Social process

LIFE AS CONFLICT—CONFLICT AND ORGANIC GROWTH—CONFLICT INSTIGATES CO-OPERATION—ORGANIZATION MAKES THE CONDITIONS OF CONFLICT—THE TWO AS AN ORGANIC WHOLE—CONFLICT AND WASTE—CONFLICT AND PROGRESS

From the perennial discussion regarding the meaning of conflict in life two facts clearly emerge: first, that conflict is inevitable, and, second, that it is capable of a progress under which more humane, rational, and co-operative forms supplant those which are less so. We are born to struggle as the sparks fly upward, but not necessarily to brutality and waste.

Vivere militare est; even the gentlest spirits have felt that life is an eternal strife. Jesus came to bring not peace but a sword, and the Christian life has always been likened to that of a soldier.

The thing is to fight a good fight, one that leaves life better than it found it. In the individual and in the race as a whole there is an onward spirit that from birth to the grave is ever working against opposition. A cloud of disease germs surrounds us which we beat off only by the superior vigor of our own blood-corpuscles, and to which as our organism weakens in age we inevitably succumb. It is much the same in the psychological sphere. Every meeting with men is, in one way or another, a demand on our energy, a form of conflict, and when we are weakened and nervous we cannot withstand the eyes of mankind but seek to avoid them by seclusion.

The love that pervades life, if it is affirmative and productive, works itself out through struggle, and the best marriage is a kind of strife. The sexes are as naturally antagonistic as they are complementary, and it is precisely in their conflict that a passionate intimacy is found. We require opposition to awaken and direct our faculties, and can hardly exert ourselves without it. “What we agree with leaves us inactive,” said Goethe, “but contradiction makes us productive.” Stanley, the explorer of Africa, writes: “When a man returns home and finds for the moment nothing to struggle against, the vast resolve which has sustained him through a long and difficult enterprise dies away, burning as it sinks in the heart; and thus the greatest successes are often accompanied by a peculiar melancholy.”^[5]

It is apparent that both conflict and co-operation have their places in our process of organic growth. As forces become organized they co-operate, but it is through a selective method, involving conflict, that this is brought about. Such a method compares the available forces, develops the ones most fitted to the situation, and compels others to seek functions where, presumably, they can serve the organism better. There seems to be no other way for life to move ahead. And a good kind of co-operation is never static, but a modus vivendi under which we go on to new sorts of opposition and growth. People may be said to agree in order that their conflict may be more intimate and fruitful, otherwise there is no life in the relation.^[6]

The two are easily seen to be inseparable in every-day practice. When, for example, people have come together to promote social improvement, the first thing to do is to elect officers. This may not involve a conflict, but the principle is there, and the more earnestness there is, the more likelihood of opposition. Then there must be a discussion of principles and programme, with occasional ballots to see which view has won. I remember reading of several rather serious conflicts within societies for the promotion of peace, and churches and philanthropic movements are not at all lacking in such incidents.

Co-operation within a whole is usually brought about by some conflict of the whole with outside forces. Just as the individual is compelled to self-control by the fact that he cannot win his way in life unless he can make his energies work harmoniously, so in a group of any sort, from a football-team to an empire, success demands coordination. The boys on the playground learn not only that they must strive vigorously with their fellows for their places on the team, but also that as soon as their team meets another this kind of conflict must yield to a common service of the whole. In no way do working people get more discipline in fellowship and co-operation than in carrying through a strike. The more intelligent students recognize some measure of conflict between capital and labor as functional and probably lasting. Like the struggle of political parties it is a normal process, through which issues are defined and institutions developed.

And likewise with nations. Their enlargement and consolidation, throughout history, including the remarkable development of internal organization and external co-operation due to the great war, have almost invariably been occasioned by the requirements of conflict. And if we are to have a lasting world-federation it must preserve, while controlling, the principle of national struggle.

