Social disintegration: effects

Most schoolteachers and social workers would agree that the children who give them the greatest trouble are those with family problems. Such children may have a father who, for various reasons, does not fulfil his fatherly functions - in all probability he will be simply displaying one of the many symptoms of anomie or egotely - or a mother with similar problems, or he may simply come from an incomplete, or one parent, family.

Whatever the exact situation, the child will have suffered from some form of family deprivation which is bound to affect him profoundly and colour every aspect of his behaviour throughout his life. Such children are often referred to as emotionally disturbed. However bright they may be, they will tend to find it very difficult to fit into their social environment, the reason being that the early and most important stages of socialization were badly impaired. The earlier family deprivation occurred, the more will this be the case, for as D. O. Hebb [1] shows, the effect of early experience on adult behaviour is universally correlated with age.

Sadly, it is rarely possible for socially deprived and emotionally disturbed children to be satisfactorily socialized. No amount of school education can do much for them.

Children who have grown up in isolation from their fellows are even further incapacitated. They are incapable of the normal familial and communal functions and sometimes seem indistinguishable from congenital idiots. This subject is treated in Zingg's remarkable study, Wolf Children and Feral Man. [2] Experiments with animals, such as those conducted by Harlow with monkeys, lead one to the same conclusion. [3]

Emotionally disturbed children are characterized by inability to accept any social constraints. They are unable to concentrate on their work and are only interested in things which are of apparent immediate advantage to them. Regardless of their intelligence level, they are thus extremely difficult to educate. They are particularly concerned with the present, and the short-term, and are predisposed to all pathological forms of behaviour such as delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism and schizophrenia.

What is worse, when they grow up, they are unlikely to be capable of fulfilling their normal family functions; their children consequently also deprived of a normal family environment, will in turn tend to be emotionally unstable.

John Bowlby went so far as to compare a delinquent with a typhoid carrier. [4] he is as much a carrier of disease as the latter - of a disease of the personality, which affect his family and his community for generations, until his descendants are eliminated by natural selection. Socially deprived, emotionally disturbed youths are a feature of disintegrating societies. In the black ghettoes of New York and other large American cities, they are the rule rather than the exception. The low standard of achievement and the high rate of crime, and various forms of retreatism that characterize such societies, is mainly attributable to family deprivation.

If a child is seriously affected by being deprived of a satisfactory family environment, an adult is also adversely affected by being deprived of a satisfactory communal environment. In an ordered society a man is a differentiated part of a family or of a community which is made up of a large number of interwoven groups of different kinds. In a typical tribal society he belongs to a paternal and a maternal kinship group. He may also be a member of an age group, of an economic association, of a secret society, of a military group, etc. It is his position as a member of each of these groups which provides him with his status or identity as a differentiated member of his social system.

In a disintegrating society, he loses his identity. He is lost in an anonymous mass of humanity. It is this lack of identity which is normally referred to as alienation or anomie. It is that terrible feeling of loneliness when surrounded by a vast number of people that is so much worse than loneliness in a desert. In an ordered society, a cultural pattern provides an individual with a complete goal structure and an environment within which these goals can be satisfied.

In a stable society the principal goal appears to be the acquisition of prestige, to be looked up to by one's family and community. In each society this is achieved in a different way. In a hunting society it requires skill in the hunt, while in a society earning its livelihood from agriculture, it must be skill in husbandry.

But this is not sufficient. Such skill is nearly always regarded as associated with what the Polynesians call ‘mana', a special sort of power which can be acquired by performing the rituals and observing the ethical code which together make up society's culture. [5a,5b] At the same time an individual's personal stock of this power can be reduced by breaking any of the society's many taboos. In our industrial society, prestige is achieved in a variety of ways, including the right education, entering a socially acceptable profession and perhaps most important of all, making money.

The proletariat, as well as members of different ethnic groups, may for various reasons, find these avenues of success barred to them. In such conditions they have no alternative but to develop a substitute set of goals. Cloward and Ohlin [6] interpret the development of a criminal sub-culture in the slums of a big city in these terms. It provides people with a new set of goals which they can achieve. Once crime becomes big business, and requires the same sort of qualities that permit success in the mainstream culture, then a further substitute outlet is required.

