Chapter XI
, published in his _Folkways_ a minute and extended account of the nature of primitive institutions.
In the development of his theories, Sumner began with the needs of primitive peoples and with the attempts to meet these needs. Repetition of these acts leads to established ways of doing, that is, to folkways. Folkways are “the widest, most fundamental, and most important operation by which the interests of men in groups are served.”[XVIII-2] Societal life consists chiefly in making folkways and applying them. Even the science of society might be defined as the study of folkways. Folkways are the product of the trial and failure method of meeting needs. They tend to become firmly established and to be passed on from generation to generation. They become traditional. They acquire all the authority which is attached to the memory of respected ancestors. Even the ghosts of ancestors stalk the earth keeping guard over the folkways. The folkways carry with them the conviction that they are essential to human welfare. It is this conviction which gives them the force of _mores_. Thus the folkways are not purposeful methods of securing progress but unconscious ways of meeting current exigencies; they are blindly and rigorously forced upon successive generations.
8. Races are guilty of ethnocentrism.[XVIII-3] Each race considers itself the center of mankind. It judges all other races by its own standards, and not by a higher standard that is determined by data that are representative of the best interests of all races. Ethocentrism compels each race to exaggerate the importance of its own folkways and to depreciate the folkways of other races. For example, the Romans and Greeks called all outsiders “barbarians.” The Jews considered themselves “the chosen people,” and the Romans and Greeks as “pagans.”
9. Sumner divided the chief motives of human action into four classes: Hunger, sex passion, vanity, and fear (of ghosts and spirits). Behind each of these motives there is a set of interests. (1) Hunger led primitive man to invent simple weapons and tools, such as arrows and hoes, and then to produce and hoard more complex forms of wealth. A strange peculiarity of wealth is its effect on its creator; it seems to be stronger than its creator. It often bears him down to a slavish, materialistic, and even selfish existence. Labor in the struggle for existence is irksome and painful. Wealth and labor, however, are both commendatory when they are used to increase human welfare. In this statement Sumner overlooked the fact that wealth in order to be commendable must also be produced under constructively social conditions, and that labor in order to be praiseworthy must in its exercise be individually helpful. In other words, Sumner’s test of the use to which wealth and labor are put is incomplete.
Sumner gave a new meaning to the term, slavery. He held that “men of talent are constantly forced to serve the rest. They make the discoveries and inventions, order the battles, write the books, and produce the art.”[XVIII-4] Sumner deplored the tendency to call whatever one does not like by the name of slavery. He felt that marriage slavery, rent slavery, sin slavery are terms which are coined by a too easily disgruntled people.
(2) The sex passion leads to sex _mores_ which cover the relations of men and women to each other before marriage and in marriage, and the obligations of married persons to society. The sex _mores_ determine the nature of marriage and of divorce. Sumner derided sex equality. Man has a more stable nervous system than woman, is more self-absorbed, more egoistic, less tactful. Since man has greater physical strength than woman, woman was educated by circumstances in primitive days to adapt herself to the stronger sex, and to win by developing charms where her lack of comparative strength rendered her helpless. Resignation and endurance thus became acquired traits of women.
Neither renunciation nor license is the proper method of control of the sex passions. Both produce unnecessary agony. License, for example, “stimulates desire without limit, and ends in impotent agony.” Sumner advocated temperance and regulation--a regulation which comes from knowledge and judgment.
Women by necessity must bear an unequal share in the responsibilities of sex and reproduction. Likewise, men must bear an unequal share of the responsibilities of property, war, and politics. For the latter types of duties women are hampered by a delicately adjusted and cumbersome generative system which men do not possess.[XVIII-5]
Formerly women yielded to the will of men. Today, the marital state is one of endless discussion, a defeat for one party or the other, with unpleasant effects upon life and character. In ancient times women took pride in the supervision which their husbands exercised over them and valued themselves as hidden treasures.[XVIII-6] This protected position was considered aristocratic. Under polygamy, women looked with pity and disgust upon the man who cannot, or is unwilling to, support more than one wife.
