Social process

by Charles Horton Cooley

In a large view, heredity and environment are not opposing influences, as is commonly imagined, but complementary and co-operating organs of life, each having its appropriate part to play in the great whole. They are like man and woman, in that the question regarding them is not which is greater or more indispensable, but just what are their respective functions, and how do they or should they work together. Those men of science who, lacking comprehensive views, have stated the problem as one of “nature versus nurture” have merely fallen in with the popular misapprehension. It is quite as if they had stated the problem of the family as one of man versus woman.

Heredity gives some men an ambitious spirit, and this is neither more nor less important than the direction their ambition takes, which is a matter of environment; they are different kinds of things and cannot well be weighed against each other. No more was the military talent, let us say, of General Grant more or less important to his life than the outbreak of the Civil War, which gave it a chance to develop.

We have to do with two processes, or two branches of a common process, going on side by side, and each contributing in its way to the total movement of organic life. In the case of the biological process or branch the material vehicle of life is the germ-plasm, a special kind of cells set apart for the transmission of hereditary types. In this there is a complex mingling and development of tendencies in accordance with laws of heredity which are as yet obscure. The social phase of the process takes place through the medium of psychical communication, the vehicle being language, in the widest sense of the word, including writing, printing, and every means for the transmission of thought. Through this, social types are propagated somewhat as biological types are believed to be in the germ-plasm. In each of these mediums there is a kind of growth, of selection, of adaptation of types to one another, and of survival of some at the expense of others. It should be our aim to see the two as organs of a common whole and to explain how they are related to each other.

The best way to get this larger view, probably, is to consider the evolution of the matter and note how heredity and environment, as we see them working in man, have developed from lower forms of life. Among animals and plants the actions that enable a living being to cope with its surroundings and thus survive are secured mainly by heredity, and come into the world ready-made, as it were, with little or no need to be fashioned by a supplementary social process. Animal conduct, as broadly contrasted with human, is a system of fixed hereditary responses to fixed stimuli; the instinct is like a hand-organ which will play certain tunes whenever you turn the crank, and will play no others no matter what you do. If this predetermined reaction meets the needs of life, if the tune is in harmony with events, the life of the organism is furthered. But this can scarcely be unless the conditions of life have been nearly uniform through many generations, so that the instinctive mechanism has had time to become adjusted to them by a series of survivals and eliminations, such as is required for “natural selection.” If a newly hatched chick has come to have the instinct to pick up and swallow small objects of a certain appearance, this implies that such objects, for ages past, have on the whole proved to be digestible and supported life; if they ceased to do so the race of chickens, I suppose, would die out.

The distinctive thing in human evolution, on the other hand, is the development of a process which is not fixed but plastic, which adapts itself directly to each particular situation, and is capable of an indefinite number of appropriate and successful modes of action. This happy result involves a change in the hereditary process, as well as the rise of a new process to supplement it. The hereditary tendencies, instead of remaining definite and fixed, have to become vague and plastic in order that they may be moulded into the infinitely various forms of human conduct. The hand-organ has to become a piano, which will yield no tune at all except under the touch of a trained player, but under such a touch is capable of infinite melody.

The player, to carry out the analogy, is the human intelligence trained by working with the social environment. This is the agent through which situations are understood and hereditary tendencies organized to meet them. The instinctive life is no longer a mere mechanism as—comparatively at least—it was before, but a plastic thing with a mind to guide it. And this new, distinctively human process implies a complex social life, with a system of communication, tradition, and education; because it is through these that intelligence is enabled to develop and to organize its control.

The human process, then, involves a plastic heredity prepared to submit itself to the guidance of environment as interpreted by intelligence. The distinctively human heredity is not an inborn tendency to do definite things, but an inborn aptitude to learn to do whatever things the situation may call for.

Just what is it, then, that we owe to heredity? In general it is capacity, or, more exactly, lines of teachability. We must depend upon the environment to stimulate and define this capacity, to supply teaching along these lines. When we say that a child is a born musician we mean, not that he can play or compose by nature alone, but that if he has the right kind of teaching he can rapidly develop power in this direction. In this sense, and in no other, a man may be a born lawyer, or teacher, or poet, or, if you please, a born counterfeiter or burglar.

Suppose that twin children are born with precisely the same hereditary tendencies, and that one of these is carried off and brought up in a French family, while the other remains with its parents in America: how would they be alike, and how different? Presumably their temperaments, as energetic or sluggish, and their general lines of ability, so far as these found any encouragement, would remain similar. But all definite development would depend upon the environment. The former child would speak French and not English; if he developed ambition the objects of it would be suggested by the life around him, his whole system of ideas would be French, he would enter body and soul into the social process of France. And so it would be if he were taken to Germany, or China.

A good heredity is something very different from hereditary goodness, in the sense of good conduct. The latter does not exist, while the former is simply an inheritance of lines of capacity corresponding to the chief lines of human function; a good raw material for social influence to work up, just as sound timber is good for houses, ships, or what-not. And this sort of heredity is a condition of biological survival because it alone makes possible the education of individuals and their organization into those plastic social wholes, with innumerable special functions, upon which the life and power of man is based.