Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 7

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 93.]

Human beings tend not only sympathetically to reproduce the instinctive actions of others,[2] but they tend, despite themselves, to experience directly and immediately, often involuntarily, the emotions experienced and outwardly manifested by others. Almost everyone has had his mood heightened to at least kindly joy by the presence in a crowded street car of a young child whose inquiring prattle and light-hearted laughter were subdued by the gray restraints and responsibilities of maturity. One melancholy face can crush the joy of a boisterous and cheerful party;[3] the eagerness and enthusiasm of an orator can, irrespective of the merits of the cause he is defending, provoke eagerness and enthusiasm for the same cause among an audience that does not in the least understand what the orator is talking about.

[Footnote 2: "In man infectious laughter or yawning, walking in step, imitating the movements of a ropewalker, while watching him, feeling a shock in one's legs when one sees a man falling, and a hundred other occurrences of this kind are cases of physiological sympathy." Ribot: _Psychology of the Emotions_, p. 232.

Reproduction of the actions of others has by a certain school of philosophers and psychologists, notably Tarde, Le Bon, and Baldwin, been ascribed to imitation. But no experimental researches have revealed any such specific instinct to imitate (see Thorndike, p. 73 ff.), and "imitations" of acts can generally be traced to sympathy, or suggestion--which is sympathy on an intellectual plane.]

[Footnote 3: Such expressions as "kill joy," "wet blanket," "life of the party" are instances of the popular appreciation of the fact of social contagion.]

One brand of cigarettes was recently advertised by the face of a young soldier, roguishly irresponsible, palpably and completely given over to joy. One found one's self transported into something of this same mood before one had a chance to speculate at all as to whether there was any causal relation between the specific quality of tobacco the youngster was smoking, and that contagious, undeniable delight. What is called personal magnetism is perhaps more than anything else the ability to provoke in others sympathetic experiences of pleasant and exhilarating emotions.

Sensibility to the emotions of others, though possessed by almost all individuals, varies in degree. The complete absence of it marks a man out as "stolid," "cold," "callous,"

"brutal." Such a type of personality may be efficient and successful in pursuits requiring nothing besides a direct a.n.a.lysis of facts, uncolored by any irrelevant access of feeling, as in the case of mathematics and mechanics. But the geniuses even in strictly intellectual fields have frequently been men of sensitiveness, delicacy, and responsiveness to the feelings of others. That intellectual a.n.a.lysis, however, does frequently blunt the poignancy of feeling is ill.u.s.trated in the case of John Stuart Mill, who writes in his _Autobiography_:

a.n.a.lytic habits may thus even strengthen the a.s.sociations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a _mere_ matter of feeling.

They are, therefore, I thought, favorable to prudence and clear-sightedness, but a perpetual worm at the root both of the pa.s.sions and of the virtues; and above all fearfully undermine all desires and ... all except the purely physical and organic; of the entire insufficiency of which to make life desirable, no one had a stronger conviction than I had.... All those to whom I looked up were of the opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Autobiography_ (Holt edition), p. 138.]

A generous degree of susceptibility to the emotions of others makes a man what is variously called "mellow," "humane,"

"large-hearted," "generous-souled." The possession of such susceptibility is an a.s.set, first, in that it enriches life for its possessor. It gives him a warm insight into the feelings, emotions, desires, habits of mind and action of other people, and gives to his experiences with them a vivid and personal significance not attainable by any hollow intellectual a.n.a.lysis. It is an a.s.set, moreover, in the purely utilitarian business of dealing with men. The statesman or executive who deals with men as so many animate machines, may achieve certain mechanical and arbitrary successes. But he will be missing half the data on which his decisions must be based if he does not have a live and sensitive appreciation of how men feel when placed in given situations. The placing of women in positions of labor management where women chiefly are to be dealt with is an ill.u.s.tration of the recognition of the importance of sympathy, fellow-feeling in the management of human affairs. One of the reasons why many university scholars make poor teachers is because they cannot place themselves back at the point where a subject was as live and fresh and virgin to them as it is to their students.

An extraordinary degree or a decided hypertrophy of emotional susceptibility is as dangerous a trait as its possession in a reasonable degree is a utility and an enrichment of life. It results in the hysteria or sentimentalism which adds to the real evils and difficulties of life fancied grievances and disasters. Such temperaments when confronted with any good or beautiful action dissolve into ecstasy, and when faced with a problem or a difficulty dissolve into tears. Doctors will not treat their own children because the overplus of sympathy is a hindrance to action. Sentimental ladies are not the most efficient charity workers or prisoner reformers.

