Socio-Astrology

Primary tabs

Pages

1937_Autumn-p 0013
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, an inevitable part of the social process. To use Pareto's own terms—they are to the uninitiated almost as bewildering as Mr. Sorokin's—Western society in the nineteenth century displayed a dominance of "residues ofthe instinct for combinations" over "residues of persistent aggregates,"a dominance so great that society was pushed into individualistic extremeswhich could not be maintained. Pareto made use of the term "equilibrium"to express the observed tendency of any society to counteract change inone direction by a reaction towards the old and established. Mr. Sorokin is eloquent against the mechanistic overtones of the term, and will have none of it. But just as he agrees with Pareto that the nineteenth centuryis indeed over, so he agrees with him in the essentials of the concept ofsocial equilibrium, Mr Sorokin on the very last page of his third volumeindicates that the shift from a Sensate to an Ideational society we are nowsuffering from—and all such changes in the past
1937_Autumn-p 0014
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, ress, or the God Nation, or the God Dialectical Materialism—and stillbehave in much the same way as social and political animals. A man maydance the fox-trot and still be as good a citizen, husband, and father asif he danced the minuet. He may believe in the Rights of Man and bejust as sober and conservative a citizen as if he believed in the DivineRight of Kings. For Mr. Sorokin, however, the dancer of the minuet wouldbe an Ideationalist or perhaps an Idealist, the fox-trotter a Sensatist, andtheir social attitudes and behavior would vary accordingly. Belief in theRights of Man would inevitably make its holder a Sensatist revolutionary.Here, clearly, is a very real difference. One need not be an ardentfollower of Pareto to feel Mr. Sorokin has sidestepped a very realproblem. The line between art—even great art- and fashion is a verydifficult one to draw. And though fashion may have profound sociologicalsignificance of the sort Mr. Sorokin has summed up in his Ideational-Sensate formula, it may equally well be the result of chance, of human taste for variety, of a designer's whimsy, and a good deal else. In so big a book it is possible to overlook some passages, but apparently Mr. Sorokinhas not discussed the problem of Ideational and Sensatec lothing. Perhapslong trousers are Sensate, toga and tunic Ideational? Perhaps one couldcorrelate in a graph the actual weight and yardage of women's clothes andthe degree of Sensateness and Ideationalism of their wearers, the moreclothes the more Ideational? Twentieth-century women would then comeout where they belong, extremely Sensate,Even within the higher arts, fluctuations in taste may well be determined by undignified fashion rather than by the cosmic rhythm of Ideational and Sensate. At any rate, the wise sociologist will be very, verycareful about using evidence from the arts, and will check carefully on every bright idea he has. For instance, a good deal of nonsense has been concluded from the fact that in England and America recent years have witnessed a striking vogue of the historical novel. It is perfectly possible that this vogue is a sign of our discontent with an unhappy present, a form of wholesale escapism, a sign of the decay of our whole society, the beginning of the end for us all. It is more likely that a large public found longnarratives of adventure a cheap form of entertainment during the recent depression. It is still more likely that we read Anthony Adverse, Gone
1937_Autumn-p 0015
With the Wind, and Northwest Passage rather than Sinister Street, Thenew Machiavdti, The Riseof Silas Lapham, Daisy Miller because wehave had an overdose of psychology and sociology in our novels, becausewe are tired of bright voting men seeing out to reform the world, or tounderstand women, or to think hard. We want color and action simplybecause we’ve been so long without them. There is no need to assume thatwhat we read has nay more necessary and logical connection with twhat we do than has what we believe or what we hope.Let us, however, pass this difficulty over and take Mr. Sorokin on hisown ground. Let us grant him that for the sociologist society is a seamlessweb, and that sociology must take into equal account all man’s varied activity, must fit music and philosophy into a synthesis with marriage and politics. Then it must be admitted that he does not quite overcome the difficulties of such a synthesis, even as a matter of mere static desciption, let alone of dynamics. He makes a valiant effort with his tables, his graphs, and his complicated lists of distinguishing traits, but he doesn’t convince us that Ideational, Idealistic, Sensate, correspond to our actual experience of cultures. Here he is distinctly inferior to another rival, Spengler. To make any sense at all out of art and literature, even the sociologistneeds what Pascal called the esprit de finesse. This is by no means meregood will, nor is it intensity'of feeling. Mr. Sorokin has plenty of both.But he has not artist’s skill. He cannot bring out in imagery, as couldSpengler at his best, the imaginative interpretations men have given to their experience. There is in Mr, Sorokin's work nothing as good asSpengler's famous image of the cave for his "Magian" culture. Emotionin the service of graphs and tables cannot give life or beauty to the graphsand table. Mr. Sorokin objects to mere scientists because they fail tosee the whole, fail to put together what they have taken apart. He willuse the "logico-meaningful' method to restore the unity other socialscientists have destroyed. And yet his labels fail completely to tie togetherthe various parts—painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature—ofcultures he so laboriously analyzes. Take, for instance, the label “Idealistic” he applies to those two happy moments, the fourth century B.C. in Athens and the thirteenth
