Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic

by Sidney Lewis Gulick

This individualistic development of the communal principle is its intensive development; it is the focalizing and centralizing of the consciousness of the national unity in each individual member. The extensive process of communal enlargement must ever be accompanied by the intensive establishment in the individual of the communal ideal, the objective by the subjective, the physical by the psychical, if the accidental association for individual profit is to develop into the permanent association for the national as well as the individual life. The intensive or subjective development of the communal principle does, as a matter of fact, take place in all growing communities, but it is largely unconscious. Not until the final stages of national development does it become a self-conscious process, deserving the distinctive name I have given it here, communo-individualism.[^[CG]]

The point just made is, however, only one aspect of a more general fact, too, of cardinal importance for the sociologist and the student of human evolution. It is that, throughout the entire period of the expansion of the community, there has been an equally profound, although wholly unconscious, development of the individual. This fact seems to have largely escaped the notice of all but the most recent thinkers and writers on the general topic of human and social evolution. The fact and the importance of the communal life have been so manifest that, in important senses, the individual has been almost, if not wholly, dropped out of sight. The individual has been conceived to have been from the very beginning of social evolution fully endowed with mind, ideas, and brains, and to be perfectly regardless of all other human beings. The development of the community has accordingly been conceived to be a progressive taming and subduing of this wild, self-centered, primitive man; a process of eliminating his individualistic instincts. So far as the individual is concerned, it has been conceived to be chiefly a negative process; a process of destroying his individual desires and plans and passions. Man's natural state has been supposed to be that of absolute selfishness. Only the hard necessity of natural law succeeded in forcing him to curb his natural selfish desires and to unite with his fellows. Only on these terms could he maintain even an existence. Those who have not accepted these terms have been exterminated. Communal life in all its forms, from the family upward to the most unified and developed nation, is thus conceived as a continued limiting of the individual—a necessity, indeed, to his existence, but none the less a limitation.

I am unable to take this view, which at best is a one-sided statement. It appears to me capable of demonstration, that communal and individual development proceed pari passu; that every gain in the communal life is a gain to the individual and vice versa. They are complementary, not contradictory processes. Neither can exist, in any proper sense, apart from the other; and the degree of the development of the one is a sure index of the degree of the development of the other. So important is this matter that we must pause to give it further consideration.

Consider, first, man in his earliest stage of development. A relatively segregarious animal; with a few ideas about the nuts and fruits and roots on which he lives; with a little knowledge as to where to find them; the subject of constant fear lest a stronger man may suddenly appear to seize and carry off his wife and food; possessing possibly a few articulate sounds answering to words; such probably was primitive man. He must have been little removed from the ape. His "self," his mind, was so small and so empty of content that we could hardly recognize him as a man, should we stumble on him in the forest.

Look next upon him after he has become a family-man. Living in the group, his life enlarges; his existence broadens; his ideas multiply; his vocabulary increases with his ideas and experiences; he begins to share the life and thinking and interests and joys and sorrows of others; their ideas and experiences become his, to his enormous advantage. What he now is throws into the shade of night what he used to be. So far from being the loser by his acceptance of even this limited communal life, he is a gainer in every way. He begins to know what love is, and hate; what joy is, and sorrow; what kindness is, and cruelty; what altruism is, and selfishness. Thus, not only in ideas and language, in industry and property, but also in emotions, in character, in morality, in religion, in the knowledge of self, and even in opportunity for selfishness, he is the gainer. In just the degree that communal life is developed is the life of the individuals that compose it extended both subjectively and objectively. Human psychogenesis takes place in the communal stage of his life. Human association is its chief external cause.

It matters not at what successive stage of man's developing life we may choose to look at him, the depth and height and breadth, in a word, the fullness and vigor and character of the inner and private life of the individual, will depend directly on the nature and development of the communal life. As the community expands, taking in new families or tribes or nations, reaching out to new regions, learning new industries, developing new ideas of man, of nature, of the gods, of duty, inventing new industries, discovering new truths, and developing a new language, all these fresh acquirements of the community become the possession of its individual members. In the growing complexity of society the individual unit, it is true, is increasingly lost among the millions of his fellow-units, yet all these successive steps serve to render his life the larger and richer. His horizon is no longer the little family group in which he was born; he now looks out over large and populous regions and feels the thrill of his growing life as he realizes the unity and community of his life and interests with those of his fellow-countrymen. His language is increasingly enriched; it serves to shape all his thinking and thus even the structure of his mind. His knowledge reaches far beyond his own experience; it includes not only that of the few persons whom he knows directly, but also that of unnumbered millions, remote in time and space. He increasingly discovers, though he never has analyzed, and is perhaps wholly unable to analyze, the discovery that he is not a thing among things; his life has a universal aspect. He lives more and more the universal life, subjecting the demands of the once domineering present to decisions of a cool judgment that looks back into the past and carefully weighs the interests of the future, temporal and eternal. Every advance made by the community is thus stored up to the credit of its individual members. So far, then, from the development of the communal principle consisting of and coming about through a limitation of the individual, it is exactly the reverse. Only as the individual develops are communal unity and progress possible. And on the other hand, only where the communal principle has reached its highest development, both extensively and intensively, do we find the most highly developed personality. The one is a necessary condition of the other. The deepest, blackest selfishness, even, can only come into existence where the communal principle has reached its highest development.

