PRIMARY GROUPS
MEANING OF PRIMARY GROUPS—FAMILY, PLAYGROUND, AND NEIGHBORHOOD—HOW
FAR INFLUENCED BY LARGER SOCIETY—MEANING AND PERMANENCE OF “HUMAN
NATURE”—PRIMARY GROUPS THE NURSERY OF HUMAN NATURE.
By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face
association and coöperation. They are primary in several senses, but
chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature
and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association,
psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common
whole, so that one’s very self, for many purposes at least, is the
common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of
describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a “we”; it involves
the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which “we” is the
natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the
chief aims of his will in that feeling.
It is not to be supposed that the unity of the primary group is
one of mere harmony and love. It is always a differentiated and
usually a competitive unity, admitting of self-assertion and various
appropriative passions; but these passions are socialized by sympathy,
and come, or tend to come, under the discipline of a common spirit. The
individual will be ambitious, but the chief object of his ambition
will be some desired place in the thought of the others, and he will
feel allegiance to common standards of service and fair play. So the
boy will dispute with his fellows a place on the team, but above such
disputes will place the common glory of his class and school.
The most important spheres of this intimate association and
coöperation—though by no means the only ones—are the family, the
play-group of children, and the neighborhood or community group of
elders. These are practically universal, belonging to all times and
all stages of development; and are accordingly a chief basis of what
is universal in human nature and human ideals. The best comparative
studies of the family, such as those of Westermarck[6] or Howard,[7]
show it to us as not only a universal institution, but as more alike
the world over than the exaggeration of exceptional customs by an
earlier school had led us to suppose. Nor can any one doubt the general
prevalence of play-groups among children or of informal assemblies
of various kinds among their elders. Such association is clearly the
nursery of human nature in the world about us, and there is no apparent
reason to suppose that the case has anywhere or at any time been
essentially different.
As regards play, I might, were it not a matter of common observation,
multiply illustrations of the universality and spontaneity of the group
discussion and coöperation to which it gives rise. The general fact is
that children, especially boys after about their twelfth year, live in
fellowships in which their sympathy, ambition and honor are engaged
even more, often, than they are in the family. Most of us can recall
examples of the endurance by boys of injustice and even cruelty, rather
than appeal from their fellows to parents or teachers—as, for instance,
in the hazing so prevalent at schools, and so difficult, for this very
reason, to repress. And how elaborate the discussion, how cogent the
public opinion, how hot the ambitions in these fellowships.
Nor is this facility of juvenile association, as is sometimes supposed,
a trait peculiar to English and American boys; since experience
among our immigrant population seems to show that the offspring of
the more restrictive civilizations of the continent of Europe form
self-governing play-groups with almost equal readiness. Thus Miss
Jane Addams, after pointing out that the “gang” is almost universal,
speaks of the interminable discussion which every detail of the gang’s
activity receives, remarking that “in these social folk-motes, so to
speak, the young citizen learns to act upon his own determination.”[8]
Of the neighborhood group it may be said, in general, that from the
time men formed permanent settlements upon the land, down, at least,
to the rise of modern industrial cities, it has played a main part in
the primary, heart-to-heart life of the people. Among our Teutonic
forefathers the village community was apparently the chief sphere of
sympathy and mutual aid for the commons all through the “dark” and
middle ages, and for many purposes it remains so in rural districts
at the present day. In some countries we still find it with all its
ancient vitality, notably in Russia, where the mir, or self-governing
village group, is the main theatre of life, along with the family, for
perhaps fifty millions of peasants.
In our own life the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up
by the growth of an intricate mesh of wider contacts which leaves us
strangers to people who live in the same house. And even in the country
the same principle is at work, though less obviously, diminishing our
economic and spiritual community with our neighbors. How far this
change is a healthy development, and how far a disease, is perhaps
still uncertain.
Besides these almost universal kinds of primary association, there
are many others whose form depends upon the particular state of
civilization; the only essential thing, as I have said, being a certain
intimacy and fusion of personalities. In our own society, being little
bound by place, people easily form clubs, fraternal societies and the
like, based on congeniality, which may give rise to real intimacy. Many
such relations are formed at school and college, and among men and
women brought together in the first instance by their occupations—as
workmen in the same trade, or the like. Where there is a little common
interest and activity, kindness grows like weeds by the roadside.
But the fact that the family and neighborhood groups are ascendant in
the open and plastic time of childhood makes them even now incomparably
more influential than all the rest.
Primary groups are primary in the sense that they give the individual
his earliest and completest experience of social unity, and also in
the sense that they do not change in the same degree as more elaborate
relations, but form a comparatively permanent source out of which the
latter are ever springing. Of course they are not independent of the
larger society, but to some extent reflect its spirit; as the German
family and the German school bear somewhat distinctly the print of
German militarism. But this, after all, is like the tide setting back
into creeks, and does not commonly go very far. Among the German,
and still more among the Russian, peasantry are found habits of free
coöperation and discussion almost uninfluenced by the character of the
state; and it is a familiar and well-supported view that the village
commune, self-governing as regards local affairs and habituated to
discussion, is a very widespread institution in settled communities,
and the continuator of a similar autonomy previously existing in the
clan. “It is man who makes monarchies and establishes republics, but
the commune seems to come directly from the hand of God.”[9]
In our own cities the crowded tenements and the general economic and
social confusion have sorely wounded the family and the neighborhood,
but it is remarkable, in view of these conditions, what vitality they
show; and there is nothing upon which the conscience of the time is
more determined than upon restoring them to health.