A factor of co-operation, of organization, always presides over conflict and fixes its conditions. There is never a state of utter chaos but always a situation which is the outcome of the organic development of the past, and to this the contestants of the hour must adjust themselves in order to succeed. That this is the case when the situation includes definite rules, as in athletic contests, is manifest. But the control of the social organization over conflict goes far beyond such rules, operating even more through a general situation in which certain modes of conflict are conducive to success and others are not. In business the customary practices and opinions must be observed as carefully as the laws, if one would not find every man’s hand against him, and the same is true in sports, in professional careers, in manual trades, in every sphere whatsoever.

Even in war, which is the nearest approach to anarchy that we have on any large scale, it is not the case that a presiding order is wholly absent. Any nation which defies the rooted sentiment of mankind as to what is fair in this form of conflict, regarding no law but that of force, sets in operation against itself currents of distrust and resentment that in the long run will overbear any temporary gain. The most truculent states so far understand this that they try to give their aggressions the appearance of justice.

The more one thinks of it the more he will see that conflict and co-operation are not separable things, but phases of one process which always involves something of both. Life, seen largely, is an onward struggle in which now one of these phases and now another may be more conspicuous, but from which neither can be absent.

You can resolve the social order into a great number of co-operative wholes of various sorts, each of which includes conflicting elements within itself upon which it is imposing some sort of harmony with a view to conflict with other wholes. Thus the mind of a man is full of wrangling impulses, but his struggle with the world requires that he act as a unit. A labor-union is made up of competing and disputing members; but they must manage to agree when it comes to a struggle with the employer. And employer and employees, whatever their struggles, must and do combine into a whole for the competition of their plant against others. The competing plants, however, unite through boards of trade or similar bodies to further the interests of their city against those of other cities. And so the political factions of a nation may be at the height of conflict, but if they are loyal they unite at once when war breaks out with another country.

And war itself is not all conflict, but often generates a mutual interest and respect, a “sympathy of concussion.” A scholar who perished in the trenches of the German army in France wrote: “Precisely when one has to face suffering as I do, it is then a bond of union enlaces me with those who are over there—on the other side.... If I get out of this—but I have little hope—my dearest duty will be to plunge into the study of what those who have been our enemies think.” It is not impossible to think of the battling nations as struggling onward toward some common end which they cannot see. They slay one another, but they put a common faith and loyalty into the conflict; and out of the latter may come a clearer view of the common right. It is a moral experiment to which each contributes and defends its own hypothesis, and if the righteous cause wins, or the righteous elements in each cause, all will profit by the result. So it was with the American Civil War, as we all feel now. North and South say: “We differed as to what was right. It had to be fought out. There might have been another way if our minds had been otherwise, but as it was the way to unity lay through blood.”

Much has been said, from time to time, about our age being one of combination, in the economic world at least, and of the decline of competition. It would be more exact to say that both combination and competition have been taking on new forms, but without any general change in the relation between them. What happens, for example, when a trust is formed to unite heretofore competing plants, is that unification takes place along a new line for the purpose of aiding certain interests in their conflict for aggrandizement. It is merely a new alignment of forces, and has no tendency toward a general decline of competition. Indeed every such trust not only fights outside competitors, but deliberately fosters manifold competition within its system, for the sake of exciting exertion and efficiency. The different plants are still played off one against the other, as are also the different departments, the different foremen in each department, and the different workmen. By an elaborate system of accounting, every man and every group is led to measure its work against that of other men and other groups, and to struggle for superiority. And the great combinations themselves have not been and will not be left at peace. If they absorb all their competitors they will have to deal with the state, which can never permit any form of power to go unchecked.

It is evident that the vigor of the struggle is proportionate to the human energy that goes into it, and that we cannot expect tranquillity. It does not follow, however, that the amount of conflict is a measure of progress. The function of struggle is to work out new forms of co-operation, and if it does not achieve this but goes on in a blind and aimless way after the time for readjustment has arrived, it becomes mere waste. Synthesis also takes energy, and very commonly a higher or more rational form of energy than conflict. Critics of the present state of things are wrong when they condemn competition altogether, but they are right in condemning many present forms of it. Extravagant and fallacious advertising, price-cutting conflicts, the exploitation of children and squandering of natural resources, not to mention wars, indicate a failure of the higher constructive functions. Indeed the irrational continuance of such methods exhausts the energies that should put an end to them, just as dissipation exhausts a man’s power of resistance, so that the more he indulges himself the less able he is to stop.

