Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 28

Yet impetuosity, exceeding of orders, unwillingness to retreat when the general situation demands it, are signs not of good morale but the reverse. They are signs that one's heart cannot be kept up except by the flattering stimulus of always going forward--a state of mind that may cause a commanding officer serious embarra.s.sment, even to making impossible decisive strokes of strategy.

In fact, the better the morale, the more profound its mystery from the utilitarian angle of judgment. There is something miraculous in the power of a bald and unhesitating announcement of reverse to steel the temper of men attuned to making sacrifices and to meeting emergencies.

No one can touch the deepest moral resources of an army or nation who does not know the fairly regal exaltation with which it is possible for men to face an issue--_if they believe in it_. There are times when men seem to have an appet.i.te for suffering, when, to judge from their own demeanor, the best bait fortune could offer them is the chance to face death or to bear an inhuman load. This state of mind does not exist of itself; it is morale at its best, and it appears only when the occasion strikes a nerve which arouses the super-earthly vistas of human consciousness or subconsciousness. But it commonly appears at the summons of a leader who himself welcomes the challenge of the task he sets before his followers. It is the magic of King Alfred in his appeal to his chiefs to do battle with the Danes, when all that he could hold out to them was the prospect of his own vision,

This--that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

Morale, for all the greater purposes of war, is a state of faith; and its logic will be the superb and elusive logic of human faith. It is for this reason that morale, while not identical with the righteousness of the cause, can never reach its height unless the aim of the war can be held intact in the undissembled moral sense of the people. This is one of the provisions in the deeper order of things for the slow predominance of the better brands of justice.

There are still officers in army and navy--not as many as formerly--who believe exclusively in the morale that works its way into every body of recruits through discipline and the sway of _esprit de corps_. "They know that they're here to can the Kaiser, and that's all they need to know," said one such officer to me very recently. "After a man has been here two months, the worst punishment you can give him is to tell him he can't go to France right away. The soldier is a man of action; and the less thinking he does, the better." There is an amount of practical wisdom in this; for the human mind has a large capacity for adopting beliefs that fit the trend of its habits and feelings, and this trend is powerfully molded by the unanimous direction of an army's purpose. There is an all but irresistible orthodoxy within a body committed to a war.

And the current (pragmatic) psychology referred to, making the intelligence a mere instrument of the will, would seem to sanction the maxim, "First decide, and then think accordingly."

But there are two remarks to be made about this view; first, that in the actual creation of morale within an army corps much thinking is included, and nothing is accomplished without the consent of such thoughts as a man already has. Training does wonders in making morale, when nothing in the mind opposes it. Second, that the morale which is sufficient for purposes of training is not necessarily sufficient for the strains of the field.

The intrinsic weakness of "affective morale," as psychologists call it, is that it puts both sides on the same mental and moral footing: it either justifies our opponents as well as ourselves, or it makes both sides the creatures of irrational emotion.

Crowds are capable of doing reasonless things upon impulse and of adopting creeds without reflection. But an army is not a crowd; still less is a nation a crowd. A mob or crowd is an unorganized group of people governed by less than the average individual intelligence of its members. Armies and nations are groups of people so organized that they are controlled by an intelligence higher than the average. The instincts that lend, and must lend, their immense motive-power to the great purposes of war are the servants, not the masters, of that intelligence.

III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS

1. The Scientific Study of Societies

Interest in the study of "society as it is" has had its source in two different motives. Travelers' tales have always fascinated mankind. The ethnologists began their investigations by criticising and systematizing the novel and interesting observations of travelers in regard to customs, cultures, and behavior of people of different races and nationalities. Their later more systematic investigations were, on the whole, inspired by intellectual curiosity divorced from any overwhelming desire to change the manner of life and social organizations of the societies studied.

The second motive for the systematic observation of actual society came from persons who wanted social reforms but who were forced to realize the futility of Utopian projects. The science of sociology as conceived by Auguste Comte was to subst.i.tute fact for doctrines about society. But his attempt to interpret social evolution resulted in a philosophy of history, not a natural science of society.

Herbert Spencer appreciated the fact that the new science of sociology required an extensive body of materials as a basis for its generalizations. Through the work of a.s.sistants he set himself the monumental task of compiling historical and cultural materials not only upon primitive and barbarous peoples but also upon the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, the French and the English. These data were cla.s.sified and published in eight large volumes under the t.i.tle _Descriptive Sociology_.

The study of human societies was too great to be satisfactorily compa.s.sed by the work of one man. Besides that, Spencer, like most English sociologists, was more interested in the progress of civilization than in its processes. Spencer's _Sociology_ is still a philosophy of history rather than a science of society. The philosophy of history took for its unit of investigation and interpretation the evolution of human society as a whole. The present trend in sociology is toward the study of _societies_ rather than _society_. Sociological research has been directed less to a study of the stages of evolution than to the diagnosis and control of social problems.

Modern sociology's chief inheritance from Comte and Spencer was a problem in logic: What is a society?

