Social Psychology
Chapter 11: The Radiant Points of Conventionality (Concluded)
Edward Alsworth Ross
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The city is imitated by the country.
High potential of the city
City dwellers never keep abreast of country dwellers in reproduction, and hence the city is constantly fed with the overflow from the farms, an overflow that is, in a sense, the cream of the rural population, for it consists of stirring and ambitious persons who migrate to the city early in the active period of life. Freshened constantly with such effervescent elements, the city never becomes traditional and stagnant, as it might well do if it raised its own population. Moreover, these eager young immigrants, fleeing the deadness of quiet neighborhoods and the tedium of humdrum villages, sharpen and brighten one another. Outworn traditions, narrow local sentiments, and obstinate provincial prejudices meet and cancel one another. A type of mentality emerges more impressionable and plastic than that of the farms. The shutters of the intellect are swung back. The mind becomes alert and supple. Freed from the hampering net of kin and class ties, the individual appears. The city is, therefore, a hotbed, where seed ideas quickly germinate. Its progressive population naturally places itself at the head of the social procession and sets the pace for the slower country dwellers.
Says a distinguished economist:[1] "The two great
The cities pass the torch to the rest of society
(182) founders of modern pedagogy, Rousseau and Pestalozzi, have sprung from cities. The universities can, in their modern organization, be traced back, in Europe as well as in America, to the model established by Bologna and Paris, centres of urban culture. The numerous foundations of universities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were made exclusively in cities; they represented the reaction against the older, monastic, world-shunning learnedness, as also only those monastic orders took hold of them, which in the two preceding centuries had sought their seats not in rural loneliness, but in the cities." "The city acquires cultural treasures, but only in order to let them radiate and in order to begin, thereupon, the work again on new materials. Its educational work is a constant renunciation of acquired privileges. This is shown especially clearly in America in the history of the library movement. This movement has begun especially in the cities. First it was the ambition of each city to surpass the country by the possession of a public library, accessible to everybody. To-day it is the ambition of the cities to induce the country to follow their example."
The cities cast a spell on the country
Thanks to its real superiorities, everything about the city comes at last to have a glamour. Thus Mahaffy[2] writes of the Hellenistic period: "The brilliancy of city life, the comforts and conveniences with which the citizens became supplied, the privileges which they obtained, gave to all this epoch of men a strong tendency to migrate from the country into the towns. So it was that to live in villages like the Pagani of the Romans, came to suggest boorishness and want of refinement. In the book of
(183) Revelation, which concludes our New Testament, the ideal of the future is no longer the Elysian Fields, but the New Jerusalem come down from heaven, a city with walls and gates and splendid streets. This and not fair glades and trees and streams was the conception of the highest happiness produced by average Hellenism." Christianity owes much to city prestige. Its Founder labored on the countryside and amid the hamlets, yet so much hinged on the city reaction upon his work that few realize that Jesus passed but a few days in Jerusalem. Paul preached in the cities, and Christianity spread from the great urban centres to the towns, and lastly to the country, where the lowest class of peasants (pagani) dwelt. Writes Pliny to Trajan: "This contagious evil has spread not only in the cities, but also in the towns and villages." In the same way modern socialism is of city origin and propagation, and sometime, perhaps, it will be combated by city capitalists alarming, organizing, and exploiting the conservatism of the rural districts and of rural sections like the South and the far West.
The citizens of the great capital constitute a kind of aristocracy
The city as fountainhead of initiative and examples is well described by Tarde:[3] " In the hypertrophy of great cities and, especially, of capitals, where oppressive privileges take root and ramify, while the last traces of the privileges of the past are jealously effaced, is to be found the kind of inequality which modern life creates and which it finds indispensable, in fact, in managing and promoting the great currents of its industrial production and consumption, i.e., of imitation on an immense scale. The course of a Ganges like this necessitated a Himalayas. Paris is the Himalayas of France. Paris unquestionably
(184) rules more royally and more orientally over the provinces than the court ever ruled over the city. Every day the telegraph or the railroad distributes its ready-made ideas, wishes, conversations, revolutions, its ready-made dresses and furniture, throughout the whole of France. The suggestive and imperious fascination which it instantaneously exerts over this vast territory is so profound, so complete, and so sustained, that it no longer surprises any one. . . . It is futile for the city laborer to consider himself a democrat in working for the destruction of the middle classes; he is none the less an aristocrat himself, the much admired and much envied aristocrat of the peasant. The peasant is to the laborer what the laborer is to his employer. "
Royal pride may sap the country to build up the capital
At times the domination of the city over the rest of society has been wantonly exaggerated. The policy of monarchs in wringing money from the people in order to beautify and aggrandize the capital, as well as the enforced concentration of feudal nobles at the royal court, deadened the country, causing the life of the province to become mean, dwarfed, servile, and apologetic.
