Part 10 (2/2)

THE series of questions which arise when we consider the individual as a member of society fall together under the general theory of what has been called, in a figure, Social Heredity.

The treatment of this topic will show something of the normal relation of the individual's mind to the social environment; and the chapter following will give some hints as to the nature and position of that exceptional man in whom we are commonly so much interested--the Genius.

The theory of social heredity has been worked up through the contributions, from different points of view, of several authors.

What, then, is social heredity?

This is a very easy question to answer, since the group of facts which the phrase describes are extremely familiar--so much so that the reader may despair, from such a commonplace beginning, of getting any novelty from it. The social heritage is, of course, all that a man or woman gets from the acc.u.mulated wisdom of society. All that the ages have handed down--the literature, the art, the habits of social conformity, the experience of social ills, the treatment of crime, the relief of distress, the education of the young, the provision for the old--all, in fact, however described, that we men owe to the ancestors whom we reverence, and to the parents whose presence with us perhaps we cherish still. Their struggles, the orator has told us, have bought our freedom; we enter into the heritage of their thought and wisdom and heroism. All true; we do. We all breathe a social atmosphere; and our growth is by this breathing-in of the tradition and example of the past.

Now, if this be the social heritage, we may go on to ask: Who are to inherit it? To this we may again add the further question: How does the one who is born to such a heritage as this come into his inheritance? And with this yet again: How may he use his inheritance--to what end and under what limitations? These questions come so readily into the mind that we naturally wish the discussion to cover them.

Generally, then, who is eligible for the social inheritance? This heir to society we are, all of us. Society does not make a will, it is true; nor does society die intestate. To say that it is we who inherit the riches of the social past of the race, is to say that we are the children of the past in a sense which comes upon us with all the force that bears in upon the natural heir when he finds his name in will or law. But there are exceptions. And before we seek the marks of the legitimacy of our claim to be the heirs of the hundreds of years of acc.u.mulated thought and action, it may be well to advise ourselves as to the poor creatures who do not enter into the inheritance with us.

They are those who people our asylums, our reformatories, our jails and penitentiaries; those who prey upon the body of our social life by demands for charitable support, or for the more radical treatment by isolation in inst.i.tutions; indeed, some who are born to fail in this inheritance are with us no more, even though they were of our generation; they have paid the penalty which their effort to wrest the inheritance from us has cost, and the grave of the murderer, the burglar, the suicide, the red-handed rebel against the law of social inheritance, is now their resting place. Society then is, when taken in the widest sense, made up of two cla.s.ses of people--the heirs who possess and the delinquents by birth or conduct who have forfeited the inheritance.

We may get a clear idea of the way a man attains his social heritage by dropping figure for the present and speaking in the terms of plain natural science. Ever since Darwin propounded the law of Natural Selection the word Variation has been current in the sense explained on an earlier page.

The student in natural science has come to look for variations as the necessary preliminary to any new step of progress and adaptation in the sphere of organic life. Nature, we now know, is fruitful to an extraordinary degree. She produces many specimens of everything. It is a general fact of reproduction that the offspring of plant or animal is quite out of proportion in numbers to the parents that produce them, and often also to the means of living which await them. One plant produces seeds which are carried far and near--to the ocean and to the desert rocks, no less than to the soil in which they may take root and grow. Insects multiply at a rate which is simply inconceivable to our limited capacity for thinking in figures. Animals also produce more abundantly, and man has children in numbers which allow him to bury half his offspring yearly and yet increase the adult population from year to year. This means, of course, that whatever the inheritance is, all do not inherit it; some must go without a portion whenever the resources of nature, or the family, are in any degree limited and when compet.i.tion is sharp.

Now Nature solves the problem among the animals in the simplest of ways. All the young born in the same family are not exactly alike; ”variations” occur. There are those that are better nourished, those that have larger muscles, those that breathe deeper and run faster. So the question who of these shall inherit the earth, the fields, the air, the water--this is left to itself. The best of all the variations live, and the others die. Those that do live have thus, to all intents and purposes, been ”selected” for the inheritance, just as really as if the parents of the species had left a will and had been able to enforce it. This is the principle of ”Natural Selection.”

Now, this way of looking at problems which involve aggregates of individuals and their distribution is becoming a habit of the age.

Wherever the application of the principles of probability do not explain a statistical result--that is, wherever there seem to be influences which favour particular individuals at the expense of others--men turn at once to the occurrence of Variations for the justification of this seeming partiality of Nature. And what it means is that Nature is partial to individuals _in making them_, in their natural heredity, rather than after they are born.

The principle of heredity with variations is a safe a.s.sumption to make also in regard to mankind; and we see at once that in order to come in for a part in the social heritage of our fathers we must be born fit for it. We must be born so endowed for the race of social life that we a.s.similate, from our birth up, the spirit of the society into which we are reared. The unfittest, socially, are suppressed. In this there is a distinction between this sphere of survival and that of the animal world. In it the fittest survive, the others are lost; but in society the unfittest are lost, all the others survive. Social selection weeds out the unfit, the murderer, the most unsocial man, and says to him: ”You must die”; natural selection seeks out the most fit and says: ”You alone are to live.” The difference is important, for it marks a prime series of distinctions, when the conceptions drawn from biology are applied to social phenomena; but for the understanding of variations we need not now pursue it further. The contrast may be put, however, in a sentence: in organic evolution we have the natural selection of the fit; in social progress we have the social suppression of the unfit.

Given social variations, therefore, differences among men, what becomes of this man or that? We see at once that if society is to live there must be limits set somewhere to the degree of variation which a given man may show from the standards of society. And we may find out something of these limits by looking at the evident, and marked differences which actually appear about us.

