Social organization

by Charles Horton Cooley

Along with the sense of the team as a mechanical instrument, and unseparated from it in the boy’s mind, is the consciousness of it as the embodiment of a common purpose. There is in team play a very intimate experience of the ways in which such a purpose is built up and made effective. You feel, though without analysis, the subtle ways in which a single strong character breaks out the road ahead and gives confidence to the rest to follow; how the creative power of one ardent imagination, bravely sustained, makes possible the putting through of the play as he conceives it. You feel to the marrow of your bones how each loyal member contributes to the salvation of all the others by holding the conception of the whole play so firmly in his mind as to enable them to hold it, and to participate in his single-minded determination to see it carried out. You have intimate experience of the ways in which individual members contribute to the team and of how the team, in turn, builds up their spiritual nature....

And the team is not only an extension of the player’s consciousness; it is a part of his personality. His participation has deepened from coöperation to membership. Not only is he now a part of the team, but the team is a part of him.”[13]

Moral unity, as this illustration implies, admits and rewards strenuous ambition; but this ambition must either be for the success of the group, or at least not inconsistent with that. The fullest self-realization will belong to the one who embraces in a passionate self-feeling the aims of the fellowship, and spends his life in fighting for their attainment.

The ideal of moral unity I take to be the mother, as it were, of all social ideals.

It is, then, not my aim to depreciate the self-assertive passions. I believe that they are fierce, inextinguishable, indispensable. Competition and the survival of the fittest are as righteous as kindness and coöperation, and not necessarily opposed to them: an adequate view will embrace and harmonize these diverse aspects. The point I wish particularly to bring out in this chapter is that the normal self is moulded in primary groups to be a social self whose ambitions are formed by the common thought of the group.

In their crudest form such passions as lust, greed, revenge, the pride of power and the like are not, distinctively, human nature at all, but animal nature, and so far as we rise into the spirit of family or neighborhood association we control and subordinate them. They are rendered human only so far as they are brought under the discipline of sympathy, and refined into sentiments, such as love, resentment, and ambition. And in so far as they are thus humanized they become capable of useful function.

Take the greed of gain, for example, the ancient sin of avarice, the old wolf, as Dante says, that gets more prey than all the other beasts.[14] The desire of possession is in itself a good thing, a phase of self-realization and a cause of social improvement. It is immoral or greedy only when it is without adequate control from sympathy, when the self realized is a narrow self. In that case it is a vice of isolation or weak social consciousness, and indicates a state of mind intermediate between the brutal and the fully human or moral, when desire is directed toward social objects—wealth or power—but is not social in its attitude toward others who desire the same objects. Intimate association has the power to allay greed. One will hardly be greedy as against his family or close friends, though very decent people will be so as against almost any one else. Every one must have noticed that after frank association, even of a transient character, with another person, one usually has a sense of kindred with him which makes one ashamed to act greedily at his expense.

Those who dwell preponderantly upon the selfish aspect of human nature and flout as sentimentalism the “altruistic” conception of it, make their chief error in failing to see that our self itself is altruistic, that the object of our higher greed is some desired place in the minds of other men, and that through this it is possible to enlist ordinary human nature in the service of ideal aims. The improvement of society does not call for any essential change in human nature, but, chiefly, for a larger and higher application of its familiar impulses.

I know, also, that the most truculent behavior may be exalted into an ideal, like the ferocity of Samuel, when he hewed Agag to pieces before the Lord,[15] or of the orthodox Christian of a former age in the destruction of heretics. In general there is always a morality of opposition, springing from the need of the sympathetic group to assert itself in the struggle for existence. Even at the present day this more or less idealizes destructiveness and deceit in the conflicts of war, if not of commerce.

But such precepts are secondary, not ideals in the same primary and enduring sense that loyalty and kindness are. They shine by reflected light, and get their force mainly from the belief that they express the requirements of the “we” group in combating its enemies. Flourishing at certain stages of development because they are requisite under the prevailing conditions of destructive conflict, they are slowly abandoned or transformed when these conditions change. Mankind at large has no love of them for their own sake, though individuals, classes, or even nations may acquire them as a habit. With the advance of civilization conflict itself is brought more and more under the control of those principles that prevail in primary groups, and, so far as this is the case, conduct which violates such principles ceases to have any ideal value.