Chapter 7

Value/Norm-Forming

Agencies and Processes

'Tis Education forms the common mind,

Just as the Twig is Bent, the Tree's inclin'd.

Alexander Pope

Since every life experience and every encounter contribute to the formation of values and attitudes in the members of society, it is not always easy to identify values and attitudes as functions of a particular agency. Above all, the social fluid is pregnant with power and flows under the impulse of the weightier parts of the society which hold that power -- the power complex itself being both cause and consequence of the value system which the forming agencies promote. The social complex, in its fermentations and dynamics, embraces agencies and institutions and transcends them. Socialization, in its encompassing connotation, is carried out by the society as a whole. While in this: chapter we will concentrate on family, peer group, church, educational system, ideological parties and mass media as value-forming agencies, they do not cover the value-forming process completely. Their study is a logical step towards understanding political institutions and structures, which we will cover in later chapters and which are more closely related to those normative areas we identified in our last chapter as legal.[1]

I. Family

To discover how society disseminates its values and inculcates its members with them, we can perhaps find a point of departure in our earlier discussion of values as the content of the group. We noticed that there was one group the human being could not do without--namely, the immanent group, out of which he emanates. Until the day when test-tube babies become the normal method of procreation, we need a man and a woman to do the job. Because of this context and the comparatively long period of weaning and rearing, the first germs of social behavior are inculcated within the family. Physiologically and traditionally, the male-female couple constitutes the nucleus.

The family is the early natural habitat of the child, and parents are the first likely potentates he encounters. They ark also the most likely persons with whom the child will establish his first relationships, which, though obviously functional, are essentially affectional, providing bases for the formation of values. It is therefore understandable that recognition of the family's authority and responsibility towards the child has been a prevalent social trend throughout human history.[2]

Exceptions to this general pattern may occur during abrupt social changes and revolutions, when the newly installed power structures may need to alienate the new generations from the old for an overhaul of the value system. But then, at least so far in the history of mankind, the role of the family as a value-forming agency has again been recognized and restored. In recent times, National Socialists in Germany, early Soviets and Chinese Communists, among others, have attempted the systematic alienation of the generations by indoctrinating the young through other value-forming agencies (education, the party organization and mass media) against the values of their families. The Nazi experience lasted only a short while, but its impact was rapid because, as we saw earlier, it promoted values based on myths rooted in German folklore and culture. Thus, in the German experience, the indoctrination of the younger generations soon pacified the older generations and the family could again play a role as value-forming agency -- although its influence was reduced by other agencies, as we shall discuss later. The Nazis were indoctrinating the younger generation not so much against the traditional values of the family as against the more recent bourgeois and proletarian values and ideologies that had impregnated large social segments, rivalizing the Nazi myth.[3]

In the Soviet Union the need to counter the traditional values of older segments of the family also arose, beyond ideological considerations, for the practical needs of a system which had to mobilize the rising generations in a revolutionary economic and social outlook. What the Soviet regime had inherited from the Tzar was not a pre-communist, saturated capitalism, as depicted by Marx, but a backward, agricultural and devastated economy. Before learning the ideological intricacies of Marxism and Leninism, the young generation had to learn discipline, punctuality and sound working habits. Lenin had said, "Put a Muzhik on a tractor and you will have Socialism." To introduce a Muzhik to a tractor was not an easy job, but the Soviets were set on accomplishing it. There was also, of course, the ideological premise of reducing the role of the bourgeois family, which was anathema to the edification of communism. But it was only the "bourgeois" dimension of the family-that part which made of the family an instrument of production and consumption in the feudal-capitalist system -- that the Soviets wanted to get rid of. By the early 1930's, when things had settled down and the Stalin regime needed a more controllable social base on which to operate, the family regained its role as value-forming agency within the new Soviet social structure.[4] Here is how A. S. Makarenko, the Soviet pedagogue whose A Book for Parents has been a best-seller in the Soviet Union for three decades, sees the role of the Soviet family:

The family becomes the natural primary cell of society, the place where the delight of human life is realized, where the triumphant forces of man are refreshed, where children -- the chief joy of life -- live and grow.

Our parents are not without authority either, but this authority is only the reflection of social authority. In our country the duty of a father toward his children is a particular form of his duty toward society. It is as if our society says to parents:

You have joined together in goodwill and love, rejoice in your children and expect to go on rejoicing in them. That is your own personal affair and concerns your own personal happiness. But in this happy process you have given birth to new people. A time will come when these people will cease to be only a joy to you and become independent members of society. It is not at all a matter of indifference to society what kind of people they will be. In handing over to you a certain measure of social authority, the Soviet state demands from you correct upbringing of future citizens. Particularly it relies on a certain circumstance arising naturally out of your union -- on your parental love ....

Parental authority in Soviet society is authority based not only on the delegated power of society, but on the whole strength of public morality, which demands from parents that at least they should not be morally depraved.[5]

A Soviet decree of July 8, 1944, dealt with many family matters in bourgeois terms, such as the illegitimate child, unwed mother or multistage and complicated divorce procedures. Some futurist communal concepts of the old guard have lingered, such as those of economist S. Stroumiline, who recognized that parents are not necessarily good educators and that the child, as of the moment when his umbilical cord is cut, becomes a subject with rights, whose education should be entrusted by the society to gifted and competent educators.[6] But the mainstream of contemporary Soviet family life is oriented by the basic ideas and goals of the 1944 decree, with a Victorian puritan morality idealizing "psychological 'forces of cohesion'; feelings of love, kinship, duty, family solidarity and responsibility."[7] There is, however, a growing tendency on the part of Soviet families to transfer an ever greater part of the responsibility for child rearing to social institutions. Beyond the ideological acquiescence that is increasing among the new generation of parents born and raised after the October Revolution, this development is due also to social evolutions similar to those in the industrial West after the Victorian Era. Children can become time-consuming for ambitious and socially involved parents.[8] The 1977 Constitution of the USSR obliges Soviet citizens to devote themselves to the upbringing of their children (Article 66).

The Chinese experiment of breaking the traditional value-forming role of the family presents its own particular features. We saw earlier how ancient and deep-rooted filial piety was in China. The whole of Chinese traditional culture and Confucian orthodoxy was interwoven with the kinship system.[9] Before the advent of the People's Republic of China, the modernizing elements had already initiated the "family revolution," notably during the New Culture Movement which started in 1917 and culminated in the May 4th movement of 1919. The general thrust of the "family revolution" was to transform the kinship ties and lineage systems, which were virtually the patterns of social and political structures, into a more westernized nuclear family arrangement. The social trend in this direction progressed, not always evenly, during the Civil, Japanese and Second World Wars. Since 1949 and the installation of the Communist regime, there have been variations in the orientation of the Chinese Communist Party towards the family. The general direction has been, of course, a systematic de-emphasis of the traditional extended family. But the nuclear family itself, although recognized as a basic social unit, has at times become the subject of revolutionary measures, notably during the Great Leap period in the 50's and the Cultural Revolution of the 60's.[10] In its variations, the general tendency of the Chinese Communist Party has been to absorb the nuclear family within the commune. Considering the Chinese traditional extended family heritage, this policy points to an attempt by the communist authorities to achieve an interesting metamorphosis.

One may surmise that the Chinese have been trying to circumvent the bourgeois nuclear family phase. The conversion from clan and kinship to people's communes may in fact be easier than first awakening nuclear family consciousness among couples and their children, then stripping them of their autonomy and passing the authority to the commune. The loyalty to the traditional patriarchal hierarchy is transferred to the ideological communal hierarchy with the parents serving as value-forming agents for that goal. The process is plausible if, as the Chinese intended, the communal organization is made the basic and sole structure of the society and "the function of the state will be limited to protecting the country from external aggression; and it will play no role internally.”[11] However, the implication that there may be external aggression makes the likelihood of the final communal arrangement remote, because warding off external aggression implies national institution and planning which will strain the communes beyond their communal goals and make them part of the big whole.

If peace prevailed, and the communes were to become the total life experience of their members and the sole value-forming agency, they should become relatively small, well-integrated entities free from outside servitudes--and therefore without dependence or extensive interaction with the outside including a sovereign national state. Such a situation would revert us to conditions similar to those of primeval groups. In this situation, the revolutionary committees' and commune managers' ideological considerations should no longer be dictated from beyond the commune, but shaped by the interests of their immediate communal environment, and their loyalty should be exclusively to the commune whose basic nature will become identical with a clan, with the difference that communes and clans will be at the opposite ends of the Marxian historical materialism spectrum. To follow the development from one to the other, we should indeed start by identifying the clan as the early and sole value-forming agency because, as we noticed earlier, it is not necessarily the male-female couple which plays the predominant value-forming role. The family as a social unit has a more general connotation. The nuclear family of father, mother and offspring may become a dissociable part of a bigger entity: the extended family, itself extending into a clan. There, values are part and parcel of the group and the identification of the value forming agency poses no problem. The homogeneous and monolithic group and its values are a coherent and coincident whole.

II. Family and Church

In Chapter Three we saw that the evolution of the group brings about differentiations in specialization and in social strata, which in turn can bring about diversification of interests within the family, clan and kinship pattern, reducing its all-encompassing value-forming potentials. The son of the farmer may, for example, become a sailor and have life experiences not covered by nor tallying with the value pattern the family circle could provide. Thus, as the group grows in complexity, to remain integrated, it will need additional value-forming agencies. The agency which seems to have emerged to fulfill the added value-forming needs at an early stage of social complexity is, in a broad sense, the religious institution. It became the promoter of beliefs and the custodian of the value system, superimposed on and interacting with the family and the clan. The institution of faith grew, of course, out of what was already there: the clan. The homo magus, the witch doctor, the sorcerer, evolved into homo divinans, the holder of the faith. Different cultures may have emphasized either the family or the religious institution as the dominant value-forming agency. For example, in China as compared to India the family played a more important role than the house of worship. But as anthropological studies indicate, at the earlier stages of social evolution, family and religious institutions became everywhere the principal value-forming agencies.

