Social adjustment

“ That progress is impossible so long as society maintains the fatalistic viewpoint which condemns men because of the sins of the fathers and is blind to the transgressions of the brothers. And finally, that it is through the promulgation of the new view of the universality of human capacity, the remediability of maladjustment, and the advantages of universalized opportunity, that maladjustment will eventually be eliminated and adjustment secured. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the whole, they are prepared for the gradual disentanglement of men from the Normal Social Life altogether, and they look for new ways of living and new methods of human association with a certain adventurous hopefulness. ”

“ Society, the special field for the cultivation of manners, would soon be sterile soil were it not abandoned during lenten intervals and summers in the country. After meeting a multitude of people and being obliged to adjust ourselves to only such matters as all can understand, what a relief it is to be in the open fields, social conventions dropped, responsibilities forgotten, and no regard for others marking our words, acts, or dress! ”

“ The modification of men's moral natures, caused by the continuous discipline of social life, which adapts them more and more to social relations, is therefore the chief proximate cause of social progress. ”

“ Similarly, since the “laboring classes” feel most the growing healthful pain of their position, they as naturally revolt under the same conviction. Sociologically, these conditions, which some find so painful and alarming, mean but one thing,—the increase of social consciousness. ”

“ I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. ”

“ Yet it goes without saying that original, unlearned [pg 093] activity has its distinctive place and that an important one in conduct. Impulses are the pivots upon which the re-organization of activities turn, they are agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and changing their quality. Consequently whenever we are concerned with understanding social transition and flux or with projects for reform, personal and collective, our study must go to analysis of native tendencies. ”

“ Or, to put the matter in slightly different words, while the struggle for safety develops the esthetic life, and the struggle for subsistence becomes the economic life, and the struggle for adaptation broadens into the ethical life, the struggle of resembling creatures to adjust their similar adaptations to one another, is the beginning and the continuing process of the social life. ”

“ On the contrary, the high tension, the rigid routine, the gray monotony of modern life insistently call for moments of organic relief, though the precise form that that orgiastic relief takes must necessarily change with other social changes. ”

“ Whether it is due to the varying degrees of socialization represented in the different individuals or whether it is not also partly due to the fact that philanthropy functions best in a sphere out of line with a man's own particular occupation, the truth remains that some display an altogether unusual type of reaction in an emergency to the actions of others; and perhaps exhibit behavior quite different from that which appears normal in a realm of conduct where associations based on habit are so strongly ingrained. ”

“ In the process of interesting events, the reform of the family brought about the reform of the community, with unhappy dispositions changed into lovable characters, that make good citizens and reach social success. ”

“ The possibility of giving direction at critical periods of character-formation, particularly during adolescence, and of discovering clews to deep-lying causes of disturbance, makes the country life a valuable extension of the organized social work of the settlement. ”

“ Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors,—the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the play of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We shall have, of course, to enlarge our family and social life, not in the petty spirit of present day Social Reform, hammering at small details and belittling our immediate past, but with a larger idea and more generous impulses. ”

“ It is another to argue that human nature is subject to the general law of change, and that the process by which it slowly but continuously tends to adapt itself more and more to the conditions of social life—children inheriting the acquired aptitudes of their parents—points to an ultimate harmony. Here profitable legislation and education are auxiliary to the process of unconscious adaptation, and respond to the psychological changes in the community, changes which reveal themselves in public opinion. ”

“ The explanation is, of course, that on the whole the incentives to marriage or suicide, in a reasonably stable state of society, remain constant from year to year, so that by taking an average of several years we can eliminate results which are due to individual peculiarities of temperament and situation, and obtain something like a measure of the degree in which the general conditions of social existence impose a certain common trend or character on the interests and purposes of individuals. ”

“ Another age may divide the manual labor of the world more equally on all the members of society, and so make the labors of a few hours avail to the wants and add to the vigor of the man. But the reform that applies itself to the household must not be partial. It must correct the whole system of our social living. It must come with plain living and high thinking; it must break up caste, and put domestic service on another foundation. It must come in connection with a true acceptance by each man of his vocation,—not chosen by his parents or friends, but by his genius, with earnestness and love. ”

“ Even at the present time, however, it is possible to support sociological arguments by means of considerations provided by psychological motives, and the assistance thus rendered to sociology will become far greater as the science of social psychology advances. ”

“ By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society [190] and class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment. ”

