Our social heritage

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Chapter I. Introduction . . . . 13

Our social heritage consists of ttiat part of our "nurture" which we acquire by the social process of teaching and learning. Men have more social heritage than other animals, and are more dependent on it for existence. We have, indeed, become biolo^cally parasitic upon our social heritage; and, if we once forgot what we have been taught, our species might die out before it had time to acquire a new social heritage. The mass of our social heritage is rapidly increasing, and the problem of securing economy in its acquirement and use, and efficiency in its continuous criticism and improvement, is becoming more urgent.

Chapter II. Social Heritage in Work and

Part of our social heritage consists of the power, which we acquire by education from infancy onwards, of making sustained and conscious muscular and mental efforts. We learn to recognize the difference between will and impulse; and are thereby enabled to make continuous use of processes which are naturally intermittent, to invent methods of compensating for the resulting nervous strain, and to avail ourselves of the "drive" of artistic impulse. Thought under modem conditions requires us to learn, not only how to stimulate artificial intellectual effort, but also how to use artificial intellectual methods. These methods have hitherto been most successful in the physical sciences; but it seems likely that in certain respects the direction of self-conscious intellectual effort may in the future be developed more successfully by the students of the moral sciences. If so, that development may produce an important effect on educational technique both in Britain and in America.

Chapter III. Group Cooperation ... 54

Group cooperation under modem conditions, requires (like indirtdual work and thought) a combination of socially inherited expedients with biologically inherited instincts. Men are a loosely gregarious species who instinctively used significant cries even before the invention of language; and they naturally cooperate by a clamorous alternation of the impulse to lead with the impulse to follow. Our socially inherited expedients of group cooperation by discipline and discussion are still imperfectly worked out, and are apt at any moment to break down, and their place to be taken by the primitive instinctive process. These facts may be illustrated from the Reports of the British Dardanelles and Mesopotamia Commissions of 1917.

Chapter IV. The Nation as Idea and Fact . 77

National cooperation is more dependent on our social heritage than group cooperation. In a group, men think and feel about direct sensations and memories of their fellows; in a nation, they must think and feel about some entity of the mind. At present we generally leave the formation of the mental "panoramas" which represent our nation for each of us, to chance, or to the scheming of professional manipulators of motive. We should try to make the formation of a trustworthy idea of our nation into a conscious process. Our idea when it is formed should remind us of the facts of the human type, of the differences between individual human beings, and of the quantitative relation between the grades and kinds of difference. Such an idea will help us to realize that a modern industrial nation is not likely to be permanently coherent unless habit is based on contentment; and unless contentment is made possible by an approximation to social equality, by a clearer understanding of economic facts, and by a greater liking in each of us for his work. That liking will only be secured under modem conditions if our social organization and our educational methods are based more on the idea of difference than on the idea of identity.

Chapter V. The Control of National Cooperation 102

During the nineteenth century the industrial nations of the world directed their large-scale cooperative activities by two main expedients, the territorial state and capitalism. Both expedients are now widely distrusted, and progressive opinion often inclines towards

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vocationalism. Vocational organization is in many ways useful, but when it is proposed to make vocationalism the main source of social power we must examine its tendencies in the present and its history in the past. Does guild socialism offer us a sufficiently varied and interesting life? Will it tend to strengthen professional conservatism? Is it compatible with "integration of labor," when that process is socially desirable, or with the sufficient accumulation of capital for future work? On all these points our experience in the war indicated that the modem democratic state tends to take the more socially desirable and the modem vocational organizations the less socially desirable side.

Chapter VI. Professionalism . . . 122

The problem of vocational organization as a socially inherited expedient can be approached with less prejudice by examining the professions than by examining the Trade Unions. The profession of the law is the most powerful of the English vocational organizations, and shows the difficulties and dangers of uncontrolled vocationalism most clearly. The organization of the medical profession is more recent, and yet reveals important intellectual and administrative defects. Military professionalism has a history as old as civilization, and its dangers are obvious. The professionalism of teachers is peculiar in its relation to the special but intermittent teaching instinct, and in the relation between the process of teaching and learning and the whole of our social heritage of new and old knowledge.

