Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 6

Rest is as fundamental a need as food, and its deprivation almost as serious in its effects.

[Footnote 1: For a striking array of testimony on this point see Goldmark: _loc. cit._, pp. 220-35.]

NERVOUS AND MENTAL FATIGUE. The conditions of nervous and mental fatigue have been less adequately studied than the types of purely physiological fatigue just discussed. It is difficult in experiments to discount the effects of muscular fatigue, and to discover how far there is really impairment of nervous tissue and functions. Experimental studies do show that "nervous fatigue is an undoubted fact"[2] and that "we cannot deny fatigue to the psychic centers"[3] which, like any other part of the organism are subject to deterioration by fatigue toxins. Most students report, however, a higher degree of resistance to fatigue in the nerve fibers than in the muscles, and a like high resistance to fatigue in the brain centers.[4]

[Footnote 2: Frederick S. Lee: "Physical Exercise from the Standpoint of Physiology,"

_Science_, N.S., vol. XXIX, no. 744, p. 525.]

[Footnote 3: Lee: _Fatigue_. Harvey Lectures, 1905-06, p. 180.]

[Footnote 4: For a summary of nervous fatigue and extensive bibliography, see Goldmark: _loc. cit._, p. 32.]

The conditions of mental fatigue, however, can be by no means as simply described as those of physical fatigue. Elaborate experiments by Professor Thorndike and others tend to show that, in the strictest sense of the term, there is no such thing as mental fatigue. That is, any mental function may be performed for several hours with the most negligible decrease in the efficiency of the results attained. The subject of one experiment kept continuously for seven hours performing mental multiplications of four-place numbers by four-place numbers with scarcely any perceptible decrease in speed or accuracy in results.[1] Professor Thorndike draws from this and similar experiments the conclusion that it is practically impossible to impair the efficiency of any mental function as such. What happens when we say our mental efficiency is being impaired is rather that we _will not_ than that we _cannot_ perform any given mental function. The causes of loss of efficiency are rather competing impulses[2] than fatigue in specific mental functions. We are tired _of_ the work, not _by_ it. Continuous mental work of any given kind, writing a book, solving problems in calculus, translating French, etc., involves our being withheld from other activities, games, music, or companions.h.i.+p, to which by force of habit or instinct, we are diverted, and diverted more acutely the more we remain at a fixed task. That it is not mental "fatigue" so much as distraction that prevents us from persisting at work is evidenced in the longer time we can stick to work that really interests us than to tasks in which we have only a perfunctory or compulsory interest. The college student who is "too dead tired" to stay up studying trigonometry will, though in the same condition, stay up studying football strategy, rehearsing for a varsity show, or getting out the next morning's edition of his college paper. "If each man did the mental work for which he was fit, and which he enjoyed, men would work willingly much longer than they now do."[1*] The effects of mental fatigue are, when a.n.a.lyzed, due chiefly to the physically injurious effects that do, but do not necessarily, accompany mental work.

[Footnote 1: T. Arai: _Mental Fatigue_.]

[Footnote 2: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 322.]

[Footnote 1*: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 326.]

Proper air and light, proper posture and physical exercise, enough food and sleep, and work whose purpose is rational, whose difficulty is adapted to one's powers, and whose rewards are just, should be tried before recourse to the abandonment of work itself. It is indeed doubtful if sheer rest is the appropriate remedy for a hundredth part of the injuries that result from mental work in our present irrational conduct of it.[2]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., p. 328.]

The study of the conditions of mental work seems to reveal, in brief, that the conditions of fatigue are essentially physical in character. Given adequate physical conditions, in particular guarding against eye-strain, over-excitement (which means distraction from the work in hand), and loss of sleep, mental work is itself peculiarly unaffected by fatigue conditions. The degree in which mental work can be persisted in depends, therefore, other things being equal, on the individual's own interests, the number and intensity of rival interests which persist during a given piece of mental work, and the habits of mind with which the individual approaches his work.

