Social organization

by Charles Horton Cooley

I need not point out in detail how the old legal and ethical relations—the whole social structure indeed—of industry have mostly broken down; how the craftsman has lost control of his tools and is struggling to regain it through associations; how vast and novel forms of combination have appeared; how men of all classes are demoralized by the lack of standards of economic justice; these are familiar matters which I mention only to show their relation to the principle under discussion.

In general, modern industry, progressing chiefly in a mechanical sense, has attained a marvellous organization in that sense; while the social and moral side of it remains in confusion. We have a promising plant but have not yet learned how to make it turn out the desired product of righteousness and happiness.

Wherever there is power which has outstripped the growth of moral and legal standards there is sure to be some kind of anarchy; and so it is with our commerce and finance. On these seas piracy flourishes alongside of honest trade; and, indeed, as in the seventeenth century, many merchants practise both of these occupations. And the riches thus gained often go to corrupt the state.

Tn the inferior strata of the commercial order we find that human nature has been hustled and trodden under foot: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” The hand-worker, the clerk and the small tradesman, generally insecure in the tenure of their occupations and homes, are anxious and restless, while many classes suffer special and grievous wrongs, such as exhaustion and premature old age, due to the nervous strain of certain kinds of work, death and mutilation from machinery, life in squalid tenements, and the debasement of children by bad surroundings and premature work.

Although the individual, in a merely mechanical sense, is part of a wider whole than ever before, he has often lost that conscious membership in the whole upon which his human breadth depends: unless the larger life is a moral life, he gains nothing in this regard, and may lose. When children saw the grain growing in the field, watched the reaping and threshing and grinding of it, and then helped their mother to make it into bread, their minds had a vital membership in the economic process; but now that this process, by its very enlargement, has become invisible, most persons have lost the sense of it.[167] And this is a type of modern industry at large: the workman, the man of business, the farmer and the lawyer are contributors to the whole, but being morally isolated by the very magnitude of the system, the whole does not commonly live in their thought.

Is it not a universal experience that we cannot do anything with spirit or satisfaction unless we know what it is for? No one who remembers the tasks of childhood will doubt this; and it is still my observation that so soon as I lose a sense of the bearing of what I am doing upon general aims and the common life, I get stale and discouraged and need a fresh view. Yet a great part not only of hand labor but of professional work and business is of this character. The world has become so complicated that we know not what we do, and thus suffer not only in our happiness but in our moral steadfastness and religious faith. There is no remedy short of making life a moral and spiritual as well as a mechanical whole.

Education is another matter that might be discussed at much length from this point of view. That radical changes are taking place in it is hardly more obvious than that these changes are not altogether beneficent. We may say of this department as of others that there is a spirit of freedom and vigor abroad, but that its immediate results are somewhat anarchical.

The underlying reason for the special growth of educational institutions in our time is the free and conscious character of our system, which demands a corresponding individual to work it. Thus democracy requires literacy, that the voter may learn what he is voting about, and this means schools. Under the plan of free competition the son need not follow his father’s occupation, but may take the open sea of life and find whatever work suits him; and this renders obsolete household instruction in trades. Indeed, our whole life is so specialized and so subject to change that there is nothing for it but special schools.

We may probably learn also, as time goes on, that the enlarged sphere of choice and the complexity of the relations with which it deals call for a social and moral education more rational and explicit than we have had in the past. There are urgent problems with which no power can deal but an instructed and organized public conscience, for the source of which we must look, in part, to public education.

In striving to meet new requirements our schools have too commonly extended their system rather than their vital energies; they have perhaps grown more rapidly in the number of students, the variety of subjects taught, and in other numerable particulars, than in the inner and spiritual life, the ideals, the traditions and the personnel of the teaching force. In this as in other expanding institutions life is spread out rather thin.