The psychology of social reconstruction

Front matter

‘THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION

By G. T. W. Patrick, Ph.D.

Professor of Philosophy in the State University of Iowa, and author of “The Psychology of Relaxation”

Introduction

PsycHOLOGICAL Factors IN SociaL RE- CONSTRUCTION

PsycHo.LocicAL Factors 1n SociAu RE- CONSTRUCTION (continued)

PsycHOLoGIcAL Factors IN SociaAL RE- CONSTRUCTION (continued)

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION

Chapter I Introduction

HAT the Freudian psychology has a social application no one can doubt who has carefully observed the world’s progress during the last ten or twenty years. It was really about the time the dancing craze burst upon us that the reaction began. When we look back upon those tango days, they seem quite innocent and mild as compared with the present; but it was a wild orgy then. | It will be only the youngest of us who cannot recall the exalted social mood in which we lived in the early years of this century. The moral fervor of our heroic action in banishing slavery was still upon us. We were thrilled by a new zeal for breaking also the chains of alcohol. We were still priding ourselves upon our wonderful schools and our remarkable freedom from illiteracy. We dimly remembered the horrors of war, but we were providing against any such . calamity as a great war by means of peace societies and arbitration treaties! Most of all, perhaps, we were exulting in the almost miraculous results of the industrial revolution. We had at last gained complete mastery over the forces of nature. Earth and sky and water were subservient to man. Science and invention, the marvelous bequests of the nineteenth century, were the keys to a kind of terrestrial paradise just opening to us. Best of all, the economic surplus promised to put an end forever to the old pain-economy, in which the world had always lived, and we had visions of a pleasure-economy to extend to all lands and classes. In fact we were all aglow with enthusiasm for something which we called ‘modern civilization.”

Furthermore, we were really living up to our high ideals. We had ourselves well in hand. There was a high standard of morals and a high degree of refinement. It was relatively a period of self-control, temperance, thrift, and decency. Although beer, wine, and distilled liquors were everywhere to be had and at a moderate price, we were as a people temperate and restrained.} The house of ‘‘modern civilization”? looked so genuine and solid that we never suspected that what we saw was just a veneer. We were ignorant of the new psychology that tells us now of the danger when deep racial impulses are merely suppressed and not properly sublimated and redirected.

It was the first symptom of the reaction when the dancing craze burst upon us. From our puritan standpoint we were shocked when the whole world took to dancing, and not very decorous dancing at that. Some thought that the whole. world had suddenly gone crazy. But this was only the beginning, for it was soon followed by the nation-wide and world-wide amusement crazes. In those staid and proper early days of the century, had some prophet foretold that ten to fifteen million people in the United States would very soon be in daily attendance upon

1 In those days we used to hear about the delicate aroma of old wines and burgundies, the rich and mellow taste of rare old whiskies, and the tonic nutritive value of ales and beers. made from good barley and hops. But now all this ancient camouflage has been brushed away and men have discovered that what they want is alcohol, and the larger percentage of it the better. Even for two and three quarters per cent they have shown themselves ready to wage a determined and persistent fight. This self-revelation has been humiliating and disillusioning, but self-knowledge such as this will be valuable in the social reconstruction of the future.

moving-picture shows exhibiting no high dramatic art, but for the most part tawdry, sensational, and erotic, the story would have been as incredible as that in fewer years than twenty there would be a great world war whose direct and indirect cost would be estimated at the unbelievable sum of three hundred and thirtyeight thousand million dollars and in which fifty-nine million men would be called to arms and seven and one half million killed.

Had the curtain been drawn. still farther aside, revealing the hosts of shameless profiteers and the sudden rush for new wealth both during and after the war; revealing still further the harsh and ugly picture of post-war conditions, the scramble for territory and power in Europe, the avarice, the cynicism and the deceit, the sacrifice of human rights to national aggrandizement, the low cunning of European diplomacy,} the frenzy of spending as well as the greed for gain in America, the sacrifice of great world reforms to petty politics and party, the silly and childish behavior of many of our American people when their self-made dry-laws began to

1 Compare articles by E. Alexander Powell, “'The New Frontiers of Freedom,” Scribner's Magazine, January, February, and March, 1920.

close down upon them, in their absurd scramble for a last drink or for a stay of the enforcement of the laws, if only for a few weeks or days — had all these things been foreseen, those good people of just one short generation past would have said that such sudden madness of men could be explained only by some new and strange astronomical influences.