First, there is the idiot. He is not available, from a social point of view, because he varies too much on the side of defect. He shows from infancy that he is unable to enter into the social heritage because he is unable to learn to do social things. His intelligence does not grow with his body. Society pities him if he be without natural protection, and puts him away in an inst.i.tution. So of the insane, the p.r.o.nounced lunatic; he varies too much to sustain in any way the wide system of social relations.h.i.+ps which society requires of each individual. Either he is unable to take care of himself, or he attempts the life of some one else, or he is the harmless, unsocial thing that wanders among us like an animal or stands in his place like a plant. He is not a factor in social life; he has not come into the inheritance.

Then there is the extraordinary cla.s.s of people whom we may describe by a stronger term than those already employed. We find not only the unsocial, the negatively unfit, those whom society puts away with pity in its heart; there are also the antisocial, the cla.s.s whom we usually designate as criminals. These persons, like the others, are variations; but they seem to be variations in quite another way. They do not represent lack on the intellectual side always or alone, but on the moral side, on the social side, as such. The least we can say of the criminals is that they tend, by heredity or by evil example, to violate the rules which society has seen fit to lay down for the general security of men living together in the enjoyment of the social heritage. So far, then, they are factors of disintegration, of destruction; enemies of the social progress which proceeds from generation to generation by just this process of social inheritance.

So society says to the criminal also: ”You must perish.” We kill off the worst, imprison the bad for life, attempt to reform the rest.

They, too, then, are excluded from the heritage of the past.

So our lines of eligibility get more and more narrowly drawn. The instances of exclusion now cited serve to give us some insight into the real qualities of the man who lives a social part, and the way he comes to live it.

Pa.s.sing on to take up the second of the informal topics suggested, we have to find the best description that we can of the social man--the one who is fitted for the social life. This question concerns the process by which any one of us comes into the wealth of relations.h.i.+ps which the social life represents. For to say that a man does this is in itself to say that he is the man society is looking for. Indeed, this is the only way to describe the man--to actually find him.

Society is essentially a growing, s.h.i.+fting thing. It changes from age to age, from country to country. The Greeks had their social conditions, and the Romans theirs. Even the criminal lines are drawn differently, somewhat, here and there; and in a low stage of civilization a man may pa.s.s for normal who, in our time, would be described as weak in mind. This makes it necessary that the standards of judgment of a given society should be determined by an actual examination of the society, and forbids us to say that the limits of variation which society in general will tolerate must be this or that.

We may say, then, that the man who is fit for social life _must be born to learn_. The need of learning is his essential need. It comes upon him from his birth. Speech is the first great social function which he must learn, and with it all the varieties of verbal accomplishment--reading and writing. This brings to the front the great method of all his learning--imitation. In order to be social he must be imitative, imitative, imitative. He must realize for himself by action the forms, conventions, requirements, co-operations of his social group. All is learning; and learning not by himself and at random, but under the leading of the social conditions which surround him. Plasticity is his safety and the means of his progress. So he grows into the social organization, takes his place as a Socius in the work of the world, and lays deep the sense of values, upon the basis of which his own contributions--if he be destined to make contributions--to the wealth of the world are to be wrought out. This great fact that he is open to the play of the personal influences which are about him is just the ”suggestibleness” which we have already described in an earlier chapter; and the influences themselves are ”suggestions”--social suggestions. These influences differ in different communities, as we so often remark. The Turk learns to live in a very different system of relations of ”give and take” from ours, and ours differ as much from those of the Chinese. All that is characteristic of the race or tribe or group or family--all this sinks into the child and youth by his simple presence there in it, with the capacity to learn by imitation. He is suggestible, and here are the suggestions; he is made to inherit and he inherits. So it makes no difference what his tribe or kindred be; let him be a learner by imitation, and he becomes in turn possessor and teacher.

The case becomes more interesting still when we give the matter another turn, and say that in this learning all the members of society agree; _all must be born to learn the same things_. They enter, if so be that they do, into the same social inheritance. This again seems like a very commonplace remark; but certain things flow from it. Each member of society gives and gets the same set of social suggestions; the differences being the degree of progress each has made, and the degree of variation which each one gives to what he has before received. This last difference is treated below where we consider the genius.

There grows up, in all this give and take, in all the interchange of suggestions among you, me, and the other, an obscure sense of a certain social understanding about ourselves generally--a _Zeitgeist_, an atmosphere, a taste, or, in minor matters, a style. It is a very peculiar thing, this social spirit. The best way to understand that you have it, and something of what it is, is to get into a circle in which it is different. The common phrase ”fish out of water” is often heard in reference to it. But that does not serve for science. The next best thing that I can do in the way of rendering it is to appeal to another word which has a popular sense, the word Judgment. Let us say that there exists in every society a general system of values, found in social usages, conventions, inst.i.tutions, and formulas, and that our judgments of social life are founded on our habitual recognition of these values, and of the arrangement of them which has become more or less fixed in our society. For example, to be cordial to a disagreeable neighbour shows good social judgment in a small matter; not to quarrel with the h.o.m.oeopathic enthusiast who meets you in the street and wishes to doctor your rheumatism out of a symptom book--that is good judgment. In short, the man gets to show more and more, as he grows up from childhood, a certain good judgment; and his good judgment is also the good judgment of his social set, community, or nation. The psychologist might prefer to say that a man ”feels” this; perhaps it would be better for psychological readers to say simply that he has a ”sense” of it; but the popular use of the word ”judgment” fits so accurately into the line of distinction we are now making that we may adhere to it. So we reach the general position that the eligible candidate for social life must have good judgment as represented by the common standards of judgment of his people.

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