Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
What connection or what divorce appears to exist between mental and
moral qualities in the groups and in the individuals composing them?
Are criminals as a rule of a lower order of intelligence than
non-criminals? If so, what types of intelligence are associated with
different types of crime? For example, do professional burglars and
professional confidence men represent different mental types?
What are the effects upon these different types of isolation and of
mobility, of stimulus and of repression?
To what extent can playgrounds and other forms of recreation supply
the stimulation which is otherwise sought for in vicious pleasures?
To what extent can vocational guidance assist individuals in finding
vocations in which they will be able to obtain a free expression of
their temperamental qualities?
_The moral region._—It is inevitable that individuals who seek the same
forms of excitement, whether that excitement be furnished by a horse
race or by grand opera, should find themselves from time to time in the
same places. The result of this is that in the organization which city
life spontaneously assumes the population tends to segregate itself, not
merely in accordance with its interests, but in accordance with its
tastes or its temperaments. The resulting distribution of the population
is likely to be quite different from that brought about by occupational
interests or economic conditions.
Every neighborhood, under the influences which tend to distribute and
segregate city populations, may assume the character of a “moral
region.” Such, for example, are the vice districts, which are found in
most cities. A moral region is not necessarily a place of abode. It may
be a mere rendezvous, a place of resort.
In order to understand the forces which in every large city tend to
develop these detached milieus in which vagrant and suppressed impulses,
passions, and ideals emancipate themselves from the dominant moral
order, it is necessary to refer to the fact or theory of latent impulses
of men.
The fact seems to be that men are brought into the world with all the
passions, instincts, and appetites, uncontrolled and undisciplined.
Civilization, in the interests of the common welfare, demands the
suppression sometimes, and the control always, of these wild, natural
dispositions. In the process of imposing its discipline upon the
individual, in making over the individual in accordance with the
accepted community model, much is suppressed altogether, and much more
finds a vicarious expression in forms that are socially valuable, or at
least innocuous. It is at this point that sport, play, and art function.
They permit the individual to purge himself by means of symbolic
expression of these wild and suppressed impulses. This is the catharsis
of which Aristotle wrote in his _Poetic_, and which has been given new
and more positive significance by the investigations of Sigmund Freud
and the psychoanalysts.
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