Chapter VII. Liberty 158

The psychological facts which give political force to the idea of Liberty may be seen in the results which follow from the obstruction of human impulses. Those results depend on the nature of the obstructing cause even more than on the nature of the obstruction. Obstruction by human agents produces a different reaction from that produced by obstruction by non-human causes; but this unfreedomreaction is only produced when obstruction is felt to be an interference with the normal course of human relations. Pericles' conception of Liberty showed enormously more psychological insight than did that of Mill; and the loss of control by the British Liberal Party in the nineteenth century was largely due to an insufficient analysis of the principle which they shared with Mill. The Oxford metaphysical criticism of the principle of Liberty and Arnold's psychological criticism of it were ineffective as political forces. The future of LiberaUsm may depend on its power to apply to modern conditions the vision of Pericles.

Chapter VIII. Rights, Honor, and Independence 187

The analysis of Liberty helps us to analyze Natural Right. That analysis will show both that Natural Rights are real things, and that it is not always good for us to receive them in full. It also will show the cause of the historical assertion and denial and conflicting interpretation of Rights. The principle of Honor is based on similar psychological facts, and can be made more useful by a similar analysis. So is the principle of Independence, in the case of judges, quasi-judicial officers, technicians, and administrators. A psychological analysis of the principle of Independence may also help us in the difficult task of adapting to modern needs the expedients of parliamentary representation and the newspaper press.

Chapter IX. World Cooperation . . . 203

The change of scale from national cooperation to world cooperation involves a change in the cooperative process. Our cooperative instincts of defense may here act as a cause of international hatred. But world cooperation is necessary if the human species is to survive; and the chief hope of world-peace lies in a recognition of that fact, leading to the effort of rational calculation and calculated action. For that purpose we must bring a new "problem-attitude" to bear on such sciences as logic, history, law, and biology, and on such principles as Liberty, Independence, Nationality, and Equality. We must abo make an effort of invention in the adaptation of national institutions to world purposes, and in the creation of new world institutions and traditions.

Chapter X. Constitutional Monarchy . . 222

British constitutional monarchy is described by Bagehot and other writers as a means of securing instinctive personal loyalty for a government which is in fact parliamentary and impersonal. It is also now described as the "great symbol" of that relation between Britain and the Dominions which would otherwise be "openly and franklv nothing." Queen Victoria and the other British monarchs during the nineteenth century claimed, however, that their prerogative was "limited" rather than symboUc. The limitation of British monar-

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chical prerogative depends on the two conventions : that the monarch should not veto legislation, or retain in power a ministry without a majority in the House of Commons; and on the presumption that the army will always obey a parliamentary government. The events of 1909-1913 left the first convention and the presumption no longer unchallenged; and during the war, constitutional monarchy abroad became less constitutional. Constitutional monarchy as symbol represents the primitive expedient of a "specimen-symbol" rather than a "word-symbol." It has the psychological advantages of its type; but it also has the disadvantage of providing a less penetrating working conception of the political relation which it symbolizes.

Chapter XI. Science . . . . . 245

The "world-outlook" of Science has given mankind a growing sense of power both over their environment and over their own conduct. But it still leads to the old dilemma of free will and determinism. We may some day escape from that dilemma; but meanwhile it has, whether in its theological or its scientific form, an unfortunate effect on our conduct. Our simpler motives seem to us more "scientific" than our less simple motives. The materialist explanation of history was till 1848 a conservative, and has been since 1848 a revolutionary economic force. Darwinian determinism has made wars more likely; and psychological determinism is apt to diminish personal initiative and responsibility in a modern democracy. We should not allow either the physical scientists or the metaphysicians to divide the facts of human motive into those which are "scientific," and those which are not.

