sometimes goes wrong at the university because he has not
developed self-control enough to make a good use of his freedom; or a
man may be driven to drink and despair by getting into an occupation
which to another would be quite congenial.
Degeneration, then, is part of the general organic process of life.
Every wrong has a history, both in the innate tendencies of individuals
and in the circumstances under which they have developed. We no longer
feel that we understand crime and vice when we know who are practising
them, and how, but we must trace them back to bad homes and
neighborhoods, want of wholesome play, inadequate education, and lack of
training for useful work. And we need to know also, if we can, what kind
of a hereditary outfit each person brought into the world with him, and
how it has reacted to his surroundings.
Moreover, the various kinds of wrong hang together in an organic whole;
they are due largely to the same causes and each tends to reinforce all
the others. Where poverty and apathy have become established we may
expect to find drunkenness and other sensual vices, idiocy, insanity,
pauperism, and delinquency.
There is no better illustration of this than the degenerate villages
that may be found, probably, in all parts of the country, but are most
common, perhaps, in regions which have been stranded outside the current
of economic progress. In these the hereditary stock is usually impaired
by the more enterprising people moving away, and also by the
interbreeding of the inferior strains that remain. Along with this goes
a deterioration of the environment in the form of decay of enterprise,
of wholesome public opinion, of health, decency, and morality. Drink,
gambling, and prostitution flourish; whatever decent people are left
tend to move out, and not uncommonly their places are taken by newcomers
of a degraded class who find it easier to get a footing in a place like
this than anywhere else. There may be another village five miles away
that is in just the opposite condition, the only explanation of the
difference being that in the former degeneracy in some way got started
and a downward growth set in, while in the latter growth was the other
way.
In the same way all real reform must be general, an advance all along
the line. Each particular evil is interwoven with others and with the
general process of life in such a way that if you treat it as a thing by
itself your work will be superficial and usually ineffective. The method
of reform that naturally follows from the organic view is one of
team-work, under which each reformer devotes himself to a special line
of effort, but always in co-operation with others working in different
lines, and always with an eye to the unity of the process in which all
are engaged. If one were to undertake the regeneration of such a village
as I have described, he would no doubt have to begin at some definite
point—with improvement in the school, say, or the church, or the
introduction of a new industry—but he would need also to start work at
as many other points as possible.
For similar reasons reform must be sympathetic, in the sense that it
must be based on a real understanding, an inside view, of the minds of
the people concerned. No social situation is understood until we can see
truly how the several parties think and feel at critical moments, and
see also something of the process by which they come to think and feel
in this way. In these states of the spirit we get the vital synthesis of
the various factors that have been at work, the actual process of life
here and now. If we have this basis we may hopefully take the next step
of imagining something that will help the process on. Of social workers
without imagination it may be said, as has been said of mediocre poets,
that neither men nor gods have any use for them.
Much breath is wasted in discussing the question whether society or the
individual is to be held responsible for social wrong. To clear thinking
no such problem exists. That is, so far as responsibility exists, it is
both social and individual, these terms merely indicating points of
view. The active individual is responsible, and yet he only sums up the
action of society at the given moment. On the other hand, society, which
has provided the antecedents of the wrong, is responsible, but this only
means a large number of individuals. If Sam Clarke grows up a criminal,
and you say society is responsible, you mean that you, I, and others who
might, among us, have provided better influences for him, failed to do
so. And, after all, Clarke himself has his individual responsibility for
what he does, like the rest of us. The essential change which the
organic view calls for is that we should see all these individual
responsibilities not as separable things, but as working together in one
living whole.
Questions involving personal responsibility can always be treated so as
to make it appear that this is the main factor, or, on the other hand,
that the individual is dominated by impersonal causes. If, for example,
we study unemployment with reference to the fluctuating character of
industry, the lack of rational adjustment between demand and supply, and
the inadequacy of vocational education and guidance, we shall come to
see it as a societal condition over which the individual has little or
no control; but if we take statistics of unemployment with reference to
steadiness, foresight, ambition, and thrift, we may find that the
unemployed largely lack these traits. The two sets of facts are not
contradictory; it is merely a matter of emphasizing one aspect or
another of the same organic condition. Unemployment goes up and down
with general conditions, but also selects the less competent.