It is in these terms that Cloward and Ohlin interpret the `violent gang' subculture which also has its own ethic and goal structure, so different from the mainstream culture. However, those who have not succeeded in shedding the latter's values find themselves incapable of participating in it. They are forced to indulge in one or other form of retreatism - to isolate themselves psychologically from an environment which not only fails to provide them with an essential goal structure but also denies the setting for it.

Merton [7] describes a retreatist in the following way:

" .. Defeatism, quietism and resignation are manifested in escape mechanisms which ultimately lead him to "escape" from the requirements of the society. It is thus an expedient which arises from the continued failure to near the goal by legitimate measures and from an inability to use the illegitimate route because of internalized prohibitions, this process occurring while the supreme value of the success-goal has not yet been renounced. The conflict is resolved by abandoning both precipitating elements, the goals and the means. The escape is complete, the conflict is eliminated and the individual is associalised."

In a disintegrating society one would tend to find sub-cultures developing along all these different lines in varying degrees, i.e. there will be an increase in delinquency, violence and all the various forms of retreatism, such as drugs, drink, strange religious cults, etc, and mental disease. Such a society will be characterized by a general feeling of aimlessness, a frantic, almost pathetic search for originality, over-preoccupation with anything capable of providing short-term entertainment, and beneath it all a feeling of hopelessness of the futility of all effort.

Margaret Mead [8] writes,

"Juveniles who affect aberrant dress and modified transvestism ... are a group who see life as a blind alley. They are in an economic situation which offers them no hope of a kind to satisfy social identity."

A student from Mason City, Iowa, could not put it more clearly when he writes in Time Magazine,

"I am a student at the University of Northern Iowa, and from the present state of the college I can see a direct relationship, almost a reflection of the entire world situation. On the campus one can find a small percentage of social drop-outs, another small percentage of dedicated students, while the vast majority are lost in a maze of non-purposeful lives."

Crime

Crime is very rare in a really stable and ordered society. Social constraints prevent all deviations from the cultural norm. often these appear to the outside to be of a very mild nature. Ridicule, for instance, is often quite sufficient to prevent anti-social behaviour. As Linton [9] writes,

"The Eskimos say that if a man is a thief no-one will do anything about it, but the people will laugh when his name is mentioned. This does not sound like a severe penalty, but it suffices to make theft almost unknown."

In societies like that of the Comoro Islands, where feasts play a big part in people's lives, those given by people who have committed anti-social acts will be boycotted. This is a terrible insult and a most powerful deterrent. If it does not suffice, then there is the ultimate punishment: exclusion from the tribe or village.

Such a fate is considered worse than death. The victim is thereby deprived of his essential social environment and goal structure. He is lost in a hostile world to which he is not adapted culturally. He is condemned to the life of an isolate.

It must follow that in a stable society there is no need for a police force, nor for lawyers, tribunals, prisons, burglar-alarms, etc, that vast and elaborate superstructure required to control crime in a disintegrating society. It is interesting that in a modern industrial state, those areas where life most closely approximates that of a primitive society are precisely those where crime is the lowest, while it is where social structures have most conspicuously broken down - in big cities - that it is most frequent.

In the United States, according to Mr John Mitchell, Attorney-General, crime in cities of more than 250,000 inhabitants is two and a half times that of the suburbs, which in turn is twice that of rural areas. Crime, needless to say, is on the increase. In the United States it has doubled in the last 10 years. In 1969 there were 2,471 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants. There were 655,000 violent crimes and 4,334,000 crimes against property, 14,590 murders, 36,470 rapes and 306,420 aggravated assaults.

This reports an increase of 12 percent over the previous year. In the United Kingdom, crime is increasing at a similar rate. In 1970, according to a Newsnight investigation, there were 1.1 million indictable crimes, 300,000 in London alone, an increase of about 10 per. cent over 1969.

Crimes of violence and burglary and battery in particular are increasing at the fastest rate, at more than 15 percent per annum. These are at present 66 crimes of violence per 100,000 people in the United Kingdom as opposed to 324 per 100,000 in the United States. At the present doubling rate of 5 years it will take approximately 12 years to achieve the us rate of 324 per 100,000, which is so bad that life in cities has become intolerable and economic activity seriously menaced.

Professor Michael Banton of the Department of Sociology, Bristol University, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that "increased disorder is part of the price we pay for the adaptation of our social arrangements to an economic system which brings us such great material benefits".