1937_Autumn-p 0016
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, Century in Western Europe. While we need not in matters so subtle and complex insist on the maxim that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, nevertheless Mr. Sorokin must be taken to mean that inVery important essentials the two cultures are similar. To the plain critic the two cultures seem about as different as cultures can be. Can anyone imagine St. Louis delivering Pericles's funeral speech? Or St. Thomas Aquinas acting the gadfly among the citizens of Paris as Socrates did at Athens? Surely the Parthenon is as unlike a thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral as it is possible for two masterpieces of architecture to be. It is with music for which Mr. Sorokin clearly has a deep appreciation, that one most readily the tendency of his Ideational-Idealistic-Sensate sequence to become, after the fashion of awkward generalizaitons, a bed of Procrustes. His Ideational peak has to come with the Gregorian Chant, and of course jazz and Stravinsky come out neatly Sensate. Even the modernist return to primitive music fits in, for one of the marks of a declining Sensate culture is the wistful return to the distant past. ButBach must be made to come out less genuinely religious, more Sensate, than Palestrina; and Mozart, too, must be cursed with impurities. Thefact is that music, of all the arts, fits least well into any kind of sociologicalsynthesis. It reached what most critics regard as its noblest achievementsin the eighteenth century, a century in which most of the arts were over-formalized, or precious, or bawdy, or satirical. How can anyone put Bach in the same boat with Voltaire and Watteau?This brings us to the very obvious fact that the arts by no meansadvance and retreat together, that their peaks of achievement occur atdifferent times within the same culture. The drama was quite dead inEngland in the early nineteenth" century, at a time when lyric poetry wasvery much alive. Mr. Sorokin is quite conscious of this difficulty, anddevotes pages to demolishing the work of Hegel, Ligeti, Petrie, Combarieu, and all other theorists who have discerned regular sequences in the blossoming of the arts. But he comes back to his own formula with a renewed and happy confidence which the reader cannot altogether share. It seems, then, that in spite of his qualifications, his exceptions, his frequent backtracking, Mr. Sorokin puts his materials together in a pattern falsely simple. The elements of his analysis of human dispositions
1937_Autumn-p 0017
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, are not unsound. He probably would not care to be complemented as apsychologist, but in certain respects he is at his best in this field. Like mostpsychologists, he is not as original as his terminology. Vet it seems indisputable that some individuals think and feel as do his "Ascetic Ideation-alists," that others think and feel as do his "Active Sensatists." Some men are consistently "tender-minded" and some consistently "tough-minded"(Mr. Sorokin, of course, finds these terms of William James’s hopelessly inadequate). Most men are probably rather inconsistently both. But the step from individual temperaments to "cultures" is the really difficult one.Certainly most men of the thirteenth century who have left a record ofthemselves seem to havehad a an unquestioning faith in organized Christianity you will not find in most men of the nineteenth century. Yet in those very Gothic temples to the true faith any tourist can be shown the amusing and irreverent carving on the underside of the seats in the choir stalls, carvings that seem harly to have been made by good “Ideationalists.” Nor do the bawdy fabliaux of medieval literature quite fit in with the picture of an age idealistically devoted to a better and more dignified world. Frederick II and Pierre Mauclerc were perhaps as good children of the thirteen th century as were St. Louis and St. Thomas Aquinas. These are difficult matters, and in fairness to Mr. Sorokin it mustbe admitted that he does not claim that there were no Sensatists in thethirteenth century, no Ideationalists in the nineteenth. Moreover, he holdsthat the great masses of men hardly have a genuine culture. Under thelabel "Passive Ideationalists" he classifies them as neutral and relativelyunchanged. Only the tone of the culture shared by cultivated men issubject to his sequence of Ideational-Idealistic-Sensate. But even thisseems too simple. We are back to the central difference between Mr. Sorokin and Pareto. It is at least possible that Pareto is right, and that there is something more fundamental in determining the realities of human life on earth than the forms taken by men's religious and philosophical beliefs, their aesthetic tastes and habits, and their moral codes. To display at once our own Sensate narrowness, this same fundamental thing would appear to be the quality and strength of their sentiments towards institutions and especially towards economic, social, and political institutions. After
