Social Psychology
Chapter 9: The Radiant Points of Conventionality
Edward Alsworth Ross
Table of Contents | Next | Previous
PERHAPS the most general clew to the direction and spread of conventionality is given in the statement: The social superior is imitated by the social inferior.[1]
Before illustrating this principle, the great key to conventional imitation, let us consider some of its limitations.
Basic instincts and needs may resist imitation of the superior
Workingmen do not accept the bougeois aversion to early marriage
In the first place the influence of the social superior may be withstood in case it clashes with fundamental needs or instincts. For instance, in the upper class from time to time it has been held "bad form " for ladies to nurse their children; but this convention violates so deep-rooted an instinct that it has never come into general good repute and probably never will. In his code of lady service or of duelling the social superior has at times gone to such absurd lengths that the common sense of the inferior has revolted. In the England of the seventeenth century it was not the profligacy of the upper class, but the Puritanism of the middle class, that finally gave the key-note to English morals. We see the same thing in the refusal of wage-earners to accept the bourgeois aversion to early marriage. Miss Addams [2] points out that the charity visitor, as she comes to know the situation of the poor, " discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards
Nor the bourgeois doctrine of the rights of children
(148) have been, and it takes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class which fail to fit the bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people. The charity visitor holds well-grounded views upon the imprudence of early marriages, quite naturally, because she comes from a family and circle of professional and business people. A professional man is scarcely equipped and started in his profession before he is thirty. A business man, if he is on the road to success, is much nearer prosperity at thirty-five than twenty-five, and it is therefore wise for these men not to marry in the twenties; but this does not apply to the working-man. In many trades he is laid upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly all trades he receives the largest wages in his life between twenty and thirty." " He naturally regards his children as his savings-bank; he expects them to care for him when he gets old, and in some trades old age comes very early." The writer goes on to show why parental abdication, now so popular with the bourgeoisie, is not imitated by wage- earners. "Parents who work hard and anticipate an old age when they can no longer earn take care that their children shall expect to divide their wages with them from the very first. Such a parent, when successful, impresses the immature, nervous system of the child, thus tyrannically establishing habits of obedience, so that the nerves and will may not depart from this control when the child is older. The charity visitor, whose family relation is lifted quite out of this, does not in the least understand the industrial foundation for this family tyranny.
"The head of a kindergarten training class once addressed a club of working women, and spoke of the des-
(149) -potism which is often established over little children. She said that the so-called determination to break a child's will many times arose from a lust of dominion, and she urged the ideal relationship founded upon love and confidence. But many of the women were puzzled. One of them remarked as she came out of the club room, I If you did not keep control over them from the time they are little, you would never get their wages when they are grown up.' Another one said: 'Ali, of course she [meaning the speaker] doesn't have to depend upon her children's wages. She can afford to be lax with them, because even if they don't give money to her, she can get along without it."[3]
By sheer merit a thing may mount in defiance of social gravity
Happily, social prestige is not everything, and the humblest person may launch a doctrine or ideal which, by reason of its strength or fitness, will ultimately find favor with the upper social layers. Chrysippus and Epictetus, though without social vantage-ground, radiated Stoic ideas to the very apex of Roman society. Think of the success- ful propagation of the Gospel by Jews and slaves and "base mechanicals" in a world ripe for monotheism and a purer ideal! Luther, George Fox, Howard, Pestalozzi, George Stevenson, Garrison, and Lincoln are men who in some way impressed society, without a dais to stand on.
