Social Psychology
Chapter 10: The Radiant Points of Conventionality (Continued)
Edward Alsworth Ross
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The holder of power is imitated.
The powerholder is copied
This is to say that the hierarchical superior in any authoritative organization - governmental, ecclesiastical, educational, or industrial - is by the very power he wields clothed with prestige in the eyes of some, and becomes therefore a radiant point of imitations. Quite aside from the motive of currying favor, people copy the power-holder because the presumption of superiority attaches to the example set by one on so glittering a pinnacle.
The example of a Roman emperor contagious
Says Dill:[1] "The example of an emperor must always abe potent for good or evil. We have the testimony of Pliny and Claudium, separated by an interval of three hundred years, that the world readily conforms its life to that of one man, if that man is the head of the state. Nero's youthful enthusiasm for declamation gave an immense impulse to the passion for rhetoric. His enthusiasm for acting and music spread through all ranks, and the Emperor's catches were sung at wayside inns. M. Aurelius made philosophy the mode, and the Stoic Emperor is responsible for some of the philosophic imposturewhich moved the withering scorn of Lucian. The Emperor's favorite drug grew so popular that the price of it became almost prohibitory. If the model Vespasian's homely habits had such an effect in reforming society,
(167) we may be sure that the evil example of his spendthrift predecessors did at least as much to deprave it."
Provincial imitation of Rome
Upon the provincials the example of the Imperial City seemed to cast a magic spell. Dill elsewhere[2] says:
Although for generations there was a settled abstinence from centralization on the part of the imperial government, the many varieties of civic constitution in the provinces tended by an irresistible drift to a uniform type of organization. Free and federate communities voluntarily sought the position of a colony or a municipium. Just as the provincial town must have its capitol, with the cult of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, or imported the street names Velabrum or Vicus Tuscus, so the little community called itself respublica, its commons the populus, its curia the senate or the amplissimus et splendidissimus ordo; its magistrates sometimes bore the majestic names of praetor, dictator, or censor, in a few cases even of consul. This almost ludicrous imitation of the great city is an example of the magical power which Rome always exercised on her most distant subjects, and even on the outer world of barbarism, down to the last days when her forces were ebbing away."
The direction of the current of imitation reveals the seat of power. Always the nobility imitates its king and the masses copy the nobles. "In Byzantium," says Baudrillart, "the court looked to the prince, the city to the court, and the country to the city in the matter of luxury." Louis XIV completed the hierarchization of French society under royalty. The obligation of every noble to attend the court[3] opened routes by which the
(168) vanities and prodigalities of Versailles were automatically diffused throughout France. St. Simon observes: "Luxury is a plague which once introduced becomes an internal, all-devouring cancer, because from the court it is promptly communicated to Paris and throughout the provinces and the army."
National imitation of court luxuries and extravagances
So seductive was the example of the powerful that it was deemed necessary to restrain by sumptuary laws the eagerness of the lower orders to emulate the extravagance of the nobles. Tarde,[4] speaking of "the tendency to ape the hierarchical superior and the rapidity with which this inclination has at all times satisfied itself at the least gleam of prosperity," says: "The frequency of the sumptuary edicts during the entire period of the old régime is a proof of. this, just as the multiplicity of a river's dikes bears witness to the impetuosity of its current. The first French Court dates from Charles VIII; but we must not imagine that the imitative contagion of court manners and luxury took several centuries to reach down to the common people of France. From Louis XII on, this influence was felt everywhere. The disasters of the religious wars arrested this development in the sixteenth century, but in the following century it started up again. Then the miseries brought on by the later wars of the Grand Monarch occasioned another set-back. In the course of the eighteenth century there was a fresh start; under the Revolution another reaction. With the First Empire the advance began again on a great scale; but thenceforward it assumed a democratic form which we shall not consider at this moment. Under Francis I, under Henry II, the spread of luxury begun under Louis XII continued. At
(169) this period a sumptuary law forbade 'all peasants, laborers, and valets (save those attached to princes) to wear silken doublets or hose overlaid or puffed out with silk.' From 1543 to the time of the League there were eight important ordinances against luxury. 'Some of them,' says Baudrillart, 'apply to every French subject; they forbid the use of cloth of gold, of silver, or of silk.' Such was the elegance prevailing on the eve of the wars of religion." In justifying laws in restraint of trade "one of the reasons most frequently advanced was that France was ruining herself in the purchase of foreign luxuries."
The more successful is imitated by the less successful.