The experimental demonstration that so-called mental fatigue is largely physical in its conditions has thus a dual significance. It indicates how arduous and persistent mental endeavor may be and how wide are the possibilities of intellectual accomplishment. It is an important fact for human life that the brain is possibly the most tireless part of the human machine. What seems to be mental fatigue can be materially reduced if the physical conditions under which studying, writing, and all other kinds of mental work are performed are carefully regulated. Another large part of what pa.s.ses for mental fatigue will be removed if the individual becomes trained to a reflective appreciation of the end of his work. A habit of alert and conscious attention, if it is really habitual, will enable one to persist at work in the face of tempting distractions.

Learning to "tend to business" by an intelligent application to the aims of the work to be done, will be a healthy antidote against that yielding to every dissuading impulse which so often pa.s.ses for mental weariness.

CHAPTER V

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN

MAN AS A SOCIAL BEING. Man has long been defined as the "social animal," and it is certainly characteristic of human activity that it takes place largely with reference to other people.

Many of man's native tendencies, such as those of s.e.x, self-a.s.sertiveness, and the like, require the presence and contact of other people for their operation. Nineteenth-century philosophers attempted frequently to explain how individuals who were natively self-seeking ever came to act socially. The solution to this problem was usually found in the fact that precisely those self-seeking and self-preservation instincts which governed man's activity could not find satisfaction except through cooperation with a group. All man's social activity was conceived as purely instrumental to the gratification of his own egoistic desires. Man got on with his fellows simply because he could not get on without them. We shall see that, in the light of the specific and natural tendencies toward social behavior which are part of man's original equipment, this sharp psychological isolation between the individual and the group is an altogether unwarranted a.s.sumption. For it is just as native to man to act socially as it is for him to be hungry, or curious, or afraid. The element of truth in the nineteenth-century exaggeration of man's individuality lies in the fact that social activity is partly brought about in the satisfaction of the more egoistic impulses of the individual. "The fear motive drives men together in times of insecurity; the pugnacity motive bands them together for group combat; the economic motive brings industrial cooperation and organization; the self-a.s.sertive and submissive tendencies bring emulation as well as obedience; the expansion of the self to cover one's family, one's clique, one's cla.s.s, one's country contributes to loyalty; while the parental instinct, expanding its scope to cover others besides children who are helpless, leads to self-sacrifice and altruism."[1]

[Footnote 1: R. S. Woodworth: _Dynamic Psychology_, p. 204.]

The fact is, however, that while social activity is promoted because individuals find in cooperation the possibility of the satisfaction of their egoistic desires, social activity is primarily brought about through the specifically social tendencies which are part of our native equipment. It is with these natural bases of social activity that we shall in this chapter be particularly concerned. We shall have to take note, in the first place, of a native tendency to be with other people, to feel an unlearned sense of comfort in their presence, and uneasiness if too much separated from them, physically, or in action, feeling, or thought. Human beings tend, furthermore, to reproduce sympathetically the emotions of others, especially those of their own social and economic groups.

Thirdly, man's conduct is natively social in that he is by nature specifically sensitive to praise and blame, that he will modify his conduct so as to secure the one and avoid the other. Finally, besides the specific tendencies to respond to the presence, the feelings, the actions, and the thoughts of others, man displays a "capacity for social behavior." And, as is the case with all native capacities, man has, therefore, a native interest in group or social activity for its own sake.

The predominantly social character of human behavior has thus a twofold explanation. It is based, in the first place, on the group of native tendencies of a social character to which we have already referred. It is based, secondly, on the necessity for group activity and cooperation which the individual experiences in the satisfaction of his egoistic impulses and desires. Man, because of his original tendencies, wants to live, act, think, and feel with others; for the satisfaction of his nonsocial impulses he must live with others. And in civilized society human action from almost earliest childhood is in, and with reference to, a group. Human behavior is thus seen to be that of an essentially social nature acting in an essentially social environment. And, as in the case of other instinctive and habitual activities, human beings experience in social activity an immediate satisfaction apart from any satisfactions toward which it may be the instrument.

GREGARIOUSNESS. The "herd instinct" is manifested by many animals very low in the scale of animal development.

