Social dynamics

“ 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? ”

“ This relation, in which the mutual rendering of services is unforced and neither individual subordinated, becomes the predominant relation throughout society, in proportion as the industrial activities predominate. Daily determining the thoughts and sentiments, daily disciplining all in asserting their own claims, while forcing them to recognize the correlative claims of others, it produces social units whose mental structures and habits mould social arrangements into corresponding forms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Any group of individuals, who have thus consciously established relationships with one another and with their social environment is a society. The relations through whose channels the interplay of social forces is constantly going [2] on make up the social organization. The readjustments of these relations for the better adaptation of one individual to another, or of either to their environment, make up the process of social development. A society which remains in equilibrium is termed static, that which is changing is called dynamic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He loves to contemplate the entrance of new social ways and forms, into a world of old social preference and tradition; to show how there is waged, all the land over, a conflict between street and field, factory and farm, or between the instincts of blood and the capacities of brain ”

“ Oh, we are going a long way with these Socialists, we are going to discover a new world of social relationships—and then, and then, like a mighty wave; will flow in upon us a renewed and more wonderful sense of the worth of the individual human soul. ”

“ 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! ”

“ At the end of the eighteenth century, under different circumstances from those in which we are living to-day, there went up a cry from the hidden depths of human nature for a re-formation of human social relations. ”

“ Everything now which is present in the individuals—the immediate concrete locations of all historical actuality—in the nature of impulse, interest, purpose, inclination, psychical adaptability, and movement of such sort that thereupon or therefrom occurs influence upon others, or the reception of influence from them—all this I designate as the content or the material of socialization. In and of themselves, these materials with which life is filled, these motivations which impel it, are not social in their nature. ”

“ It forced men into the social state; made social organization inevitable; and has developed the social sentiments. It has stimulated to progressive improvements in production, and to increased skill and intelligence. It is daily thrusting us into closer contact and more mutually-dependent relationships. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the shiftings, surgings, and upheavals of society arise from the strained relations between the individual and the social organization through which the individual attempts to realize his life. Sociology seizes at once upon social organization as a means of personal development. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ The interactions which take place among the members of a community so constituted are immediate and unreflecting. Intercourse is carried on largely within the region of instinct and feeling. Social control arises, for the most part spontaneously, in direct response to personal influences and public sentiment. ”

“ The problem, however, of how those established and more or less deeply grooved systems of interaction which we call social groups, big and small, modify the activities of individuals who perforce are caught-up within them, and how the activities of component individuals remake and redirect previously established customs is a deeply significant one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Society was more diffuse than it is to-day—held together less firmly, but with less of the friction which is a necessary preliminary to that readjustment of social arrangements which the industrial movements of the modern world are tending slowly to bring about. ”

“ The motor of the social world is will. It is what I have called the dynamic agent in society. The full import of this truth will be brought out in the seventh paper. I have merely worked up to it here to show the direct manner in which sociology bears upon psychology. ”

“ The fact that some phases of society are more dominated by settled types, whether traditional or conventional, than others, indicates, of course, a certain equilibrium of influences in them, and a comparative absence of competing ideas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No doubt many other social phenomena such as strikes, wars, popular elections, and religious revivals, perform a similar function in releasing the subconscious tensions. But within smaller communities where social relations are more intimate and inhibitions more imperative, there are many exceptional individuals who find within the limits of the communal activity no normal and and healthful expression of their individual aptitudes and temperaments. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When social relations, applicable to mental or worldly pleasures, are alone involved, there are no longer distinctions of classes, or contests; differences of situation and opinion cease to exist; we have no thought but to enjoy and contribute in common our mutual possessions, [110] pretensions, and recommendations. ”

“ The success or failure of this effort to assure individual adjustment to the social norm and conformity to its practices varies with the prosilitizing enthusiasm of the society and with the ration of adaptability and self-consciousness of its individual members. ”

“ And this society is not a mere set of wealthy exclusives banded together against the rest of the world; it comprehends everybody.
One sees in the streets abundant evidence of these conditions of social relationship. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And if, as seems probable, this group activity is to remain a dominant feature of social progress, even in a fairly coherent society, it is manifest that there will result more or less of competition among groups. ”

“ Control.—The public mirror of the press reveals a third characteristic of social life. Activity and association are both under control. Activity would result in exploitation of the weak by the strong, and finally in anarchy, if there were no exercise of control. Under control activities are co-ordinated, individuals and classes are brought to work in co-operation and not in antagonism, and under an enlightened and sanctioned authority life becomes richer, fuller, and more truly free.
Social control begins in the individual mind. Instincts and feelings are held in the leash of rational thought. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The effect of custom on habit, and of habit upon thought is enough to prove this statement. When we [pg 317] begin to forecast consequences, the consequences that most stand out are those which will proceed from other people. The resistance and the cooperation of others is the central fact in the furtherance or failure of our schemes. Connections with our fellows furnish both the opportunities for action and the instrumentalities by which we take advantage of opportunity. All of the actions of an individual bear the stamp of his community as assuredly as does the language he speaks. ”

“ Inside the group individuals are continually readjusting their modes of thought and activity to one another, and between groups there is a similar adjustment of social habits. Without such change there can be no progress. War or other catastrophe suddenly alters wide human relations. External influences are constantly making their impression upon us, stimulating us to higher attainment or dragging us down to individual and group degeneration. ”

“ They are for the most part silent forces that have been modifying the folk-ways in Europe and America. There has been little conception of social obligation or social ideals, little more than a blind obedience to the stimuli that pressed upon the individual and the group. But with the awakening of the social consciousness and a quickening of the social conscience has come telic progress. ”

“ Constant Factors in Social Phenomena.—Our study of social life has made it plain that it is a complex affair, but it has been possible to classify society in certain groups, to follow the gradual extension of relations from small groups to large, and to take note of the numerous activities and interests that enter into contemporary group life. ”

“ But it was impossible wholly to harmonize these new social instincts, even in the simplest societies, with the old, deeper-rooted, individualist tendencies; and as life became more complex and choice wider, conflict grew more and more frequent. ”