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Table of Contents

The “catastrophe” in sociological literature—The “catastrophic view” vs. progress in evolution—Factors in social change—The stimuli factors—What crises mean—Communities and great vicissitudes—Causes of immobility—Catastrophe and progress—Historic cases suggested for study.

There are many virgin fields in Sociology. This is one of the attractions the subject has for the scientific mind. But of all such fields none is more interesting than the factor of catastrophe in social change.

And strangely enough, if there are but few references to the problem in all our rapidly-growing literature, it is not because catastrophies are few. Indeed it would seem that with the advent of the industrial age, disasters grow more frequent every year.[1] Many are small, no doubt, touching but the life of a village or a borough—a broken dyke, a bridge swept out by ice, a caved-in mine. Others again write themselves on the pages of History—an Ohio flood, an Omaha tornado, a Chicago fire, a San Francisco earthquake, a Halifax explosion. Each in its own way inscribes its records of social change—some to be effaced in a twelve-month—some to outlast a generation. Records they are, for the most part unread. How to read them is the problem. And it may be that when readers have grown in number and the script is better known, we shall be able to seize the moment of catastrophe and multiply immeasurably its power for social good.

To define the term catastrophe is scarcely necessary. The dictionary calls catastrophe “an event producing a subversion of the order or system of things,” and such as “may or may not be a cause of misery to man.”[2] It is desirable however to limit the use of the term, in primary investigations at least, to those disasters which affect communities rather than states or nations, for restricted areas are more amenable to study. National cataclysms, such as war, famine, and financial panic are too general in character, and function on too grand a scale for satisfactory treatment, at least until the ground is cleared. It is necessary also to limit this investigation to those social changes which follow upon catastrophies, rather than precede them. For there are social effects which result from living in anticipation of disaster, such as are observable among communities in volcanic areas. Interesting as a broad study might be, it would be likely to lead the investigator too far afield into the realm of speculation. Nevertheless a general point of view is necessary to give meaning to even a limited treatment of the theme. For this purpose there may be contrasted the catastrophic view of history, as illustrated by that of the Hebrew peoples, and the modern conception of progress through evolution. The former looks upon history as a series of vicissitudes mercifully ending one day in final cataclysm. The spirit of apocalyptic expectancy prevails. Social conditions rest hopelessly static. Faith is pinned to a spiritual kingdom which can grow and can endure. Against this has been set an optimistic evolution, pictured like an escalade with resident forces lifting the world to better days. Progress becomes a smooth continuous growth. On the other hand the newer philosophy sees in history not necessarily the operation of progressive evolution but also of retrogressive evolution and cataclysm.[3] There are great stretches of smooth and even current in the stream, but always along the course are seen the rapid and the water-fall, the eddy and reversing tide. The latter is the general subject of this dissertation, and its thesis is the place of the water-fall. Only a very small, and specialized treatment is attempted; the great Niagaras must be left to abler hands.

The conception of social change as used in this monograph also needs definition. By social change is meant those rapid mutations which accompany sudden interferences with the equilibrium of society, break up the status-quo, dissipate mental inertia and overturn other tendencies resistant to structural modification. The various forces which initiate such disturbances are factors in social change. These factors may be intra-social,—within the group—such factors as operate in the regular social process, imitation and adaptation, for example; or they may be extra-social, “stimuli” factors—from without the group—such as, accidental, extraneous or dramatic events. Of the latter conquest may be one, or the sudden intrusion of a foreign element, or rapid changes of environment.[4]

These sudden changes are fully worthy of careful study by scientific method. However important the accumulation of impulses toward social transformation may be, there is often a single “precipitating factor” which acts as the “igniting spark” or “the knocking away of the stay-block,” or “the turning of a lever.”[5] It is among such extra-social or “stimuli” factors that catastrophe falls as a precipitating agent in social change.

