Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 115

There is a fashion or a trend in public opinion. A. V. Dicey, in his volume on _Law and Opinion in England_, points out that there has been a constant tendency, for a hundred years, in English legislation, from individualism to collectivism. This does not mean that public opinion has changed constantly in one direction. There have been, as he says, "cross currents." Public opinion has veered, but the changes in the mores have been steadily in one direction.

There has been a change in the fundamental att.i.tudes. This change has taken place in response to changed conditions. Change in mores is something like change in the nest-building habits of certain birds, the swallows, for example. This change, like the change in bird habits, takes place without discussion--without clear consciousness--in response to changed conditions. Furthermore, changes in the mores, like changes in fashion, are only slightly under our control. They are not the result of agitation; rather they are responsible for the agitation.

There are profound changes going on in our social organization today.

Industrial democracy, or something corresponding to it, is coming. It is coming not entirely because of social agitation. It is coming, perhaps, in spite of agitation. It is a social change, but it is part of the whole cosmic process.

There is an intimate relation between the mores and opinion. The mores represent the att.i.tudes in which we agree. Opinion represents these att.i.tudes in so far as we do not agree. We do not have opinions except over matters which are in dispute.

So far as we are controlled by habit and custom, by the mores, we do not have opinions. I find out what my opinion is only after I discover that I disagree with my fellow. What I call my opinions are for the most part invented to justify my agreements or disagreements with prevailing public opinion. The mores do not need justification. As soon as I seek justification for them they have become matters of opinion.

Public opinion is just the opinion of individuals plus their differences. There is no public opinion where there is no substantial agreement. But there is no public opinion where there is not disagreement. Public opinion presupposes public discussion. When a matter has reached the stage of public discussion it becomes a matter of public opinion.

Before war was declared in France there was anxiety, speculation. After mobilization began, discussion ceased. The national ideal was exalted.

The individual ceased to exist. Men ceased even to think. They simply obeyed. This is what happened in all the belligerent countries except America. It did not quite happen here. Under such circ.u.mstances public opinion ceases to exist. This is quite as true in a democracy as it is in an autocracy.

The difference between an autocracy and a democracy is not that in one the will of the people finds expression and in the other it does not. It is simply that in a democracy a larger number of the citizens partic.i.p.ate in the discussions which give rise to public opinion. At least they are supposed to do so. In a democracy everyone belongs, or is supposed to belong, to one great public. In an autocracy there are perhaps many little publics.

What role do the schools and colleges play in the formation of public opinion? The schools transmit the tradition. They standardize our national prejudices and transmit them. They do this necessarily.

A liberal or college education tends to modify and qualify all our inherited political, religious, and social prejudices. It does so by bringing into the field of discussion matters that would not otherwise get into the public consciousness. In this way a college education puts us in a way to control our prejudices instead of being controlled by them. This is the purpose of a liberal education.

The emanc.i.p.ation which history, literature, and a wider experience with life give us permits us to enter sympathetically into the lives and interests of others; it widens that area over which public opinion rather than force exercises control.

It makes it possible to extend the area of political control. It means the extension of democratic partic.i.p.ation in the common life. The universities, by their special studies in the field of social science, are seeking to acc.u.mulate and bring into the view of public opinion a larger body of attested fact upon which the public may base its opinion.

It is probably not the business of the universities to agitate reforms nor to attempt directly to influence public opinion in regard to current issues. To do this is to relax its critical att.i.tude, lessen its authority in matters of fact, and jeopardize its hard-won academic freedom. When a university takes over the function of a political party or a church it ceases to perform its function as a university.

6. News and Social Control[271]

Everywhere today men are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. For in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

I do not agree with those who think that the sole cause is corruption.

There is plenty of corruption, to be sure, moneyed control, caste pressure, financial and social bribery, ribbons, dinner parties, clubs, petty politics. The speculators in Russian rubles who lied on the Paris Bourse about the capture of Petrograd are not the only example of their species. And yet corruption does not explain the condition of modern journalism.