What is striking in this social evolution is the extent to which the social hierarchy and structure have entrusted the inculcation of values to the family and the institutionalized belief. Looking back at our earlier discussions, we may trace certain paths of convergence leading to this social phenomenon. Among the basic human drives discussed in Chapter Two, we can discern variations permitting us to identify some of those drives as more material and functional (the physiological and biological drives), some as more dynamic (the drives for domination, excitement, game and challenge) and some as more oriented towards social rationales (the drives for freedom, justice and order). Further, there are some drives which qualify more aptly as affectional and nonrational. They are those which complement the physiological needs for contact comfort or security and turn into needs for "love," attention, respect, recognition, approval and psychic reinforcement. There is also the drive to search for and fear the unknown, whose very nature and whose extension beyond the known leads to the nonrational. It is the essence of all religion to explain the inexplicable: creation, death and what lies beyond. We saw in Chapter Three that the affectional and the nonrational were dimensions of group relationship interacting and merging with functional and rational dimensions to create and provide bases for values. It is then understandable to find the institutions which envelop and claim these affectional and nonrational dimensions, namely family -- clan -- and religion, as the primordial value-forming agencies. As the basic texture of the society, they not only perpetuate its value system but reflect it. They are not only value-forming agencies but values, and each upholds in its teachings the validity of the other. Faith permeates the family, and the religious institutions uphold the sacredness of the family and the honor of parenthood.

The family, having the first natural access to the fresh mind of the child, can generally inculcate him with such dimensions necessary for social life as obedience, deference, cooperation, "correct" sexual behavior and class consciousness. In most cases, the family can provide a better evaluation and dosage of reward and punishment than can other social institutions. The long weaning and rearing provide the appropriate setting to exploit the individual's imitative potentials and to apply repetitive methods of control and training, inculcating social symbols and rituals, feeding and orienting the child's imagination, impulses and drives. By appropriate conditioning and reinforcement, by authoritative yet affectionate imperatives such as "this is the way to do it," or "you should not do that," the parents give the child a set of unquestionable values, the acceptance of which prepares the individual for adherence to the belief system and the social and political authority structure. The family further provides for the child the means of communication with his peers, who also play a strong value-forming role because of their similitude attraction and kindred qualities.

The complementary roles and tendencies of male and female not only lend themselves to satisfying the different dimensions of the child's needs, but also provide outlets for the adults' drives. Much of the parents' drives for domination, excitement and challenge, and their conservative and possessive drives, are combined, tempered and channeled for family responsibilities and the benefit of the social structure. Depending on the culture and the individual nature, the man may be more reckless, free from filial and familial bonds. The female may be socio-psychologically conditioned for motherhood and may develop conservative and possessive tendencies out of the biological experience of pregnancy and childbirth. The two -- male and female -- once combined, become predictable and responsible social units. The social authority structure recognizes and upholds that responsibility.

The religious institution picks up its value-forming role from within the family. Drawing on the dispositions developed for acceptance of unquestionable values, it provides the unanswerable questions about the beyond with unquestionable answers, on the basis of which further values are passed on to the member of society. Devout conviction complements filial affection and respect. Belief becomes an important factor in the recognition of the peer group, whose adherence to the religious institution validates and reinforces its value structure. As we shall see in Chapter Eleven, belief in divine omnipotence, combined with filial piety, provides for the acceptance of and submission to the supremacy of the social and political hierarchy.

* * *

The coherence of the value-forming roles of family and church with the social structure depends, of course, on the homogeneity of the society. That is why we examined the family and the church anthropologically at the primeval stage. When the society becomes heterogeneous, family and religious institutions may be less integrated within the social system, in which case they will lose their exclusivity as value-forming agencies. The social framework will then provide grounds for the competition of the different institutions and agencies involved. It develops into a complex beyond the original clan where the warriors, the elders and the shamans were components directly bound together in kinship ties. If one of these components has been instrumental in the group's social evolution and has acquired a prominent position in its hierarchy, it will want the value-forming agencies to inculcate the social values favoring its prominence, while the component itself (the emergent power structure emanating from warriors, elders or shamans) will want to operate beyond the confines of those agencies. Indeed, it must be able to expand its base of operations if it is to claim political sway beyond its own kinship ties; and it should identify itself with controls and interests distinct from the power of the custodians of the faith (unless it is the custodians of the faith who have secured secular power for themselves, like the priests of the Sumerian temples in Mesopotamia some 5,000 years ago, or the Church in the Vatican).

The heterogeneous society will reduce the functional attributes of the family and make different demands on family members. The patriarchal or matriarchal extended family or clan will no longer be the group's sole and total identifiable texture. The family, no longer the exclusive depository of the group's authority nor the direct recipient in the distribution of tasks and prerogatives, may itself feel the discrepancies of social redistribution. If the parents' expectations remain unfulfilled, this may be reflected in the family's value-forming processes, and the family may create a spirit of resistance and challenge to the power structure, providing a basis for social change. If this trend becomes prevalent, the power structure, to maintain itself, may try to alienate the younger generation from the family through other value-forming agencies.

As for the institutionalized belief, by virtue of its inherent potentials for control (particularly over the soul) it will lay claim to social power. And if it does not already control the secular authority; it will rival it. Thus, the belief institution may form values not always coinciding with the interests of the political secular authority. The Christian church was not conceived by St. Augustine and St. Thomas purely and simply to support the ruling system, but also to check on it. As history witnesses, this trend has shaped most of our societies up to the modern age. From the conflict of Pharaoh Amenophis IV with the priests of Amon-Re in 1372 B.C., to the Bismarckian Kulturkampf against the Vatican Council's proclamation of the "dogma of papal infallibility" in 1870, the issue has remained the same. Thus, with the society growing in heterogeneity, relationships between the socio-political secular powers, the family/clan and the institution of faith evolve, engendering at times (and often at the same time) cohesion and coherence or conflict and rivalry, stimulating the development and diffusion of new value-forming patterns.

III. Family, Church and Education

The new value-forming patterns in the heterogeneous society evolve from within the old premises. From within the family, the clan and the belief institution grows another value-forming agency which, sooner or later, can be identified as the instructional and educational institution. In its early stages the heterogeneous society while creating specializations beyond primeval forms, will nevertheless depend greatly on family, clan and kinship to provide training for skills, crafts and professions from one generation to another. This functional attribute of the family will be different from what it was at the primeval stage, when the unit was self-contained and virtually self-sufficient at the subsistence level. There, as we saw, every segment of the clan was identical in its functions with another segment, with every man, woman and child doing more or less what every other man, woman and child did within the clan. In the early cumulative economy, families diversify their specializations. The carpenter's son likely follows his father's profession but has to depend on the butcher for his meat. Professional training in this context refers to social functions and at first sight may seem to carry no value-forming potentials. We need to take a closer look at its evolution, because as it evolves, its value-forming potentials become more apparent.

The Apprentice

As the heterogeneous society grows more complex, expands and provides greater mobility, weakening family ties, especially those of the extended family, the passage of professional know-how from one generation to another shifts beyond the family.[12] Learning a trade, whether from a father or from a master, becomes a matter of apprenticeship distinct from the rudimentary experiences and affectional securities provided by the family. This shift brings about an identity among the members of the same profession which, beyond the functional process of professional training, creates a community of outlook and provides for affectional relationships and value-forming possibilities. At the traditional stages such relationships develop into brotherhoods, corporations and guilds. While these associations will have different types and degrees of impact on their members, they all carry the basic germ of common interests which, as we noticed in Chapter Four, are essential in forming social values. In that sense, they provide the historical link and the social dimension complementing the tribe and the interest groups. The guilds of medieval Europe were not only professional associations but developed their own moral codes And norms of conduct. The contracts of indenture passed between the master and the parents of the apprentice were not confined to teaching a craft, but placed the master in loco parentis--in the place of the parents. He was responsible both to teach the apprentice a skill and to look after his welfare and moral education.[13]

The Scribe and the Cleric

Parallel to the evolution of professional training grows a traditional education centered around the belief institutions. The doctors of faith -- whether doctors because they have evolved from the witch doctors or because they promote the "doctrine" -- will be called upon and will claim to teach the "truth." The truths which the doctors will be asked to impart will support both practical and moral purposes of social life. As distinct from its role as the house of worship, depending on the complexities of the social structure, the institution of faith inculcates the young with the abstract thoughts and moral premises needed for social order. It also produces scribes who, by their knowledge of literature and grammar, by writing and recording, facilitate commercial business and the business of government. This pattern of social evolution varies with different cultures, depending upon their particular fermentations and dynamics and the sequence of events to which they are exposed in time and space.[14]

In traditional and agricultural societies, where change is slow, the economic and technical specializations are comparatively few, and most of the population is engaged in farming, the possibilities for the propagation of knowledge remain limited. Also, the number of people exposed to systematic education is comparatively small and generally selective on the bases of filial, professional, belief and class standards.[15] It is noteworthy that certain social conditions seem conducive to the growth and autonomy of secular education as a distinct value-forming agency, and that without them the secular education prematurely instituted tends to gravitate around the more primeval value-forming agency of religion. For example, while Confucius and early Confucians advocated and practiced education free from supernatural dogma, the Chinese educational system fell back under the influence of the belief systems (although those systems in China were not as centralized, dogmatic and potent as medieval Christianity in Europe and did not totally absorb the secular educational practices).[16] A later current for systematized secular education in China during the Sung period (960-1279 A. D.) was more successful and longer lasting because China had evolved into a comparatively more urban and bourgeois society, with a centralized and bureaucratic government.[17] It was not that the Chinese society was liberated from religious beliefs, which indeed the Sung also upheld, but that concurrent with the premises of belief and the supernatural, the secular education acted as a value-forming agency in its own right and provided moral, ethical and social standards for a large segment of the Chinese middle and upper classes.[18]

In Europe secular education developed towards autonomy as a value-forming agency centuries later than it did in China. The church's preeminence as a value-forming agency during the dark ages of Europe encompassed education and inhibited the advancement of scientific learning. Even philosophical thought had to fit the religious mold. This religious hegemony was taking place on a continent which had seen the days of Aristotle, Plato, Seneca and Cicero. Otherwise, besides the Chinese experience, in other parts of the world the search for the unknown generally combined the justification of the supernatural with philosophical inquiry, conditioning the latter by the former.[19] In Europe, the Christian church became preponderant because it was in a position to fill the political vacuum created by the collapse of the Roman Empire. If the church did continue to dominate the European scene for centuries, it was because European social development and political conditions were at the level of a traditional culture. We noticed earlier that while the social power and authority of the state depended on the belief structure, the latter also rivaled the former for social control. In the particular case of Europe in the earlier days of the Middle Ages, both the Christian religion and the emerging secular power of the northern barbaric tribes were alien importations in relation to the Graeco-Roman cultures of antiquity. But the church could claim an earlier Roman heritage, thus commanding the respect of the secular powers it converted to Christianity.

