Introduction to the Science of Sociology

by Robert Ezra Park; E. W. Burgess

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for believing that the inevitable evolution of religion has been in a humanitarian direction, and that there is an intimate connection between social idealism and the higher religions. There are two reasons for this generalization. The social life becomes more complex with each succeeding stage of upward development, and groups have therefore more need of commanding the unfailing devotion of their members if they are to maintain their unity and efficiency as groups. More and more, accordingly, religion in its evolution has come to emphasize the self-effacing devotion of the individual to the group in times of crisis. And as the complexity of social life increases, the crises increase in which the group must ask the unfailing service and devotion of its members. Thus religion in its upward evolution becomes increasingly social, until it finally comes to throw supreme emphasis upon the life of service and of self-sacrifice for the sake of the group; and as the group expands from the clan and the tribe to humanity, religion necessarily becomes less tribal and more humanitarian until the supreme object of the devotion which it inculcates must ultimately be the whole of humanity.

III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS

1. Social Control and Human Nature

Society, so far as it can be distinguished from the individuals that compose it, performs for those individuals the function of a mind. Like mind in the individual man, society is a control organization. Evidence of mind in the animal is the fact that it can make adjustments to new conditions. The evidence that any group of persons constitutes a society is the fact that the group is able to act with some consistency, and as a unit. It follows that the literature on social control, in the widest extension of that term, embraces most that has been written and all that is fundamental on the subject of society. In chapter ii, "Human Nature," and the later chapters on "Interaction" and its various forms, "Conflict," "Accommodation," and "Assimilation," points of view and literature which might properly be included in an adequate study of social control have already been discussed. The present chapter is concerned mainly with ceremonial, public opinion, and law, three of the specific forms in which social control has universally found expression.

Sociology is indebted to Edward Alsworth Ross for a general term broad enough to include all the special forms in which the solidarity of the group manifests itself. It was his brilliant essay on the subject published in 1906 that popularized the term social control. The materials for such a general, summary statement had already been brought together by Sumner and published in 1906 in his Folkways. This volume, in spite of its unsystematic character, must still be regarded as the most subtle analysis and suggestive statement about human nature and social relations that has yet been written in English.

A more systematic and thoroughgoing review of the facts and literature, however, is Hobhouse's Morals in Evolution. After Hobhouse the next most important writer is Westermarck, whose work, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, published in 1906, was a pioneer in this field.

2. Elementary Forms of Social Control

Literature upon elementary forms of social control includes materials upon ceremonies, taboo, myth, prestige, and leadership. These are characterized as elementary because they have arisen spontaneously everywhere out of original nature. The conventionalized form in which we now find them has arisen in the course of their repetition and transmission from one generation to another and from one culture group to another. The fact that they have been transmitted over long periods of time and wide areas of territory is an indication that they are the natural vehicle for the expression of fundamental human impulses.

It is quite as true of leadership, as it is of myth and prestige, that it springs directly out of an emotional setting. The natural leaders are never elected and leadership is, in general, a matter that cannot be rationally controlled.

The materials upon ceremony, social ritual, and fashion are large in comparison with the attempts at a systematic study of the phenomena. Herbert Spencer's chapter on "Ceremonial Government," while it interprets social forms from the point of view of the individual rather than of the group, is still the only adequate survey of the materials in this special field.