Mr. Franklin P. Adams wrote recently:

Now there is much pettiness--and almost incredible stupidity and ignorance--in the so-called free press; but it is the pettiness, etc., common to the so-called human race--a pettiness found in musicians, steamfitters, landlords, poets, and waiters. And when Miss Lowell [who had made the usual aristocratic complaint] speaks of the incurable desire in all American newspapers to make fun of everything in season and out, we quarrel again. There is an incurable desire in American newspapers to take things much more seriously than they deserve. Does Miss Lowell read the ponderous news from Washington? Does she read the society news? Does she, we wonder, read the newspapers?

Mr. Adams does read them, and when he writes that the newspapers take things much more seriously than they deserve, he has, as the mayor's wife remarked to the queen, said a mouthful. Since the war, especially, editors have come to believe that their highest duty is not to report but to instruct, not to print news but to save civilization, not to publish what Benjamin Harris calls "the Circ.u.mstances of Publique Affairs, both abroad and at home," but to keep the nation on the straight and narrow path. Like the kings of England, they have elected themselves Defenders of the Faith. "For five years," says Mr. Cobb of the _New York World_, "there has been no free play of public opinion in the world. Confronted by the inexorable necessities of war, governments conscripted public opinion. They goose-stepped it. They taught it to stand at attention and salute. It sometimes seems that, after the armistice was signed, millions of Americans must have taken a vow that they would never again do any thinking for themselves. They were willing to die for their country but not willing to think for it." That minority, which is proudly prepared to think for it, and not only prepared but c.o.c.ksure that it alone knows how to think for it, has adopted the theory that the public should know what is good for it.

The work of reporters has thus become confused with the work of preachers, revivalists, prophets, and agitators. The current theory of American newspaperdom is that an abstraction like the truth and a grace-like fairness must be sacrificed whenever anyone thinks the necessities of civilization require the sacrifice. To Archbishop Whately's dictum that it matters greatly whether you put truth in the first place or the second, the candid expounder of modern journalism would reply that he put truth second to what he conceived to be the national interest. Judged simply by their product, men like Mr. Ochs or Viscount Northcliffe believe that their respective nations will perish and civilization decay unless their idea of what is patriotic is permitted to temper the curiosity of their readers.

They believe that edification is more important than veracity. They believe it profoundly, violently, relentlessly. They preen themselves upon it. To patriotism, as they define it from day to day, all other considerations must yield. That is their pride. And yet what is this but one more among myriad examples of the doctrine that the end justifies the means? A more insidiously misleading rule of conduct was, I believe, never devised among men. It was a plausible rule as long as men believed that an omniscient and benevolent Providence taught them what end to seek. But now that men are critically aware of how their purposes are special to their age, their locality, their interests, and their limited knowledge, it is blazing arrogance to sacrifice hard-won standards of credibility to some special purpose. It is nothing but the doctrine that I want what I want when I want it. Its monuments are the Inquisition and the invasion of Belgium. It is the reason given for every act of unreason, the law invoked whenever lawlessness justifies itself. At bottom it is nothing but the anarchical nature of man imperiously hacking its way through.

Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from high places, the most immoral act the immorality of a government, so the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by those whose profession it is to report the news. The news columns are common carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable. Public opinion is blockaded. For when a people can no longer confidently repair "to the best fountains for their information," then anyone's guess and anyone's rumor, each man's hope and each man's whim, become the basis of government. All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster, must come to any people which is denied an a.s.sured access to the facts.

No one can manage anything on pap. Neither can a people.

Few episodes in recent history are more poignant than that of the British prime minister, sitting at the breakfast table with that morning's paper before him, protesting that he cannot do the sensible thing in regard to Russia because a powerful newspaper proprietor has drugged the public. That incident is a photograph of the supreme danger which confronts popular government. All other dangers are contingent upon it, for the news is the chief source of the opinion by which government now proceeds. So long as there is interposed between the ordinary citizen and the facts a news organization determining by entirely private and unexamined standards, no matter how lofty, what he shall know, and hence what he shall believe, no one will be able to say that the substance of democratic government is secure. The theory of our const.i.tution, says Mr. Justice Holmes, is that truth is the only ground upon which men's wishes safely can be carried out. In so far as those who purvey the news make of their own beliefs a higher law than truth, they are attacking the foundations of our const.i.tutional system. There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.

