SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT--THE SCIENCE OF MOLDING INSTITUTIONS
After a gardener has produced his seed, guaranteeing a good heredity by
breeding together those individual plants which possess in the highest
degree the qualities he desires to secure, he turns his attention to the
seed bed. First of all, the location must be good--the bed must be on a
southern slope, where it will benefit by the first warm rays of the spring
sun; then the soil must be finely pulverized, in order that the tiny
rootlets may easily force their way downward, finding nourishment ready at
hand; when the seeds have been planted, in ground well prepared and
fertilized, they must be watered, cultivated, weeded; and as they develop
into larger plants, thinned, transplanted, pruned and sprayed. The wise
gardener considers environment as well as heredity. By sowing choice
seeds in well prepared soil, he ensures the excellence of his crop.
Modern society may well be compared to a garden. The plants are living,
moving beings, with some freedom to act on their own initiative. Moreover,
it is they who make and tend the gardens in which they grow. Like the
gardener in the story, they must look to environment as well as to
heredity. The seed bed must be carefully prepared, and the young plants,
as they appear, must be given all the attention which science makes
possible. Modern society is a garden of which the products are men and
women. The sowing, weeding, cultivating--carried forward through social
institutions--determines by its character whether the race shall decay, as
other races have done, or progress toward the Super Man.
The science of social gardening--Social Adjustment--has been given a great
impetus, in recent years, by the increased knowledge of the relative
influences of heredity and environment in determining the status of the
individual. This knowledge has led us to a belief in men.
Earlier beliefs conceived of the majority of men as utterly depraved. Some
indeed were among the elect, but the remainder, born to the lowest depths
of the social gehenna, were outcasts and pariahs, helpless in this world
and hopeless in the next. This doctrine of total depravity set at nought
all progressive effort. Here stands a man--society has called him a
criminal. Last year he attempted to steal an automobile, less than three
weeks after his release from serving a two-year sentence for grand
larceny. To-day he is in court again, charged with entering a lodging
house and stealing three pairs of trousers and an overcoat. The man is on
trial for burglary--what shall be the social verdict regarding him?
"Alas," mourns the advocate of total depravity, "God so made him. It is
not our right to interfere."
"Wait," says the social scientist, "until I investigate the case."
The case is held over while the scientist makes his investigation. After
careful inquiry, he reports that the young man's criminal record began at
the age of nine, when he was arrested for stealing bananas from a freight
car. Locked up with older criminals, he soon learned their tricks. He was
"nimble" and could "handle himself," so his prison mates taught him the
science of pocket picking, and initiated him into the gentle art of "shop
lifting." He was released, after two months of this schooling, and
slipping out into the big, black city, he tried an experiment. Succeeding,
he tried again, and yet again. Before the month was out, he was detected
stealing a silk handkerchief, and was back in prison. There his education
was perfected, and he entered the world to try once more. From the world
to jail, from jail to the world--this boy's life history from the age of
nine, had been one long attempt to learn his trade; fortunately or
unfortunately, he was somewhat of a bungler, and sooner or later he was
always caught.
When he was a boy, he sneaked up a dingy court, and three pairs of dirty
stairs to a landing where, in the rear of a battered tenement, was an
abode which he had been taught to call home. His father, a dock laborer,
earned, on the average, about $300 a year. Sometimes he worked steadily,
day and night, for a week, and earned $25 or $30; then there would be no
work for ten days or perhaps two weeks; the money would run out; the
grocer would refuse credit; and the family would be hungry. It was during
one of these hungry intervals that the nine-year-old urchin made his
descent on the bananas in the freight car, and received his first jail
sentence.
His mother, good hearted but woefully ignorant, made the best of things,
taking in washing, doing odd jobs here and there, tending to her children,
when opportunity offered, and at other times letting them run the streets.
"There," concludes the social scientist, "is the story of that boy's life.
His only picture of manhood is an inefficient father who cannot earn
enough to support his family; his concept of a mother expresses itself in
good hearted ignorance; his view of society has been secured from the rear
of a shabby tenement, the curb of a narrow street and a cell in the county
jail. The seed bed has been neither prepared, watered, nor tended, and
the young shoot has grown wild."