While there is a general tendency to experience sympathetically the feelings of others, this becomes specialized in most people, and one tends to experience most immediately and intensely the emotions of one's own kind, physically, socially, and intellectually. Sympathy is a specialization of man's general gregariousness, and becomes more specialized as one becomes habituated exclusively to a small group. Within this small group, individuals not only experience the emotions of others, but like to share and communicate their own emotions.

The nearer people are to us in mode of life, social status, and intellectual interests, the closer is community of feeling and "consciousness of kind." Two Americans meeting in a foreign country have a quick and sympathetic understanding of each other. Two alumni of the same college meeting in a distant city have a common basis of interest and feeling.

This easy give-and-take of feeling and emotion makes the deep attractiveness of intimate companionship. Our companion has but to mention a name or a place, and we experience the same a.s.sociations, the pleasures, or antipathies which he does. A gesture, a curious glance of the eye, a pause, we understand as quickly as if he had spoken a sentence. But not only do we understand his feelings; he (or she) understands ours. And for most people, all their interests and enjoyments are heightened by the presence of an intimately known companion.

Many children manifest very clearly this tendency of active sympathy; they demand that their every emotion shall be shared at once.

"Oh, come and look!" is their constant cry when out for a walk, and every object that excites their curiosity or admiration is brought at once, or pointed out, to their companion.... On the other hand, another child, brought up, perhaps, under identical conditions, but in whom this impulse is relatively weak, will explore a garden, interested and excited for hours together, without once feeling the need for sympathy, without once calling on others to share his emotions.[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 172.]

In adult life, few people care to go to theater or concert alone, and a man at a club will wander half through the dining-room until he will find some one with whom he will feel like sitting through a dinner conversation.

The fact that emotions exhibited in one individual are readily aroused in another makes art possible and makes it interesting.

A poet by a phrase, a musician by a chord or melody, can suddenly reproduce in us his own feeling of gayety or exaltation. A painter by disposition of line and color can suggest the majesty of mountains, or the sadness of a sunset as he himself has experienced it. In novels and dramas we can _relive_ the feelings that the writer imagines to have been experienced by others. It is testimony to the easy excitability of sympathy as well as to an artist's skill that this can sometimes be done in a few lines or paragraphs. Witness the famous opening of Poe's _Fall of the House of Usher:_

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been pa.s.sing alone on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium; the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?

To Aristotle tragedy seemed to afford a cleansing or "katharsis of the soul" through the sympathetic experience of pity or fear. To Schopenhauer music was the greatest of the arts because it made us at one with the sorrows and the strivings of the world. All the representative arts are vivid ways of making us feel with the pa.s.sions or emotions that stir mankind. And those men are poets, painters, or musicians who, besides having a unique gift of expression, whether in word, tone, or color, have themselves an unusually high sensitivity to the moods of other men and to the imagined moods of the natural scenes among which they move.[1]

[Footnote 1: Poets generally are so susceptible to emotional shades and nuances that they read them into situations where they are not present, and then reproduce them sympathetically in their works. The so-called "pathetic fallacy" is an excellent ill.u.s.tration of this. Poets sympathize with the emotions of a landscape, emotions which were in the first place, their own.]

In experience, the presence or absence of genuine sympathy with the emotions of others determines to no small extent the character of our dealings with them. Even courts of justice take motives into account and juries have been known to ask for clemency for a murderer because of their keen realization of the provocation which he had undergone. Fellow-feeling with others may again warp our judgments or soften them; in our judgment of the work of our friends, it is difficult altogether to discount our personal interest and affection. On the other hand, we may have the most sincere admiration and respect for a man, and yet be seriously hampered in our dealings with him, socially or professionally, by a total lack of sympathy with his motives and desires.