The preceding statement, however, is not equivalent to saying that when communalism and individualism arose in human consciousness they were both accepted as equally important. The reverse seems always to have been the case. As soon as the two principles are distinguished in thought, the communal is at once ranked as the higher, and the individual principle is scorned if not actually rejected. And the reason for this is manifest. From earliest times the constant foe which the community has had to fight and exterminate has been the wanton, selfish individual. Individualism of this type was the spontaneous contrast to the communal life, and was ever manifesting itself. No age or race has been without it, nor ignorant of it. As soon as the two principles became clearly contrasted in thought, therefore, because of his actual experience, man could conceive of individualism only as the antithesis to communalism; it was felt that the two were mutually destructive. It inevitably followed that communalism as a principle was accepted and individualism condemned. In their minds not only social order, but existence itself, was at stake. And they were right. Egoistic individualism is necessarily atomistic. No society can long maintain its life as a unified and peaceful society, when such a principle has been widely accepted by its members. The social ills of this and of every age largely arise from the presence of this type of men, who hold this principle of life.

If, therefore, after a fair degree of national unity has been attained, the higher stages of national evolution depend on the higher development of individualism, and if the only kind of individualism of which men can conceive is the egoistic, it becomes evident that further progress must cease. Stagnation, or degeneration, must follow. This is what has happened to nearly all the great nations and races of the world. They progressed well up to a certain point. Then they halted or fell back. The only possible condition under which a new lease of progressive life could be secured by them was a new variety of individualism, which would unite the opposite and apparently contradictory poles of communalism and egoism, namely, communo-individualism. Inconceivable though it be to those men and nations who have not experienced this type of life, it is nevertheless a fact, and a mighty factor in human and in national evolution. In its light we are able to see that the communal life itself has not reached its fullest development until the individualistic principle has been not only recognized in thought, but exalted, both in theory and in fact, to its true and coordinate position beside the communal principle. Only then does the nation become fully and completely organized. Only then does the national organism contain within itself the means for an endless, because a self-sustained, life.

It is important to guard against a misunderstanding of the principles just enunciated which may easily arise. In saying that the development of the individual has proceeded pari passu with that of the community, that every gain by the community has contributed directly to the development of the individual, I do not say that the communal profits are at once distributed among all the members of the group, or that the distribution is at all equal. Indeed, such is far from the case. Some few individuals seem to appropriate a large and unfair proportion of the communal bank account. So far as a people live a simple and relatively undifferentiated life, all sharing in much the same kind of pursuits, and enjoying much the same grade of life,—such as prevailed in a large measure in the earlier times, and decreasingly as society has become industrial,—and so far also as the new acquirements of thought are transformed into practical life and common language, all the members of the community share these acquirements in fairly equal measure. So far, however, as the communal profits consist of more or less abstract ideas, embodied in religious and philosophic thought, and stored away in books and literature accessible only to scholars, they are distributed very unequally. The more highly developed and consequently differentiated the society, the more difficult does distribution become. The very structure of the highly differentiated communal organism forbids the equal distribution of these goods. The literary and ruling minority have exclusive access to the treasures. The industrial majority are more and more rigidly excluded from them. Thus, although it is strictly true that every advance in the communal principle accrues to the benefit of the individual, it is not true that such advance necessarily accrues to the benefit of every individual, or equally to all individuals. In its lowest stages, developing communalism lifts all its individual members to about the same level of mental and moral acquirement. In its middle stages it develops all individuals to a certain degree, and certain individuals to a high degree. In its highest stages it develops among all its members a uniformly high grade of personal worth and acquirement.

Now the great problem on whose solution depends the possibility of continued communal evolution is, from this view-point, the problem of distributing the gains of the community to all its members more and more equally. It is the problem of giving to each human unit all the best and truest thought and character, all the highest and noblest ideals and motives, which the most advanced individuals have secured. If we stop to inquire minutely and analytically just what is the nature of the greatest attainments made by the community, we discover that it is not the possession of wealth in land or gold, it is not the accident of social rank, it is not any incident of temporal happiness or physical ease of life. It consists, on the contrary, in the discovery of the real nature of man. He is no mere animal, living in the realm of things and pleasures, limited by the now and the here. He is a person, a rational being. His thoughts and desires can only be expressed in terms of infinity. Nothing short of the infinite can satisfy either his reason or his heart Though living in nature and dependent on it, he is above it, and may and should understand it and rule it. His thoughts embrace all time and all being. In a very real sense he lives an infinite and eternal life, even here in this passing world.