62. Unconscious Factors in Language and Culture
The unceasing processes of change in language are mainly unconscious. The results of the change may rise to the recognition of the speakers; the act of change, and especially its causes, happen without awareness of those through whose minds and mouths they take place. This holds of all departments of language: the phonetics, the structural form, largely even the meaning of words. When a change has begun to creep in, it may be observed and be consciously resisted on the ground of being incorrect or vulgar or foreign. But the underlying motives of the objectors are apparently as unknown to themselves as the impulses of the innovators.
If this view seem extreme, it can easily be shown that the great bulk of any language as it is, apart from any question of change, is employed unconsciously. An illiterate person will use such forms as child, child’s, children, children’s with the same “correctness” as a philologist, yet without being able to give an explanation of the grammatical ideas of singularity and plurality, absoluteness and possession, or to lay down rules as to the manner of expression of these ideas in English. Grammar, in short, exists before grammarians, whose legitimate business is to uncover such rules as are already there. It is an obviously hasty thought that because grammar happens to be taught in schools, speech can be grammatical only through such formal teaching. The Sanskrit and Greek and Latin languages had their declensions and conjugations before Hindu and Greek and Roman scholars first analyzed and described them. The languages of primitive peoples frequently abound with complicated forms and mechanisms which are used consistently and applied without suspicion of their existence. It is much as the blood went round in our bodies quite healthily before Harvey’s discovery of its circulation.
The quality of unconsciousness seems not to be a trait specifically limited to linguistic causes and processes, but to hold in principle of culture generally. It is only that the unconsciousness pervades speech farther. A custom, a belief, an art, however deep down its springs, sooner or later rises into social consciousness. It then seems deliberate, planned, willed, and is construed as arising from conscious motives and developing through conscious channels. But many social phenomena can be led back only to non-rational and obscure motives: the wearing of silk hats, for instance. The whole class of changes in dress styles spring from unconscious causes. Sleeves and skirts lengthen or shorten, trousers flare or tighten, and who can say why? It is perhaps possible to trace a new fashion to Paris or London, and to a particular stratum of society there. But what is it that in the winter of a particular year makes every woman—or man—of a certain social group wear, let us say, a high collared coat, or a shoe that does not come above the ankle, and the next year, or the tenth after, the reverse? It is insufficient to say that this is imitation of a leader of fashion, of a professional creator of style. Why does the group follow him and think the innovation attractive and correct? A year earlier the same innovation would have appeared senseless or extravagant to the same group. A year after, it appeals as belated and ridiculous, and every one wonders that style was so tasteless so short a time ago.
Evidently the æsthetic emotions evoked by fashions are largely beyond the control of both individuals and groups. It is difficult to say where the creative and imitative impulses of fashion come from; which, inasmuch as the impulses obviously reside somewhere in human minds, means that they spring from the unconscious portions of the mind. Evidently then our justification of the dress styles we happen at any time to be following, our pronouncing them artistic or comfortable or sensible or what not, is secondary. A low shoe may be more convenient than a high one, a brown one more practical than a black one. That that is not the reason which determines the wearing of low brown shoes when they are customarily worn, is shown by the fact that at other times high black ones are put on by every one. The reasons that can be and are given are so changeable and inconsistent that they evidently are not the real reasons, but the false secondary reasons that are best distinguished as rationalizations. Excuses, we should call them with reference to individual conduct.
What applies to fashion holds also of manners, of morals, and of many religious observances. Why we defer to women by rising in their presence and passing through a door behind them; why we refrain from eating fish with a knife or drinking soup out of a two handled cup, though drinking it from a single handled one is legitimate; why we do not marry close kin; why we remove our hats in the presence of the deity or his emblems but would feel it impious to pull off our shoes; all the thousands of prescriptions and taboos of which these are examples, possess an unconscious motivation.
Such cases are also illustrations of what is known as the relativity of morals. The Jew sets his hat on to worship, the Oriental punctiliously slips out of his shoes. Some people forbid the marriage of the most remote relatives, others encourage that of first cousins, still others permit the union of uncle and niece. It would seem that all social phenomena which can be brought under this principle of relativity of standard are unconsciously grounded. This in turn implies the unconscious causation of the mores, those products of the social environment in which one is reared and which one accepts as the ultimate authority of conduct. As mores are those folkways or customs to which an emotional coloring has become attached, so that adherence to the custom or departure from it arouses a feeling respectively of approval or disapproval, it is evident that the origin of folkways generally is also unconscious, since there seems no reason why the emotions or ethical affect enveloping a customary action should incline more than the custom itself to spring up unconsciously.