PRAISE AND BLAME. An important part of man's social equipment is his susceptibility to the praise and blame of his fellows. That is, among the things which instinctively satisfy men are objective marks of praise or approval on the part of other people; among the things which annoy them, sometimes to the point of acute distress, are marks of disapproval, scorn, or blame. This is ill.u.s.trated most simply and directly in the satisfaction felt at "intimate approval as by smiles, pats," kindly words, or epithets applied by other people to one's own actions or ideas, and the discomfort, amounting sometimes to pain, that is felt at frowns, hoots, sneers, and epithets of scorn or derision. One student of this subject notes "as early as the fourth month a 'hurt' way of crying which seemed to indicate a sense of personal slight. It was quite different from the cry of pain or that of anger, but seemed about the same as the cry of fright. The slightest tone of reproof would produce it. On the other hand, if people took notice and laughed and encouraged, she was hilarious."[1]

[Footnote 1: Cooley: _Human Nature and the Social Order_, p. 166.]

Man's sensitiveness to praise and blame is paralleled by his instinctive tendency to express them.

Smiles, respectful stares, and encouraging shouts occur, I think, as instinctive responses to relief from hunger, rescue from fear, gorgeous display, instinctive acts of strength and daring, victory, and other impressive instinctive behavior that is harmless to the onlooker.

Similarly, frowns, hoots, and sneers seem bound as original responses to the observation of empty-handedness, deformity, physical meanness, pusillanimity, and defect. As in the case of all original tendencies, such behavior is early complicated and in the end much distorted, by training; but the resulting total cannot be explained by nurture alone.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, Briefer Course, pp. 32-33.]

Man's instinctive tendency to respond to praise and blame and to exhibit them is, next to gregariousness--through which men in the first place are able to live together--the individual human trait most significant for social life. For while the desire for praise, the avoidance of blame, and the expression of both are instinctive, the occasions on which they are called forth depend on the traditions and group habits to which the individual has been exposed. He soon learns that in the society in which he is living, certain acts will bring him the praise of others; certain other acts will bring him their disapproval. The whole scope of his activity may thus be profoundly modified by the penalties and prizes in the way of praise and blame which society attaches to different modes of action. And the more explicit and outward signs there are of the approval or scorn of others, the more will individual action be subject to social control.

As Plato said so long ago and said so well:

Whenever they [the public] crowd to the popular a.s.sembly, the law courts, the theaters, the camp, or any public gathering of large bodies, and there sit in a dense and uproarious ma.s.s to censure some of the things said or done, and applaud others, always in excess; shouting and clapping, until, in addition to their own noise, the rocks and the places wherein they are echo back redoubled the uproar of their censure and applause. At such a moment, how is a young man, think you, to retain his self-possession? Can any private education that he has received hold out against such a torrent of censure and applause, and avoid being swept away down the stream, wherever it may lead, until he is brought to adopt the language of these men as to what is honorable and dishonorable, and to imitate all their practices, and to become their very counterpart?[1]

[Footnote 1: Plato: _Republic_ (Davies and Vaughn translation), p. 208.]

We have already had occasion to point out that education is the method by which society inculcates in its younger members habits which are regarded as socially beneficial. In its broadest sense the whole social environment is an individual's education. And it is an education chiefly through experience with other people, discovering what they will and will not tolerate, what they will cherish and what they will condemn.

The elaborate paraphernalia and rites of fashion in clothes exist chiefly by virtue of their value as means of securing diffuse notice and approval. The primitive s.e.x display is now a minor cause: women obviously dress for other women's eyes. Much the same is true of subservience to fashions in furniture, food, manners, morals, and religion. The inst.i.tution of tipping, which began, perhaps, in kindliness and was fostered by economic self-interest, is now well-nigh impregnable because no man is brave enough to withstand the scorn of a line of lackeys whom he heartily despises, or of a few onlookers whom he will never see again.[2]

[Footnote 2: Thorndike: _loc. cit._, p. 32.]

One of the things we mean when we say a man is worldly-wise, shrewd, knows human nature, is that he knows what will win people's admiration, and knows, moreover, to distinguish between that which they publicly condemn and secretly approve, and _vice versa_. In the pa.s.sage quoted above Plato was trying to show how the young Athenian acquired not wisdom itself, but "worldly wisdom," the ability to get along in affairs. This he learned not from the professional teachers, but from the Athenian public, with whose approvals and disapprovals he came in daily contact.

PRAISE AND BLAME MODIFY HABIT. In order to avoid censure and gain the expressed approval of others, people learn, either, as we say, through bitter experience, or deliberately, to modify their actions. The well-brought-up child, even when its mother is not about and its appet.i.te unsatisfied, may be ashamed to say "Yes" to a second offering of ice cream. The ten-year-old who likes to be coddled by his mother in private would be acutely embarra.s.sed to be "babied" in the presence of other people. Among adults, likewise, actions are checked, prompted, or modified by the praise and blame that have become habitually a.s.sociated with them. Men like to appear virtuous, even if they do not like to practice virtue. It is not only the professional politician who does generous acts for public approval, nor is even the most disinterested and conscientious work altogether free from being affected by the expressed att.i.tudes of approval or disapproval of other people.