Chapter XII. The Church . . . . 258

What part in the control of modem long-range conduct is played by the socially inherited fact of organized Christianity, and especially by the great Catholic and Lutheran Churches? In the case of those national actions during the war which are now most universally condemned, it would appear that there was an inverse statistical correlation between membership of the historical churches and an attitude of protest against the wrongdoing of one's nation. In the English Church such failure as exists in intellectual and humanitarian leadership may be partly due to defects in current Anglican metaphysic, and in the psychology of current sacramentalism. Sacramentalism has no necessary connection with any ethical solution of modem problems, and tends to substitute a ritual for a social conception of

II conduct. Sacramentalism also encourages professionalism among the clergy in its narrowest form. If the Anglican Church is disestablished this professionalism may make it a disruptive rather than a conservative force, with an ideal not of individual initiative but of corporate and nationalist particularism. Clerical professionalism will concern itself chiefly with education, and may tend to diminish fruitful mtellectual effort, either by bringing education under more effective clerical control, or by maintaining obscurantist compromises. If the twentieth century sees a new birth of intellectual energy, the part played by the organization of emotion in our social heritage may be radically changed.

Chapter I Introduction

MEN, like all other animals, are enabled to exist in their present numbers by a combination of "nature" and "nurture."

Our nature consists of those facts of structure and instinct which are inherited by the biological process of begetting and birth. We inherit biologically, for instance, the viscera by which we digest certain kinds of food, and the instincts which make us desire them; a skin which resists bacterial infection, and an instinct to brush away a fly before he pierces our skin; a highly complex nervous system, and an instinctive impulse to think.

The nature of all animals empowers and impels them to acquire, after birth, the structural modifications and nervous and muscular habits and memories which constitute their nurture. Men are mammalian vertebrates, and nurture plays a much larger part in the lives of mammals than it does in the lives of invertebrates like the insects, or of lower vertebrates like the fishes or reptiles. The nature of a higher mammal is, indeed, a strongly outlined sketch, the details of which are filled in after birth by his nurture.

Our nurture may, again, be divided into two parts. The first part consists of that which each one of us acquires for himself, without learning it from other human beings. The second part consists of the knowledge and expedients and habits which were originally the personal acquisition of individuals, but which have been afterwards handed down from one generation to another by the social process of teaching and learning. It is this second part of our nurture which I shall call our "social heritage."^

Men differ widely from all other animals by the extent of their social heritage, and the degree of their dependence on it. Those insects among whom one generation dies out before another is born can obviously have no social heritage at all; nor can fishes, or any other species among whom parents do not associate with their offspring. A certain amount of social heritage apparently exists in some species of birds. Birds are long-lived and acquire much individual experience. The young of some bird-species remain a comparatively long time with their parents; and useful expedients can be socially transmitted from one bird-generation to another by flocking and other gregarious processes. In the cold spring, for instance,

^ The term "social inheritance" is, I find, used in the sense in which I use "social heritage" by Benjamin Kidd in his Science of Power (1918), pp. 113-114. Baldwin (quoted by Drever, Instinct in Man, p. 80) uses the term "social heredity" in that sense. Watson in his Behavior (1914), p. 187, uses the term "phylogenetic habit" in much the same sense. Wells in his Outline of History, Chap. VII, §2, uses the word "tradition." Wells confines the "tradition and the nervous organization necessary to receive tradition" to the mammals. The evidence seems to me to indicate that some birds have more of it than many mammals. Sir E. Ray Lankester, in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Zoology, uses the term "Record of the Past" or "Record," as related to "Educability."

of 1895, a few sea-gulls found that they could easily obtain food by going up the Thames into the smoky atmosphere of London. Since then, large numbers of gulls come to London every winter, in mild weather as well as in cold. They have evolved no new biologically inherited instinct, but have acquired a new socially inherited habit, which will probably last long after the original pioneers are dead. In the annual journeys of migratory birds, it may be that, while the instinct to follow the flock or to return to the point from which it started, is biologically inherited, the actual route is socially inherited. In New Zealand the "mountain parrot" apparently hands down by social inheritance the art of attacking sheep's kidneys. Experiment, again, seems to show that, while the characteristic flight of each bird-species is biologically inherited, the characteristic song of some singing-birds is socially inherited.^ Among mammals, seals may be guided by social inheritance to their breeding places, and town rats may, perhaps, hand on to successive generations the habit of resorting to certain accidentally discovered stores of food. Some American naturalists claim that there is a large socially inherited element in the methods by which certain American carnivorous mammals obtain food and escape traps.