But the explanation is much simpler. It was a case not of stars but of brain cells. It was a case of a certain kind of culture spread over the surface of a great body of deep racial instincts and desires. It was a case of getting civilized too rapidly, when civilization is understood merely as a kind of social decorum. In those days society was simply being given a course in manners, instead of having its deep latent energies redirected into healthy channels by moral, exsthetic, and social ideals. These energies being suppressed were still working subterraneously, resulting in a social “complex,” which took the form of the violent outbreaks mentioned. Society, as well as individuals, may be subject to nervous disorders and have its suppressed “wish.”

But what is to happen? Were these waves of frivolity and this “‘dose of savagery” a kind of “fling,” which was necessary to restore the social balance, and has society suffered a sort of katharsis, which will leave it purified and harmonious? Was it merely a case of social tension, which has now been relieved by a period of excess? Are the suppressed desires now “‘working themselves off,” so that we may soon expect a return to normal healthy conditions?

Although neither the analogy of the Freudian psychology nor the social experience of the past warrants such a hope, nevertheless something like this may take place. There are hopeful conditions, as we shall presently see, that greatly redeem the outlook. I am not interested here in predicting either a great social disaster or the speedy return of social calm and serenity. Probably neither will happen. I am interested only in noting the amazing change which has taken place in respect to our confidence about the future. Formerly a few croaking pessimists and alarmists used to amuse us by predicting the downfall of our civilization. We were amused rather than alarmed by these predictions, because we had been taught to believe, and with boundless pride, that we were just entering upon a glorious period of human progress under the safe guidance of science and the mechanic arts and through the final long-sought freedom, equality, and fraternity. Now we are suddenly told — and not by alarmists nor pessimists, but by some of those who represent the clearest thought of the day — that our whole western civilization is in grave danger, if not near its end.

A writer in a recent number of the “Manchester Guardian” says of the present times, “It is the kind of situation in which former civilizations have gone down.” The Rt. Hon. C. F. G. Masterman, writing in the “Atlantic Monthly” for August, 1919, after a long and careful review of the situation in England, uses these significant words:

The shadows lie heavy on the hills. It will be years, it may be decades, before these shadows are dispelled. It may be that never will they be completely disnatilg These four years of mad destruction may

ave struck a blow at Europe’s prosperity from which it will never recover. Some of the greatest of the Dominion statesmen have expressed to me their conviction that the result will be a permanent change. They foresee a great and increasing migration from Great Britain, and indeed, from all the war-tortured countries, of people fleeing from national bankruptcy in a region haunted by evil dreams. From such a migration they anticipate the building-up of huge white communities in still unsettled lands, which will give a new orientation to the world’s future history: Canada, South Africa, Australasia, will take the place in this war which was taken by the West after the Civil War in America. However this may be, at home weare in for troublous times. Reconstruction far more vital and profound than anything contemplated by the present Parliament alone can insure internal tranquillity.

Similar testimony could be quoted from a long list of careful writers whom no one would call alarmists.

In discussing a question of this kind preliminary to our study of reconstruction, we must avoid on the one hand a too easy optimism such as prevailed two decades ago, and on the other hand an unnecessary pessimism due to the results of the war. In these chapters I wish to study certain social and psychological forces which were at work before the war and which will go on hereafter whatever the result of the war may be. I am considering here not any kind of temporary reconstruction which shall reinstate economic conditions as they were before the war, but social reconstruction in the broader sense of social, political, and economic movements designed to correct evils inherent in our modern life. We live in the hope that Europe may be able to recover herself after her terrible convulsion, and that America may in part escape the price which Europe must at any rate pay. We may, therefore, here omit the darker picture of conditions in European capitals which so many writers have so vividly drawn,! and do so in the hope — a hope perhaps not fully justified — that the waves of crimes both of passion and of violence, the unrestrained and unashamed revelry and frivolity, the reckless extravagance and foolish spending, the barbaric and childish display, the apparent complete loss of the sense of social obligation, are merely manifestations of an acute nervous disease due to the strain of those terrible years of war and that the healing will speedily come. As the war passes into the background, as production is resumed, as order is restored, these things will cease to be so much in evidence. Possibly for that very reason we may become forgetful of certain real dangers that threaten the integrity of our modern society.

What are these dangers? That they are real and threatening even the most optimistically inclined cannot doubt. What has seemed to us sometimes the most imminent danger, the triumph of Bolshevism, Communism, or Anarchy,

1 Compare, for instance, the article by Sisley Huddleston, in the Atlantic Monthly for May, 1920, entitled “ The Menace of the World.”

fe) SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION may be really the least of the dangers which threaten our civilization. In a country brought to the very verge of ruin by war, it is conceivable that these movements might be the occasion of the final downfall, but the real cause. they could hardly be. If Bolshevism and similar movements may occasionally have the opportunity of trying themselves out, we shall soon learn how quickly they fuse into old social orders, how human nature triumphs over economic theory, how the old social and political relations and the old evils, too, remain much the same.