“ Has progress been hindered by the club studying household economics, by the investigator seeking for facts, by the theorist trying to square the ideal with the real, and by students of social conditions anxious to explain the present by the past? Is the only remedy for present ills the suppression of all discussion, since discussion breeds contempt and unhappiness? ”

“ The most highly improved peoples of the present day were savages within historic times, and we meet with the widest differences between peoples of the same stock. Nor can they be wholly ascribed to differences in physical environment; the cradles of learning and the arts are now in many cases tenanted by barbarians. All these differences are evidently connected with social development. Beyond perhaps the veriest rudiments, it becomes possible for man to improve only as he lives with his fellows. ”

“ By social change is meant those rapid mutations which accompany sudden interferences with the equilibrium of society, break up the status-quo, dissipate mental inertia and overturn other tendencies resistant to structural modification. The various forces which initiate such disturbances are factors in social change. These factors may be intra-social,—within the group—such factors as operate in the regular social process, imitation and adaptation, for example; or they may be extra-social, “stimuli” factors—from without the group—such as, accidental, extraneous or dramatic events. ”

“ It is this progressive extension of the sphere of imaginative sympathy which, more than anything else, has broken down all the social barriers that confined the energies of men and has set free their various faculties in that competition of ever increasing severity which is the principal cause underlying the modern progress of peoples. ”

“ It acts as a continual check and control; it prevents social and moral stagnation. The habit of reflection upon conduct, if it could be made generally current, would insure social progress. For customs would be regarded merely as tools, as instruments to be modified and adapted to new circumstances, as provisional modes of attaining the good. Fixity and rigidity in social life would give place to flexibility and wise continual adaptation. ”

“ But as society continued to evolve, reaching an ever-higher degree of interdependent complexity, developing in the human soul an ever-growing capacity and necessity for wide, free, general association, and transmitting that increasing social capacity to the daughter as well as the son, the enormous pressure had to find some outlet. ”

“ This depends in turn upon the outlets and inhibitions supplied by the social environment.
In a definite sense, then, a human society is always starting afresh. It is always in process of renewing, and it endures only because of renewal. ”

“ My present object, however, is to set out some elementary—and when stated fairly obvious—considerations bearing on social evils and their remedies under present conditions of society, the recollection of which if followed by practical action, would secure greatly increased efficiency in social work. ”

“ Cast our experiences in a larger mould if our lives are to be animated by the larger social aims. We have met the obligations of our family life, not because we had made resolutions to that end, but spontaneously, because of a common fund of memories and affections, from which the obligation naturally develops, and we see no other way in which to prepare ourselves for the larger social duties. ”

“ As a matter of fact, there is no stage of development where the feelings are net greatly modified. In view of the discovery that incipient social life often consists, not in working together or mutual help, but in play and festivity, we might well assert that the influence of group life on the likings, aversions and desires is more potent and pervasive than its influence on activities. ”

“ Give them that, the one thing needful alike for social happiness and moral improvement, and you make a mighty step in social amelioration and elevation; because you lay the foundation on which it all rests, and on which it must, in a general point of view, all depend—without it, all the rest will be found to be as much thrown away as the seed cast on the arid desert. ”

“ Or is there perhaps a third and a better possibility that for the very reason that they are changing its form they are increasing its possibilities for social usefulness and for the enrichment of individual lives? ”

“ Some have urged that élite youth, exempt from the struggle to live and left to the freedom of their own inclinations, might serve as a biological and ethnic compass to point out the goal of human destiny. But the spontaneous expressions of this best age and condition of life, with no other occupation than their own development, have shown reversions as often as progress. The rupture of home ties stimulates every wider vicarious expression of the social instinct. ”

“ Yet our society is sufficiently adapted to this state so that it gives some good social chances to the superficial too, and this not only to the rich, but to those on every level. Only the nervous system cannot so easily be adjusted to the new régime. ”

“ Social structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the community; or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of thought of the individuals which make up the community. The evolution of society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set of circumstances in the past. ”

“ We regard those changes as progressive whether they be moral, intellectual, or material, which bring about a better adaptation of individuals to one another in society, and of social groups to the requirements of their existence. Social progress means, in other words, the adaptation of society to a wider and more universal environment. The ideal of human progress is apparently adaptation to a perfectly universal environment, such an adaptation as shall harmonize all factors whether internal or external, present or remote, in the life of humanity. ”