SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.

CONFLICT OF INTERESTS.

Happiness may be defined as the feeling we have that we (including any friend or cause with which we identify ourselves) have more than enough energy to handle any situation that confronts us. That we may he happy in spite of experiencing keen want or pain (within certain limits) is shown, for instance, by the pleasure it is to be hungry when we know that a good dinner is not far away, or to receive a blow that given us a long awaited excuse to crush the enemy who struck it, or to ponder over our own or the world's woes, if we believe we have the best possible solution for them (writes Prince Hopkins in "The Labor Age").

The implications, then, of our aim of promoting the greatest happiness to the greatest number present these alternatives: Either the world must be freed from problems too difficult for people as at present constituted to meet successfully, or else people must be made more capable of handling them.

EFFECT OF SCIENCE.

The progress of science will undoubtedly make it possible to overcome some of our present day evils. But the equable distribution of those benefits of science among the many predicates an industrial revolution in society. A world mechanically productive of so much wealth that certain groups can have everything they want, is the ideal of the present generation. Unfortunately, men's wants are not stationary; the satisfaction of one want opens up new desires, and capitalist society is becoming a mad scramble of each to have more than his neighbor. This condition is teaching mankind the lesson that "man does not live by bread alone." Attention is thus being directed from the attempt to provide an easy physical berth for the race— especially for a select few of the race —toward a hope for making the mass of mankind more intelligent and capable, more able to control their industrial machines and themselves.

"CAN'T CHANGE HUMAN NATURE."

But this attempt is far from easy "You can't change human nature unless you change the institutions in which it is moulded. That it is changed and profoundly, under the influence of differing institutions is shown by the great difference in thought as expressed in the writings or the men who lived in savage, barbarian, classic, feudal, and modern times. Their whole outlook on life is in each case incomprehensible to those who lived in a later age. Whenever we send a child to school, we tacitly admit that we believe that human nature can be modified. When, however, we deliberately attempt to change mankind en masse, we must make sure that we understand of what sort of psychological stuff men are made.

 THE NATURE OF LIVING BEINGS.

Let us turn from further examination of the physical material available to make a new world to the nature of feeling and thinking creatures. We find that all are organised out of a substance called protoplasm which is characterised by its relatively great tendency to put forth movements of its own and to modify the nature of these movements because of consequent experience. These qualities of protoplasm become accentuated in the more highly evolved kinds of animals. The latter may react in one way so long as the result is pleasurable to them; but if the result is displeasable, they often turn and react oppositely. In short, successful acts are repeated, while unsuccessful ones are repressed. A child meeting and overcoming moderate obstacles develops into a man of "strong will," endowed with an optimism that moves others. Another child who is balked at every turn is likely to develop into a pessimist and a foredoomed failure. A whole nation, victorious in war, expands into a policy of mad imperialism; or crushed utterly, it loses its grip and degenerates. A social class gains psychological power in the confidence born of an advancing economic condition, but too many defeats sap its morale and lead to an utter rout.

RESULTS OF FREEDOM.

Whole ages of our race's development are characterised by the predominance of one or other of these types of character. The pictures left in their prehistoric caves by the men of the neolithic period indicate a freedom of stroke which excites our admiration to-day; the paintings by the men of the later paleolithic culture are cramped in comparison. Similarly the days of ancient Greece and Rome were days of freedom, amounting to license, which we correctly associate with the name pagan. Christianity, as a movement born on the crest of men's reaction to this lack of restraint, has for two thousand years swamped western culture with a puritanical strain of however fluctuating intensity.

Now, Christianity is losing its grip and an era of greater freedom is again developing. The economic interpretation of history is supplemented thus by its psychological interpretation of why men will no longer submit with patience to the chains their fathers bore. In the political, as earlier in the religious field, autocratic authority, absolutism, has had to give way to democracy and freedom, and to-day the victorious war is being carried into the field of industry.

ADAPTATION TO ENVIRONMENT.

What specific impulses develop out of this tendency of protoplasm to be active and to react with some adaptation to every stimulus? By experiments of a most interesting nature, Loeb, the noted American biologist, has shown that the conduct of low forms of animal life as well as of plant life is strikingly like that of the sunflower, which always turns its head toward the source of light. He shows how nervous connections from the eyes of certain water animals to swimming muscles on the opposite sides or their bodies cause these animals to swing themselves until both eyes face equally into the light. Two other low lives, Bacterium termo and Spirillum undula, face about in a mechanical fashion toward the source from which an infusion of 0.001 per cent of peptone or of meat extract comes to them. Nereis, a marine worm, is stimulated by the contact of glass against its skin to enter tiny glass tubes, even if against strong sunlight, which kills it.

