1. The Implications of Human Association.
—Society is one word, but many things. Men associate together in
all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes. One man is concerned
in a multitude of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite
different. It often seems as if they had nothing in common except that
they are modes of associated life. Within every larger social
organization there are numerous minor groups: not only political
subdivisions, but industrial, scientific, religious, associations.
There are political parties with differing aims, social sets, cliques,
gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely together by ties
of blood, and so on in endless variety. In many modern states and in
some ancient, there is great diversity of populations, of varying
languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this
standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for
example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an
inclusive and permeating community of action and thought.
(See Ante, p. 24.)
The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a
eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a meaning
de jure and a meaning
de facto. In social philosophy, the
former connotation is almost always uppermost. Society is conceived as one
by its very nature. The qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy
community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of
sympathy, are emphasized. But when we look at the facts which the term
denotes instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic
connotation, we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good
and bad. Men banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations
that prey upon the public while serving it, political machines held together
by the interest of plunder, are included. If it is said that such
organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal
requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the
conception of society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having
no reference to facts; and in part, that each of these organizations, no
matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of
the praiseworthy qualities of "Society" which hold it together. There
is honor among thieves, and a band of robbers has a common interest as
respects its members. Gangs are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow
cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes. Family life may be
marked by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without,
and yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Any education given
by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of
the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group.
Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode
of social life. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes.
We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal
society. We must base our conception upon societies which actually
exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable
one. But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the
traits which are actually found. The problem is to extract the
desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and
employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement.
Now in any social group whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find
some interest held in common, and we find a certain amount of
interaction and coöperative intercourse with other groups. From these
two traits we derive our standard. How numerous and varied are the
interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the
interplay with other forms of association? If we apply these
considerations to, say, a criminal band, we find that the ties which
consciously hold the members together are few in number, reducible
almost to a common interest in plunder; and that they are of such a
nature as to isolate the group from other groups with respect to give
and take of the values of life. Hence, the education such a society
gives is partial and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind
of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there are
material, intellectual, aæsthetic interests in which all participate and
that the progress of one member has worth for the experience of other
members—it is readily communicable—and that the family is
not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into relationships with
business groups, with schools, with all the agencies of culture, as well
as with other similar groups, and that it plays a due part in the
political organization and in return receives support from it. In
short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and
there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of
association.
I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically
governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an
organization between governed and governors. The authorities in command
must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects, must
call some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said that a government
could do everything with bayonets except sit on them. This cynical
declaration is at least a recognition that the bond of union is not
merely one of coercive force. It may be said, however, that the
activities appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading—that
such a government calls into functioning activity simply capacity for
fear. In a way, this statement is true. But it overlooks the fact that
fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience. Caution,
circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future events so as to avert
what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling
the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission.
The real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking
dread and hope of specific tangible reward—say comfort and
ease—many other capacities are left untouched. Or rather, they
are affected, but in such a way as to pervert them. Instead of
operating on their own account they are reduced to mere servants of
attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
This is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common
interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of the
social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided. In
order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the
group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from
others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and
experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters,
educate others into slaves. And the experience of each party loses in
meaning, when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience
is arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject-class
prevents social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the superior
class are less material and less perceptible, but equally real. Their
culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their
art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious;
their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than
humane.
Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety
of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced.
Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to
thought. The more activity is restricted to a few definite
lines—as it is when there are rigid class lines preventing
adequate interplay of experiences—the more action tends to become
routine on the part of the class at a disadvantage, and capricious,
aimless, and explosive on the part of the class having the materially
fortunate position. Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from
another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains
even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever
men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose
service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. Much
is said about scientific management of work. It is a narrow view which
restricts the science which secures efficiency of operation to movements
of the muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the discovery of
the relations of a man to his work—including his relations to
others who take part—which will enlist his intelligent interest in
what he is doing. Efficiency in production often demands division of
labor. But it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the
technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in what they
do, and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by such
perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as efficiency of
activity and scientific management to purely technical externals is
evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in
control of industry—those who supply its aims. Because of their
lack of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not
sufficient stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships
in industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with
technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very acute and
intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the
failure to take into account the significant social factors means none
the less an absence of mind, and a corresponding distortion of emotional
life.
II. This illustration (whose point is to be extended to all
associations lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second
point. The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its
antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever
one group has interests "of its own" which shut it out from full
interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the
protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress
through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from
one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they
had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the
interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned
and unlearned. The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity
and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals
within the group. That savage tribes regard aliens and enemies as
synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the fact that they have
identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs.
On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others,
for such contact might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion
reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding mental
life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the physical
environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to the
field where we are apt to ignore it—the sphere of social contacts.
Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the
operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between
peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the
alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the
fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them
and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and
thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial
tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to
bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connection
with one another. It remains for the most part to secure the
intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of
space.