Common sense usually recognizes, in practical matters, this
many-sidedness of responsibility. If a boy has done wrong we usually
insist, in talking to him, that his will is the cause, because we feel
that this point of view ought to be impressed upon him. But in speaking
to his parents we probably dwell upon their part in the matter, and
exhibit the boy as an almost passive agent. And again, when we come to
address the Civic Association upon juvenile delinquency, we shall take
both the boy and his parents for granted, treating the whole matter as
mainly one of better schools and playgrounds. This is a legitimate
variation of emphasis quite in accord with the organic view.
I should say that under this view responsibility is not so much
diminished or increased as reinterpreted and made a different kind of a
thing; you have to think of the whole question in a new way, which is
not less hopeful or animating than the old and much more in accord with
the facts of life. Responsibility becomes a universal and interdependent
function of mankind, in which each individual and group has its own part
to play, and must go ahead with this part, trusting that others will do
the like. The whole matter must be conceived in a spirit of fellowship.
We may blame and even punish other people; but it must be done, if it is
done rightly, with a kind of contrition, and a sense that we more or
less share their guilt, somewhat in the spirit of a good father
punishing his child. Treatment which involves the isolation or
repudiation of any individual, no matter how degenerate, can never stand
as right. We are all in one boat. Imprisonment, and perhaps even death,
may be inflicted in a way which carries an acknowledgment of social
membership, and makes it a kind of service.
It is well to emphasize this co-operative idea, because the minds of
those engaged in reform have in the past been much ruled by the opposite
view, which I call particularism, the view that there is some one reform
which is _the_ fundamental one, and that if we give our whole energy to
effecting this the others will follow as a matter of course. As each
group of reformers has a different conception as to what this
fundamental reform is, the natural result is a number of groups working
at cross-purposes, and each depreciating the others. Thus temperance
reformers, of the old pattern, held that the radical ill was drink, and
that when they had put an end to that, which they sought to do by the
most obvious and repressive methods, there would be little else left to
do. Others thought that the unjust distribution of wealth was the root
of evil, seeking to remedy this by socialism or communism of some kind
and depreciating other reforms as merely palliative. Another group, with
biological antecedents, saw in bad heredity the primal ill, and
advocated sterilization. Still others pinned their faith to religious
conversion, woman suffrage, or the single tax. Reformers, in short, went
to battle like one of the hordes of our Germanic forefathers, in small
units, by tribes and clans, each leader with a band of followers about
him as ready to fight their neighbors as the enemy, in a tumultuous,
loosely co-ordinated crowd, and not at all with the ordered efficiency
of a modern army.
It may be thought that narrowness of view is, after all, useful, because
a man who believes that a particular thing is the only thing worth doing
is likely to pursue that with more energy than if he took a broader
view. The fact, however, is that people who see only one thing can never
see that truly, and are not likely to act wisely with reference to it.
The truth of a matter lies in its relations to a hundred other matters,
and these are just what the particularist does not perceive. Specialized
effort is essential; it is a good thing that each reformer should devote
himself with particular zeal to the cause which appeals to him; but it
should start from a large understanding of the situation, and should
proceed in a spirit of co-operation with others.
It is from a kind of particularism that when anything is wrong we assume
there must be some one cause to which the whole or a definite part of
the trouble can be ascribed. Thus we say that twenty-five per cent of
poverty is due to drink, or sixty per cent of insanity to heredity; and
if these figures are, possibly, not quite correct, we do not doubt that
by more exact study we could find figures, equally definite, that are
correct. We do not see that there is no such separation of factors as
these calculations imply, and that instead of contributing to precision
of thought they impair it by introducing a false conception.
In social inquiries we are not dealing, usually, with distinct and
separately measurable forces, but with a complex of forces no one of
which can be understood or measured apart from the rest. Granting that
drinking to excess is present in one-fourth the cases of poverty, other
conditions will be present along with it, such as ill health, bad
housing, lack of training, lack of enterprise, low wages, unwholesome
work, and so on; and who shall define what part each of these plays, and
how far drink is an effect rather than a cause? For the most part
poverty is the outcome of a complex organic development, in the
individual, his family, and his general environment.
