Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 105

It is probably true, also, that like-mindedness of the kind that expresses itself in national types contributes indirectly by facilitating the intermingling of the different elements of the population to the national solidarity. This is due to the fact that the solidarity of modern states depends less on the h.o.m.ogeneity of population than, as James Bryce has suggested, upon the thoroughgoing mixture of heterogeneous elements. Like-mindedness, so far as that term signifies a standard grade of intelligence, contributes little or nothing to national solidarity. Likeness is, after all, a purely formal concept which of itself cannot hold anything together.

In the last a.n.a.lysis social solidarity is based on sentiment and habit.

It is the sentiment of loyalty and the habit of what Sumner calls "concurrent action" that gives substance and insures unity to the state as to every other type of social group. This sentiment of loyalty has its basis in a _modus vivendi_, a working relation and mutual understanding of the members of the group. Social inst.i.tutions are not founded in similarities any more than they are founded in differences, but in relations, and in the mutual interdependence of parts. When these relations have the sanction of custom and are fixed in individual habit, so that the activities of the group are running smoothly, personal att.i.tudes and sentiments, which are the only forms in which individual minds collide and clash with one another, easily accommodate themselves to the existing situation.

It may, perhaps, be said that loyalty itself is a form of like-mindedness or that it is dependent in some way upon the like-mindedness of the individuals whom it binds together. This, however, cannot be true, for there is no greater loyalty than that which binds the dog to his master, and this is a sentiment which that faithful animal usually extends to other members of the household to which he belongs. A dog without a master is a dangerous animal, but the dog that has been domesticated is a member of society. He is not, of course, a citizen, although he is not entirely without rights. But he has got into some sort of practical working relations with the group to which he belongs.

It is this practical working arrangement, into which individuals with widely different mental capacities enter as co-ordinate parts, that gives the corporate character to social groups and insures their solidarity. It is the process of a.s.similation by which groups of individuals, originally indifferent or perhaps hostile, achieve this corporate character, rather than the process by which they acquire a formal like-mindedness, with which this paper is mainly concerned.

The difficulty with the conception of a.s.similation which one ordinarily meets in discussions of the race problem is that it is based on observations confined to individualistic groups where the characteristic relations are indirect and secondary. It takes no account of the kind of a.s.similation that takes place in primary groups where relations are direct and personal--in the tribe, for example, and in the family.

Thus Charles Francis Adams, referring to the race problem in an address at Richmond, Virginia, in November, 1908, said:

The American system, as we know, was founded on the a.s.sumed basis of a common humanity, that is, absence of absolutely fundamental racial characteristics was accepted as an established truth. Those of all races were welcomed to our sh.o.r.es. They came, aliens; they and their descendants would become citizens first, natives afterward. It was a process first of a.s.similation and then of absorption. On this all depended. There could be no permanent divisional lines. That theory is now plainly broken down. We are confronted by the obvious fact, as undeniable as it is hard, that the African will only partially a.s.similate and that he cannot be absorbed.

He remains an alien element in the body politic. A foreign substance, he can neither be a.s.similated nor thrown out.

More recently an editorial in the _Outlook_, discussing the j.a.panese situation in California, made this statement:

The hundred millions of people now inhabiting the United States must be a united people, not merely a collection of groups of different peoples, different in racial cultures and ideals, agreeing to live together in peace and amity. These hundred millions must have common ideals, common aims, a common custom, a common culture, a common language, and common characteristics, if the nation is to endure.

All this is quite true and interesting, but it does not clearly recognize the fact that the chief obstacle to the a.s.similation of the Negro and the Oriental are not mental but physical traits. It is not because the Negro and the j.a.panese are so differently const.i.tuted that they do not a.s.similate. If they were given an opportunity, the j.a.panese are quite as capable as the Italians, the Armenians, or the Slavs of acquiring our culture and sharing our national ideals. The trouble is not with the j.a.panese mind but with the j.a.panese skin. The j.a.p is not the right color.

The fact that the j.a.panese bears in his features a distinctive racial hallmark, that he wears, so to speak, a racial uniform, cla.s.sifies him.

He cannot become a mere individual, indistinguishable in the cosmopolitan ma.s.s of the population, as is true, for example, of the Irish, and, to a lesser extent, of some of the other immigrant races.

The j.a.panese, like the Negro, is condemned to remain among us an abstraction, a symbol--and a symbol not merely of his own race but of the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to as the "yellow peril." This not only determines to a very large extent the att.i.tude of the white world toward the yellow man but it determines the att.i.tude of the yellow man toward the white. It puts between the races the invisible but very real gulf of self-consciousness.

