CHAPTER XXXII SOCIALIZATION BY 66 socialization" is meant here the development of the СНАР. Genesis we feeling in associates and their growth in capacity and will to act together. The process is affected by a great variety of Love of 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 have a capacity for 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 draw 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 South Africa has characteristic odors as well as sights and sounds. Native CHAP. Strong Emotions The Stimulating Emotions Have the Value To the home of the floods and the thunder, To the lift of the great Cape combers, To the reef and the water-gold. Still other elements hold the heart of the English bred in India. To the blaze of our jewelled main. It is thus that each land becomes "home" and, however sharp EMOTIONAL COMMUNITY From the reminiscences exchanged on an "old settlers' day" it is evident that what knit the hearts of the pioneers was the vivid experiences they passed thru together-intense social pleasure at merry makings and celebrations as well as suffering and anxiety caused by floods, draughts, 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 18th century were assimilated much sooner when they settled on the Indian-fighting frontier than when they dwelt in groups in the safe seaboard strip. Has one emotion the same value as another for generating fellow feeling? It is likely that the expansive emotions enlarge the heart more than do the depressive emotions. Golden moments, when one escapes from confining walls and beholds large horizons, when one has a delicious and unwonted sense of free and onward life, beget 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 milk shop 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 Common Master ence Be gets FreeMasonry A master experience is likely to segregate those who have had it. The converted come into fellowship, for the unregenerate Experi 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 sea-faring men are never quite themselves with landlubbers." Motherhood may inspire a sisterly feeling among women. A kind of free-masonry 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 Feasting Together Pointless 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 and of social feelings in crude natures." Feasting together begets Reserve CHAP. XXXII The Common Meal a Vital Institution Social Sig- National 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 medieval guild "the common meal, like the festival at the old tribal folk mote- 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 sat 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 fire 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 2 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 unison formed by the periodic convergence 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 fes1 Kropotkin, "Mutual Aid,” p. 175. 2 La logique sociale, pp. 325-6. |