Manifestly if the relations between individuals in society are not merely formal, and if society is something more than the sum of its parts, then these relations must be defined in terms of interaction, that is to say, in terms of process. What then is _the social process_; what are the social processes? How are social processes to be distinguished from physical, chemical, or biological processes? What is, in general, the nature of the relations that need to be established in order to make of individuals in society, members of society? These questions are fundamental since they define the point of view of sociology and describe the sort of facts with which the science seeks to deal. Upon these questions the schools have divided and up to the present time there is no very general consensus among sociologists in regard to them. The introductory chapter to this volume is at once a review of the points of view and an attempt to find answers. In the literature to which reference is made at the close of chapter iii the logical questions involved are discussed in a more thoroughgoing way than has been possible to do in this volume.

Fortunately science does not wait to define its points of view nor solve its theoretical problems before undertaking to a.n.a.lyze and collect the facts. The contrary is nearer the truth. Science collects facts and answers the theoretical questions afterward. In fact, it is just its success in a.n.a.lyzing and collecting facts which throw light upon human problems that in the end justifies the theories of science.

2. Surveys of Communities

The historian and the philosopher introduced the sociologist to the study of society. But it was the reformer, the social worker, and the business man who compelled him to study the community.

The study of the community is still in its beginnings. Nevertheless, there is already a rapidly growing literature on this topic.

Ethnologists have presented us with vivid and detailed pictures of primitive communities as in McGee's _The Seri Indians_, Jenk's _The Bontoc Igorot_, Rivers' _The Todas_. Studies of the village communities of India, of Russia, and of early England have thrown new light upon the territorial factor in the organization of societies.

More recently the impact of social problems has led to the intensive study of modern communities. The monumental work of Charles Booth, _Life and Labour of the People in London_, is a comprehensive description of conditions of social life in terms of the community. In the United States, interest in community study is chiefly represented by the social-survey movement which received impetus from the Pittsburgh Survey of 1907. For sociological research of greater promise than the survey are the several monographs which seek to make a social a.n.a.lysis of the community, as Williams, _An American Town_, or Galpin, _The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community_. With due recognition of these auspicious beginnings, it must be confessed that there is no volume upon human communities comparable with several works upon plant and animal communities.

3. The Group as a Unit of Investigation

The study of societies is concerned primarily with types of social organization and with att.i.tudes and cultural elements embodied in them.

The survey of communities deals essentially with social situations and the problems connected with them.

The study of social groups was a natural outgrowth of the study of the individual. In order to understand the person it is necessary to consider the group. Attention first turned to social inst.i.tutions, then to conflict groups, and finally to crowds and crowd influences.

Social inst.i.tutions were naturally the first groups to be studied with some degree of detachment. The work of ethnologists stimulated an interest in social origins. Evolution, though at first a purely biological conception, provoked inquiry into the historical development of social structure. Differences in inst.i.tutions in contemporary societies led to comparative study. Critics of inst.i.tutions, both iconoclasts without and reformers within, forced a consideration of their more fundamental aspects.

The first written accounts of conflict groups were quite naturally of the propagandist type both by their defenders and by their opponents.

Histories of nationalities, for example, originated in the patriotic motive of national glorification. With the acceptance of objective standards of historical criticism the ground was prepared for the sociological study of nationalities as conflict groups. A school of European sociologists represented by Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, and Novicow stressed conflict as the characteristic behavior of social groups. Beginnings, as indicated in the bibliography, have been made of the study of various conflict groups as gangs, labor unions, parties, and sects.

The interest in the mechanism of the control of the individual by the group has been focused upon the study of the crowd. Tarde and Le Bon in France, Sighele in Italy, and Ross in the United States were the pioneers in the description and interpretation of the behavior of mobs and crowds. The crowd phenomena of the Great War have stimulated the production of several books upon crowds and crowd influences which are, in the main, but superficial and popular elaborations of the interpretations of Tarde and Le Bon. Concrete material upon group behavior has rapidly acc.u.mulated, but little or no progress has been made in its sociological explanation.

At present there are many signs of an increasing interest in the study of group behavior. Contemporary literature is featuring realistic descriptions. Sinclair Lewis in _Main Street_ describes concretely the routine of town life with its outward monotony and its inner zest.

Newspapers and magazines are making surveys of the buying habits of their readers as a basis for advertising. The federal department of agriculture in co-operation with schools of agriculture is making intensive studies of rural communities. Social workers are conscious that a more fundamental understanding of social groups is a necessary basis for case work and community organization. Surveys of inst.i.tutions and communities are now being made under many auspices and from varied points of view. All this is having a fruitful reaction upon the sociological theory.

4. The Study of the Family

The family is the earliest, the most elementary, and the most permanent of social groups. It has been more completely studied, in all its various aspects, than other forms of human a.s.sociation. Methods of investigation of family life are typical of methods that may be employed in the description of other forms of society. For that reason more attention is given here to studies of family life than it is possible or desirable to give to other and more transient types of social groups.