The process of social inheritance is, as far as I know, not necessary for the existence of any wild non-human species or variety. The swallows, or the London rats,

2 "Until recent years it was supposed that the characteristic songs of birds were inherited, like instincts. Apparently this is not wholly true. It would seem from the work of Scott and Conradi that what the birds inherit is a strong tendency to sing, but that no characteristic song develops without training." (J. B. Watson, Behavior (1914)7 P- U^-) Watson gives an account of the experiments.

IS might, if they forgot all that they had learnt from their parents, sink, for a few generations, to one half, or one quarter, of their present numbers. But the most important and progressive varieties of the human race would probably, if social inheritance were in their case interrupted, die out altogether. If the earth were struck by one of Mr. Wells's comets, and if, in consequence, every human being now alive were to lose all the knowledge and habits which he had acquired from preceding generations (though retaining unchanged all his own powers of invention, and memory, and habituation) nine tenths of the inhabitants of London or New York would be dead in a month, and 99 per cent of the remaining tenth would be dead in six months. They would have no language to express their thoughts, and no thoughts but vague reverie. They could not read notices, or drive motors or horses. They would wander about, led by the inarticulate cries of a few naturally dominant individuals, drowning themselves, as thirst came on, in hundreds at the riverside landing places, looting ■ those shops where the smell of decaying food attracted them, and perhaps at the end stumbling on the expedient of cannibalism. Even in the country districts, men could not invent, in time to preserve their lives, methods of growing food, or taming animals, or making fire, or so clothing themselves as to endure a northern winter. An attack of constipation or measles would be invariably fatal. After a few years mankind would almost certainly disappear from the northern and temperate zones. The white races would probably become extinct everywhere. A few primitive races might live on fruit and small animals in those fertile tropical regions where the human species was originally evolved, until they had slowly accumulated a new social heritage. After some thousands of generations they would probably possess something which we should recognize as a language, and perhaps some art of taming animals and cultivating land. They might or might not have created what we should call a religion, or a few of our simpler mechanical inventions and political expedients. They probably would not have re-created such general ideas as "Law" or "Liberty"; though they might have created other general ideas which would be new to us.

Man has been increasingly dependent on his social heritage since the beginning of conventional language and of the art of flint-chipping, that is to say, for perhaps half a million years. This fact has brought about important modifications in our biologically inherited nature. We have become biologically more fitted to live with the help of our social heritage, and biologically less fitted to live without it.^ We have become, one may say, biologically parasitic upon our social heritage. Just as the parasitic crustacean sacculina, after living for unnumbered thousands of generations upon the body-juices of the crab, has evolved special organs and a special body of instincts which fit it to obtain that food, and unfit it to live without that food; so man has evolved, and is still evolving, certain modifications of structure and instinct, which, while

2 This statement does not, of course, involve any Lamarckian assumption of the biological inheritability of acquired characteristics. It is only necessary to assume (a) that those families vifhich were more able to acquire and hand down social heritage would tend to survive, and (b) that those parts of our bodily and nervous structure which the existence of social heritage rendered unnecessary or less necessary for survival would tend to degenerate.

they increase his power of acquiring and using social heritage, also increase his dependence on it.

Some of the modifications are general changes in his instincts, which make him more able to learn and to teach. Man, as compared with other mammals, has a much wider and more untiring curiosity, and a greater power of responding to suggestion and of forming new muscular and nervous habits. Human beings seem also to have an instinctive impulse, intermittent and varying greatly in individuals, to teach. Even more important than these general changes is the evolution of the instinct of speech, and the corresponding structural modifications of tie speechorgans in the mouth and throat and brain. Men for many thousand generations have accumulated conventional language-systems, and have been increasingly dependent on their use. We have, therefore, evolved a special instinct, impelling us to learn and use conventional words. Anyone who has watched a child during its second year will see that this instinct is as definite as that which impels sacculina to settle on a crab; and that, if there were no language present for the child to learn, the speech-instinct would be as meaningless and baffled as the instinct of sacculina when it finds no crab.

