Normalcy

“ Are men on the whole sane, or hysterical, or possibly paranoiac, in their attitude toward real and possible social conditions? Are the postulates of our social introspection valid or invalid? Have we learned all that can be known about the antecedents of present conditions, about the standards by which these conditions should be judged, about the type of future conditions toward which it is rational to aim, about the means at the disposal of man for the creation of a different social order? ”

“ And I for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of individual differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of fatalisms. Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is it to be,—that of your preference, or mine? There lies the question of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide. ”

“ We hear, indeed, some wild talk about the establishment of a social order, or disorder, without government and without laws and courts of justice, in which everybody can do what he or she pleases, and that when everybody can do what he or she pleases, everybody will do right, and have enough of the good things of the world, and be happy. ”

“ If the elementary social condition be different in regard to religion, government, arts, science, industry, the resulting movements of society will be different. Hence, when we have ascertained by accurate observation upon and record of the social phenomena, that the social movement is uniformly in a certain direction, and that certain results uniformly follow, we shall know in what elements the conditions of society must be changed, in order to change the results. ”

“ The problem of the individual involves in its details the study of all the social influences and institutions,—family, school, church, the law, the newspaper, the story, the motion picture, the occupations, the economic system, the unorganized personal relationships, the division of life into work and leisure time, etc. But the human wish underlies all social happenings and institutions, and human experiences constitute the reality beneath the formal social organization and behind the statistically formulated mass-phenomena. ”

“ But, as I have pointed out in the Introduction to my Social Psychology, those who approached these problems were generally stimulated to do so by their interest in questions of right and wrong, in questions of norms and standards of conduct, the urgency of which demanded immediate answers for the practical guidance of human life in all its spheres of activity, for the shaping of laws, institutions, governments, and associations of every kind ”

“ Am I going too fast to carry my Readers with me to these obvious conclusions? Surely a moment’s reflection, and a single instance from common life, must convince every one that our whole social system is based upon Regularity, or Equality of Angles. ”

“ Now, if we trace out the laws which govern human life in society, we find that in the largest as in the smallest community, they are the same. We find that what seem at first sight like divergences and exceptions are but manifestations of the same principles. ”

“ This singular degree of regularity en masse, combined with the extreme of irregularity in the cases composing the mass, is a felicitous verification a posteriori of the law of causation in its application to human conduct. Assuming the truth of that law, every human action, every murder, for instance, is the concurrent result of two sets of causes. On the one part, the general circumstances of the country and its inhabitants; the moral, educational, economical, and other influences operating on the whole people, and constituting what we term the state of civilization. ”

“ The purposeful and systematic types, in common with the Individualist and Marxist, regard the Normal Social Life, for all the many thousands of years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, in human experience; and they are prepared for a future society that may be ultimately different right down to its essential relationships from the human past. ”

“ The normal is either the usual, the habitual, the customary, or is, at best, an ideal construction of the variations of life more or less successfully adjusted to the conditions of the external environment. ”

“ To attain an apprehension of the importance of this distinction, let us visit, in imagination, the proceedings of some metropolis. Consider the multitude of human beings who inhabit it, and survey, in thought, the actions of the several classes into which they are divided. Their obvious actions are apparently uniform: the stability of human society seems to be maintained sufficiently by the uniformity of the conduct of its members, both with regard to themselves, and with regard to others. The labourer arises at a certain hour, and applies himself to the task enjoined him. ”

“ Ever the tendency is toward congruity between beliefs and requirements. Either the social arrangements are gradually changed until they come into harmony with prevailing ideas and sentiments; or, if surrounding conditions prevent change in the social arrangements, the necessitated habits of life modify the prevailing ideas and sentiments to the requisite extent. ”

“ May we not welcome, as at least a step in the right direction, a change in our conventional habits, which may extend, though in ever so small a degree, the region of common thoughts and aims, common hopes and disappointments, common joys and common sorrows? ”

“ The question whether the society is formed of only two classes, the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, or whether all the intervening grades are represented in a sound and healthy proportion, is a question which has importance because it furnishes indications of the state and prospects of the society. No society which consists of the two extreme classes only is in a sound and healthy condition. ”

“ For the social structure at any period is in fact the net product of all the experiments that have been made by the individuals of which it is and has been composed. Therefore, so far as we can obtain some general views of the successive changes in social order which have been gradually and steadily developing themselves throughout the more noisy and conspicuous but comparatively superficial political disturbances, we can detect the true meaning of some general phenomena in which the actors themselves were unconscious of the determining causes. ”

“ Instead of being surprised at the alarming divergence of views produced by the universal propagation during the last century of this anarchical tendency, should we not rather experience a gratified wonder at discovering that, thanks to the natural good sense and intellectual moderation of men in general, [2] the disorder is not more complete, and that, beneath the decomposition of social maxims, certain rallying-points for humanity may still be dimly discerned? ”