1937_Autumn-p 0018
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, All, it is an observed fact that human beings can be quite as afraid of lightning when they believe it to be a “natural” discharge of electricity as they were when they believed it to be a weapon in the hands of a an angry Zeus. What counts is the fear, not the explanation of the fear. Mr. Sorokin concentrates on the explanation, even to the extent of explaining away the fear. It is our contention that the fear is always there. No doubt the explanation has some slight effect on the degree of fear, and the true task of the sociologist would seem to be to attempt the difficult correlation between the two; or put more generally, the correlation between what men say – their religions, philosophies, moral codes, political ideas, art and literature-and what men do. Such a sociologist would, if faithful to his observations, be driven to the conclusion that what they say varies much more than what they do. He would come ot see the profound truth in Talleyrand’s aphorism: plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. This is not, as has been so often asserted, a piece of cynicism. Indeed,its implications for the study of man in society are in some ways moreheartening than Mr. Sorokin's vision of a glorious Ideational dawn afterour dark Sensate night. For the aphorism really asserts, in a somewhatprovoking form, the doctrine of historical continuity, a doctrine whichMr. Sorokin and iand his fellow prophets, our contemporary philosophers ofhistory, have, in opposition to to simple-minded professional historians, denied. We may take the occasion of Mr. Sorokin's book to look briefly at present vogue of the philosophy of history. Such a vogue certainly exists. It is true that from St. Augustine andOrosius, indeed from the earliest cosmogonies, men have sought to explain the course of events on this planet in terms that would make the future clear. But the last generation or two have been particularly addicted to this pursuit. The Marxists are all essentially prophets and philosophers of history. Spengler's Decline of the West perhaps initiated the present vogue. Then there are, besides Mr. Sorokin's book, Mr. A. J. Toynbee's A Study of History; Pareto’s The Mind and Society, some parts of which certainly fall into this category, though the work as a whole is a partly Successful attempt to apply to the study of man in society genuinely objective methods not much in use among philosophers of history; Mr. Kenneth
1937_Autumn-p 0019
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, Burke’s recent Attitudes Towards History. There is the work of Mr. EgonFriedell on our Western civilization; and with Mr. Stanley Casson, eventhe professional archaeologists have entered the lists—indeed, Mr. Cassonout-Cassandras all the rest in gloom. These writers are in most respects by no means in agreement, andtheir work has by no means the same aesthetic and scientific value. Butthey are all in varying degrees prophets of immediate doom, and someof them look for the cataclysmic breakdown of our civilization tomorrow—well, day after tomorrow. Their fears have spread to the editorial pages,presumably an index or something or other. We should not dare opposeall this array of authority with it naive nineteenth-century assertion ofbelief in the immortality of our Western civilization. But we should liketo enter the mild protest that history, as the objective study of the past,does not it-self permit anything like such sweeping prophecy. Of course, if these gentlemen feel cosmically gloomy and bilious, there cannot be te slightest objection to their translating their emotions into books. Their emotions, if shared by many of their fellows, are certainly data which the careful sociologist must take into consideration in studying the world today. He would have, however, to try to ascertain just how far their emotions are so shared, a very difficult task. Probably they are somewhat shared, and at the depths of the recent economic crisis were even more completely shared than in 1937, John Jones, the mythical man in the street. But John Jones, a much less volatile person than Mr. Sorokin and most of his fellow philosophers of history, does not quite so easily repudiate his social inheritance. And that social inheritance still includes a dis-position to go on working, and buying Fords, and getting ready for television. Mr. Sorokin is vastly impatient with him for his failure to realize how stupid it is to buy Fords when the world is collapsing; but Mr. Sorokinis an intellectual, and for centuries John Jones has proved wiser and more stubbornly alive than in- intellectuals. At any rate, the world, if too much with us, is still very much on hand. History and archaeology certainly record the complete collapse of societies. Ruins like those of Angkor-Vat in Indo-China and the Mayan ruins in Central America evidence a complete cessation of human existence on a given part of this earth. Some mysterious annihilation seems to have
1937_Autumn-p 0020