In a few generations it will seem ludicrous to historians that a people professing government by the will of the people should have made no serious effort to guarantee the news without which a governing opinion cannot exist. "Is it possible," they will ask, "that at the beginning of the twentieth century nations calling themselves democracies were content to act on what happened to drift across their doorsteps; that apart from a few sporadic exposures and outcries they made no plans to bring these common carriers under social control, that they provided no genuine training schools for the men upon whose sagacity they were dependent; above all, that their political scientists went on year after year writing and lecturing about government without producing one single, significant study of the process of public opinion?" And then they will recall the centuries in which the church enjoyed immunity from criticism, and perhaps they will insist that the news structure of secular society was not seriously examined for a.n.a.logous reasons.

7. The Psychology of Propaganda[272]

Paper bullets, according to Mr. Creel, won the war. But they have forever disturbed our peace of mind. The war is long since over, all but saying so; but our consciousness of the immanence of propaganda bids fair to be permanent. It has been discovered by individuals, by a.s.sociations, and by governments that a certain kind of advertising can be used to mold public opinion and control democratic majorities. As long as public opinion rules the destinies of human affairs, there will be no end to an instrument that controls it.

The tremendous forces of propaganda are now common property. They are available for the unscrupulous and the destructive as well as for the constructive and the moral. This gives us a new interest in its technique, namely, to inquire if anywhere there is an opportunity for regulative and protective interference with its indiscriminate exploitation.

Until recently the most famous historical use of the term propaganda made it synonymous with foreign missions. It was Pope Gregory XV who almost exactly three centuries ago, after many years of preparation, finally founded the great Propaganda College to care for the interests of the church in non-Catholic countries. With its centuries of experience this is probably the most efficient organization for propaganda in the world. Probably most apologetics is propaganda. No religion and no age has been entirely free from it.

One of the cla.s.sical psychoa.n.a.lytic case histories is that of Breuer's water gla.s.s and the puppy dog. A young lady patient was utterly unable to drink water from a gla.s.s. It was a deep embarra.s.sment. Even under the stress of great thirst in warm weather and the earnest effort to break up a foolish phobia, the gla.s.s might be taken and raised, but it couldn't be drunk from. Psychoa.n.a.lysis disclosed the following facts.

Underlying this particular phobia was an intense antipathy to dogs. The young lady's roommate had been discovered giving a dog a drink from the common drinking-gla.s.s. The antipathy to the dog was simply transferred to the gla.s.s.

The case is a commonplace in the annals of hysteria. But let us examine the mechanism. Suppose that I had wanted to keep that drinking-gla.s.s for my own personal use. A perfectly simple and effective expedient it would have been in the absence of other good motives to capitalize that antipathy by allowing her to see the dog drink out of the gla.s.s. The case would then have been a perfect case of propaganda. All propaganda is capitalized prejudice. It rests on some emotional premise which is the motive force of the process. The emotional transfer is worked by some a.s.sociative process like similarity, use, or the causal relationship. The derived sympathetic antipathy represents the goal.

The great self-preservative, social, and racial instincts will always furnish the main reservoir of motive forces at the service of propaganda. They will have the widest and the most insistent appeal.

Only second to these in importance are the peculiar racial tendencies and historical traditions that represent the genius of a civilization.

The racial-superiority consciousness of the Germans operated as a never-ending motive for their "Aushalten" propaganda. We Americans have a notable cultural premise in our consideration for the underdog. Few things outside our consciousness of family will arouse us as surely and as universally as this modification of the protective instinct.

In addition to the group tendencies that arise from a community of experience, individual propaganda may use every phase of individual experience, individual bias and prejudice. I am told that first-cla.s.s salesmen not infrequently keep family histories of their customers, producing a favorable att.i.tude toward their merchandise by way of an apparent personal interest in the children. Apparently any group of ideas with an emotional valence may become the basis for propaganda.

There are three limitations to the processes of propaganda. The first is emotional recoil, the second is the exhaustion of available motive force, the third is the development of internal resistance or negativism.