Crime is part of the price of affluence, or more precisely, of the egotely that affluence creates.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of our industrial society is the behaviour of people when the elaborate mechanisms of the law are for some technical reason put temporarily out of action. In Montreal, during a 24-hour police strike, shops were pillaged, women raped and houses burgled. In London a power strike, theft increased to such an extent in shops and department stores that many had to close until the light came on again.

Nothing better illustrates what can happen when the self-regulating mechanisms which normally ensure the orderly behaviour of the members of a stable society, break down and are replaced by a precarious set of external controls.

Illegitimacy

As the family unit breaks down, it is not surprising to find that illegitimacy, another symptom of social disintegration, increases. Nor is it surprising to find that it is closely linked with other systems of social disintegration. According to W. R. Lyster, an Australian statistician,

"Crime and illegitimacy rates are simultaneous in their incidence. The illegitimacy rate in England and Wales per hundred of all births has increased since 1955 from 4-7 to 7-8; crime has increased from about 45 per 10,000 to 120 per 10,000; thus, both have more than doubled."

Illegitimacy is costing the government £52 million per year. In industrial slums and other societies that have reached the more advanced stages of disintegration it is not unusual to find that up to 70 percent of children are illegitimate.

W. A. W. Freeman, President of the Children's Officers Association, has recently reported a startling increase in the number of women who are simply abandoning their children, something which would not occur in a stable and ordered society.

Discipline

As a society disintegrates, there is a general reduction in discipline. It is surprising just how disciplined people are in simple, ordered societies. The Hellenes, who prided themselves on their liberty, were in fact subjected to laws that we would consider the most shameful infringements of personal liberty.

Many Greek cities made it illegal for men to remain bachelors after a certain age. At Locrai, at Miletus and at Marseilles, women were forbidden to drink wine. In Sparta there were strict laws on women's hairstyles, and in Athens, the law forbade women to take with them on a .journey more than three dresses. In Rhodes the law prescribed shaving. In Sparta moustaches were forbidden. In Byzantium, the mere possession of a razor incurred a fine. [10]

The laws concerning involvement in public issues were strict. Neutrality, or indifference, to the politics of the city was punished by the loss of civil rights.

As society disintegrates, every rule and convention is questioned and discipline increasingly relaxed. We eventually find a situation in which everyone can do precisely what he pleases, and any attempt to enforce any discipline in the interests of the society is opposed.

Alcoholism

The correlation of alcoholism, another form of retreatism, with anomie or egotely occurring as a result of the breakdown of social order, is well established.

This thesis is well presented by Field [11] who shows that it is universally proportionate to the cohesiveness of the family, clan and tribal groupings. It is significant that in the disintegrating society in which we live, alcoholism is increasing, and this despite alternative forms of retreatism, such as drugs, being more readily available.

William Madsen [12] examines the cause of the alcoholism among the semiacculturated Mexican Americans along the Mexican-Texan border. The gringo, or semi-acculturated Mexican, finds himself alienated from his normal family and communal social structures, without having succeeded in becoming integrated in Anglo-American society. He is thus a marginal man. "Alone among two cultural worlds, the Agringado frequently finds alcohol the only mechanism available for anxiety relief."

Madsen concludes,

"Although the specific etiology of alcohol is unknown, the cultural setting involving value concepts resulting in loss of identity with community seem to be conducive to alcoholism particularly. when the individual has been exposed to the tradition that alcohol may function as an escape mechanism or as a prop to some core value."

Clearly all drinking is not associated with egotely. Among other things, it is known to have a definite integrative effect on society. It provides a cathartic outlet for the tension and anxiety that exist in any society.

For each specific cultural pattern there must exist an optimum degree of alcohol consumption. It is likely that increases over and above this level will be in direct proportion to the development of disorder within the society itself. The number of offences of drunkenness proved in England and Wales for the year 1967 is greater than the number of offences proved in previous years. The increase as expected occurred in the large cities, the City of London having 47,643 offences for each 10,000 of its population. The Home Office with characteristic ignorance of basic sociological matters writes,

"No reason for the increase can be adduced. There was no significant change in the liquor licensing laws."

According to the National Council on Alcoholism, alcoholism is costing the country about £250 million a year, mainly by absenteeism from work. About seven workers out of every thousand have drinking problems, and there are about 400,000 alcoholics in the country, a figure which is increasing annually.