The lower classes may copy their ancestors rather than their superiors
Then, in a strongly traditional society, the members of a lower caste will prefer to imitate their ancestors rather than ape the upper caste. This is the Bauern-Stolz so often met with in Germany and Austria. "Rarely, indeed, even among the most prosperous Bauers, so long as they are occupied in the cultivation of their land, is there any tendency to ape the manners or social customs
(150) of even the poorest of the aristocracy or of the official or the professional classes."[4]
The superior insensibility borrows from the inferior
Again, just as bodies of different temperature interchange heat, so classes on different levels interchange characteristics, and to a certain extent the superior borrows from the inferior. Slang or argot invades literature; homely country phrases flavor city speech; darky songs and dances win the entrée to the drawing-room; Marie Antoinette in her Petit Trianon plays at peasant life; Millet introduces the peasant into high art; the nobility accepts the frock-coat and the simple manners of the middle class; masters become tainted with the sensuality and vices of their slaves; our Southerners soften their consonants and open their vowels in unwitting imitation of the negro. When one language drives out another, it nevertheless borrows some words from the displaced tongue. English vanquishes Spanish in the Southwest, but accepts such words as calabash, cotton, palaver, guerilla, alligator, corridor, adobe, patio, arroyo, renegade, plaza, etc. From the long-vanished Indian speech English took such words as potato, squaw, wigwam, moccasin, pemmican, hurricane, and wampum.
Culture men enveloped by an inferior race become conservative
Whites in contact with aborigines let down. Certain of the first trans-Alleghany settlers became so Indianized as to wear a buckskin dress, marry a squaw, and let the scalp-lock grow. Realizing this danger of let-down, an isolated white folk enveloped by savages becomes intensely conservative. The French Canadians of to-day are French of the seventeenth century, and their conservatism has, no doubt, the same root that Miss Schreiner[5] finds for Boer conservatism.
(151)
The key to Boer conservative
"It is true that the Boer has preserved in the South African wilds the ideals and manners of his ancestors of two centuries ago; that in him the seventeenth, and even remnants of the sixteenth, century are found surviving as among few peoples in Europe; but if this survival of the past be taken to imply . . . the immobility of the weak, and therefore unadaptable, nature, not having the vitality and strength to change, it is wholly untrue. Nothing so indicates the dogged, and almost fierce, strength of the South African Boer, as this unique conservatism. Placed in a new environment, removed from all the centres of European culture, thrown out into the wilds of the African deserts, surrounded by primitive conditions of life, and often by none but savage and primitive human creatures, nothing could have been easier, or would have seemed almost more inevitable, than that rapid change should at once have set up in the South African Boer; nothing more difficult, and almost impossible, than for him to maintain that degree of cultivation and civilization which he brought from Europe and already possessed. Again and again, under like conditions, men of lofty European races have been modified wholly. Thrown amid new and primitive surroundings, when, after a few generations of isolation from European life, they come to be considered by us, we find that whatever of culture or knowledge they brought with them has vanished; their religion has atrophied, their habits of life are modified, and among savage peoples, and often interblending with them, they have lost all, or almost all, the old distinctive marks. They are a new human modification, but a modification often lower in the scale of life than the primitive people by whom they were surrounded; a degenerate and
(152) decayed people. On the cast and west coasts of Africa, in South America, and elsewhere, again and again this has happened. Europeans, not having the conserving strength to retain what they possess, have gone backward in the scale of being. With the South African Boer this has not been so.
That little flag of seventeenth-century civilization which he took with him into the wilderness two hundred years ago, we still find to-day gallantly flying over his head, untorn and hardly faded after its two centuries' sojourn in the desert. With the quick instinct of a powerful race, the Boer saw, or rather felt, his danger. The traditions, the faith, the manners, of his fathers, he would hold fast by these. To move, to be modified by the conditions about him, was to go backward: he would not move; he planted his foot, and stood still!
"You say he still wears the little short jacket of his great-great-grandfather's great-grandfather? Yes, and had he given it up, it would have been to wear none at all! So, line by line, his wife made it, as his father's forefather's had been. You say he stuck generation after generation to the straight-backed elbow-chair and the hard-backed sofa of his forefathers? Yes, and had he given them up, it would have been to adopt nothing more aesthetic; it would have been to sit on the floor; so he held solemnly by the old elbow-chair and the straightbacked sofa, almost as a matter of faith.