At this point it is interesting to note that W. I. Thomas has distinguished between the sexes on the basis of differences in metabolism--men being katabolic and women anabolic. Man consumes more energy than woman.[XVIII-7] He is better fitted for bursts of energy, while woman possesses more endurance. Man’s structural variability is toward motion; woman’s, toward reproduction. Hence man seems to have been assigned in primitive society to tasks requiring violence and exertion, whereas to women fell the work requiring constant attention.
Civilization thus far has largely profited by the intelligence of man. If to this situation it will develop and add the intelligence of women, it will be supplanted by a higher type of civilization. Under these conditions a large percentage of marriages will represent “the true comradeship of like minds,” instead of being frequently, as now, an arrangement in which woman is treated as a pet.
(3) The motive of vanity is all-powerful. “One likes to be separated from the crowd by what is admired, and dislikes to be distinguished for what is not admired.”[XVIII-8] To satisfy vanity, barbarian mothers “deform their babies toward an adopted type of bodily perfection.” Aristocracies grow up out of appeals to vanity. An aristocracy is a group of persons closely united who define the possession of things for which they are admired and which the masses do not possess. Vanity leads to all types of absurdities and indecencies in dress. Teeth are knocked out for the sake of appeasing vanity. An Indian woman puts a board on the forehead of her baby to make the forehead recede.
(4) Fear as a motive rules the lives of primitives. Fear of ghosts and spirits is peculiarly enslaving. Pestilence, defeat in war, bodily pain were all considered the result of the wrath of the gods.
The mass phenomena of fear are especially pitiful. Manias of various types rule whole masses. Witchcraft thrived for centuries on the strength of fear. Pilgrimages and crusades were partly due to fear; demonism was a product of fear. When fear became firmly established in the folkways, it acted as an ever-ruling tyrant. In the _mores_ it became firmly entrenched and was a leading factor in moulding character. Through religious practices and dogmas it defined a “hell” and ruled with a fearful hand.
10. Upon simplest analyses, according to Sumner, four societal values stand out with clearness: intellectual, moral, economic, and physical.[XVIII-9] Each of these, however, is composite. The highest societal value seems to result from a harmonious combination of the four values enumerated. The best member of society is he in whom the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical values are more or less equally and harmoniously represented.
11. Sumner divided society into five main classes.[XVIII-10] (1) The masses represent social mediocrity. They are of average social usefulness. (2) Then there are the dependent and defective classes--a drag upon society but not harmful or vicious. (3) The delinquent classes are grossly harmful. They are anti-social and a grievous burden. (4) Above the masses there are the people of talent, and (5) above the talented are the geniuses. “A man of talent, practical sense, industry, perseverance, and moral principle is worth more to society than a genius who is not morally responsible, or not industrious.”[XVIII-11]
It is a mistake to think of the masses as being at the base of society; they are located at the core. They are traditional, conservative, and the bearers of the _mores_. The lowest sections of the masses are a dead weight of ignorance, disease, and crime.
12. A social institution is composed of an idea, notion, or interest, and a resultant structure. The primary institutions are property, marriage, and religion.[XVIII-12] These began as folkways; they became customs. Social institutions can be modified only when the _mores_ are changed; they develop rituals, which are ceremonious, solemn, and strongest when perfunctory and when exciting no thought.[XVIII-13]
Sumner boldly asserted that nothing but might has ever made right, and that nothing but might makes right now.[XVIII-14] The fact that property began in force is not proof that property is an unjust institution. Marriage and religion also began in force, but the element of justice in the existence of these institutions is not seriously questioned today. Sumner, however, did not discriminate between force as an agent or a tool, and force as a primary cause. He did not distinguish clearly between hate and love as the dynamic factors behind
## action that is decisive. He did not set forth the distinction between
harsh, material, immutable force and a kindly, spiritual, attracting love.
