SOME FACTORS IN DEGENERATE PROCESS
DISPLACEMENT—ITS DIVERSE EFFECTS—MIGRATION—CHANGES IN THE ECONOMIC
SYSTEM—IN BELIEFS AND STANDARDS—DEMORALIZATION OF SAVAGE PEOPLES
BY CONTACT WITH CIVILIZATION—STAGNATION—ORGANIZED VICE
Probably the phases of degeneration most distinctive of our time are
those connected with social change. We live, as we constantly hear, in
an epoch of transition, and of the confusion and mental strain that go
with such an epoch. Although change may be progressive on the whole, it
is apt to break down established social relations and with them the
moral order and discipline upon which the individual depends.
We need to distinguish, in this connection, between moderate change,
which is usually wholesome, giving us the stimulus needed to keep our
minds awake, and radical change, involving displacement. By this term I
mean such a break in the conditions of personal life that one can
scarcely adapt himself to them by any gradual and normal process; there
is a kind of shock which may easily upset his character. We are
dependent for moral health upon intimate association with a group of
some sort, usually consisting of our family, neighbors, and other
friends. It is the interchange of ideas and feelings with this group,
and a constant sense of its opinions that makes standards of right and
wrong seem real to us. We may not wholly adopt its judgments, or that of
any member of it, but the social interplay is necessary to keep the
higher processes of the mind in action at all.
Now, it is the general effect of social displacement to tear us away
more or less completely, from such groups. When we move to town, or go
to another country, or get into a different social class, or adopt ideas
that alienate us from our former associates, it is not at all certain
that we shall form new relations equally intimate and cogent with the
old. A common result, therefore, is a partial moral isolation and
atrophy of moral sense. If the causes of change are at all general we
may have great populations made up largely of such displaced units, a
kind of “anarchy of spirits” among whom there is no ethos or settled
system of moral life at all, only a confused outbreak of impulses,
better or worse. Or the prevalent beliefs may break down under the
impact of strange ideas, and with them may go the ideals, sanctions,
standards, which have heretofore lived in the minds of men and sustained
their daily striving. Whole communities may thus be demoralized. Indeed
mental strain enters largely into all demoralization by change. The
adaptation of a social group to its conditions is normally a matter of
generations of experiment and adjustment. It is too much to think out
all at once, and no wonder if untrained minds, confused and discouraged
by attempting to do so, give it up and live by impulse.
It is probably the usual effect of displacement to both intensify and
disorganize the processes of selection; there is a livelier conflict of
persons and tendencies along with a lack of established institutions to
preside over this conflict and regulate the outcome. The result, as
regards individuals, is likely to be a greater diversity in their
fortunes than could exist under more orderly conditions; opportunity, of
certain kinds at least, may be increased, and those who have capacities
suited to take advantage of it, or who happen to be in favorable
situations, will prosper; others, who might have done as well as any in
quieter times, will be crowded down. A chance mixture of characters and
temperaments, brought into contact with a chance mixture of conditions
and opportunities, will naturally produce many new combinations, both
fortunate and unfortunate.