"You say he had only one book, and clung to it with a passion that was almost idolatry? Yes, but had he given up that one book, it could not have been to fill his library with the world's literature; it would have been to have no literature at all! That one book, which he painfully
(153) spelled through, and so mightily treasured, was his only link with the world's great stream of thought and knowledge . . . his one possible inlet to the higher spiritual and intellectual life of the human race. . . . If the Boer had forsaken his Bible, we should have found him to-day a savage, lower than the Bantus about him, because decayed. In nothing has he so shown his strength as in clinging to it.
"To one who wisely studies the history of the African Boer, nothing is more pathetic than this strange, fierce adherence of his to the past. That cry, which unceasingly for generations has rung out from the Boer woman's elbowchair, 'My children, never forget you are white men! Do always as you have seen your father and mother do! I was no cry of a weak conservatism, fearful of change; it was the embodiment of the passionate determination of a great, little people, not to lose the little it possessed and so sink in the scale of being. To laugh at the conservatism of the Boer is to laugh at the man who, floating above a whirlpool, clings fiercely with one hand to the only outstretching rock he can reach, and who will not relax his hold on it by one finger till he has found something firmer to grasp."
Public education as a means of resisting down-pull
The English settlers in America felt the down-pull, due partly to contact with the aborigines, partly to the rude struggle with the wilderness,[6] but they successfully withstood it by organizing education. Fiske [7] speaks of the "widespread seminal influence of Yale and Harvard, sending their graduates into every town and village as ministers, lawyers, and doctors, schoolmasters and editors,
(154) merchants and country squires." And adds: "Among the founders of New England were an extraordinary number of clergymen noted for their learning, such as Hooker and Shepard, Cotton and Williams, Eliot and the Mathers; together with such cultivated laymen as Winthrop and Bradford, familiar with much of the best that was written in the world, and to whom the pen was an easy and natural instrument for expressing their thoughts. The character originally impressed upon New England by such men was maintained by the powerful influence of the colleges and schools, so that there was always more attention devoted to scholarship and to writing than in any of the other colonies. Communities of Europeans, thrust into a wilderness and severed from Europe by the ocean, were naturally in danger of losing their higher culture and lapsing into the crudeness of frontier life. All the American colonies were deeply affected by this situation. While there were many and great advantages in the freedom from sundry Old World trammels, yet in some respects the influence of the wilderness was barbarizing. It was due to the circumstances above mentioned that the New England colonies were more successful than the others in resisting this influence, and avoiding a breach of continuity in the higher spiritual life of the community."[8]
(155)
Conservatism of the Germans at Tiflis
The colony of five or six thousand Wurtembergers at Tiflis, descended from the emigrants who left their country because their prince insisted on forcing on his subjects a new hymn-book which they considered too lax in its statements of doctrine, have become encysted in a conservatism which enables them to resist their Russo-Oriental environment. Says Bryce:[9] "Here have they dwelt ever since, preserving all their old ways and habits, cherishing their Protestant faith, and singing out of their dear old hymn-book. Rows of trees run along the principal street; breweries and beer-gardens border it, where the honest burgher sits at night and listens over his supper to a band, as his cousins are doing at the same hour in the suburbs of Stuttgart. Tidy little Fraus come out in the evening cool to the doorsteps, and knit and chat among their fair-haired Karls and Gretchens. They have their own schools, far better than any which Russian organization produces; they are nearly all Protestants, with a wholesome Protestant contempt for their supersti-
(156) -tious Georgian and Armenian neighbors. They speak nothing but German among themselves, and show little or no sign of taking to Russian ways or letting themselves be absorbed by the populations that surround them. It was very curious to contrast this complete persistency of Teutonism here with the extraordinarily rapid absorption of the Germans among other citizens which one sees going on in the American West, Milwaukee, e.g. Here they are exiles from a higher civilization planted in the midst of a lower one; there they lose themselves among a kindred people, with whose ideals and political institutions they quickly come to sympathize."