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, overtaken Minoan civilization. Other civilizations, notably that of China,have preserved an undeniable continuity through all sorts of disasters—floods., invasions, revolutions, and the rise of prophets. Our own civilization is commonly traced down that of the ancient Near East and displays a marked continuity. The nearest to a total break in the thread of our civilization occurred during the collapse of the Roman Empire and in the following centuries, which used to be called the Dark Ages. Modern scholarship has increasingly tended to minimize the extent of that break. It is now pretty clear that more of the Graeco-Roman world survived than perished. Byzantium, which the older historians seem almost to have forgotten, was a living link with the world of Columbus. Language, religion, political and economic institutions, all carried over from the Roman Empire. The darkness of the Dark Ages has become nothing worse than twilight.It is true that Mr, Sorokin does not prophesy our absolute annihilation but only another, and, since our children or grandchildren will enjoy the dawn, briefer Dark Age. But need one follow him even here? Thesubject is a vast one, but two considerations may be brought out. First,however rotten the Roman Empire may have been, it "fell," in so far asit fell at all, from the pressure of Germanic barbarians who had beenformed quite outside the discipline of its civilization. Where are the barbarians today? Writers like Mr. Lothrop Stoddard and Mr. W. C. Abbott answer that they are in our midst, the "new barbarians" of workshop, store, and field who have never really achieved the restraining disciplines ofour top-heavy civilization. The proletariat is essentially barbarous, forthey enjoy the benefits showered on them by their superiors—inventors,artist-, statesmen, .industrialists—without having earned them. They areungratefully jealous of the privileges their superiors enjoy, and are ungratefully jealous of the privileges their superiors enjoy, and are ready in their blind passion to overthrow them. Once their numbers prevail in revolution, once there are in the saddle, their incompetence will wreck civilization. They are the new Vandals. Mr. A. J.Toynbee’s notion of the role of the “internal proletariat” is a subtler and less old-maidish form of the same fear. He, at least, will admit that the proletariat is capable of learning to run the machine. Certainly recent events in Russia would bear him out. However little one may sympathize with the Russian experiment,
1937_Autumn-p 0021
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, one must admit that Russia is today a going concern. The triumphantproletarian seems to behave extraordinarily like a good bourgeois. Ifthere is any country in which Kulturbolschevisntus is more unpopular thanin Hitler's Germany it is bolshevist Russia. There the "new barbarians"seem to have been even more reverent towards what they supposed theywere destroying than wire the Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire—and they learned a lot quicker.Perhaps the barbarians who are to destroy us can be found in theFar East? One hears rather less about the Yellow Peril than one used to.It is , however, possible that a Japan fortified by absorbing China mightgain a world-hegemony, and build a pax japonica comparable to the paxromana. Yet since Japan has succeeded precisely in so far as she haswesternized herself, it seems rather farfetched to assert that her triumph—a very problematic one—would mean the destruction of all things Western. New Japan would be old Europe writ large,and the Ford would not perish from the earth. To judge from the past, however—a bad habitwith historians—China is more likely to absorb Japan than Japan China,and Kipling's music-hall remarks about East and West to remain substantially true for a future sufficiently long for all but confirmed prophets.There is a second consideration which may be allowed to temper thepossibility of an immediate and thorough breakdown in our Western civilization. In the short period in which it has been at work the Industrial Revolution, as Mr. Sorokin's tables and graphs show, has made a spectacular series of quantitative differences in much that the sociologist studies.We may readily grant that it has made a spectacular difference in man'sability to kill off his fellows in organized warfare. Yet even here there arecertain caveats to be entered. The Industrial Revolution also made possible a vast Increase in population, and when Mr. Sorokin's figures for the slaughter in the World War are correlated with his figures for the size of armies, and also for total populations, the first quarter of our present century doesn't seem quite so bloody. Not only have medicine and surgery made advances proportion as great as has the art of killing, but the age-old balance between attack and defence seems to establish itself after short intervals, as it always has. The present war in Spain is an interesting comment on some of the romantic predictions of total annihilation for
1937_Autumn-p 0022