We can watch, to-day, certain slow tendencies in the further evolution of this parasitic relation of man to his social heritage. Families with bad teeth or very short sight are enabled to live and beget children by the socially inherited inventions of false teeth and spectacles. Women whose children would be born dead or would die for want of milk, are enabled by the arts of midwifery and artificial feeding to bring up their young; and our natural strength of teeth, excellence of sight, and ease in bearing and suck-

i8 ling, are apparently beginning to decline; though civilized man, when his health has been preserved by the art of medicine, and his sight has been corrected by the art of optics, is, on the average, much stronger, more efficient, and longer-lived than the savage.

During the last two centuries that part of the social heritage of mankind which consists of the applied industrial sciences has been multiplied many times. This process is too recent to have produced obvious biological effects within any given variety of the human species; but it has already produced an important change in the proportionate numbers of the different human varieties. A much greater proportion of the human species than was. the case two centuries ago, now belong to those European breeding-stocks whose mental elasticity and power of forming habits of sustained industry have so far enabled them to acquire most easily, and exploit most fully, the industrial methods which depend on mechanical energy. Perhaps, after a few more generations, the yellow races may prove themselves to be even more fitted biologically for modern industrial methods, and may be found to have increased in a still larger proportion. But the growth of the applied industrial sciences is only part of an enormous recent increase in the accumulated knowledge on which modern civilization and the size of modem populations depend. In twenty years an encyclopaedia is now obsolete; and this increase is constantly adding to our difficulty in handing down our social heritage from one generation to the next. The difficulty has been partly met by the devices of writing and printing and cataloguing, which enable us to keep knowledge, when once acquired, ready for use, without the necessity that anyone should actually remember it. It has been partly met by compulsory education, and by a constant increase in the length of the average educational course. Education, indeed, has in all civilized countries already reached a point where it is very hard to iind a sufficiency of qualified teachers; and the possibility has already to be faced that the burden of learning and teaching may prove too great to be consistent with a harmonious and happy life. But the most effective, as it is, in some respects, the most dangerous, means of dealing with the growing accumulation of our knowledge has been the division and subdivision of knowledge and function. Only one man in a million may now acquire some piece of knowledge or skill on which the safety of all the rest depends. The members of almost any profession or skilled craft can, therefore, if they agree to withhold their services, "hold up" much of the social and economic life of their nation; and I shall discuss in a later chapter* the influence of this fact on the social organization of a modern industrial nation.

The problem, however, of social inheritance does not simply consist in the difficulty of handing down a steadily growing accumulation of arts and sciences, and organizing its use. Each generation, if it is to live happily and harmoniously, or even is to avoid acute suffering, must adapt to its present needs the social heritage which it received from the preceding generation. The exhaustion of an old source of supply of food or raw materials, the appearance of a new disease, or an increase of population, may, of itself, make obsolete old arts and sciences and customs and make new discoveries necessary. A new discovery again, like that of printing, or the compass, or steam or

* Chap. V.

gunpowder, or the microscope, or representation by election, or biblical criticism, or of such ideas as nationality or socialism, may compel the readjustment of tradition in a hundred ways. And, side by side with this recurrent necessity of readjustment, is the continuous pressure of human curiosity, and of the human creative instincts, impelling the abler members of each generation to hand on to their children more than they received from their own parents. This bursting of old bottles by new wine has, in the history of mankind, usually been a slow and uncertain process. In this or that region the admitted failure of some old tradition, or a new idea put forward by some thinker or group of thinkers, leads to detailed local changes which slowly spread to other communities. But sometimes, as in the Athens of Pericles and Socrates, or in Italy of the Renaissance, or France of the Revolution, a wide and conscious effort has been made to survey the whole field of our social heritage, and to bring the old into systematic relation with the new. Such a wide and conscious effort of "reconstruction" may be found by future historians to have followed, after an interval for recovery from nervous exhaustion, the world war of 1914-1918. If reconstruction is to be successful, new knowledge, the discovery of hitherto unknown relations of cause and effect, will in some cases be required. In other cases knowledge already accumulated must be applied by newly invented expedients to new problems. Sometimes what will be needed is an alteration of the proportion of the limited learning-power of the growing generation allotted to different types of study, and of the emphasis given in education to this or that element in the past experience of mankind. Sometimes we shall have to make the painful effort of unlearning what we have been taught, and of breaking intellectual and emotional habits.

