Social Control

A Survey of the Foundations of Order

Edward Alsworth Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781412810289
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351490443
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Social Control falls within social psychology, which is the branch of knowledge that deals with the psychic interplay between man and his environment. In Ross' terms, one of these branches, social ascendency, deals with the domination of society over the individual. Another, individual ascendency, embraces such topics as invention, leadership, the role of great men, and deals with the domination of the individual over society.Social ascendency is divided into social infl uence-- mob mind, fashion, convention, custom, public opinion, and the like--and social control. Th e former is occupied with social domination that is without intention or purpose. The latter is concerned with social domination that is intended and that fulfi ls a function in the life of society. At the start of the twentieth century this work played an important role in the origination of social psychology as a distinct field.Ross sought to determine how far the order we see about us is due to infl uences that reach men and women without social intervention. Investigation shows that the personality freely unfolds under conditions of healthy fellowship and may arrive at goodness on its own, and that order is explained partly by this streak in human nature and partly by the infl uence of social surroundings. Ross' book separates the individual's contribution to social order from that of society, and, brings to light everything that is considered in the social contribution of the individual. Th is classic volume is an important contribution to the history of ideas.

SOCIAL CONTROL

PART I

THE GROUNDS OF CONTROL

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM

A CONDITION of order at the junction of crowded city thoroughfares implies primarily an absence of collisions between men or vehicles that interfere one with another. Order cannot be said to prevail among people going in the same direction at the same pace, because there is no interference. It does not exist when persons are constantly colliding one with another. But when all who meet or overtake one another in crowded ways take the time and pains needed to avoid collision, the throng is orderly. Now, at the bottom of the notion of social order lies the same idea. The members of an orderly community do not go out of their way to aggress upon one another. Moreover, whenever their pursuits interfere they make the adjustment necessary to escape collision, and make it according to some conventional rule. If the weaker of two hunters that have brought down the same stag avoids a fight by yielding up the game, there is peace, but no order. But if the dispute is settled according to the rule that “first struck” decides the ownership of game, the solution is an orderly one. Similarly, there is order when teamsters shun collision by conforming to “the law of the road,” or miners settle the ownership of claims according to priority of “pegging out.”

The denser the traffic that is handled without confusion at a busy corner, the higher is the grade of order. Likewise, the more that the smooth running of social machinery implies the frequent breaking off or turning aside of individual activities, the more perfect is the social order. Successful cooperation, therefore, bespeaks a high grade of social order, inasmuch as each of the coöperators must unfold specific activities within precise limits, and the results therefrom are enjoyed or shared according to some recognized principle. Hierarchical organization is still more a test of orderliness, inasmuch as in the sharing of unlike burdens and the division of unequal benefits men are more apt to fall afoul of one another.

The severest test of the régime of order occurs when, as in war or government, individuals are incited to a common effort, the benefits of which are shared in common. The sacrificing of one corps of an army to save the rest, or the placing of the public burdens upon the non-governing classes, is recognized as putting the severest strain on discipline. In general, the absence of hostile encounter is a mark of social order, since it implies that interferences are adjusted according to some rule. But extreme division of social labor and high organization is the surest sign of order, since it requires the nice adjustment of multifarious activities according to some prearranged plan.

The readiness of men to disturb the peace or to violate rules in the pursuit of their personal interests depends upon their mental make-up. The peaceable turn aside from collision, while the pugnacious welcome it. The easily contented readily accommodate their desires and actions to the customary restrictions, but the enterprising are always pressing against and trampling upon barriers. The passive strive only to satisfy old wants, and are therefore much stronger in resistance than in offence. The aggressive are insatiate and put forth as much energy to seize what they have not, as to keep what they have. In a passive race, once order is established, the individual keeps to his prescribed orbit from sheer inertia. In an aggressive race order is perpetually endangered by the unruliness of the individual, and can be maintained only through the unremitting operation of certain social forces.

Now, it is the purpose of this inquiry to ascertain how men of the West-European breed are brought to live closely together, and to associate their efforts with that degree of harmony we see about us. Social order, even among the passive, unambitious Hindoos, presents a problem for solution. But it is a much more serious problem among the dolichocephalic blonds of the West. The restless, striving, doing Aryan, with his personal ambition, his lust for power, his longing to wreak himself, his willingness to turn the world upside down to get the fame, or the fortune, or the woman, he wants, is under no easy discipline. The existence of order among men of this daring and disobedient breed challenges explanation. Especially is this true of the European man in America or Australia. The same selective migrations that made the Teuton more self-assertive than the docile Slav or the quiescent Hindoo, have made the American more strong-willed and unmanageable than even the West-European.

