Human Nature and the Social Order

Cooley, Charles Horton 1922. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner. [Internet Archive]

INTRODUCTION: HEREDITY AND INSTINCT

We have come in recent years to look upon all questions of human life from an evolutionary points of view. It may be worth while to recall something of what that phrase means.
It means, for one thing, that all our life has a history, that nothing happens disconnectedly, that everything we are or do is part of a current coming down from the remote past. Every word we say, every movement we make, every idea we have, and every feeling, is, in one way or another, an outcome of what our predecessors [|] have said or done or thought or felt in past ages. There is an actual historical continuity from their life to ours, and we are constantly trying to trace this history, to see how things come about, in order that we may understand them better and may learn to bring to pass those things we regard as desirable. (Cooley 1922: 3-4)

Historical determinism.

Life, it appears, is all one great whole, a kinship, unified by a common descent and by common principles of existence; and our part in it will not be understood unless we can see, in a general way at least, how it is related to other parts. (Cooley 1922: 4)

We are all one, man, like, far-out! etc.

The stream of this life-history, whose sources are so remote and whose branchings so various, appears to flow in two rather distinct channels. Or perhaps we might better say that there is a stream and a road running along the bank - two lines of transmission. The stream is heredity or animal transmission; the road is communication or social transmission. One flows through the germ-plasm; the other comes by way of language, intercourse, and education. The road is more recent than the stream: it is an improvement [|] that did not exist at all in the earliest flow of animal life, but appears later as a vague trail alongside the stream, becomes more and more distinct and travelled, and finally develops into an elaborate highway, supporting many kinds of vehicles and a traffic fully equal to that of the stream itself. (Cooley 1922: 4-5)

Evolutionary stream and cultural highway.

Suppose, for example, that an American family in China adopts a Chinese baby and brings it home to grow up in America. The animal life-history of that baby's past will lie in China. It will have the straight black hair, the yellowish skin and other physical traits of the Chinese people, and also any mental tendencies that may be part of their heredity. But his social past will lie in America, because he will get from the people about him the English speech and the customs, manners, and ideas that have been developed in this country. (Cooley 1922: 6)

Somewhat dubious, though (if epigenetics is to be believed) not completely. What exactly are "mental tendencies", though?

Nor is there any doubt, though it is not so obvious, that he gets from this source his original mental endowment. A child of feeble-minded ancestors is usually feeble-minded also, and one whose parents had unusual ability is apt to resemble them. (Cooley 1922: 7)

I.Q. is heritable type claim?

Heredity brings us not only tendencies to a definite sort of physical development, but also capacity, aptitude, disposition, lines of teachability, or whatever else may call the vague physical tendencies that all of us are born with. (Cooley 1922: 7)

If they are admittedly vague, how do you know they are hereditary?

And from social transmission, through the environment, come all the stimulation and teaching which cause these tendencies to develop in a definite form, which lead us to speak a particular language, to develop one set of ideas or kind of ambition rather than another, to feel patriotism for America rather than for England or Italy. (Cooley 1922: 7)

Missing firstness.

Suppose, for example, there is a Southern county in which there are five thousand negroes and five thousand whites, and that the average number of children raised in negro and white families is about the same. Now if, in some way, you can cause the white families to raise more children, or the negroes fewer, the complexion of the county will gradually be altered. (Cooley 1922: 10)

This reads like a manual for what has actually happened in the U.S. over the past century just by imprisoning black people at a higher rate than white people.

There has, in fact, arisen a science of Eugenics, or Race-Improvement, seeking to stimulate the propagation of desirable types of human heredity and prevent that of undesirable types. There are many difficulties in this, and it is not clear how much we may expect to accomplish, but there is no doubt that some things can and should be done. Scientific tests should be made of all children to ascertain those that are feeble-minded or otherwise hopelessly below a normal capacity, followed by a study of their families to find whether these defects are hereditary. (Cooley 1922: 12)

"A screening test for Down's syndrome, Edwards' syndrome and Patau's syndrome is available between weeks 10 and 14 of pregnancy." - Beyond that it gets into the nightmare territory of "capacity, aptitude, disposition, lines of teachability, or whatever else".

On the other hand, the educated and prosperous classes show a tendency to limit the number of their children that is often spoken of as Race-Suicide. This limitation appears to be due partly to the taste for ease and luxury fostered by wealth, partly to increasing social ambition and greater desire for self-development. These latter, excellent no doubt in themselves, draw upon our means and energy, and are apt to cause us to postpone marriage or to have fewer children after marriage than we otherwise would. Since they grow with democracy, it may well be that democracy antagonizes the birth-rate. (Cooley 1922: 13)

Firstness no longer missing - Cooley's are ease and luxury, so basically Plato (and not, for example, Aesara). Weird how Cooley starts out with the right conclusion - people have fewer children with education and prosperity - and ends up with the wrong conclusion - democracy inherently antagonistic to birth-rate.

The upper classes are falling far short of their quota, and if we assume that they represent the abler stocks it would seem that the race is being impaired by their diminution. Is it not desirable, and perhaps practicable, [|] to induce them to become more prolific? Even if they do not represent abler stocks than the middle class, is there not danger that the small-family tendency will pervade that class also? It has already done so in France. (Cooley 1922: 13-14)

Abler for what? Amassing wealth? Usury? Exploitation? Self-interestedness? This also illustrates the lax nature of "tendencies". If education and prosperity lead to having fewer children and we see this all over the world, then it means that humanity has a natural small-family tendency that is only hampered by poverty and lack of education.

Others give their apprehensions a still wider range and see an imminent Yellow Peril in the fecundity of the oriental peoples, which threatens, they think, to put an early end to the ascendancy of the white races and of white civilization. (Cooley 1922: 14)

Literally replacement theory.

The spread of education, the abolition of slavery, the growth of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, and automobiles, the formation of a society of nations and the abolition of war - all this kind of thing is social and may go on indefinitely with no improvement in heredity. (Cooley 1922: 14)

The first edition was published before WWI when such hopes might have been commonplace.

Heredity and environment, as applied to the present life of a human being, are, in fact, abstractions; the real thing is a total organic process not separable into parts. (Cooley 1922: 15)

Holistic thinking.

Speech well illustrates the inextricable union of the animal and social heritages. It springs in part from the native structure of the vocal organs and from a hereditary impulse to use them which we see at work in the chattering of idiots and of the deaf and dumb. A natural sensibility to other persons and need to communicate with them also enters into it. But all articulate utterance comes by communication; it is learned from others, varies with the environment and has its source in tradition. Speech is thus a sociobiologic function. (Cooley 1922: 16)

Not too shabby. The "natural sensibility to other persons" reminds me of this: "There are people who, without sympathy or antipathy, have pleasure in the intuitive ascription of emotion to others."

And so it is with ambition and all our socially active impulses: We are born with the need to assert ourselves, but whether we do so as hunters, warriors, fishermen, traders, politicians, or scholars, depends upon the opportunities offered us in the social process. (Cooley 1922: 16)

Thus, "the taste for ease and luxury", "the social ambition" and "desire for self-improvement" are socially active impulses in Cooley's terminology.

But are there also, or are there not, subtle differences of temperament, mental capacity or emotional gifts, which are both hereditary and important, which render the races incapable of living together in peace, or make one of them superior to the other? (Cooley 1922: 18)

"Temperament" is Second?

And again, with reference to the rich and powerful classes. Is their ascendancy that of natural ability, of a superior breed, and so, perhaps, just and beneficial? Or is it based on social privileges in the way of education and opportunity, and hence, as many think, unfair and detrimental? Unsolved questions of this kind arise whenever we try to make out just how we may better the course of human life. (Cooley 1922: 18)

The latter.

The great majority of us gain our food, after we have left the parental nest, through what we call a job, and a job [|] is any cativity whatever that a complex and shifting society esteems sufficiently to pay us for. It is very likely, nowadays, to last only part of our lives and to be something our ancestors never heard of. Thus whatever is most distinctively human, our adaptability, our power of growth, our arts and sciences, our social institutions and progress, is bound up with the indeterminate character of human heredity. (Cooley 1922: 21-22)

Almost like a rebuttal to the "if you can't describe your job in 3 words you have a bullshit job" meme.

Moreover, although our outward actions had ceased to be determined by heredity, it [|] seemed that we still had inward emotions and dispositions that were so determined, and had an immense influence on our conduct. The question, then, was, and is, whether human behavior, guided in a genaral way by these hereditary emotions and dispositions, shall be called instinctive or not. (Cooley 1922: 23-24)

Animals have instinctive first and second, humans only instinctive first.

It is fairly clear that we have at least half a dozen well-marked types of instinctive emotional disposition that are social in that they concern directly our attitude toward other persons. I might name, as perhaps the plainest, the dispositions to anger, to fear, to maternal love, to male and female sexual love, and to the emotion of self-assertion or power. (Cooley 1922: 25)

Not the standard list of universal emotions.

Much the same may be said of the employement, of a supposed gregarious instinct, or "instinct of the herd," to explain a multiplicity of phenomena, including mob-excitement, dread of isolation, conformity to fads and fashions, subservience to leaders and control by propaganda; which require, like war, a detailed study of social antecedents. This is, as Professor Findlay remarks, "an easy, dogmatic way of explaining phenomena whose causes and effects are far more complicated than these authors would admit." Indeed I am not aware that there is any such evidence of the existence of a gregarious instinct as there is of an instinct of fear or anger; and many think the phenomena which it is used to explain may be accounted for by sympathy and suggestion, without calling in a special instinct. It seems to me to be the postulate of an individualistic psychology in search of some special motive to explain collective behavior. If you regard human nature as primarily social you need no such special motive. (Cooley 1922: 28)

And some people still (anno domini 2023) believe that humans have this instinct. Cooley's metapsychological judgment seems correct to me.

The notion that collective behavior is to be attributed to [|] an "instinct of the herd" seems to owe its vogue in great part to Nietzsche, who made much use of it, in a contemptuous sense, to animate his anti-democratic philosophy. (Cooley 1922: 28-29, fn)

Apt. "[...] the antitheses between "egoistic" and "altruistic" presses more and more heavily on the human conscience - it is, to use my own language, the herd instinct which finds in this antithesis an expression in many ways." (Nietzsche 1921: 5).

Indeed, reason is itself an instinctive disposition, in a large use of the term, a disposition to compare, combine, and organize the activities of the mind. (Cooley 1922: 30)

These sound like the laws of association.