Drug addiction

Drug addiction is another form of retreatism which tends to increase with social disorder. Clearly a model capable of describing the rate of drug addiction would take into account other variables as well. In India, for example, because of religious aversion to alcohol in certain castes, drugs of various sorts play a big role among available cathartic outlets. They also play an important part in the rituals of many primitive peoples. Nevertheless, drug addiction as a form of retreatism undoubtedly increases with social disorder. Cloward and Ohlin [13] show that drug addiction as a form of retreatism is resorted to by deviants for whom both the legitimate and illegitimate avenues to social advancement are closed.

It is well known that drug addiction is increasing at an exponential rate in most of the industrial societies of the Western world today. At the 1969 meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs [14] it was stated that the abuse of narcotics is assuming "alarming proportions".

In Britain, according to the British representative, it is estimated that up to 125,000 people may be showing some dependence on barbiturates and up to 100,000 on amphetamines. The latter are the staple diet of the discotheques. The National Health service is responsible for issuing some 400 million tablets a year and millions more are obtained on private prescription or simply stolen.

In the United Kingdom the number of known heroin addicts increased 60 percent between 1968 and 1969 to 2,782, 1,775 of which were 15 - 23-year-olds.

According to the Home Office Inspector for Drugs, cases could be expected to multiply by five between 1969 and 1972. If these predictions were projected to the year 2000, there would be 546,750,000 cases - and practically everyone in England would be a drug addict!

According to The Times, heroin deaths in New York City have multiplied two-fold in 3 years.

In March 1970 there were an estimated 25,000 youngsters on heroin. Dr Donald H. Houria, President of the New York State Council on Drug Addiction, predicted "within a couple of years, every high school and every college in the country will be inundated with heroin".

In Washington, according to Dr Robert Dupont the head of the Police Department's Narcotics Treatment Agency, there are estimated to be 15,000 addicts of whom half are juveniles. A survey conducted by him revealed that in Washington 45 percent of gaol inmates are heroin addicts.

The connection between drug addiction and more apparent psychotic states, which we know to be connected with anomie, was revealed in a study conducted by Dr Hekiemann and Gershon among random samples of 112 of the 560 drug abusers admitted to Belle Vue Psychiatric Hospital from January to July 1967. Dr Hekiemann said the most important reason for taking drugs was to escape from a strange underlying depression. Half of the drug abusers were found to have had definite pre-drug signs of schizophrenia and had been seen by psychiatrists before they had turned to drugs.

Mental health

Social disintegration is a major cause of mental disease. When an individual deprived of his essential social and physical environment is incapable of building a substitute one, or fails to isolate himself from the one he can no longer tolerate, by means of drugs or alcohol, his behaviour pattern, no longer adaptive to an environment for which it was not designed, tends to break down. One remaining position of defence is to build up his own personal world of fantasy which contains just those environmental constituents of which he has been deprived, and which he most requires.

There is considerable evidence to show that members of a society undergoing acculturation, whose culture is breaking down under the influence of an alien one are particularly prone to mental disease.

This point is made by Wittkower and Fried. [15]

"Change which affects basic cultural values, ideals or attitudes, traditionally the core of inter-personal relations, adversely affect mental health."

They also say,

"Evidence is accumulating to substantiate the hypothesis that mental health problems grow in direct relation to the disturbing of traditional bonds which hold families and communities together. It is suggested that individuals socialized under such well-knit family conditions may suffer when they are estranged from traditional systems of security arrangements, previously rooted in the family."

Anthony Wallace [16] points to the same tendency:

"Anthropologists frequently have made note of the fact that primitive groups, who have been forced into situations of culture conflict and of partial, unorganized acculturation, seem prone to a higher frequency of the milder neurotic and personality trait disorders, Chronic anxiety and tension, psychosomatic complaints, alcoholism, narcotic addiction, delinquency and crime, witch fear, regressive or stunted personality development: such disorders apparently proliferate under the conditions produced by culture conflict and partial acculturation."

Demarath [17] in a careful survey of the evidence, concludes that "wherever Schizophrenia has been reported, the society in question has been in the process of acculturation."

Wittkower and Fried, [18] from research carried out in 1966 in Peru, found evidence that migrants from a tightly knit family background are especially vulnerable in an urban setting, and isolated from the security of their relatives. Involved in such movements are all the stresses and difficulties inherent to the tremendous readjustment immigrants must make to a novel and often hostile social cultural environment. Similar practice is reported from Formosa, "where mainland migrant patients show a parallel tendency to develop psychosomatic symptoms, as an unconscious defence against anxiety and tension."

