Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology

by John Dewey

When we recognize the diversity of native activities and the varied ways in which they are modified through interactions with one another in response to different conditions, we are able to understand moral phenomena otherwise baffling. In the career of any impulse activity there are speaking generally three possibilities. It may find a surging, explosive discharge—blind, unintelligent. It may be sublimated—that is, become a factor coordinated intelligently with others in a continuing course of action. Thus a gust of anger may, because of its dynamic incorporation into disposition, be converted into an abiding conviction of social injustice to be remedied, and furnish the dynamic to carry the conviction into execution. Or an excitation of sexual attraction may reappear in art or in tranquil domestic attachments and services. Such an outcome represents the normal or desirable functioning of impulse; in which, to use our previous language, the impulse operates as a pivot, or reorganization of habit. Or again a released impulsive activity may be neither immediately expressed in isolated spasmodic action, nor indirectly employed in an enduring interest. It may be "suppressed."

Suppression is not annihilation. "Psychic" energy is no more capable of being abolished than the forms we recognize as physical. If it is neither exploded nor converted, it is turned inwards, to lead a surreptitious, subterranean life. An isolated or spasmodic manifestation is a sign of immaturity, crudity, savagery; a suppressed activity is the cause of all kinds of intellectual and moral pathology. One form of the resulting pathology constitutes "reaction" in the sense in which the historian speaks of reactions. A conventionally familiar instance is Stuart license after Puritan restraint. A striking modern instance is the orgy of extravagance following upon the enforced economies and hardships of war, the moral let-down after its highstrung exalted idealisms, the deliberate carelessness after an attention too intense and too narrow. Outward manifestation of many normal activities had been suppressed. But activities were not suppressed. They were merely dammed up awaiting their chance.

Now such "reactions" are simultaneous as well as successive. Resort to artificial stimulation, to alcoholic excess, sexual debauchery, opium and narcotics are examples. Impulses and interests that are not manifested in the regular course of serviceable activity or in recreation demand and secure a special manifestation. And it is interesting to note that there are two opposite forms. Some phenomena are characteristic of persons engaged in a routine monotonous life of toil attended with fatigue and hardship. And others are found in persons who are intellectual and executive, men whose activities are anything but monotonous, but are narrowed through over-specialization. Such men think too much, that is, too much along a particular line. They carry too heavy responsibilities; that is, their offices of service are not adequately shared with others. They seek relief by escape into a more sociable and easy-going world. The imperative demand for companionship not satisfied in ordinary activity is met by convivial indulgence. The other class has recourse to excess because its members have in ordinary occupations next to no opportunity for imagination. They make a foray into a more highly colored world as a substitute for a normal exercise of invention, planning and judgment. Having no regular responsibilities, they seek to recover an illusion of potency and of social recognition by an artificial exaltation of their submerged and humiliated selves.

Hence the love of pleasure against which moralists issue so many warnings. Not that love of pleasures is in itself in any way demoralizing. Love of the pleasures of cheerfulness, of companionship is one of the steadying influences in conduct. But pleasure has often become identified with special thrills, excitations, ticklings of sense, stirrings of appetite for the express purpose of enjoying the immediate stimulation irrespective of results. Such pleasures are signs of dissipation, dissoluteness, in the literal sense. An activity which is deprived of regular stimulation and normal function is piqued into isolated activity, and the result is division, disassociation. A life of routine and of over-specialization in non-routine lines seek occasions in which to arouse by abnormal means a feeling of satisfaction without any accompanying objective fulfilment. Hence, as moralists have pointed out, the insatiable character of such appetites. Activities are not really satisfied, that is fulfilled in objects. They continue to seek for gratification in more intensified stimulations. Orgies of pleasure-seeking, varying from saturnalia to mild sprees, result.

It does not follow however that the sole alternative is satisfaction by means of objectively serviceable action, that is by action which effects useful changes in the environment. There is an optimistic theory of nature according to which wherever there is natural law there is also natural harmony. Since man as well as the world is included in the scope of natural law, it is inferred that there is natural harmony between human activities and surroundings, a harmony which is disturbed only when man indulges in "artificial" departures from nature. According to this view, all man has to do is to keep his occupations in balance with the energies of the environment and he will be both happy and efficient. Rest, recuperation, relief can be found in a proper alternation of forms of useful work. Do the things which surroundings indicate need doing, and success, content, restoration of powers will take care of themselves.