By the eleventh century, however, the secular powers of Europe, having developed their own identity and weary of the ever-increasing claims of the popes to temporal as well as spiritual rule, welcomed conditions that would counterbalance the power of the church. These conditions, which culminated after five centuries in the Renaissance and the Reformation, were economic, social, political and intellectual, in many ways comparable to those of the Sung period in China but with later dramatic technical and industrial consequences catapulting Europe into the modern age. Central to our discussion here is the re-emergence of philosophical thought beyond the confines of religion, enhancing the development of educational institutions as autonomous value-forming agencies.

The early challenge to the Christian church's monopoly as value-forming agency took the general form of legal contentions and jurisdictional conflicts. A combination of Germanic Volk laws with Roman law was gradually being developed and practiced by the secular monarchs, corroding the ecclesiastic authority.[20] In the spirit of this new revival of Germanic customs, blended with the pre-Christian Roman legal concepts, the princes of the empire came to claim the churches of their realm--their Landeskirche--more and more as an integral part of their political domain. Their patronage did not stop at providing for the material existence of a church but extended to its administration and control.[21] In this rivalry for power, the secular had to meet the challenge of the church, not so much on theological grounds but in the field of jurisprudence. Ever increasing numbers of Cardinals were trained jurists, equipped with the know-how of government. In a way the state was forced to educate itself to cope with the omniscient spiritual power. The secular sovereigns thus tended to call more on lawyers and lay civil servants than on clerics supplied by the church to fill government offices. These bureaucrats had to be trained outside the church. Thus, the University of Naples became the first European university to be established by a royal charter, instituted by Frederick II in 1224 to train state officials.[22]

The Philosopher

Parallel to this evolution, new dimensions were developing within the church itself. The study of Greek philosophy, which Europe came to rediscover through Moslem thinkers like Avicenna (980-1037) and Averroes (1126-1198), flourished, blending the theological tenets of such great scholastics as Albertus Magnus (1193?-1280) and St. Thomas (1225-1274) with Aristotelian logic. The introduction of Aristotelian philosophy into theological thinking, however, itself contributed to the gradual loosening of the tight jacket of Christian orthodoxy on philosophic thinking. With the competition between the secular princes and the papacy for power and authority, and the new philosophical dimension injected into theological thinking, European scholars found greater room for critical analysis and learning beyond the teachings of the church. It was within this enlarged context that the new thoughts of such scholars as Dante (1265-1321), Marsiglio of Padua (1280-1343) and William of Ockham (1290?-1349) gradually provided grounds for scientific inquiry, distinguishing the personality of "educational institutions."[23] The nominalism of William of Ockham reversed the scholastic synthesis of science and faith of Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas and suggested a distinction among philosophy, theology and the scientific approach. Basing itself on experimentation and legal positivism, it carried the germ of empiricism.[24] By the fourteenth century, most of the universities that flourished in Germany, although Christian in orientation and spirit, had been established by secular princely or city charters, indicating the loss of the church's monopoly on education.[25]

The philosophic emancipation accompanied other dimensions of social change. The expansion of cities and commerce brought about a larger bourgeoisie. The appeal to laic and non-cleric civil service by the European courts enlarged the bureaucratic class. Once they became literate, these classes called for further literary and artistic stimulation. The vernacular began to be used in literature. In France, Villehardouin (died c. 1212) wrote the first vernacular history, Conquest of Constantinople. The French romances of the time, such as the Roman de la Rose of William of Lorris, taken up by Jean de Meung, were suggestively erotic and bourgeois. Dante wrote La Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy in the Tuscan vernacular, and he defended writing in the vernacular in his De Vulgari Eloquentia, written in Latin. The attenuation of the church as the dominant pole of attraction permitted the development of new perspectives taking into account man's point of view. Thus flourished humanists such as the Florentines Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio (13131375). The humanist movement spread rapidly across Europe where, particularly in Germany, it developed along with the traditional teachings within the universities and led the way to pedagogical studies concerning the development of the individual, culminating in the strong plea of Erasmus (1467-1536) for more schools and the popularization of education. We know of the influence that the thoughts of Erasmus had on Luther and the later evolutions of the Reformation. It was indeed after the Reformation that the educational institutions and philosophic thoughts became substantial value-forming agencies in Europe. Komensky (or Comenius, 1592-1670), the Czech churchman (and nationalist), did for education what Galileo had done for astronomy, recognizing the principles of education rather than blind faith as man's guide to the labyrinth of the world. All this was accelerated with the improvement of the printing press by the early fifteenth century.

However, we must put in the right perspective the development of education as a distinct value-forming agency in the high middle ages and after. The social currents contributing to this development did not, strictly speaking, emanate from the masses who, we must remember, remained basically rural. In their refinement, all these evolutions touched more directly the limited, higher stratum of European society. Philosophical inquiry germinated within the church with the revival of the Greek classics. In the conjuncture of temporal and spiritual conflicts, it found favorable patrons among the aristocrats and the growing bourgeoisie and bureaucracy who encouraged its pedagogic orientations for social purposes. Philosophy begot pedagogy, yet it was the church that claimed its spiritual fatherhood, and it was mothered by the secular powers and the emerging bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. While the ensuing educational institutions provided appropriate grounds for philosophical and scientific inquiry, they were at the same time regarded as agencies to promote the interests and values of the various segments concerned. The fact that these interests and values did not always coincide was, of course, an inspiration and a challenge for philosophy and science. As mentioned earlier, the church and the aristocratic rulers did not always see eye to eye. It was within the centers of higher learning that the problem was acknowledged and studied in depth. Despite the small numbers which philosophy then touched, it had nevertheless a great impact, for those it touched were those who counted. In the following centuries, it was within philosophic and scientific circles that the impending conflicts between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, proletariat and bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie and bureaucracy were first diagnosed.

This process of philosophic and scientific inquiry which bases itself on the analysis of facts, experimentation and reasoning (in short, the process of thought as opposed to the uncritical learning and acceptance of established values) can, of course, carry germs of change unfavorable to the dominant and current value system. The established social order, or rather its weightier part, can then rightfully resent and distrust the unruly and uninhibited tendencies of the intellectuals. In other words, within the educational process we may distinguish two dimensions. The first is one which the prevailing order patronizes as an extension and elaboration of the value-forming and training by the family, the guild and the church; the other, both cause and consequence of the first, will be inquiry for further knowledge, to improve life and to explore the unexplored. In general terms, this second dimension is philosophy--the love of wisdom. The different segments of the prevailing order may use this dimension as a weapon in their social conflicts, but only in so far as it advances their cause. Sometimes the aim may be the total usurpation or annihilation of the adversary, such as the struggle of the militant proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The intelligentsia in this case is given free course to pave the road and justify the final victory of the revolution, and then is put again into the mold of the ruling order, as in the case of the Soviet Union.

Sometimes, however, the contending power sectors are symbiotic and use the intelligentsia only to redistribute power without endangering each other's existence. This has been the usual pattern of social conflicts and the role of the intelligentsia in the Western world since the French Revolution. The fine line of social control over philosophic and scientific thought and its influence on the course of events is, of course, difficult to draw during periods of crisis, and at times may get out of the hands of the contending segments of the social order. This was the case, for example, of the French Revolution. The influence of the Philosophes had gone beyond what the "Enlightened Despotism" of Louis XVI had intended and the bourgeoisie contended. It took the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the church years to re-establish the simili-order of pre-revolution. But the irreparable damage had been done and a new social consciousness had been created, setting the tone for the political upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and eventually changing the very political texture of European society.

But it is in the nature of philosophic and intellectual inquiry, as its historical evolution and social dynamics attest, that it can inspire and influence the power structure without becoming it. Love of wisdom, in its pure state, is not socially functional. It must be patronized by the functionally powerful segments of the society to become operative. That is why great political thinkers often dedicated their philosophic works to princes of state and church--not always to those whose rule corresponded to their inclinations, but to those whom they hoped to change. And, indeed, they were patronized by those who had a hand on the reins of power. Philosophy, in its profound essence, does not patronize its own application, and the socially effective patron does not philosophize. To the extent that the one does the other, he ceases to be the one. To the extent the philosopher-king is a philosopher, his kingly functions are carried out by others. Asokas do not perpetuate themselves,[26] and the meditations and the practices of Marcus Aurelius were worlds apart.

The Pedagogue

I have insisted on the pure and essential stages of philosophy because it is there--in the search for wisdom (for the love of wisdom)--that philosophy is not socially functional. Otherwise, the social order does pick up and convert the findings of philosophic, scientific and intellectual inquiry into practical tools. Within the educational institutions, to separate these two dimensions (facts and values, skill-training and inquisitiveness, information and inspiration) and isolate them from one another is difficult. Once learning in itself is recognized as a value and the process of learning and inquiry is initiated, limits to it must justify themselves within those premises. Education generates itself from within by the interaction of the two philosophic and pedagogic dimensions and the essential interaction of the peer group. That is precisely where the value-forming power of education resides. In abstraction, that part of education which is empirical and informative may not be considered value-forming. But what is empirical and what is informative? Empiricism itself may be a principle of behavior and hence become a value. So may the possession of information. When the master shows the disciple how to hold the chisel or connect the wires or multiply 2 x 2, he not only passes on know-how, but commands respect (at least he should), and more often than not he imparts values by creating predispositions in the learner to see things from a particular angle. As for the peer group within the educational institution, not only does it have influence through general exposure, but it also affects the learning behavior of its members.[27] Both teachers and students in the educational environment are led to embrace their peer group standards of learning and inquiry.

