Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/579

 SOCIAL CONTROL 565

ing ideals can have the pick of the human race for his purposes.

In an age of skepticism and self-assertion it is not the most effective form of control society can lay hand to. At the same time it has the defects of its qualities. Contrasting the oriental social order resting on authority with that of the Occident so largely based on self-respect, Mary S. Barnes says: "The East, on her side, must confess that her systems of education tend to allow, if not to cherish, such faults as servility and double dealing, while they actually crush out the inventor and the vari- ant, in a word, the hope of progress. The West, on her side, must note the fact that her systems develop arrogance, self-con- ceit, angularity, and eccentricity, and, still more serious arraign- ment, they actually discourage love, patience and courtesy, in a word, social harmony." 1

Just because it is the ascendant moral force of our time it is hard for many to see that this exquisite and perfected guidance is a form of social control at all. Least of all can "ethics," addressing, as it always does, the individual, and bent on pro- viding him reasons for being good, surrender this, its trump card. The moralists assure us they are not "controlling" the individual, they are simply enlightening him. They are think- ing not of the social order, but of what it is best for the individ- ual to strive for. That the moral values they point him to should tally with values for society is a mere accident. That what it is best for the individual to make himself agrees so exactly with what his particular group would have him be, that the values of the various elements of moral excellence are revised with every change in the situation and need of society, gives them no hint of the truth. On whatever crutches of law, divine retribution, or hell-fire, humanity has hobbled up to its present moral level, it has at last, they tell us, thrown away all such aids and now advances upon its own legs.

But the sociologist must regard the polarizing of the feelings of the individual in regard to carefully-framed social types of character as simply one of the means by which bodies of men

1 Studies in Education, III.