Most diffusions obey social gravity
The descent of wants
In general, however, the current of imitation runs from superior to inferior. Accent, style of handwriting, gestures, salutations, etiquette, amusements, and modes of entertainment pass from Americans to immigrants, from big boys to little boys in school, from seniors to freshmen, from the travelled to the stay-at-homes, from whites to blacks, from society women to débutantes, from Mrs. Colonel to Mrs. Subaltern. Gurewitsch[10] shows that nearly all existing elements of culture were first taken up by an upper class and penetrated to the masses under the influence of their example. Dress, sported by the leisured to distinguish them from the clouted laborers, becomes clothing. Most cereals began by furnishing spirituous liquors to the well-to-do. Only when they entered the dietary of the poorer classes did their nutritive value begin to be prized. The useful metals furnished ornaments to the rich before they gave tools to the artisan. The ass and the horse were probably domesticated not
(157) so much for burden or draught purposes as for the saddle, and they were ridden less for comfort than for the dignified and impressive mode of locomotion they afforded. Butter, milk, cheese, and bread, no less than tea, coffee, and tobacco, are an acquired taste, and first became popular because the social superiors had made them reputable. The use of milk spread among the Hindus from the Brahmins. In Egypt and Mexico bread entered the diet of the upper classes while yet the rabble lived on dates and fish.
The descent of culture
Gurewitsch shows that even the artistic and intellectual activities that later became the learned professions began among the leisured as honorific employments, documenting one's sensibility and talent. The sciences owe their beginning largely to the love of displaying intellectual prowess. Philosophy is of gentle origin, but exact science is of humble ancestry, for it was peasant brains that gave upper-class speculations a practical turn and transformed intellectual sport into serious work. Language owes much of its enrichment to the social superior seeking new terms and words in order to avoid the colloquial speech of the vulgar; but the masses would not thus be eluded and by appropriating such refinements they insured the development of the mother-tongue.
The descent of manners and accomplishments
Says Hearn [11] of Japan: " During the Tokugawa period, various diversions or accomplishments, formerly fashionable in upper circles only, became common property. Three of these were of a sort indicating a high degree of refinement: poetical contests, tea ceremonies, and the complex art of flower arrangement. All were introduced
(158) into Japanese society long before the Tokugawa régime. . . . But it was under the Tokugawa Shogunate that such amusements and accomplishments became national. Then the tea ceremonies were made a feature of female education throughout the country." " It was in this period also that etiquette was cultivated to its uttermost, - that politeness became diffused throughout all ranks, not merely as a fashion, but as an art." " For at least ten centuries before Iyéyasu, the nation had been disciplined in politeness, under the edge of the sword. But under the Tokugawa Shogunate politeness became particularly a popular characteristic, - a rule of conduct maintained by even the lowest classes in their daily relations."
The descent of ideals of life
It is true that monogamy worked from below upward, embodying the anti-monopoly protest of the masses against upper-class polygamy. But the position of the wife in the monogamic union is patterned upon the rights and privileges of the first or favorite wife in the polygamous household of the upper class. The knightly ideal was worked out by a religious-military caste, adopted enthusiastically by the upper ranks, and then slowly descended, partly by aid of social gravity, to the body of the people. In this process of universalizing, the pattern of the knight has become modified into that of the gentleman. Likewise, Bushido, the knightly ideal that has been, and still is, the mould of Japanese character, was perfected within the fighting caste of the samurai. Says Dr. Nitobe: [12] " In manifold ways has Bushido filtered down from the social class where it originated, and acted as a leaven among the masses, furnishing a moral standard for the whole people. The precepts of knighthood, begun at first as
