Chapter XVI

The Primitive Social Process

Although it may never be possible to draw a definite boundary line between animal and human societies, so that we may say without qualification, "At this point the species graduates from the animal class into the human class," we may find an approximate distinction. So long as biological interests control, the process does not reach the plane of the social. When choices, as distinct from physiological cause and effect, begin to modify individual action, the human plane is reached. In so far as individuals on that plane come in contact with each other, their reactions initiate the social process.

At the beginning there is little or no outward difference between the more highly developed forms of the biological process and the rudimetary forms of the social process. Herds of elephants appear to be better organized than some collections of men. It is only by detecting evidence of factors in actions of men which cannot be discovered in elephants, that we have the means of making out the more involved process which men maintain.

We have called the ultimate moving springs of human action "interests." Among interests some are common to beasts and to men. Added to these basic interests, both as variations of them and as factors of generically different orders, are other interests which contain the promise and potency of unlimited differentiation of human action. These interests are mighty forms of impulse. They presently spur or curb the animal interests to such purpose that other ends are gained than those indicated in physiological impulse. They reach out after satisfactions either in the possession of things, or in adjustments between persons, or in higher types or degrees of individual attainment. These interests transform themselves into wants, which are each individual's expression of a generic interest, and they manifest themselves in desire for something. Experience merely develops power to desire, and modifies the direction which desires take.

We have thus far placed the emphasis upon the single person. We begin to find the social process when we turn our attention to groups of persons. In fact, nobody has ever seen a person who is independent of other persons. Human life is always and necessarily social life; i. e., life in groups, the members of which influence each other. All that we need say, for our present purposes, about contrasts between human groups and animal. groups, is that the members of the former influence each other in more ways than those of the latter.

From a very early stage in the social process, if not absolutely from the beginning, men live and move and have their being as members one of another.

Indeed, it is more than probable that we are doing violence to facts when we speak as though individuals, in the modern sense, first came into existence, and afterward social groups were formed. It is probably nearer the truth to suppose that originally individuals were differentiations of groups, than to suppose that groups were syntheses of individuals.¹ It becomes a problem of more particular analysis to make out the precise course of the rhythm between movements from group to individual, and vice versa.²

To get at the reality of the social process, we must see not only that this interdependence is a fact; we must see that this fact is the necessary outgrowth of the fundamental fact of interest.

If we place a plant in a cellar to which only a narrow crevice admits a ray of sunlight, we find after a few days that the plant is growing toward that crevice. Within the plant is some sort of interest that makes it seek sunlight. The sunlight furnishes something that the plant wants. It, accordingly, tries to get into partnership with the sunlight.

Speaking literally, there is something like this—how like and how unlike need not trouble us at present—in the social process. Not referring to the facts of animal propagation, which unite generations by the bond of blood, leaving no gap in the physical continuity of races, there are facts about persons which satisfy or antagonize the interests of other persons. People are not therefore like fugitive bits of dust in the air — disconnected with each other. Persons everywhere attract or repel persons. Persons lean toward each other or avoid each other. Persons attach themselves to each other or proscribe each other. Persons form groups, because inborn interests push them toward association, in place of individual isolation, and also stimulate antagonism to other associations.

The reference is now to groups in which the bond of union is not alone the mere physical bond, but in which choices in a measure independent of physical necessity begin to operate.

In the purposeful groupings of persons we have the initial phenomena of the social process in the proper sense—that is, in-distinction from the biological process. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: in groupings so far as they are purposeful. This is the point at which to start, if we would find the essentials of the social process. While we must hark back constantly to the traits of individual persons, the philosophy of social action can never long at a time leave out of sight the affinities that work-in groups of persons. In other words, the social process is a continual formation of groups around interests, and a continual exertion of reciprocal influence by means of group-action.

We will use the terms "tribe" and "tribal condition" to designate the most rudimentary type of social status that can be described in detail. For all that we positively know to the contrary, these earliest tribal conditions may have been the outcome of social processes that occupied much time and passed through many stages. At all events, we have only the most dubious scientific sanction for assuming that we know the "original" social condition. Speaking of men in the least developed social status that has been credibly described, we might almost confess that we are in candor bound to stop with this. noncommittal generality "least developed." Whatever we add in the way of particulars has various chances of being out of focus, especially if we try to make statements that apply to more than one case at a time.