The principle applies to moral as well as economic struggles. The
unregulated freedom of action, forcing constant choice and
self-reliance, develops the mind rapidly, one way or the other, and is
likely to produce some characters of great vigor and independence, while
others, not necessarily of inferior capacity, may suffer decay. Those
who come out successfully may not be the best but simply the toughest,
the least sensitive and vulnerable. Miss Addams writes: “A settlement
constantly sees the deterioration of highly educated foreigners under
the strain of maladjustment, in marked contrast to the often rapid rise
of the families of illiterate immigrants.”[40]
In the international migrations of our day, which in some years have
brought more than a million strangers to the harbors of the United
States, the guiding motives are mainly economic, and these also cause
the immigrants to congregate in certain localities after they arrive. It
is true that part of them come in families, and that people from the
same provinces and neighborhoods often settle together; but the social
displacement, along with the total change in environment and modes of
work, is sufficient to cause wide-spread maladjustment and strain. It
has been said, with much appearance of truth, that it would be easier
for the immigrants to fight Indians, like the first settlers, than to
combat the perplexing social and economic conditions of the present
time. There is, perhaps, no topic of the kind on which the evidence is
more profuse and unanimous than this of the moral strain and partial
degeneration of our foreign element. It would be easy to collect any
number of passages like the following, from a settlement report:
The rude reversal of relationships, when parents depend more upon
children as interpreters than children upon parents for guidance; the
separation of husband from wife, father from children, for the first
time, under the necessity to seek a seasonable job at some
lumber-camp, railway section or shipping route; the transplanting of a
peasant family from their out-of-door life and work in a southern
climate to the indoor life in a crowded city tenement, and work in a
sweat-shop or factory; the ignorance of and inability to conform to
the difference in laws, customs, climate, clothing, diet, and
housing—these and many other experiences combine to make a situation
pitifully tragic.[41]
The Jews, because of their excellent family life and loyalty to their
traditions, probably stand change as well as any people; but they
acknowledge a considerable demoralization, and a writer in the
Pittsburgh Survey gives, as examples, wife desertion, laxity of
religious observance, gambling at the coffee-houses, occasional
licentiousness, and contempt for the ideals, customs, and beauties of
the traditional family and religious life. One of my Jewish students
writes: “I can take at random twenty of my friends, and out of these
twenty no more than five, I can say, are really interested in Judaism.
Yet all of them are the sons of pious Jewish parents.” The decay of
respect and discipline on the part of children is universally complained
of, and unites with other demoralizing conditions to explain the
prevalence of juvenile crime.
The movement from country to town is quite as trying, especially as most
of those who go are young men and girls who separate entirely from their
family and neighborhood connections, becoming subject to unusual stress
and temptation without the usual safeguards of association and public
opinion. Lonesomeness drives them into questionable companionship, and
organized vice of several kinds exists by exploiting them. It is well
known that urban prostitutes are recruited largely from girls who have
left country homes to work in the city.[42]
The radical changes in the economic system upset life even for those who
remain in the same place. It is rare nowadays that people earn their
bread in the same way that their fathers did; they have to turn to new
occupations, form new habits and think new thoughts. Even farming, the
ancient type of stability, is rapidly being transformed, and the farmer
with it. Moreover, it often happens that an occupation does not last a
lifetime; and one who has achieved efficiency and high pay in it feels
it drop from under him, leaving him to begin again as a common laborer.
This may happen several times to the same man. To all this we must add
the irregularity of employment due to the ups and downs of modern
industry and to labor troubles, the result being a rather general
condition of insecurity and strain. Men and families are thrown out of
the system, others are disquieted by apprehension, and nearly all feel
that their houses are builded on the sand, so that they cannot easily
have that confidence in the stability of their livelihood upon which
mental and moral stability largely depend. The principle that human
character deteriorates under irregular and uncertain employment is an
old one and, I believe, undisputed. There are innumerable cases like the
following: “When he moved to Peoria he had regular work for some months,
until a lull threw him out. Then he began to loaf on the corner, and has
never since desired anything more. ‘It’s easy,’ he said, ‘and I get
enough to live on. If I get sick there’s the hospitals.’” Where there is
a class of workers subject to such conditions, like the lumberjacks and
steamboat-hands of the Great Lakes, or the wheat-harvesters of the
Northwest, it is almost invariably found that their lives are morally as
well as industrially irregular; and though this may be partly due to the
fact that such work attracts an unstable class of men, there is no
reasonable doubt that the work itself causes instability.
