CHAPTER V
COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY
I. THE “NATURAL DEPRAVITY” OF MANKIND
In view of the fact that man is so manifestly—as Aristotle described him—a political animal, predestined to live in association with, and dependence upon, his fellows, it is strange and interesting to discover, as we are compelled to do, now and again, how utterly unfitted by nature man is for life in society.
It is true, no doubt, that man is the most gregarious of animals, but it is nevertheless true that the thing of which he still knows the least is the business of carrying on an associated existence. Here, as elsewhere, it is those who have given the subject the closest study—the educator, the criminologist, and the social worker—who are most aware of the incalculable elements in every social situation and feel most keenly their inability to control human behavior.
In his recent study, The Unadjusted Girl, Dr. W. I. Thomas, referring to this matter, calls attention to the fact that “The whole criminal procedure is based on punishment, and yet we do not even know that punishment deters from crime. Or, rather, we know that it sometimes deters, and sometimes stimulates to further crime, but we do not know the conditions under which it acts in one way or another.”[[58]]
So ill-adapted is the natural, undomesticated man to the social order into which he is born, so out of harmony are all the native impulses of the ordinary healthy human with the demands which society imposes, that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that if his childhood is spent mainly in learning what he must not do, his youth will be devoted mainly to rebellion. As to the remainder of his life—his recreations will very likely turn out to be some sort of vacation and escape from this same social order to which he has finally learned to accommodate, but not wholly reconcile, himself.
So far is this description true that our ancestors, living under a sterner discipline and in a moral order less flexible and accommodating than our own, were so impressed with the innate cantankerousness of ordinary mankind that they were driven to the assumption that there was something fundamentally diabolical in human nature, a view which found expression in the well-known doctrine of the “natural depravity of man.”
One reason why human beings, in contrast with the lower animals, seem to be so ill-adapted to the world in which they are born is that the environment in which human beings live is so largely made up of the experience and memories and the acquired habits of the people who have preceded them.
This experience and these memories—crystallized and embodied in tradition, in custom, and in folkways—constitute the social, as distinguished from the biological, environment; for man is not merely an individual with certain native and inherited biological traits, but he is at the same time a person with manners, sentiments, attitudes, and ambitions.
It is the social environment to which the person, as distinguished from the individual, responds; and it is these responses of the person to his environment that eventually define his personality and give to the individual a character which can be described in moral terms.