Considering both the facts reported, and the character of the investigations on which the reports were based, we probably have no better cases of quasi-original conditions than those described by Spencer and Gillen.³ As those writers clearly enough show, it is well-nigh impossible to use the simplest words in the languages of civilized men, in connection with these tribes, without .attributing facts, or relations, or ratios of each, that do not exist. In connection with the rudest tribes, the words "father," "mother," "husband," "wife," "brother," "sister," "family," "right," "wrong," and of course all terms that have less constant meanings, vary from the sense which we assign to them somewhat as the term "citizen" in the case of Russian peasants would vary from the sense in which it applies to American farmers. It is only with this qualification that we can safely discuss savage tribes in familiar language.

Having the Arunta and Warramunga in mind as examples, we may say, in the first place, that no sufficient warrant appears for denying that individuals in the lowest tribal state manifest some small degree at least of each generic human interest. To be sure, we might put into our terms arbitrary or conventional meanings that by definition would deny each of these interests to savages. With a restricted sense reserved for each predicate, we might say that the Arunta, for instance, show signs of neither the health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, nor rightness interest. The truth would be that, with the possible exception of health, they afford very little of the same kind of evidence of those interests which our present standards demand. They have no hygienic, economic, political, scientific, aesthetic, or ethical organizations, of a sort that would cut much figure in advanced society. They give little evidence of abstract thinking about any of these interests. When we explain their actions, if we happen to be correct, the explanation probably never occurred to them. It is our formulation of causes and effects which never assumed that relation in their minds. In a word, their desires represented a maximum of the instinctive form of the interests, and a minimum of the conscious form. At the same time, from another point of view, we may say that the actions of the most primitive men known manifest a certain degree of response to stimuli which we must interpret as rudiments of the general interests.

In the second place, primitive tribes have rudimentary social structures, which serve inchoate social functions. It is not enough to say that the members of the tribe complete the round of their lives by simply feeding, and mating, and breeding, as the other animals do. They have developed a certain system in their feeding and mating and breeding. It is not certain that the system is more complex than the social system of bees and ants, for instance; but there is plenty of evidence in the case of savages, not discovered in the case of bees and ants, that forces are beginning to be set free which must presently carry the human social process far beyond that of the other animals.

In the third place, while we may not venture in this argument to interpret tribal conditions,⁴ we may name elements in the structure of the tribe. Referring to the same illustrations, we have, first, the totemic structure; second, the arrangement of the sexes; and, third, the system of secret rites. It would be a theorem in explanation, if we should assert that this classification corresponds exactly with the functional meaning of these systems. In all probability it does not. The' totem not merely rallies a fraction of the tribe supposed to be nearest of kin, but it doubtless has economic, moral, and religious meanings. Possibly all this is true in a way of the other two systems. The essential thing is that interests, such as they are in the savage tribe, produce a certain structural and functional arrangement. Thinking of the social process as beginning at this point— a harmless fiction after the qualifications above— we have now before us in the concrete elements which we schedule generally in Part VI; viz.: environment, interests, individuals, social structure, social functions, social purposes. The incessant workings of reciprocal cause and effect between these elements make up the social process.

In the fourth place, implied in the last paragraph, the savage tribe exhibits the rudiments of social authority.⁵ This authority is apparently at first not that of individual over individual, nor of functionaries over individuals, in the modern sense of those terms. On the contrary, it is the authority of group-interests, made vivid in group-customs, and insisted upon by virtually unanimous group-opinion. It is an authority which prescribes conduct very minutely with reference to the whole program of life. Economic activity, relations of persons, beliefs, rituals, attitude toward outside groups—all are foreordained, and perhaps more specifically and peremptorily than any conduct of civilized men, under constitutions and statutes.

To social beginnings which must be described along the general lines thus indicated, not to the phenomena in connection with which he stated the proposition, we would apply the familiar words of Herbert Spencer:

Setting out with social units as thus conditioned, as thus constituted physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and as thus possessed of certain early-acquired notions and correlative feelings, the Science of Sociology has to give an account of all the phenomena that result from their combined actions.⁶

Notes