Human Traits and their Social SignificanceEdman, Irwin
Philosophy
Human Traits and their Social Significance
Edman, Irwin
Social psychology
A second cause for the control of instinct lies in the fact that
people live and have to live together. The close association
which is so characteristic of human life is, as we shall see,
partly attributable to a specific gregarious instinct, partly to
the increasing need for cooeperation which marks the increasing
complexity of civilization. But whatever be its causes,
group association makes it necessary that men regulate their
impulses and actions with reference to one another. Endowed
as human beings are with more or less identical sets of
original native desires, the desires of one cannot be freely
fulfilled without frequently coming into conflict with the
similar desires of others. Compromise and adjustment must be
brought about by some intelligent modification both of action
and desire. The child's curiosity, the acquisitiveness or sex
desire or self-assertiveness of the adult must be checked and
modified in the interests of the group among which the individual
lives. One may take a simple illustration from the
everyday life of a large city. There is, for most individuals,
an intrinsic satisfaction in fast and free movement. But that
desire, exhibited in an automobile on a crowded thoroughfare,
will interfere with just as normal, natural, and inevitable
desires on the part of other motorists and pedestrians.
Still another imperative reason for the control of our instinctive
equipment lies in the fact that instincts as such are inadequate
to adjust either the individual or the group to contemporary
conditions. They were developed in the process
of evolution as useful methods for enabling the human animal
to cope with a radically different and incomparably simpler
environment. While the problems and processes of his life
and environment have grown more complex, man's inborn
equipment for controlling the world he lives in has, through
the long history of civilization, remained practically
unchanged. But as his equipment of mechanisms for reacting
to situations is the same as that of his prehistoric ancestors,
so are his basic desires. And the satisfaction of man's primary
impulses is less and less attainable through the simple,
unmodified operation of the mechanisms of response with
which they are associated. In the satisfaction of the desire
for food, for example, which remains the same as it was under
primitive forest conditions, much more complex trains of
behavior are required than are provided by man's native
equipment. To satisfy the hunger of the contemporary citizens
of New York or London requires the transformation of
capricious instinctive responses into systematic and controlled
processes of habit and thought. The elaborate systems of
agriculture, transportation, and exchange which are necessary
in the satisfaction of the simplest wants of men in civilization
could never be initiated or carried on if we depended on the
instincts with which we are born.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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