And, finally, just what do we mean by Human Nature? The phrase is used vaguely, but there are at least three meanings that can be distinguished with some precision. And as we distinguish them we may be able, at the same time, to answer the perennial question, Does Human Nature change?
It may mean, first, the strictly hereditary nature of man, borne by the germ-plasm, the formless impulses and capacities that we infer to exist at birth, but of [|] which we have little definite knowledge because they do not manifest themselves except as a factor in social development. This nature appears to change very slowly, and we have no reason to think we are very much different at birth from our ancestors of, say, a thousand years ago. (Cooley 1922: 31-32)

Notably this type of human nature does change, yet imperceptibly slowly.

It may mean, second, a social nature developed in man by simple forms of intimate association or "primary groups," especially the family and neighborhood, which are found everywhere and everywhere work upon the individual in somewhat the same way. This nature consists chiefly of certain primary social sentiments and attitudes, such as consciousness of one's self in relation to others, love of approbation, resentment of censure, emulation, and a sense of social right and wrong formed by the standards of a group. This seems to me to correspond very closely to what is meant by "human nature" in ordinary speech. We mean something much more definite than hereditary disposition, which most of us know nothing about, and yet something fundamental and wide-spread if not universal in the life of man, found in ancient history and in the accounts of remote nations, as well as now and here. (Cooley 1922: 32)

This type of human nature consists of vague observations on the general emotive dispositions of mankind. It nevertheless merely assumes fixity and uniformity.

Perhaps the commonest fallacy we meet in this connection is that which assumes that human nature does not change, points out respects in which it has worked deplorably, and concludes that it will always work so. An unchanging human nature, it is said, has given us wars and economic greed; it always will. (Cooley 1922: 33)

We popped out of Eden 6000 years ago exactly as we are now and God or Devil or someone put the fossils of our evolutionary ancestors in the ground to play a trick on the archaeologists.

I. SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL

If we accept the evolutionary point of view we are led to see the relation between society and the individual as an organic relation. That is, we see that the individual is not separable from the human whole, but a living member of it, deriving his life from the whole through social and hereditary transmission as truly as if men were literally one body. He cannot cut himself off; the strands of heredity and education are woven into all his being. And, on the other hand, the social whole is in some degree dependent upon each individual, because each contributes something to the common life that no one else can contribute. (Cooley 1922: 35)

Society conditions the individual and individuals constitute the society.

If this is true there is, of course, a fallacy in that not uncommon manner of speaking which sets the social and the individual over against each other as separate and antagonistic. The word "social" appears to be used in at least three fairly distinct senses, but in none of these does it mean something that can properly be regarded as opposite to individual or personal.
In its largest sense it denotes that which pertains to the collective aspect of humanity, to society in its [|] widest and vaguest meaning. In this sense the individual and all his attributes are social, since they are all connected with the general life in one way or another, and are part of a collective development.
Again, social may mean what pertains to immediate intercourse, to the life of conversation and face-to-face sympathy - sociable, in short. This is something quite different, but no more antithetical to individual than the other; it is in these relations that individuality most obviously exists and expresses itself.
In a third sense the word means conducive to the collective welfare, and thus becomes nearly equivalent to moral, as when we say that crime or sensuality is unsocial or anti-social; but here again it cannot properly be made the antithesis of individual - since wrong is surely no more individual than right - but must be contrasted with immoral, brutal, selfish, or some other word with an ethical implication. (Cooley 1922: 38-39)

Individuals viewed as a kind of totality; the communication between individuals; and things that benefit that totality.

Most people not only think of individuals are society as more or less separate and antithetical, but they look upon the former as antecedent to the latter. That persons make society would be generally admitted as a matter of course; but that society makes persons would strike many as a startling notion, though I know of no good reason for looking upon the distributive aspect of life as more primary or causative than the collective aspect. (Cooley 1922: 42)

Perfectly acceptable even in phrases like "he was a product of his upbringing", which amounts to "that society made this kind of person".

Next is double causation, or a partition of power between society and the individual, thought of as [|] separate causes. This notion, in one shape or another, is the one ordinarily met with in social and ethical discussion. It is no advance, philosophically, upon the preceding. There is the same premise of the individual as a separate, unrelated agent; but over against him is set a vaguely conceived general or collective interest and force. It seems that people are so accustomed to thinking of themselves as uncaused causes, special creators on a small scale, that when the existence of general phenomena is forced upon their notice they are likely to regard these as something additional, separate, and more or less antithetical. (Cooley 1922: 43-44)

The human being is a pebble that spontaneously takes flight and lands where it wishes.

Thirdly we have primitive individualism. This expression has been used to describe the view that sociality follows individuality in time, is a later and additional product of development. This view is a variety of the preceding, and is, perhaps, formed by a mingling of individualistic preconceptions with a somewhat crude evolutionary philosophy. Individuality is usually conceived as lower in moral rank as well as preceding in time. Man was a mere individual, mankind a mere aggregation of such, but he had gradually become socialized, he is progressively merging into a social whole. Morally speaking, the individual is the bad, the social the good, and we must push on the work of putting down the former and bringing in the latter. (Cooley 1922: 45)

This seems to me the common view, perhaps due to urbanization. As in, the rural farmers were a mere aggregation of mankind but when they moved into the city they became a "society" due to more frequent interpersonal contact.

Of course the view which I regard as sound, is that individuality is neither prior in time nor lower in moral rank than sociality; but that the two have always existed side by side as complementary aspects of the same thing, and that the line of progress is from a lower to a higher type of both, not from the one to the other. If the word social is applied only to the higher forms of mental life it should, as already suggested, be opposed not to individual, but to animal, sensual, or some other word implying mental or meral inferiority. If we go back to a time when the state of our remote ancestors was such that we are not willing to call it social, then it must have been equally underserving to be described as individual or personal; that is to say, they must have been just as inferior to us when viewed separately as when viewed collectively. (Cooley 1922: 45)

This is golden - and has its bearing upon Stapledon's vision of humanity's future.

To question this is to question the vital unity of human life. (Cooley 1922: 46)

Hmm.

Finally, there is the social faculty view. This expression might be used to indicate those conceptions which regard the social as including only a part, often a rather definite part, of the individual. Human nature is thus divided into individualistic or non-social tendencies or faculties, and those that are social. Thus, certain emotions, as love, are social; others, as fear or anger, are unsocial or individualistic. Some writers have even treated the intelligence as an individualistic faculty, and have found sociality only in some sort of emotion or sentiment. (Cooley 1922: 46)

This appears to be the position of those who speak of "the social function of language", for example, as if all functions of language were not always already social.

This idea of instincts or faculties that are peculiarly social is well enough if we use this word in the sense of pertaining to conversation or immediate fellow feeling. Affection is certainly more social in this sense than fear. But if it is meant that these instincts or faculties are in themselves morally higher than others, [|] or that they alone pertain to the collective life, the view is, I think, very questionable. At any rate the opinion I hold, and expect to explain more fully in the further course of this book, is that man's psychical outfit is not divisible into the social and the non-social; but that he is all social in a large sense, is all a part of the common human life, and that his social or moral progress consists less in the aggrandizement of particular faculties or instincts and the suppression of others, than in the discipline of all with reference to a progressive organization of life which we know in thought as conscience. (Cooley 1922: 46-47)

This explains Ch. 10, "The social aspect of conscience".

3. Is the individual a product of society?
Yes, in the sense that everything human abou thim has a history in the social past. If we consider the two sources from which he draws his life, heredity and communication, we see that what he gets through the germ-plasm has a social history in that it has had to adapt itself to past society in order to survive: the traits we are born with are such as have undergone a social test in the lives of our ancestors. And what he gets from communication - language, education, and the like - comes directly from society. Even physical influence, like food and climate, rarely reach us except as modified and adapted by social conditions. (Cooley 1922: 48)

A summary of the preceding. Though Cooley did not mean it in this sense, we now do indeed experience climate as modified by social conditions.

The evolutionary point of view encourages us to believe that life is a creative process, that we are really building up something new and worth while, and that the human will is a part of the creative energy that does this. Every individual has his unique share in the work, which no one but himself can discern and perform. Although his life flows into him from the hereditary and social past, his being as a whole is new, a fresh organization of life. Never any one before had the same powers and opportunities that you have, and you are free to use them in your own way. (Cooley 1922: 50)

A great perspective.

II. SUGGESTION AND CHOICE

The word suggestion is used here to denote an influence that works in a comparatively mechanical or reflex way, without calling out that higher selective activity of the mind implied in choice or will. Thus the hypnotic subject who performs apparently meaningless actions at the word of the operator is said to be controlled by suggestion; so also is one who catches up tricks of speech and action from other people without meaning to. From such instances the idea is extended to embrace any thought or action which is mentally simple and seems not to involve choice. The behavior of people under strong emotion is suggestive; crowds are suggestible; habit is a kind of suggestion, and so on. (Cooley 1922: 51)

I very much needed this definition.

We speak suggestion as mechanical; but it seems [|] probable that all psychical life is selective, or, in some sense, choosing, and that the rudiments of consciousness and will may be discerned or inferred in the simplest reaction of the lowest living creature. (Cooley 1922: 52-53)

Touching the lower semiotic threshold.

In our own minds the comparatively simple ideas which are called suggestions are by no means single and primary, but each one is itself a living, shifting, multifarious bit of life, a portion of the fluid "stream of thought" formed by some sort of selection and synthesis out of simpler elements. On the other hand, our most elaborate and volitional thought and action is suggested in the sense that it consists not in creation out of nothing, but in a creative synthesis or reorganization of old material. (Cooley 1922: 53)

Beautiful.

Precisely as the conditions about us and the ideas suggested by those conditions become intricate, are we forced to think, to choose, to define the useful and the right, and, in general, to work out The higher intellectual life. (Cooley 1922: 53)

The laborers are useful, the guards are right, and the philosopher-kings work out the higher intellectual life, right?

Take, for instance, the case of a member of Congress, or of any other group of reasoning, feeling, and mutually influencing creatures. Is he free in relation to the rest of the body or do they control him? The question appears senseless. He is influenced by them and also exerts an influence upon them. (Cooley 1922: 55, fn)

(1) feeling; (2) mutual influence; (3) reasoning.

It can hardly be doubted that the choosing and formative vigor of the mind is greater under the age of twenty-five than after: the will of middle age is stronger in the sense that it has more momentum, but it has less acceleration, runs more on habit, and so is less capable of fresh choice. (Cooley 1922: 57)

How did Cooley know that the brain keeps developing until the 25th year?