It has become recognized that the average man’s convictions on social matters remote from him are not developed through examination of evidence and exercise of reason, but are taken over, by means of what is sometimes denominated the “herd instinct,” from the society or period in which he happens to have been born and nurtured. His belief in democracy, in monotheism, in his right to charge profit and his freedom to change residence or occupation, have such origin. In many instances it is easy to render striking proof of the proposition: as in the problems of high tariff, or the Athanasian creed, or compulsory vaccination, which are so technical or intricate as to be impossible of independent solution by evidence and argument by the majority of men. Time alone would forbid: we should starve while making the necessary research. And the difference between the average man’s attitude on such difficult points and the highly gifted individual’s attitude toward them or even toward simpler problems, would seem to be one of degree only.
Even on the material sides of culture, unconscious motivation plays a part. In the propulsion of ships, oars and sails fluctuated as the prevalent means down almost to the period of steam vessels. It would be impossible to say that one method was logically superior to the other, that it was recognized as such and then rationally adhered to. The history of warfare shows similar changes between throwing and thrusting spears, stabbing and hewing swords, light and heavy armor. The Greeks and Macedonians in the days of their military superiority lengthened their lances and held them. It no doubt seemed for a time that a definite superiority had been proved for this type of weapon over the shorter, hurled javelin. Then the Romans, as part of their legionary tactics, reverted to the javelin and broke the Macedonian phalanx with their pilum. But the Middle Ages again fell back on the thrusting lance. The Greeks successfully developed heavy armor, until Athenian light armed troops overcame Spartan hoplites. The Macedonians reintroduced heavy armament, which held sway in Europe until after the prevalence of firearms. But the last few years have brought the rebirth of the helmet.
These fashions in tools and practical appliances do not alter as fast as modern dress styles, and part of their causes can often be recognized. Yet there seems no essential difference, as regards consciousness, between the fluctuation of fashions in weapons—or navigation or cooking or travel or house building—and, let us say, the fluctuation of mode between soft and stiff hats or high and low shoes. It may be admitted to have been the open array of the legion that led to the pilum; the bullet that induced the abandonment of the breast plate, shrapnel that caused the reintroduction of the helmet. But these initiating factors were not deliberate as regards the effects that came in their train; and in their turn they were the effects of more remote causes. The whole chain of development in such cases is devious, unforeseen, mainly unforeseeable. At most there is recognition of what is happening; in general the recognition seems to become full only after the change in tool or weapon or industrial process has become completed and is perhaps already being undermined once more.
Of course purely stylistic alterations—and linguistic innovations—also possess their causes. When the derby hat or the pronoun thou becomes obsolete, there is a reason, whether or not we know it or do not see it clearly.
The common causal element in all these changes may be called a shift in social values. Perhaps practical chemical experience has grown, and gunpowder explodes more satisfactorily; or an economic readjustment has made it possible to equip more soldiers with guns. The first result is a greater frequency of bullet penetrations in battle; the next, the abandonment of the breast plate. Increasing wealth or schooling or city residence makes indiscriminate familiarity of manners seem less desirable than at an earlier period: brusque thou begins to yield to indirect plural you. Or again, new verbs, all of regular conjugation like love, loved, are formed in English or imported from French until their number outweighs that of the ancient irregular ones like sing, sang. A standardizing tendency is thereby set going—“analogizing” is the technical term of the philologist—which begins to turn irregular verbs into regular ones: dived replaces dove, just as lenger becomes longer, and toon becomes toes. There is the same sort of causality in one of these phenomena as in another. The individual or community that leaves off the breast plate or stiff hat is more likely to be aware that it is performing the act than the one that leaves off saying toon or thou. But it does not seem that there is an essential difference of process. Linguistic and æsthetic changes are most fully unconscious, social ones next, material and economic ones perhaps least. But in all cases change or innovation is due to a shift of values that are broader than the single phenomenon in question, and that are held to impulsively instead of reasonably. That is why all social creations—institutions, beliefs, codes, styles, speech forms—prove on impartial analysis to be full of inconsistencies and irrationalities. They have sprung not from weighed or reasoned choices but from impulsive desires and emotionally colored habits.
The foregoing discussion may be summarized as follows. Linguistic phenomena and processes are on the whole more deeply unconscious than cultural ones, without however differing in principle. In both language and culture, content is more readily imparted and assimilated than form and enters farther into consciousness. Organization or structure in both cases takes place according to unconscious patterns, such as grammatical categories, social standards, political or economic points of view, religious or intellectual assumptions. These patterns attain recognition only in a late stage of sophistication, and even then continue to alter and to be influential without conscious control. The number of such linguistic and social patterns being limited, they tend to be approximately repeated without historic connection. Partially similar combinations of such patterns sometimes recur, producing languages or cultures of similar type. But established patterns, and still more their combinations, replace each other with difficulty. Their spread therefore takes place through the integral substitution of one language or culture for another, rather than by piecemeal absorption. This is in contrast to the specific elements of which language and culture consist—individual words, mechanical devices, institutional symbols, particular religious ideas or actions, and the like. These elements absorb and diffuse readily. They are therefore imitated more often than they are reinvented. But linguistic and cultural patterns or structures growing up spontaneously may possess more general resemblance than historic connection.