Educational institutions thus become value-forming agencies in their own right, promoting, together with the other value-forming agencies, the prevailing social values, but also contrasting with and influencing them. The teacher receives the impact of a family and .a religious, mythical or ideological pattern, but what he teaches does not necessarily mirror the values of those institutions. He may teach the theory of evolution, conflicting with the dogma of the church, and be tried for it, as Scopes experienced in Dayton, Tennessee, as late as 1925.

IV. New Churches: Ideological and Mythical Systems

The Scopes trial, however, was not only a challenge between the two value-forming agencies of church and education. It also engendered a clash of the old and the new in beliefs, myths and ideologies. At about the time when the Einstein-Friedmann relativistic theories of cosmology--the Big Bang--were elaborated, Clarence Darrow, the famous Scopes defense attorney, made William Jennings Bryan, former U. S. Secretary of State who had invested all his energies in the prosecution, testify in the Dayton court that the whale swallowed Jonah, that Joshua made the sun stand still, and that the world was created in the year 4004 B. C.[28] At issue was the cultural evolution of the Western world since the Renaissance and Reformation.

The inquiry injected by the revival of Greek philosophy into theology followed the arduous path between curiosity and conformity to reach the conclusions of Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo (1564-1642) and beyond, to the rational thinking of Descartes (1596-1650). Up to then the Augustinian postulate had prevailed--believing before understanding. Galileo demonstrated that what was believed in, was not necessarily true. Once it was realized that the premises of belief may be false, the alternative was to base man's understanding on reason.[29] Descartes in France, Hobbes (1588-1679) in England (although they did not always agree with each other) and others were labeled atheists, but Christians were no longer burning heretics at the stake. With the philosophic and scientific heritage of the seventeenth century, the experimental method initiated by Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the deductive logic of Descartes, and Newtonian discoveries based on experimental rationalism, the eighteenth century was set to become the Age of Enlightenment. The rational observations of the "enlighteners," generally more rational in France and more observational in England, kept eroding the premises of the established church, sometimes inadvertently, other times by design.

Already at the turn of the century, John Locke (1632-1704) not only championed the idea of toleration but, in his Essay on Human Understanding (1690), subjecting thought itself to experimentation and observation, concluded that ideas originated not in the soul--and by extension God--as Descartes believed, but in the senses. This sensualism developed into eighteenth-century utilitarianism. Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771), who advanced the idea that men were inclined to maximize their pleasures and minimize their pains, and who influenced the philosophical work of Bentham, also claimed to have proved that God did not exist.[30] Along with French rationalism went David Hume's (1711-1776) empiricism and skepticism about God[31] and the flourishing schools of materialism and utilitarianism. Reason and empirical observation questioned God. The materialists reduced man's concerns to the palpable and "freed" him from abstract and metaphysical speculations.[32] God was ceasing to be an answer and was becoming a question. Then what was the answer?

We saw earlier that religious institutions appeased man's anxiety and, by inculcating him with faith in God, provided him with a sense of purpose which became instrumental in his elaboration of norms and social and political organization. Since some process of value-crystallization is needed to provide man with purpose and order, when one value system fails, another should replace it. Reason, while weakening the foundations of religious institutions, was providing grounds for another value-crystallizing process, namely ideology. Historically, this brings us to the distinction we made earlier between the different crystallization processes. While it was at the end of the nineteenth century that the term "ideology" was coined, we must be cautious in assuming that with the advent of the age of reason in Europe, the belief institutions were replaced as value-forming agencies by ideological institutions.

Reason and empiricism were not always cozy corners for all the philosophical thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One cannot leave the beyond alone simply because one cannot observe it or conceive it by reason.[33] There grew schools of thought which, not satisfied with the hard, cold facts of rationalism and not content with the pre-rational premises of religious faith, conceived of a beyond which man could project, sometimes to irrational dimensions, from within himself: the abstract dimensions which could be made godly and willful through feelings and power of spirit. The Romantics and idealists saw in man the possibilities of realizations beyond the dissectable, mechanical and organic man of the rational and empirical scientists. Carlyle (1795-1881) saw in man the hero; Nietzsche (1844-1900) the superman; and beyond man, Herder (1744-1803) and Fichte (1762-1814) saw the greatness of the nation; while Hegel, still further beyond, conceived of the "Idea of the world mind." These ideas, which justified breakthroughs beyond the rational restrictions of historical and philosophical facts, later inspired the myths for modern value-crystallization, as discussed in Chapter Five.

Thus, with the waning of vigor in religious institutions--more in some societies, less in others--the ground was laid for new value-forming agencies. The process, although rapid in historical context, was gradual. At first, ideologies such as socialism or myths conducive to nationalism did not represent organized institutions (compared to the degree to which the church was organized). They were fluids running through the different social fibers, transmitted by the existing social structures: family, educational institutions and peer groups. New value-forming agencies based on myths and ideologies emerged in the heterogeneous modern and industrialized societies, as did religious institutions based on supernatural belief and faith from within the primeval groups when these groups evolved into communal and traditional patterns. Neither ideologies and myths, nor the institutions inspired by them were exactly new. Communism and socialism were outgrowths of capitalism which had itself been preceded by mercantilism. As for the institutions which we can identify in general terms as associations, pressure groups and parties (which serve to different extents as value-forming agencies for myths and ideologies), they were the ever-present ingredients of heterogeneous social textures. What was new about them was the value-forming magnitude of institutionalized myths and ideologies in the modern Western context. That magnitude had different impacts and natures in different cultural settings. Nationalism or communism developed differently in Great Britain, Germany or Russia.

Up to the end of the eighteenth century, the ideologically militant and missionary party was not developed, although its ingredients were there. In his essays on parties, David Hume lists those which are based on personal ties, reflecting the affectional dimensions of kinship and friendship, and those founded on some real difference of sentiment or interest, of which the most extraordinary are the "parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle,...known only to modern times" and, despite their idealistic claims, often disguising "factions of interest."[34] Hume had on his mind, notably, the Whigs and the Tories, political factions formed in the British Parliament in the seventeenth century, respectively opposing and supporting the royal court on questions of principle which, as we shall discuss in Chapter Eleven, were also inspired by particular interests. But these "parties from principle" were not as yet value-forming agencies for the indoctrination of the masses. The new philosophic and scientific approaches were discussed in informed circles which sometimes became structured. One of the most cosmopolitan of these was Freemasonry. Originally a brotherhood of masons in the middle ages, the organization developed in England in the early eighteenth century into a secret society, with philosophical and speculative tendencies. Its lodges spread quickly all over Europe where the new ideas of change were being studied and discussed. But because of its secret nature and lofty ideals, its elaborate symbols and rituals, and the underdeveloped mass media, the movement was not destined for popular activism. Its adherents were mostly members of the upper classes, and--despite papal condemnation of the movement--a number of ecclesiastics. Such movements were instrumental in acquainting the sovereigns and the ruling classes in Europe with emerging ideas and inspiring their reforms and enlightened despotism.

At the time of the French Revolution, the first attempts at organizing militant and ideological associations and parties were made. Political clubs born of "societies of thought" (les sociétés de pensées), which had been created as of the middle of the eighteenth century in many European countries, were meeting in the early years of the French Revolution to discuss affairs of state. Among the most militant were the Jacobin clubs. These clubs not only discussed political affairs, but watched the authorities and debated the reforms and policies of the Constitutional Assembly. The enthusiasm of the popular uprising and the liberty enjoyed by the press in the early years of the French Revolution supplemented the vigor of the political clubs, which did indeed serve as value-forming agencies. The role of these popular clubs as controls of the official authorities was recognized by the 1793 Convention, and by 1794 they served as instruments of "the reign of terror" (the period when commissioners of the National Convention who were sent to the French provinces collaborated with the Jacobins to suppress the counterrevolutionaries, sometimes with great violence and terrorism).

However, the experience was not long-lasting, not only because of the historical conjunctures, but also because of the rudimentary techniques and means of mass indoctrination. Uncompromising factionalism cloaked in elaborate myths did not fit into the political culture of the French Revolution. "The cult of the Supreme Being," the concept of the "republic of virtue" and the dynamics of "people in revolution" which Robespierre used for his platform in the Committee of Public Safety (Comité de Salut publique) in 1794 did not provide a well-rounded ideology which the revolutionary committees and Jacobin clubs supporting him could oppose to their adversaries, nor sell to the Paris commune and the French workers as a package. There was no centrally organized party or disciplined hierarchy with a declared ideology to lead the clubs and the revolutionary committees. Nor were the means and media of communication yet developed for the ideological and mythological agitation and propaganda. That took the whole of the nineteenth century, culminating in the spectacular performances of the Fascist and Nazi parties in the twentieth century.

The economic, social and technological upheavals of nineteenth-century Europe brought about conditions permitting new interest clusters and their convergence towards certain myths and ideologies. The concentration of population in industrial centers, the development of rail transportation and the improvement of printing facilitated the movement of ideas. By the middle of the century the process of value-crystallization into an ideology representing a certain interest sector took recognizable form: that of the Marxian proletariat. The Communist Manifesto defined the value-forming role of the organs representing different classes and reserved for the proletariat, once it took power, the task of educating the other classes into the classless society. The politically organized group thus supplemented family, church and education as a value-forming agency in its own right, heavily depending on the peer group as a point of recruitment and convergence of like-minded people.