The deadening of the provinces in monarchical France
Taine[4] portrays how the concentration policy of the French kings had glorified city at the expense of country: "None remain in the provinces except the poor rural nobility; to live there one must be behind the age, disheartened or in exile. The king's banishment of a seignior to his estates is the highest disgrace; to the humiliation of this fall is added the insupportable weight of ennui. The finest chateau on the most beautiful site is a frightful 'desert'; nobody is seen there save the grotesques of a small town or the village rustics. 'Exile
(185) alone,' says Arthur Young, 'forces the French nobility to do what the English prefer to do, and that is to live on their estates and embellish them.' . . . Court historians, on mentioning a ceremony, repeatedly state that 'all France was there'; in fact, every one of consequence in France is there. . . . Paris and the court becomes, accordingly, the necessary sojourn of all fine people. In such a situation departure begets departure; the more a province is forsaken the more they forsake it, 'There is not in the kingdom says the Marquis of Mirabeau, "a single estate of any size of which the proprietor is not in Paris and who, consequently, neglects his buildings and chateaux."' "A country in which the heart ceases to impel the blood through its veins presents a sombre aspect. Arthur Young, who travelled over France between 1787 and 1789, is surprised to find at once such a vital centre and such dead extremities. Between Paris and Versailles the double file of vehicles going and coming extends uninterruptedly for five leagues from morning until night. The contrast on other roads is very great. Leaving Paris by the Orleans road, says Arthur Young, ' we met not one stage or diligence for ten miles; only two messageries and very few chaises, not a tenth of what would have been met had we been leaving London at the same hour.' On the highroad near Narbonne, 'for thirty-six miles,' he says, 'I came across but one cabriolet, half a dozen carts and a few women leading asses.' Throughout this country the inns are execrable. . . . It is only in very large towns that there is any civilization and comfort. At Nantes there is a superb theatre 'twice as large as Drury Lane and five times as magnificent. Mon Dieu! I cried to myself, do all these wastes, the deserts,
(186) the heath, ling, furze, broom, and bog that I have passed for three hundred miles lead to this spectacle? You pass at once from beggary to profusion.' . . . Paris magistrates in exile at Bourges in 1753 and 1754 give the following picture of that place: ' A town in which no one can be found, with whom you can talk at your ease on any topic whatever, reasonably or sensibly; nobles, threefourths of them dying of hunger, rotting with pride of birth, keeping apart from men of the robe and finance, and finding it strange that the daughter of a tax-collector, married to a councillor of the parliament of Paris, should presume to be intelligent and entertain company; citizens of the grossest ignorance, the sole support of this species of lethargy in which the minds of most of the inhabitants are plunged.' . . . Says Arthur Young: 'At Claremont, I dined or supped five times at the table d'hôte with from twenty to thirty merchants, tradesmen, officers, etc., and it is not easy for me to express the insignificance, the inanity of their conversation. Scarcely any politics at a moment when every bosom ought to beat with none but political sensations. The' ignorance or the stupidity of these people must be absolutely incredible; not a week passes without their country abounding with events that are analyzed and debated by the carpenters and blacksmiths of England.' The cause of this inertia is manifest; interrogated on their opinions, all reply, 'We are of the provinces and we must wait to know what is going on in Paris."' "The provinces form an immense stagnant pond." "Such is the languor or, rather, the prostration, into which local life falls when the local chiefs deprive it of their presence, action, or sympathy."
Such wilful subordination of country to city and of
The revival of local centres
(187) provinces to capital is vicious. It causes a dying of the extremities. In every society there ought to be a number of vigorous local centres, tenacious of what is best in their past and proud of their distinctive characteristics. The "Celtic Revival" inspires in the gifted Irish a fire and spirit they would never have if they looked for no success save that which bears the London stamp. A national festival like the " Eistedfodd " lifts the Welsh people far higher than they would rise under the inspiration of London-made poetry and song. Scotch genius owes much ,0 a literary centre like Edinburgh, and it is untoward that the Scotch are beginning to distrust Edinburgh judgments as "provincial." Paris-ridden France is seeking to revive her outlying centres by planting and strengthening provincial universities. The nationalist movements in central and eastern Europe - Finnic, Lettish, Polish, Magyar, Czechish - represent not only the revival of submerged peoples, but also the resuscitation of ancient towns reduced to provincial pettiness by the insolent domination of a dynasty-made metropolis like Vienna, St. Petersburg, or Berlin.