Now, asks Loeb, in effect, have we not in the turning of Bacterium termo toward a chemical infusion the beginning of the impulse which draws the small boy toward home when he smells dinner cooking? And have we not in Nereis the explanation of the boy's love of crawling into the cave he has dug for himself? It is interesting to note that the same stimulus may, under slightly different circumstances, cause quite different reactions. Thus, by seeing a small animal of its own kind, an animal may he moved by the protective impulse, whereas, if the stranger had slightly larger, the combative impulse would have been aroused, and if larger still, then the impulse of flight. Similarly, an employer of labor may feel benevolence toward a small company union, but when it joins the trade union movement, he fights it, and this quite aside from its having actually demonstrated hostile intent toward him.

Of the four great drives of human beings, two corresponding to hunger and love obviously are derived from Loeb's tropians; the other two, fighting and flight, are defensive mechanisms aroused chiefly when the first two are threatened. Then, there are the inhibitive impulses corresponding to each of these.

THE HUMAN IMPULSES.

Some psychologists stop here, fearing to enumerate the human impulses more minutely, until science has made more certain of them. But most authorities give at least a tentative listing of special instincts.* You will find long lists of them given by James Thorndike, and others. Carleton Parker, the economist and student of labor, says (Casual Laborer. p. 125):

*The definition of an instinct is that it is a tendency born in us and inherited from thousands of ancestors, without any need of training at all, to act in vary definite ways when certain situations occur.

"Those instinctive tendencies are persistent—are far less warped and modified by the environment than we believe; . . they function quite as they have for a thousand years; . . . they as motives in their various normal or perverted habit form can at times dominate singly the entire behavior and act as if they were a clean character dominant."

Parker gives the "following catalogue of instincts"; 1. Gregariousness; 2. parental bent, motherly behavior, kindliness; 3. curiosity, manipulation, workmanship; 4. acquisition collecting ownership; 5. fear and flight; 6. mental activity: 7 housing or settling; 8. migration, homing: 9. hunting; 10. anger, pugnacity; 11. revolt at confinement, at being limited in liberty of action and choice; 12. revulsion; 13. leadership and mastery; 14. subordination, submission; 15. display, vanity, ostentation; 16. sex.

It is possible, while taking a position more conservative than that of those who list in detail the instincts, yet to follow their indications of direction in impulsive tendency.

These motives, of course, are shared in common by man and the lower animals. In the lives of at least the undomesticated animals they are fairly adequate to assure their happiness, because they have been evolved through hundreds of generations, during which those animals have lived in essentially the same kind of environment as that which they still inhabit today. Man, however, lives in an artificial world, which he alters continually, and faster than new instincts can possibly be evolved in himself.

CONFLICT OF IMPULSES.

When one of the lower animals is hungry, it is proper for it to seize food and eat; when sexually attracted, to mate; when afraid, to run away; or when enraged, to kill. But a man's hunger may find itself conflict with his habit of respecting the property of others, or his desire not to appear greedy: his love may go counter to his social or economic ambition; his fear may threaten to lose him the respect of his fellows; and to kill his enemy may cost him his own life. As a result, there is a tremendous conflict going on within the breast of every civilised man or woman, all the time, between the instincts which our complex civilisation constantly stimulates.

"SUBLIMATION,"

The inner conflicts which are bred by even quite necessary social restrictions would blow society to atoms, but for adaptive mechanism which mankind has evolved. This consists in "sublimation" (literally, vaporising), our impulses into expressions which symbolise, or stand for the original instincts, without really being them. Thus, under some conditions, "hunger" for books may take the energy that naturally would flow into physical hunger; or a widow may sublimate her love for her late husband into religious "love." Unfortunately, this process of sublimation isn't so simple that we can easily bring it about when ever we wish. Nevertheless, much may be effected if we make a habit of always "reasoning through" to its final causes each situation which disturbs us. Thus, for example, when we are angry at an individual, we can at least recall to what extent he is the result of the forces of heredity and environment. Not to punish this man, but to free all men, is the remedy.

REVOLT AGAINST PRESENT SYSTEM.

The tendency to "sublimate" his passions into higher forms of expression is never quite absent in mankind. That is why every age of license has been followed by one of "spiritual" striving. America, precisely because she is one of the most luxurious and crass of nations, has been the most prolific of new-fangled religious cults, of well-meaning philanthropists and of sentimental literature; and some day she will produce a movement true and fine, surpassing anything the world has known. This will be a revolt against the whole system whereby human values are subordinated to commercial values. It will proclaim, as the first essential of an endurable society, that it should not provoke, by unnecessary repressions, a war of passions in the breasts of its citizens, sure presently to find expression in literal warfare; and that it should cease to put a premium upon the lowest human motives for production of goods, but should so organise its machinery as to stimulate instead the impulses of workmanship, creativeness, self-respect, co-operation, and mutual aid.

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld. : 1912 - 1936), Saturday 22 April 1922, page 4