All politically active groups, however, do not have equal claims and impacts as value-forming agencies. The value-forming potentials of an organization depend on several systemic variables. One is the nature of its involvement; that is, whether its stated goal is to serve as a forum for a broad spectrum of interests, to defend certain interests or to promote particular values. (As discussed in Chapter Four, of course, interests and values are intertwined.)[35] Another variable is the extent to which the group association (or party) claims to voice the views and values of its adherents or to form and mold those views and values. Together with these variables goes the organization's degree of openness to membership and participation: its recruitment policy, the possibilities of member participation in decision- and policy-making, and its indoctrinating machinery. The Federation of British Industries, the American Farm Bureau Federation or the American Greyhound Track Operators Association are not value-forming agencies in the same sense that the Communist parties in the Soviet Union and China are. Different combinations of the enumerated variables cover, notably, various classifications made of political parties.[36] For instance, parties claiming to represent a broad spectrum and to voice the views and values of their adherents have been labeled broker, caucus, coalitional, indirect or mass parties, while parties aiming to form and mold their members, promoting particular values, have been called ideological, militant, missionary or class interest parties. We shall refer to .the activities of these parties within the political system later, notably in Chapter Fourteen. As for their value-forming nature, obviously the ideologically militant and missionary parties play a more overt role. But even associations, organizations and parties claiming only to represent particular or broad spectrums of interests have value-forming dimensions. The trade union mentality grows within the trade union as distinct from family, church or school. The social and political conditions which the existence of these organizations brings about, such as voting, campaigning and electioneering, are in themselves not only value-forming but also influential on the other agencies so far discussed.

The value-forming potentials of ideologically and mythically militant associations and parties were not fully exploited until they received the boost of modern mass media. Before that, propaganda required more initiative on the part of its audience even to be transmitted at all. They had to read the pamphlet or move themselves to within the limited range of the herald's, bard's, minstrel's or haranguer's voice. In the 1920's and 1930 's radio invaded the masses. Through its waves the modern political leader could move millions in the comfort of their homes.

V. Mass Media

Signs and symbols, words and images, spoken, written or acted out, whether in personal contacts, in conferences, or in books, newspapers, magazines, radio or television serve in different degrees as instruments and amplifiers of the value-forming agencies so far discussed. The medium used by the family is, nearly exclusively, word of mouth. The church has traditionally used word of mouth for the masses and the written word for its inner communication, with recent experiments using radio and TV. The educational establishment has emphasized the written word and word of mouth in that order; it has begun to use radio and TV recently and may use them more in the future. Political associations and parties use all these media but, depending on their environment, rely more and more on radio and TV--more on radio in the less developed countries, more on TV in the developed countries. The choice as to which medium to emphasize thus has something to do with the nature of the value-forming agency. The extent to which the media are used of course, has also to do with the particular cultures, particularly political cultures. In a totalitarian regime with an ideologically or mythically militant party in power, the media and their contents will be declared an extension of the political organization. The program of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March, 1919, provided for "development of the propaganda of Communist ideas on a wide scale and for that purpose the utilization of state resources and apparatus," which meant, of course, control of the mass media. Under more fluid regimes, the contents of the mass media are not directly controlled by the state or a party. The media are left more or less open to reflect the different currents within the society. In countries like France and Great Britain, the government controls and subsidizes the functioning of some of the media, such as radio and TV, but leaves control of their content to bodies more or less independent of direct, overt governmental control. In the United States, while the media are promoted as private enterprises, they are subject to certain laws, like Section 315 of the Federal Communications Act of 1934 providing for equal time for all political platforms. Also, state and federal censorship and other mechanisms regulate some of their content.

So far we are assuming that the medium is only the medium, that the different media are simply channels serving the value-forming agencies we have discussed. This is obviously simplistic. As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the social, political, economic, cultural (ethical and aesthetic) flux of the society means values are formed by more than just the easily identifiable agencies. The media, then, are also media for transmitting these complex dimensions. The poet, the singer, the painter or the architect, though using the media, may not represent any of the agencies we have so far discussed. But even in a face-to-face, word of mouth situation in a family, the language and words used, the intonation of the voice--not always voluntarily and consciously--influence the value-forming processes. In other words, the medium influences the message. To what extent does it do so? McLuhan raised a good deal of controversy by affirming, "The medium is the message."[37] Let us more moderately say, however, that there are both the medium and the message.

One way of establishing the media's impact as value-forming agencies is to compare their relative importance in that role. Depending on their type and nature, the media have different impacts, ranges and audiences; some are more appropriate for some contents than others. John Crosby, then TV and radio critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, remarked on the relativity of the media in regard to the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate.[38] At the time of the debate, he had listened to the radio and felt that Nixon had scored better. He was surprised to find out the next day that the consensus favored Kennedy. A few days later he viewed the videotape of the debate and was amazed at how the TV advantaged Kennedy.[39] The discrepancy in his judgment of Nixon's and Kennedy's performances had to do with the additional visual dimension of the TV; Kennedy simply looked better. The TV debate had a significant effect on the electorate because by 1960 the television had become a mass medium. The Kennedy-Nixon debate was viewed and commented upon by a substantial sector of the voting population. The TV became a mass medium not only because of technological developments, but also because of its appeal to the public and the nature of the country's economy. Books, magazines and newspapers have long benefited from technological advances in printing, but they demand more concentration and effort on the part of their audiences. A greater percentage of the public is likely to be reached by radio and TV because the effort demanded for exposure is merely to turn a knob.[40] Had Nixon and Kennedy carried out their polemics by articles in The Nation, for example, even if there were greater discrepancy in the scores of their duel, it would have touched a different audience and not affected the outcome of the elections to the same degree as their TV debate.

The popular use of a medium also has to do with a country's economic and social development. The American general public, though literate, may not necessarily read as much as the general public in, for example, Sweden. According to the 1972 statistics, there were 333 TV sets per 1000 population in Sweden as against 472 sets per 1000 in the U. S. A. There were 515 copies of daily newspapers per 1000 in Sweden as against 314 in the U. S. A. Of course, the number of newspaper copies is not a decisive indicator about the influence of the newspaper as a medium of information. I have seen the Indian villager read the newspaper front to back, and the Manhattanite rush out of the subway, buy the New York Times, keep the classified section and throw the rest away. The Western man's culture of accelerated and concentrated economic effort, whether in an office, in a factory or on a farm, may reduce his drive for concentrated reading.

Because of their different forms and potentials, one medium cannot totally replace another. They appeal to different audiences with different interests, goals and values. The man who wants to know Kantian philosophy will probably want to read it directly, not just see a program about it on TV. The written word, depending, of course, on whether it is in a popular magazine or a scholarly treatise, can deal with a subject in greater detail and be scrutinized more carefully by the reader than can TV or radio coverage of the same topic. The book is a docile companion, yet a stubborn interlocutor. It is the garden of dreams and the field of imagination. The reader can make the world of the book according to his own image. He can choose his pace with the book, go back to its earlier arguments and debate with it. The book will not raise its voice, but neither will it change its mind -- printed black on white.

This brings us to our more direct concern about the value-forming role of the media. Our examination of the different impacts and audiences of the media so far shows us that their value-forming potentials vary, but it does not necessarily qualify them as value-forming agencies. Rather, at this stage of our inquiry, their participation in the value-forming process seems to be passive. Indeed, the question to ask is: How does a writer come to write what he writes, who decides on the content of a book or a radio or TV program, and who wants it? Who decides that an article or book should be published or a program go on the air? Should we consider mass media as value-forming agencies while they are really just frames to be filled by people whose values have been shaped by other agencies? After all, Kennedy and Nixon were representing the political values of their parties.

The mass media's passivity in forming values may best be illustrated in the totalitarian state, where the media are totally at the service of the political apparatus. Paradoxically, however, this same illustration can help us examine the independent value-forming potentials of the media. For where the fiction of freedom of expression is officially subordinated to a myth or ideology, any discrepancy which may be discerned between the official structural and overall content control of the media, and the actual processing and presentation of the content, will indicate the possibilities for the mass media to play an original role in influencing their audience. In speaking of the mass media as shapers of values, let us then distinguish among structural control, overall content control, and the actual processing and presentation of the content.

Structural control of the media, reflecting the prevailing social, economic and political order, can run from total state control to regulated private enterprise management of the media. Total state control is structurally effective only to the extent that the total control of the social complex as a whole is effective. The Soviet state control of the media during the Stalin era was much more monolithic than after de-Stalinization in the early 1960's when, while the media structures remained under state control, the "liberals" managed to penetrate the cultural apparatus.[41] It is unthinkable that a Yevtushenko could have recited "Babi Yar" in front of Stalin and gotten away with it,[42] or that the outspoken Solzhenitsyn would have been spared from exile for so long under the old dictator, or that the "Samizdat" (personally circulated pamphlets) could proliferate in the Soviet Union as has been the case recently. Certain media, of course, because of their nature and technology, can be controlled more effectively by a faction in power. It is more difficult at present to transmit a clandestine TV program than to circulate an underground pamphlet.

When we look at the structural control of the media in the United States as compared to the totalitarian control in the Soviet Union, we notice that the basic democratic liberties of freedom of expression, of speech and of the press are conditioned by the realities of competitive free enterprise with its tendencies towards conglomerates and monopolies. A newspaper, a radio or TV network under competitive free enterprise abides by the same financial and economic rules that govern business: it needs a market and a profit. Thus, it must have either a sufficiently big organization to gather the information and sell advertisements, or be affiliated with a big outfit. The tendency, then, is towards control of the structure and organization of the mass media by big business.[43] The argument for structural and financial supervision of certain mass media by the state in some European countries has been intended precisely to avoid their falling under the control of one sector, such as big business or a party with totalitarian tendencies. The government-supported national autonomous organisms of radio and television engender, however, the potential of succumbing to the influence of their patron: the state.

Financial and structural control of the media, however, does not necessarily make the media useful for the ends of the controllers. For that, the media need an audience. In the free enterprise context, for example, in order to be profitable, the media should have a large enough audience to attract the advertisements constituting their main source of income. It is between their audience and their advertisers that the mass media should find the criteria for their operation and the control of their programs.

This brings us to a .discussion of overall content control. While in a free enterprise the structure and organization of the media are usually controlled by business, and while the main source of their income is advertising which also, in its quasi-totality, comes from business, there remains the need for an audience--a need which business recognizes and which conditions the content of the media's information and programs. From this point on, the controller of the structures of the media, whether it is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the majority share-holder of RCA or NBC, has to rely on the editors, reporters, commentators and all those who have made it their profession to run the show. The final purpose for printing a daily or a magazine is to have it read; for creating a radio or TV network, to have the set turned on. Thus, those who control the media's structure and organization cannot force their values on the audience (if they are different than those of the audience) without making them palatable. Thus, the audience at least indirectly influences the content. Regular rating will permit the TV networks to adjust their programs to the audience's taste. The adjustment takes into account the social flux and the prevailing values--those of the audience and those of the owners and advertisers of the network.

