Social and Cultural Dynamics (Review)

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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, Of all the scholars in the United States who are today toiling in the broad and steadily broadening field of sociology, Pitirim Sorokin is, Ibelieve, the only one who writes and thinks in the grand manner of the earlier social philosophers. He alone has shown a positive flare for systematic, or better said, architectonic thinking. Other and earlier of Sorokin's writings have exhibited the same talent for organizing facts in original and spacious patterns, but the volumes with which this review is concerned are undoubtedly the most characteristic and imposing expression of the author's philosophy, his scholarship and his peculiar genius for what I may describe as the structural organization of facts. The three volumes now published do not complete the author's work as originally planned. There is a fourth to follow, in which he will summarize his theory of social and cultural change, and discuss the logical aspects of the subject. The closing chapters will, the Preface informs us, take the form of a treatise on sociological methods. This final volume will, no doubt, clear up some obscure points in the discussion and bring into clearer light the theoretic implications of the facts as presented. But thework in its main outlines, at least, is visibly here, and one may presume to comment upon it as a completed project. Surveying it then as a whole, one cannot fail to be impressed with the extraordinary amount of erudition that has gone into the making of these volumes, and with the dimensions of his task as the author conceived it—nothing less than a survey of the movement and changes of culturallife during twenty-five hundred years of occidental history. If it were not for the derogatory implications which that word seems to have inthe author's vocabulary, one might describe it as colossal. To do that, however, would seem to put the project in the same category with the Woolworth Building and some other things that most Americans admire but Professor Sorokin deprecates because they are examples of colossalism.
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, Colossalism is, I might explain, a kind of disease like giantism. Professor Sorokin uses the term to characterize a type of culture prevalent inAmerica today and in the modern world generally. I mention this particular comment on contemporary life because it reflects, in a characteristic way, a personal note of discontent with respect to things as they are, which runs like a kind of hidden theme through all the volumes, and because the author's personal comments on contemporary cultural life constitute an essential part of his treatise. In fact, as he states in his Preface, these volumes represent the author's attempt to understand the character of contemporary culture and society. They reflect "the world as seen through the window of an individual temperament and a personal life experience." It may be an expression of a temperament, or merely a point of view; or it may be the nature of culture, particularly culture on the higher and more intellectual levels with which these studies are concerned, but culture—as here described at any rate—tends to break up into little facets of opinion and doctrine, each seemingly the apex of a little group of the intelligentsia. If we are intelligent at all, it seems, we are expected to bepartisans of some doctrine—eternalism, temporalism, or some other ism (II, 241). In any case there is an extraordinary number of isms in Professor Sorokin's universe of discourse. They are likely to turn up anywhere in these three volumes, but are, as one might expect, particularly numerous in the volume dealing with the "fluctuation of truth, ethics,and law." It seems as if almost any noun or adjective could be converted into an ism of some sort, and, if it should be, there would instantly rise up to defend the point of view for which it was the symbol, some ardent little group of adherents. One finds in these volumes not merely all the isms, like sensualism andspirtualism, or dadism, cubism, futurism—terms with which one who has ever been interested in art is likely to be familiar—but others lessfamiliar, like, singularism and universalism, quantitism and scientism, some of which, I suspect have been improvised by the author to characterize some shade of opinion which was without a name until he discovered and bestowed a title upon it. All these nuances of opinion, it seems, have to be reckoned with when one seeks to investigate cultural changes on the higher and more sophisticated levels, rather than on the lower and more primitive ones, where culture is less completely integrated. As I have indicated, one of the isms to which the author refers at some length is colossalism. Colossalism, it appears, is characteristic of every culture that has, so to speak, hung too long in the sun and is a
