the scale in favor of unity and coherence. Hence group loyalty and adherence were traits which favored the survival of those tribes which possessed them. The efforts of these peoples were therefore bent to the attainment of qualities upon which group safety and solidarity seemed most obviously to depend. As customs and usages were often associated with past security and success it became the function of the group to restrain its younger members from any act of innovation. It is probable that as primitive man began to observe that the blows of nature fell without discrimination upon all, he began to associate accidental change in the way of performing a customary act, with disaster to the group. He assumed that repetition of the innovation would be followed by like disaster. Similarly, it may have happened, quite by chance, that the transgression of a rule of conduct was followed by calamity to the group. Thereafter any transgression would be safely guarded against, in the belief that a like calamity would be the inevitable consequence.22 There was no "limited liability" in their conception of human relations; the life of individuals in society was regarded as a partnership on which a rash member by a sudden impiety might bring utter ruin. They were possessed with the notion that ill-luck does not attach itself simply to the doer, but may fall upon any member of the group.23 In Molembo a pestilence broke out soon after a Portuguese had died there. After that the natives took all possible measures not to allow any white man to die in their country.24 On 22 Chapin, F. S.-Education and the Mores, Columbia Univ. Series in Hist., Eco. and Pub. Law, vol. xlii, no. 2, pp. 27-28. 23 Bagehot, op. cit., p. 102. 24 Bastian, A.-Die Deutsche Expedition an der Loango-Küste, p. 104. the Nicobar Islands some natives who had just begun to make pottery died. The art was given up and never again attempted.25 A Yakut woman contracted an endogamous marriage. She soon afterwards became blind. This was thought to be on account of the violation of ancient customs.20 From the illustrations we have just cited it is clear that as association increases the social experience of the primitive group and complex relations develop, a social pressure begins to operate and exercises restraint over the actions of its members. The human consciousness. of kind including sympathies, antipathies, prejudices, and cordialities, develops the notion of type and makes the group sensitive to any lack of conformity to that type. Members who do not follow the established usages of the group come to be regarded as disloyal to its traditions. They are restrained, persecuted, or outlawed. And so it happens that while the first essential to the development of that group solidarity which spells vietory and survival, is a bond of custom or usage, this very unity may be preserved at the expense of exterminating useful and helpful variation. The group pressure upon its members becomes unreasonable and oppressive. "What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion I phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better." 27 25 Ratzel, F.-Anthropogeographie, vol. ii, p. 699. 26 Sieroshevski, V. L.-Twelve Years in the Country of the Yakuts, p. 558. 27 Begehot, op. cit., p. 53. Usages give solidarity and coherence to the group. The unity secured by loyalty to its traditions makes survival assured. But if there is to be further progress and continuing success in the struggle, the restraint of disloyal members must not be carried over into a habit of persecution which fails to discriminate between helpfu! innovators and dangerous egoism. Nature allows variations from type. When these variations give advantage, natural selection secures the preservation of those individuals which possess them. Yet among men there is often a tendency to preserve the old usage at a sacrifice of new and useful activities-to persecute for the sake of persecution. This habit has led one sociologist to say that men try to preserve what nature has ordained to decay.28 The result is a retarded state of culture. "In certain respects each born generation is not like the last born; and in certain other respects it is like the last. But the peculiarity of arrested civilization is to kill out varieties at birth almost; that is, in early childhood, and before they can develop. The fixed custom which public opinion alone tolerates is imposed on all minds, whether it suits them or not." 29 Those primitive groups that clung blindly to their superstitions and imposed their customary discipline upon their innovating members by terrible sanctions, killed out of the whole society the propensity to variation which was the principle of progress. If association is responsible for the intellectual faculties of man, it is doubly responsible for his moral nature. Morals are socially determined. They are the result of social growth and experience. They are the rules of life found to work in the evolution of any particular group. Morals are nothing but the conviction 28 Gumplowicz. 29 Bagehot, op. cit., p. 54. implanted by the social group in the minds of its members of the propriety of the manner of life imposed by it upon them.30 When two or more simple groups unite and sovereignty has been organized, the different moral FIGURE 48. Silver Amulet against the Evil Eye. views begin to contend in the larger social circle. The primitive moral codes are useless and a new one must be formed if the union is to continue. The members of the new union become habituated to the new institutions which become necessary to sustain sovereignty and new conceptions of what is right, proper, allowable and good, grow up. Thus, while morals are the product of the relation of the simple social group to its individual members, rights are the product of the union of different social elements. 30 Gumplowicz, L.-The Outlines of Sociology, translated by F. W. Moore, p. 168. |