In principle, the choices given to the audience should not deviate from the values cherished by those who finance the existence of the media. NBC or CBS would not preach communism, nor would Pravda or the Soviet State Television preach capitalism. That fact is, at least in principle, understandable. In practice, however, the content of mass media does not strictly reflect the values of those who control their structure. Beyond the compromise between the values of the controlling business and the tastes and values of the audience, there is the influence of those who provide material for and produce the content of the media. In the heterogeneous complex society, the media professionals who scrutinize the society for the materials they want to use will eventually develop their own angles of vision conditioning the content of their medium. The modern media's claims to impartiality may sometimes blur their value-forming role.

The impact and nature of content-controllers' influence varies from medium to medium. It is probably by looking at the written word, books, that we may more readily define the valuational responsibilities and influences. The publishers control the organizational and distributive business, while the private writer provides the content. Whether that content reflects the values of the structure which makes publishing possible or is geared to the taste of the readers, it is usually associated with the writer. He is the one who takes responsibility for the form and the philosophy presented and in most cases claims to advance unique valuational dimensions which may--and often do--go against the values of business (including those which make publishing possible).[44] Of course, the organizational controllers of publishing will set valuational limits on what will be published. In the Soviet Union, the Ministry of Culture and the Writers Union can decide whether a book is published. We know the fate of the works of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. In the West, the limits are laid by bourgeois values. The book should sell. If it may sell but offends certain social values, it has to wait until those values have evolved. The values often evolve, however, when business compromises its values by publishing what startles its audience, because the startling subject sells well. Thus, by writing the book, the author takes the first step towards transforming the prevailing values. There resides the value-forming role of the medium--the book, in this case. Novels of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller were first banned in the United States, but times changed and they made their way to the public.

Our look at the creative work of an author may enable us to realize the role and influence of those who prepare and produce the contents of other media. The journalist or the radio or TV editor may try to reflect the values of the power structure or of the masses, but he is also more deeply exposed to and involved in the artistic and literary works which supply material for his program, inspire him and may create in him new valuational dimensions. The mass media thus breed a new species of social and professional intelligentsia. The journalist cannot, of course, bluntly use the media as a platform for his own values. He has to compromise between what his financial or political bosses want, what the audience wants, and his own outlook.[45] The stricter the structural control, as in the totalitarian regimes, or the broader the popular rating, as in the bourgeois democracy, the less the possibility for autonomous media artistry.[46] It is interesting to notice, for example, the breath of fresh air that sometimes blows over TV programming in the United States during the "black weeks" (the occasional periods when the rating companies take time off).

The more integrated the society, where the structural and financial controllers of the mass media, the producers of the contents and programs, and the readers and viewers share a general pattern of values, the more the media serve as value-reinforcement agencies, as distinct from value-forming agencies.[47] It is during the periods of social change and dynamism that the mass media may serve as autonomous value-forming agencies, influencing the mainstream of social values. In such situations, the mass media can more easily look beyond the confines of other value-forming agencies. Some ingredients of the media which accelerate social change may be products of cultural interpenetrations. For example, Western movies have had an impact on the bourgeois classes of underdeveloped countries ever since the 1930's and 1940's--an impact which played a role in loosening the traditional values in many underdeveloped countries, making way for acceptance of change.

Indeed, the mass media do more than entertain and inform; and people try to control them not only to sell entertainment and information for a profit but also to exploit their propaganda and agitation potentials.[48] It is not only when a particular medium plays politics that it exerts valuational pressure-because at least then it shows its colors.[49] It is when the media claim to entertain and inform that they overtly agitate or covertly propagandize. In the actual processing and presentation, the content, the sequence, the range and the emphasis of the basic "what, where, when, why, how and who" can be so manipulated as to carry a particular message with a given valuational overtone. The TV camera can emphasize the contents of a speech or rub in the disruptions in the audience. The radio journalist can read the news with a sarcastic or a respectful tone, and the journalist can tell tales between the lines--or, as editor, drown information in an unnoticeable corner or display it on the front page. All this can take place according to conscious planning, all the way from the actual presentation of reports and comments to overall content controls and beyond to structural control. But it also can and does take place subconsciously underneath the ripples of human communication.

The media, whether by their message in particular or their role in general, will, in the last analysis, have a decisive impact (negative or positive, depending on who is evaluating and the outcome) on their total social complex. In State of Florida vs. Ronney Zamora (1977) the defense even tried to put TV on trial for its negative value-forming effects on the defendent, a 15-year-old youth who, allegedly intoxicated by watching too much violence on the tube, had robbed and murdered an 82-year-old neighbor woman. Whether the audience is the individual members of the society or the masses as a whole, what finally counts is what, where, when, why and how gets to whom. An author writes a book and throws her thoughts like seeds into the winds. The author may be Barbara Tuchman, and her book, The Guns of August; it may be read by the President of the United States and influence his course of action.[50] On a more massive scale, we may cite the impact of the radio in Nasserian Egypt. The introduction of the radio into the remote villages and the new world thus opened to the isolated peasants gave them expectations unaccompanied by corresponding achievement incentives or provisions for their fulfillment. The result was frustration. As Lerner stated, Major Salah Salem, the Minister of National Guidance in the early days of the Egyptian revolution, concluded that it was impossible to convert an "inert and isolated peasantry into an informed and participant citizenry by the mass media alone."[51] But the media did do its own uncalled-for value-forming. This is one of the more characteristic dimensions of the mass media compared to other value-forming agencies: Its impact is more open-ended. Family, church, education and parties, as they form our values, keep a tab on us. The mass media leave us more room for criticism, interpretation and imagination.[52]

A factor which we should not leave unnoticed before concluding this section on the media as value-forming agencies is the role played by the peer group in the media context. The peer group influences its members on the choice of media, propagates the media's messages and serves as a supplemental source of information. The individual is likely to read the books and watch the TV programs that his peers read and watch, and he depends, to a large extent, on his peers to learn about the happenings of the world, and their interpretation.[53]

VI. Family, Church, Education, Party, Media and Peers

Our examination of the different value-forming agencies within the social complex has shown how they evolve from within each other and develop, mix, coexist and intertwine to contribute their particular value-forming shares. The political party hardly replaces the family (at least so far) and, as we saw earlier, even if it had totalitarian control, it would have to call on the family to instill its long-lasting influence into the child. The family registers, stores and influences general social patterns in the long run. Because it generally embraces a few generations, it secures the continuity of social norms and values. Of course, generations influence each other both ways. But the older generation is usually the carrier of the more established norms. The older generation, which was once the younger generation, was influenced in its own time by new social approaches (including indoctrination by the power structure and authorities) and, through action and reaction with the old generations of its younger times, assimilated them into the pattern of socialization which it presents to the new generation.[54]

The church creates the binding supernatural dimension which other agencies do not provide. Even in totalitarian states where the church's role is drastically reduced, the need for this binding force and some of its ritualization emerges in other forms. The Soviets had discouraged religious marriages, but when faced with numerous, unabashed divorces disrupting the social order, they not only passed stricter laws but also developed elaborate ceremonies to make marriage a unique life experience and sanctify its moral commitment. For example, Palaces of Marriage in Soviet cities provides a spiritual atmosphere for the unions contracted, and persons marrying for the second or subsequent time may not register there.[55] The educational institutions, as already discussed, provide for the knowledge and skill which in the complex heterogeneous society other agencies cannot easily supply. They also expose the young to additional ethical dimensions beyond the more traditional patterns of family and church before they join the mainstream of social life. Parties, associations, factions and interest groups--in short, associational affiliations -- not only supplement, through their ideologies and myths, those premises of the church which falter in the age of science and technology, but also provide forums and platforms for the diversities inherent in a complex modern society. The mass media provide channels of communication, without which the modern society would be paralyzed. Beyond that, mass media help create the patterns through which social complexities become identifiable and ideas take shape and flow into the social current.

Finally, a place should be reserved for the peer group as a value-forming agency. You may have noticed that in our discussion of every other agency we have pointed out the peer group's role within it. Because of the fluidity of its definition (peers meaning simply equals), the peer group can cut across agency lines, combining and amalgamating the characteristics and identifications of each agency within the individual who is influenced by them. Thus, in the context of any single agency, the individual may be identified as a peer to others on the basis of common characteristics each may have acquired under the influence of other agencies. If, for example, within the family peers are distinguished by age and sex, we may find that within the church, education or political association, the same distinctions serve as bases of peer identification. Similarly, the values inculcated by the church, the level of education, the professional affiliation, the political myth or ideology can each provide for peer identification across the areas of different agencies.[56]

Of course, there is no distinct line between spheres of activities of the different agencies. In the exercise of their functions they overlap. In their interactions and intertwinings they may support, supplement or supplant each other. We mentioned earlier the mutual support between family and church, and the interrelation of the church and the educational establishment. In their admixture, the different value-forming agencies feel each other's pull and push. There is, for example, the "Mendelian law of politics," i.e., the inheritance of party identification, which apparently overlaps familial and associational affiliations.[57] Churches and political associations have had a long history of interaction. In modern times the church has taken sides with different political tendencies and, despite their obvious rivalry with the faith, has promoted certain myths and ideologies against others-choosing the least dangerous of the evil competitors. It was easier for the church to coexist with capitalist free enterprise than with communist totalitarianism which professed atheism. The mass media bring the church and the political associations into contact with their elements. They also provide the continuing education the fast-moving modern world needs beyond the walls of the educational institutions.

