Social conditions

“ With adults, the beneficial influences of fresh air, good food, well-built houses, open spaces, and healthy conditions of labour have become common-places of sociology. In every rational biography attention is paid to the formative influences of parents, friends, and general environment. Medical men seek the cause of frames of mind in nervous structure, and predisposition to physical, mental, and moral disease in heredity. Statisticians point to absolute uniformity of general human action under certain social conditions. Moralists point to the power of ideals on people's minds. ”

“ A thousand various conditions of our social environment hinder powerful innate activities from finding expression and attaining elevated social positions. Now, when we start to measure these different categories of persons, shall we measure the more or the less fortunate individuals, those more or those less favoured by economic conditions of birth and environment, or shall we measure those persons who are actually the more and the less intelligent? ”

“ The economic conditions—which are the resultant of the ethnical energies and aptitudes acting in a given physical environment—are the determining basis of all the moral, juridical and political phenomenal manifestations of human life, both individual and social. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The different economic, social, and moral questions connected with these various conditions, the illustrations of which could be multiplied indefinitely, may be, generally are, decided by each individual without reference to society at large. ”

“ No less interesting to us are the phenomena of dependence of human life upon those social conditions that find expression in the customary mode of nutrition and occupation; in the effects of contact between neighboring groups of people ”

“ The society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its parts, would become at once a society rent by moral and social problems; and endless suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-ordinate the ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new conditions! ”

“ But as social knowledge ripens, as acquaintance with the means of securing the general well-being increases, so we may hope that the difficulties attending the reformation of evil habits will lessen; and p. 27although we may not hope to see established a condition of houses, of streets, of towns, of food and drink, of labour, and of all those conditions which would render human life and surroundings ideally perfect, yet continuous efforts must be made to realise for the community such moral and physical surroundings as shall conduce to their welfare in the highest possible degree. ”

“ These activities will take different forms under different social conditions, but in rough outline they are those by which men in mutual helpfulness conquer and adapt nature, and overcome the influences which would make them victims of chance and accident, of brute force and animal passion. ”

“ Reviewing the development in society of the conditions for the satisfaction of the individual will to live, and to live in the best way conceivable, we see in the progress of moral ideas the progress of discovery of the most reasonable manner of ordering the life of the individual and the form of social institutions under the contemporary environment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The disputes and struggles connected with labor, and the conditions of the poorest classes of the community, have directed the attention of many thoughtful men and women to the social and economic problems of the day, and in all parts of the world these are presenting themselves to educationists, social reformers, politicians and statesmen, as the matters which above all others are urgently demanding careful study and investigation. ”

“ Conditions have a large influence on character, and the hardships of life may be as prejudicial to the growth of character as the luxuries. They, therefore, who work to get good houses and good schools, who provide means of intercourse and high teaching, who increase the comforts of the poor, may also claim to be strengthening character. ”

“ When we remember the conditions under which the vast mass of servants have grown up, the exposures and privations of their homes, their undeveloped mental state in relation to social duties, the exhausting work upon which the majority of them enter in hotels, lodging-houses, struggling households, or the special danger of rich, careless establishments, and realize both the condition under which their service drags on and the natural instincts of the human being, then it is easy to understand why to a frightfully increasing extent they yield to the solicitations to which they are exposed. ”

“ As they evolve, there arise certain conditions to be fulfilled for the maintenance of social life; and, in proportion as the social life becomes high, these conditions need to be more effectually fulfilled. ”

“ There are three forces on the side of life which require no exceptional mental endowment, which are not very rare at present, and might be very common under better social institutions. They are love, the instinct of constructiveness, and the joy of life. All three are checked and enfeebled at present by the conditions under which men live—not only the less outwardly fortunate, but also the majority of the well-to-do. Our institutions rest upon injustice and authority: ”