The imitative act, however, was often an end in itself, an interesting exercise of his constructive faculties, pursued at first without much regard to anything beyond. This was the case with the utterance of words, and, later, with spelling, with each of which he became fascinated for its own sake and regardless of its use as a means of communication. (Cooley 1922: 60)

Like the pleasure one gets from re-typing a fragment of text without much thought of actually using it for anything in particular.

It is very natural to assume that to do what some one else does requires no mental effort; but this, as applied to little children, is, of course, a great mistake. They cannot imitate an act except by learning how to do it, any more than grown-up people can, and for a child to learn a word may be as complicated a process as for an older person to learn a difficult piece on the piano. A novel imitation is not at all mechanical, but a strenuous voluntary activity, accompanied by effort and followed by pleasure in success. (Cooley 1922: 61)

It could be argued that imitation is more difficult than being original because originality usually proceeds from an extensive experience of previous imitations. Imitating an original may take more effort because it proceeds without that background experience.

Children imitate much because they are growing much, and imitation is a principal means of growth. This is true at any age; the more alive and progressive a man is the more actively he is admiring and profiting by his chosen models. (Cooley 1922: 65)

Well put.

A second reason is that adults imitate at longer range, as it were, so that the imitative character of their acts is not so obvious. They come into contact with more sorts of persons, largely unknown to one another, and have access to a greater variety of suggestions in books. Accordingly they present a deceitful appearance of independence simply because we do not see their models. (Cooley 1922: 65)

Also very true.

The common impression among those who have given no special study to the matter appears to be that suggestion has little part in the mature [|] life of a rational being; and though the control of involuntary impulses is recognized in tricks of speech and manner, in fads, fashions, and the like, it is not perceived to touch the more important points of conduct. The fact, however, is that the main current of our thought is made up of impulses absorbed without deliberate choice from the life about us, or else arising from hereditary instinct, or from habit; while the function of higher thought and of will is to organize and apply these impulses. (Cooley 1922: 65-66)

Signs grow inside us, etc.

It is a truth, though hard for us to realize, that if we had lived in Dante's time we should have believed in a material Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, as he did, and that our doubts of this, and of many other things which his age [|] did not question, have nothing to do with our natural intelligence, but are made possible and necessary by competing ideas which the growth of knowledge has enabled us to form. Our particular minds or wills are members of a slowly growing whose, and at any given moment are limited in scope by the state of the whole, and especially of those parts of the whole with which they are in most active contact. Our thought is never isolated, but always some sort of a response to the influences around us, so that we can hardly have thoughts that are not in some way around by communication. (Cooley 1922: 67-68)

This "slowly growing whole" we call culture around these parts.

We can scarcely rid ourselves of the impression that the way of life we are used to is the normal, and that other ways are eccentric. Doctor Sidis holds that the people of the Middle Ages were in a quasi-hypnotic state, and instances the crusades, dancing manias, and the like. But the question is, would not our own time, [|] viewed from an equal distance, appear to present the signs of abnormal suggestibility? Will not the intense preoccupation with material production, the hurry and strain of our cities, the draining of life into one channel, at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty, appear as mad as the crusades, and perhaps of a lower type of madness? (Cooley 1922: 73-74)

Usable in relation with how Stapledon's Eighteenth Men might see us First Men.

Sidis, Boris 1924. The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society. New York: Appleton. [Internet Archive]

I have already said, or implied, that the activity of the will reflects the state of the social order. A constant and strenuous exercise of volition implies complexity in the surrounding life from which suggestions come, while in a simple society choice is limited in scope and life is comparatively mechanical. It is the variety of social intercourse or, what comes to the same thing, the character of social organization, that determines the field of choice; and accordingly there is a tendency for the scope of the will to increase with that widening and intensification of life that is so conspicuous a feature a recent history. This change is bound up with the extension and diffusion of communication, opening up innumerable channels by which competing suggestions may enter the mind. (Cooley 1922: 75)

This is demonstrated both by the Internet and whatever the heck is going on with Stapledon's 96-member groups.

We are still dependent upon environment - life is always a give and take with surrounding conditions - but environment is becoming very wide, and in the case of imaginative persons may extend itself to almost any ideas that the past or present life of the race has [|] brought into being. This brings opportunity for congenial choice and characteristic personal growth, and at the same time a good deal of distraction and strain. (Cooley 1922: 75-76)

Today we need less imagination to achieve this.

An orator, for instance, first unifying and heightening the emotional state of his audience by some humorous or pathetic incident, will be able, if tolerably skilful, to do pretty much as he pleases with them, so long as he does not go against their settled habits of thought. (Cooley 1922: 77)

You can smell the Durkheim in the air.

III. SOCIABILITY AND PERSONAL IDEAS

In this chapter I hope to show something of the origin and growth of social ideas and feelings in the mind of the individual, and also something of the nature of society as we may find it implies in these ideas and feelings. If it appears that the human mind is social, that society is mental, and that, in short, society and the mind are aspects of the same whole, these conclusions will be no more than a development of the propositions advanced in the first chapter. (Cooley 1922: 81)

Whole process.

The general impression left upon one is that the early manifestations of sociability indicate less fellow feeling than the adult imagination likes to impute, but are expressions of a pleasure which persons excite chiefly because they offer such a variety of stimuli of sight, hearing, and touch; or, to put it otherwise, kindliness, while existing almost from the first, is vague and undiscriminating, has not yet become fixed upon its proper objects, but flows out upon all the pleasantness the child finds about him, like that of St. Francis, when, in his "Canticle of the Sun," he addresses the sun and the moon, stars, winds, clouds, fire, earth, and water, as brothers and sisters. (Cooley 1922: 83)

Damn infants and their undiscriminating joys.

It is the same throughout life; alone one is like fireworks without a match: he cannot set himself off, but is a victim of ennui, the prisoner of some tiresome train of thought that holds his mind simply by the absence of a competitor. A good companion brings release and fresh activity, the primal delight in a fuller existence. So with the child: what excitement when visiting children come! He shouts, laughs, jumps about, produces his playthings and all his accomplishments. He needs to express himself, and a companion enables him to do so. The shout of another bay in the distance gives him the joy of shouting in response. (Cooley 1922: 85)

Phatic communion.

I take it that the child has by heredity a generous capacity and need for social feeling, rather too vague and plastic to be given any specific name like love. It is not so much any particular personal emotion or sentiment as the undifferentiated material of many: perhaps sociability is as good a word for it as any. (Cooley 1922: 86)

Sociability is the undifferentiated material of many emotions and sentiments.

In children and in simple-minded adults, kindly feeling may be very strong and yet very naïve, involving little insight into the emotional states of others. A child who is extremely sociable, bubbling over with joy in companionship, may yet show a total incomprehension of pain and a scant regard for disapproval and punishment that does not take the form of a cessation of intercourse. In other worlds, there is a sociability that asks little from others except bodily presence and an occasional sign of attention, and often learns to supply even these by imagination. It seems nearly or quite independent of that power of interpretation which is the starting-point of true sympathy. While both of my children were extremely sociable, R. was not at all sympathetic in the sense of having quick insight into others' states of feeling. (Cooley 1922: 87)

God damn. Phatic communion, again.

The chief difference between normal people and imbeciles in this regard is that, while the former have more or less of this simple kindliness in them, social emotion is also elaborately compounded and worked up by the mind into an indefinite number of complex passions and sentiments, corresponding to the relations and functions of an intricate life. (Cooley 1922: 88)

Sociability does not social emotion make.

But, in either case, after a child learns to [|] talk and the social world in all its wonder and provocation opens on his mind, it floods his imagination so that all his thoughts are conversations. He is never alone. Sometimes the inaudible interlocutor is recognizable as the image of a tangible playmate, sometimes he appears to be purely imaginary. Of course each child has his own peculiarities. (Cooley 1922: 88-89)

How does this differ from the thoughts of adults?

The main point to note here is that these conversations are not occasional and temporary effusions of the imagination, but are the naïve expression of a socialization of the mind that is to be permanent and to underlie all later thinking. The imaginary dialogue passes beyond the thinking aloud of little children into something more elaborate, reticent, and sophisticated; but it never ceases. Grown people, like children, are usually unconscious of these dialogues; as we get older we cease, for the most part, to carry them [|] on out loud, and some of us practise a good deal of apparently solitary meditation and experiment. But, speaking broadly, it is true of adults as of children, that the mind lives in perpetual conversation. (Cooley 1922: 89-90)

So, it doesn't. This is eerily reminiscent of Juri Lotman's dialogism.

The fact is that language, developed by the race through personal intercourse [|] and imparted to the individual in the same way, can never be dissociated from personal intercourse in the mind; and since higher thought involves language, it is always a kind of imaginary conversation. The word and the interlocutor are correlative ideas. (Cooley 1922: 91-92)

I cannot find fault with this.

And it was doubtless because he had many such thoughts which no one was at hand to appreciate, that he took to writing essays. The uncomprehended of all times and peoples have kept diaries for the same reason. So, in general, a true creative impulse in literature or art is, in one aspect, an expression of this simple, childlike need to think aloud or to somebody; to define and vivify [|] thought by imparting it to an imaginary companion; by developing that communicative element which belongs to its very nature, and without which it cannot live and grow. (Cooley 1922: 92-93)

I feel this. I started writing a long letter to someone who can never receive it, and it was incredibly easy to write that way.

If is worth noting here that there is no separation between real and imaginary persons; indeed, to be imagined is to become real, in a social sense, as I shall presently point out. An invisible person may easily be more real to an imaginative mind than a visible one; sensible presence is not necessarily a matter of [|] the first importance. A person can be real to us only in the degree in which we imagine an inner life which exists in us, for the time being, and which we refer to him. The sensible presence is important chiefly in stimulating us to do this. All real persons are imaginary in this sense. (Cooley 1922: 95-96)

Theory of mind (ToM)? It reminds me of this: "Knowledge of the life and consciousness of others is not ascribable to sensational discernment nor to apperception, but the knowledge is universally allowed to originate in experience."

If, however, we use imaginary in the sense of illusory, an imagination not corresponding to fact, it is easy to see that visible presence is no bar to illusion. Thus I meet a stranger on the steamboat who corners me and tells me his private history. I care nothing for it, and he half knows that I do not; he uses me only as a lay figure to sustain agreeable illusion of sympathy, and is talking to an imaginary companion quite as he might if I were elsewhere. So likewise good manners are largely a tribute to imaginary companionship, a make-believe of sympathy which it is agreeable to accept as real, though we may know, when we think, that it is not. (Cooley 1922: 96)

Oh god damn it. Phatic communion yet again: "Or personal accounts of the speaker's views and life history, to which the hearer listens under some restraint and with slightly veiled impatience, waiting till his own turn arrives to speak."