There is another consideration. Peoples we know intimately we respect and esteem. In our casual contact with aliens, however, it is the offensive rather than the pleasing traits that impress us. These impressions acc.u.mulate and reinforce natural prejudices. Where races are distinguished by certain external marks, these furnish a permanent physical substratum upon which and around which the irritations and animosities, incidental to all human intercourse, tend to acc.u.mulate and so gain strength and volume.

a.s.similation, as the word is here used, brings with it a certain borrowed significance which it carried over from physiology, where it is employed to describe the process of nutrition. By a process of nutrition, somewhat similar to the physiological one, we may conceive alien peoples to be incorporated with, and made part of, the community or state. Ordinarily a.s.similation goes on silently and unconsciously, and only forces itself into popular conscience when there is some interruption or disturbance of the process.

At the outset it may be said, then, that a.s.similation rarely becomes a problem except in secondary groups. Admission to the primary group, that is to say, the group in which relationships are direct and personal, as, for example, in the family and in the tribe, makes a.s.similation comparatively easy and almost inevitable.

The most striking ill.u.s.tration of this is the fact of domestic slavery.

Slavery has been, historically, the usual method by which peoples have been incorporated into alien groups. When a member of an alien race is adopted into the family as a servant or as a slave, and particularly when that status is made hereditary, as it was in the case of the Negro after his importation to America, a.s.similation followed rapidly and as a matter of course.

It is difficult to conceive two races farther removed from each other in temperament and tradition than the Anglo-Saxon and the Negro, and yet the Negro in the southern states, particularly where he was adopted into the household as a family servant, learned in a comparatively short time the manners and customs of his master's family. He very soon possessed himself of so much of the language, religion, and the technique of the civilization of his master as, in his station, he was fitted or permitted to acquire. Eventually, also, Negro slaves transferred their allegiance to the state of which they were only indirectly members, or at least to their masters' families, with whom they felt themselves in most things one in sentiment and interest.

The a.s.similation of the Negro field hand, where the contact of the slave with his master and his master's family was less intimate, was naturally less complete. On the large plantations, where an overseer stood between the master and the majority of his slaves, and especially on the sea island plantations off the coast of South Carolina, where the master and his family were likely to be merely winter visitors, this distance between master and slave was greatly increased. The consequence is that the Negroes in these regions are less touched today by the white man's influence and civilization than elsewhere in the southern states.

C. AMERICANIZATION AS A PROBLEM IN a.s.sIMILATION[247]

1. Americanization as a.s.similation

The Americanization Study has a.s.sumed that the fundamental condition of what we call "Americanization" is the partic.i.p.ation of the immigrant in the life of the community in which he lives. The point here emphasized is that patriotism, loyalty, and common sense are neither created nor transmitted by purely intellectual processes. Men must live and work and fight together in order to create that community of interest and sentiment which will enable them to meet the crises of their common life with a common will.

It is evident, however, that the word "partic.i.p.ation" as here employed has a wide application, and it becomes important for working purposes to give a more definite and concrete meaning to the term.

2. Language as a Means and a Product of Partic.i.p.ation

Obviously any organized social activity whatever and any partic.i.p.ation in this activity implies "communication." In human, as distinguished from animal, society common life is based on a common speech. To share a common speech does not guarantee partic.i.p.ation in the community life but it is an instrument of partic.i.p.ation, and its acquisition by the members of an immigrant group is rightly considered a sign and a rough index of Americanization.

It is, however, one of the ordinary experiences of social intercourse that words and things do not have the same meanings with different people, in different parts of the country, in different periods of time, and, in general, in different contexts. The same "thing" has a different meaning for the nave person and the sophisticated person, for the child and the philosopher; the new experience derives its significance from the character and organization of the previous experiences. To the peasant a comet, a plague, and an epileptic person may mean a divine portent, a visitation of G.o.d, a possession by the devil; to the scientific man they mean something quite different. The word "slavery"

had very different connotations in the ancient world and today. It has a very different significance today in the southern states and in the northern states. "Socialism" has a very different significance to the immigrant from the Russian pale living on the "East Side" of New York City, to the citizen on Riverside Drive, and to the native American in the hills of Georgia.

Psychologists explain this difference in the connotation of the same word among people using the same language in terms of difference in the "apperception ma.s.s" in different individuals and different groups of individuals. In their phraseology the "apperception ma.s.s" represents the body of memories and meanings deposited in the consciousness of the individual from the totality of his experiences. It is the body of material with which every new datum of experience comes into contact, to which it is related, and in connection with which it gets its meaning.

