Human nature and the social order

by Charles Horton Cooley

No doubt there are elements of vagueness in this conception. What is full and harmonious personal development? What is the right, the opportunity to achieve which is freedom? The possibilities of development are infinitely various, and unimaginable until they begin to be realized, so that it would appear that our notion gives us nothing definite to go by after all. This is largely true: development cannot be defined, either for the race or for individuals, but is and must remain an ideal, of which we can get only partial and shifting glimpses. In fact, we should cease to think of freedom as something definite and final, that can be grasped and held fast once for all, and learn to regard it as a line of advance, something progressively appearing out of the invisible and defining itself, like the forms of a mountain up which one is climbing in a mist. This vagueness and incompleteness are only what we meet in every direction when we attempt to define our ideals. What is progress? What is right? What is beauty? What is truth? The endeavor to produce unmistakable and final definitions of these things is now, I suppose, given up, and we have come to recognize that the good, in all its forms, is evolved rather than achieved, is a process rather than a state.

The best definition of freedom is perhaps nothing other than the most helpful way of thinking about it; and it seems to me that the most helpful way of thinking about it is to regard it in the light of the contrast between what a man is and what he might be, as our experience of life enables us to imagine the two states. Ideas of this sort are suggested by defining freedom as opportunity, and their tendency is to stimulate and direct practical endeavor. If the word helps us to realize, for instance, that it is possible to make healthy, intelligent, and hopeful children out of those that are now sickly, dull, and unhappy, so much the better. On the other hand, the definition of it as letting people alone, well enough suited, perhaps, to an over-governed state of society, does not seem especially pertinent to our time and country.

We have always been taught by philosophy that the various forms of the good were merely different views of the same thing, and this idea is certainly applicable to such notions as those of freedom, progress, and right. Thus freedom may be regarded as merely the individual aspect of progress, the two being related as the individual and the social order were asserted to be in the first chapter, and no more distinct or separable. If instead of contrasting what a particular man is with what he might be, we do the same for mankind as a whole, we have the notion of progress. Progress which does not involve liberation is evidently no progress at all; and, on the other hand, a freedom that is not part of the general onward movement of society is not free in the largest sense. Again, any practicable idea of freedom must connect it with some standard of right, in which, like opposing claims in a clearing-house, the divergent tendencies of each person, and of different persons, are disciplined and reconciled. The wrong is the unfree; it is that which tends, on the whole, to restrict personal development. It is no contribution to freedom to turn loose the insane or the criminal, or to allow children to run on the streets instead of going to school. The only test of all these things—of right, freedom, progress, and the like—is the instructed conscience; just as the only test of beauty is a trained æsthetic sense, which is a mental conclusion of much the same sort as conscience.

So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational. A free discipline controls the individual by appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are fit for.

Thus freedom is relative to the particular persons and states who are to enjoy it, some individuals within any society, and some societies as wholes, being capable of a higher sort of response than others. In the family, it implies the substitution, so far as practicable, of familiarity and moral suasion for distance and the rod; in government the growth of public opinion and education as compared with autocracy and the military and police functions; in the church, the decline of dogma, form, the fear of hell and hypnotic conversion, relatively to intelligence, sympathy, and good works. But any relaxation of lower forms of discipline which is not supplied by higher, which tends, on the whole, to confusion rather than reorganization, is not in the way of real freedom. The question what this is is always one that is relative to the actual situation, never one that can be absolutely or abstractly answered. Freedom can be increased only in connection with the increase of sympathy, intelligence, and self-control in individuals.

The social order is antithetical to freedom only in so far as it is a bad one. Freedom can exist only in and through a social order, and must be increased by all the healthy growth of the latter. It is only in a large and complex social system that any advanced degree of it is possible, because nothing else can supply the multifarious opportunities by means of which all sorts of persons can work out a congenial development through the choice of influences.

In so far as we have freedom in the United States at the present time, in what does it consist? Evidently, it seems to me, in the access to a great number and variety of influences by whose progressive selection and assimilation a child may become, within vague limits set by the general state of our society, the best that he is naturally fitted to become. It consists, to begin with infancy, in a good family life, in intelligent nurture and training, adapted to the special traits of character which every child manifests from the first week of life. Then it involves good schooling, admitting the child through books and teachers to a rich selection from the accumulated influences of the best minds of the past. Free technical and professional education, so far as it exists, contributes to it, also the facility of travel, bringing him in contact with significant persons from all over the world; public libraries, magazines, good newspapers, and so on. Whatever enlarges his field of selection without permanently confusing him adds to his liberty. In fact, institutions—government, churches, industries, and the like—have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.

Although a high degree of freedom can exist only through a complex social order, it by no means follows that every complex social order is free. On the contrary, it has more often been true in the past that very large and intricately organized states, like the Roman Empire, were constructed on a comparatively mechanical or unfree principle. And in our own time a vast and complex empire, like Russia or China, may be less free than the simplest English-speaking colony. There are serious objections to identifying progress, as Herbert Spencer sometimes appears to do, with the mere differentiation and co-ordination of social functions. But the example of the United States, which is perhaps on the whole the most intricately differentiated and co-ordinated state that ever existed, shows that complexity is not inconsistent with freedom. To enter fully into this matter would require a more careful examination of the institutional aspect of life than I wish to undertake at present; but I hold that the possibility of organizing large and complex societies on a free principle depends upon the quickness and facility of communication, and so has come to exist only in recent times. The great states of earlier history were necessarily somewhat mechanical in structure.

It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought it at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them. Thoreau in his hut remained as truly a member of society, as dependent for suggestion upon his books, his friends, and his personal memories, and upon verbal expression for his sense of self, as did Emerson in Concord or Lowell in Cambridge; and I imagine that if he had cared to discuss the matter he would have admitted that this was the case. Indeed, the idea of Thoreau as a recluse was not, I think, his own idea, but has been attached to him by superficial observers of his life. Although he was a dissenter from the state and the church of his time, his career would have been impossible without those institutions, without Harvard College, for instance, which was a joint product of the two. He worked out his personal development through congenial influences selected from the life of his time, very much as others do. He simply had peculiar tendencies which he developed in a peculiar way, especially by avoiding a gregarious mode of life unsuited to his temperament. He was free through the social order, not outside of it, and the same may be said of Edward Fitzgerald and other seclusive spirits. No doubt the commonplace life of the day is a sort of slavery for many sensitive minds that have not, like these, the resolution to escape from it into a calmer and broader atmosphere.

Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not. So far as children are ill-nurtured or ill-taught, as family training is bad, the schools inefficient, the local government ill-administered, public libraries lacking, or private associations for various sorts of culture deficient, in so far the people are unfree. A child born in a slum, brought up in a demoralized family, and put at some confining and mentally deadening work when ten or twelve years old, is no more free to be healthy, wise, and moral than a Chinese child is free to read Shakespeare. Every social ill involves the enslavement of individuals.