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, civilian populations by poison gas, airplanes, disease-germ bombs, and soon, predictions very popular with novelists, pulp-writers, and prophets inthe last decade. No one would wish to minimize the very real horrors ofthe present situation in Spain, hut it does seem that a large number ofSpanish civilians have -somehow survived. Life in Madrid has not quitetaken on the form of a Wellsian fantasy. Indeed, it would seem that menare living on through I in- siege of Madrid much as they once lived throughthe siege of Troy.We know even less of the qualitative effects of the Industrial Revolution. The notion, common among lovers of beauty, that machines havecheapened human aesthetic emotions can by no mean be proved. Machineshave made possible the literature of the pulps. But is it so certain that thequality of emotion behind the pulps is very new? Again, it is the fashionin some circles lo admire what is called folk-literature, and to contrast with it most unfavourably the shocking stuff our John Jones now feeds his literary appetites upon. But a great deal of surviving folk-literature seems to some of us very pulpy indeed, and we must assume that great portions of it have perished utterly-as will the pulps.The fruit of the spruce is less than immortal, and in a few decades nothing will be left of the Hearstnewspapers and Lewd Stories. Is it unreasonable to assume that something like a thirteenth –centuray Hearst has vanished, having us only with the deceptive perfection of Aquinas and the cathedrals?We are not even certain that the high-pressure of life in modern times,the speeding up, the roar of metropolitan existence, have really injured thecapacity of the race to keep society going. Our hospitals for the mentallydiseased are fuller than ever before, but probably rather because we sendAunt Hattie to a hospital instead of locking her up in the attic than becausemore of us are going mad. Mr. North Whitehead's most recent experiments have shown pretty conclusively monotonous and repetitive work of the kind brought with the Industrial Revolution is not in itself a source of discontent among workers. What seems to cause much more discontent among them is any breaking down of the routines and social arrangements they have become accustomed to. Too rapid and too continual change can probably be shown experimental to be more than human beings can bear. But there is no conclusive evidence that in the past century or so change has
1937_Autumn-p 0023
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, been of this kind- At any rate, it slowing up rather than a total cessation is perfectly possible. Still another favorite argument of the prophets of doom is that, like the decadent Romans, we congregate to watch our modern equivalent of the gladiatorial combats. The Polo Grounds are our Coliseum. But men have always congregated where they could for a spectacle. The Idealistic Middle Ages were very fond indeed of spectacles. There are plenty of statistics to show that modern men and women thoughout the Western World tire actually participating in sports far more than their grandparents did. There is no need, however, of entering into it catalogue, and attempting to rival Mr. Sorokin himself in fullness. The essential point we have been trying to make is the social sciences are not at present by anymeans in a state to permit accurate social prognosis for the immediate, let alone the distant, future. The desire for prophecy is too constant among men not to correspond to some real need, and we should not wish to try to discourage it unduly. But Mr.Sorokin’s own sincere and valiant attempt to use his training and skill as a sociologist in the service of the old art of prophecy is simply another evidence of the great gulf between prophecy and science. He may be right about the gurue of the race, but you and I may be right about the next heavyweight champion, or what General Motors will sell for next year. And we may all be very wrong. It is not of course, that the future, and especially the immediate future, is a total mystery, about which one man’s guess is as good as another’s. In one’s tired moments, it is tempting to agree that the only thing to be learned from history is that nothing is ever learned from history. But that is an attitude almost as purely emotional as Mr. Sorokin’s Several kinds of men can and have learned a good deal from history, as from any other kind of experience. But these are the men sometimes scornfully called practical, the politician, the soldier, the priest, the administrator, the executive-rarely the sociologist. They have learned that, confronting similar situations, men tend to behave as they have behaved before. But they also know that an immense variety of situations can confront human beings, and they have learned to distrust set formulas and neat patters. They will plan ahead, but not too far ahead, and they will not be surprised if their plans go awry. They are not concerned with a
1937_Autumn-p 0024
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, cosmic future, and so far as the cosmos enters their minds at all, it is the varied and constantly surprising set of conditions out of which they must find means for their immediate ends.These are not heroic pursuits, and they leave many men with a haunting sense of insufficiency. The finer spirits can hardly satisfy that sense with the old-fashioned Utopias that seemed so attractive to our fathers. There is, however, ample opportunity for them to make up for this insufficiency. Among such opportunities, in these days when formal religion seems languishing, is that art we have, with no unkind intent, called socio-astrology. Long may it offer them the consolation of sharing a certitude denied the rest of us. We shall, for a while, have to put up with the adventurous uncertainties of history, and leave them in the safe haven of the philosophy of history.

Pages