The social scientist has not been content with an analysis of social
maladjustment; going further, he has transplanted the young shoots from
the defective seed bed to better ground. Dr. Bernardo organized a system
for taking the boy criminals out of the slums of English cities, and
sending them to farms in Australia, South Africa and Canada. Nearly 50,000
boys have been thus disposed of. Though in their home cities many of them
had already entered a criminal life, in their new surroundings less than
two per cent. of them showed any tendency to revert to their former
criminal practices. A little tending and transplanting into a congenial
environment, proved the salvation of these boys, who would otherwise have
thronged the jails of England.
Careful analysis has convinced the social scientist that, in the absence
of malformation of the brain, or of some other physical defect, the
average man is largely made by his environment. As serious physical defect
is quite rare, being present in less than five per cent. of the
population; and as only a small percentage of the population, perhaps two
or three per cent., is above the average in ability, more than nine-tenths
of the people remain average--shaped by their environment; capable of good
or of evil, according as the good or evil forces of society influence
their youth and early maturity.
The eighteenth century philosophers had embodied the same conclusion in
the doctrine that all men are created free and equal. Victor Hugo, in the
first half of the nineteenth century, based most of his inspiring novels
on the theory that in every man there is a divine spark--a
conscience--which will be developed by a good environment or crushed and
blackened by a bad one.
Each year added new proofs of the theory of universal capacity, until Ward
was able to write his _Applied Sociology_, demonstrating that opportunity
is the key-note of social progress.[16] For, says he, up to the present
time nine-tenths of the men, and ten-tenths of the women (nineteen
twentieths of society) have been denied a legitimate opportunity for
development. Grant this opportunity, and at once, without any change in
hereditary characteristics, you can increase, nineteen fold, the
achievements of society.
Ward's estimate may be or may not be exactly correct. His contention that
universalized opportunity would greatly augment social achievement is,
however, fundamentally sound. Social Adjustment aims, through the shaping
social institutions, to provide every individual with an opportunity to
secure a strong body, a trained mind, an aggressive attitude, the power of
concentration, and the vision of a goal toward which he is working.[17] In
short, the object of Social Adjustment is the provision of universal
opportunity.
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear many a gem of purest ray serene.
Even the most gifted individual, thrown into an adverse environment, will
either fail utterly to develop his powers, or else will develop them so
incompletely that they can never come to their full fruition. Thomas A.
Edison cast away on an island in the South Pacific would be useless to his
fellows. Abraham Lincoln, living among the Apache Indians, would have left
small impress on the world. A sculptor, to be really great, must go to
Rome, because it is in Rome that the great works of sculptured art are to
be found. It is in Rome, furthermore, that the great sculptors work and
teach. A lawyer can scarcely achieve distinction while practicing in a
backwoods county court, nor can a surgeon remain proficient in his science
unless he keep in constant touch with the world of surgery. "I must go to
the city," cried a woman with an unusual voice. "Here in the country I can
sing, but I cannot study music." She must, of necessity, go to the city
because in the city alone exists the stimulus and the example which are
necessary for the perfection of her art.
A congenial environment is necessary for the perfection of any hereditary
talent. Lester F. Ward concludes, after an exhaustive analysis of
self-made men, that such men are the exception. That they exist he must
admit, but that their abilities would have come to a much more complete
development in a congenial environment he clearly demonstrates.
The rigorous persecution of the Middle Ages eliminated any save the most
daring thinkers. Men of science, who presumed to assert facts in
contradiction of the accepted dogmas of the Church, were ruthlessly
silenced, hence the ages were very dark. The nineteenth century, on the
contrary, through its cultivation of science and scientific attainments,
has reaped a harvest of scientific achievement unparalleled in the history
of the world. Men to-day enter scientific pursuits for the same reason
that they formerly entered the military service--because every emphasis is
laid on scientific endeavor. The nineteenth century scientist is the
logical outcome of the nineteenth century desires for scientific progress.
The environment shapes the man. Yet, equally, does the man shape the
environment. A high standard individual may be handicapped by social
tradition, but, in like manner, progressive social institutions are
inconceivable in the absence of high standard men and women.
The institutions of a society--its homes, schools, government,
industry--are created by the past and shaped by the present. Institutions
are not subjected to sudden changes, yet one generation, animated by the
effort to realize a high ideal, may reshape the social structure. Can one
conceive of a paper strewn campus in a college where the spirit is strong?
Parisians believe in beauty, hence Paris is beautiful. Social institutions
combine the achievements of the past with the ethics of the present.
"Let me see where you live and I will tell you what you are," is a true
saying. The social environment, moldable in each generation, is an
accurate index to the ideals and aspirations of the generation in which it
exists.