“ Here a word must be said about the subjective aspect of society, which, in its objective aspect, as we have seen, is merely the struggle and process of adjustment. What is the relation of adjustment to sympathy and to understanding, to communication and to concerted purpose, to the evolution of a social constraint through which the community controls and shapes the individual, to cooperation and to social organization? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The institutions of self-perpetuation. These are the establishments of society growing out of sex hunger, maternal instinct, and the higher tender emotions of the races. They embrace the social safeguards of the home and the school, of family life, education, ethics, and religion. ”

“ We are now in a position to describe how man came by that social modus vivendi which we call utility, and define as all that makes for the continued existence and progressive welfare of the community. Utility is scientifically "the result of the conflict of individual rights, with survival of the fittest." ”

“ Importance of social environment I take the explanation of the differences that distinguish communities to be this: That each society, small or great, necessarily weaves for itself a web of knowledge, beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions and laws. Into the web woven by each society (or rather, into these webs, for each community above the simplest is made up of minor societies that overlap and interlace each other) the individual is received at birth and continues until his death. ”

“ Briefly, a wholesome social condition implies that every social organ discharges a useful function; it renders some service to the community which is equivalent to the support which it derives; brain and stomach each get their due share of supply; and there is a thorough reciprocity between all the different members of the body. But what kind of equality should be desired in order to secure this desirable organic balance? ”

“ That means that every community, through the very character of the environment which it imposes upon the individuals that compose it, tends to determine the personal traits as it does determine the language, the vocation, social values, and, eventually, the personal opinions, of the individuals who compose it. ”

“ That which, when we become capable of reflection, we term conscience, consists in pleasure in forms of action furthering the welfare of society—forms gradually moulded to habit with the development of social relations,—and in a corresponding pain at the realization of having failed of such action; the knowledge of the demand, by society as a whole or by a part of society, of action in accord with the general welfare, and the sense of the justice of this demand, constituting the feeling of obligation and duty. ”

“ And the prosperity of individuals, of families, and of nations, for this life and the life to come, depends more on the proper control and regulation of these principles than on any other social or moral duty. ”

“ Our complex civilisation, our industrial methods, our strange social system, combined with the varied characteristics mental and physical of individuals, make social salvation for the mass difficult and quite impossible for many. ”

“ It's another social system, a rearrangement of your whole scheme of life, under which you and your children, and your children's children, may live with the dignity and freedom due to that strange and common gift of life which beats in your pulses and in mine. ”

“ That is the healthiest society which is the freest, which gives the fullest play to individual intelligence and energy; and in such a social state we note a tendency on the part of the rich upper class to sink, and the poor laboring class to rise; we observe therein a social cycle at whose completion the rich and the poor, the upper and the lower orders, are found, as a whole, to have changed places. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now education looks increasingly at the social problems that present themselves for solution in the case of the individual child, the problem of physical deterioration, of under-feeding, of impoverished homes and unsuitable employment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Individual activities, whether physical or mental, if that discrimination be permitted, assuredly work out well or ill as they harmonize or run counter to natural law. This must be true also of social activities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The same is true of the large array of people who, in the domestic and ecclesiastical institutions, are teaching the children at home or in the schools and churches ; of the policemen and prison officials who are dealing with anti-social classes ; of the charity workers and pauper overseers who are dealing with the sub-social classes ; these are fitting social material for society, just as the other technical workers are fitting natural material for society's uses. ”

“ They were obliged to labour hard, yet in the intervals of work, father and son would read or discourse concerning the ills attendant on humanity, and they traced all to the social system, which made the few the tyrants of the many. ”

“ I will admit that for the necessities of social arrangement and relationship here, the necessary balances and inter-adjustments that go to make up a workable society of beings, some form of equation between the less and more avid sexually, the too hot and the too cold, must be and is struck, willy-nilly and regardless of individual or man’s moral theory. ”

“ The subject-matter of sociology is, therefore, the forms or ways in which human beings exist beside, for, and with each other. The purposes for the sake of which these socializations come into being—economic and social, [2] religious and criminal, sexual and military, political and ethical, etc.—will be treated by other sciences. ”