The aristocracy of achievement
In the eyes of some, not the high, but the rising, are I clothed with prestige. Lofty station is ambiguous; it a may or may not testify to rare prowess. Often it is owed to birth, marriage, favor, or luck. But the man who makes his way upward by achievement furnishes thereby signal proof of his power. Occasionally the strong climber has a proper pride in his achievement and flaunts it in the face of the aristocracy of birth. Pope Urban IV, the son of a cobbler, who himself had worked at the trade, chose a cobbler's tools as his symbol. Senator Sawyer of Wisconsin, who made a fortune in sawmilling, put on his carriage the Latin word vidi, which, being translated, signifies "I saw!" The active element in society recognizes that the aristocracy of achievement belongs to the present, not to the past. It stands for some good thing lately done, not for something which has long gone by. "When Theodore Parker first visited Cincinnati, at that time the recognized leader among Western cities, he said that he had made a great discovery, namely, that while the aristocracy of Cincinnati was unquestionably founded
(170) on pork, it made a great difference whether a man killed pigs for himself, or whether his father had killed them. The one was held plebeian, the other patrician. It was the difference, Parker said, between the stick 'ems and the stuck 'ems; and his own sympathies, he confessed, were with the present tense. It was, in other words, aristocracy in the making."[5]
The "men who do things" dispute the preeminence of the titled
The tendency of men of achievement to wrest social leadership from the hereditary titular aristocracy is brought out by Taine. [6] " On the one hand, the nobles are drawn nearer to the Third-Estate, and on the other, the Third-Estate is drawn nearer to the nobles, actual equality having preceded equality as a right. On the approach of the year 1789 it was difficult to distinguish one from the other in the street. The sword is no longer worn by gentlemen in the cities; they have abandoned embroideries and laces and walk about in plain frock-coats or drive themselves in their cabriolets. 'The simplicity of English customs,' and the customs of the Third-Estate seem to them better adapted to ordinary life. Their prominence proves irksome to them, and they grow weary of being always on parade. Henceforth they accept familiarity that they may enjoy freedom of action and are content 'to mingle with their fellow-citizens without obstacle or ostentation.' . . . An equalization of the ways and externals of life is, indeed, only a manifestation of the equalization of minds and tempers. The antique scenery being torn away indicates the disappearance of the sentiments to which it belonged. . . . If the nobles dress like the bourgeoisie, it is owing to their having
(171) become bourgeois, that is to say, idlers retired from business, with nothing to do but to talk and amuse themselves. Undoubtedly they amuse themselves and converse like people of refinement; but it is not very difficult to equal them in this respect. Now that the ThirdEstate has acquired its wealth a good many plebeians have become people of society. . . . Their sons . ., . throw money out of the window with as much elegance as the young dukes with whom they sup. A parvenu with money and intellect soon becomes brightened and his son, if not himself, is initiated: a few years' exercises in an academy, a dancing master, and one of the four thousand public offices which confer nobility, supply him with the deficient externals. . . . After this intermixture of classes and this displacement of character, what superiority rests with the nobles ? By what special merit, through what recognized capacity are they to secure the respect of a member of the Third-Estate? . . . What superior education, what familiarity with affairs, what experience with government, what political instruction, what local ascendency, what moral authority, can be alleged to sanction their pretensions to the highest places? In the way of practice, the Third-Estate already does the work, providing the qualified men, the intendants, the ministerial head clerks, the lay and ecclesiastical administrators, the competent laborers of all kind and degrees. . . . Consider the young men who, about twenty years of age in 1780, born in industrious families, accustomed to effort and able to work twelve hours a day, a Barnave, a Carnot, a Roederer, a Merlin de Thionville, a Robespierre, an energetic race conscious of its strength, criticising their rivals, aware of 'their weakness, comparing their own
(172) application and education to their levity and incompetency, and, at the moment when youthful ambition stirs within them, seeing themselves excluded in advance from any superior position, consigned for life to subaltern employment, and subjected in every career to the precedence of superiors whom they hardly recognize as their equals. At the artillery examinations where Chérin, the genealogist, refuses plebeians, and where the Abbé Bosen, a mathematician, rejects the ignorant, it is discovered that capacity is wanting among the noble pupils and nobility among the capable pupils, the two qualities of gentility and intelligence seeming to exclude each other, as there are but four or five out of a hundred pupils who combine the two conditions. Now, as society at this time is mixed, such tests are frequent and easy. Whether lawyer, physician, or man of letters, a member of the Third-Estate with whom a duke converses familiarly, who sits in a diligence alongside of a count-colonel of hussars, can appreciate his companion or his interlocutor, weigh his ideas, test his merit, and esteem him at his just value. . . . The nobility having lost a special capacity, and the Third-Estate having acquired a general capacity, they are on a par in education and in aptitudes, the inequality which separated them becoming offensive and becoming useless."
