Our Social Heritage e-bog

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Group Cooperation; Group cooperation under modern conditions, requires (like individual work and thought) a combination of socially inherited expedients with biologically inherited instincts. Men are a loosely gregarious species who instinctively used significant cries even before the invention of language; and they naturally cooperate by a clamorous alternation of the impulse to lead with the impulse to follow. Our socially inherited expedients of group cooperation by discipline and discussion are still imperfectly worked out, and are apt at any moment to break down, and their place to be taken by the primitive instinctive process. These facts may be illustrated from the Reports of the British Dardanelles and Mesopotamia Commissions of 1917; The Nation as Idea and Fact; National cooperation is more dependent on our social heritage than group cooperation. In a group, men think and feel about direct sensations and memories of their fellows; in a nation, they must think and feel about some entity of the mind. At present we generally leave the formation of the mental panoramas which represent our nation for each of us, to chance, or to the scheming of professional manipulators of motive. We should try to make the formation of a trustworthy idea of our nation into a conscious process. Our idea when it is formed should remind us of the facts of the human type, of the differences between individual human beings, and of the quantitative relation between the grades and kinds of difference. Such an idea will help us to realize that a modern industrial nation is not likely to be permanently coherent unless habit is based on contentment; and unless contentment is made possible by an approximation to social equality, by a clearer understanding of economic facts, and by a greater liking in each of us for his work. That liking will only be secured under modern conditions if our social organization and our educational methods are based more on the idea of difference