Facial expression is one of the later things to be imitated, for the reason, apparently, that the little child cannot be aware of the expression of his own countenance as he can hear his own voice or see his own hands; and therefore does not so soon learn to control it and to make it a means of voluntary imitation. He learns this only when he comes to study his features in the looking-glass. This children do as early as the second year, when they may be observed experimenting before the mirror with all sorts of gestures and grimaces. (Cooley 1922: 99)

Well, now I finally know what the "looking-glass self" refers to. Somehow I didn't connect the dots that it is just the mirror and not the magnifier or something.

That which we usually speak of as "personality," in a somewhat external sense, is a sort of atmosphere, having its source in habitual states of feeling, which each of us unconsciously communicates through facial [|] and vocal expression. If one is cheerful, confident, candid, sympathetic, he awakens similar feelings in others, and so makes a pleasant and favourable impression; while gloom, reserve, indifference to what others are feeling, and the like, have an opposite effect. We cannot assume or conceal these states of feeling with much success; the only way to appear to be a certain sort of person is actually to become that sort of person by cultivating the necessary habits. We impart what we are without effort or consciousness, and rarely impart anything else. (Cooley 1922: 106-107)

Another dang phaticism: "It consists in just this atmosphere of sociability and in the fact of the personal communion of these people."

This is evidently the case in those arts which imitate the human face and figure. Painters and illustrators give the most minute study to facial expression, and suggest various sentiments by bits of light and shade so subtle that the uninitiated cannot see what or where they are, although their effect is everything as regards the depiction of personality. It is the failure to reproduce them that makes the emptiness of nearly all copies of famous painting or sculpture that represents the face. Perhaps not one person in a thousand, comparing the "Mona Lisa" or the "Beatrice Cenci" with one of the mediocre copies generally standing near them, can point out where the painter of the latter has gone amiss; yet the difference is like that between life and a wax image. (Cooley 1922: 107)

This reads exactly like current discourse on AI generated art, which is widely regarded as soulless.

Poetry, however, usually refrains from minute description of expression, a thing impossible in words, and strikes for a vivid, if inexact, impression, by the use of such phrases as "a fiery eye," "a liquid eye," and "The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling." (Cooley 1922: 109)

Verbal description of nonverbal communication is indeed tricky. Also, A Fine Frenzy is a literal band name.

It is not to be supposed, for instance, that such feelings as generosity, respect, mortification, emulation, [|] the sense of honor, and the like, are an original endowment of the mind. Like all the finer and larger mental life these arise in conjunction with communication and could not exist without it. It is these finer modes of feeling, these intricate branchings or differentiations of the primitive trunk of emotion, to which the same sentiments is usually applied. Personal sentiments are correlative with personal symbols, the interpretation of the latter meaning nothing more than that the former are associated with them; while the sentiments, in turn, cannot be felt except by the aid of the symbols. (Cooley 1922: 114-115)

I feel like this is not an improvement over Shand's definition of sentiments as something akin to ideational emotions.

If a person is more his best self in a letter than in speech, as sometimes happens, he is more truly present to me in his correspondence than when I see and hear him. And in most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable. (Cooley 1922: 117)

A fairly convincing point. Good writes may be lousy conversationalists because they have dedicated themselves to the art of writing, not to the art of conversation.

So far as the study of immediate social relations is concerned the personal idea is the real person. That [|] is to say, it is in this alone that one man exists for another, and acts directly upon his mind. My association with you evidently consists in the relation between my idea of you and the rest of my mind. If there is something in you that is wholly beyond this and makes no impression upon me it has no social reality in this relation. The immediate social reality is the personal idea; nothing, it would seem, could be much more obvious than this. (Cooley 1922: 118-119)

I think I've finally reached the portion for which this text was given to read in this course. This is more-or-less a summary, extension or generalization of Cooley's theory of mind, above, pp. 95-96.

Society, then, in its immediate aspects, is a relation among personal ideas. In order to have society it is evidently necessary that persons should get together somewhere; and they get together only as personal ideas in the mind. Where else? What other possible locus can be assigned for the real contact of persons, or in what other form can they come in contact except as impressions or ideas formed in this common locus? Society exists in my mind as the contact and reciprocal influence of certain ideas named "I," Thomas, Henry, Susan, Bridget, and so on. It exists in your mind as a similar group, and so in every mind. Each person is immediately aware of a particular aspect of society: and so far as he is aware of great social wholes, like a nation or an epoch, it is by embracing in this particular aspect ideas or sentiments which he attributes to his countrymen or contemporaries in their collective aspect. (Cooley 1922: 119)

This, on the other hand, basically expands the first definition of "social", given above, pp. 38-39.

Yet most of us, perhaps, will find it hard to assent to the view that the social person is a group of sentiments attached to some symbol or other characteristic element, which keeps them together and from which the whole idea is named. The reason for this reluctance I take to be that we are accustomed to talk and think, so far as we do think in this connection, as if a person were a material rather than a psychical fact. Instead of basing our sociology and ethics upon what a man really is as part of our mental and moral life, he is vaguely and yet grossly regarded as a shadowy material body, a lump of flesh, and not as an ideal thing at all. But surely it is only common sense to hold that the social and moral reality is that which lives in our imaginations and affects our motives. As regards the physical it is only the finer, more plastic and mentally significant aspects of it that imagination is concerned with, and with them chiefly as a nucleus or centre of crystallization for sentiment. Instead of perceiving this we commonly make the physical the dominant factor, and think of the mental and moral only by a vague analogy to it. (Cooley 1922: 120)

This makes way too much sense. Society is not a collection of human bodies, it is made up of our subjective impressions and associations. Each person basically lives in a separate and unique Umwelt constituted by suggestions from all of his interpersonal contacts and book knowledge.

Persons and society must, then, be studied primarily in the imagination. It is surely true, prima facie, that the best way of observing things is that which is most direct; and I do not see how any one can hold that we know persons directly except as imaginative ideas in the mind. (Cooley 1922: 120)

"I am a product of ideology and imagination", etc.

What, for instance, could the most elaborate knowledge of his weights and measures, including the anatomy of his brain, tell us of the character of Napoleon? Not enough, I take it, to distinguish him with certainty from an imbecile. Our real knowledge of him is derived from reports of his conversation and manner, from his legislation and military dispositions, from the impression made upon those about him and by them communicated to us, from his portraits and the like; all serving as aids to the imagination in forming a system that we call by his name. (Cooley 1922: 121)

Hot damn, this is one of the best takes on the topic of "man is sign" that I've ever seen.

I by no means aim to discredit the study of man or of society with the aid of physical measurements, such as those of phychological laboratories; but I think that these methods are indirect and ancillary in their nature and are most useful when employed in connection with a trained imagination. (Cooley 1922: 121)

Merely a striking a title.

I conclude, therefore, that the imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society, and that to observe and interpret these must be a chief aim of sociology. I do not mean merely that society must be studied by the imagination - that is true of all investigations in their higher reaches - but [|] that the object of study is primarily an imaginative idea or group of ideas in the mind, that we have to imagine imaginations. The intimate grasp of any social fact will be found to require that we divine what men think of one another. (Cooley 1922: 121-122)

Me peame ettekujutusi ette kujutama.

It is important to face the question of persons who have no corporeal reality, as for instance the dead, characters of fiction or the drama, ideas of the gods and the like. Are these real people, members of society? I should say that in so far as we imagine them they are. Would it not be absurd to deny social [|] reality to Robert Louis Stevenson, who is so much alive in many minds and so potently affects important phases of thought and conduct? He is certainly more real in this practical sense than most of us who have not yet lost our corporeity, more alive, perhaps, than he was before he lost his own, because of his wider influence. (Cooley 1922: 122)

This is where things approach parasocial relationships and things get iffy: are famous people more "real" than non-famous people merely because more people can imagine them?

On the other hand, a corporeally existent person is not socially real unless he is imagined. If the nobleman thinks of the serf as a mere animal and does not attribute to him a human way of thinking and feeling, the latter is not real to him in the sense of acting personally upon his mind and conscience. And if a man should go into a strange country and hide himself so completely that no one knew he was there, he would evidently have no social existence for the inhabitants. (Cooley 1922: 123)

Today I watched a video on Equatorial Guinea and how currently (anno domini 2023, again) people who do not live in the cities are considered animals and slavery is merely discouraged. On the other hand, hiding themselves completely for a time is what some very admirable people (Uku Masing, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and possibly others) have done.

If you have no definite idea of personality or self beyond the physical idea, you are naturally led to regard the higher phases of thought, which have no evident relation to the body, as in some way external to the first person or self. Thus instead of psychology, sociology, or ethics we have a mere shadow of physiology. (Cooley 1922: 128)

Catchy.

According to this view of the matter society is simply the collective aspect of personal thought. Each man's imagination, regarded as a mass of personal impressions worked up into a living, growing whole, is a special phase of society; and Mind or imagination as a whole, that is human thought considered in the largest way as having a growth and organization extending throughout the ages, is the locus of society in the widest possible sense. (Cooley 1922: 134)

I'm genuinely surprised how well Cooley's thought interlaces with Stapledon's.

IV. SYMPATHY OR UNDERSTANDING AS AN ASPECT OF SOCIETY

The growth of personal ideas through intercourse, described in the preceding chapter, implies a growing power of sympathy, of entering into a sharing the minds of other persons. To converse with another, through words, looks, or other symbols, means to have more or less understanding or communion with him, to get on common ground and partake of his ideas and sentiments. If one uses sympathy in this connection - and it is perhaps the most available word - one has to bear in mind that it denotes the sharing of any mental state that can be communicated, and has not the special implication of pity or other "tender emotion" that it very commonly carries in ordinary speech. (Cooley 1922: 136)

It really is a very small step from here to phatic communion.

Thus although to get one's finger pinched is a common experience, it is impossible, to me at least, to recall the sensation when another person has his finger pinched. So when we say that we feel sympathy for a person who has a headache, we mean that we pity him, not that we share the headache. There is little true communication of physical pain, or anything of that simple sort. (Cooley 1922: 138)

Heterogeneous sympathy.