The real dangers lie deeper; they lie even deeper than war, although we are beginning to learn that it may indeed be war which will overthrow our civilization. War has lost all its glamour. In primitive times, and to some extent throughout human history, war has had a vitalizing and salutary effect on the human race, encouraging manly virtues and eliminating the weak and unfit. Now all this is changed. A mod- | ern war is a human scourge. It is a decivilizing agency. Its effects are deadening and paralyzing. It eliminates not the unfit but the fit. It selects for its slaughter the prime young men of all the nations. Its cost is so terrific that it buries pos-

INTRODUCTION II terity under a crushing debt. It idealizes all the medizeval virtues — physical bravery, personal sacrifice, unbounding sympathy, and group antagonism. It retards perhaps for a hundred years the virtues upon which the health and integrity of modern society depend — commercial honesty, sexual purity, international amity, temperance, and thrift.

And it is doubtful whether the effect of a modern war upon the vanquished is worse than upon the victors. The pitiful picture of poverty, the impoverishment of land and of natural resources, the waste and depletion of human vitality, the despair and discouragement of the vanquished are not much worse than the hate and revenge, the greed and the avarice, the profligate spending and the moral deterioration of the victors. Another great war may reduce the world to barbarism. }

But there is another danger even greater than war which threatens our modern civilization, and that is decadence — physical, mental, and moral. There is evidence of all of these which no thoughtful man can ignore. There is danger that physical degeneracy will follow upon our sedentary manner of living, upon the increase of wealth, ease, and luxury. There is danger that mental degeneracy will follow upon the reversal of the law of survival which in the past has eliminated the mentally unfit. There is danger of moral degeneracy in the period of readjustment from religious to purely ethical sanctions of conduct. 7

The decline of the birth-rate among our effective stocks, the disastrous results of modern philanthropy upon racial health, the rapid increase of subnormals, defectives, and ineffectives of all kinds, the devastation of racial values by the war, the exhaustion of racial reserves such as in ancient times replaced the decadent

1 The most serious aspect of this moral decadence is seen in the wave of bad music which has been sweeping the country and the world. The psychology of the jazz music — that is, the ground of its powerful appeal — has not yet been worked out. When this is done its explanation will probably be found to rest on anthropological grounds. It is barbaric music — literally, not figuratively. It recalls echoes of the ancient camp-fire with its barbaric syncopated strains and its accompanying dance, in which the sex element is predominant. The dancing craze of the present time, and the rag and jazz, are not, then, to be regarded merely as one phase of the moral decadence which follows a war, nor passed by whimsically as a temporary craze, having, to be sure, disastrous moral consequences, but condoned or excused as a passing fad. They are to be considered as reversions to a primitive culture and to primitive morals indicating that the upward urge of progress is ceasing. If this interpretation of the case be correct, it is a most serious indictment of our times and our civilization. Let us hope that it is not true, but that it is due to a temporary social fatigue of the higher brain centers resulting from the pressure of our tense and rapid living.

Romans, —all these present problems compared with which the economic questions of the day appear unimportant. According to Mr. Seth K. Humphrey, if it could be conceived that society should so arouse itself to its dangers as to see to it that the two million defectives and the three million border-liners or ineffectives in the United States should, either by sequestration, or in other ways, be prevented from further contributing to the deterioration of our racial stock, while we should be saved from the danger of racial degeneracy, we should still be condemned to mediocrity, owing to our increasing | number of “racial slackers.”

Without passing judgment here upon the accuracy of these views, we see that taken all together there are dangers enough which threaten our civilization. Other civilizations have perished under circumstances not essentially different.

Of course at this point the question might be raised whether our civilization is, anyway, worth saving. If it is not, we need trouble ourselves no further. Lately there has been a general awakening to the fact that our so-called modern

1 See his recent book entitled The Racial Prospect.

culture is after all nothing very wonderful. Even before the war we had begun to doubt whether the great hopes of the nineteenth century for the regeneration of the world through science, invention, and the conquest of nature, and through the economic surplus, were to be realized. What are the final tests of a high civilization? If they are found in a social system which offers a just distribution of wealth and opportunity, we are told that our present system is a failure. If they are found in art and morals, we have neither in high degree. If they are found in peace and social stability, what we see is war and social unrest. If they are found in physical stamina and racial health, we recall the humiliating revelations of the physical examinations of our five millions of drafted soldiers, showing one third of them physically unfit. If they are found in universal education, we remember that twenty-five per cent of our young men called to the colors were found to be illiterate.}

1 “Tliteracy suddenly revealed itself as a national handicap when we found that the two hundred thousand illiterates drawn sto the training camps appreciably delayed our military preparations. The pitiable inefficiency of a school system in which one fourth of all the teachers are scarcely more than boys and girls themselves finds an ominous parallel in the fact that one fourth of the drafted men were reported as being unable to write an intelligible letter or read a newspaper intelligently.” (W. C. Bagley, in The New Republic, December 17, 1919, p. 89.)

