SOCIALIZATION

EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS
University of Wisconsin

By "socialization" is meant here the development of the we feeling in associates and their growth in capacity and will to act together. The process is affected by a great variety of conditions and circumstances and is not the same for those who never come into personal contact as for members of a primary group.

Sons of the same land gain a capacity of mutual sympathy from the identity of their early impressions from the physical environment. Not that they will love one another—unless they meet homesick in a far country-but when they have to choose between strangers and their countrymen they will prefer the latter. The recurrent unheeded impressions constitute, as it were, the stable background of individual experience. When people discover that they have the same background they are pleased and drawn together.

In "The Native-born" Kipling brings out clearly what it is that tends to make one people of those reared in the same climate and scene. The Australian calls upon his friends to drink

To the hush of the breathless morning
On the thin, tin, crackling roofs,
To the haze of the burned back-ranges
And the dust of the shoeless hoofs-

The Canadian's toast is

To the far-flung fenceless prairie,

Where the quick cloud-shadows trail,

To our neighbor's barn in the offing
And the line of the new-cut rail;

To the plough in her league-long furrow
With the gray Lake gulls behind-

South Africa has characteristic odors as well as sights and sounds. Her son drinks

To the home of the floods and the thunder,

To her pale dry healing blue

To the lift of the great Cape combers,

And the smell of the baked Karroo,

To the growl of the sluicing stamp-head

To the reef and the water-gold.

Still other elements hold the heart of the English bred in India. They drain the cup

To our dear dark foster-mothers,

To the heathen songs they sung

To the heathen speech we babbled

Ere we came to the white man's tongue.

To the cool of our deep verandas

To the blaze of our jewelled main

It is thus that each land becomes "home" and, however sharp the strife among its sons, they are likely to draw together when an issue arises with an alien people. Here indeed is the primitive strand of nationality.

EMOTIONAL COMMUNITY

From the reminiscences exchanged on an "old settlers' day" it is evident that what linked the hearts of the pioneers was the vivid experiences they passed through together-intense social pleasure at merrymakings and celebrations as well as suffering and anxiety caused by floods, droughts, blizzards, prairie fires, and Indian outbreaks. If foreign-born are interspersed among native settlers such experiences bring them all into sympathetic relations, and then the interchange of ideas gradually assimilates them. It is significant that the non-British immigrants into the American colonies in the eighteenth century were assimilated much sooner when they settled on the Indian-fighting frontier than when they dwelt in groups in the safe seaboard strip.

One may wonder whether one emotion has the same value as another for generating fellow-feeling. It is very likely that the

expansive emotions enlarge the heart more than do the depressive emotions. Golden moments, when one escapes from confining walls and comes in sight of large horizons, when one has a delicious and unwonted sense of free and onward life, dilate the we feeling. Religious conversion is such an experience, and it ought to show itself in a greater force and range of sympathy and love.

During the early days of the first Russian revolution people were exalted out of themselves. Absolute strangers met each other and suddenly talked like old friends. In a milkshop people would help themselves and leave the right pay. The worst-looking specimen of a man would step off the path into the wet snow to make room for a woman or child. "A boundless bright good-will flowed like waves from all the streets up into every room in the town. It was one of those vast miracles that come to a nation only at moments." "It was a dazzling revelation of the deep powers for brotherhood and friendliness that lie buried in mankind." It passed soon, not because such social feeling is transient, but because differences of aim and ideas made themselves felt.

Common hardships, perils, and maltreatment, as well as common deliverance, success, and triumph, socialize those who react to them in the same way; but unlike reaction to strain sunders men, as we see in the antipathy of martyrs to apostates, of fighters to skulkers, of rebels to cringers. Not those in the same situation but those who feel and act alike in the same situation are drawn together.

A master-experience is likely to segregate those who have had it. The converted come into fellowship, for the unregenerate cannot understand them. Russian revolutionaries with antithetical principles are brothers while they are hounded and persecuted but not afterward. To war veterans the civilian is forever an outsider. Simple seafaring men are never quite themselves with "landlubbers." Motherhood may inspire a sisterly feeling among women. A kind of freemasonry invites lovers of outdoors or wilderness hunters. Those who have been "up against it" or "down to the bottom dollar" are of a fraternity to which the darlings of fortune can never belong.