What gives the city its glamour
In America there prevails among the people a feeling that somehow the city gives a higher rank than the country. Among the farmers one hears such expressions as: " I wonder how they like coming down to living in the country, after being city folks?" "The farm will be quite a comedown to him!" " Oh, she feels big now that she is a city lady!" What a triumphal march the city girl enjoys in the little village! What a sensation the city beau creates among the rural beauties I This halo is attributable to the splendor of urban existence, to the apparent affluence and high social standing of city dwellers in con
(188) sequence of their conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, to the polished manners of the urbanite, to the fact that all the extremely rich are in the city. Here the great and famous are gathered; here are the libraries, the works of art, and the higher institutions of learning. City work seems superior; though it cannot all be dignified as brain-work, it is at least semi-professional, clerical, light hand work, highly skilled, or has an artistic side; at any rate the greater part is not ordinary manual labor. On the other hand, farm work is manual toilsome, dirty, and to it a stigma still clings. The car toons and gibes of a jeering metropolitan press against the "hayseed" and the uncomplimentary allusions of print in general still more emphasize this notion of urban superiority. The consequence is that country youth imagine they rise in life by becoming city residents. Especially does this city prestige tend to hold people in the cities, even when economic conditions are more favorable in the country.
The limits to metropolitan leadership
Happily, however, cities are not pace-setters in every thing. In matters of fancy, taste, and caprice New York, it is true, leads the country. Foreign artists, singers, actors, musicians, and lecturers make their debut there, and the verdict of the metropolitan critics gives the cue to the rest of the country. Books, plays, and operas are launched in New York. Most of the periodical literature is edited there. Metropolitan fashions, amusements, pastimes, drinks, topical songs, books, and magazines enjoy everywhere the right of way. But, in matters of interest and reason, prestige alone can confer no such leadership. New York's financial policy, political bias, municipal projects, or commercial standards are not
(189) accepted forthwith as models by the American people. The discoveries of her scientists, the mechanisms of her inventors, the reasoning of her theologians, the operations of her surgeons, the decisions of her judges, the methods of her educators, the régime of her sanatoriums, do not instantly become patterns for the country at large, because here reason and criticism have full play. We have seen public attention arrested by an educational innovation at Quincy, Massachusetts, the therapeutic methods at Battle Creek, Michigan, the welfare work at Dayton, Ohio, the industrial modus vivendi at Leclaire, Illinois, the cooperative successes of Greeley, Colorado, the adjustment of church and public school at Stillwater, Minnesota, the plan of city government at Galveston, Texas, the legislative reference bureau at Madison, Wisconsin. This willingness to take light from any quarter in the serious affairs of life indicates that Americans are far from succumbing to the baleful spell of a glittering metropolis that pulls local communities out of their true orbit to make them mere satellites.
In democracies majorities are imitated.
The authority of the greater number
No one has accounted for this so well as De Tocqueville:[5] When the ranks of society are unequal, and men unlike each other in condition, there are some individuals wielding the power of superior intelligence, learning, and enlightenment, whilst the multitude are sunk in ignorance and prejudice. Men living at these aristocratic periods are therefore naturally induced to shape their opinions by the standard of a superior person, or superior class of persons, whilst they are averse to recognize the infallibility of the mass of the people.
Among equals the majority has prestige
(190)
"The contrary takes place in ages of equality. The nearer the people are drawn to the common level of an equal and similar condition, the less prone does each man become to place implicit faith in a certain man or a certain class of men. But his readiness to believe the multitude increases, and opinion is more than ever mistress of the world. Not only is common opinion the only guide which private judgment retains amongst a democratic people, but amongst such a people it possesses a power infinitely beyond what it has elsewhere. At periods of equality, men have no faith in one another, by reason of their common resemblance; but this very resemblance gives them almost unbounded confidence in the judgment of the public-, for it would not seem probable, as they are all endowed with equal means of judging, but that the greater truth should go with the greater number.
Pressure of the minds of all upon the reason of each
" When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them; but when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows, and to place himself in contrast with so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness. The same equality which renders him independent of each of his fellow-citizens, taken severally, exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater number. The public has therefore, among a democratic people, a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive of; for it does not persuade to certain opinions, but it enforces them, and infuses them into the intellect by a sort of enormous pressure of the minds of all upon the reason of each."
(191)
To this prestige of vast numbers Bryce[6] has given a name:
The fatalism of the multitude
Out of the mingled feelings that the multitude will prevail, and that the multitude, because it will prevail, must be right, there grows a self-distrust, a despondency, a disposition to fall into line, to acquiesce in the dominant opinion, to submit thought as well as action to the encompassing power of numbers. Now and then a resolute man will, like Athanasius, stand alone against the world. But such a man must have, like Athanasius, some special spring of inward strength." "This tendency to acquiescence and submission, this sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the Multitude. It is often confounded with the tyranny of the majority, but is at bottom different, though, of course, its existence makes tyranny by the majority easier and more complete." "In the fatalism of the multitude there is neither legal nor moral compulsion; there is merely a loss of resisting power, a diminished sense of personal responsibility and of the duty to battle for one's own opinions, such as has been bred in some peoples by the belief in an overmastering fate. It is true that the force to which the citizen of the vast democracy submits is a moral force, not that of an unapproachable Allah, nor of the unchangeable laws of matter. But it is a moral force acting on so vast a scale, and from causes often so obscure, that its effect on the mind of the individual may well be compared with that which religious or scientific fatalism creates."