Is such a civilization worth the saving? No one with the slightest acquaintance with history will hesitate in his answer to this question. We may realize to the full the defects of our civilization, we may realize the much advertised inequalities of our social system — nevertheless every one knows that our civilization is worth saving and must be saved. When all is said, there has been for some centuries a rather steady growth in the things which we have come to prize — freedom, opportunity, security, physical comforts, medical, surgical, and dental service, control of contagious diseases, household conveniences, conveniences of travel and communication, a world-wide news service, the passing of fear and superstition, educational facilities for our children, constantly increasing rights and privileges of women, and so on through the long list. We should not care again to face hunger and cold and constant fear, nor should we be willing to sacrifice the security which law and order during the longer and longer intervals of peace have gained for our women and children and for our lives and property. When radical social reformers clamor for the overthrow of our present social system and arraign it as a system of slavery and poverty and cruel injustice, it is evident that they use these terms relatively, having in mind some ideal social order in which all our present freedom and security and our comforts and conveniences are to be retained and the glaring imperfections removed. Comparing our present well-being with any epoch in the past, we are certainly happy in our possession of all those things which we most prize. If on every side we see greed and jealousy and inequality and injustice and poverty and want and cfime and unrest, it is only necessary to look back over the road that mankind has traveled to find at every station of the journey more of each and all of these. It would be wholesome for us more often to look back and compare the degree of social welfare which we enjoy with that of former times. It was not many centuries ago, for instance, that the English peasants lived in hovels with dirt floors, slept on a pile of straw, and were afflicted with vermin.

Far more noteworthy than the security, the freedom, and the comforts of the present age — which themselves may be indirectly sources of danger — are its idealism and its visions of better things. When, for instance, we think of our disappointed hopes in the Treaty of Versailles, when we are humiliated by the spectacle of hatred, greed,! and revenge, and the display of narrow and selfish nationalism which displaced the fine idealism of the early years of the war, we are ready to despair of any progress and to condemn our whole modern civilization. But we forget that hatred, greed, and revenge are familiar things in the history of the world, while the idealism itself is something new. In the year 1914 the world was stirred to its depths by an idealism which was the very fruitage of twenty centuries of Christian civilization; that this revolt against autocracy, this mighty cry for fair play and justice and democracy which later was embodied in the fourteen points was possible at all as a great world movement redeems the picture, at any rate to some extent, and holds out great promise for the future. In spite of our selfish strife for personal advantage, there is gradually emerging a social conscience. In spite of our frenzied nationalism, there is slowly arising a spirit of international brotherhood.

But our civilization is redeemed not merely by its idealism, not merely by its material blessings, but even more by its charity, its sympathy, its faith, and its heroism. Grossness there is indeed

1 “Tmbecile greed” is what John Maynard Keynes calls it. See his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 147, ;

a plenty, but ‘‘above all this grossness there towers a sweetness and beauty of thought, and an earnestness.of purpose, a sincerity of effort, which makes the present time fuller of moral purpose, fuller of desire to be clean and to help others to be clean, than graced any previous period in the history of either England or. America.” }

One of the reasons that our civilization seems so fraught with danger is the startling rapidity of social changes at the present time. The changing social order has become a commonplace in speech and writing, but although the world is at present changing with kaleidoscopic, yes, with cinematographic rapidity, it is comforting to observe that up to the present there is nothing in these changes to be greatly alarmed about. Some of them, such as the enormous burden of bonded indebtedness being piled up now by states, cities, corporations, etc., and the apparent growing laxity in some departments of morals, are causes for apprehension certainly. These changes have to do with rather profound aspects of our social life and may stand in the way of progress or result in some kind of social _1 Samuel C. Schmucker, The Meaning of Evolution, p. 256.

stagnation, not catastrophic so much as insidiously weakening. But when we contemplate the actual changes in our social order up to date, we must admit that for the most part they are changes for the better.