The descriptions of travelers, of ethnologists and of historians made the first contributions to our knowledge of marriage, ceremonials, and family organization among primitive and historical peoples. Early students of these data devised theories of stages in the evolution of the family. An anthology might be made of the conceptions that students have formulated of the original form of the family, for example, the theory of the matriarchate by Bachofen, of group marriage growing out of earlier promiscuous relations by Morgan, of the polygynous family by Darwin, of pair marriage by Westermarck. An example of the ingenious, but discarded method of arranging all types of families observed in a series representing stages of the evolution is to be found in Morgan's _Ancient Society_. A survey of families among primitive peoples by Hobhouse, Ginsberg, and Wheeler makes the point that even family life is most varied upon the lower levels of culture, and that the historical development of the family with any people must be studied in relation to the physical and social environment.

The evolutionary theory of the family has, however, furnished a somewhat detached point of view for the criticism of the modern family. Social reformers have used the evolutionary theory as a formula to justify attacks upon the family as an inst.i.tution and to support the most varied proposals for its reconstruction. Books like Ellen Key's _Love and Marriage_ and Meisel-Hess, _The s.e.xual Crisis_ are not scientific studies of the family but rather social political philippics directed against marriage and the family.

The interest stimulated by ethnological observation, historical study, and propagandist essays has, however, turned the attention of certain students to serious study of the family and its problems. Howard's _History of Matrimonial Inst.i.tutions_ is a scholarly and comprehensive treatise upon the evolution of the legal status of the family. Annual statistics of marriage and divorce are now compiled and published by all the important countries except the United States government. In the United States, however, three studies of marriages and divorces have been made; one in 1887-88, by the Department of Labor, covering the twenty years from 1867-86 inclusive; another in 1906-7, by the Bureau of the Census, for the twenty years 1887-1906; and the last, also by the Bureau of the Census, for the year 1916.

The changes in family life resulting from the transition from home industry to the factory system have created new social problems.

Problems of woman and child labor, unemployment, and poverty are a product of the machine industry. Attempts to relieve the distress under conditions of city life resulted in the formation of charity organization societies and other philanthropic inst.i.tutions, and in attempts to control the behavior of the individuals and families a.s.sisted. The increasing body of experience gained by social agencies has gradually been incorporated in the technique of the workers. Mary Richmond in _Social Diagnosis_ has a.n.a.lyzed and standardized the procedure of the social case worker.

Less direct but more fundamental studies of family life have been made by other investigators. Le Play, a French social economist, who lived with the families which he observed, introduced the method of the monographic study of the economic organization of family life. Ernst Engel, from his study of the expenditure of Saxon working-cla.s.s families, formulated so-called "laws" of the relation between family income and family outlay. Recent studies of family incomes and budgets by Chapin, Ogburn, and others have thrown additional light upon the relationship between wages and the standard of living. Interest in the economics of the family is manifested by an increasing number of studies in dietetics, household administration and domestic science.

Westermarck in his _History of Human Marriage_ attempted to write a sociology of the family. Particularly interesting is his attempt to compare the animal family with that of man. The effect of this was to emphasize instinctive and biological aspects of the family rather than its inst.i.tutional character. The basis for a psychology of family life was first laid in the _Studies in the Psychology of s.e.x_ by Havelock Ellis. The case studies of individuals by psychoa.n.a.lysts often lead into family complexes and illuminate the structure of family att.i.tudes and wishes.

The sociological study of the family as a natural and a cultural group is only now in its beginnings. An excellent theoretical study of the family as a unity of interacting members is presented in Bosanquet, _The Family_. The family as defined in the mores has been described and interpreted, as for example, by Thomas in his a.n.a.lysis of the organization of the large peasant family group in the first two volumes of the _Polish Peasant_. Materials upon the family in the United States have been brought together by Calhoun in his _Social History of the American Family_.

While the family is listed by Cooley among primary groups, the notion is gaining ground that it is primary in a unique sense which sets it apart from all other social groups. The biological interdependence and co-operation of the members of the family, intimacies of closest and most enduring contacts have no parallel among other human groups. The interplay of the attractions, tensions, and accommodations of personalities in the intimate bonds of family life have up to the present found no concrete description or adequate a.n.a.lysis in sociological inquiry.

The best case studies of family life at present are in fiction, not in the case records of social agencies, nor yet in sociological literature.

Arnold Bennett's trilogy, _Clayhanger_, _Hilda Lessways_, and _These Twain_, suggests a pattern not unworthy of consideration by social workers and sociologists. _The Pastor's Wife_, by the author of _Elizabeth and Her German Garden_, is a delightful contrast of English and German mores in their effect upon the intimate relations of family life.

In the absence of case studies of the family as a natural and cultural group the following tentative outline for sociological study is offered:

1. _Location and extent in time and s.p.a.ce._--Genealogical tree as retained in the family memory; geographical distribution and movement of members of small family group and of large family group; stability or mobility of family; its rural or urban location.

2. _Family traditions and ceremonials._--Family romance; family skeleton; family ritual, as demonstration of affection, family events, etc.

3. _Family economics._--Family communism; division of labor between members of the family; effect of occupation of its members.

4. _Family organization and control._--Conflicts and accommodation; superordination and subordination; typical forms of control--patriarchy, matriarchy, consensus, etc.; family _esprit de corps_, family morale, family objectives; status in community.