The elite alone should lead
(192) Some argue that democracy means the ascendency of majorities not in government alone, but in all spheres of opinion and feeling; that, while it lifts up the many, it saps the independence and self-confidence of the exceptional man; that by discrediting, even overawing and silencing, the élite few, it condemns society at last to conformity, mediocrity, and stagnation. This indictment, were it true, would be crushing, for in a highly dynamic society unguided majorities are apt to be wrong. Save in matters of immediate and general personal experience, as, for example, family relations, sex relations, etc., the profoundest truths, the highest ideals, the best standards, will first appear in an élite minority. just as the lofty peaks catch the dawn long before its light can flood the plain, so, in an advancing society, there will be, in the earlier stages of every discussion, a minority that is nearer right than any majority. This is not to say that in any particular division of opinion the smaller number is more likely to be right than the greater. The presumption is with it only when it includes the élite.
The democracy of to-day heeds the elite
As a matter of fact, however, modern democracy, of while it spurns privileged orders and authoritative direction, does not undervalue the proven worthiest or refuse their guidance. Unheeding the sham tinsel élite it reveres and hearkens to the genuine, the tested élite It was the poor benighted Demos before the days of the press, the public school, the voluntary association, and a margin of leisure, that followed the leader who would echo its delusions and prejudices. In America the plain people have a great respect for those of exceptional achievement, and confidence in the expert is rapidly growing.
So ingrained is imitation of those above us in the social
Social equality started in the upper class and spread by social gravity
(193) hierarchy that even the idea and practice of social equality which undermined the prestige of the old social classes owed much to the example of these same classes. Says Tarde:[7] "Everything, even progress toward equality, is effected by imitation and by the imitation of superior classes. Before political and social equality between all classes of society was possible or even conceivable, it had to be established on a small scale in one of them. Now, it was first seen to occur on top. From Louis XI to Louis XVI the different grades of nobility which had formerly, in the time of great vassals and of pure feudalism, been separated by such impassable distances were steadily levelled, and, thanks to the crushing prestige of royalty and to the comparative multiplicity of points of contact between all men of gentle birth, fusion was brought about between the nobility of the sword and the nobility of the gown. Now, strange to say, while this levelling was being accomplished on top, the innumerable sections of the middle classes and the common people continued to hold aloof from one another with even intensified class vanity up to the eve of '89. Read in De Tocqueville, for example, the enumeration of the different grades of upper, middle, and lower bourgeoisie in a town of the old régime of this date. There was certainly more antagonism between the consuls and the petty merchants of the eighteenth century than between those of the Middle Ages. The suming paradox may therefore be safely advanced that the real preparatory work in behalf of modern equality was carried on in the past, not by the middle classes, but by the nobility."
A curious confirmation of Tarde's paradox is furnished
(194) by Mahan [8] in explaining that laxity of discipline in the old aristocratic French navy which so often led to disaster. " This class feeling carried with it a curious sentiment of equality among officers of very different grades, which injuriously affected the spirit of subordination. Members, all, of a privileged order, their equality as such was more clearly recognized than their inequality as junior and senior." " Disputes, arguments, suggestions, between two gentlemen forgetful of their relative rank, would break out at critical moments, and the feeling of equality, which wild democratic ideas spread throughout the fleets of the republic, was curiously forestalled by that existing among the members of a most haughty aristocracy.
SUMMARY
The city is fed constantly with superior immigrants in the active period, who reciprocally emancipate and stimulate one another.
Wherever they may have originated, most cultural treasures find their way to the general population by way of the city.
Owing to the civilization it contributes or communicates, a presumption of superiority comes at last to attach to everything urban.
The splendor of visible consumption in the city, and the more attractive aspect of its work, lend the city a glamour.
The undue prestige of a metropolis may oppress and dwarf local life.
In a healthy society the prestige of the city will not be so overshadowing but that a good thing launched at any obscure point will speedily make its way.
When ideas of social equality prevail, the majority has prestige and is imitated.
A society may be democratic without repudiating the leadership of the genuine élite
EXERCISES
I. What was the origin of the social prestige that in England attaches to the ownership of an estate?
2. What effect does it have upon the balance of power between country and city?
3. Explain why in the country birth, in the city wealth, is the chief basis of social rating.
4. Where should a college be located -in the city or in the small town?
5. Should the capital of a commonwealth be its chief city, or some centrally located town?
6. Show that an aristocracy is never identical with the élite
7. Compare the pecuniary burden on society of an aristocracy and an élite.
8. What social policies tend to discover the true élite and throw the leadership of society into their hands?
