These would appear to be phenomena comparable to the growth of feudalism in China more than a thousand years earlier than in Europe, or the appearance of a great centrally governed empire in Peru similar to the ancient monarchies of the Orient.
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.