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, little overripe. It is "the tendency to substitute quantity for quality, the biggest and largest for the best." One can see this in virtually all forms of the Hellenistic art: in music and architecture, in literature ("the best sellers!"), in sculpture and painting. It is enough to remind the reader of the Colossus of Rhodes, about 105 feet high; of the Halicarnassus Mausoleum (or tomb of Mausolos), 140 feet high; of thelarge scale of the Perganeme Frieze, and other sculptures; of the large buildings, and large paintings; in order to make clear this trait of the Visual art. Later on we shall see the same characteristic in the late Hellenistic and the Visual Graeco-Roman music and literature, theatrical performances, and other forms of art. Before us, in our own day, we have the "Hellenistic" Radio City, the biggest in the world! Where one cannot or does not want to provide quality, one attempts to achieve an impression by size, by the biggest quantity. Andin such a culture such a means succeeds in its purpose! [I, 304, 516.] In these obiter dicta of the author one seems to hear the echoes of classroom discussions, and one divines that here is one of the original sources of much that enlivens the text in these volumes and brings it down to the level and understanding of the average sociologist, which, as W.I.Thomas is reported to have remarked, is about that of the average citizen. The other materials of the three volumes may be classified roughly as (1) a preliminary discussion of the logical apparatus—the concepts, theories, presuppositions, and frame of reference—with which the author has operated in the selection, ordering, and interpreting of the vast body, fact, theory, and "subsidiary matters" with which these volumes are concerned; (2) a critical comment on the cultural changes in art, science, law, and the mores during the period of twenty-five hundred years which these studies cover; (3) a statistical description of cultural changes in which, by the ingenious use of a variety of indexes, one and another aspect of the cultural flux is reduced to a measurable continuum, and qualitative changes are systematically described in quantitative terms. For example, in describing the fluctuations in the realm of artistic expression, a means was found by which it was possible to measure the fluctuation of nudity in certain forms of art, employing as units, (1) body covered, (2) partly covered, (3) uncovered, except sex organs, (4a) nude:sex organs depicted and, finally, (46) sex organs not depicted (table 19, I, 432-37)- This, however, is but one of many devices by which the author has sought to describe in quantitative terms the extent and the degree to which, at different periods, society and social life has been dominated by an "ideational," a "s ensate," or mixed culture type, and by a correspond-
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, ing mentality. Similar indexes are employed in later volumes to measure the corresponding "fluctuation in systems of truth, ethics, and law," and the accompanying and associated "fluctuation of social relationships, war, and revolution." These statistics are unquestionably the most dubious and the least thrilling portion of the treatise. I cannot believe that any future student of cultural change will take the trouble to check up Professor Sorokin's studies in qualitative and quantitative nudity in art or elsewhere, and, from my present standpoint, I should regard it as deplorable if the further expansion of quantitative sociology should take that direction. Personally I share the opinion of the Chinese philosopher, Lin Yutang, who thinks that there are certain things-—among them personality and culture—that cannot profitably be described in mathematical terms.1 Furthermore, I gather from some tangential remarks of the author that he is disposed to regard these statistics as something in the nature of a concession to the prevailing mentality and the contemporary system of truth (II, 116). One suspects that at some time in the inception and planning of this project he must have said to himself, "Well, if they want'em, let's let 'em have 'em." Statistics on nudity in art are probably as good as most others in this particular field of research. Furthermore,the insistence on formal accuracy in fields of knowledge where any real accuracy is not possible, is itself a kind of ism. It is statisticism.Social and Cultural Dynamics, as the author describes it, is not history but sociology—a sociology of culture and more specifically of cultural and social change. If that description seems rather abstract and unin-forming, I might add that, as I understand them, these volumes are mainly concerned with what historians somethimes refer to as a kind of collective mind, the "mediaeval mind" or the "modem mind," for example. Every period, including the so-called "Mauve Age," has had its own mind. Such a mind is a product of communication.People who live together, speak the same language, live and think within the limits of the same universe of discourse, are likely to be veryconscious of their differences of opinion. On the other hand, they are quite as likely to be wholly unaware of the extent to which they are of one mind in regard to other customary matters that are taken for granted. It is these understandings and this general concensus, which communication and custom inevitably bring about, that constitute the "mind" with which these volumes are concerned. 1 See Lin Yutang's "a pseudo-scientific formula" for measuring human progress and historical change (Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living [New York, 1937], pp. 4-12).