While the agencies as a whole promote the amalgam of values prevailing within the society, they do not necessarily support each other harmoniously. Each agency, in passing on the prevailing values to the group members, blends them according to its own point of view. Different agencies may sometimes have conflicting interests or a lack of synchronization because their value-forming processes have different paces and tempos. The family and church, for example, may lag behind the educational system and mass media. If a particular agency or social sector becomes predominant, it may enhance or restrict the value-forming role of the other agencies. The ideologically militant Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917 because the other value-forming agencies lagged behind. Sometimes the enhancement or restriction of the role of certain value-forming agencies by the prevailing order may take drastic proportions. History has witnessed book-burning practices from the legalists of China in the third century B. C. to the Nazis in the twentieth century A. D. Churches, temples and synagogues have been burned in the course of human history. Educational systems have suffered restrictions and regimentations by the church and political powers, and political associations have suffered suppression by dominating powers, whether religious or political. But when the forceful control of the social flux is exaggerated, a backlash or a revival of the suppressed value-forming agencies may occur, as happened with the family institution in the Soviet Union.

The more there is social fluidity, the more the push and pull of the different agencies and their free interplay will determine their value-forming magnitude. For example, if the value-forming roles of family and church diminish within the highly industrialized, mobile and heterogeneous groups in the United States, it is not through overt suppression by any other value-forming agency, but due to the direction of the social flux. Going through the history of the different agencies discussed, we can discern an evolution in their order of magnitude as we move from traditional to more modern societies.

Fig. 7.01

In the primeval context the sphere of family, clan and kinship covered the total value-forming area and the other agencies were not identifiable. If we were to illustrate the magnitude of each agency in comparison with others on a frequency distribution chart giving each agency a volume corresponding to the importance of its value-forming role within a given society at a given time, at the primeval group level, the curve will be totally skewed in favor of family, clan and kinship (Fig. 7.1).

Moving toward more heterogeneous societies, we may find curves emphasizing family and church and later education in a traditional society. Of course, no precise curve for any particular society at any given time can be drawn without detailed data--if such data can be empirically collected. But the chart can indicate an evolution in the value-forming role of different agencies, going from the prominence of the family and church in traditional societies to that of political institutions and mass media in modern societies. In this evolution, educational institutions could probably be represented as standing in the middle, shared by both traditional and modern societies. A curve for the Chinese Sung Dynasty's age of reform in the eleventh century, for example, may emphasize the traditional value-forming agencies, while a curve for the present Chinese regime would emphasize the educational system, party and mass media.

Fig. 7.2

Similar trends are traceable in the West, from the medieval church and family to the age of TV. The question that arises is: How far can this shift in the skew of the curves progress? Will the modern age--as some have suggested, at least in the form of science fiction--end up skewed at the far right, with the electronic media as the sole controlling agency inculcating man's values, beliefs, education and political consciousness? There are arguments for and against, depending on how one views the combination of technology with human nature. Technologically speaking, in some societies we are very fast getting there.

A study of human nature may also seem to lead to a conclusion favoring the possibility of total control through mass media. Exposure to the media in electronic form is a new experience for man. The effects so far registered suggest a high degree of passivity to the electronic inroads on the part of listeners and viewers and their gullibility to sophisticated indoctrination. The new dimension introduced by modern electronic media is revolutionary not only in the technological sense, but also ethologically. Communication is a condition sine qua non for the passage of values. In order to be able to pass on values, the social agencies need to communicate with their members. We noted in the last chapter that, with our present scientific knowledge, we believe that human communication--unlike that of many lower animals, which are equipped with instinctive and innate means of communication--should take place within the social context, and its means should be given to the members of society through learning and socialization. Before the advent of the electronic mass media, the value-forming process needed direct human contact and warmth, for both the inculcation of values by word of mouth and initiation into the written word. The electronic mass media have expanded the human horizon for communication beyond the needs for personal contact and experience. If communication is so essential and if modern electronic media can bring man a total dimension of communication, will the media not become the message? To ask this question is to overlook the fact that while man is their object, the media and the message are man's subjects. It has been a long time since Chapter Two when we discussed man in his own right as a political animal. In the chapters that followed, the social contexts and contents engendering man seem to have absorbed him and claimed his total delineation. Yet discussing symbols in the last chapter we saw, for example, that while the pattern of communication develops through socialization, employing man's imitative qualities and the repetitive process of assimilation and accommodation, it is not a quid pro quo registration of the symbols but their adaptation to the individual organism, which in turn contributes to the symbolic creative process as it transmits the symbols along. Further, the symbolic complex carries variations characteristic of intergroup and interagency cooperations and conflicts. It is hardly plausible that within these dynamics the medium can become the message. And that, of course, as we have seen, also goes for the other agencies. For the message and the agencies which carry it, although influential, themselves grow out of the social flux, which is in turn made of men. To paraphrase a famous saying, you can control all the people some of the time; you can control some of the people all the time; but you cannot control all the people all the time.

These final observations call for a reassessment of man's role within the socio-political complex that has emerged in the last chapters. In the last analysis, it is the nature and intensity of the interactions among members of society with various social agencies and institutions which enhance, solidify, rigidify or attenuate the different social control patterns. Our re-examination and reassessment of man and society will help us understand the patterns of authority and political structures which, within the socio-political complex, are more deeply involved in the elaboration of the legal norms complementing the moral and ethical values, which are more directly promoted by the value-forming agencies we have discussed in this chapter.

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[1] For similar approaches see, for example, V. 0. Key, Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1961), pp. 291 ff. and Richard E. Dawson and Kenneth Prewitt, Political Socialization (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), notably Part III.

[2] The early legal and religious recognition of family as a social institution in different cultures is striking. We saw the case of filial piety in Confucian China (supra, p. 52). In fact, filial piety was a legal obligation in China much earlier than the time of Confucius. In Legge's translation of The Shoo King, (The Shoo King, The Chinese Classics, Vol. III (London, 1865), p. 392.) we read of a Chou ordinance labeling as criminals "the son who does not reverently discharge his duty to his father, but greatly wounds his father's heart; and the father who can no longer love his son." The address to Osiris in the Egyptian Book of the Dead (2500 B. C.) includes the item: "I have not oppressed the members of my family." Article 195 of the Code of Hammurabi (1800 B. C.) reads: "If a son has struck his father, his hand shall be cut off"; and, "Honor thy father and thy mother" is among the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments.

[3] S. N. Eisenstadt, From Generation to Generation (New York: Free Press, 1956), notably pp. 316-321.

[4] In a model constitution for the foundation of youth communes, the Soviet Komsomol, condemning a licentious sex life, said: "The sexual question can be correctly decided in one way only; steadfast and lasting marriage founded on love." Quoted in Klaus Mehnert, Youth in Soviet Russia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1933), p. 215.

[5] A. S. Makarenko, The Collective Family: A Handbook for Russian Parents; published in the Soviet Union as A Book for Soviet Parents (Garden City, N,Y.: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 27-28.

[6] S. Stroumiline, Pensees sur le Communisme (Paris: Agence de Presse Novosti, Supplement a Etudes Sovietiques, 178, 1963).

[7] A. Kharchev, "Once More on the Family," Pravda, 23 November 1966, traps. in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 14 December 1966, p. 23. Kharchev's book Marriage and Family Relations in the U.S.S.R. (Moscow: Novosti, 1965) was one of the substantial and first attempts at a comprehensive study of the Soviet family. It is a good illustration of the Soviet concern to establish the family as a useful value-forming agency. See notably Peter Juviler, "Soviet Families," Survey, No. 60 (July 1966); Kent M. Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968); and Paul Hollander, ed., American and Soviet Society: A Reader in Comparative Sociology and Perception (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969). This last work contains useful excerpts on the subject from Soviet authors.

[8] See, for example, Alex Simirenko, ed., Social Thought in the Soviet Union (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), and Urie Bronfenbrenner, Two Worlds of Childhood (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970).

[9] C. K. Yang, The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press, 1959), pp. 5 ff.

[10] James R. Townsend, Politics in China (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 188-194.

[11] "Resolution on Some Questions Concerning the People's Communes," Communique and Resolution of the Sixth Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (Peking: China Reconstructs, 1959), p. 14.

[12] See Ernest Burgess and Harvey J. Locke, The Family: From Institution to Companionship, 2nd ed. (American Book Co., 1953), notably p. 312.

[13] This pattern can be traced in the traditional stages of different cultures, such as the early Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese and Persian. For the particular case of Europe, see for example P. Boissonnade, Life and Work in Medieval Europe (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927); Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1925); Norman F. Cantor and Michael S. Werthman, eds., The Structure of European History, Vol. 2 (New York: Crowell, 1967). Our terms of reference will include training and apprenticeship arrangements within the framework of the mercenary soldiery and knighthood, chivalrous rules of conduct, and manorial courtly manners. See, for example, William Stearns Davis, Life on a Medieval Barony (New York: Harper, 1923); Sidney Painter, French Chivalry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1940).

[14] Archeological and historical evidence indicates that the general sketch drawn above was the pattern of early educational evolution in the Egyptian, Sumerian, Vedic and Hebrew cultures, where temple schools provided the basic social education, although later in China and Greece there seem to have developed educational systems more autonomous from the system of belief. Nevertheless, we should not forget that even the Pythagoreans, whose supreme Olympian was Apollo, the god of light and reason, had their Orphic doctrine for mystic union with the beyond, with its sacred texts and beliefs. At about the time of Pythagoras (sixth century B.C.) Confucius in China was emphasizing the role of education in social development.

[15] This is indeed the pattern which supplanted the Greek and Roman cultures of the Mediterranean and prevailed over Western Europe from the advent of Christianity to the Renaissance, but more particularly during the dark ages (between the sixth and eleventh centuries, when the church powerfully discouraged secular learning).

[16] The Confucian approach was the first attempt at a well-rounded education of the individual for social purposes, giving him the appropriate training for a job (government service) and initiating him with moral and ethical values: the li and ti. (For different connotations of Z2, see H. G. Creel, Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 29 ff.; and Michael Loewe, Imperial China (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 96.) Yet, while the Confucian doctrine scorned the practice of divination and became the backbone of Chinese laic education and civil service for over 2,000 years, it did not escape the influence of the belief system. By Han times (202 B. C.-220 A. D.) Confucianism was attributed the authorship of the Book of Changes, an ancient diviner's manual, whose original version preceded Confucius by many centuries. See Creel, Chinese Thought, pp. 172; and James Legge's preface and introduction to the second edition of the I Ching: Book of Changes (New York: University Books, 1964; originally published in 1882).