“ We may intellectually set up a norm or standard, but it will be a norm or standard from which every individual is bound to vary.
The fact that individuals do differ, and in specific and definable respects, has most serious consequences for social life. ”

“ It merely serves to illustrate those parts of a cause and of its consequences, which enter into human motives, and to shew how the future is struck out of the reckoning, when the constitution of society is such as to diffuse the effects of individual acts throughout the community at large, instead of appropriating them to the individuals, by whom they are respectively committed. ”

“ The conditions that dictate our education, the distribution of our property, our marriage laws, amusements, worship, prisons, and all other things, change imperceptibly from hour to hour; the moulds containing them, being inelastic, do not change, but hold on to the point of bursting, and then are hastily, often clumsily, enlarged. ”

“ And from this basis the origin of institutions and customs, political, religious, and industrial, is traced. In developing these various customs and institutions, along with the corresponding sentiments, the course of social evolution has had the effect of gradually bringing out and cultivating those feelings and tendencies in the individual which promote the welfare of the organism, while other individual tendencies, hostile to social welfare, have been repressed. ”

“ Only after all their separate forms, from their most primitive to their most developed types, have been inductively determined and psychologically interpreted, can we gradually solve the riddle: “What is society in its essence?” ”

“ Our present system of social life, if system it can be called, is a chaos of conflicting interests, duties, thoughts, feelings, actions—a prison-house in which the finer qualities and attributes of man can scarcely exist. ”

“ It is a sign that in the existing situation some one or more of the four wishes—security, new experience, recognition, and response—has not been and is not adequately realized. The fact that the symptom is social, that it is contagious, is an indication that the situations that provoke it are social, that is to say, general in the community or the group where the unrest manifests itself. ”

“ All this multitude will have this much in common, that it will be dealing, not with the primary inexorable logic of natural laws, but with the shifting, uncertain prejudices and emotions of the general mass of people. ”

“ Come, tell me that!"
"Well," said I, "I suppose there would be a difference according to circumstances in people's action about these matters."
"I should think so, indeed," said he. "At all events, experience shows that it is so. Amongst us, our differences concern matters of business, and passing events as to them, and could not divide men permanently. ”

“ From instances of popular tumults, seditions, factions, panics, and of all passions, which are shared with a multitude, we may learn the influence of society in exciting and supporting any emotion; while the most ungovernable disorders are raised, we find, by that means, from the slightest and most frivolous occasions. ”

“ Hence the familiar idea of the universality, which is identical with the indeterminate character, of any side of human nature; of the political side, for example, or the religious or the physiological, of the lawful or of the lawless. Not any particular political status, nor any particular religion, nor any particular body is universal, but the political or the religious or the physiological is universal—as universal, to repeat, as it is indeterminate. Not any particular lawfulness or lawlessness, but the lawful or the lawless is universal. ”

“ And so on to the most elaborate phases of self-consciousness and social consciousness, to the metaphysician pondering the Ego, or the sociologist meditating on the Social Organism. Self and society go together, as phases [Pg 9] of a common whole. I am aware of the social groups in which I live as immediately and authentically as I am aware of myself ”

“ Such is exactly my present feeling,—an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America,—in the nervous centres of the world's activity. ”

“ In fine, no competent judge will deny that these and all social scientists must ideally construct definitions which concrete facts only temporarily and indistinctly contain—unless, indeed, we are content to look in despair on that vast moving mass which we call "social life" and give up the attempt to understand and explain it altogether. ”

“ But the scale on which he represents them is increased or diminished, not according to the dignity of the persons concerned in them, but according to the degree in which they elucidate the condition of society and the nature of man. ”

“ In a free country each definite instinct or tendency represents itself in the general structure of society. When tendencies, as frequently happens, contradict each other, common sense comes in to the rescue, and, on the whole, justice is done, though at the price of consistency. ”

“ In some early states of society, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess, and the social principle had a hard struggle with it. ”

“ WHEN one passes in review the individual causes that disturb and complicate our social life, by whatever names they are designated, and their list would be long, they all lead back to one general cause, which is this: the confusion of the secondary with the essential. Material comfort, education, liberty, the whole of civilization—these things constitute the frame of the picture ”

“ A certain social sense is, therefore, the foundation upon which all concerted action rests; and this, permeating the character and winning conformity in the life, produces a social order which is at once the criterion of civilization and the source of its power. ”

“ Every healthy society falls into three distinct types, which reciprocally [Pg 218] condition one another and which gravitate differently in the physiological sense; and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special feeling of perfection, and its own mastership. ”

“ But before the crucial question of justice which divides modern society, namely, whether we shall lay emphasis upon adjustment of rewards to previous abilities, habits, possessions, character, or shall lay stress upon needs, and the possibility of bringing about a greater measure of equality, the doctrine which would find its standard in an a priori reason is helpless. ”