Evidently progress is to be looked for not in the suppression of conflict but in bringing it under rational control. To do this calls for some sort of a social constitution, formal or informal, covering the sphere of struggle, a whole that is greater than the conflicting elements and capable of imposing regulation upon them. This regulation must be based on principles broad enough to provide for pacific change and adaptation, to meet new conditions. So far as we can achieve this we may expect that struggle will rise to higher forms, war giving place to judicial procedure, a selfish struggle for existence to emulation in service, a wasteful and disorderly competition to one that is rational and efficient. Our past development has been in this direction, and we may hope to continue it.

But the current of events is ever bringing to pass unforeseen changes, and if these are great and sudden they may again throw us into a disorderly struggle, just as a panic in a theatre may convert an assemblage of polite and considerate people into a ruthless mob. Something of this kind has taken place in connection with the industrial revolution, bringing on a confusion and demoralization from which we have only partly emerged. Another case is where a conflict, for whose orderly conduct the organization does not provide, having long developed beneath the surface in the shape of antagonistic ideals and institutions, breaks out disastrously at last, as did the Civil War in the United States, or the great war in Europe. We can provide against this only in the measure that we foresee and control the process in which we live. If we can do this we may look for an era of deliberate and assured progress, in which conflict is confined and utilized like fire under the boiler.

INTELLECTUAL PARTICULARISM—ITS FALLACY—ECONOMIC DETERMINISM—THE ORGANIC VIEW AS AFFECTING METHODS OF STUDY—WHY PARTICULARISM IS COMMON

We meet in social discussion a way of thinking opposed to the conception of organic process as I have tried to expound it, which I will call intellectual particularism.^[7] It consists in holding some one phase of the process to be the source of all the others, so that they may be treated as subsidiary to it.

A form of particularism that until recently was quite general is one that regards the personal wills of individual men, supplemented, perhaps, by the similar will of a personal God, as the originative factor in life from which all else comes. Everything took place, it was assumed, because some one willed it so, and for the will there was no explanation or antecedent history: it was the beginning, the creative act. When this view prevailed there could be no science of human affairs, because there was no notion of system or continuity in them; life was kept going by a series of arbitrary impulses. As opposed to this we have the organic idea that will is as much effect as cause, that it always has a history, and is no more than one phase of a great whole.

In contrast to particularistic views of this sort we have others which find the originative impulse in external conditions of life, such as climate, soil, flora, and fauna; and regard intellectual and social activities merely as the result of the physiological needs of men seeking gratification under these conditions.

A doctrine of the latter character having wide acceptance at the present time is “economic determinism,” which looks upon the production of wealth and the competition for it as the process of which everything else is the result. The teaching of Marxian socialism upon this point is well known, and some economists who are not socialists nevertheless hold that all important social questions grow out of the economic struggle, and that all social institutions, including those of education, art, and religion, should be judged according as they contribute to success in this struggle. This is, indeed, a view natural to economists, who are accustomed to look at life from this window, though most of them have enough larger philosophy to avoid any extreme form of it.^[8]

The fallacy of all such ideas lies in supposing that life is built up from some one point, instead of being an organic whole which is developing as a whole now and, so far as we know, always has done so in the past. Nothing is fixed or independent, everything is plastic and takes influence as well as gives it. No factor of life can exist for men except as it is merged in the organic system and becomes an effect as much as a cause of the total development. If you insist that there is a centre from which the influence comes, all flowing in one direction, you fly in the face of fact. What observation shows is a universal interaction, in which no factor appears antecedent to the rest.