Or suppose that we are investigating the causes of insanity and find
that the ancestry show traces of it in sixty per cent of the cases. Who
can say in how many cases ancestral weakness would not have manifested
itself without the co-operation of such other factors as alcohol, drugs,
venereal disease, or nervous strain? Evidently to ascribe sixty per cent
to heredity alone would be misleading, and no real understanding of the
case is possible without a synthetic study of all the chief factors.
Such questions are the same, in principle, as the question of the cause
of the great European War. A dozen causes may be given—as the military
traditions and ideals of Prussia, the commercial ambitions of Germany
and England, the lack of international control, the grudge of the French
regarding Alsace-Lorraine, the struggle between democracy and autocracy,
secret diplomacy, the Eastern Question—all of them essential aspects of
a vast and complex situation which, _as a whole_, was the real source of
the outbreak.
This fallacy of “the cause” is so wide-spread and so insidious that it
may be worth while to consider somewhat further the theory of the
matter. Everything in life is dependent upon a complex system of
antecedents without which it could not have come to pass; and yet it may
often be proper, from a practical standpoint, to speak of “the cause” of
an event. Commonly we mean by this the exceptional or variant factor in
the course of things. There is a sound and regular process of some sort
which is broken in upon by something irregular and abnormal, as when a
man of habitually vigorous health is seized with weakness and chills
which prove to be due to an irruption of the germs of typhoid fever.
Something analogous is often found in social process, as when poverty
and a sequence of other ills are brought upon a normal family by a quite
exceptional event, like the failure of a bank, or an unforeseeable
accident, and it is right to speak of this as “the cause.”
Another example is where there is one and only one factor that we can
control, and so interest centres upon this, and we regard it as “the
cause” of things going one way or another. Thus, if a baby is sick and
needs a certain kind of food we may say that the getting or not getting
this food is the cause of its living or dying, although its natural
vitality, its previous nurture, the character of the disease, and many
other conditions enter. This might plausibly be given as a reason for
ascribing drunkenness to the saloon; that is, it might be said that the
other causes, such as moral weakness, discouragement, lack of better
recreation, and the like, were obscure and hard to get at, while the
saloon is something that we can abolish.
Now what I wish to say is that personal and social degeneration is not
ordinarily due to a wholly exceptional factor breaking in upon a sound
process, nor is it often the case that all the factors but one are
beyond our reach. Usually many conditions of a more or less unwholesome
tendency co-operate, and usually all of these are directly or indirectly
within our power to amend. The social process has a degenerate side that
is an organic part of it, and tends to break out wherever the better
influences are relaxed; and it has also a constructive energy that may
be applied wherever we see fit. The man who takes to drink is never
morally and physically sound, and it is within our power not only to
abolish the saloon but to work upon the economic misery, the bad
heredity, and other factors that are of equal importance. To attack one
of these conditions and not the others might result in a measure of
success, but it would be like the success an army may gain by piercing
the enemy’s line at only one point; an attempt to advance farther at
this point would be exposed to flank attacks by the enemy on each side.
If we repress degenerate factors at but one point they are pretty sure
to appear at others, and the only hope of permanent conquest lies in an
advance all along the line.
Recently the people of a neighboring city became alarmed at the growth
of juvenile crime, and a leading social worker did me the honor to ask
my opinion about the matter. He said that the chief of police laid it to
idleness; Father L. of the Catholic Charities to unsupervised
recreation; Mr. M. of the Boy Scouts to lack of recreation facilities,
and Mr. E. of the Boys’ Farm to wrong conditions in the home.
It seemed to me probable that all these conditions and others also had a
part in the trouble, and I suggested that a fundamental way to study the
question would be to take, say, a hundred typical cases of boys coming
before the courts, and have social workers, by gaining their confidence,
make an intimate study of their life-histories, trying to see just how
the conditions of the city had acted upon their development, and where
and why they had gone wrong. The cases would doubtless differ much from
one another, and all together would be likely to indicate a whole system
of improvements tending to make the community a better place for boys to
grow up in. Nothing adequate would be accomplished by working upon any
one cause.
I hold, then, that in all studies of degeneracy aiming to be thorough
and suggest thorough remedies, _the conception of “the cause” should
give way to that of organic development_. Even accidents, viewed
largely, are not isolated causes but the outcome of events which we can
understand and control.