[17] During this period there was a generalized use of the printing press, which made classical texts more accessible to a wider circle of scholars and thus provided more talents on which the civil service could draw for expansion. It also facilitated and went hand-in-hand with the commercial and technological advances of the time. While the techniques of printing were known to the Chinese much earlier, it was during the tenth century that the Sung government started making massive use of it. (Loewe, Imperial China, pp. 111-112.) Printing was used to produce bills of exchange and official banknotes needed for commercial exchange. The growing diversities in trade and manufacture and the complexities of government affairs gave rise to substantial bureaucratic, bourgeois and technological classes which enhanced the further development of educational institutions. In that context, the growing class of scholars was able to present a Confucianism greatly "stripped of its religious character, and left as an ethical system divorced from supernatural sanctions." Fitzgerald, China, p. 410.

[18] For an interesting collection of writings on the Sung period, see James T. C. Liu and Peter J. Golas, eds., Change in Sung China: Innovation or Renovation (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1969).

[19] From the Brahmanic schools of Taxila and Nalanda in the seventh century B. C. India to the later Islamic Madressahs of the Moslem world flourishing from Spain to India, grammar and logic, astrology and astronomy, arithmetic and geometry, medicine and alchemy were studied within the orbit of the prevailing religion. Not that they did not have their unorthodox scholars and philosophers like Avicenna, but they remained within a traditional setting where the social and political structures drew their identity from the religious fiber.

[20] Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma, author's 3rd ed. of 1893 (New York: Dover, 1961).

[21] Mulford Q. Sibley, Political Ideas and ideologies: A History of Political Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 201.

[22] Other universities were founded, although with the patronage of the church and the service of religious scholars, yet distinct from monastical education. The "Guild of Masters," recognized in 1170, provided the germ of the University of Paris, which was chartered in 1200. Cambridge was founded in 1209.

[23] When asked who should interpret the complexities of the scriptures, Marsiglio of Padua replied: "Its meaning is to be authoritatively given by those who have knowledge and wisdom in these things, the men of intelligence. In this respect ,...the University of Paris -- his own alma mater -- may have better insights and scholarship than the Bishop of Rome himself." Ibid., p. 272.

[24] A. P. d'Entreves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy (London: Hutchinson's, 1952), pp. 68-69.

[25] Robert Folz, "Le Monde Germanique," in Rene Grousset and Emile G. Leonard, eds., Histoire Universelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), II, 680.

[26] Asoka, the Indian Emperor of the third century B. C., conquered an empire extending from Bengal to Afghanistan, but after a particularly bloody battle he embraced Buddhism and non-violence. His empire collapsed after his rule, torn into pieces by contending pretenders.

[27] For studies on peer group influence in U. S. schools see, for example, Natalie Rogoff, "Local Social Structure and Educational Selection," in A. H. Halsey et al., eds., Education, Economy and Society (New York: Free Press, 1961), pp. 241-251; Philip E. Jacob, Changing Values in College: An Exploratory Study of the Impact of College Teaching (New York: Harper & Row, 1957) and Paul R. Abramson, Generational Change in American Polities (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975).

[28] Oscar Theodore Barck, Jr. and Nelson Manfred Blake, Since 2900 (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 356.

[29] At first, as either a sincere belief or lip service to the prevailing religious order, the rational thinkers paid tribute to Christian dogma. For example, although Descartes' methodic doubt and logical deduction -- his Cogito, ergo sum -- was a direct challenge to the Augustinian pre-rational belief, a look at the full title of his meditations reveals the care that Descartes took to try to obtain the church's favor for his philosophy. It read: Méditations sur la philosophie première, dans lesquelles sont démontrées l'existence de Dieu et la distinction de l 'âme et du corps. (This was the title of the work as it appeared in Amsterdam in 1642; another edition which had been published in 1641 in Paris had a slightly different title.) A passage in a letter Descartes wrote in April, 1634, from Amsterdam to Father Mersenne -- a literary pole of attraction who served as an intellectual clearing house in Descartes' time -- shows Descartes' concern for the views of the church. It goes: "You know, undoubtedly, that Galileo has been taken in, of late, by the Inquisitors of Faith, and that his opinion concerning the movement of the earth has been condemned as heretic. Now, I must tell you that all the things I was explaining in my treatise, among which was also this opinion on the movement of the earth, depended so much one on another, that is enough to know one of them false, to know that all the reasons I have used have no force; and while I think that they are based on very solid, and very evident demonstrations, nevertheless, for nothing in the world would I defend them against the authority of the church."

[30] Helvétius was only one of the Philosophes (the encyclopedists) who dominated the French intellectual scene of the mid-eighteenth century and greatly influenced the European philosophic world. The reasonable doubts of the encyclopedists about the supernatural were of different degrees. Voltaire (1694-1778), prominent among them, although against the institutionalized church, believed that if there were no god, man would have had to invent one. But the product of these great men, the Encyclopedie, which was completed in 28 volumes in 1772, was markedly anti-religious.

[31] See notably his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1799).

[32] An early exponent of modern materialism was La Mettrie, who in his L'Homme Machine (1748) rejected the Cartesian duality of body and soul and developed the concept of one substance, namely matter -- matter possessing the attributes of motion.

[33] In many ways the Leibnitzian "Monads," the Kantian "Ideal of rational completeness" and "Noumena," and the Hegelian "Idea" were attempts at filling the vacuum left by the absence of the Christian god. Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out this fact, as far as the Hegelian "Idea" was concerned, as early as 1843.

[34] David Hume, "Of Parties in General," Essays, Part I, viii, and "Of the Coalition of Parties," ibid., Part II, xiv. See also his "That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science," ibid., Part I, iii (1741-1742).

[35] At one end of the scale group association may exist for a specific functional goal. But it may envelop its interests in valuational premises. For example, the American Rifle Association's lobby in Washington, which safeguards the interests of the industry, claims inspiration from Article II of the Bill of Rights. At the other end of the scale a group with few outwardly functional and material interests may declare the goal of promoting a given value but actually be defending certain underlying interests. The Daughters of the American Revolution is a case in point.

[36] Maurice Duverger, Party Politics and Pressure Groups: A Comparative Introduction (New York: Crowell, 1972); Kay Lawson, The Comparative Study of Political Parties (New York: St. Martin's, 1976); and Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).

[37] See McLuhan, Understanding Media. For his critics, see Sidney Walter Finkelstein, Sense and Nonsense of McLuhan (New York: International Publishers, 1968); and Raymond B. Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan, Pro and Can (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968).

[38] For an account of the Kennedy-Nixon debates and other instances, see notably Bernard Rubin, Political Television (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1967).

[39] Reported by Ota Thomas Reynolds, "American Public Address and the Mass Media," in J. Jeffery Auer, ed., The Rhetoric of Our Times (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), p. 173.

[40] For some data on this phenomenon and other points discussed here, see Key, Public Opinion, pp. 346 ff.

[41] Patricia Blake, "Freedom and Control in Literature, 1962-63," in Alexander Dallin and Alan F. Westin, eds., Politics in the Soviet Union (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966), p. 167. See also Peter Viereck, "The Mob Within the Heart," Tri-Quarterly, Spring 1965, pp. 7-43.

[42] Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet poet, read his poem "Babi Yar" attacking anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union at a meeting with Khrushchev in 1963 in the Kremlin.

[43] Robert Horton, "The Economic Squeeze on Mass TV" The Reporter, 28 April 1960, pp. 14-20. See Key, Public Opinion, pp. 370-405, for data and insight on the financing and control of the mass media; and Frank Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow, Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life (New York: Times Books, 1978).

[44] Bertrand de Jouvenel shows that the values of big business, interested in material profit, are in contradiction to the aesthetic and literary values of creative artists. Bertrand de Jouvenel, "The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Historians," in F. A. Hayek, ed., Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 93-i23.

[45] See notably Theodore E. Kruglak, The Foreign Correspondents: A Study of the Men and Women Reporting for the American Information Media in Western Europe (Geneva: E. Droz, 1955), pp. 100-102.

[46] On mediocrity of taste of the mass audience see Bernard C. Hennessy, Public Opinion, 2nd ed. (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1970), pp. 319 ff.

[47] Key, Public Opinion, pp. 396 ff.

[48] Nicholas Johnson, "The Media Barons and the Public Interest--An FCC Commissioner's Warning," The Atlantic, June 1968, pp. 43-51.

[49] As did, for example, WMCA radio station in New York by being the first to endorse a presidential candidate (John F. Kennedy in 1960). See Calvin B. T. Lee, One Man, One Vote (New York: Scribner's, 1967), for a discussion of WMCA's involvement in the reapportionment case WMCA v. Lomenzo.

[50] Robert F. Kennedy in his Thirteen Days wrote of the "great impression" Tuchman's novel made on President John F. Kennedy and how it influenced his decision during the Cuban missile crisis. Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 62 and 127.

[51] Daniel Lerner, "Toward a Communication Theory of Modernization: A Set of Considerations," in Lucian W. Pye, ed., Communications and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), p. 345.

[52] Steven R. Brown, "Political Literature and Response of the Reader: Experimental Studies of Interpretation, Imagery, and Criticism," APSR, 71: 567-584 (1977).

[53] See Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1944), notably Ch. 16, cited in Key, Public Opinion, p. 359.

[54] See, for example, Robert E. Lane, "Fathers and Sons: Foundations of Political Belief," American Sociological Review, 24:502-511 (1959); Robert F. Winch, Identification and Its Familial Determinants (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1962); James C. Davies, "The Family's Role in Political Socialization," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 161: 11-19 (1965).

[55] A, G. Kharchev, "On Some Results of a Study of Motives for Marriage," Soviet Review, Summer 1964, pp. 3-13.

[56] Peer identification includes other variables than those based on the value-forming agencies. See our later discussion of reference groups in Chapter Nine. On the use of the peer group as a value-forming agency, see Bronfenbrenner's observation of the efforts in the Soviet Union to utilize the peer group for socializing the child. Urie Bronfenbrenner, "Response to Pressure from Peers Versus Adults Among Soviet and American School Children," International Journal of Psychology, 2:199-207 (1967).

[57] See Campbell, Gurin and Miller, The Voter Decides, p. 99.