Any particularistic explanation of things, I should say, must be based on the idea that most institutions, most phases of life, are passive, receive force but do not impart it, are mere constructions and not transitive processes. But where will you find such passive institutions or phases? Are not all alive, all factors in the course of history as we know it? It seems to me that if you think concretely, in terms of experience, such an explanation cannot be definitely conceived.

I hold that the organic view is not a merely abstract theory about the nature of life and of society, but is concrete and verifiable, giving a more adequate general description than other theories of what we actually see, and appealing to fact as the test of its value. It does not attempt to say how things began, but claims that their actual working, in the present and in the historical past, corresponds to the organic conception.

Let any one fix his mind upon some one factor or group of factors which may appear at first to be original, and see if, upon reflection, it does not prove to be an outgrowth of the organic whole of history. Thus many start their explanation of modern life with the industrial revolution in England. But what made the industrial revolution? Was it brought into the world by an act of special creation, or was it a natural sequence of the preceding political, social, intellectual, and industrial development? Evidently the latter: it is a historical fact, like another, to be explained as the outcome of a total process, just as much an effect of the mental and social conditions of the past as it came to be a cause of those of the future. I think this will always prove to be the case when we inquire into the antecedents of any factor in life. There is no beginning; we know nothing about beginnings; there is always continuity with the past, and not with any one element only of the past, but with the whole interacting organism of man.

If universal interaction is a fact, it follows that social life is a whole which can be understood only by studying its total working, not by fixing attention upon one activity and attempting to infer the rest. The latter method implies an idea similar to that of special creation, an idea that there is a starting-place, a break of continuity, a cause that is not also an effect.

Such visible and tangible things as climate, fuel, soils, fruits, grains, wild or domestic animals, and the like have for many a more substantial appearance than ideas or institutions, and they are disposed to lean upon these, or upon some human activity immediately connected with them, as a solid support for their philosophy of life. But after all such things exist for us only as they have interacted with our traditional organism of life and become a part of it. Climate, as it actually touches us, may be said to be a social institution, of which clothes, shelter, artificial heat, and irrigation are obvious aspects. And so with our economic “environment.” What are deposits of iron and coal, or fertility of soil, or navigable waters, or plants and animals capable of domestication, except in conjunction with the traditional arts and customs through which these are utilized? To a people with one inheritance of ideas a coal-field means nothing at all, to a people with another it means a special development of industry. Such conditions owe their importance, like anything else, to the way they work in with the process already going on.

Another reason for the popularity of material or economic determinism is the industrial character of our time and of many of our more urgent problems, which has caused our minds to be preoccupied with this class of ideas. A society like ours produces such theories just as a militarist society produces theories that make war the dominating process.

It is easy to show that the “mores of maintenance,” the way a people gets its living, exercise an immense influence upon all their ideas and institutions.^[9] But what are the “mores of maintenance”? Surely not something external to their history and imposed upon them by their material surroundings, as seems often to be assumed in this connection, but simply their whole mental and social organism, functioning for self-support through its interaction with these surroundings. They are as much the effect as they can possibly be the cause of psychical phenomena, and to argue economic determinism from their importance begs the whole question. Material factors are essential in the organic whole of life, but certainly no more so than the spiritual factors, the ideas, and institutions of the group.

Professor W. G. Sumner, probably by way of protest against a merely ideal view of history, said: “We have not made America; America has made us.” Evidently we might turn this around, and it would be just as plausible. “We” have made of America something very different from what the American Indians made of it, or from what the Spaniards would probably have made of it if it had fallen to them. “America” (the United States) is the total outcome of all the complex spiritual and material factors—the former chiefly derived from European sources—which have gone into its development.

To treat the human mind as the primary factor in life, gradually unfolding its innate tendencies under the moulding power of conditions, is no less and no more plausible than to begin with the material. Why should originative impulse be ascribed to things rather than to mind? I see no warrant in observed fact for giving preference to either.^[10]

It is the aim of the organic view to “see life whole,” or at least as largely as our limitations permit. However, it by no means discredits the study of society from particular standpoints, such as the economic, the political, the military, the religious. This is profitable because the whole is so vast that to get any grasp of it we need to approach it now from one point of view, now from another, fixing our attention upon each phase in turn, and then synthetizing it all as best we can.

