Chapter XIV

Elements of the Social Process

In the beginning were interests.

We are now using the word in the same sense in which it is familiar in business and in politics. Nothing would be gained by greater exactness of terms at present. We shall have to provide for closer analysis later.¹ Both. something in men that makes then have wants, and something outside of men that promises to gratify the wants, is implied by the word "interest." We need not now enter into these details, but may frankly speak as we do when we-refer to the farming interests, or the banking interests, or the labor interests, or the interests of the "machine."

The primary interest of every man, as of every animal, is in sheer keeping alive. Nobody knows how many ages men consumed in getting aware of any other interest. This primary animal interest can never be outgrown, although it is doubtful if we ever observe it alone in normal human beings. In nearly all men who have left traces of their mode of life, we find indications, faint perhaps, that the radical interest is in partnership with a few generically unlike interests. Among more highly developed men the latter display innumerable specific variations, and enter into countless combinations.

For example, a universal form of the primary interest is the food-interest. Men must eat to live. This is true no more and no less of the primitive savage than of the poet laureate. It is true no more and no less of men who eat roots or uncooked flesh, than of the men who make up their bill-of-fare according to the gastronomic standards of any capital, from Pekin to London. It is true no more and no less of the men whose food is so precarious that they first eat their vanquished enemies before exploiting their lands, than of the men who start bread riots in the streets of Milan, or who call a strike in New York, or who plan over a banquet table to suppress a strike in Chicago. The interest is at bottom, and in social effects, in principle one. In variations, and in ratio of. social effects, it is infinitely variable and dependent upon countless shadings of circumstance.

Again, the food-interest is merely foremost in a group of interests that are in the most intimate sense peculiar to the body, the animal part of men. They are all the interests that seek their satisfaction in the activities and enjoyments of the body. In this group the sex-interest is usually made coordinate with the food-interest, and it is doubtful if there is a third approaching these in importance. I venture to call all the other positive types of bodily interest by the general name the work-interests. Whether this is a good designation or not, I mean by it all the impulses to physical activity for its own sake. I mean the impulses to physical prowess and skill, that vary from the pranks of childhood to the systematized trial of skill among athletes. The three. species of interest which I call food, sex, and work make up one genus of human interests, to which I give the name the health-interest. By this phrase I mean all the human desires that have their center in exercise and enjoyment of the powers of the body.

So far as I am able to account for the activities of men, they all run back to motives that have their roots in combinations of this health-interest with interests that arrange themselves in five other groups. Men have a distinct interest in controlling the resources of nature, in asserting their individuality among their fellows, in mastering all that can be known, in contemplating what seems to them beautiful, and in realizing what seems to them right. I have not been able to find any human act which requires, for explanation, any motive that cannot be accounted for by specialization and combination of these interests. Each of the groups has subdivisions, more or fewer than those of the first. All men, however, from the most savage to the most highly civilized, act as they do act, first, because of variations in the circumstances of their environment, both physical and social; second, because of variations and permutations of their six elementary interests. I name these, for convenience, Health, Wealth, Sociability, Knowledge, Beauty, and Rightness.²

Of course, this analysis of human interests is from the standpoint of the observer, not of the actor. Real human beings are not such prigs as to start by saying: "Go to now. I propose to secure health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness." It is only the rare individual, even in relatively advanced society, whose powers of abstraction are so developed that he can say: "I want food." Most men know simply that they are hungry and want the particular food that will satisfy present cravings; or they want work, because its wage will buy today's dinner. Still less do men, as a rule, define the other groups of interests, but all men act for reasons which the few reflective men may trace back to combinations of motives conveniently classified in our six groups. The precise type and balance of motive is a distinct problem in each social situation.

In all literal description of the social process, therefore, the key must be found in the purposes, general and special, that call out the efforts of the people concerned. All their social structures are to be understood as aids or hindrances to those purposes. All the social functions, acting or lacking, have a meaning that depends upon their help or hindrance to achievement of these purposes. Each incident in social experience must be construed in its relations to these purposes. In brief, then, the form in which we must try to think all social experience is this: individuals in large numbers, each representing such and such combinations of specific interests, and working by means of, or in spite of, such and such social structures, in and through, or in spite of, such and such operations of social function, directing their efforts toward such and such immediate aims, resulting in such and such episodes, incidental to conscious or unconscious endeavor of such and such nature, to achieve such and such ultimate purposes. A science of the whole social process is possible simply to the degree in which we become able to give a definite value to each of those indefinite terms, through long series of social experiences.³

Expressed in an illustration: To know that phase of the social process which was displayed in England during the period of Roundhead and Cavalier, we must first know the personal make-up of all the different types of Englishmen whose force counted at all in the social situation. We must know how they were grouped, and how much force each kind of group was able to bring to bear upon the situation. We must know the framework of the institutions—domestic, economic, political, legal, ecclesiastical, and social—which constituted at once their means of expressing themselves and limitations upon their self-expression. We must know how the different groups of effective Englishmen regarded the actual working of these institutions; whether, and in what ratio, they classed them as channels of their will, or. as obstructions of their wishes. We must know what specific social efforts were undertaken, and how they clashed or combined with each other; and we must know the larger purposes that defined the general aims. We must know how the elements of the situation at the end of the period compared with their character at the beginning—viz., the personal make-up of the Englishmen of the later time, their rearrangements, the changes wrought in the structure and functions of their institutions, their specific aims, and the main purpose that gave general tone and direction to their action.

In so far as we can know these things of any historic period, we know the social process as it worked itself out in that period. In so far as we can know these things of many historic periods, among many peoples, we have the means of generalizing laws of the social process. In so far as we can combine such knowledge of the past with similar knowledge of the period in which we are living, we have all the scientific equipment available for intelligent participation in promoting the social process.⁴

In the foregoing paragraphs I have not intentionally left anything unsaid which might disabuse any mind of the impression that it is easy to understand the social process. It is by far the most difficult problem in the field of positive knowledge. My claim as to possible results is simply this: For the present the best that any man can accomplish, under the most favorable circumstances, through study of the social process at large, will be merely a little better balancing of his mind for social judgments than would have been possible in his case without the study. Whoever knows enough about the social process to appreciate the difference for social weal or woe between the effects of wise and unwise action, even by an individual, will hardly doubt that merely the meager amount of result fairly to be expected from diligent study of the social process is worth more than it costs.

Notes