Human nature and the social order

by Charles Horton Cooley

Is a Phase of the Question of Right and Wrong—Relation to the Idea of Development—Justification and Meaning of the Phrase “Personal Degeneracy”—Hereditary and Social Factors in Personal Degeneracy—Degeneracy as a Mental Trait—Conscience in Degeneracy—Crime, Insanity, and Responsibility—General Aims in the Treatment of Degeneracy.

I wish to touch upon this subject only in so far as to suggest a general way of conceiving it in accord with the views set forth in the preceding chapters.

The question of personal degeneracy is a phase of the question of right or wrong and is ultimately determined by conscience. A degenerate might be defined as one whose personality falls distinctly short of a standard set by the dominant moral thought of a group. It is the nature of the mind to form standards of better or worse in all matters toward which its selective activity is directed; and this has its collective as well as its individual aspect, so that not only every man but every group has its preferences and aversions, its good and bad. The selective, organizing processes which all life, and notably the life of the mind, presents, involve this distinction; it is simply a formulation of the universal fact of preference. We cannot view things in which we are interested without liking some and disliking others; and somewhat in proportion to our interest is our tendency to express these likes and dislikes by good and bad or similar words. And since there is nothing that interests us so much as persons, judgments of right and wrong regarding them have always been felt and expressed with peculiar zest and emphasis. The righteous and the wicked, the virtuous and the vicious, the good and bad under a hundred names, have been sharply and earnestly discriminated in every age and country.

Although this distinction between personal good and bad has always been a fact of human thought, a broader view of it is reached, in these days, through the idea of evolution. The method of nature being everywhere selective, growth is seen to take place not by making a like use of the elements already existing, but by the fostering of some to the comparative neglect or suppression of others. Or, if this statement gives too much the idea of a presiding intelligence outside the process itself, we may simply say that the functions of existing elements in contributing to further growth are extremely different, so much so that some of them usually appear to have no important function at all, or even to impede the growth, while others appear to be the very heart of the onward or crescent life. This idea is applicable to physiological processes, such as go on within our bodies, to the development of species, as illustrated with such convincing detail by Darwin, and to all the processes of thought and of society; so that the forces that are observed in the present, if viewed with reference to function or tendency, never appear to be on the same level of value, but are strung along at different levels, some below a mean, some above it. Thus we not only have the actual discrimination of good and bad in persons, but a philosophy which shows it as an incident of evolution, a reflection in thought of the general movement of nature.

Or, to regard the process of evolution in more detail, we find degeneracy or inferiority implied in that idea of variation which is the starting-point of Darwinism. All forms of life, it seems, exhibit variation; that is, the individuals are not quite alike but differ from one another and from the parents in a somewhat random manner, so that some are better adapted to the actual conditions of life, and some worse. The change or development of a species takes place by the cumulative survival and multiplication, generation after generation, of fit or fortunate variations. The very process that produces the fittest evidently implies the existence of the unfit; and the distinctly unfit individuals of any species may be regarded as the degenerate.

It will not do to transfer these ideas too crudely to the mental and social life of mankind; but it will hardly be disputed that the character of persons exhibits variations which are partly at least incalculable, and which produce on the one hand leadership and genius and on the other weakness and degeneracy. We probably cannot have the one without having something, at least, of the other, though I believe that the variations of personality are capable, to a great degree, of being brought under rational control.

This truth that all forms of deficient humanity have a common philosophical aspect is one reason for giving them some common name, like degeneracy. Another is that the detailed study of fact more and more forces the conclusion that such things as crime, pauperism, idiocy, insanity, and drunkenness have, in great measure, a common causation, and so form, practically, parts of a whole. We see this in the study of heredity, which shows that the transmitted taint commonly manifests itself in several or all of these forms in different generations or individuals of the same family; and we see it in the study of social conditions, in the fact that where these conditions are bad, as in the slums of great cities, all the forms become more prevalent. A third reason for the use of a special term is that it is desirable that the matter receive more dispassionate study than formerly, and this may possibly be promoted by the use of words free, so far as possible, from irrelevant implications. Many of the words in common use, such as badness, wickedness, crime and the like, reflect particular views of the facts, such as the religious view of them as righteousness or sin, and the legal view as criminal or innocent, while degeneracy suggests the disinterestedness of science.

I do not much care to justify the particular word degeneracy in this connection, further than to say that I know of none more convenient or less objectionable. It comes, of course, from de and genus through degenerare, and seems to mean primarily the state of having fallen from a type. It is not uncommon in English literature, usually meaning inferiority to the standard set by ancestors, as when we say a degenerate age, a degenerate son, etc.; and recently it has come into use to describe any kind of marked and enduring mental defect or inferiority. I see no objection to this usage unless it be that it is doubtful whether the mentally or morally inferior person can in all cases be said to have fallen from a higher state. This might be plausibly argued on both sides, but it does not seem worth while.

I use the phrase personal degeneracy, then, to describe the state of persons whose character and conduct fall distinctly below the type or standard regarded as normal by the dominant sentiment of the group. Although it must be admitted that this definition is a vague one, it is not more so, perhaps, than most definitions of mental or social phenomena. There is no sharp criterion of what is mentally and socially up to par and what is not, but there are large and important classes whose inferiority is evident, such as idiots, imbeciles, the insane, drunkards and criminals; and no one will question the importance of studying the whole of which these are parts.

It is altogether a social matter at bottom; that is to say, degeneracy exists only in a certain relation between a person and the rest of a group. In so far as any mental or physical traits constitute it they do so because they involve unfitness for a normal social career, in which alone the essence of the matter is found. The only palpable test of it—and this an uncertain one—is found in the actual career of the person, and especially in the attitude toward him of the organized thought of the group. We agree fairly well upon the degeneracy of the criminal, largely because his abnormality is of so obvious and troublesome a kind that something in particular has to be done about it, and so he becomes definitely and formally stigmatized by the organs of social judgment. Yet even from this decisive verdict an appeal is successfully made in some cases to the wider and maturer thought of mankind, so that many have been executed as felons who, like John Brown, are now revered as heroes.