Moreover, every phenomenon stands in more immediate relation to some parts of the process than to others, making it necessary that these parts should be especially studied in order to understand this phenomenon. Hence it may be quite legitimate, with reference to a given problem, to regard certain factors as of peculiar importance. I would not deny that poverty, for example, is to be considered chiefly in connection with the economic system; while I regard the attempt to explain literature, art, or religion mainly from this standpoint as fantastic. But when we are seeking a large view we should endeavor to embrace the whole process. No study of a special chain of causes is more than an incident in that perception of a reciprocating whole which I take to be our great aim.

If we think in this way we shall approach the comprehension of a period of history, or of any social situation, very much as we approach a work of organic art, like a Gothic cathedral. We view the cathedral from many points, and at our leisure, now the front and now the apse, now taking in the whole from a distance, now lingering near at hand over the details, living with it, if we can, for months, until gradually there arises a conception of it which is confined to no one aspect, but is, so far as the limits of our mind permit, the image of the whole in all its unity and richness.

We must distinguish between the real particularist, who will not allow that any other view but his own is tenable, and the specialist, who merely develops a distinctive line of thought without imagining that it is all-sufficing. The latter is a man you can work with, while the former tries to rule the rest of us off the field. Of course he does not succeed, and the invariable outcome is that men tire of him and retain only such special illumination as his ardor may have cast; so that he contributes his bit much like the specialist. Still, it would diminish the chagrin that awaits him, and the confusion of his disciples, if he would recognize that the life process is an evolving whole of mutually interacting parts, any one of which is effect as well as cause.

It should be the outcome of the organic view that we embrace specialty with ardor, and yet recognize that it is partial and tentative, needing from time to time to be reabsorbed and reborn of the whole. The Babel of conflicting particularisms resembles the condition of religious doctrine a century ago, when every one took it for granted that there could be but one true form of belief, and there were dozens of antagonistic systems claiming to be this form. The organic conception, in any sphere, requires that we pursue our differences in the sense of a larger unity.

I take it that what the particularist mainly needs is a philosophy and general culture which shall enable him to see his own point of view in something like its true relation to the whole of thought. It is hard to believe, for example, that an economist who also reads Plato or Emerson comprehendingly could adhere to economic determinism.

There are several rather evident reasons for the prevalence of particularism. One is the convenience of a fixed starting-point for thinking. Our minds find it much easier to move by a lineal method, in one-two-three order, than to take in action and reaction, operating at many points, in a single view. In fact, it is necessary to begin somewhere, and when we have begun somewhere we soon come to feel that that is the beginning, for everybody, and not merely an arbitrary selection of our own.

Very like this is what I may call the illusion of centrality, the fact that if you are familiar with any one factor of life it presents itself to you as a centre from which influence radiates in all directions, somewhat in the same way that the trees in an orchard will appear to radiate from any point where you happen to stand. Indeed it really is such a centre; the illusion arises from not seeing that every other factor is a centre also. The individual is a very real and active thing, but so is the group or general tendency; it is true that you can see life from the standpoint of imitation (several writers have centred upon this) but so you can from the standpoint of competition or organization. The economic process is as vital as anything can be, and there is nothing in life that does not change when it changes; but the same is true of the ideal processes; geography is important, but not more so than the technical institutions through which we react upon it; and so on.

Another root of particularism is the impulse of self-assertion. After we have worked over an idea a while we identify ourselves with it, and are impelled to make it as big as possible—to ourselves as well as to others. There are few books on sociology, or any other subject, in which this influence does not appear at least as clearly as anything which the author intended to express. It is not possible or desirable to avoid these ambitions, but they ought to be disciplined by a total view.

I have little hope of converting hardened particularists by argument; but it would seem that the spectacle of other particularists maintaining by similar reasoning views quite opposite to their own must, in time, have some effect upon them.