Dr D. C. Madison came to a similar conclusion as a result of a study of Polish migrants in New York State. He writes,

"There is a substantially higher percentage of Polish migrants in mental hospitals than would be expected from the incidence rate for the country as a whole."

Malzberg and Lee in the study of hospital admission for the period 1939 - 41 in New York State, concluded that the rates of first admission to hospital for mental disease are markedly higher for migrants.

"Far more prone to mental disease than the migrant who lives among his own people and retains his own culture is a member of a minority group who is in the process of abandoning his culture in favour of a new one and who is thus undergoing acculturation."

Victor D. Sauna [19] in a study of personality adjustment among different generations of American Jews and non-Jews shows that Jews leading the ghetto life are very conservative and orthodox and have a low rate of mental ill-health. The Jew who is marginal, i.e. between two cultures, is submitted to far greater tension.

It appears that whereas the second generation of Jews, the marginal ones between two cultures, had a high rate of mental illness, third-generation Jews are far less marginal, having succeeded to a certain extent in adapting themselves to the world of the non-Jews, and thus again come out of it with a better mental-disease level.

Wilson and Lantz, [20] in a study of state hospital admissions, showed that the Southern Negroes pay a heavy toll in mental illness for their partial emancipation. When they were living entirely among themselves, or even as slaves, mental health was much better. "It appears that negroes, when refusing to abide by the white man's dictum of where one belongs in society, occasionally lose the security of the earlier position."

Gillin [21] who has conducted research on this subject in Central America also observes: "So long as the Indian stays within the framework of his culture, he is less prone to be beset by anxieties and frustrations, which the Ladino culture almost inevitably creates."

As national boundaries break down, small communities are swallowed up by vast urban conglomerations, mobility is increased and people move about the place in search of better pay, so cultural patterns break down.

In the United Kingdom, mental disease is increasing at a phenomenal rate. According to Ministry of Health statistics 169,160 people were admitted to hospitals in England and Wales in 1967 suffering from mental illness, two and a half times as many as in 1951.

There were 600,000 mentally disordered people in England and Wales in 1967, 186,901 of them occupying hospital beds or 46.6 percent of all hospital beds. 32 million working days every year are lost because of mental illness, representing a cost to the nation of £100 million, and local authorities spent £20,250,000 in mental health, more than six times what was spent in 1957.

Suicide

Durkheim [22] regarded suicide as the ultimate manifestation of anomie. He found that the suicide rate was particularly low in poor rural communities where social structures were intact, and high in disintegrating affluent societies, especially among the working classes and even more so among immigrants, in this case Italians, to the cities of Lorraine.

He goes so far as to say that "suicide varies in inverse proportion to the degree of integration of the social groups to which the individual belongs".

Dr Ralph S. Paffenberger, Junior, headed a recent study whose object was to determine the traits in youth that predisposed them to suicide. The survey was carried out among 50,000 college graduates whose histories after leaving college were carefully traced.

The trait found to be the most significant was the loss of the student's father in pre-college days, i.e. to the disintegration of the family unit in early youth.

In Britain the suicide rate has fallen over the last six years by about 200 a year. Nevertheless, according to the Samaritans, a lay organization that helps depressed and potentially suicidal people, the number of potential suicides has more than doubled in the last two years.

In 1967 their seven London area branches dealt with 5,999 new cases. In 1969 the same branches dealt with a further 11,641 cases. The Reverend Basil Higginson an official of this organization, estimated that in 1970 there would be about 60,000 new cases.

Conclusion

There is every reason to believe that the social ills at present afflicting our society - increasing crime, delinquency, vandalism, alcoholism as well as drug addiction - are closely related and are the symptoms of the breakdown of our cultural pattern which in turn is an aspect of the disintegration of our society. These tendencies can only be accentuated by further demographic and economic growth. It is chimeric to suppose that any of these tendencies can be checked by the application of external controls or by treating them in isolation, i.e. apart from the social disease of which they are but the symptoms.

It is the cause itself, unchecked economic and demographic growth, that must be treated. Until such time as the most radical measures are undertaken for this purpose, these tendencies will be further accentuated - until their cost becomes so high that further growth ceases to be viable.

References