THE COMMON MEAL

From savage life to our own, eating and drinking together has been the favorite reviver of good feeling and the seal of amity. Nor have intoxicants and narcotics been without a social rôle. They have been, in the words of Giddings, "the crude excitants of social feelings in crude natures." Feasting together makes for a genial and expansive frame of mind. The ancient village community set such store by it that every available opportunity, such as the commemoration of the ancestors, the religious solemnities, the beginning and the end of field work, the births, the marriages, and the funerals, were seized upon to bring the community to a common meal. In the mediaeval guild

the common meal, like the festival at the old tribal folkmote-the mahl or malum-or the Buryate aba, the parish feast, and the harvest supper, was simply an affirmation of brotherhood. It symbolized the times when everything was kept in common by the clan. This day, at least, all belonged to all; all sate at the same table and partook of the same meal. Even at a much later time the inmate of the almshouse of a London guild sat this day by the side of the rich alderman.'

Even now, when we wish to weave a bond of fellowship or to persuade men to join in a generous undertaking we gather them about the banquet board. Indeed, to "break bread together" has a symbolic, even a mystic, significance, and we will not sit at meat with those against whom we intend to draw a color line or a social line.

RÔLE OF THE FESTIVAL

In olden time the larger societies provided for periodical assemblage in order not to disintegrate into bickering local groups or social classes. The socializing value of such assemblage lies in this, that in one another's presence people are deeply moved in the same way at the same time and are conscious of their community of emotion. In the words of Tarde a festival is

that sovereign process by which the social logic of the sentiments resolves all partial discords, private enmities, envies, contempts, jealousies, moral oppositions of all sorts, into an immense union formed by the periodic convergence

I Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 175.

of all the secondary sentiments into a greater and stronger feeling, into a collective hatred or love for some great object, which gives the tone to all hearts and transfigures their dissonances into a higher harmony. Hence, the more a society in becoming complicated multiplies these dissonances, the more it has need of magnificent and frequent festivals. This major feeling, this tonic note of the public heart, is sometimes a national hatred which is magnified and intensified by expressing itself in mimic combats, by the slaughter of captives, by all those bloody and ferocious criminal festivals in which primitive civilizations delight. Sometimes it is a great national love for a god or for a man, a national worship or admiration, religious, patriotic, or political in tinge.

In the multifarious Hellenic festivals, Olympian games, Isthmian games, Panathenian processions, the triumphal return of the victorious athlete, etc., was expressed intense admiration for strength, agility and beauty, and for the heroes in which these qualities were embodied, also respect and love of the god or the goddess of the city-piety and patriotism blent in a unique combination. Rome had its triumphal marches of generals to the Capitol, its apotheoses of emperors which, like its gladiatorial games, glorified its love of glory, its appetite for dominion and conquest. The Middle Ages had its canonization of saints, its coronations, its jousts, its exposure of reliquaries in procession, all of them expressions of chivalric, feudal, or monarchic mysticism.

We have our patriotic, political, or humanitarian festivals, such as military reviews, the funeral of Victor Hugo, the bringing back of the ashes of Napoleon, the unveiling of statues in honor of great writers, great artists, greater or lesser statesmen. There are no festivals . . . . which have not the virtue of binding for the moment all souls into one bundle, united by a dominant feeling.

....

Public worship is but a variety of periodical assemblage, and originally its social or national motive was obvious. "The most important functions of ancient worship," says W. Robertson Smith, "were reserved for public occasions, when the whole community was stirred by a common emotion." "Universal hilarity prevailed; men ate, drank, and were merry, together, rejoicing before their god. Feasting, dancing, song, and music were present." We read of "orgiastic gladness," "intoxication of the senses," "physical excitement of religion," and "hilarious revelry" as characterizing the later Semitic religious gatherings, in contrast with the natural exhilaration of the primitive feasts. A people without letters, arts, or trade, living in scattered rural settlements has little to keep alive mutual interest. Wanting are the ties created by education, travel, news, common literature, and central authority.