The successful as models and pace-setters
Society is called democratic not because a social hier- archy is absent, but because its hierarchy is formed on the competitive rather than the hereditary principle. With us, not kings, princes, and nobles, but bankers, merchant princes, railroad magnates, capitalists, officials, politicians, editors, educators, writers, and artists occupy the high seats, hold the baton, and beat time for the great
(173) social orchestra. Society is no longer a many-storied pagoda of closed castes, but a pyramid whose sides, narrowing toward the top, provide a hierarchy of places into which individuals climb, or to which they are admitted on demonstrating their superior merit. As in wealth, so in eminence and fame, democracy tolerates many inequalities; but these are of recent, not remote, origin. As the boundaries between sections, classes, and nations fade out, the chorus of acclaim that greets the man of transcendent genius becomes vaster, for the bigger the audience, the greater the glory to be distributed among the actors. The apotheosis in our time of Lincoln, Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, Tolstoi, Paderewski, Bernhardt, and Booth reveals among us pinnacles of literary and artistic glory never before dreamt of.
In the United States the educated are contesting the leadership of the successful
The more dynamic a period, the more quickly the social sceptre passes from type to type. Some evidence is accruing that the "men who do things" will be obliged to yield somewhat to the educated. Munsterberg[7] observes: "The most important factor in the aristocratic differentiation of America is higher education and culture, and this becomes more important every day. . . . The social importance ascribed to a college graduate is all the time growing. It was kept back for a long time by unfortunate prejudices. Because other than intellectual forces had made the nation strong, and everywhere in the foreground of public activity there were vigorous and influential men who had not continued their education beyond the public grammar school, so the masses instinctively believed that insight, real energy, and enterprise were better developed in the school of life than in
(174) the world of books. The college student was thought of as a weakling, in a way, who might have many fine theories about things, but who would never take hold to help solve the great national problems - a sort of academic 'mugwump,' but not a leader. The banking house, factory, farm, the mine, the law office, and the political position were all thought better places for the young American man than the college lecture halls. . . . This has profoundly changed now, and changes more with every year. . . . The change has taken place in regard to what is expected of the college student; distrust has vanished, and people realize that the intellectual discipline which he has bad until his twenty-second year in the artificial and ideal world is after all the best training for the great duties of public life, and that academic training, less by its subject-matter than by its methods, is the best possible preparation for practical activity. . . . The leading positions in the disposal of the nation are almost entirely in the hands of men of academic training, and the mistrust of the theorizing college spirit has given place to a situation in which university presidents and professors have much to say on all practical questions of public life, and the college graduates are the real supporters of every movement toward reform and civilization."
Men of achievement are imitated with more discrimination than an upper class
In a society of hereditary grades the superior is copied by the inferior in everything; the stream of imitation flows mostly one way, is unilateral. But where the grading is elective or social, the superior is imitated most in that particular excellence which has won him acclaim and distinction. Hence no one person or class sets the pace in everything. A Kipling is imitated in point of
(175) literary style, a Booth in acting, a Gibson in drawing, a Sargent in painting, a Brummel in dress, a Corbett in pugilistics. But the leader in one thing follows in some other things, so that the imitation becomes multilateral, and, to a certain extent, rational.
Nevertheless, such rationalizing does not proceed very far for the reason stated by Cooley when he says:[8] " When there is a real personal superiority, ascendency is seldom confined to the traits in which this is manifested, but, once established in regard to these traits, it tends to envelop the leader as a whole, and to produce allegiance to him as a concrete person. This comes, of course, from the difficulty of breaking up and sifting that which presents itself to the senses, and through them to the mind , as a single living whole. And as the faults and weaknesses of a great man are commonly much easier to imitate than his excellences, it often happens, as in the case of Michael Angelo, that the former are much more conspicuous in his followers than the latter."
The rich are imitated by the poor.
Among Mammon worshippers the example of the rich is infectious
There are times and circles in which wealth sums up the A Humanly Desirable, and the possession of wealth creates an irresistible presumption of superiority. Then one verifies the saying of the Hindu epic poet, "That which is called the wealthy is a very important member of the state; for verily a mar. with money is the top of all creation." Then, in matters of opinion and conviction as well as in the trappings and formalities of life, the rich will wield the baton, no matter how destitute they may be of outlook, ideas, taste, or refinement. When the worship of Mammon is widespread the millionnaire is a high authority, not
(176) only in the technique of money-making, but in every thing else as well. He is interviewed on every fresh topic that crops up in public discussion. His crassest stupidities have the indescribable charm of coming from a "solid" man. A string of platitudes in the heavy Olympian style of Crcesus is as much prized as a leaf from a Sibylline Book. When he expounds the vulpine ethics that justify his career, the Sermon on the Mount is rocked to its base. Upon the nod or frown of the boxes hangs the fate of the artist, the composer, the playwright. The pastimes, entertainments, and extravagances of the rich are eagerly noted and enthusiastically aped by the multitude immediately below them in the cash scale. Small fry mortgage their homes to acquire an automobile which serves them about as well as an eight-day clock in the hut of a negro who can't tell time.[9]
The rise of the American dollarocracy
Yellow journalism itself originated in the vertigo that a generation ago began to seize upon the people of the Northern cities when they contemplated the rich. It was born in 1882 out of a conversation in which Mr. Pulitzer, of the New York World, thus noted the rise of the dollarocracy.[10]
"The trouble with the American people to-day is their assumed independence. They imagine that they am
(177) alone in the universe. They are wealth-mad. They see it on every side of them - money and the work of money. They have created fortunes, and they don't know how to spend them. Those who have not succeeded in amassing money worship those who have, and these worshippers are in the majority. Their every thought is to become like the rich; to emulate their every act and success. It is a sensation with them; they crave sensation.
