Social problem

“ The problem of abnormality—crime, vagabondage, prostitution, alcoholism, etc. How far is abnormality the unavoidable manifestation of inborn tendencies of the individual, and how far is it a matter of deficient social organization,—the failure of institutional influences? There is a quantitative difference of efficiency between individuals, but if there is hardly a human attitude which if properly controlled and directed could not be used in a socially useful and productive way, must there remain a permanent qualitative difference between socially normal and anti-social actions? ”

“ All this mischief has been done by men who sat down to consider the problem (as I heard an apprentice of theirs once express it) , What kind of a society do we want to make? When they had settled this question a priori to their satisfaction, they set to work to make their ideal society, and to-day we suffer the consequences. Human society tries hard to adapt itself to any conditions in which it finds itself, and we have been warped and distorted until we have got used to it, as the foot adapts itself to an ill-made boot. ”

“ Here, in cold scientific statement, is our social problem: here are volumes biological on heredity, eugenics, dietetics, and disease; volumes sociological on marriage, prostitution, the family, the position of woman, contraception and the control of population; volumes psychological on education, criminology, and the replacement of supernatural by social religion; volumes economic on private property, poverty, child labor, industrial methods, arbitration, minimum wage, trusts, free trade, immigration, prohibition, war ”

“ But nobody would dream of raising the question whether their social systems on that account are superior to ours. Social problems do not appear in the mass; they become apparent in isolated cases, in individual lives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How It Has Met Its Responsibility.—This problem of prosperity which is both economic and social, is the concern of all the people of the nation, and any attempt to solve it in the interest of one section or a single group cannot bring success. That is one reason for many of the social weaknesses everywhere visible. ”

“ Social problems, whether robed in dithyrambic form or clad in offensive rags, are unable to force upon society reforms which are laid down in names unless society has become ready to assimilate them; otherwise they upset society, agitate it, and throw it back on reaction. ”

“ As Professor Ward and many other sociologists have emphasized, it is this latter side which is the most available point of attack on all social problems; for when we have secured a right attitude of the individual toward society all social problems will be more than half solved. ”

“ What would become of society itself? How could it exist? And is that to be considered a charity which strikes at the root of all this; which subverts all the excellence and the charms of social life; which tends to destroy the very foundation and frame-work of society, both in its practices and in its opinions; which subverts the whole decency, the whole morality, as well as the whole Christianity and government, of society? ”

“ I conclude, gentlemen, by saying that a society in which one sees such social inequalities as we see all about us, in which we see every day suicides caused by poverty, prostitution flaring at every street corner,--a society whose principal monuments are barracks and prisons,--such a society must be transformed as soon as possible, on pain of being eliminated, and that speedily, from the human race. ”

“ 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, then, ought to see that all minority, all servitude, all excess of inequality that may be produced by the fatal effect of the laws of nature or of the social laws, is suppressed or alleviated as much as possible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are as yet cursed.
Hence, to those who are struggling with disease and pain, with ignorance and defect, with vice, and with crime, but for the most part too separately, it is time to say that all these four evils are capable of being viewed together, and largely even treated together. ”

“ This prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added unto us, without any further trouble on our part. ”

“ We are expert eyes, asked to point the way; and all that we report is that there is nothing to see, and nowhere to go. We are without even a partial sense of the awful responsibility of intelligence.
It is time we put this problem of knowledge, even the problem of the validity of knowledge, into the hands of science. How we come to know, what the process of knowledge is, what “truth” is,—all these are questions of fact; they are problems for the science of psychology, they are not problems for philosophy. ”

“ So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or [29] moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? ”

“ In the stationary societies, where all individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral, and social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering had of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might be occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but not by conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable and undesirable, in all branches of human life. ”

“ But when, on the contrary, a man comes to the conclusion that the products of Society as constituted have in them more of evil than of good, he may quite creditably, in a strict sense of the word, start an attack upon Society, or upon great social institutions, and seek to bring them to dissolution. ”

“ Its concern is with society rather than the individual, and it sacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying one rule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, on the broad scale. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What is the good of a social order in which the men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the conceit that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an inkling of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all this squalor and evil temper.... ”

“ Society is doomed to an ignominious death as soon as the connective tissue of institutions and the ossified material of officialdom with its rank growth of unyielding red tape and formalism begin to spread, choking, and strangling the free, personal life of the individual. ”

“ From its debris we shall either revert to the Normal Social Life and begin again the long struggle towards that ampler, happier, juster arrangement of human affairs which we of this book, at any rate, believe to be possible, or we shall pass into the twilight of mankind.
This greater social life we put, then, as the only real alternative to the Normal Social Life from which man is continually escaping. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Here our difficulty is to understand the social conditions, so unlike those with which we are acquainted, and as society is greater than man, so we feel that society, and not individual men, should occupy the chief place in the picture. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By that inevitable law of action and reaction which prevails alike in moral and social as in physical phenomena, the community which has so large a portion of its members in a condition of ignorance and brutality, must, throughout its whole body, partake of the degradation which exists within it, and must be affected, by the very contact, in all its feelings, sentiments, and purposes, through the gross and ignorant passions which such an association cannot fail to arouse. ”

“ Along with the good which a society derives from this self-asserting and self-preserving action, by which each division and subdivision keeps itself strong enough for its functions, there goes, among other evils, this which we are considering—the aptness to contemplate all social actions in their bearings on class-interests, and the resulting inability to estimate rightly their effects on the society as a whole. ”

“ Most of the great problems of all the states are substantially the same, as in the case of pauperism, crime, defective and delinquent children, roads, the relations of labor and capital, and the like. ”

“ For a man who, seeing the want and misery, the ignorance and brutishness caused by unjust social institutions, sets himself to right them in so far as he has strength, there is disappointment and bitterness. ”

“ If we were beasts of the field, no doubt we should be as they are. Rating ourselves, however—perhaps wrongly—as higher, we recognise the necessity of social laws. But tell me, or don't if you like, what was the matter with you just now. ”

“ The general good nature, the social equality, deprive them of triumphs on the one hand, and of grievances on the other. There is extremely little impertinence; there is almost none. You will say I am describing a terrible society,—a society without great figures or great social prizes. ”

“ Discontent, then, arises from absurd notions of equality, from natural conditions of inequality, from false notions of education, and from the very patent fact, in this age, that men have been educated into wants much more rapidly than social conditions have been adjusted, or perhaps ever can be adjusted, to satisfy those wants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The millions have fragmentary knowledge of societary relations, and they are trying to transmute that meager knowledge into social doctrine and policy. The peculiar element of danger in the situation was just now suggested. ”

“ It seemed worth while to arouse interest in problems which are of personal concern to every citizen, problems which [Pg viii] are indeed the concern of every person who cares about the reasonable organisation of social life. ”

“ In proportion to the incongruity between the natures men inherit from the pre-social state, and the requirements308 of social life, must be the amount of pain entailed by their actions, either on themselves or on others. ”

“ The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of an universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny. ”

“ All the different social types of men who labor with their hands and with their brains, the transformers of their environment, the producers of wealth, the directors of governments, equally with the undistinguished crowd of parasites, the enemies of society, all lived together in childhood, sitting side by side, upon the same school benches. ”