There is no question that a more rational and adequate control in the field of human behavior is very desirable. And there are no powers of the human mind necessary to the formation of a science in this field which have not already been employed in the development of a science and a corresponding practice in the material world. The chief obstacle to the growth of a science of behavior has been our confidence that we had an adequate system for the control of behavior in the customary and common sense regulation of the wishes of the individual by family, community, and church influences as outlined in Chapter II, if only we applied the system successfully. And the old forms of control based on the assumption of an essential stability of the whole social framework were real so long as this stability was real.
But this stability is no longer a fact. Precisely the marvelous development of the physical and biological sciences, as expressed in communication in space and in the industrial system has made the world a different place. The disharmony of the social world is in fact due to the disproportionate rate of advance in the mechanical world. The evolution of the material world, based on science, has been so rapid as to disorganize the social world, based on common sense. If there had been no development of mechanical inventions community life would have remained stable. But even so, the life of the past was nothing we wish to perpetuate.
Another cause of the backwardness of the science of society is our emotional attachment to the old community standards or “norms.” I described in Chapter II how much emotion enters into the formation of everyday habits. It is well known that men have always objected to change of any kind. There was strong condemnation, for example, of the iron plow, invented late in the eighteenth century, on the ground that it was an insult to God and therefore poisoned the ground and caused weeds to grow. The man who first built a water-driven sawmill in England was mobbed; the man who first used an umbrella in Philadelphia was arrested. There was opposition to the telegraph, the telephone, the illumination of city streets by gas, the introduction of stoves and organs in churches, and until recent years it would be difficult to find a single innovation that has not encountered opposition and ridicule.
This emotional prepossession for habitual ways of doing things enters into and controls social investigations, particularly social reforms. The Vice Commission of Chicago, for example, which undertook an investigation of prostitution, was composed of thirty representative men, including ministers, physicians, social workers, criminologists, business men and university professors. In the introduction to its report it was at pains to state that it was anxious to make no discoveries and no recommendations which did not conform to standards accepted by society. “[The Commission] has kept constantly in mind that to offer a contribution of any value such an offering must be, first, moral; second, reasonable and practical; third, possible under the constitutional powers of our courts; fourth, that which will square with the public conscience of the American people.” This commission made, in fact, a very valuable report. It even included items of scientific value concerning prostitution which led the federal authorities to exclude the report from the mails (the decision was later reversed) but it had determined beforehand the limitations and character of its investigation and results, and excluded the possibility of a new determination of behavior norms in this field.
A method of investigation which seeks to justify and enforce any given norm of behavior ignores the fact that a social evolution is going on in which not only activities are changing but the norms which regulate the activities are also changing. Traditions and customs, definitions of the situation, morality, and religion are undergoing an evolution, and a society going on the assumption that a certain norm is valid and that whatever does not comply with it is abnormal finds itself helpless when it realizes that this norm has lost social significance and some other norm has appeared in its place. Thus fifty years ago we recognized, roughly speaking, two types of women, the one completely good and the other completely bad,—what we now call the old-fashioned girl and the girl who had sinned and been outlawed. At present we have several intermediate types,—the occasional prostitute, the charity girl, the demi-virgin, the equivocal flapper, and in addition girls with new but social behavior norms who have adapted themselves to all kinds of work. And some of this work is surprisingly efficient. Girls of twenty and thereabouts are successfully competing in literature with the veteran writers. But no one of these girls, neither the orderly nor the disorderly, is conforming with the behavior norms of her grandmother. All of them represent the same movement, which is a desire to realize their wishes under the changing social conditions. The movement contains disorganization and reorganization, but it is the same movement in both cases. It is the release of important social energies which could not find expression under the norms of the past. Any general movement away from social standards implies that these standards are no longer adequate.
A successful method of study will be wide and objective enough to include both the individual and the norms as an evolving process, and such a study must be made from case to case, comparatively and without prejudice or indignation. Every new movement in society implies some disorder, some random, exploratory movements preliminary to a different type of organization answering to new conditions. Individualism is a stage of transition between two types of social organization. No part of the life of the individual should be studied as dissociated from the whole of his life, the abnormal as separated from the normal, and abnormal groups should be studied in comparison with the remaining groups which we call normal. There is no break in continuity between the normal and the abnormal in actual life that would permit the selection of any exact bodies of corresponding materials, and the nature of the normal and the abnormal can be understood only with the help of comparison. When we have sufficiently determined causal relations we shall probably find that there is no individual energy, no unrest, no type of wish, which cannot be sublimated and made socially useful. From this standpoint the problem is not the right of society to protect itself from the disorderly and anti-social person, but the right of the disorderly and anti-social person to be made orderly and socially valuable.
But while we have prepossessions which have stood in the way of an objective study of behavior there is no doubt that the main difficulty at present is the lack of a concrete method of approach. This method will have to be developed in detail in the course of many particular investigations, as has been the case in the physical sciences, but the approach to the problem of behavior lies in the study of the wishes of the individual and of the conditions under which society, in view of its power to give recognition, response, security, and new experience, can limit and develop these wishes in socially desirable ways.
Correlated with the wishes of the individual are the values of society. These are objects directly desired or means by which desired objects are reached,—immediate values or instrumental values. Thus a coin, a foodstuff, a machine, a poem, a school, a scientific principle, a trade secret, a dress, a stick of rouge, a medal for bravery, the good will of others, are values which the individual wishes or uses in realizing his wishes. Money is the most generalized value; it is convertible into many values which may be used in turn in pursuing the wishes. A value is thus any object, real or imaginary, which has a meaning and which may be the object of an activity. The sum total of the values of a society is its culture. Any value may provoke in the individual a variety of tendencies to action which we may call mental attitudes. Thus money as a value may provoke one or another of the attitudes: work for it, save it, borrow it, beg it, steal it, counterfeit it, get it by gambling or blackmail. The attitude is thus the counterpart of the social value; activity, in whatever form, is the bond between them.
The problem of society is to produce the right attitudes in its members, so that the activity will take a socially desirable form. In Chapter II we saw that society is more or less successful to the degree that it makes its definitions of situations valid. If the members of a certain group react in an identical way to certain values, it is because they have been socially trained to react thus, because the traditional rules of behavior predominant in the given group impose upon every member certain ways of defining and solving the practical situations which he meets in his life.
It is, of course, precisely in this connection that the struggle between the individual and his society arises. Society is indispensable to the individual because it possesses at a given moment an accumulation of values, of plans and materials which the child could never accumulate alone. For example, a boy can now construct a wireless plant or build an engine, but he could never in his life accumulate the materials, devise the principles alone. These are the results of the experience of the entire past of a cultural society. But the individual is also indispensable to society because by his activity and ingenuity he creates all the material values, the whole fund of civilization. The conflict arises from the fact that the individual introduces other definitions of the situation and assumes other attitudes toward values than the conventionalized ones and consequently tends to change plans of action and introduce disorder, to derange the existing norms. A new plan may be merely destructive of values and organization, as when a counterfeiter imitates a bank note or a girl destroys her value and that of her family by prostituting herself, or it may be temporarily disorganizing but eventually organizing, as when an inventor displaces the hand-loom by the power-loom or the biologist introduces a theory of evolution which contradicts the theory of special creation. Society desires stability and the individual desires new experience and introduces change. But eventually all new values, all the new cultural elements of a society are the result of the changes introduced by the individual.