When persons interpret data on different grounds, when the apperception ma.s.s is radically different, we say popularly that they live in different worlds. The logician expresses this by saying that they occupy different "universes of discourse"--that is, they cannot talk in the same terms. The ecclesiastic, the artist, the mystic, the scientist, the Philistine, the Bohemian, represent more or less different "universes of discourse." Even social workers occupy universes of discourse not mutually intelligible.

Similarly, different races and nationalities as wholes represent different apperception ma.s.ses and consequently different universes of discourse and are not mutually intelligible. Even our remote forefathers are with difficulty intelligible to us, though always more intelligible than the Eastern immigrant because of the continuity of our tradition.

Still it is almost as difficult for us to comprehend _Elsie Dinsmore_ or the _Westminster Catechism_ as the Koran or the Talmud.

It is apparent, therefore, that in the wide extension and vast complexity of modern life, in which peoples of different races and cultures are now coming into intimate contact, the divergences in the meanings and values which individuals and groups attach to objects and forms of behavior are deeper than anything expressed by differences in language.

Actually common partic.i.p.ation in common activities implies a common "definition of the situation." In fact, every single act, and eventually all moral life, is dependent upon the definition of the situation. A definition of the situation precedes and limits any possible action, and a redefinition of the situation changes the character of the action. An abusive person, for example, provokes anger and possibly violence, but if we realize that the man is insane this redefinition of the situation results in totally different behavior.

Every social group develops systematic and unsystematic means of defining the situation for its members. Among these means are the "don'ts" of the mother, the gossip of the community, epithets ("liar,"

"traitor," "scab"), the sneer, the shrug, the newspaper, the theater, the school, libraries, the law, and the gospel. Education in the widest sense--intellectual, moral, aesthetic--is the process of defining the situation. It is the process by which the definitions of an older generation are transmitted to a younger. In the case of the immigrant it is the process by which the definitions of one cultural group are transmitted to another.

Differences in meanings and values, referred to above in terms of the "apperception ma.s.s," grow out of the fact that different individuals and different peoples have defined the situation in different ways. When we speak of the different "heritages" or "traditions" which our different immigrant groups bring, it means that, owing to different historical circ.u.mstances, they have defined the situation differently. Certain prominent personalities, schools of thought, bodies of doctrine, historical events, have contributed in defining the situation and determining the att.i.tudes and values of our various immigrant groups in characteristic ways in their home countries. To the Sicilian, for example, marital infidelity means the stiletto; to the American, the divorce court. And even when the immigrant thinks that he understands us, he nevertheless does not do this completely. At the best he interprets our cultural traditions in terms of his own. Actually the situation is progressively redefined by the consequences of the actions, provoked by the previous definitions, and a prison experience is designed to provide a datum toward the redefinition of the situation.

It is evidently important that the people who compose a community and share in the common life should have a sufficient body of common memories to understand one another. This is particularly true in a democracy, where it is intended that the public inst.i.tutions should be responsive to public opinion. There can be no public opinion except in so far as the persons who compose the public are able to live in the same world and speak and think in the same universe of discourse. For that reason it seems desirable that the immigrants should not only speak the language of the country but should know something of the history of the people among whom they have chosen to dwell. For the same reason it is important that native Americans should know the history and social life of the countries from which the immigrants come.

It is important also that every individual should share as fully as possible a fund of knowledge, experience, sentiments, and ideals common to the whole community and himself contribute to this fund. It is for this reason that we maintain and seek to maintain freedom of speech and free schools. The function of literature, including poetry, romance, and the newspaper, is to enable all to share victoriously and imaginatively in the inner life of each. The function of science is to gather up, cla.s.sify, digest, and preserve, in a form in which they may become available to the community as a whole, the ideas, inventions, and technical experience of the individuals composing it. Thus not merely the possession of a common language but the wide extension of the opportunities for education become conditions of Americanization.

The immigration problem is unique in the sense that the immigrant brings divergent definitions of the situation, and this renders his partic.i.p.ation in our activities difficult. At the same time this problem is of the same general type as the one exemplified by "syndicalism,"

"bolshevism," "socialism," etc., where the definition of the situation does not agree with the traditional one. The modern "social unrest,"

like the immigrant problem, is a sign of the lack of partic.i.p.ation and this is true to the degree that certain elements feel that violence is the only available means of partic.i.p.ating.

3. a.s.similation and the Mediation of Individual Differences

In general, a period of unrest represents the stage in which a new definition of the situation is being prepared. Emotion and unrest are connected with situations where there is loss of control. Control is secured on the basis of habits and habits are built up on the basis of the definition of the situation. Habit represents a situation where the definition is working. When control is lost it means that the habits are no longer adequate, that the situation has changed and demands a redefinition. This is the point at which we have unrest--a heightened emotional state, random movements, unregulated behavior--and this continues until the situation is redefined. The unrest is a.s.sociated with conditions in which the individual or society feels unable to act.