Social experience is a matter of imaginative, not a material, contacts; and there are so many aids to the imagination that little can be judged as to one's experience by the merely external course of his life. An imaginative student of a few people and of books often has many times the range of comprehension that the most varied career can give to [|] a duller mind; and a man of genius, like Shakespeare, may cover almost the whole range of human sentiment in his time, not by miracle, but by a marvellous vigor and refinement of imagination. The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds. (Cooley 1922: 139-140)

Don't become a tourist; read some books.

We often hear people described as sympathetic who have little mental power, but are of a sensitive, impressionable, quickly responsive type of mind. The sympathy of such a mind always has some defect corresponding to its lack of character and of constructive force. A strong, deep understanding of other people implies mental energy and stability; it is a work of persistent, cumulative imagination which may be associated with a comparative slowness of direct sensibility. On the other hand, we often see the union of a quick sensitiveness to immediate impressions with an inability to comprehend what has to be reached by reason or constructive imagination. (Cooley 1922: 140)

"My brain contains the contents of his but in the junk drawer."

Sympathy is a requisite to social power. Only in so far as a man understands other people and thus enters into the life around him has he any effective [|] existence; the less he has of this the more he is a mere animal, not truly in contact with human life. And if he is not in contact with it he can of course have no power over it. This is a principle of familiar application, and yet one that is often overlooked, practical men having, perhaps, a better grasp of it than theorists. It is well understood by men of the world that effectiveness depends at least as much upon address, savoir-faire, tact, and the like, involving sympathetic insight into the minds of other people, as upon any more particular faculties. There is nothing more practical than social imagination; to lack it is to lack everything. (Cooley 1922: 140-141)

A common insight both in discussions of phatic communion and in Dale Carnegie type self-help literature.

A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol, which both of us connect with the common sentiment or idea; and thus by communicating an impulse he can move the will. Sympathetic influence enters into our system of thought as a matter of course, and affects our conduct as a matter of course, and affects our conduct as surely as water affects the growth of a plant. (Cooley 1922: 142)

This reads a bit like something out of Frank Herbert's Dune.

Much the same may be said regarding mental health in general; its presence or absence may always be expressed in terms of sympathy. The test of sanity which every one instinctively applies is that of a certain tact or feeling of the social situation, which we expect of all right-minded people and which flows from sympathetic contact with other minds. (Cooley 1922: 144)

A sane person can read the room.

A man's sympathies as a whole reflect the social order in which he lives, or rather they are a particular phase of it. Every group of which he is really a member, in which he has any vital share, must live in his sympathy; so that his mind is a microcosm of so much of society as he truly belongs to. Every social phenomenon, we need to remember, is simply a collective view of what we find distributively in particular persons - public opinion is a phase of the judgments og individuals; [...] (Cooley 1922: 144)

Every person is a microcosm of their society.

The main reason for thisk, I take it, is that the social imagination is not so hard worked in the one case as in the other. In the mountains of North Carolina the hospitable inhabitants will take in any stranger and invite him to spend the night; but this is hardly possible upon Broadway; and the case is very much the same with the hospitality of the mind. If one sees few people and hears a new thing only once a week, he accumulates a fund of sociability and curiosity very favorable to eager intercourse; but if he is assailed all day and every day by calls upon feeling and thought in excess of his power to respond, he soon finds that he must put up some sort of a barrier. (Cooley 1922: 146)

I wonder if this has any implications on our ICT use. If you are addicted to the assailing feed of short form videos, will this lead to intellectual incuriosity?

Sensitive people who live where life is insistent take on a sort of social shell whose function is to deal mechanically with ordinary relations and preserve the interior from destruction. They are likely to acquire a conventional smile and conventional phrases for polite intercourse, and a cold mask for curiosity, hostility, or solicitation. (Cooley 1922: 146)

Back to phatic communion.

A man may be regarded as the point of intersection of an indefinite number of circles representing social groups, having as many ares passing through him as there are groups. This diversity is connected with the growth of communication, and if another phase of the general enlargement and variegation of life. Because of the greater variety of imaginative contacts it is impossible for a normally open-minded individual not to lead a broader life, in some respect at least, than he would have led in the past. (Cooley 1922: 148)

The gems keep on coming.

It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experience of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity. (Cooley 1922: 150)

Know at least one thing thoroughly and the rest will follow.

The likeness in the communicating persons is necessary for comprehension, the difference for interest. We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale - identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us likes in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual. (Cooley 1922: 153)

Very much the stuff of Juri Lotman's notion that if if A and B completely overlap then there is nothing to communicate but if A and B do not overlap at all then it is impossible to communicate.

Each sex represents to the other a wide range of fresh and vital experience inaccessible alone. Thus the woman usually stands for a richer and more open emotional life, the man for a stronger mental grasp, for control and synthesis. (Cooley 1922: 155)

Gender stereotypes.

Love, in this sense of kindly sympathy, may have all degrees of emotional intensity and of sympathetic penetration, from a sort of passive good-nature, not involving imagination or mental activity of any sort, up to an all-containing human enthusiasm, involving the fullest action of the highest faculties, and bringing with it so strong a conviction of complete good that the best minds have felt and taught that God is love. Thus understood, it is not any specific sort of emotion, at least not that alone, but a general outflowing of the mind and heart, accompanied by that gladness that the fullest life carries with it. When the apostle John says that God is love, and that every one that loveth knoweth God, he evidently means something more than personal affection, something [|] that knows as well as feels, that takes account of all special aspects of life and is just to all. (Cooley 1922: 159-160)

Briefly thought that this was about Spinoza.

5. THE SOCIAL SELF — 1. THE MEANING OF "I"

"Self" and "ego" are used by metaphysicians and moralists in many other senses, more or less remote from the "I" of daily speech and thought, and with these I wish to have as little to do as possible. What is here discussed is what psychologists call the empirical self, the self that can be apprehended or verified by ordinary observation. (Cooley 1922: 168)

Ego, then, is a theoretical self?

This view is very fully set forth by Professor Hiram M. Stanley, whose work, "The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling," has an extremely suggestive chapter on self-feeling. (Cooley 1922: 170)

Stanley, Hiram Miner 1895. Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling. London: S. Sonnenschein & Co. [Internet Archive]

We all have thoughts of the same sort as these, and yet it is possible to talk so coldly or mystically about the self that one begins to forget that there is, really, any such thing. (Cooley 1922: 174)

A truism.

Self-feeling of a reflective and agreeable sort, an appropriative zest of contemplation, is strongly suggested by the word "gloating." To gloat, in this sense, is as much as to think "mine, mine, mine," [|] with a pleasant warmth of feeling. Thus a boy gloats over something he has made with his scroll-saw, over the bird he has brought down with his gun, or over his collection of stamps or eggs; a girl gloats over her new clothes, and over the approving words or looks of others; a farmer over his fields and his stock; a business man over his trade and his bank-account; a mother over her child; the poet over a successful quatrain; the self-righteous man over the state of his soul; and in like manner every one gloats over the prosperity of any cherished idea. (Cooley 1922: 174-175)

"While boys are taken up with what they are doing, girls live much in their imagination of how they appears to others." (Ross 1920: 119)

A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification. The comparision [sic] with a looking-glass hardly suggests the second element, the imagined judgment, which is quite essential. The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind. This is evident from the fact that the character and weight of that other, in whose mind we see ourselves, makes all the difference with our feeling. (Cooley 1922: 184)

Cue all the websites and subreddits in the style of "am I hot or not?"

And it has been observed that the demand for the continued and separate existence of the individual soul after death is an expression of self-feeling, as by J. A. [|] Symonds, who thinks that it is connected with the intense egotism and personality of the European races, and asserts that the millions of Buddhism shrink from it with horror. (Cooley 1922: 186-187)

For buddhists, Christianity is cringe.

But if love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance, and fatuity. (Cooley 1922: 188)

Phatic? "1. a: something foolish or stupid. b: stupidity, foolishness. 2. archaic: the condition of being affected with intellectual disability or dementia."

She has tasted the joy of being a cause, of exerting social power, and wishes more of it. She will tug at her mother's skirts, wriggle, girgle, stretch out her arms, etc., all the time watching for the hoped-for effect. These performances often give the child, even at this age, an appearance of what is called affectation, that is, she seems to be unduly preoccupied with what other people think of her. Affectation, at any age, exists when the passion to influence others seems to overbalance the established character and give it an obvious twist or pose. (Cooley 1922: 196)

Wow, I had no idea this was the meaning of the word affectation - "behaviour, speech, or writing that is pretentious and designed to impress."

Sex-difference in the development of the social is apparent from the first. Girls have, as a rule, a more impressible social sensibility; they care more obviously for the social image, study it, reflect upon it more, and so have even during the first year an appearance of subtlety, finesse, often of affectation, in which boys are comparatively lacking. Boys are more taken up with muscular activity for its own sake and with construction, their imaginations are preoccupied somewhat less with persons and more with things. (Cooley 1922: 202)

VI. THE SOCIAL SELF — 2. VARIOUS PHASES OF "I"

And I cannot think of any strong man I have known, however good, who does not seem to me to have had intense self-feeling about his cherished affair; though if his affair was a large and helpful one no one would call him selfish. (Cooley 1922: 213)

Elon Musk's overall affair may be large and helpful but the man himself has an overbearing affectation in the above-given sense.

A lack of tact in face-to-face intercourse very commonly gives an impression of egotism, even when it is a superficial trait not really expressive of an unsympathetic character. Thus there are persons who in the simplest conversation do not seem to forget themselves, and enter frankly and disinterestedly into the subject, but are felt to be always preoccupied with the thought of the impression they are making, imagining praise or depreciation, and usually posing a little to avoid the one or gain the other. Such people are uneasy, and make others so; no relaxation is possible in their company, because they never come altogether out into open and common ground, but are always keeping back something. It is not so much that they have self-feeling as that it is clandestine and furtive, giving one a sense of insecurity. Sometimes they are aware of this lack of frankness, and try to offset it by reckless confessions, but this only shows their self-consciousness in another and hardly more agreeable aspect. Perhaps the only cure for this sort of egotism is to cherish very high and difficult ambitions, and so drain off the superabundance of self-feeling from these petty channels. People who are doing really important things usually appear simple and unaffected in conversation, largely because their selves are healthfully employed elsewhere. (Cooley 1922: 215)

Once again a discussion that would fit perfectly into a treatment of phatic communion.

One who has tact always sees far enough into the state of mind of the person with whom he is conversing to adapt himself to it and to seem, at least, sympathetic; he is sure to feel the situation. But if you tread upon the other person's toes, talk about yourself when he is not interested in that subject, and, in general, show yourself out of touch with his mind, he very naturally finds you disagreeable. And behavior analogous to this in the more enduring relations of life gives rise to a similar judgment. (Cooley 1922: 216)

Likewise, phatic communion. Don't monopolize the conversation to talk only about yourself or your interests.

