The significance of crisis in social change likewise requires attention, and it will be clarifying to our thought at this point to distinguish carefully between crisis and catastrophe, and to inquire what the nature of the former really is. The word “crisis” is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation, an instant when change one way or another is impending. Crises are those critical moments which are, as we say, big with destiny. Battles have crisis-hours when the tide of victory turns. Diseases have them—the seventh day in pneumonia, or the fourteenth day in typhoid fever. Social institutions afford numerous illustrations, such as the eighth year of marriage.[6] There are critical years of stress and strain—the ages of fourteen and forty in life-histories, the latter being according to Sir Robertson Nicoll the most dangerous hour of existence. Other crises are “hours of insight” in the world of thought, and hours of opportunity in the world of action,—that “tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,” hours of doubt in religion “when all the gods are dead.” “Crisis,” Professor Shailer Mathews observes, “is something more than a relative term. It describes a situation which is no ordinary member of a line of antecedents and consequents, but one that assures radical change in the immediate future.” He distinguishes between a crisis and a revolution. “The difference between a revolution and a crisis is the difference between the fire and the moment when someone with a lighted match in hand pauses to decide whether a fire shall be lighted.” The term covers the situation preceding change, whether this situation be the culmination of a process or the result of some particular stimulus. “It is not necessarily precipitated by great issues. Quite as often it is occasioned by events .... which are so related to a new situation as to set in motion an entire group of forces as a match kindles a huge bonfire when once the fuel is laid.”[7] The failure to distinguish between that which occasions the crisis and the crisis itself has been the source of some confusion in thinking. “Defeat in battle, floods, drought, pestilence and famine,” are not strictly crises, but they super-induce the crisis-situation, as does anything which brings about “a disturbance of habit,” though it be simply “an incident, a stimulation or a suggestion.” In short, crises are the result either of a slowly maturing process or of sudden strain or shock; and the nature of the reaction in the crisis-hour is nothing more than the effort towards the reëstablishment of habits, new or old, when the former functioning has been disturbed. The situation, as has been pointed out, is closely correlated with attention.
When the habits are running smoothly the attention is relaxed; it is not at work. But when something happens to disturb the run of habit, the attention is called into play, and devises a new mode of behavior which will meet the crisis. That is, the attention establishes new and adequate habits, or it is its function so to do.[8]
What appears to take place is analogous to what is known as the reconditioning of instincts in psychology. Professor Giddings has been the first to make the sociological application:
Folk-ways of every kind, including mores and themistes are the most stable syntheses of pluralistic behavior; yet they are not unchanging. Under new and widening experience they suffer attrition and are modified. Instincts and with them emotion and imagination which largely fills the vast realm between instinct and reason are reconditioned. The word means simply that reflexes and higher processes subjected to new experiences are in a degree or entirely detached from old stimuli and associated with new ones. From time to time also traditions are invaded and habits are broken down by crisis. Pluralistic behavior then is scrutinized, criticized, discussed. It is rationally deliberated.[9]
Crises often, perhaps most often, precede catastrophies, as when revolutions break. The alternate truth that the catastrophies themselves are re-agents to generate the crisis-situation has not been so commonly noted. Nevertheless the disintegration of the normal by shock and calamity is an increasingly familiar spectacle.
Heretofore it has been in the life-histories and careers of individual men rather than in the case of communities that the observations have been recorded. Our biographies teem with instances of personal crises precipitated by a great shock or disappointment—Hawthorne's dismissal from the custom house, Goldsmith's rejection from Civil Service, the refusal of Dickens's application for the stage, the turning back of Livingstone from China, the bankruptcy of Scott.
Now examination reveals that the one thing characteristic of the crisis-period in the individual is a state of fluidity[10] into which the individual is thrown. Life becomes like molten metal. It enters a state of flux[11] from which it must reset upon a principle, a creed, or purpose. It is shaken perhaps violently out of rut and routine. Old customs crumble, and instability rules. There is generated a state of potentiality for reverse directions. The subject may “fall down” or he may “fall up.” The presence of dynamic forces in such a state means change. But the precise rôle of the individual mind in a period of crisis is a problem not for sociology but for psychology.
The principle that fluidity is fundamental to social change is also true, however, of the community. Fluidity is not the usual state of society.
Most of the “functions” of society have no tendency to disturb the status quo. The round of love, marriage and reproduction, so long as births and death balance, production so far as it is balanced by consumption, exchange so long as the argosies of commerce carry goods and not ideas, education so far as it passes on the traditional culture, these together with recreation, social intercourse, worship, social control, government and the administration of justice are essentially statical. They might conceivably go on forever without producing change.[12]
Indeed the usual condition of the body politic is immobility, conservatism and “determined resistance to change.” The chief reason for this immobility is habit:[13]