These groups, then, are springs of life, not only for the individual
but for social institutions. They are only in part moulded by special
traditions, and, in larger degree, express a universal nature. The
religion or government of other civilizations may seem alien to us, but
the children or the family group wear the common life, and with them
we can always make ourselves at home.
By human nature, I suppose, we may understand those sentiments and
impulses that are human in being superior to those of lower animals,
and also in the sense that they belong to mankind at large, and not
to any particular race or time. It means, particularly, sympathy and
the innumerable sentiments into which sympathy enters, such as love,
resentment, ambition, vanity, hero-worship, and the feeling of social
right and wrong.[10]
Human nature in this sense is justly regarded as a comparatively
permanent element in society. Always and everywhere men seek honor and
dread ridicule, defer to public opinion, cherish their goods and their
children, and admire courage, generosity, and success. It is always
safe to assume that people are and have been human.
It is true, no doubt, that there are differences of race capacity,
so great that a large part of mankind are possibly incapable of any
high kind of social organization. But these differences, like those
among individuals of the same race, are subtle, depending upon some
obscure intellectual deficiency, some want of vigor, or slackness of
moral fibre, and do not involve unlikeness in the generic impulses of
human nature. In these all races are very much alike. The more insight
one gets into the life of savages, even those that are reckoned the
lowest, the more human, the more like ourselves, they appear. Take for
instance the natives of Central Australia, as described by Spencer
and Gillen,[11] tribes having no definite government or worship and
scarcely able to count to five. They are generous to one another,
emulous of virtue as they understand it, kind to their children and to
the aged, and by no means harsh to women. Their faces as shown in the
photographs are wholly human and many of them attractive.
And when we come to a comparison between different stages in the
development of the same race, between ourselves, for instance, and
the Teutonic tribes of the time of Cæsar, the difference is neither
in human nature nor in capacity, but in organization, in the range
and complexity of relations, in the diverse expression of powers and
passions essentially much the same.
There is no better proof of this generic likeness of human nature than
in the ease and joy with which the modern man makes himself at home
in literature depicting the most remote and varied phases of life—in
Homer, in the Nibelung tales, in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the legends
of the American Indians, in stories of frontier life, of soldiers and
sailors, of criminals and tramps, and so on. The more penetratingly
any phase of human life is studied the more an essential likeness to
ourselves is revealed.
To return to primary groups: the view here maintained is that human
nature is not something existing separately in the individual, but a
_group-nature or primary phase of society_, a relatively simple and
general condition of the social mind. It is something more, on the
one hand, than the mere instinct that is born in us—though that enters
into it—and something less, on the other, than the more elaborate
development of ideas and sentiments that makes up institutions. It
is the nature which is developed and expressed in those simple,
face-to-face groups that are somewhat alike in all societies; groups
of the family, the playground, and the neighborhood. In the essential
similarity of these is to be found the basis, in experience, for
similar ideas and sentiments in the human mind. In these, everywhere,
human nature comes into existence. Man does not have it at birth; he
cannot acquire it except through fellowship, and it decays in isolation.
If this view does not recommend itself to common-sense I do not know
that elaboration will be of much avail. It simply means the application
at this point of the idea that society and individuals are inseparable
phases of a common whole, so that wherever we find an individual fact
we may look for a social fact to go with it. If there is a universal
nature in persons there must be something universal in association to
correspond to it.
What else can human nature be than a trait of primary groups? Surely
not an attribute of the separate individual—supposing there were any
such thing—since its typical characteristics, such as affection,
ambition, vanity, and resentment, are inconceivable apart from society.
If it belongs, then, to man in association, what kind or degree of
association is required to develop it? Evidently nothing elaborate,
because elaborate phases of society are transient and diverse, while
human nature is comparatively stable and universal. In short the
family and neighborhood life is essential to its genesis and nothing
more is.
Here as everywhere in the study of society we must learn to see mankind
in psychical wholes, rather than in artificial separation. We must see
and feel the communal life of family and local groups as immediate
facts, not as combinations of something else. And perhaps we shall do
this best by recalling our own experience and extending it through
sympathetic observation. What, in our life, is the family and the
fellowship; what do we know of the we-feeling? Thought of this kind may
help us to get a concrete perception of that primary group-nature of
which everything social is the outgrowth.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] The History of Human Marriage.
[7] A History of Matrimonial Institutions.
[8] Newer Ideals of Peace, 177.
[9] De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 5.
[10] These matters are expounded at some length in the writer’s Human
Nature and the Social Order.
[11] The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Compare also Darwin’s
views and examples given in chap. 7 of his Descent of Man.