To many, no doubt, a survey of the foundations of social order will appear superfluous. Most of us take order for granted, and are hardly more aware of it than we are of the air we breathe. Order being the universal and indispensable condition of all our social structures, we give no more thought to it than to the force of cohesion that keeps our machinery from flying into bits. Those to whom the fact is brought home by the persistence of a delinquent class assume, nevertheless, that the social fabric rests on a law-abiding disposition which is natural to all but the slant-browed few.

But it would be, in truth, much juster to assume a state of disorder. We ought to take for granted that men living in propinquity will continually fall afoul of one another. We ought to expect in the normal person not, it is true, the malice, lust, or ferocity of the born criminal, but certainly a natural unwillingness to be checked in the hot pursuit of his ends. Whenever men swarm in new places,—Dutch Flat, Kimberly, Siberia, Skagway,—the man-to-man struggle stands out naked and clear, and the slow emergence of order out of disorder and violence presents itself as the attainment of a difficult and artificial condition. Could we abstract from such communities the training received in older societies, the thrift that recognizes disorder as a blight upon prosperity, and the ready revolver which discourages aggression by equalizing men, we might arrive at a notion of the state in which the men of to-day, despite their high facial angle, would find themselves, if they were remanded to the zero point of social development.

Starting from this point, we must face the problem. By what means is the human struggle narrowed and limited? How has violence been purged away from it? How has the once brawling torrent of conflicting personal desires been induced to flow smoothly in the channels of legitimate rivalry, or even for a time to vanish underground in those numerous coöperations where conflict is absent until it comes to dividing the results?

It is a common delusion that order is to be explained by the person’s inherited equipment for good conduct, rather than by any control that society exercises over him. Once it was held that normal human beings are born with a set of commandments etched upon the soul. When evidence accumulated as to the startling contrasts in the moral ideas of different times and peoples, the moralists contented themselves with declaring that the soul is, at least, endowed with a sense of oughtness. When the emptiness of this theory was demonstrated, and formalism was convicted of overlooking the emotional elements that lie behind conduct, there arose the theory that man’s nature is constituted out of egoism and altruism. This in time was seen to be much the same as defining milk as a combination of whey and curd. Then came the charming tales of the mutual aid of ants, beavers, and prairie dogs, suggesting the existence of certain social instincts which moralists found it very convenient to use in explaining human society.

We are not yet sure, however, that man is the “good ape” Buffon supposed him to be. There is reason to believe that our social order is by no means a mere hive or herd order. It seems to be a fabric, rather than a growth.

But, in any case, it is important to know what human nature can furnish in the cause of social harmony. The gulf between private ends and public ends, between the aims of the individual and the aims of his fellows, is bridged from both sides, and we must know what abutments and spans are provided by the individual himself, if we are to measure the extent of the moral engineering that must be undertaken by society. It is our business, therefore, before entering upon the consideration of the social factors of order, to take stock of the moral capital of the person. We shall, first of all, ascertain the rôle of sympathy, of sociability, of the sense of justice, and of resentment, in establishing and maintaining social order.

CHAPTER II

THE RôLE OF SYMPATHY

SYMPATHY, Sociability, Justice—these are the “mothers” to which, Faust-like, we must repair for the secret of natural goodness. For we are no longer free to reduce altruism to an extremely refined egoism, or to pronounce illusory the pains and pleasures felt on beholding the experiences of another. The metaphysical, strictly egoistic “self” of Helvetius or D’Holbach turns out to be a myth. Those cunning architects, Selection and Heredity, are quite competent to build into the nervous system sympathetic promptings as well as selfish appetites. In the light of the facts collected by many workers, it is no longer difficult to trace the slender stem of altruism rising from the lower levels of mammalian life side by side with the thicker and rougher trunk of egoism.

The beginnings of sympathy lie in the later developments of the reproductive function. With the advent of the helpless mammalian young, sympathy acquires a high value for survival and is rapidly generated. In the human species the dependence of the young on the self-sacrifice of the parents is great, and the feeling of tenderness for the helpless becomes all-important. Those lacking in this quality do not leave so many children as the self-sacrificing, and so are crowded out and replaced. Thus has been developed in woman, in connection with her child-rearing function, a power of sympathy so great that travellers among savages have learned to throw themselves, when in straits, on the pity of females.

Besides family selection, social selection works in many ways to put a premium on the more amiable type of man. We know that women, being less quarrelsome, learned to associate before their male companions did. It is probable that, likewise, the more peaceable strains of men betook themselves to group life sooner than did the rest. Now, other things being equal, the larger and better-knit the group, the better its chances of success in conflict with other groups. While this may not favor the mild and gentle, it tends, at least, to put at a disadvantage the man of savage and solitary mood.

