It is evident, however, that the word "participation" as here employed has a wide application, and it becomes important for working purposes to give a more definite and concrete meaning to the term.
2. Language as a Means and a Product of Participation
Obviously any organized social activity whatever and any participation in this activity implies "communication." In human, as distinguished from animal, society common life is based on a common speech. To share a common speech does not guarantee participation in the community life but it is an instrument of participation, and its acquisition by the members of an immigrant group is rightly considered a sign and a rough index of Americanization.
It is, however, one of the ordinary experiences of social intercourse that words and things do not have the same meanings with different people, in different parts of the country, in different periods of time, and, in general, in different contexts. The same "thing" has a different meaning for the naïve person and the sophisticated person, for the child and the philosopher; the new experience derives its significance from the character and organization of the previous experiences. To the peasant a comet, a plague, and an epileptic person may mean a divine portent, a visitation of God, a possession by the devil; to the scientific man they mean something quite different. The word "slavery" had very different connotations in the ancient world and today. It has a very different significance today in the southern states and in the northern states. "Socialism" has a very different significance to the immigrant from the Russian pale living on the "East Side" of New York City, to the citizen on Riverside Drive, and to the native American in the hills of Georgia.
Psychologists explain this difference in the connotation of the same word among people using the same language in terms of difference in the "apperception mass" in different individuals and different groups of individuals. In their phraseology the "apperception mass" represents the body of memories and meanings deposited in the consciousness of the individual from the totality of his experiences. It is the body of material with which every new datum of experience comes into contact, to which it is related, and in connection with which it gets its meaning.
When persons interpret data on different grounds, when the apperception mass is radically different, we say popularly that they live in different worlds. The logician expresses this by saying that they occupy different "universes of discourse"—that is, they cannot talk in the same terms. The ecclesiastic, the artist, the mystic, the scientist, the Philistine, the Bohemian, represent more or less different "universes of discourse." Even social workers occupy universes of discourse not mutually intelligible.
Similarly, different races and nationalities as wholes represent different apperception masses and consequently different universes of discourse and are not mutually intelligible. Even our remote forefathers are with difficulty intelligible to us, though always more intelligible than the Eastern immigrant because of the continuity of our tradition. Still it is almost as difficult for us to comprehend Elsie Dinsmore or the Westminster Catechism as the Koran or the Talmud.
It is apparent, therefore, that in the wide extension and vast complexity of modern life, in which peoples of different races and cultures are now coming into intimate contact, the divergences in the meanings and values which individuals and groups attach to objects and forms of behavior are deeper than anything expressed by differences in language.
Actually common participation in common activities implies a common "definition of the situation." In fact, every single act, and eventually all moral life, is dependent upon the definition of the situation. A definition of the situation precedes and limits any possible action, and a redefinition of the situation changes the character of the action. An abusive person, for example, provokes anger and possibly violence, but if we realize that the man is insane this redefinition of the situation results in totally different behavior.
Every social group develops systematic and unsystematic means of defining the situation for its members. Among these means are the "don'ts" of the mother, the gossip of the community, epithets ("liar," "traitor," "scab"), the sneer, the shrug, the newspaper, the theater, the school, libraries, the law, and the gospel. Education in the widest sense—intellectual, moral, aesthetic—is the process of defining the situation. It is the process by which the definitions of an older generation are transmitted to a younger. In the case of the immigrant it is the process by which the definitions of one cultural group are transmitted to another.