McDougall quotes in this connection Francis Galton's cla.s.sical account of this instinct in its crudest form: "Describing the South African ox in Damaraland, he says he displays no affection for his fellows, and hardly seems to notice their existence, so long as he is among them; but, if he becomes separated from the herd, he displays an extreme distress that will not let him rest until he succeeds in rejoining it, when he hastens to bury himself in the midst of it, seeking the closest possible contact with the bodies of his fellows."[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, p. 84.]

This original tendency exhibits itself among human beings in a variety of ways. The tendency of human beings to herd together, for which there is evidence in the earliest history of the race, may be observed on any crowded thoroughfare, or in any amus.e.m.e.nt park, or city. That group life has expanded partly through practical necessity, is, of course, true, but groups of humans tend to become, as in our monster cities, larger than they need be, or can be for economic efficiency.

The fascination of city life has not infrequently been set down to the multiplicity of opportunities offered in the way of companions, amus.e.m.e.nts, and occupations after one's own taste. But the fascination has clearly a more instinctive basis, the desire to be with other people. Many a man, as has been pointed out, lives in a large city as unsociable and secluded a life as if he were surrounded by miles of mountain or prairie, who yet could not be happy elsewhere. Any one who has failed to be amused by a really good comedy when the theater was comparatively empty, or in the presence of thousands of others hugely enjoyed a second-rate baseball game, or gone down to the crowded shopping district to get what he could have purchased on a side-street uptown, can appreciate how instinctive is this undiscriminating desire for companions.h.i.+p.

The native intensity of this desire is what makes rural isolation, on the other hand, so unsatisfactory. The bleakness of New England country life as pictured in Edith Wharton's _Ethan Frome_, or in some of Robert Frost's _North of Boston_, is due more than anything else to this privation from companions.h.i.+p. Perhaps nothing better could be said for the rural telephone, the interurban trolley, and the cheap automobile than that they make possible the fulfillment of this normal human longing to be near and with other people in body and spirit. The horror which makes it practically impossible in civilized countries to legalize punishment by solitary confinement and the nervous collapse which such confinement brings about are indications of how deep-seated is this desire.

The "herd instinct," like all the other of man's original tendencies, is educable. It can be trained to respond to groups of various sizes and kinds. In its simplest manifestation it tends to be aroused by the family, but in the history of civilization the group tends progressively to enlarge. The family, the town, the nation--the gregarious instinct may be educated to respond to these ever-widening groups. The intensity and controlling power of this instinct over our actions seems to vary with the degree of intimacy and intercommunication between the individual and the group. In primitive society it is most intense among the family and clan, and the family still remains in civilized society, certainly in rural districts, a very closely knit primary group. But as intercommunication widens, a sense of attachment to and solidarity with a larger group begins to make itself felt. That intercommunication is largely important in extending the group in response to which the herd instinct may be aroused, is well ill.u.s.trated by the utter lack of national group feeling exhibited during the Great War by recruits drafted from the backwoods districts where they had been tied by no railroads or newspapers to the national civilization of which they were a part.

The devotion of generous-hearted souls to "lost causes,"

whether political or religious, of the individual to his family or friends in the face of personal privation, are cla.s.sic ill.u.s.trations of the power of men's gregarious instinct even in the face of the dictates of reason. In the perhaps extreme but nevertheless suggestive statement of Mr. Trotter:

He [man] is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence. It can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct.

It is the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage and endurance, and can as easily take these away. It can make him acquiesce in his own punishment, and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty, bow to tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not merely can it make him accept hards.h.i.+p and suffering unresistingly, but it can make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly preventable afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is this acme of the power of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable proof of the profoundly gregarious nature of man.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter: _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_, pp. 114-15.]

To how large a group the individual can respond with spontaneous and instinctive loyalty is questionable. The small child throws out his arms and exclaims pa.s.sionately, "I love the whole world." Auguste Comte could be imbued with a fervor for "humanity" in the abstract. The idea of a League of Nations arouses in some minds a pa.s.sionate devotion to a world order that to those themselves habituated to an intense loyalty to the national group seems incredible. Certainly it is true that we rapidly outgrow that state of mind common to enthusiastic adolescence when we can develop a love for the universe in the abstract. The instinct of gregariousness seems unquestionably to be most intense where there is intimacy and vividness of group a.s.sociation. The primary groups, as Professor Ross calls them, are face-to-face a.s.sociations, the family, the play group, the neighborhood group.

