Social process

by Charles Horton Cooley

But along with this growth in the scale of conflict we have a complication which makes it something essentially different from a mere enlargement of the struggles of primitive tribes. Groups have become multiform and intersecting, so that the national competition which succeeds to the tribal is only one of a vast system of interactions. There are groups of every size, from two or three persons up to millions; their purposes are countless, their methods equally so. We can no longer see mankind as broken up into distinct wholes struggling for similar ends in a similar manner; we see many systems of struggle which interpenetrate one another, the same men taking part in various systems, so that the lines of alliance and opposition are inextricably entangled. Modern life, even when viewed as conflict, is an organic whole which it is impossible to break up into fragments.

Group struggle has, on the whole, tended to rise to higher levels of intelligence and moral control in accordance with the increasing mental and moral unification of life. History shows a general growth of rational organization; and this means, for one thing, a general situation in which intelligence and the control of the part in the interest of the whole more and more condition every kind of success. International struggles are affected by this trend, as are all other kinds. Special associations which cross national lines, such as those of commerce, labor, science and philanthropy, increase, and so also do the informal bonds of literature, art and public sentiment. It is more and more apparent that the national bond is only one, though in some respects the most important one, in a growing network of relations.

It is the nature of solidarity to react upon and control destructive forms of activity. In so far as life is organic a harm done to the part comes to be a harm done to the whole, and to be felt as such. If it is true that common interests of some kind unite every sort of men with every other, then it is no longer possible to divide man into separate and merely hostile wholes. There was never before so much to lose by an outbreak of violence, and we have seen how a modern war can become a world-calamity, arousing a universal determination to prevent its repetition. And although this may prove ineffectual and war may recur, it must be true, if man has power over his own destiny, that it is, on the whole, obsolescent. The principle applies also to international or interracial bad faith or ill will. It is not too much to say that the whole world is becoming one body, so that evil appearing in one part is felt as a menace to all the others.

Intimately bound up with the growth of rational control is the trend toward democracy, in the sense of an active participation of the common people in the social process. Our modern communication, with its implications of popular discussion and education, is essentially democratic; it means that the people are in reality participating, whether formally so or not. I cannot affirm with any confidence that all peoples are to have deliberative self-government, as that is understood in England or America; democracy will be different for different races and traditions. But everywhere, I conceive, there is coming to be a public mind, a vital psychic whole, and the government, whatever its precise methods, will be essentially the expression of this.

This emergence of the popular mind involves also a tendency to humanism, in the sense of bringing all forms of life under the control of humane ideals springing from the family and community groups in which the people are nurtured. These primary ideals have been kept under in the past by the need of harsh forms of control, the prevalence of war, the domination of classes and the severity of economic conditions; but all signs indicate that they are to have an increasing part in the future.

This modern enlargement and complication imply a kind of differentiation of the person from the group. In primitive society membership is intimate and inclusive, the individual putting his whole personality into it. But as groups become numerous and complex there comes to be a kind of parcelling out of personal activities into somewhat impersonal functions, with special associates in each function. A person, while as much dependent as ever upon the group system as a whole, grows less and less identified with any one group. His relations become selective, each man working out for himself a system of life different from that of any other man, and not embraced in any one set of connections. Personality becomes more and more an organization by itself, distinct from that of any group, and forming itself by a special choice of influences. You cannot sum up the social environment and mental outlook of a man of to-day by saying that he is a farmer, or an artisan, or a priest, as you might have done in the Middle Ages. He may be a farmer and also many other things; a member of learned societies, an investor in remote enterprises, a socialist, a poet; in short, a complex and unique personality.

We are coming more and more to base our social order upon this selective association. In accordance with the ideal of “equal opportunity,” we try to facilitate special personal development in every possible way, holding that it not only does the most for the individual, but enables him to do the most for society. In this way modern society recognizes and fosters individuality as the earlier epochs never thought of doing.

These conditions involve another of great practical interest, namely, that the division of groups in modern life is, for the most part, not a division of persons. I mean that although you may classify the population, for example, as Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, and Socialists, there are no separate groups of whole persons corresponding to these distinctions. Although A may be a Republican and B a Democrat, and their differences in this field may be quite irreconcilable, they may yet belong to the same church, club, stock company, even to the same family. Only a small part of them is separable on the political line, and so with any other group line. To put it otherwise, there is no such specialization of life into narrow classes as you might infer from the large number of special groups, since these are not groups of whole persons, but of interests, activities, opinions, or what-not, many of which meet in a single person. The whole system is more intricately unified, as well as more intricately specialized, than was formerly the case.

The inclusive, essentially personal, groups persist to some extent, the chief example being the family. But I need hardly point out that even the family is far less an inclusive group than it used to be; that it no longer absorbs the individual’s political status in its own, that it does not control the marriages of its children or transmit occupations, that it has abandoned many of its economic and educational functions, and has become, in short, a comparatively specialized group whose main functions are sociability and the nurture of young children. Nowhere more clearly than in the family can we see the disintegrating effect of the modern order upon any form of association which conflicts with selective personal development.

In view of all this we see that the group struggles of modern life must be more and more impersonal, conflicts of ideas rather than of people. Perhaps the way to test the matter is to ask ourselves how many of the group struggles in which we are concerned are of a nature to make us feel that the men in the opposing groups are our enemies. Even in war we do not always have this feeling: we have become conscious of too many bonds of sympathy with the people of other countries. And in every-day life we contend a great deal, but for the most part impersonally. If we hate anybody it is more likely to be a matter of natural antipathy than of social opposition.