It is easy for a person with a particular bias regarding causes of
degeneration to present statistics which seem to confirm his view: he
has only to display the facts in such a manner as to reveal the
operation of the cause in which he is interested, unconsciously
concealing the truth that others are equally operative. If he is a
student of heredity he will so present matters—and quite honestly,
too—that you will wonder you ever thought anything else of much
importance; but the next man, armed with facts just as cogent, will give
you the same impression regarding education. I suppose there is nothing
which more confuses and discourages the amateur student of society than
this illusive and contradictory character in what seem to be, and often
are, quite trustworthy facts. Unless he can get a commanding and
reconciling view, his case, as a thinker, is hopeless.
The practical truth, in all such cases, is that what we are to regard as
the cause, if we are to single out any one, is not an absolute matter
but relative to the special situation we have to meet. We are justified
in selecting any factor which we may hope to control and thus bring
about improvement, as the cause for the purpose in hand. If we are
discussing eugenic marriage it may be quite proper to say that
non-eugenic marriages are the cause of sixty per cent of insanity,
provided we can show a probability that this per cent might be
eliminated through the control of marriage. At the same time it might be
true that sixty per cent could be eliminated by abolishing alcohol and
venereal disease, and, again, that sixty per cent might be saved through
better education and training—notwithstanding the fact that these three
sixties added together are more than the total number of cases. To a
great extent these are alternative methods of treatment, any one of
which might be effective. It is on the same principle that a man who is
suffering from illness brought on by heavy eating, lack of exercise, and
hereditary weakness of the digestive organs, might be cured either by
less food or more exercise, or, if it were practicable, by getting a
better hereditary outfit.
I do not mean to depreciate the statistical study of degeneracy,
believing it to be of the utmost value, but its legitimate purpose I
take to be to contribute authentic details which the mind can use, along
with other facts, to help in forming a true picture of the social
process leading up to the condition we are interested in. The particular
facts and relations we get in this way are like the detailed studies a
landscape-painter makes of trunks of trees, leaves, rocks, and water
surfaces, which cannot be put directly into his painting, but which give
him a perception of details by the aid of which his constructive vision
can produce the whole which he strives to depict. The understanding of a
social situation is always such a creative or artistic working of the
mind and never a reproduction of statistics as such. I have before me
the report of an investigation of the feeble-minded in a certain State,
which contains carefully prepared tables and diagrams showing the number
and grade of the mentally defective, their sex, age, nativity, ancestry,
school progress, delinquency, physical condition, and many other
pertinent facts. Such a report is of great value to a capable mind which
already has a sound general understanding of the subject, and of its
relation to other subjects, but in the lack of these it is of little or
no use; it is a raw material which needs a trained imagination to give
it form and meaning. If there is any kind of knowledge for which a
highly specialized action of the mind suffices, it is not sociology,
which always calls for a large synthesis of life.
I think I do not go too far in saying that most current interpretation
of statistics is invalidated by inadequate views of the social process
as a whole. There is evident need, in practical work, of clearer views
of one’s field and of its relation to other fields. The common complaint
is of well-intentioned societies and institutions working ahead in a
narrow and somewhat futile way for lack of ideas and methods broad as
the facts themselves and adequate to effect co-operation. Sometimes vast
quantities of precise data are available which illuminate nothing for
lack of organizing conceptions. The social process itself being organic,
social knowledge must become so in order to deal with it.
If we aim at an understanding of any extended condition of degeneracy,
such as the prevalence of crime, vice, and misery in a group, there is
nothing adequate, I think, except a precise, sympathetic, and many-sided
study of the evolution of the condition, both in individuals and in the
group as a whole. _All_ the main factors must be gone into, both in
detail and in synthesis. For example, a survey might be made of a
degenerate village, or quarter of a city, which should not only describe
the actual condition from various points of view, but should trace its
history in the same way. And it would not be complete without a
collection of typical individual biographies. These should be
sympathetic, and should enable us really to understand, in a human way,
the course of personal life in its representative varieties. There is
much of a kind of formalism which shuns the merely human as sentimental
and prefers to rest in the external fact, not seeing that this is always
barren without a human interpretation. We are far too complaisant, in my
opinion, to that prejudice of the physical scientist which identifies
the personal with the vague, and wishes to have as little to do with it
as possible. Even psychologists are sometimes guilty of this, which for
them is a kind of treason.