Language seldom distinguishes clearly between a way of feeling and its visible expression; and so the word vanity, which means primarily emptiness, indicates either a weak or hollow appearance of worth put on in the endeavor to impress others, or the state of feeling that goes with it. It is the form social self-approval naturally takes in a somewhat unstable mind, not sure of its image. The vain man, in his more confident moments, sees a delightful reflection of himself, but knowing that it is transient, he is afraid it will change. He has not fixed it, as the proud man has, by incorporation with a stable habit of thought, but, being immediately dependent for it upon others, is at their mercy and very vulnerable, living in the frailest of glass houses which may be shattered at any moment; and, in fact, this catastrophe happens so often that he gets somewhat used to it and soon recovers from it. (Cooley 1922: 234)

Very much in line with what others (like Ross) have written on the subject of vanity. Especially about its fickle nature.

It is characteristic of him to be so taken up with his own image in the other's mind that he is hypnotized by it, [|] as it were, and sees it magnified, distorted, and out of its true relation to the other contents of that mind. He does not see, as so often happens, that he is being managed and made a fool of; he "gives himself away" - fatuity being of the essence of vanity. On the other hand, and for the same reason, a vain person is frequently tortured by groundless imaginings that some one has misunderstood him, slighted him, insulted him, or otherwise mistreated his social effigy. (Cooley 1922: 234-235)

Very reminiscent of the greatest president in America's history, greater than Lincoln, even.

We like the manner of a person who appears interested in what we say and do, and not indifferent to our opinion, but has at the same time an evident reserve of stability and independence. It is much the same with a writer; we require of him a bold and determined statement of his own special view - that is what he is here for - and yet, with this, an air of hospitality, and an appreciation that he is after all only a small part of a large world. (Cooley 1922: 237)

The second part is what makes "active listening" so pernicious. Asking further clarifying questions without putting forth a view of your own comes across as insincere.

An astronomer may be indifferent when you depreciate his personal appearance, abuse his relatives, or question his pecuniary honestry; but if you doubt that there are artificial canals on Mars you cut him to the quick. And poets and artists of every sort have always and with good reason been regarded as a genus irritabile. (Cooley 1922: 255)

The Mars Rover cut very deep.

The peculiar relations to other persons attending any marked personal deficiency or peculiarity are likely to aggravate, if not to produce, abnormal manifestations of self-feeling. Any such trait sufficiently noticeable to interrupt easy and familiar intercours with others, and make people talk and think about a person or to him rather than with him, can hardly fail to have this effect. (Cooley 1922: 259)

And yet once again, something akin to phatic communion.

VII. HOSTILITY

But for a social, imaginative being, whose main interests are in the region of communicative thought and sentiment, the chief field of anger, as of other emotions, is transferred to this region. Hostility ceases to be a simple emotion due to a simple stimulus, and breaks up into innumerable hostile sentiments associated with highly imaginative personal ideas. In this mentally higher forms it may be regarded as hostile sympathy, or a hostile comment on sympathy. That is to say, we enter by sympathy or personal imagination into the state of mind of others, or think we do, and if the thoughts we find there are injurious to or uncongenial with the ideas we are already cherishing, we feel a movement of anger. (Cooley 1922: 266)

Intellectualized hostility. Antipathy? — Yes.

Bryant, Sophie 1895. Antipathy and Sympathy. Mind 4(15): 365-370. [JSTOR]

It is thus possible rudely to classify hostilities under three heads, according to the degree of mental organization they involve; namely, as
Primary, immediately, or animal.
Social, sympathetic, imaginative, or personal, of a comparatively direct sort, that is, without reference to any standard of justice.
Rational or ethical; similar to the last but involving reference to a standard of justice and the sanction of conscience.
The function of hostility is, no doubt, to awaken a fighting energy, to contribute an emotional motive force to activities of self-preservation or aggrandizement. (Cooley 1922: 271)

Unsurprisingly a triadic division.

The mass of mankind are sluggish and need some resentment as a stimulant; this is its function on the higher plane of life as it is on the lower. Surround a man with soothing, flattering circumstances, and in nine cases out of ten he will fail to do anything worthy, but will lapse into some form of sensualism or dilettanteism. There is no tonic, to a nature substantial enough to bear it, like chagrin - "erquickender Verdruss," as Goethe says. Life without opposition is Capua. No matter what the part one is fitted to play in it, he can make progress in his path only by a vigorous assault upon the obstacles, and to be vigorous the assault must be supported by passion of some sort. (Cooley 1922: 273)

This is Nietzschean (cf. Midgley 1980: 213).

His [Thomas Huxley's] hatred was of a noble sort, and the reader of his Life and Letters can hardly doubt that he was a good as well as a [|] great man, or that his pugnacity helped him to be such. Indeed I do not think that science or letters could do without the spirit of opposition, although much energy is dissipated and much thought clouded by it. (Cooley 1922: 274-275)

Made me think of Charles Fourier's three antagonistic passions.

A just resentment is not only a needful stimulus to aggressive righteousness, but has also a wholesome effect upon the mind of the person against whom it is directed, by awakening a feeling of the importance of the sentiments he has transgressed. On the higher planes of life an imaginative sense that there is resentment in the minds of other persons performs the same function that physical resistance does upon the ower. (Cooley 1922: 275)

Patten, Simon N. 1896. The Theory of Social Forces. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science. [Internet Archive]

The diversity of human minds and endeavors seems to be an essential part of the general plan of things, and shows no tendency to diminish. This diversity involves a conflict of ideas and purposes, which, in those who take it earnestly, is likely to occasion hostile feeling. This feeling should become less wayward, violent, bitter, or personal, in a narrow sense, and more disciplined, rational, discriminating, and quietly persistent. That it ought to disappear is certainly not apparent. (Cooley 1922: 289)

Humans, stay mad.

VIII. EMULATION

There is joy in the sense of self-assertion: it is sweet to do one's own things; and if others are against him one feels sure they are his own. To brave the disapprova of men is tonic; it is like climbing along a mountain path in the teeth of the wind; one feels himself as a cause, and knows the distinctive efficacy of his being. (Cooley 1922: 298)

The language of "being a cause" again. Somehow this otherwise pretty casual motive has begun to strike me.

"Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, o when they read poetry, they are radicals." (Cooley 1922: 304)

This is "Emerson, address on New England Reformers."

There is thus nothing moraly distinctive about rivary; it is harmful or beneficient according to the objects and standards with reference to which it acts. All depends upon the particular game in which one takes a hand. It may be said in a broad way, however, that rivalry supplies a stimulus wholesome and needful to the great majority of men, and that it is, on the whole, a chief progressive force, utilizing the tremendous power of ambition, and controlling it to the furtherance of ends that are socially approved. The great mass of what we judge to be evil is of a [|] negative rather than a positive character, arising not from misdirected ambition but from apathy or sensuality, from a falling short of that active, social humanity which ambition implies. (Cooley 1922: 307)

The fact that humans have ambition implies a "social humanity". Rivalry, in which ambition can express itself, is a social force but it is a matter of how it is used or not used. Ch. Fourier's take on it was the social stimulation rivalry gives should be used to make competition a part of work and thus make it more like play, and more social. Rival teams of workers who can cooperate, compete, shit-talk each other, exchange members, etc. according to the free flow of human passion.

In order to work effectively in the service of society rivalry must be disciplined and organized. This means, chiefly, that men must associate in specialized groups, each group pursuing ideals of technical efficiency and social service, success in this pursuit being the object of rivalry. Consider, for example, how achievement in athletics is attained in our colleagues. In the first place, there is a general interest in sports and an admiration for success in them which makes it an object of general ambition. Many candidates are "tried out" and assigned, according to their promise, to special squads for training, in football, baseball, running, jumping, and so on. In each of these little groups rivalry is made intense, definite, and systematic by traditions, by standards of accomplishment, by regular training, and by expert appreciation and criticism. Occasional public contests serve to arouse the imagination and to exhibit achievement. The whole social self is thus called in to animate a course of endeavor scientifically directed to a specific end. (Cooley 1922: 308)

Mostly all well and good but this take does have its limitations. Success should not be the only object of rivalry. I think his take proceeds primarily from secondness and doesn't go much beyond this. The sportsman, guard, policeman is appreciated for his effective doing of something. Some things are done for the feel of it, for friendship and love, and some things are done for the thought of it, like studying and reasoning, philosophizing, discoursing, investigating, determining, codifying, etc. In Cooley's understanding, rivarly should be "scientifically directed" to specific ends by experts towards ends that are socially approved, and only then do we get to social imagination: what the self thinks that the audience of others its society possibly imagines that it's doing, and... The latter appears to be the same elite group of experts of those particular professional groups. It is indeed "social control" that goes from experts to mindless performers in this social game of rivalry and cooperation and whatever else, and what the performers think that their experts think they should be doing in terms of efficiency and success. The actual society, or the whole of society, does not participate in this scheme of social control. Mere friends and lovers are not in it as points of actual influence; only the guard and the policeman and armed mobs and gangs in the role of the doer, and the expert at the top as the scientific director or World Controller. What about magic instead of science? Can we have magically directed society? Where are our political technomages techno-sorcerers and Digital Enchanters? Maybe the object of rivalry should originate from the imagination of the whole society? I.e. not just experts and enforcers and the rest downgraded to mere entertainees.

The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation. (Cooley 1922: 309)

Organize rivalry into cooperation.

There appears to be nothing to prevent the higher emulation from becoming general if we can provide the right conditions for it. If college boys, soldiers, [|] and many sorts of professional men will put their utmost energies into the attainment of excellence, without pecuniary reward, impelled only by loyalty to a group ideal and the hope of appreciation, it is clear that the lack of this spirit in other situations is due not to human nature but to the kind of appeal that is made to it. (Cooley 1922: 309-310)

Gamifying the self-actualization at the very top of Maslow's pyramid. Is this about meta-needs?

Some critics of the present condition speak of it as "wage-slavery," and if the essence of slavery is being compelled to do work that is in no sense yours, it is true that our industrial work is largely of this kind. It is done under a sense of compulsion, without real participation, and hence is servile in spirit, whatever its form. "But," we are told, "if the workman doesn't like it, he can quit." Precisely; in other words, the situation is such that the ony way to assert one's self, to prove one's freedom and manhood, is to slight his job, or to strike. The self is not only outside the task but hostile to it. A strike is a time of glorious self-assertion against a hated domination. The misuse of human nature could hardly go further. (Cooley 1922: 311)

Cooley the trade-unionist.