Consider, for instance, the actual steps that have been taken in the socialization and democ-~ ratization of the world. However sinister or beneficent the extreme socialization and democratization which is proposed may be, what has really happened thus far is a change for the better. Favorable also are the actual steps which have been taken in the securing of social justice by establishing a legal minimum wage; in conceding the right of labor to organize and act collectively; in putting increased taxation upon large fortunes, incomes, and inheritances; in the institution of numerous successful plans for harmonizing the interests of capital and labor in many large manufacturing concerns; in making and enforcing laws against child labor; in providing adequate and sanitary houses; in banishing the unsightly and evil-smelling saloon from American towns and cities; in the enfranchisement of women and in their greatly enlarged sphere of action and influence in society; in the noteworthy steps which have been taken in physical training, particularly forwomen and girls; and in the advent of some degree of common sense in respect to dress. This list of happy changes could be greatly enlarged, as everybody knows, and these grateful facts, even though we are still convinced that our civilization is in danger, may ease our anxiety a good deal.!

Then there is another alleviating consideration. It may be that it is not so much that our social evils have increased, as that sensitiveness to them has increased. Long before the war it had come to be believed that society was on the sick-list, needing drastic treatment, if not a major operation. We had become painfully conscious of certain social “evils,” and our attention was fixed more and more upon certain loudly advertised ‘‘cures” for them. Among these evils were the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity, the constant clashes between labor and capital, the unjust exclusion of women from political and economic privileges, the alcohol evil, social diseases, poverty,

1 Whoever is pessimistically inclined about social progress should read that excellent little book by Edward A. Ross, What is America, and also the book by Walter E. Weyl, The New Democracy, especiaily, chapter x1v, and the recent work of Nicholas Murray Butler, Js America Worth Saving?

crime, and the failing birth-rate. Among the proposed “cures”? were the further extension of Democracy, Socialism, Syndicalism, Votes for Women, National Prohibition, Codperation, and Industrial Democracy.

Then came the war, and at once our attention was focused upon this as the worst evil of all. That such an awful calamity could suddenly befall the world increased still further our distrust of our whole social system, and we began at once to search for some cure for this further evil, and hoped to find it in a League of Nations, international agreements, and the self-determination of peoples.

It is characteristic of our age to be peculiarly sensitive to its evils. This sickening feeling that the world is in a very bad way and needs redemption is illustrated in the book written by Alfred Russel Wallace shortly before his death, in which he bewailed the degeneracy of the times, dwelling upon the prevalence of poverty and crime, and frightful social diseases, and social injustice, in a note almost of despair.!

Certainly it is a hopeful sign that we have become so sensitive to injustice, so conscious of social evils, so intolerant of wrong-doing, so

1 Social Environment and Moral Progress, chaps. vui-xu.

repelled by the horrors of war, that our own era, which is really clean and wholesome and peaceful and righteous as compared with past periods in human history, seems to us so imperfect. Thus there is, at any rate, this element of hope in the situation that there must be some spark of divinity in the human mind, since we compare the present, not with the real past, but always with an ideal future.

The special characteristic of our time is, therefore, not the presence of evils, of which, to be sure, there are quite enough, but the peculiar consciousness of them and the resolute will to cure them — a will so persistent and so determined that it is certain that the twentieth century will see profound changes in our social order. But it does not follow necessarily that these changes will be beneficial. ‘They will be experimental, and the prophet of social catastrophe may well question whether the radical experiments which it is proposed to make in social reform may not prove to be destructive of the civilization which we have. This is the first time in history that man has consciously and with determined purpose entered upon the task of directing his own fortunes. Hitherto he has been a puppet in the hands of cosmic forces — evolution, climate, the struggle for existence; the industrial revolution wrought by mechanical inventions and by the discovery of coal, iron, and petroleum; and, finally, the retroactive influences of the American and Pacific frontiers. Now the period of conscious control has come.

But is this conscious control to be intelligent control, or is it to be the kind which the newly rich suddenly acquire over their material surroundings? So far as we can see at present, the era of intelligent control lies far in the future, and the control which is to mark the twentieth century will spring from an impulsive idealism characterized by a keen sensitiveness to our present social evils, rather than by a comprehensive grasp of the whole situation. We are to enter upon the deliberate attempt at social reconstruction, but with a kind of adolescent impetuousness, and a fatuous, almost fanatical, faith in the magic of certain symbols to cure social evils. ‘This is, no doubt, a necessary stage in the progress of social control, but it is not without its dangers. We have gained the power to remodel our social order; have we gained the necessary poise, the scientific, historical, and psychological knowledge that will make our meddling safe?