" To be rich is the one object of the masses in every walk of life in this country to-day. There is nothing akin to this money craze in the older countries of Europe, but in place of it they have an aristocracy there. They expend their sentiment on that. . . . Give the people what they want. Give them an aristocracy. Tell them how these men and women have become rich. Tell the people how they spend their money; what they say; how they live; what their ambitions are. Tell it with pictures. Tell it interestingly and we will sell this paper."
Mr. Watterson[11] thus pronounces upon the new sceptreholders from the view-point of an older and finer upper class.
Barbarizing influence of the dollarocracy
The Smart Set is rotten through and through. It has not one redeeming feature. All its ends are achieved by money and largely by the unholy use of money. If one of them proposes to go into politics, he expects to buy his way, and the rogues who have seats in Congress or foreign appointments to sell, see that he pays the price. If one of them wants to marry a lord, she expects to buy him, and the titled scamps who seek to recoup their broken fortunes see that she pays the price. Their influence is to the last degree corruptive. Their hangers-
(178) on and retainers are only such as money will buy. Nine out of every ten of the fortunes behind them will not bear scrutiny; when it is not actually got by foul means, it yet goes back to the grimiest antecedents, the washtub and the stable yard. . . . Must these uncleanly birds of gaudy, and therefore of conspicuous, plumage fly from gilded bough to bough, fouling the very air as they twitter their affectations of social supremacy and no one to shy a brick and to cry, 'Scat, you devils!' . . . From Maine to California there are myriads of cheerful, comfortable homes where 'Dad' and 'Mam' and 'Granny,' yea, and 'Molly' and 'Polly' and 'Susey' and 'Sis' lead clean and wholesome lives, happy in their ignorance of evil such as in the mouths of the Smart Set is familiar as household words; not merely an honest, brawny people, who work for a living, and would scorn to have any earls or marquises sitting around on their cracker barrels, but educated, cultivated people, with plenty of money for all of the reasonable luxuries and adornments of life, who would blush to sit at table with these unclean birds and to listen to their chatter."
Not long ago a Newport divine, preaching against divorce, pleaded with his fashionable congregation to order themselves more strictly in things marital. " Remember,'; he said to them in effect, "your example in family matters is followed by eighty millions of people." Shortly after an eminent Southern writer hotly denounced the clerical admonition as a slander, and denied that any considerable section of the American people heeds the example of the Newport plutocracy in any serious relation of life. The rebuke was just, yet the virus of wealth-worship spreads and area after area is infected. Baltimore, Richmond,
(179) Charleston, Savannah, Louisville, - strongholds of a different prestige, - begin to suspect that they are provincial. The cold-cash standard of human excellence, having conquered the big cities in the North, is now reducing the smaller centres and the country.[12]
SUMMARY
The possessor of power bedazzles; and fascinates.
Currents of imitation radiate from rulers.
In monarchies the extravagance of the court spreads outward and has a pernicious effect upon the tastes and wants of the people.
If a titular aristocracy be closed, a moment comes when its social leadership is disputed by the men of distinguished achievement.
In a society without a hereditary upper class the conspicuously successful are looked up to and copied.
The imitation of the successful is altogether more discriminating and rational than the imitation of a titled nobility.
When wealth is supremely coveted, the rich are admired and imitated.
The diffusion of pecuniary standards of excellence from the dollarocracy whets greed and lowers the moral tone of society.
EXERCISES
1. What elements enter into the standard by which a person is valued in your community, and what is their order of importance?
2. Is the attitude of the public the same toward the man who has married money, as toward the man who has made money?
3. Show the difference in tone and standards between the selfmade rich and the hereditarily rich. Contrast their influence on society.
4. If the successful compose the influential social class, what will be the effect upon the birth rate? Upon the frequency of heartfailure and neurasthenia?
5. If the general avidity for wealth be intensified, what will be the effect upon commercial, professional, and political ethics ? Upon the motives to social intercourse and to matrimony?
6. Show how training in a professional school instead of an office favors the efficiency standard of human worth as against the cash standard.
