Social process

by Charles Horton Cooley

Common sense usually recognizes, in practical matters, this many-sidedness of responsibility. If a boy has done wrong we usually insist, in talking to him, that his will is the cause, because we feel that this point of view ought to be impressed upon him. But in speaking to his parents we probably dwell upon their part in the matter, and exhibit the boy as an almost passive agent. And again, when we come to address the Civic Association upon juvenile delinquency, we shall take both the boy and his parents for granted, treating the whole matter as mainly one of better schools and playgrounds. This is a legitimate variation of emphasis quite in accord with the organic view.

I should say that under this view responsibility is not so much diminished or increased as reinterpreted and made a different kind of a thing; you have to think of the whole question in a new way, which is not less hopeful or animating than the old and much more in accord with the facts of life. Responsibility becomes a universal and interdependent function of mankind, in which each individual and group has its own part to play, and must go ahead with this part, trusting that others will do the like. The whole matter must be conceived in a spirit of fellowship.

We may blame and even punish other people; but it must be done, if it is done rightly, with a kind of contrition, and a sense that we more or less share their guilt, somewhat in the spirit of a good father punishing his child. Treatment which involves the isolation or repudiation of any individual, no matter how degenerate, can never stand as right. We are all in one boat. Imprisonment, and perhaps even death, may be inflicted in a way which carries an acknowledgment of social membership, and makes it a kind of service.

It is well to emphasize this co-operative idea, because the minds of those engaged in reform have in the past been much ruled by the opposite view, which I call particularism, the view that there is some one reform which is the fundamental one, and that if we give our whole energy to effecting this the others will follow as a matter of course. As each group of reformers has a different conception as to what this fundamental reform is, the natural result is a number of groups working at cross-purposes, and each depreciating the others. Thus temperance reformers, of the old pattern, held that the radical ill was drink, and that when they had put an end to that, which they sought to do by the most obvious and repressive methods, there would be little else left to do. Others thought that the unjust distribution of wealth was the root of evil, seeking to remedy this by socialism or communism of some kind and depreciating other reforms as merely palliative. Another group, with biological antecedents, saw in bad heredity the primal ill, and advocated sterilization. Still others pinned their faith to religious conversion, woman suffrage, or the single tax. Reformers, in short, went to battle like one of the hordes of our Germanic forefathers, in small units, by tribes and clans, each leader with a band of followers about him as ready to fight their neighbors as the enemy, in a tumultuous, loosely co-ordinated crowd, and not at all with the ordered efficiency of a modern army.

It may be thought that narrowness of view is, after all, useful, because a man who believes that a particular thing is the only thing worth doing is likely to pursue that with more energy than if he took a broader view. The fact, however, is that people who see only one thing can never see that truly, and are not likely to act wisely with reference to it. The truth of a matter lies in its relations to a hundred other matters, and these are just what the particularist does not perceive. Specialized effort is essential; it is a good thing that each reformer should devote himself with particular zeal to the cause which appeals to him; but it should start from a large understanding of the situation, and should proceed in a spirit of co-operation with others.

It is from a kind of particularism that when anything is wrong we assume there must be some one cause to which the whole or a definite part of the trouble can be ascribed. Thus we say that twenty-five per cent of poverty is due to drink, or sixty per cent of insanity to heredity; and if these figures are, possibly, not quite correct, we do not doubt that by more exact study we could find figures, equally definite, that are correct. We do not see that there is no such separation of factors as these calculations imply, and that instead of contributing to precision of thought they impair it by introducing a false conception.

In social inquiries we are not dealing, usually, with distinct and separately measurable forces, but with a complex of forces no one of which can be understood or measured apart from the rest. Granting that drinking to excess is present in one-fourth the cases of poverty, other conditions will be present along with it, such as ill health, bad housing, lack of training, lack of enterprise, low wages, unwholesome work, and so on; and who shall define what part each of these plays, and how far drink is an effect rather than a cause? For the most part poverty is the outcome of a complex organic development, in the individual, his family, and his general environment.

Or suppose that we are investigating the causes of insanity and find that the ancestry show traces of it in sixty per cent of the cases. Who can say in how many cases ancestral weakness would not have manifested itself without the co-operation of such other factors as alcohol, drugs, venereal disease, or nervous strain? Evidently to ascribe sixty per cent to heredity alone would be misleading, and no real understanding of the case is possible without a synthetic study of all the chief factors.

Such questions are the same, in principle, as the question of the cause of the great European War. A dozen causes may be given—as the military traditions and ideals of Prussia, the commercial ambitions of Germany and England, the lack of international control, the grudge of the French regarding Alsace-Lorraine, the struggle between democracy and autocracy, secret diplomacy, the Eastern Question—all of them essential aspects of a vast and complex situation which, as a whole, was the real source of the outbreak.

This fallacy of “the cause” is so wide-spread and so insidious that it may be worth while to consider somewhat further the theory of the matter. Everything in life is dependent upon a complex system of antecedents without which it could not have come to pass; and yet it may often be proper, from a practical standpoint, to speak of “the cause” of an event. Commonly we mean by this the exceptional or variant factor in the course of things. There is a sound and regular process of some sort which is broken in upon by something irregular and abnormal, as when a man of habitually vigorous health is seized with weakness and chills which prove to be due to an irruption of the germs of typhoid fever. Something analogous is often found in social process, as when poverty and a sequence of other ills are brought upon a normal family by a quite exceptional event, like the failure of a bank, or an unforeseeable accident, and it is right to speak of this as “the cause.”