The significance of crisis in social change likewise requires attention, and it will be clarifying to our thought at this point to distinguish carefully between crisis and catastrophe, and to inquire what the nature of the former really is. The word “crisis” is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation, an instant when change one way or another is impending. Crises are those critical moments which are, as we say, big with destiny. Battles have crisis-hours when the tide of victory turns. Diseases have them—the seventh day in pneumonia, or the fourteenth day in typhoid fever. Social institutions afford numerous illustrations, such as the eighth year of marriage.[6] There are critical years of stress and strain—the ages of fourteen and forty in life-histories, the latter being according to Sir Robertson Nicoll the most dangerous hour of existence. Other crises are “hours of insight” in the world of thought, and hours of opportunity in the world of action,—that “tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,” hours of doubt in religion “when all the gods are dead.” “Crisis,” Professor Shailer Mathews observes, “is something more than a relative term. It describes a situation which is no ordinary member of a line of antecedents and consequents, but one that assures radical change in the immediate future.” He distinguishes between a crisis and a revolution. “The difference between a revolution and a crisis is the difference between the fire and the moment when someone with a lighted match in hand pauses to decide whether a fire shall be lighted.” The term covers the situation preceding change, whether this situation be the culmination of a process or the result of some particular stimulus. “It is not necessarily precipitated by great issues. Quite as often it is occasioned by events .... which are so related to a new situation as to set in motion an entire group of forces as a match kindles a huge bonfire when once the fuel is laid.”[7] The failure to distinguish between that which occasions the crisis and the crisis itself has been the source of some confusion in thinking. “Defeat in battle, floods, drought, pestilence and famine,” are not strictly crises, but they super-induce the crisis-situation, as does anything which brings about “a disturbance of habit,” though it be simply “an incident, a stimulation or a suggestion.” In short, crises are the result either of a slowly maturing process or of sudden strain or shock; and the nature of the reaction in the crisis-hour is nothing more than the effort towards the reëstablishment of habits, new or old, when the former functioning has been disturbed. The situation, as has been pointed out, is closely correlated with attention.

When the habits are running smoothly the attention is relaxed; it is not at work. But when something happens to disturb the run of habit, the attention is called into play, and devises a new mode of behavior which will meet the crisis. That is, the attention establishes new and adequate habits, or it is its function so to do.[8]

What appears to take place is analogous to what is known as the reconditioning of instincts in psychology. Professor Giddings has been the first to make the sociological application:

Folk-ways of every kind, including mores and themistes are the most stable syntheses of pluralistic behavior; yet they are not unchanging. Under new and widening experience they suffer attrition and are modified. Instincts and with them emotion and imagination which largely fills the vast realm between instinct and reason are reconditioned. The word means simply that reflexes and higher processes subjected to new experiences are in a degree or entirely detached from old stimuli and associated with new ones. From time to time also traditions are invaded and habits are broken down by crisis. Pluralistic behavior then is scrutinized, criticized, discussed. It is rationally deliberated.[9]

Crises often, perhaps most often, precede catastrophies, as when revolutions break. The alternate truth that the catastrophies themselves are re-agents to generate the crisis-situation has not been so commonly noted. Nevertheless the disintegration of the normal by shock and calamity is an increasingly familiar spectacle.

Heretofore it has been in the life-histories and careers of individual men rather than in the case of communities that the observations have been recorded. Our biographies teem with instances of personal crises precipitated by a great shock or disappointment—Hawthorne's dismissal from the custom house, Goldsmith's rejection from Civil Service, the refusal of Dickens's application for the stage, the turning back of Livingstone from China, the bankruptcy of Scott.

Now examination reveals that the one thing characteristic of the crisis-period in the individual is a state of fluidity[10] into which the individual is thrown. Life becomes like molten metal. It enters a state of flux[11] from which it must reset upon a principle, a creed, or purpose. It is shaken perhaps violently out of rut and routine. Old customs crumble, and instability rules. There is generated a state of potentiality for reverse directions. The subject may “fall down” or he may “fall up.” The presence of dynamic forces in such a state means change. But the precise rôle of the individual mind in a period of crisis is a problem not for sociology but for psychology.

The principle that fluidity is fundamental to social change is also true, however, of the community. Fluidity is not the usual state of society.

Most of the “functions” of society have no tendency to disturb the status quo. The round of love, marriage and reproduction, so long as births and death balance, production so far as it is balanced by consumption, exchange so long as the argosies of commerce carry goods and not ideas, education so far as it passes on the traditional culture, these together with recreation, social intercourse, worship, social control, government and the administration of justice are essentially statical. They might conceivably go on forever without producing change.[12]

Indeed the usual condition of the body politic is immobility, conservatism and “determined resistance to change.” The chief reason for this immobility is habit:[13]

When our habits are settled and running smoothly they most resemble the instincts of animals. And the great part of our life is lived in the region of habit. The habits like the instincts are safe and serviceable. They have been tried and are associated with a feeling of security. There consequently grows up in the folk mind a determined resistance to change ... a state of rapid and constant change implies loss of settled habits and disorganization. As a result, all societies view change with suspicion, and the attempt to revise certain habits is even viewed as immorality. Now it is possible under such conditions for a society to become stationary or to attempt to remain so. The effort of attention is to preserve the present status, rather than to re-accommodate. This condition is particularly marked among savages. In the absence of science and a proper estimate of the value of change they rely on ritual and magic and a minute unquestioning adhesion to the past. Change is consequently introduced with a maximum of resistance ... Indeed the only world in which change is at a premium and is systematically sought is the modern scientific world.[14]

But when there comes the shattering of the matrix of custom by catastrophe, then mores are broken up and scattered right and left. Fluidity is accomplished at a stroke. There comes a sudden chance for permanent social change.