Social and Cultural Dynamics (Review)
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews (no.40), It is a kind of collective mind, which gets itself embodied in custom, tradition, and the mores, and constitutes a matrix which imposes on all normal minds, in a particular country and at a particular age, a definite style of life and thought. These patterns change, sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly, as was the case at the end of the nineteenth century, and particularly since the World War. It is these changes—changes of fashion in art and in the patterns of thought—which the author has sought to analyze, classify, and survey over a period of twenty-five hundred years. In order to carry out this program he has set up a rather elaborate logicalapparatus, which, from the theoretical point of view and for the light it throws on the whole historical process, is quite as interesting as any other part of his treatise. Fundamental to the author's point of view and method is his conception of culture and the cultural complex. This conception is based on the assumption that the prevailing patterns of art and thought and, ultimately, "Systems of Social Relationship" (see Vol. Ill, Part i) find their most integrated and representative expression only on the higher intellectuallevels and in the outstanding personalities in religion, art, science, and political life. An integrated culture will exhibit also a certain autonomy and a certain logical consistency in the relations of its parts. It is like a Chinese puzzle; its different parts all fit together logically, and it is this logical relation of each separate part which constitutes the unity of the whole. The so-called "logico-meaningful" analysis and interpretation of cultural phenomena is based on the assumption that a culture, at least an integrated culture, is not merely a "causal-functional" but an intelligible unity. It can be interpreted like a historical document, and, like a historical document, it gains sense and meaning only as it is so interpreted. "For the investigator of an integrated system of culture the internal aspect (the meaning) is paramount. It determines which of the externally existing phenomena—and in what sense and to what extent—become apart of the system" (I, 55). An artifact, or other cultural trait, loses its character as cultural when it ceases to have meaning. Once they cease to be symbols, the Venus of Milo becomes a mere block of stone, Beethoven's symphony, a combination of unintelligible sounds, and Aristotle's Metaphysics, no more than a bundle of waste paper. More important for the systematic analysis and description of cultures,are the types of "cultural mentality" into which all cultures—including their characteristic expressions, namely, (1) art, (2) systems of truth,ethics, and law, (3) social relationships, war, and revolution—may be classified. The types of cultural mentality are fundamentally two: the, Review of Vol. 1: Fluctuation of forms of Art; Vol. II: Fluctuation of Systems of Truth, Ethics, and Law; Vol.III: Fluctuation of Social Relationships, War, and Revolution in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XLIII, no.5, March
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, "ideational" or religious, and the "sensate" or secular. All other cultural types are aspects or modifications of one or the other of these two. They will be mixed types having a place in the "spectrum" somewhere in between these extremes. The summary table of these mixed types includes the following: (1) the ascetic ideational, (2) active sensate, (3) idealistic, (4) passive sensate, (5) cynical sensate and pseudo-ideational. The mixed types, with the exception of the idealistic, are likely to be "an undigested mixture of inconsistent elements" not fully integrated. In a sense, these systems may be said to represent the phases through which, in the course of its individual life-history, any culture or civilization, like that of Ancient Greece, may be expected to pass. These are called "systems of culture," I suppose, because they include the specific and more or less independent forms in which every culture finds expression, i.e., religion, art, philosophy, and science, etc. There is little difficulty in distinguishing the two fundamental types of culture, each reflected as it is, in "a characteristic mentality, manifested in an appropriate external form." The ideational mentality is typically religious. It "seeks in the universe and in its parts their unchangeable ultimate reality, their being." Its art is symbolic. Its attitude toward nature is mystical. "It is immersed in the contemplation of the superempirical." The sensate mentality, on the other hand, is interested "in the sensory-perceptual or empiricalaspect of reality." It is "turned to the ever-changing aspect of the world." "It is the mentality of becoming," rather than being. "In art it strives to render the picture, the image, the statue as nearly as possible like the sensory appearance of the things depicted" (I, 248). In the realm of knowledge ideational is "the truth of faith"; sensate, "the truth of senses." A mixed form is the truth of reason corresponding to the ideal in art. In the realm of social relationships the three different systems orphases of culture are represented by the "familistic, contractual and compulsory types of social relationships." The Middle Ages in western Europe is predominantly ideational. It is the age of faith, and the dominant pattern of human relationship is familial and feudal. On the other hand, "the 19th century is the golden age of contractualism," and human relations tend to assume everywhere the rational character of contract (III, 104). This rational character is represented in the capitalistic system. It is also reflected in the change which has tended to give marriage the character of a civil ceremony rather than a religious sacrament, and make the family a secular rather than a sacred institution. Finally, in the post-war period we have seen in Europe and America