The unemployment due to hard times, a great strike, or to other widely
acting causes, seems invariably to lead to an increase of vagrancy,
dissipation and crime in the class thus displaced. The panic of 1907 was
followed in 1909 by an increase of over thirty-four per cent in the
commitments to Elmira Reformatory, most of whose inmates come from New
York and other industrial cities.[43] An access of prosperity may be
equally demoralizing. Those who have made money rapidly, whether they
are actually rich or only relatively so compared with former straits,
furnish a large amount of moral degeneracy. Lacking ideals and
traditions that would teach them the better uses of their means, they
are apt to spend them in display and sensual dissipation, and the most
prosperous towns and families are often the least edifying in their
behavior. A very thriving city in this neighborhood, one that has grown
rich by the sudden growth of a line of manufacture, is credibly
described as in a far worse state of morals and culture than before the
boom. “Things move so fast that people become confused. There are few
standards, each gets what he can.”
Our deeper beliefs have for their function a mental adjustment to the
ruling conditions of life. Where the conditions are stable we gradually
attain modes of thought and action suitable to them, and are enabled to
live with some assurance. But if the conditions change rapidly these
modes of thought and action are discredited, because they no longer
“work,” and, since more suitable modes cannot be achieved in a day, we
fall into distraction, infidelity, pessimism, and lax conduct. “Where
there is no vision the people perish.”
No one doubts that this is a time of discredited beliefs and standards.
We have an industrial system which calls for new conceptions of right
and wrong and new methods of impressing these upon men. Otherwise we do
not see what right and wrong are, and either plunge into dangerous
experiments or fall back upon a crude selfishness. A few years ago the
officials of one of the great trade-unions, an intelligent body of men,
embarked upon a campaign of blowing up with dynamite the buildings of
those who opposed their commands. They had, apparently, no clear sense
that this was wrong, but had accepted the plausible view that they were
engaged in a “war,” and that violent means were justifiable. A
thoughtful and dispassionate mind easily sees the fallacy of this, but
men in difficult moral situations are seldom thoughtful and
dispassionate; they need to have the right defined for them in habits
and symbols; and our economic life is filled with men going wrong for
lack of such definition. Where there is anarchy in thought there will be
anarchy in conduct.
The same is true of the religious and moral institutions, whose special
function it is to give us a sound and stable basis of conduct. Churches,
creeds, standards, _mores_, every form of established righteousness,
have been shaken and discredited by their apparent unsuitability, so
that a large part of mankind, tacitly if not openly, treat all such
institutions as obsolete, and tend to the view that you may do anything
you like unless you encounter something strong enough to prevent it.
However one may trust in the power of human nature as a whole to weather
such a storm, it would be a foolish optimism to doubt that large numbers
will be lost in it. In fact we see on every hand individuals,
associations, schools of literature, art, and philosophy, even mighty
nations, struggling with one another, and with their own thoughts in the
endeavor to work a moral whole out of this confusion.
The principle of moral disintegration through abrupt change is the same
that acts so destructively in the contact of savage and civilized life.
Irrespective of any intentional aggression, and in spite, sometimes, of
a sincere aim to do good, the mere contact of civilization with the
social system of more primitive peoples is, generally speaking,
destructive of the latter, and of the character of the individuals
involved in it. The white man, whether he be soldier, settler, or
missionary, brings with him overwhelming evidences of superiority, in
power, knowledge, and resources. He may mean well, but he always wants
his own way, and that way is inevitably that of the traditions, ideals,
and organization of the white race. As the savage comes to feel this
superiority his own institutions are degraded in his eyes, and himself,
also, as inseparable from these institutions. Confused, displaced,
helpless, thrown back upon mere impulses without the dignity and
discipline of a corporate life, he falls into degeneration. “It is
really the great tragedy of civilization,” says Professor Stunner, “that
the contact of lower and higher is disastrous to the former, no matter
what may be the point of contact, or how little the civilized may desire
to do harm.”[44] Unbiassed observers are for the most part, I think, of
this opinion. Thus Spencer and Gillen, speaking of the tribes of Central
Australia, say that the white man “introduces a disturbing element into
the environment of the native, and from that moment degeneration sets
in.”[45] Old morals are lost and no new ones gained. Dudley Kidd says of
the Negroes of South Africa: “We have undermined the clan system right
and left, and have riddled its defenses through and through with the
