Introduction to the Science of SociologyPark, Robert Ezra
General
Introduction to the Science of Sociology
Park, Robert Ezra
Sociology
Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a
recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed
experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt, and in so
far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one
who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating,
with fulness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it
be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your
experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and
ejaculations. The experience has to be formulated in order to be
communicated. To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as
another would see it, considering what points of contact it has with the
life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can
appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch
phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's
experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.
All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that
any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared,
is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast
in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.
In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and
learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together
educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and
enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and
vividness of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone
mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to
reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. The
inequality of achievement between the mature and the immature not only
necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching
gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form
which will render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.
2. Behavior and Conduct[87]
The word "behavior" is commonly used in an interesting variety of ways.
We speak of the behavior of ships at sea, of soldiers in battle, and of
little boys in Sunday school.
"The geologist," as Lloyd Morgan remarks, "tells us that a glacier
behaves in many respects like a river, and discusses how the crust of
the earth behaves under the stresses to which it is subjected.
Weatherwise people comment on the behavior of the mercury in the
barometer as a storm approaches. When Mary, the nurse maid, returns with
the little Miss Smiths from Master Brown's birthday party, she is
narrowly questioned as to their behavior."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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