It represents energy, and the problem is to use it constructively.

The older societies tended to treat unrest by defining the situation in terms of the suppression or postponement of the wish; they tried to make the repudiation of the wish itself a wish. "Contentment," "conformity to the will of G.o.d," ultimate "salvation" in a better world, are representative of this. The founders of America defined the situation in terms of partic.i.p.ation, but this has actually taken too exclusively the form of "political partic.i.p.ation." The present tendency is to define the situation in terms of social partic.i.p.ation, including demand for the improvement of social conditions to a degree which will enable all to partic.i.p.ate.

But, while it is important that the people who are members of the same community should have a body of common memories and a common apperception ma.s.s, so that they may talk intelligibly to one another, it is neither possible nor necessary that everything should have the same meaning for everyone. A perfectly h.o.m.ogeneous consciousness would mean a tendency to define all situations rigidly and sacredly and once and forever. Something like this did happen in the Slavic village communities and among all savage people, and it was the ideal of the medieval church, but it implies a low level of efficiency and a slow rate of progress.

Mankind is distinguished, in fact, from the animal world by being composed of persons of divergent types, of varied tastes and interests, of different vocations and functions. Civilization is the product of an a.s.sociation of widely different individuals, and with the progress of civilization the divergence in individual human types has been and must continue to be constantly multiplied. Our progress in the arts and sciences and in the creation of values in general has been dependent on specialists whose distinctive worth was precisely their divergence from other individuals. It is even evident that we have been able to use productively individuals who in a savage or peasant society would have been cla.s.sed as insane--who perhaps were indeed insane.

The ability to partic.i.p.ate productively implies thus a diversity of att.i.tudes and values in the partic.i.p.ants, but a diversity not so great as to lower the morals of the community and to prevent effective co-operation. It is important to have ready definitions for all immediate situations, but progress is dependent on the constant redefinitions for all immediate situations, and the ideal condition for this is the presence of individuals with divergent definitions, who contribute, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, through their individualism and labors to a common task and a common end. It is only in this way that an intelligible world, in which each can partic.i.p.ate according to his intelligence, comes into existence. For it is only through their consequences that words get their meanings or that situations become defined. It is through conflict and co-operation, or, to use a current phrase of economists, through "compet.i.tive co-operation," that a distinctively human type of society does anywhere exist. Privacy and publicity, "society" and solitude, public ends and private enterprises, are each and all distinctive factors in human society everywhere. They are particularly characteristic of historic American democracy.

In this whole connection it appears that the group consciousness and the individual himself are formed by communication and partic.i.p.ation, and that the communication and partic.i.p.ation are themselves dependent for their meaning on common interests.

But it would be an error to a.s.sume that partic.i.p.ation always implies an intimate personal, face-to-face relation. Specialists partic.i.p.ate notably and productively in our common life, but this is evidently not on the basis of personal a.s.sociation with their neighbors. Darwin was a.s.sisted by Lyell, Owen, and other contemporaries in working out a new definition of the situation, but these men were not his neighbors. When Mayer worked out his theory of the trans.m.u.tation of energy, his neighbors in the village of Heilbronn were so far from partic.i.p.ating that they twice confined him in insane asylums. A postage stamp may be a more efficient instrument of partic.i.p.ation than a village meeting.

Defining the situation with reference to the partic.i.p.ation of the immigrant is of course not solving the problem of immigration. This involves an a.n.a.lysis of the whole significance of the qualitative and quant.i.tative character of a population, with reference to any given values--standards of living, individual level of efficiency, liberty and determinism, etc. We have, for instance, in America a certain level of culture, depending, let us say as a minimum, on the perpetuation of our public-school system. But, if by some conceivable _lusus naturae_ the birth rate was multiplied a hundred fold, or by some conceivable cataclysm a hundred million African blacks were landed annually on our eastern coast and an equal number of Chinese coolies on our western coast, then we should have neither teachers enough nor buildings enough nor material resources enough to impart even the three R's to a fraction of the population, and the outlook of democracy, so far as it is dependent upon partic.i.p.ation, would become very dismal. On the other hand, it is conceivable that certain immigrant populations in certain numbers, with their special temperaments, endowments, and social heritages, would contribute positively and increasingly to our stock of civilization. These are questions to be determined, but certainly if the immigrant is admitted on any basis whatever the condition of his Americanization is that he shall have the widest and freest opportunity to contribute in his own way to the common fund of knowledge, ideas, and ideals which makes up the culture of our common country. It is only in this way that the immigrant can "partic.i.p.ate" in the fullest sense of the term.