(159) the glory of the élite, became in time an aspiration and inspiration to the nation at large." [13]
Aristocracies the assimilators of early peoples
Very rapid propagation of a practice not obviously meritorious is a sign of steep social inequalities, just as the rapid flow of rivers indicates that they find their sources in highlands. In the earlier societies aristocracies were the sole avenue by which foreign novelties could gain access to a people. Says Tarde:[14] "Let us picture to ourselves the basin of the Mediterranean in the eighth century before Christ; at the moment of the great Tyrian or Sidonian prosperity, when the Phoenicians, the European carriers of the arts of Egypt and Assyria, were arousing among the Greeks and other peoples a taste for luxurious and beautiful things. These merchants were not, like the modern English, traders in cheap and common fabrics; like the mediaeval Venetians, they were wont to display along the sea-beach fine products that appealed to the rich people of all countries, purple garments, perfumes, golden cups, figurines, costly armor, ex voto offerings, graceful and charming ornaments. Thus all over, in Sardinia, in Etruria, in Greece, in the Archipelago, in Asia Minor, and in Gaul, the highest classes, the select few, might be seen wearing helmets, swords, bracelets, and tunics which from one end to the other of
(160) this vast region were more or less alike, while beneath them the plebeian populations continued to be differentiated from one another by their characteristic dress and weapons." A similar drawing together of societies at their tops occurred in the later Middle Ages when Venetian products, spreading throughout Europe, assimilated palaces and castles and city mansions but not cottages and huts. It is for this reason that the dress suit is the same the world over, while the peasant dress is distinctive for each people.[15]
A live aristocracy is progressive and cosmopolitan
An aristocracy has, then, a certain value as an inlet for foreign tastes and ideas. Even though it be not inventive, it can still afford a good launching place for inventions or novelties. In early societies it helps to break the chains of custom, and so may smooth the way for progress. Often an aristocracy is a kind of social stand-pipe, from which under high pressure refined ideas and manners are diffused throughout society.[16] The French upper classes
(161) catch from the English nobility field-sports, tweeds, racing, appreciation of country life, etc. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English aristocracy formed itself upon Italian models, and thereby incidentally injected some Italian culture into the English; later it took to French fashions, fine arts, free thinking, etc. The Roman aristocracy was a medium through which the Romans became acquainted with Greek ideas, culture, and civilization. The Gaulish aristocracy Latinized Gaul. The Russian aristocracy opened Russia to West European influence. The nobles and samurai took the lead in Europeanizing Japan. China's stagnation has been owing in part to the absence of an aristocracy. The planter aristocracy in the South imbued even the plain people in that section with chivalry toward women, courteous manners, and a sense of honor that supports a higher plane of commercial honesty than is maintained in the North. In the South the planter class, in the North the little red schoolhouse, was the channel for the injection of culture and refinement into the masses. As soon as an aristocracy becomes timid and obstructive and commits itself to tradition, its social role declines.
A society without an upper class must foster higher education
The reciprocal imitation of social equals is far feebler than the unilateral imitation in a graded society. In a society of equals natural centres and routes for the rapid, automatic diffusion of culture are lacking, and
(162) hence this social type presumes unusual intelligence and progressiveness in the ordinary man. Otherwise, you get stagnation or fatuity. Catholicism with its hierarchical determination of dogma has remained unified, whereas Protestantism, lacking an aristocracy of pope and bishops, soon split up into hundreds of sects on account of petty theological differences, and saved itself only by regaining a steadying leadership in the form of an educated clergy.