This benevolent view of nature falls in with a Puritanic devotion to work for its own sake and creates distrust of amusement, play and recreation. They are felt to be unnecessary, and worse, dangerous diversions from the path of useful action which is also the path of duty. Social conditions certainly impart to occupations as they are now carried on an undue element of fatigue, strain and drudgery. Consequently useful occupations which are so ordered socially as to engage thought, feed imagination and equalize the impact of stress would surely introduce a tranquillity and recreation which are now lacking. But there is good reason to think that even in the best conditions there is enough maladjustment between the necessities of the environment and the activities "natural" to man, so that constraint and fatigue would always accompany activity, and special forms of action be needed—forms that are significantly called re-creation.

Hence the immense moral importance of play and of fine, or make-believe, art—of activity, that is, which is make-believe from the standpoint of the useful arts enforced by the demands of the environment. When moralists have not regarded play and art with a censorious eye, they often have thought themselves carrying matters to the pitch of generosity by conceding that they may be morally indifferent or innocent. But in truth they are moral necessities. They are required to take care of the margin that exists between the total stock of impulses that demand outlet and the amount expended in regular action. They keep the balance which work cannot indefinitely maintain. They are required to introduce variety, flexibility and sensitiveness into disposition. Yet upon the whole the humanizing capabilities of sport in its varied forms, drama, fiction, music, poetry, newspapers have been neglected. They have been left in a kind of a moral no-man's territory. They have accomplished part of their function but they have not done what they are capable of doing. In many cases they have operated merely as reactions like those artificial and isolated stimulations already mentioned.

The suggestion that play and art have an indispensable moral function which should receive an attention now denied, calls out an immediate and vehement protest. We omit reference to that which proceeds from professional moralists to whom art, fun and sport are habitually under suspicion. For those interested in art, professional estheticians, will protest even more strenuously. They at once imagine that some kind of organized supervision if not censorship of play, drama and fiction is contemplated which will convert them into means of moral edification. If they do not think of Comstockian interference in the alleged interest of public morals, they at least think that what is intended is the elimination by persons of a Puritanic, unartistic temperament of everything not found sufficiently earnest and elevating, a fostering of art not for its own sake but as a means of doing good by something to somebody. There is a natural fear of injecting into art a spirit of earnest uplift, of surrendering art to the reformers.

But something quite other than this is meant. Relief from continuous moral activity—in the conventional sense of moral—is itself a moral necessity. The service of art and play is to engage and release impulses in ways quite different from those in which they are occupied and employed in ordinary activities. Their function is to forestall and remedy the usual exaggerations and deficits of activity, even of "moral" activity and to prevent a stereotyping of attention. To say that society is altogether too careless about the moral worth of art is not to say that carelessness about useful occupations is not a necessity for art. On the contrary, whatever deprives play and art of their own careless rapture thereby deprives them of their moral function. Art then becomes poorer as art as a matter of course, but it also becomes in the same measure less effectual in its pertinent moral office. It tries to do what other things can do better, and it fails to do what nothing but itself can do for human nature, softening rigidities, relaxing strains, allaying bitterness, dispelling moroseness, and breaking down the narrowness consequent upon specialized tasks.

Even if the matter be put in this negative way, the moral value of art cannot be depreciated. But there is a more positive function. Play and art add fresh and deeper meanings to the usual activities of life. In contrast with a Philistine relegation of the arts to a trivial by-play from serious concerns, it is truer to say that most of the significance now found in serious occupations originated in activities not immediately useful, and gradually found its way from them into objectively serviceable employments. For their spontaneity and liberation from external necessities permits to them an enhancement and vitality of meaning not possible in preoccupation with immediate needs. Later this meaning is transferred to useful activities and becomes a part of their ordinary working. In saying then that art and play have a moral office not adequately taken advantage of it is asserted that they are responsible to life, to the enriching and freeing of its meanings, not that they are responsible to a moral code, commandment or special task.