Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/360

 346 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The contribution of social analysis to the overcoming of this inertia must be made through due appreciation of the fact now before us, viz., the distance, moral and intellectual more signifi- cant than physical, between the elements that make up society. How this distance may be bridged, how channels of intercom- munication may be opened and kept open, is one of the fore- most problems of social technology.

VI. Solidarity or community. In distinction from the inci- dent "interdependence," the fact in view when we make note of "solidarity" or "community" is not primarily the depend- ence of one part of an association upon other parts, but the common relation of all parts to certain conditions which may at first appear to be wholly external, or to influence only a cer- tain select few within the association. Thus, not alone the individuals who must coast our Atlantic seaboard, or the great lakes, or the gulf, or the Pacific, are affected by the storms from year to year; those storms limit the life-conditions of the whole population of the continent. We are in a common lot, so far as we are affected by climate, by the health of the world at large, by its industrial system, its political institutions, its moral ideas, etc., etc. The temporary curtailment of the output of gold in the Transvaal does not affect the brokers of South Africa and London alone ; it does not confine its influence to the banking or business world. It distributes its influence over the whole of every civilized country. The world's demand for gold changes the conditions of life for every factory, shop, and farm in the United States. The particular fact to be impressed here is that, whatever be the effect of an external influence upon an associa- tion, and whatever counter-influences may operate within the association, an influence bearing upon that association, as, for instance, depression of the national credit, is not an impersonal affair; it presently comes home in some way to all the indi- viduals in the association. The machinery by which this is accomplished has been suggested in part in our discussion of interdependence, but this incident of community or solidarity is separable in thought from the antecedent incident of inter- dependence by virtue of which community becomes more specific.