Social process

by Charles Horton Cooley

It is natural that under certain conditions growth should be downward rather than upward. For the most part our natural tendencies are morally indeterminate, not tendencies to do good things or bad things, but to strive for life and self-expression under the conditions which are offered to us by the environment. These conditions may be such as to appeal mainly to the lower trend and offer little or no stimulus to the higher. Many children are depraved by sensual vices at an age when they have practically no power to refuse them. Or intellect and ambition may be aroused but led to work in directions opposed to the standards of society. Studies of juvenile delinquents have shown how their life is often such as to train good faculties in bad directions. Thus a boy may have a father so unjust that the boy feels justified in resisting and deceiving him. A little later a badly conducted school may make it natural for him to transfer this attitude to his teachers, and so continue to develop a spirit of resistance to authority. At the same time he not improbably finds that his natural intimates, the boys of the neighborhood, are banded together to thwart the police, who, at the bidding of a municipality which has provided no other playground, are repressing games on the street; and if he can help his fellows in this they will make him a leader. Thus the best traits of human nature, ambition, fellowship, self-expression, combine to urge him into what may presently turn out to be a career of crime.

In general our principles of selective growth and organization, while they are on the whole upbuilding and progressive, may easily work in an opposite sense. The current as a whole sets onward, but there are many eddies and stagnant places. And if a retrogressive movement is well developed and organized it has the same power as any other to force individuals and lesser movements to adapt themselves to it.

It is not necessary that an environment, in order to have a bad influence on a person, should be bad when considered by itself. It is rather a matter of the kind of interaction that takes place, and just as two persons, neither of whom is bad in himself, may have the worst influence on each other, so what would be called a good environment and a good individual may make an unfortunate combination. A carefully brought-up boy sometimes goes wrong at the university because he has not developed self-control enough to make a good use of his freedom; or a man may be driven to drink and despair by getting into an occupation which to another would be quite congenial.

Degeneration, then, is part of the general organic process of life. Every wrong has a history, both in the innate tendencies of individuals and in the circumstances under which they have developed. We no longer feel that we understand crime and vice when we know who are practising them, and how, but we must trace them back to bad homes and neighborhoods, want of wholesome play, inadequate education, and lack of training for useful work. And we need to know also, if we can, what kind of a hereditary outfit each person brought into the world with him, and how it has reacted to his surroundings.

Moreover, the various kinds of wrong hang together in an organic whole; they are due largely to the same causes and each tends to reinforce all the others. Where poverty and apathy have become established we may expect to find drunkenness and other sensual vices, idiocy, insanity, pauperism, and delinquency.

There is no better illustration of this than the degenerate villages that may be found, probably, in all parts of the country, but are most common, perhaps, in regions which have been stranded outside the current of economic progress. In these the hereditary stock is usually impaired by the more enterprising people moving away, and also by the interbreeding of the inferior strains that remain. Along with this goes a deterioration of the environment in the form of decay of enterprise, of wholesome public opinion, of health, decency, and morality. Drink, gambling, and prostitution flourish; whatever decent people are left tend to move out, and not uncommonly their places are taken by newcomers of a degraded class who find it easier to get a footing in a place like this than anywhere else. There may be another village five miles away that is in just the opposite condition, the only explanation of the difference being that in the former degeneracy in some way got started and a downward growth set in, while in the latter growth was the other way.

In the same way all real reform must be general, an advance all along the line. Each particular evil is interwoven with others and with the general process of life in such a way that if you treat it as a thing by itself your work will be superficial and usually ineffective. The method of reform that naturally follows from the organic view is one of team-work, under which each reformer devotes himself to a special line of effort, but always in co-operation with others working in different lines, and always with an eye to the unity of the process in which all are engaged. If one were to undertake the regeneration of such a village as I have described, he would no doubt have to begin at some definite point—with improvement in the school, say, or the church, or the introduction of a new industry—but he would need also to start work at as many other points as possible.

For similar reasons reform must be sympathetic, in the sense that it must be based on a real understanding, an inside view, of the minds of the people concerned. No social situation is understood until we can see truly how the several parties think and feel at critical moments, and see also something of the process by which they come to think and feel in this way. In these states of the spirit we get the vital synthesis of the various factors that have been at work, the actual process of life here and now. If we have this basis we may hopefully take the next step of imagining something that will help the process on. Of social workers without imagination it may be said, as has been said of mediocre poets, that neither men nor gods have any use for them.

Much breath is wasted in discussing the question whether society or the individual is to be held responsible for social wrong. To clear thinking no such problem exists. That is, so far as responsibility exists, it is both social and individual, these terms merely indicating points of view. The active individual is responsible, and yet he only sums up the action of society at the given moment. On the other hand, society, which has provided the antecedents of the wrong, is responsible, but this only means a large number of individuals. If Sam Clarke grows up a criminal, and you say society is responsible, you mean that you, I, and others who might, among us, have provided better influences for him, failed to do so. And, after all, Clarke himself has his individual responsibility for what he does, like the rest of us. The essential change which the organic view calls for is that we should see all these individual responsibilities not as separable things, but as working together in one living whole.

Questions involving personal responsibility can always be treated so as to make it appear that this is the main factor, or, on the other hand, that the individual is dominated by impersonal causes. If, for example, we study unemployment with reference to the fluctuating character of industry, the lack of rational adjustment between demand and supply, and the inadequacy of vocational education and guidance, we shall come to see it as a societal condition over which the individual has little or no control; but if we take statistics of unemployment with reference to steadiness, foresight, ambition, and thrift, we may find that the unemployed largely lack these traits. The two sets of facts are not contradictory; it is merely a matter of emphasizing one aspect or another of the same organic condition. Unemployment goes up and down with general conditions, but also selects the less competent.