Again, the level of social endowment is raised by the slow elimination of the quarrelsome. The bullies kill one another, or they are extinguished by the combined action of the peaceable, or else they are disposed of by the agents of authority. In any case there is a weeding-out process, which works in favor of adaptation. Moreover, as soon as men have a free choice between warfare and peaceful industry, the disorderly and bloodthirsty spirits are drained away and devoured by the sword, while the more peaceable elements of the population gain a steadily increasing preponderance. It is well to remember, however, that the gentle may likewise be sifted out, being slain or driven off by the violent, or self-eliminated by a mistaken celibacy. Social selections, therefore, have tended to remove the morally extreme types of men,—the ferocious who taking the sword perish by the sword, and the gentle who fail to stand up for their rights. It is not certain that their net effect is to raise to any great degree the level of sympathetic endowment. An adaptive process that rejects the few worst rather than selects the few best, seems too languid to keep pace with the fresh demands that the growing complexity of social organization is continually making on human nature. Nor may we overlook the fact that selection adapts man to yesterday’s conditions, not to to-daty’s. When the requirements of the social environment are changing a gap is bound to appear, and this will be closed, when possible, by artificial means.

The age-long operation of selection under a great variety of conditions forbids us to look everywhere for the same endowment of sympathy, and leads us to recognize that the human species embraces no small range of moral variety. Very striking are the moral differences between neighboring tribes of red men, or negroes, or the hill folk of India. In history, too, we have the contrast between the kindness and generosity of the Egyptian and the cruelty of the Assyrian or Turk. Now, it is not at all certain that the peoples most successful as social architects are the most sympathetic. In fact, it is among natural peoples who have made but slight progress in social organization—Veddahs, Arawaks, Innuits, Dhimals—that we find the best social instincts.

When we remember that idyllic gentleness has been found only in island races or in small communities isolated by natural barriers, while the races that have emerged successful from the ages of war and migration on the great open land areas, like the Mississippi Valley or the Eurasian Continent, have been marked by a bellicose rather than a pacific disposition, it is evident that the larger historical aggregations of men have not been based on sympathy. When the curtain rises on our ancestor of eighty generations ago, he was a fierce, unruly savage living in constant warfare, a wild “blond beast” with little love for his kind. Undoubtedly the Teutonic temper has been toned down by the blood-letting of centuries. Through the Dark Ages, the mutual slaughter of untamed nobles and onhangers cleared away the aggressive spirits and gave the more peaceable industrial type of man an opportunity to multiply the bonds of social life. But gentleness is still no salient trait of the European. In endowment for friendly association he is inferior to any one of half a score of races that might be mentioned. In the spontaneous formation of small, peaceable, natural communities the Buriats or the Tahitans leave him far behind. That he, nevertheless, continues ceaselessly to develop his wonderful social organization proves that his order rests upon something else than the social sentiments.

Natural affection, while it is not the main pillar of the social edifice, has, no doubt, the leading rôle in forming the family of to-day. It is sympathy, in the forms of sexual, parental, and conjugal love, that preserves and renews from generation to generation the family relations. Besides these services sympathy is valuable to the social group as a stimulus to beneficence. With its timely help it mitigates the vicissitudes of the individual life, averts the stroke of misfortune, lessens the smart of disaster, tones down the harsher inequalities of lot, and for the weaker ones, such as women, widows, children, and the aged, softens the rigor of individualistic competition. In its collective manifestation sympathy fixes the legal status of the feeble and defective classes, and determines the plane of comfort they shall enjoy at public expense. Moreover, it authoritatively oversees all disciplines and subordinations. It throws the arm of the law about the more helpless, and intervenes actively between husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and pupil, master and servant, policeman and offender, warden and convict, employer and employee. Nor is sympathy without its services to the economic organization. It smooths daily intercourse, binds together the members of an industrial group, and helps to keep men to the due performance of their appointed tasks.

But after the fullest and frankest recognition has been given to the services of spontaneous altruism, nothing can be clearer than its utter inadequacy. Success in social organization implies that each man, whether watched or unwatched, sticks to his appointed work, and interferes with no one else in his work. Each does his special task, trusting that others will do certain things, at certain times, in certain ways, and will forbear from certain other things. This trust would be sadly misplaced if affection and impulse were all that could be relied upon to work our complicated social organization.

Sympathy, as we see it in the family, tends to abolish disparities. The feeling of brotherhood makes for a condition of equality. If, then, society were founded upon sympathy, the enormous inequalities of lot and fate we see about us would be impossible. All Utopias which base the social union on mutual affection arrive at community of goods, or of women, or both. To the unfortunate sympathy presents itself as pity, the impulse to extend aid. To the miserable it presents itself as envy, the impulse to relieve one’s distress by dipping into the abundance of another. In both cases, extreme disparity of conditions inspires feelings which are unfavorable to that disparity. But a differentiating society produces and consecrates stupendous inequalities in condition; so that, did it trust itself to spontaneous feelings apar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
• PREFACE
• PART I THE GROUNDS OF CONTROL
• PART II THE MEANS OF CONTROL
• PART III THE SYSTEM OF CONTROL
• PARTIAL LIST OF AUTHORITIES CITED
• INDEX