If "world patriotism" is a possibility, it is because rapid communication and the frequency of travel, and the education of the industrial cla.s.ses to "the international mind" tend to break down barriers and to make distant countries and persons vivid and directly imaginable. But there seems to be no subst.i.tute for direct personal contact. Even devotion to a country tends to take the form of phrases, places, persons, and symbols, to which we have been familiarized.

GREGARIOUSNESS IMPORTANT FOR SOCIAL SOLIDARITY. The gregarious instinct, powerful as it is, is of the greatest significance for social solidarity, and, if misdirected, for seriously limiting it. It is, in the first place, the trait without which social solidarity would be almost impossible. "In early times when population was scanty, it must have played an important part in social evolution by keeping men together, and thereby occasioning the need for social laws and inst.i.tutions."[1] The coherence of national, political, or religious groups depends primarily on the extent to which the gregarious instinct may be aroused. Allegiance to a group may, of course, be secured through partic.i.p.ation in common ideals. This is ill.u.s.trated in the case of the numerous literary and scientific a.s.sociations that cut across national boundaries and knit into groups similarly interested persons all over the world. Groups may, again, be formed through common economic interests, as in the case of labor unions, or employers' a.s.sociations. Groups may be knit and strengthened through law and custom. And all these factors play a smaller or larger part in any important grouping of men in contemporary society. But unless there is, on the part of the members of the group, a deep-seated emotional attachment to the group itself, solidarity will be very precarious. The intensity and solidarity, of feeling exhibited so markedly during war-time is made possible by the intense excitability of this instinct when the group is under conditions of stress or danger. Any scheme for enlisting a great number of individuals in modern society in a scheme of social reform or improvement, must and does, when it is successful, arouse in him a heightened sense of loyalty to a group more than reasoned approval of a cause.

Effective recruiting posters more often told the pa.s.ser-by, "Your country needs you," than they attempted to convince him in black-and-white logic of the justice of his country's aims.

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, p. 301.]

GREGARIOUSNESS MAY HINDER THE SOLIDARITY OF LARGE GROUPS.

While gregariousness is the foundation of group solidarity, it also interferes with the solidarity of large groups, and not infrequently brings about conflicts between them, and within groups themselves. Within even so small a community as a college cla.s.s, cliques may form; and so in a country, attachment to the smaller group may inhibit attachment to the larger. An individual may be vaguely patriotic, but instinctively aroused more by his own economic or local or racial group than by the country as a whole. A man may at heart be more devoted to his town or home than to the United States. (Not infrequently his town or home is what the United States means to the citizen.) Even to-day the sectional feeling that exists in many parts of the country cannot be completely explained as occurring through separate economic interests. The division of cla.s.ses within a country is largely an economic matter, but even in such a situation a loyalty develops to the cla.s.s as a cla.s.s or group.

Again, the same instinct to herd with his fellows that makes a man intensely loyal to his own group may operate to make him indifferent to the difficulties or jealous and suspicious of the aims of others Gregariousness is the basis not only of patriotism, but of chauvinism, not only of civic pride, but of provincialism. The narrowness and parochialism of group attachments is most p.r.o.nounced where groups and communities are rigidly set off one from another. In such circ.u.mstances community of feeling and understanding is largely reduced.

This may be seen even under contemporary conditions in the comparatively complete inability of different professional, social, and economic groups within the same society to understand each other, and the proverbial ignorance and carelessness of one half of the population as to "how the other half lives." Narrowness of group feeling tends to grow less p.r.o.nounced under the mobile conditions of modern industry, communication, and education. Trade relations knit the farthest parts of the globe together; this morning's newspaper puts us in touch with the whole of mankind. We have outgrown the days when every stranger was an enemy. But though the barriers between nations are tending to break down, within nations individuals tend, as they grow older, to experience an insulated devotion to their own set or social group, a callous oblivion to the needs and desires of that great majority of mankind with whom they have a less keen sense of "consciousness of kind."

GREGARIOUSNESS IN BELIEF. Man's gregarious character, as already pointed out, is manifested not only in his desire to be physically with his fellows, but to be at one with them in their actions, feelings, and thoughts. Beliefs once established tend to remain established if for no other reason than that they are believed in by the majority. That an opinion gains prestige merely because we know other people believe it, is frequently ill.u.s.trated by the facility with which rumor travels. At the end of the Great War, it will be recalled, the false news of the armistice report flew from mouth to mouth and was accepted with the most amazing credulity simply because "everybody said so." The spread of superst.i.tions and old wives' tales and their long lingering in the minds even of intelligent people is testimony that men tend mentally as well as physically to herd together.

The tendency to find comfort in the presence of one's fellows and uneasiness if too much separated from them, is as p.r.o.nounced in the sphere of moral and intellectual relations as it is in the case of merely physical proximity. We like to be one of a crowd in our opinions and beliefs, as well as in our persons. There is hardly anything more painful than the sense of being utterly alone in one's opinions. Even the extreme dissenter from the accustomed ways of thinking and feeling of the majority is a.s.sociated with or pictures some little group which agrees with him. And, if we cannot find contemporaries to share our extreme opinions, we at least imagine some ideal group now or in posterity to share it with us.

GREGARIOUSNESS IN HABITS OF ACTION. But if men tend to think in groups they tend more emphatically still to act in groups, to be acutely uncomfortable when acting in a fas.h.i.+on different from that customary among the majority of their fellows. Habits of action are more deep-seated physiologically than habits of thought (which is one reason why our theories are so often in advance of our practice). People will accede intellectually to new ideas which they would not and could not practice, the mind being, as it were, more convertible than the emotions. Even in minor matters, in dress, speech, and manners, we like to do the accustomed thing. It is more painful for most people to use the wrong fork at dinner, or to be dressed in a business suit where everyone else is in evening clothes, than to commit a fallacy, or to act upon prejudices rather than upon logical conclusions.

The individual's instinctive desire to be identical in action with other members of his group, from the collars and clothes he wears to the way he brings up his children, is greatly reinforced by the punishment meted out to those who differ from the majority. This may vary from ridicule, as in the case of the laughter that greets the poet's proverbial long hair and flowing tie, the foreigner's accent, or a straw hat in April, to the confinement and privation that are the penalties for any marked infringement of the accepted modes of life. Even when the punishments are slight, they are effective. A man who has no moral or religious scruples with reference to gambling on any day of the week will, to avoid the social ostracism of his neighbors, refrain from playing cards on his front porch on Sunday. For no other reason than to avoid being consciously different, many a man will not wear cool white clothes on a hot day in his office who will wear them on a cool evening at the seash.o.r.e.

THE EFFECT OF GREGARIOUSNESS ON INNOVATION. A strong instinctive tendency to community of action and thought is in large part responsible for the comparative absence of innovation in either of these fields. A premium is put upon the conventional, the customary, the common, both in the instinctive satisfaction they give the individual, and in the high value set upon them by society. In advanced societies, however, the habit of inquiry and originality may itself come to be endorsed by the majority, as it is among scientists and artists. The herd instinct need not always act on the side of unreason. Among the intellectual cla.s.ses, it is already enlisted on the side of free inquiry, which among scholars is the fundamental common habit.

If rationality were once to become really respectable, if we feared the entertaining of an unverifiable opinion with the warmth with which we fear using the wrong implement at the dinner table, if the thought of holding a prejudice disgusted us as does a foul disease, then the dangers of man's suggestibility would be turned into advantages.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter; _loc. cit._, p. 45.]

SYMPATHY (A SPECIALIZATION OF GREGARIOUSNESS). Sympathy, in the strict psychological sense of the term, means a "suffering with, the experiencing of any feeling or emotion when and because we observe in other persons or creatures the expression of that feeling of emotion."[2] The behavior of animals exhibits the external features of sympathetic action very clearly. "Two dogs begin to growl or fight, and at once all the dogs within sound and sight stiffen themselves, and show every symptom of anger. Or one beast in a herd stands arrested, gazing in curiosity on some unfamiliar object, and presently his fellows also, to whom the object may be invisible, display curiosity and come up to join in the examination of the object."[1]

[Footnote 2: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 92.]