The most familiar of the three is emotional recoil. We know only too well what will happen if we tell a boy all the things that he likes to do are "bad," while all the things that he dislikes are "good." Up to a certain point the emotional value of bad and good respectively will be transferred to the acts as we intend. But each transfer has an emotional recoil on the concepts good and bad. At the end a most surprising thing may happen. The moral values may get reversed in the boy's mind. Bad may come to represent the sum total of the satisfactory and desirable, while good may represent the sum total of the unsatisfactory and the undesirable. To the pained adult such a consequence is utterly inexplicable, only because he fails to realize that all mental products are developments. There is always a kind of reciprocity in emotional transfer. The value of the modified factor recoils to the modifying factor.

The whole mechanism of the transfer and of the recoil may best be expressed in terms of the conditioned reflex of Pavlov. The flow of saliva in a dog is a natural consequence to the sight and smell of food.

If concurrently with the smelling of food the dog is pinched, the pinch ceases to be a matter for resentment. By a process of emotional transfer, on being pinched the dog may show the lively delight that belongs to the sight and smell of food. Even the salivary secretions may be started by the transfigured pinch. It was the great operating physiologist Sherrington who exclaimed after a visit to Pavlov that at last he understood the psychology of the martyrs. But it is possible so to load the smell of food with pain and damage that its positive value breaks down. Eating-values may succ.u.mb to the pain values instead of the pain to the eating-values. This is the prototype of the concept bad when it gets overloaded with the emotional value of the intrinsically desirable. The law of recoil seems to be a mental a.n.a.logue of the physical law that action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions.

The second limitation to propaganda occurs when the reciprocal effects of transfer exhaust the available motive forces of a mind. Propaganda certainly weakens the forces that are appealed to too often. We are living just now in a world of weakened appeals. Many of the great human motives were exploited to the limit during the war. It is harder to raise money now than it was, harder to find motives for giving that are still effective. One of my former colleagues once surprised and shocked me by replying to some perfectly good propaganda in which I tried to tell him that certain action was in the line of duty, to the effect that he was tired of being told that something was his duty, and that he was resolved not to do another thing because it was his duty. There seems to be evidence that in some quarters, at least, patriotism, philanthropy, and civic duty have been exploited as far as the present systems will carry. It is possible to exhaust our floating capital of social-motive forces. When that occurs we face a kind of moral bankruptcy.

A final stage of resistance is reached when propaganda develops a negativistic defensive reaction. To develop such negativisms is always the aim of counterpropaganda. It calls the opposed propaganda, prejudiced, half-truth, or, as the Germans did, "Lies, All Lies." There is evidence that the moral collapse of Germany under the fire of our paper bullets came with the conviction that they had been systematically deceived by their own propagandists.

There are two great social dangers in propaganda. Great power in irresponsible hands is always a social menace. We have some legal safeguards against careless use of high-powered physical explosives.

Against the greater danger of destructive propaganda there seems to be little protection without imperiling the sacred principles of free speech.

The second social danger is the tendency to overload and level down every great human incentive in the pursuit of relatively trivial ends.

To become _blase_ is the inevitable penalty of emotional exploitation. I believe there may well be grave penalties in store for the reckless commercialized exploitation of human emotions in the cheap sentimentalism of our moving pictures. But there are even graver penalties in store for the generation that permits itself to grow morally _blase_. One of our social desiderata, it seems to me, is the protection of the great springs of human action from destructive exploitation for selfish, commercial, or other trivial ends.

The slow constructive process of building moral credits by systematic education lacks the picturesqueness of propaganda. It also lacks its quick results. But just as the short cut of hypnotism proved a dangerous subst.i.tute for moral training, so I believe we shall find that not only is moral education a necessary precondition for effective propaganda, but that in the end it is a safer and incomparably more reliable social instrument.

C. INSt.i.tUTIONS

1. Inst.i.tutions and the Mores[273]

Inst.i.tutions and laws are produced out of mores. An inst.i.tution consists of a concept (idea, notion, doctrine, interest) and a structure. The structure is a framework, or apparatus, or perhaps only a number of functionaries set to co-operate in prescribed ways at a certain conjuncture. The structure holds the concept and furnishes instrumentalities for bringing it into the world of facts and action in a way to serve the interests of men in society. Inst.i.tutions are either crescive or enacted. They are crescive when they take shape in the mores, growing by the instinctive efforts by which the mores are produced. Then the efforts, through long use, become definite and specific.