All persons are ideal, in a true sense, and those whom we admire and reverence are peculiarly so. That is to say, the idea of a person, whether his body be present to our senses or not, is imaginative, a synthesis, an interpretation of many elements, resting upon our whole experience of human life, not merely upon our acquaintance with this particular person; and the more our admiration and reverence are awakened the more actively ideal and imaginative does our conception of the person become. Of course we never see a person; we see a few visible traits which stimulte our imaginations to the construction of a personal idea in the mind.. The ideal persons of religion are not fundamentally different, psychologically or sociologically, from other persons; they are personal ideas built up in the mind out of the material at its disposal, and serving to appease its need for a sort of intercourse that will give scope to reverence, submission, trust, and self-expanding enthusiasm. (Cooley 1922: 315)

"Personal idea" expanded.

IX. LEADERSHIP OR PERSONAL ASCENDANCY

It is plain that the theory of ascendancy involves the question of the mind's relative valuation of the suggestions coming to it from other minds; leadership depending upon the efficacy of a personal impression to awaken feeling, thought, action, and so to become a cause of life. While there are some men who seem but to add one to the population, there are others whom we cannot help thinking about; they lend arguments to their neighbors' creeds, so that the life of thei contemporaries, and perhaps of following generations, is notably different because they have [|] lived. The immediate reason for this difference is evidently that in the one case there is something seminal or generative in the relation between the personal impression a man makes and the mind that receives it, which is lacking in the other case. (Cooley 1922: 317-318)

I think this may be about charisma. Some people are immediately forgetable while others may us obsess over them. The line of the argument seems to be similar as in La Barre: the objects of hero-worship are people who make a deep personal impression, i.e. something like Lemon's phatic experts.

We are born with a vaguely differentiated mass of mental tendency, vast and potent, but unformed and needing direction - informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum. (Cooley 1922: 318)

A vague uncharted nebula... Before Saussure?

At any particular stage of individual existence, these elements, together with the suggestions from the world without, are found more or less perfectly organized into a living, growing whole, a person, a man. Obscurely locked within him, inscrutable to himself as to others, is the soul of the whole past, his [|] portion of the energy, the pasion, the tendency, of human life. Its existence creates a vague need to live, to feel, to act; but he cannot fulfil this need, at least not in a normal way, without incitement from outside to loosen and direct his instinctive aptitude. (Cooley 1922: 318-319)

This turned very mystical very fast. The soul of the whole past?

Every healthy organism evolves energy, and this must have an outlet. In the human mind, during its expanding period, the excess of life takes the form of a reaching out beyond all present and familiar things after an unknown good; no matter what the present and familiar may be, the fact that it is such is enough to make it inadequate. So we have a vague onward impulse, which is the unorganized material, the undifferentiated protoplasm, so to speak, of all progress; and this, as we have seen, makes the eagerness of hero-worship in the young, imaginative, and aspiring. So long as one minds and hearts are open and capable of progress, there are persons that have a glamour for us, of whom we think with reverence and aspiration; and although the glamour may pass from them and leave them commonplace, it will have fixed itself somewhere else. (Cooley 1922: 320)

A sort of defense of utopianism.

The explanation is perhaps something like this: When we receive these mysterious influences we are usually in a peculiarly impressionable state, with nervous energy itching to be worked off. There is pressure in the obscure reservoirs of hereditary passion. In some way, which we can hardly expect to define, this energy is tapped, an instinct is disengaged, the personal suggestion conveyed in the glance is felt as the symbol, the master-key that can unlock hidden tendence. It is much the same as when electricity stored and inert in a jar is loosed by a chance contact with wires that completes the circuit; the mind holds fast the life-imparting suggestion; cannot, in fact, let go of it. (Cooley 1922: 321)

Cooley's semiotics is weird. Body movements can be felt as symbols because they convey a personal suggestion, and the movement-felt-as-symbol can unlock "tendencies"...

Thus it is likely that all leadership will be found to be such by virtue of defining the possibilities of the mind. "If we survey the field of history," says Professor William James, "and ask what feature all great periods of reival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this; that each and all of them have said to the human being, 'the inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess'; and the same principle evidently applies to personal leadership. (Cooley 1922: 322)

How cryptic. The result is something like Umwelt-theory, I guess? Reality is more-or-less what you experience it as. (Though someone who possesses greater powers may find the inmost nature of reality even more congenial to his powers.)

Consequently these heroes of the popular imagination, especially those of war, are enabled to serve as the instigators of a common emotion in great masses of people, and thus to produce in large groups a sense of comradeship and solidarity. The admiration and worship of such heroes is possibly the chief feeling that people have in common in all early stages of civilization, and the main bond of social group.. Even in our own time this is more the case than is understood. It was easy to see, during the Spanish-American Wor, that the eager interest of the whole American people in the military operations, and the general and enthusiastic admiration of every trait of heroism, was bringing about a fresh sense of community [|] throughout the country and so renewing and consolidating the collective life of the nation. (Cooley 1922: 326-327)

Another damn phatic communion trope. War - it's at least something to talk about with your refugee neighbours!

It is because a man cannot stand for anything except as he has a significant individuality, that self-reliance [|] is so essential a trait in leadership: except as a person trusts and cherishes his own special tendency, different from that of other people and usually opposed by them in its inception, he can never develop anything of peculiar value. He has to free himself from the domination of purposes already defined and urged upon him by others, and bring up something fresh out of the vague underworld of subconsciousness; and this means an intense self, a militant, gloating "I." Emerson's essay on self-reliance only formulates what has always been the creed of significant persons. (Cooley 1922: 327-328)

Compare this to the culture-bringer psychotic in La Barre.

On the other hand, success in unfolding a special tendency and giving vogue to it, depends upon being in touch, through sympathy, with the current of human life. All leadership takes place through the communication of ideas to the minds of others, and unless the ideas are so presented as to be congenial to those other minds, they will evidently be rejected. It is because the novelty is not alien to us, but is seen to be ourself in a fresh guise, that we welcome it. (Cooley 1922: 328)

Makes me think of how we shun Kanye West because his message is not new or congenial but old and hateful.

Another may impress us with his power, and so exercise ascendancy over us, either by grossly performing the act, or by exhibiting traits of personality which convince our imaginations that he can and will do the act if he wishes to. It is in this latter way, through imaginative inference, that people mostly work upon us in ordinary social intercourse. It would puzzle us, in many cases, to tell just how we know that a man is determined, dauntless, magnanimous, intrinsically powerful, or the reverse. Of curse reputation and past record count for much; but we judge readily enough without them, and if, like Orlando in "As You Like It," he "looks successfully," we believe in him. The imagination is a sort of clearing-house through which great forces operate by convenient symbols and with a minimum of trouble. (Cooley 1922: 329-330)

This, too, could have been stated more clearly earlier on.

As our first speaker proceeds, he continues to create a sense that he feels the situation; we ae at home and comfortable with him, because he seems to be of our sort, having similar views and not likely to lead us wrong; it is like the ease and relaxation that one feels among old friends. There can be no perfect eloquence that does not create this sense of personal congeniality. But this deference to our character and mood is only the basis for exerting power over us; he is what we are, but is much more; is decided where we were vacillating, clear where we were vague, warm where we were cold. He offers something affirmative and onward, and gives it the momentum of his own belief. (Cooley 1922: 335)

Another instance of phatic communion hidden between the lines.

He must have a humanity so broad that, in certain of our moods at least, it gives a sense of congeniality and at-homeness. (Cooley 1922: 337)

I don't think I've met this expression in English before.

It is a very natural result of the principles already noted that the fame and power of a man often transcends [|] the man himself; that is to say, the personal idea associated by the world with a particular name and presence has often little basis in the mind behind that name and presence, as it appears to cool and impartial study. The reason is that the function of the great and famous man is to be a symbol, and the real question in other minds is not so much, What are you? as, What can I believe that you are? What can you help me feel and be? How far can I use you as a symbol in the development of my instinctive tendency? (Cooley 1922: 340-341)

Man is myth.

The world needed to believe in a spiritual authority as a young girl needs to be in love, and it took up with the papacy as the most available framework for that belief, just as the young girl is likely to give her love to the least repugnant of those who solicit it. (Cooley 1922: 342)

Jesus Christ, what is this imagery.

Another phase of the same truth is the ascendancy that persons of belief and hope always exercise as against those who may be superior in every other respect, but who lack these traits. The onward and aggressive portion of the world, the people who do things, the young and all having surplus energy, need to hope and strive for an imaginative object, and they will follow no one who does not encourage this tendency. The first requisite of a leader is, not to be right, but to lead, to show a way. The idealist's programme of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not ony less objectionable but more desirable, that affords occupation to progressive instinct. (Cooley 1922: 343)

This portion sounds like a fascist playbook. You know what you need to tame the idealistic youth? Offer a competing idealism that takes over the progressive instinct but effectively defends the status quo.

It was a maxim of Goethe that where there is no mystery thee is no power; and something of the perennial vitality of his writings may be attributed to the fact that he did not trouble himself too much with the question whether people would understand him, but set down his inmost experiences as adequately as he could, and left the rest to time. The same may be said of Browning, and of many other great writers. (Cooley 1922: 349)

Sounds like writing a diary.

If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revots the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted. Nothing, therefore, is more fatal to ascendancy than perceived insincerity or doubt, and in immediate intercourse it is hard to conceal them. (Cooley 1922: 350)

Cf. the presidential candidacy of Ron DeSantis.

Does the leader, then, really lead, in the sense that the course of history would have been essentialy different if he had not lived? Is the individual a true cause, or would things have gone on about the same if the famous men had been cut off in infancy? Is not general tendency the great thing, and is it not bound to find expression independently of particular persons? Certainly many people have the impression that in an evolutionary view of life single individuals become insignificant, and that all great movements must be regarded as the outcome of vast, impersonal tendencies. (Cooley 1922: 354)

The great god named General Tendency made everything so.

X. THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF CONSCIENCE

The mind in its fullest activity is denied and desecrated; we are split in two. To violate conscience is to act under the control of an incomplete and fragmentary state of mind; and so to become less a person, to begin to disintegrate and go to pieces. An unjust or incontinent deed produces remorse, apparently because the thought of it will not lie still in the mind, but is of such a nature that there is no comfortable place for it in the system of thought already established there. (Cooley 1922: 361)

Something like the beginnings of cognitive dissonance theory.

