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.
63. Linguistic and Cultural Standards
It does not follow that because social usages lack a rational basis, they are therefore unworthy of being followed, or that standards of conduct need be renounced because they are relative, that is, unconsciously founded and changing. The natural inclination of men being to regard their standards of taste, behavior, and social arrangement as wholly reasonable, perfect, and fixed, there follows a first inclination to regard these standards as valueless as soon as their emotionality and variability have been recognized. But such a tendency is only a negative reaction against the previous illusion when this has disappointed by crumbling. The reaction is therefore in a sense a further result of the illusion. Once the fundamental and automatic assumption of fixity and inherent value of social patterns has been given up, and it is recognized that the motive power of behavior in man as in the other animals is affective and unconscious, there is nothing in institutions and codes to quarrel with. They are neither despicable nor glorious; no more deserving in virtue of their existence to be uprooted and demolished than to be defended as absolute and eternal. In some form or other, they are inevitable; and the particular form which they take at this time or that place is always tolerably well founded, in the sense of being adapted with fair success, or having been but recently well adapted, to the conditions of natural and social environment of the group which holds the institution, code, or standard.
That this is a sane attitude is more easily shown in the field of language than of culture, because, language being primarily a mechanism or means, whereas in culture ends or purposes tend more to obtrude, it is easier to view linguistic phenomena dispassionately. Grammars and dictionaries, for instance, are evidently the result of self-consciousness arising about speech which has previously been mainly unconscious. They may be roughly compared to social formulations like law codes or written constitutions or philosophic systems or religious dogmas, which are also representations of usages or beliefs already in existence. When grammarians stigmatize expressions like ain’t or them cows or he don’t as “wrong,” they are judging an innovation, or one of several established conflicting usages, by a standard of correctness that seems to them absolute and permanent. As a matter of actuality, the condemned form may or may not succeed in becoming established. He don’t, for example, might attain to correctness in time, although ain’t is perhaps less likely to become legitimized, and them cows to have still smaller prospect of recognition. That a form departs from the canon of to-day of course no more proves that it will be accepted in future than that it will not. What is certain is that if it wins sufficient usage, it will also win sanction, and will become part of the standard of its time.
Linguistic instances like these differ little if at all in principle, in their involved psychology, from the finding of the Supreme Court that a certain legislative enactment is unconstitutional and therefore void; or from the decision of a denomination that dancing or playing golf on Sunday is wicked; or from the widespread sentiment that breaking an unpopular law like that on liquor prohibition is morally justifiable. The chief point of divergence would seem to be that a court is a constituted body endowed with an authority which is not paralleled on the linguistic side, at any rate in Anglo-Saxon countries; although the Latin nations possess Academies whose dicta on correctness of speech enjoy a moral authority approximating the verdicts of a high court.
It is also of interest to remember that the power of nullifying legislation was not specifically granted the Supreme Court by the Constitution of the United States, but that the practice grew up gradually, quite like a speech innovation which becomes established. Certain elements in the American population look upon this power as undesirable and therefore take satisfaction in pointing out its unsanctioned origin. The majority on the other hand feel that the situation on the whole works out well, and that a Supreme Court with its present powers is better than the risk of a Court without power. Still, it remains curiously illogical that the preservation of the Constitution should take place partly through the extra-constitutional functioning of a constitutional body. In principle such a case is similar to that of grammarians who at the same time lay down a rule and exceptions to the rule, because the contradictory usages happen to be actually established.