Social changes follow both minor and major disasters. The destruction of a mill may change the economic outlook of a village. The loss of a bridge may result in an entirely different school system for an isolated community; a cloud-burst may move a town. Great visitations, like the Chicago fire or the San Francisco earthquake, reveal these social processes in larger and more legible scale. Take as a single instance the latter city. Its quick recovery has been called one of the wonders of the age. In the very midst of surrounding desolation and business extinction, the Californian city projected a Panama-Pacific exposition, and its citizens proceeded to arrange for one of the greatest of all world fairs. On the other hand, the social changes which succeed relatively small disturbances are often such as to elude an estimate. The reason has been well suggested that “big crises bring changes about most easily because they affect all individuals alike at the same time.” In other words a more general fluidity is accomplished. We see, therefore, a second principle begin to emerge. Not only is fluidity fundamental to social change, but the degree of fluidity seems to vary directly as the shock and extent of the catastrophe.

There yet remains to notice the bearing of catastrophe upon social progress. The following words are quotable in this connection:

It is quite certain that the degree of progress of a people has a certain relation to the number of disturbances encountered, and the most progressive have had a more vicissitudinous life. Our proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention” is the formulation in folk-thought of this principle of social change.[15]

We cannot, however, remain long content with this suggestion as to the principle concerned—namely, that progress is a natural and an assured result of change. The point is that catastrophe always means social change. There is not always progress. It is well to guard against confusion here. Change means any qualitative variation, whereas progress means “amelioration, perfectionment.” The latter will be seen to depend on other things—the nature of the shock, the models presented, the community culture and morale, the stimulus of leaders and lookers-on. The single case of Galveston, Texas,[16] is sufficient to disprove the too optimistic hypothesis that the effects of catastrophies are uniform. Here a city lost heart by reason of the overwhelming flood, and in spite of superior commercial advantages was outgrown by a rival fifty miles away. At the same time the case of Dayton, Ohio, should be borne in mind. Here also was a flood-stricken city and she became “the Gem City of the West.” The principle[17] thus appears to be that progress in catastrophe is a resultant of specific conditioning factors, some of which are subject to social control.

It is indeed this very thing which makes possible the hope of eventual social control over disaster-stricken cities, and the transmutation of seeming evil into tremendous good. And this is in addition to the many practical social lessons which we have already been intelligent enough to preserve, such as those of better city-planning, and a more efficient charity organization.

How much of man's advancement has been directly or indirectly due to disaster?[18] The question asks itself and it is a question as yet without an answer. When the answer is at last written, will there not be many surprises? Pitt-Rivers tells us that “the idea of a large boat might have been suggested in the time of floods when houses floated down the rivers before the eyes of men.”[19] A terrible storm at sea gave America its first rice.[20] City-planning may be said to have taken its rise in America as a result of the Chicago fire, and the rôle of catastrophe in the progress of social legislation is a study in itself. The impetus thus received is immeasurable. Historically, labor-legislation took its rise with the coming of an infectious fever in the cotton-mills of Manchester in 1784. After the Cherry mine disaster legislation ensued at once. Again it was the Triangle fire which led to the appropriation of funds for a factory investigation commission in the State of New York. The sinking of the Titanic has greatly reduced the hazards of the sea.

It may easily prove true that the prophets of golden days to come who invariably arise on the day of disaster, are not entirely without ground for the faith which is in them; and that catastrophies are frequently only re-agents of further progress. But this is merely introductory. Thought becomes scientific only when its conclusions are checked up and under-written by observation or experiment. Prior to such procedure it must still remain opinion or belief.

The whole subject is, it must be repeated, a virgin field in sociology. Knowledge will grow scientific only after the most faithful examination of many catastrophies. But it must be realized that the data of the greatest value is left ofttimes unrecorded, and fades rapidly from the social memory. Investigation is needed immediately after the event. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that sociological studies of Chicago, Galveston, Baltimore, San Francisco, and other disaster cities should be initiated at once.[21]

Of such a series—if the work can be done—this little volume on Halifax is offered as a beginning. It is hoped that the many inadequacies of treatment will receive the generous allowances permitted a pioneer.