After the arts and professions have become differentiated a titular aristocracy hinders the diffusion of culture
A democratic society without due provision for public education will stagnate; but once adequate agencies for testing and diffusing culture have been established, the prestige of a titular upper class may become oppressive and obstructive. Thus Grant Allen [17] says: " This profound and now ingrained belief in the natural superiority of the Upper Classes reacts in a thousand most immoral ways upon English life. One is never at the end of it. But the worst of all its corollaries is undoubtedly this - that it stands hopelessly in the way of the recognition of all real betternesses. Nobody is anything by the side of the peer. His visible greatness eclipses all else. There is not a country in the world so lord-ridden as England; there is not a country where literary men, artists, thinkers, discoverers, great scientists, great poets, - the prophets and seers of the race, - fill so small a place comparatively in the public estimation." " Nobody who has not lived long in England can fully realize the appalling extent to which this gangrene of lord-worship, county gentlemen-worship, flunkeyism, snobbery, has eaten into the very heart and brain of the nation. . . . Nobody is ever thinking about real distinction; everybody is thinking about this tinsel sham which stands
(163) visible in place of it. All society is organized on the same extraordinary and unreal basis. . . . There exists in England a Society of Authors, of which Tennyson was, and Meredith is, president. . . . Yet its annual dinner has usually been presided over, not by Thomas Hardy or William Morris, not by Robert Louis Stevenson or Andrew Lang, but - by a casual lord, who has written a booklet, fished up by hook or crook from the squares of Belgravia. Would the men of letters in any other country submit to such an insult?" " The existence of a class which monopolizes public attention on the ground of birth alone, stands fatally in the way of the really superior class which deserves and struggles toward recognition in every direction. The artificial betterness eclipses the natural." " Even worse . . . is the effect produced upon the general public. Having a wholly false standard of the admirable set up to them, our people 'meanly admire mean things,' as Thackeray said; they know and understand little or nothing about high ones. The average British middle class is the most debased, materialized, and soulless bourgeoisie in the whole world. Of art, of literature, of poetry, of thought, of philosophy, of movement, it knows and cares nothing. A baronet is more to it than George Meredith or Herbert Spencer. Its ambitions are -to make plenty of money, to live in a big house, to keep a carriage and servants in livery, to hang upon the skirts of the aristocracy if it can, to ape them in everything, and if possible to rise at least as far toward their level as the attainment of a knighthood. Rich families in America are generally aware of the existence of culture and the desirability of acquiring it, or at least some pretence and outer show of it. . . . But in England, most
(164) wealthy people do not even pay this external and formal homage to culture. They do not know it exists; they do not care for it, or admire it, or value it in others. They wish to have a private box at the Oaks, a yacht like Lord Ulster's, a coach and four, an invitation to the gardenparty at the neighboring baronet's, perhaps even to own a Derby winner, and to rise to the peerage through beer or cotton. That is all. Of the real betternesses of life they are as innocent as a Central African negro."
"Hence English snobbishness, that terrible, all-pervading trait of English society from top to bottom. Do what you will, you cannot escape from it. If you live long enough in the country, you must inevitably succumb to it; you cannot emancipate even your own conduct from some lingering taint of that pervasive malady. For your neighbors, your servants, your tradesmen, your dependents, all judge you and your acts, not by what you are in yourself, but by the company you keep, the county society you do or do not know, the carriages with footmen that stop at your door or pass it by, the post assigned to you in the ordered hierarchy of the Lord Chamberlain and his flunkeys. No one is quite free from this hateful superstition. One cannot isolate one's self absolutely from one's social atmosphere . . . England can never be free, wholesome, and whole-souled till she has cast out forever these belated false gods, and learned to pay homage at the shrine of the Genuine Betternesses."
SUMMARY
The social superior is apt to be imitated by the social inferior. This, however, will not be the case if the example of the superior clashes seriously with the instincts or circumstances of the inferior.
(165)
Historically the stimulating example of the superior has been a great factor in overcoming the immobility of the mass. At the same time it has often given them false guidance.
Nearly every element in the civilization of a people was once the exclusive possession of an upper class.
In some cases the element has been an outgrowth of the manner of life and thought of the upper class. Usually, however, the upper class has served merely as its launching place.
Being more closely in touch with one another than peoples, aristocracies have provided channels for the diffusion of a cosmopolitan culture.
A society of social equals tends to stagnate unless education, both lower and higher, is amply provided for.
After the various elements of culture have come to be cared for by the special arts and professions, the social role of an upper class declines, and its influence may become positively obstructive.
EXERCISES
1. Show that the common people react selectively upon the examples set them by the social superiors.
2. Why does the standard of living rise so promptly with every increase in prosperity that there is scarcely any let-up in economic strain ?
3. Why is it easier to save money in the country than in the city?
4. What social changes going on in the South hinder the negroes getting refinement and civilization by the old route, and oblige them to get it via institutions like Hampton and Tuskegee?
5. Compare the big university with the small college in power to form and refine the student.
6. Does any good thing spread by social gravity which might not be diffused by the school?