explosive shells of civilization; we have removed nearly all the old
restraints which curbed the people, and have disintegrated their
religion, and so rendered it, comparatively speaking, useless.... With
the clan system have gone, or are going, some of the best traits in
Kafir character.[46]... If we would but leave them alone they could
easily set up a civilization that would give them unbounded
satisfaction. But our industrial requirements, no less than our moral
impulses, make that solution of the difficulty impossible.[47]... We
expose savages to the highly complex stimuli of individualism, labor
demands, economic pressure, violent legal changes, trade, clothing,
industries, a lofty spiritual religion; and to all these we add a wholly
unsuitable system of book-learning....”[48] There is a discipline under
the native system that is quite effective in its way. “Obedience to
parents hardly needs to be taught, for the children notice how every one
in the kraal is instinctively obedient to the old men: the children
catch this spirit without knowing it.”[49] This, of course, disappears
with the irruption of disorganizing ideas. Miss Kingsley, speaking of
the Negro tribes of the northwest coast, says: “Nothing strikes one so
much in studying the degeneration of these native tribes as the direct
effect that civilization and reformation has in hastening it.”[50] And
so Nansen tells of the degeneration of the Eskimo, in his account of The
First Crossing of Greenland. Their food-supply has been reduced, their
skill in seal-catching lost, sickness increased by poverty and wearing
clothes indoors, a demoralizing taste for luxury aroused, and their
self-respect and social unity undermined. All this notwithstanding that
they have been extremely well treated by the Danes.
Even Christian missions have served as the involuntary channel of
disintegrating forces. Not to speak of such crudities as compelling the
native to wear clothes under climatic and domestic conditions which make
them breeders of disease, the mere fact of discrediting rooted beliefs
and habits in order to substitute something unfamiliar is almost
inevitably destructive. Many individuals may be really Christianized,
wholly transplanted, as it were, from one social system into another,
while at the same time the overthrow of the native institutions is
causing another class, possibly much larger, to become irresponsible and
dissolute. The fact that white civilization was introduced into the
Hawaiian Islands under the auspices of American missionaries of the
highest character, whose descendants are now the ruling class, has not
prevented the moral and physical decay of the native race.
I should add, however, first, that missionaries have latterly come to
work in a more sociological spirit, and to recognize the duty of
treating native institutions with respect, and, second, that contact
with civilization is inevitable, and the missionaries are commonly the
class who are working most sincerely to make this contact as beneficial
to the native, or as little injurious, as possible. Without doubt the
situation would be far worse if they should withdraw their efforts.
The great oriental nations which are now assimilating the civilization
of the West are protected from moral dissolution by the strength of
their institutions and the loyalty with which they cherish them. In this
way their system of life, and the individuals who embody it, preserve
their continuity and self-respect; but even in China and Japan the
process is trying and, by all accounts, involves a good deal of
demoralization. It is the same story of the discrediting of old ethics
before the new has developed, and of the spread of a somewhat licentious
individualism. In India also degeneracy is rife among the numerous class
who have broken away from the caste organization, which, with whatever
defects, is still a system of moral control.
Displacement by change is no more harmful than the opposite extreme of
stagnation. One whose higher faculties are not aroused by fresh
situations and problems is thrown back upon the lower. While American
life is, on the whole, remarkably active, its activity is not regularly
distributed, and is, moreover, mostly of a somewhat narrow sort, lacking
in richness and higher appeal, so that it often fails to engage the real
interest of the actor. The result is that in the midst of our strenuous
civilization there is a large proportion of stagnant minds.
Degenerate villages, such as I have mentioned in another connection, are
to be found, apparently, all over the country, and I have notes of seven
or eight, in Michigan and neighboring States, that have been described
in students’ papers. One, for example, is a town of about one thousand
people, in a former lumbering district. When the lumbering declined the
more energetic families moved out, leaving a class of people lacking in
leadership and isolated from higher influences. There is no inspiration
or outlook for the young people, no clubs, libraries, athletics, or
Christian Associations. The schools are very poor, and the saloon with
its attendant vices has everything its own way. In such a place things
often go from bad to worse; families already degenerate move in, because
they can get a footing easier than elsewhere, and inbreeding, both
social and biological, tends to a continued deterioration.