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, the decline of the system of contractualism which was contemporaneous with the dominance of liberalism and the ideology of the middle class, and the rise of a compulsory type of social relationship represented by the totalitarian state in its various manifestations, namely, communism, fascism, nazism and the New Deal (III, 184-92). In the ideational phase of a culture the form of government is typically theocratic, as it was in Europe in the Middle Ages, as it is or was some years ago in Mormon society, in the United States. "Today," on theother hand, "we have all the signs of a superripe sensate political regime and social leadership Power belongs either to the rich classes, orto other groups which—no matter how—control the physical forces through which they can control and coerce society" (III, 150).Midway between the ideational and the sensate types there emerges, from time to time, an idealistic phase of culture and an idealistic type of mentality in which there is a harmonious integration of meaning and form, of ideational and sensuous reality. Such was the period of the fourth and fifth centuries b.c. in Greece—the Greece of Pericles, of Phidias, and of Plato. It is this middle term, idealism, which defines Professor Sorokin's point of view. He takes his stand midway between the two divergent tendencies which he sees in eternal conflict for dominance in the cultural and social life of the occidental world. It is evident also that he found in Plato a mentality congenial to hisown. Plato, also, was interested in the antinomy between being and non-being, or becoming; between the sacred and the secular, the temporal and the eternal, and he would no doubt have been equally interested, had these doctrines been recognized in his day, in the contrast and contradiction between totalitarianism and laissez faire; familism and anarchism, all of which characterize the difference between the ideational and the sensate types of mentality. Plato distinguished the three categories of science: (1) theology as themost sublime, which deals with ultimate and unchangeable reality; (2) mathematics, a mixed-empirical-intelligible form of knowledge which deals with the mixed-eternal and changeable aspects of reality; (3) the most inferior form of knowledge or "opinion"—the empirical sciences which deal , on the basis of the perception, with a perishable and an ever changing empirical world of an incessant "corruption and generation" (II, 63). These distinctions seem to correspond very closely with Professor Sorokin's threefold division of the systems of truth, namely, (1) the truth of faith, (2) the truth of reason, and (3) the truth of the senses (II, chap, i, 1-14). It is obvious that "faith" or belief, "reason" or in-
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, sight, and the "truth of the senses" or experience enter as components into every kind of knowledge. To treat these different elements of knowledge—as the author sometimes seems disposed to do—as if one element could in any sense be a substitute or surrogate for another, is to misconceive the nature of each and leave out of the reckoning its special function in the process of knowing. On the other hand, it is interesting to learn to what extent the different elements of knowledge—belief, rational insight, and experience—have entered into the "systems of truth" characteristic of the different periods of history, and to distinguish the role which different types of knowledge have played in the total cultural complex at different times. It is this that gives to Volume II, Fluctuation of Systems of Truth, Ethics, and Law, the character of a sociology of knowledge, or rather "a Wissenssoziologie of the contemporary Wissens-soziologie" (II, 413). It was inevitable, in view of the nature of its theme and the grandiose fashion in which the author has treated it, that the publication of these volumes should bring the author and his philosophy into direct comparison with other sociologists who have written philosophies of history in the same grand manner. What Professor Sorokin seems particularly interested in establishing, is the fact that human history has not evolved in linear progression as Herbert Spencer believed; that it has not moved incycles as Spengler assumed; and that it is not moving toward the realization of a final and fatally foreordained Eutopia as Marx, following Hegel, sought to demonstrate. In all this Professor Sorokin is, nevertheless, seeking—as were his fellow-philosophers, Spencer, Spengler, and Marx—to define a faith rather than establish a fact. He is seeking, in short, to answer the question:"Whither are we going?" which, with the other query, "Where have we come from?" is the most elementary form in which the inevitable metaphysical quest ordinarily presents itself. To others of us whose faith in the existing order has not been as yet too profoundly shaken, this metaphysical quest remains, as always, an interesting but relatively unimportant concern. The important question is what can be done, in the present situation. Reason and insight are necessary in formulating an inquiry, belief in its possibilities, to insure energy in carrying it out. What we want finally, however, is a knowledge that is instrumental and empirical, if not experimental; a knowledge that justifies itself by its ability to bring about the effects it predicts. No social experiments, so far as I can see, have ever been based on a philosophy of history.
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, There are, no doubt, some things in these three volumes which will be condemned by certain hardheaded Empiricists, as mere scholastic boondoggling. How much, I am not now prepared to say. My own impression is, nevertheless, that Social and Cultural Dynamics is a great intellectual acchievement, a magnum opus in precisely the same sense as that is true of Spencer's Sociology, Spengler's Declineof the West, and Marx's Capital. In this connection I am reminded of a saying of Professor Windelband, with whom I once studied. He said that in the realm ofphilosophy, it, was not those who were right who contributed most, but those who, but those hwo has been consistenly wrong.