Even transportation companies have found that they can increase the efficiency of their employees by expressing in some form the approval of their employees' courtesy and loyalty.[1] "A man, again, ... may fail to see any 'reason'

why an elementary-school teacher or a second-division clerk cannot do his work properly after he has been 'put in his place' by some official who happens to combine personal callousness with social superiority. But no statesman who did so could create an effective educational or clerical service."[2]

[Footnote 1: Many transportation companies maintain a merit system.

Sometimes they award special insignia, as the green flag to the New York bus-drivers who save gasoline.]

[Footnote 2: Wallas: _Great Society_, p. 197.]

To say that we are moved to action by praise and blame is not to indicate that actions thus motivated are done in a spirit of hypocrisy or charlatanism. Even the most sincere acts are prompted or sustained, especially where their performance involves serious personal privation or sacrifice, by the imagined or actual approval of those whom we love, admire, or respect. Whose praise and blame individuals will care about depends on their education and temperamental differences.

That there will be some group, however small, is almost sure to be the case. The poet who curls his lip at popular taste cherishes the more keenly the applause of those whom he regards as competent judges. The martyr will be unmoved by the curses, the jeers, and the hoots of the contemporary mult.i.tude so long as he has the trust of his small band of comrades or faith that the Lord approves his ways. A man who is utterly alone in the approval of his actions is regarded as crazy or is driven so by the perpetual disesteem in which he is held. There have been cases in literature and life of accused criminals who could bear up against the belief of the whole world in their guilt so long as one friend or kinsman had faith in them. That faith gone, they completely collapsed.

DESIRE FOR PRAISE MAY LEAD TO THE PROFESSION RATHER THAN THE PRACTICE OF VIRTUE. While the desire for social approval is strong in most men, so are other desires. It happens, moreover, that the actions to which men's instincts prompt them are not always such as would be approved by others.[1] In order, therefore, to have their cake and eat it, to do what they please and yet seem to please others, men often conceal the discrepancy between what they profess and what they practice.

One of the least agreeable features of civilized society is the extent to which the codes which men and groups profess differ from those by which they live. Men who have ostensibly Christian codes of honor, and, indeed, practice them in their private lives, will have an actual "ethics" for business that they could not possibly sanction in their dealings as trustees of a church. There are practices within trades and professions, the familiar "trade" practices, and "ethics" of the profession, which, for social as well as for professional reasons, their pract.i.tioners would not want known. "Company"

manners are a trivial ill.u.s.tration of this, but there are more serious instances. One has but to recall the sensation created a few years ago when a minister of a fashionable congregation called upon his congregation to practice Christianity, or, on a superb scale, Tolstoy's leaving the estates and mode of life of a rich Russian n.o.ble, in order to live the simple life he regarded as prescribed by the Christian teaching.[2]

[Footnote 1: At least not publicly approved. There is, however, admiration, often unconcealed, for the man who does even an unusual act conspicuously well. One need only mention a Raffles or a Captain Kidd.]

[Footnote 2: See Tolstoy's _Diary_ and _Confessions_.]

Psychologically, therefore, the cause of the discrepancy between the codes which men preach and profess and those which they practice, is thus seen to be a desire to secure illicit (that is, socially unsanctioned) satisfactions without incurring the penalty of social disapproval. Part of this discrepancy is not to be set down to the evils men actually do so much as the irrationality and fanaticism of the codes which they have been taught to profess. This is the case, for example, where excessive Puritanism or fanaticism, not possible for most men, is imposed upon them by an arbitrary and fanatical teaching.

They will then pretend to types of action socially regarded as virtues in order to avoid the penalties incurred by not practicing them. The desire for "respectability" is responsible for no small amount of pretension, ill.u.s.trated pathetically in cases where individuals, to satisfy the standards of their a.s.sociates, live beyond their means physically, socially, or intellectually.[1]

[Footnote 1: "Many Bostonians, _crede experto_ (and inhabitants of other cities, too, I fear), would be happier men and women to-day if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance."