CHAPTER II TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THEIR SOCIAL Instinctive Behavior We live in so highly complex a civilization and one so different from the forest life in which man's present equipment of impulses and needs was first called into play, that it is difficult to realize how important a part these primitive tendencies to act still play even in our most intellectual pursuits, and how large a part of our daily actions they still determine. So far as anthropologists can discover from the evidences of man's physical organization in the days before written history, the baby in the twentieth century is born with a set of impulses differing hardly at all from those of the baby born in the forest savagery of fifty thousand years ago. But so different are the situations which call out these powerful primitive impulses, and so complicated and so modified are the responses that are made, that modern writers on social problems, almost as much as the layman, forget that man is still a creature whose actions are determined much less by reason than by irresistible impulses to do certain things in a certain situation immediately, with no consideration of the results of what he does. Whether it is man in the pre-historic jungle "driven by hunger to try for the first time the halfburned body of some small animal which had been caught in the fire, and thus by accident discover roasted meat,"1 or the educated guest in evening dress at a dinner party of today, the instinct of hunger is the same. Though man satisfies his tendency to fight with a vote rather than with a club, though his physical desires, his longing for companionship, and his thirst for power are satisfied less crudely and directly, less simply than they were in the remote ages when they made their first appearance, they are still powerfully present and 1 Mills: The Realities of Modern Science, p. 5. are the basis of all our actions and ideals. They may be modified and directed, they may find their fulfillments in ways radically different from those which primitive man practised, but everything that the citizen of civilization does is the utilization in some form of some original capacity or a combination of them. Man cannot do anything which is not potential in him at birth. The Necessity for the Control of Instinct In civilized life not only do original tendencies, because of the novelty and complexity of the conditions to which the individual is subjected, appear in very modified form, but they are in evidence in many varieties of strength, weakness, and combination. Furthermore, the instincts of each individual cannot receive free play, even if all men so decided, since the unhindered activity of the instincts of any one individual would interfere seriously with the similar freedom of others. If every man were freely to satisfy every random impulse, it is very questionable indeed if any one would be happy. Perfectly normal human desires are perforce curbed when people live together. This is illustrated in the everyday life of a large congested city. Man's more or less native desire for fast and free locomotion would, unless interfered with when manifested in an automobile on a crowded thoroughfare, conflict seriously with just as normal and natural instincts on the part of other motorists and pedestrians. The child's quite native tendency to play with random objects, and to explore unfamiliar places must, in the interests of its own preservation as well, often, as that of others be checked on the dangerously congested streets of metropolis. Under the conditions of civilized life men have discovered," often quite by accident, that, if they are to live happily and Į fruitfully together, certain original tendencies must be encouraged, others redirected, modified, or weakened, and still others within limits altogether repressed. Individuals display at once curiosity and fear, kindliness and pugnacity, greed, cruelty, and sympathy. Of these, some are socially beneficial if allowed free play; others, if even moderately indulged, bring in their train injury not only to the individual but to other members of the group in which his own life is involved. Education, public opinion, and law are more or less deliberate methods that society has provided for encouraging the activity of certain tendencies. It promotes kindliness and curiosity, which contribute respectively to cooperation and to science, and tries to remove the occasions and repress the manifestations of cruelty, pugnacity, and greed, which are for the most part positively dangerous in a society where free and intelligent cooperation have been found to be indispensable to progress. Even those original tendencies which are generally recognized as being wholesome and deserving of the freest play, cannot under some conditions of contemporary life find fulfillment. Many present social problems can be directly traced to the inability of individuals to adjust themselves to a type of life for which they are indeed ill-adapted for their equipment of original tendencies was developed in the process of evolution when man was a hunter, a cave dweller, and a frightened believer in magical powers. William James describes a domestic terrier, who, acting on the heritage of an instinct that was useful when the storing up of food was an urgent necessity, tried to bury gloves and handkerchiefs in the carpet. So human beings try to persist in tendencies which may have been highly useful in the jungle life of by-gone ages, but are sadly misplaced in the crowded tenement districts of a large city. Some of these native/ impulses are harmful only while certain social conditions such as congested streets and over-crowded houses are allowed. to remain. The small boy's playing baseball is juvenile delinquency on the street but not in a playground; the curiosity that prompts him to meddle with the horn on an automobile, the combination of the play instinct, the wanderlust, and the curiosity that makes him steal rides on wagons and trolley cars, may, under careful education and proper provision of amusement, be utilized to great social benefit. Such movements as the Boy Scout or the settlement clubs of large cities are instances of what may be done not by sup pressing the original tendencies of children, but by providing situations to which they will respond in socially beneficial rather than harmful ways. Repression of Instinct While social conditions may be modified so as to give a larger proportion of natural desires satisfaction, civilization in the twentieth century remains so divergent from the mode of life to which man's inborn nature adapts him that the thwarting of instincts becomes inevitable. Even those that are satisfied must be subject to restraints whether by accessibility, convention, or law. We cannot appropriate other people's property; we cannot always tell other people what we think of them. It may seem as though instincts could be permanently repressed, but in reality they are too imperious and powerful not to persist either in roundabout ways, in sudden outbursts, or, when repressed, to leave the individual with a marked sense of irritation and opposition to the forces which prevent their fulfilment. The terrible monotony of a factory job where one man does one operation repeatedly for eight hours, may repress for eight hours those native desires for variety and change which are part of our biological inheritance; but nature will find postponed satisfaction in the lurid excitement of sensational moving pictures, of yellow newspapers, and of dissipation. The suppression of the sex instinct is too often accompanied by a morbid puriency in matters of sex. Assaults and lynchings in a community where law and order obtain are not infrequent evidences that man's original pugnacity is not altogether subdued by the niceties of civilization, and any panic or sudden excitement in a crowd are evidence how strong run the currents of instinct within the confining walls of civilization. The phenomenal outburst of collective vivacity and exuberance which marked the report of the signing of the armistice in the close of the Great War was a striking instance of those immense primitive energies which the control and discipline of civilization cannot altogether repress. On the powerful repressive control exerted by social standards, William James writes: "Speaking generally our moral and practical attitude at any given time, is always a resultant of two sets of forces within us, impulses pushing us one way, and obstructions and inhibitions holding us back. "Yes, yes," say the impulses. . . "No! No!" say the inhibitions. Few people who have not expressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure, almost as if we were fluidspent within the cavity of a jar. The influence is so incessant that it becomes subconscious. All of you, for example, sit here with a certain constraint at this moment, and entirely without express consciousness of the fact, because of the influence of the occasion. If left alone in the room, each of you would probably involuntarily re-arrange himself, and make his attitude more “free and easy." But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs, if any great emotional excitement intervenes. I have seen a dandy appear in the street with his face covered with shaving lather, because a house across the way was on fire; and a woman will run among strangers in her nightgown if it be a question of saving her baby's life or her own." The problem which is created by the enduring and powerful presence of instinctive tendencies in our society is to be solved neither by repression nor by the encouragement of their uncontrolled expression. It is rather to be solved by the encouragement and the provision of stimulation for the socially useful tendencies of the individual, and the redirection rather than the repression of those which are altogether or for the most part harmful in their original form. The fighting instinct which makes a boy a gangster may make him also, if it is properly directed, an enthusiastic and effective champion of a good cause. Certain tendencies, such as bullying or greed which are of comparatively complete social disutility, would seem to demand suppression, although even these may persist in the kindliest and most alturistic of individuals. The man who is far from being a bully may still on occasion be something of a tease. Instincts and Happiness On the other hand, it must be noted that the measure of man's happiness is the extent to which he utilizes all his James: Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 261-262. |