In other cases the towns are prosperous, in the economic sense, but
sordid, narrow-minded, and lacking in all animating idealism. The
leading people are, perhaps, orthodox church-members, but they provide
no culture opportunities or wholesome recreation for the young, and seem
to have no ambition for them beyond pecuniary success. Sexual vice, with
or without drunkenness, seems to be the most salient form of corruption
under these circumstances, and careful observers, who have been teachers
in such communities, have furnished me convincing evidence that a
majority of the grown-up girls and young men are sometimes involved in
it.
A great city often induces degeneracy in neighboring small towns,
because, the towns becoming suburban in character, the real life of the
energetic people is drawn to the city, leaving the small place without
leadership, ideals, or community spirit. There is also the fact that
every large city produces a class of vicious pleasure-seekers who carry
on their revels in the outlying districts.
Again, there are rural populations of considerable extent, sometimes
immigrant, more often native, which, in one way or another, have fallen
into a degenerate condition, and are living quite apart from higher
civilization. A community of this sort is described as dwelling on
exhausted timber-lands in western Pennsylvania, its members shiftless,
uneducated, half wild in appearance, with no ownership in the land, and
believed to be generally licentious.
It is not at all necessary, however, to hunt out exceptional conditions
to find examples of moral stagnation. We may discover it among business
men, hand-workers, college students—wherever we may choose to look. Our
civilization, whatever its promise, is far from having solved the
problem of maintaining an upward striving in all its members.
The organization of society may not only fail to give human nature the
moral support it needs, but may be of such a kind as actively to promote
degeneration. On its worse side the whole system of commercialism,
characteristic of our time, is of this sort. That is, its spirit is
largely mechanical, unhuman, seeking to use mankind as an agent of
material production, with very little regard, in the case of the weak
classes, for breadth of life, self-expression, outlook, hope, or any
kind of higher life. Men, women, children, find themselves required to
work at tasks, usually uninteresting and often exhausting, amidst dreary
surroundings, and under such relations to the work as a whole that their
imagination and loyalty are little, if at all, aroused. Such a life
either atrophies the larger impulses of human nature or represses them
to such a degree that they break out, from time to time, in gross and
degrading forms of expression. I have in mind an investigation by a
woman student of the amusements of factory girls in a neighboring city.
It showed that the poorer class of them were overworked during the week,
were too tired to go out at night, and had unattractive homes. On
Saturday night many of them found their only emotional outlet in
commercial dance-halls, where the men were strangers and where the
surroundings were more or less vicious. The girls were of no worse
disposition than other girls, but many of them were deteriorating
morally under these conditions. This, of course, is what has been found
true in a hundred other cities.
The deliberate promotion of vice under the impulse of gain comes
naturally in to exploit the weak places in human nature. It has been
shown in the case of sexual licentiousness that the natural sensuality
and weakness of men and women but partly explain its prevalence; we have
to add the coaxing and stimulation of an organized propaganda. Miss
Addams, in her work A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, describes the
corruption of children, intentional and unintentional, on a large scale.
Their minds are tainted by shows, dance-halls, overcrowding, contact
with the licentious class, and finally by deliberate training in vice.
Much the same may be said of drink, gambling, and theft, not to speak of
the more intangible forms of corruption rife in business and politics.
Organization of this sort arises spontaneously, as it were, out of the
universal appetite for gain and the obvious weaknesses of human nature;
it therefore almost always enters the field ahead of the organization
aiming to counteract it—the legal restrictions, educational and rescue
work, social centres, and the like—and is likely to flourish almost
unchecked in a raw civilization. It owes its strength no more to gross
passions than to the absence of alternatives that enables it to pervert
to base uses the finer impulses, those calling for companionship,
recreation, cheerful and unconstraining surroundings.
_PART IV_
SOCIAL FACTORS IN BIOLOGICAL
SURVIVAL