The parts of a mechanism work with a utmost
of cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a community. If,
however, they were all aware of the common end and all interested in it so that
they regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they would form a
community. But this would involve communication. Each would have to know what
the other was about and would have to have some way of keeping the other knowledgeable
as to his own reason and progress. Consensus demands message.
We are thus compelled to be familiar with
that within even the most social group there are many relations who are not as
yet social. A large number of human relationships in any social group are still
upon the machine-like plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired
results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition and permission
of those used. Such uses express physical superiority, or superiority of
position, skill, technological ability, and command of tools, mechanical or
fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and child, teacher and student,
employer and employee, governor and governed, remain upon this level, they form
no true social group, no matter how intimately their respective activities
touch one another. Giving and taking of orders modifies action and results, but
does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.
Not only is social life identical with
communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is
educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and
changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so
far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates
left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and
accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated,
and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing; otherwise
you resort to expletives and ejaculations. The experience has to be formulated
in order to be communicated. To formulate requires getting outside of it,
seeing it as another would see it, considering what points of contact it has
with the life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can
appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases
one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of anther's experience in
order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience. All communication is
like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that
remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who
participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine
way does it lose its educative power.