This book is an attempt to survey our relation to our social heritage in a single, though, as I believe, a very important section. I shall hardly touch, for instance, on the huge subject of the application of the physical sciences to our new world-problems. Even in the hxmian sciences I shall refer only incidentally to the eugenic problem of restoring or improving our biological inheritance, so grievously injured by the dysgenic effects of the war. The section of our social heritage with which I shall deal will be the ideas, habits, and institutions directly concerned in the political, economic, and social organization of those modern communities which constitute that which I called in 1914 "The Great Society."

I am well aware of the difficulties and risks of the task in which I shall ask my readers to cooperate with me. Every general survey of our social heritage must start from the vision of a single human mind. But no single mind can see more than a thousandth part of the relevant facts even of a section of that heritage. A tradition which seems to any one of us useless or harmful may have causes for its existence of which we are ignorant. The social heritage of any race or people, the literature or domestic economy of China, or India or Palestine, or Norway, or the governments or educational systems of Italy, or Japan, or America, may have become subtly adapted to racial or climatic facts which do not exist elsewhere. A change which in one country is easy may, in another country, require the pulling down of firmly established institutions. We all feel, indeed in

1920, much more humble, when approaching the problem of social and intellectual reconstruction, than did the followers of Rousseau or Adam Smith before the French Revolution, or the followers of Bentham, or Godwin, or Hegel, or Mazzini, after the world war that ended in 1815. But the urgency of our task is greater. The new fact of modern industrial organization is spreading over the earth, and we have learnt that the dangers arising from that fact are equally universal. Unless, therefore, an attempt is now made, in many countries and by many thinkers, to see our socially inherited ways of living and thinking as a whole, the nations of the earth, confused and embittered by the events of 1914-1920, may soon be compelled to witness — this time without hope or illusion — another and more destructive stage in the suicide of civilization.

Chapter II

IN this chapter I shall deal with sustained muscular effort, and sustained intellectual effort. I shall argue , that both these forms of human behavior are largely ! dependent on the process of social inheritance; and that we shall be most likely to increase our success in working and thinking if we clearly recognize that dependence and its consequences. Both manual and mental effort can be studied in the individual human being, looked on as isolated from his fellows; and I can, therefore, discuss them before I consider the various socially inherited forms of cooperation among human beings, in groups, or nations, or world-relationships.

Sustained muscular and mental effort are alike in the fact that they are dependent on the existence of the self-conscious will, which itself is mainly a product of social inheritance. We know little or nothing of the consciousness of non-human animals, but anyone who observes the behavior of a wild mammal may guess that it is not aware of any "self," separable from and more permanent than the impulse of the moment. Fear, or anger, or sex-love, or the hunting impulse, are, one supposes, while they prevail, inseparable parts of the animal's self. Two impulses, fear, for instance, and curiosity, may, of course, conflict. But as one watches a frightened and curious rabbit, one infers that it does not feel either that one of the two impulses is more especially its "self" than the other, or that a "self" exists apart from both of them. Primitive man may have stood in that respect somewhere between the unself-consciousness of the higher mammals and the self-consciousness of civilized man. Civilized man is taught to separate in consciousness his "self" and his "will" from his less permanent memories and impulses, by an educational process which begins even before the power of speech has developed. The youngest infant is encouraged by signs and non-linguistic sounds to make certain selfdirected efforts. A more definite stage starts with the acquirement of language. As soon as a fact of consciousness can be named, it can be separated from the namer. The original invention of words like "will" or "try" must therefore have formed a new departure point in human behavior. They made it infinitely easier to recognize the feeling of self-conscious effort, to stimulate that feeling voluntarily, and to maintain it.^ Now the degree of control that can be exercised by the