The view that the right is the rational is quite consistent with the fact that, for those who have surplus energy, the right is the onward. The impulse to act, to become, to let out the life that rises within from obscure springs of power, is the need of needs, underlying all more special impulses; and this onward Trieb must always count in our judgments of right: it is one of the thing conscience has to make room for. (Cooley 1922: 366)

A metaneed would be one that channels the impulse to act.

When, on the other hand, we say that right is largely determined by habit, we only emphasize the other aspect of that progressive mingling of continuity with change, which we see in mental life in all its phases. Habit, we know, makes lines of less resistance in thought, feeling, and action; and the existence of these tracks must always count in the formation of a judgment of right, as of any other judgment. It ought not, apparently, to be set over against novel impulses as a contrary principle, but rather thought of as a phase of all impulses, since novelty always consists, from one point of view, in a fresh combination of habits. (Cooley 1922: 368)

William James's vinyl grooves.

In the first sense, which carries no moral implication at all, is its altruistic to give to the beggar, but the word is also applicable to the greater part of our actions, since most of them are suggested by others in some way. And, of course, many of the actions included are what are generally called selfish ones. To strike a man with whom we are angry, to steal from one of whom we are envious, to take liberties with an attractive woman, and all sorts of reprehensible proceedings suggested by the sight of another person, would be altruistic in this sense, which I suppose, therefore, cannot be the one intended by those who use the word as the antithesis to egoistic. (Cooley 1922: 376)

I've never met anyone use "altruistic" in this sense.

Here, then, we have a simple manifestation of a moral force than acts upon every one of us in countless ways, and every day of his life - the imagined approval [|] or disapproval of others, appealing to instinctive emotion, and giving the force of that emotion to certain views of conduct. (Cooley 1922: 380-381)

The domestication process.

And these instances are typical of the general fact that our higher elves, our distinctivey right views and choices, are dependent upon imaginatie realization of the points of view of other persons. There is, I think, no possibility of being good without living, imaginatively of course, in good company; and those who uphold the moral power of personal example as against that of abstract thought are certainy in the right. A mental crisis, by its very difficulty, is likely to cal up the thought of some person who have been used to lok to as a guide, and the confronting of the two ideas, that of the person and that of the probem, compes us to answer the question, What woud he have thought of it? (Cooley 1922: 386)

WWJD?

Whateer publishes our conduct introduces new and strong factors into conscience; but whethe this pubicity is wholesome or otherwise depends upon the character of the public; or, more definitely, upon whether the idea of ourselves that we impute to this public is edifying or degrading. In many cases, for instance, it is ruinous to a person's character to be publicly disgraced, because he, or she, presently accepts the degrading self that seems to exist in the minds of others. (Cooley 1922: 387)

The Generalized Other is not very clearly put here.

In these days of geneal literacy, many get their most potent impressions from books, and some, finding this sort of society more select and stimulating than any other, cultivate it to the neglect of palpable persons. This kind of people often have a very tender conscience regarding the moral problems presented in noves, but a rather dull one for those of the flesh-and-blood life about them. In fact, a large part of the sentiments of imaginative persons are purely literary, created and nourished by intercourse with books, and only indirectly connected with what is commonly caled experience. Nor should it be assumed that these literary sentiments are necessarily a mere dissipation. Our highest ideals of life come to us largely in this way, since they depend upon imaginative converse with people wo do not have a chance to know in the flesh. (Cooley 1922: 391)

People whose primary company are books tend not to carry their literary sentiments into the real world but our highest ideals are suggested to us by literature. Literature, in short, reprograms metaneeds.

Idealization, of this or any other sort, is not to be thought of as sharply marked off from experience and memory. It seems probable that the mind is never indifferent to the elements presented to it, but that its very nature is to select, arrange, harmonize, idealize. That is, the whole is always acting upon the parts, tending to make them one with itself. What we call distinctivey an ideal is only a relatively complex and finished product of this activity. The [|] past, as it lives in our minds, is never a mere repetition of old experience, but is always colored by our present feeling, is always idealized in some sense; and it is the same with our anticipation of the future, so that to wholesome thought expectation is hope. Thus the mind is ever an artist, re-creating things in a manner congenial to itself, and special arts are only a more delibeate expression of a general tendency. (Cooley 1922: 392-393)

Quotable! Idealization on a gradient with experience and memory. Past and future are both idealizations.

An ideal, then, is a somewhat definite and felicitous poduct of imagination, a harmonious and congenial reconstruction of the elements of experience. And a personal ideal is such a harmonious and congenial reconstruction of our experience of persons. Its active function is to symbolize and define the desirable, and by so doing to make it the object of definite endeavor. The ideal of goodness is only the next step beyond the good man of experience, and performs the same energizing office. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, there is no separation between actual and ideal persons, only a more or less definite connection of personal ideas with material bodies. (Cooley 1922: 393)

I'm beginning to notice how much heavy lifting a "congenial" does in a Cooley type statement. The definition itself comes across as vaguely semiotics; i.e. I'm pretty sure that the same point could be expressed in terms of cultural semiotics.

This building up of higher personal conceptions does not lend itself to precise description. It is mostly subconscious; the mind is continually at work ordering and bettering its past and present experiences, working them up in accordance with its own instinctive need for consistency and pleasantness; ever idealizing, but rarely producing clean-cut ideals. It finds its materials both in immediate personal intercourse and through books and other durable media of expression. (Cooley 1922: 394)

This could just as well describe cultural autocommunication and the integration of self-descriptions.

This is, of course, a phase of the reflected self, discussed in the fifth chapter. Some people "see themseves" so constantly, and strive so obiously to live up to the image, that they give a curious impression of always acting a part, as if one should compose a drama with himself as chief personage, and then spend his life playing it. Perhaps something of this sort is inevitable with persons and vivid imagination. (Cooley 1922: 397)

iamthemaincharacter

Otherwise they only increase the distraction. But a credible creed is an excellent thing, and the lack of it is a real moral deficiency. (Cooley 1922: 400)

Cooley's takes on morality are not my cup of tea; here I'm just marvelling how well the phrase could have been "a credible source".

This state of things involves some measure of demoralization, although it may be part of a movement generally beneficient. Mankind needs the highest vision of personality, and needs it clear and vivid, and in the lack of it will suffer a lack in the clearness and cogency of moral thought. It is the natural apex to the pyramid of personal imagination, and when it is wanting there will be an unremitting and eventually more or less successful striving to replace it. (Cooley 1922: 400)

I wish this didn't read like "And this is why we need a Führer..."

Matters of decency, as in dress or manners, are almost wholly conventional, as appears, for instance, when certain Africans spit upon one as a sign of good-will. (Cooley 1922: 401)

Damn Fremen.

XI. PERSONAL DEGENERACY

It is the nature of the mind to form standards of better or worse in all matters toward which its selective activity is directed; and this has its collective as well as its individual aspect, so that not only every man but every group has its preferences and aversions, its good and bad. The selective, organizing processes which all life, and notably the life of the mind, presents, involve this distinction; it is simply a formulation of the universal fact of preference. (Cooley 1922: 402)

"Preferences and aversions" in phatic communion from a collective aspect.

As a matter of fact, the very worst men of the hard, narrow, fanatical, or brutal sorts, often live at peace with their consciences. I feel sure that any one who reflects imaginatively upon the characters of people he has known of this sort will agree that such is the case. (Cooley 1922: 414)

One nurse to another: "What are the test results?" - "Oh," goes the other who forgot to do them before now, concentrates really hard and reflects imaginatively on the results of said test.

The idea, cherished by some, that crime or wrong of any sort is invariably pursued by remorse, arises from the natural but mistaken assumption that all other people have consciences similar to our own. The man of sensitie temperament and refined habit of thought feels that he would suffer remorse if he had done the deed, and supposes that the same must be the case with the perpetrator. (Cooley 1922: 415)

Idiomorphization.

When a boy is caught stealing brass fixtures from an unfinished house the judge of the Juveile Court will first of all blame the boy, but, far from stopping there, he will bring into court also the leader of the gang who set him the example, and his parents, who failed to give him suitable care and discipline. The judge may well censure, also, the school authorities for not interesting him in healthy work and recreation, and the city government and influential classes for failing to provide a better environment for him to grow up in. The tendency of any study of indirect causes is to fix more and more responsibility upon those who have wealth, knowledge, and influence, and therefore the power to bring a better state of things to pass. (Cooley 1922: 420)

Woke.

XII. FREEDOM

The only test of all these things - of right, freedom, progress, and the like - is the instructed conscience; just as the only test of beauty is a trained æsthetic sense, which is a mental conclusion of much the same sort as conscience. (Cooley 1922: 426)

Beauty, conscience, and what's the third?

The growth of freedom is most questionable in the industrial system; but even here we have ideals, agitation, and experiments in the free participation of the individual in the process. These give us hope that the present organization - for the most part unfree - may gradually be liberalized. (Cooley 1922: 427)

Nope, more alienated than ever.

In fact, institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction. (Cooley 1922: 428)

The fossil fuel industry now threatens human freedom.

A child born in a slum, brought up in a demoralized family, and put at some confining and mentally deadening work when ten or twelve years old, is no more free to be healthy, wise, and moral than a Chinese child is free to read Shakespeare. Every social ill involves the enslavement of individuals. (Cooley 1922: 431)

One of the very last pages in the book and just throwing this out there.

In our view of freedom we have a right to survey all times and countries and from them form for our own social order an ideal condition, which shall offer to each individual all the encouragements to growth and culture that the world has ever or anywhere enjoyed. (Cooley 1922: 432)

And that is how you get Moonfall.

Consequently every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom. This is very plainly to be seen at the present time, which is one, on the whole, of rapid increase of freedom. Family life and the condition of women and children have been growing freer and better, but along with this we have the increase of divorce and of spoiled children. Democracy in the state has its own peculiar evils, as we all know; and in the church the decay of dogmatism and unreasoning faith, a moral advance on the whole, has nevertheless caused a good many moral failures. In much the same way the enfrancisement of the negroes is believed to have caused an increase of insanity among them, and the growth of suicide in all countries seems to be due in part to the strain of a more complex society. (Cooley 1922: 433)

The famous freedoms-degeneracy constant of the universe. Increasing freedom increases degeneracy. You throw previously enslaved people on the streets, they're allowed to complain, and whaddayouknow - they now have mental health issues? Brilliant. What a weird note to end the book on.

soul searching or just looking for fights

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