As a half-way measure, until schools, churches, homes, and other social institutions become infused by the new spirit of socialized effort and consciously work to develop socialized "selves," other organizations for stimulating "social service" may spontaneously arise to prepare the way. Some years ago, for example, the Agenda Club and the Nobodies Club were organized in London for this precise purpose. They are twentieth century Anglo-Saxon orders of chivalry, samurai divested of medievalism, with the avowed purpose of organizing and directing into practical and useful channels the mass of vague idealism which is wasted for want of some such form of direction. Human nature may for a long time to come need the props of religion and formulated codes of duties (as in fraternities and castes like the samurai), for the attainment of its socialized sense of self; but we have the surest grounds for believing that through rational education it will come in time to more spontaneous realization of itself and be able to discard every suggestion of priggishness or condescension. Let us now review briefly the ground we have traveled in this study. The kernel of the whole matter is that human nature is not a fixed quantity. It is infinitely diverse and infinitely malleable; infinitely sensitive to change. It is a weathercock; it is thistledown rather than the fixed star or adamant we are urged to believe. It is not altogether the nature of things; human nature is modifiable by human will, as Lowes Dickinson reminds us. This we saw clearly in primitive men. Their mystical and elastic concepts of their "persons," their identification of self with the group, cosmic powers and processes, the universal belief in metamorphosis, "possession," reincarnation, "contagion of qualities," indicate historically and genetically a sound basis for our belief that the self is a function of the will, and is socially determined. From psychology we gathered the fact that we are a bundle of potential selves and attain unity through unified activity; that a dominant activity will build up and color a dominant self; that the social self is the real self because the idea of self as a member of a coherent group becomes a dominant idea in all normal persons. Social psychology and sociology show us how this social self is built up out of social experience; how social life furnishes not only the mold but even the very materials that are poured into it for the casting of a social self; how it is no mere metaphor to insist that through the meaning of "us" we learn of "me," and that the self is thus a social product. We are all of us part and parcel of each other. And it is the very community of our selves (the old "Communion of the Saints") that has hauled us up out of the Eocene pit and made us men out of protoplasm. This identification of our selves with our fellows we found to be a real gain in breadth and freedom, instead of a suicidal crushing of our own wills and personalities. The key to such an identification of self with other-self as would be socially valuable we discovered to be "efficient imagination," the power to tolerate, to sympathize with, and to visualize others' selves. But such an elastic imagination requires a wide range of social experience which in our opinion can come only from a wider definition and practice of education; in other words, from social education. And in social education we find the means ready to hand for that molding and fashioning of the sense of self which is the prerequisite to any conscious plan of progress towards the new worlds of which we dream. Through social education men will realize and actually live out that prime social law long ago glimpsed by the Roman Emperor-sage that they were born for the service and benefit of each other. The method, so far as it can be compressed into a single phrase, must be to develop in the child's mind the dominating thought of himself as a contributing personality, and to project this dominant concept upon the plane of imagination. Thus have we accepted frankly the challenge that human nature is forever fixed and therefore unadapted to social betterment. Of the two ways of looking at the problem of society and social change (the individual on the one hand, the mass and its environment on the other), we have now finished the discussion of the personal element in controlled or purposive social change, namely the problem of the human self and its manipulation. We must now try to find out the meaning of social change; to give a precise definition to social change conceived as progress or betterment, to determine along what path or paths human personality can best express itself in order to secure improvement. This will involve a critical analysis of what the word progress covers and the various tests by which it may be identified. |