13. The persistency of folkways and _mores_ is illustrated in a thousand ways by Sumner. He described (1) their slow variability under changed life conditions, (2) their sudden variability under revolutionary conditions, (3) the possibility of changing them by intelligent action, (4) the problems involved in adjusting one’s self to the _mores_ of another group, (5) the conflicts between the _mores_ of different groups.[XVIII-15]
The _mores_ are powerful engines of societal selection. The most important fact about the _mores_ is the power which they exert over the individual. He does not know their source. He is born into them. He accepts them in his early years uncritically. His habits and character are moulded by them. If in adult life he challenges them, he is ostracized by his group, labeled unpatriotic, and even trodden under foot.[XVIII-16] The _mores_ develop powerful watch-words, slogans, and even epithets of contempt and disapproval which only the most independent and courageous individuals dare to face.
14. Ideals are entirely unscientific, declared Sumner.[XVIII-17] They are phantasies little connected with fact. They are often formed to pacify the restless, or to escape settling a question justly in the present. The “poor” are told to look to the next life for their rewards. The radicals are urged to accept the Christian virtues of meekness and lowliness. Ideals are useful, chiefly, in homiletics, in self-education _via_ auto-suggestion, in satisfying vanity, in marriage. In these observations, Sumner undoubtedly pointed out genuine weaknesses in ideals. He underestimated the psychological fact that they spring from the very real affective phases of consciousness, and that they can be projected rationally. He was right, however, in deploring the chasm which exists between ideals and practices, and in showing how ideals may become encysted in literature although not in the _mores_. “The Greeks proved that people could sink very low while talking very nobly.”
Immorality is conduct contrary to the _mores_ of the time and place.[XVIII-18] Chastity is conformity to the current taboo on the sex relation. “Modesty is reserve of behavior and sentiment.” Even “nakedness is never shameful when it is unconscious,” that is, when there is no consciousness of a difference between fact and the rule set by the _mores_.
Sumner deduced an important principle when he asserted that the “_mores_ can make anything right.” The _mores_ give usages a certain order and form, and cover them with a protecting mantle of propriety. The sanction of the _mores_ is utilized by the class in power in order to maintain the established régime, even though it be one of injustice.
Sumner decried the importance which is ordinarily attached to book learning,[XVIII-19] because it is addressed to the intellect rather than to the feelings which are the springs of action. The real education is that which comes through personal influence and example. It is derived from “the habits and atmosphere of a school, not from the school textbooks.”
15. Despite Sumner’s failure to appreciate the significance of a thoroughgoing psychological approach to an analysis of folkways, his description of these societal phenomena constitutes a unique and valuable contribution to social thought. Sumner’s rigorous attitude toward social life did not permit him to enter into an extensive interpretation of the folkways in the light of folk ideals. He dealt with what _is_ to the exclusion of what _ought to be_. He saw the past so clearly, and the present so much as a reflection of the past, that no enheartening forward look was possible. He rested his theories on the inexorable work of the laws of biological evolution, modified chiefly by his belief in a strong individualism.
Sumner’s fundamental theses have been developed and modified by A. G. Kellor. Professor Kellor has projected the Darwinian principles of variation, selection, transmission, and adaptation into societal concepts. In fact, he has done this so well that he has given the Darwinian principles full sway, not allowing sufficiently for the rise and operation of complex psychic principles. He has made the folkways the connecting link between organic and societal evolution, but has not noted fully the new, countless, and often intangible but powerful factors by which societal evolution is characterized.
16. The rôle that concepts of conduct have played in the evolution of society, has been analyzed by E. A. Westermarck and L. T. Hobhouse. The former is usually known as an anthropologist, and the latter as a sociologist. Professor Westermarck has shown that, strictly speaking, a custom is not merely the habit of a certain group of people; it also involves a rule of conduct.[XVIII-21] It possesses two characteristics--habitualness and obligatoriness.
Not every public habit, however, is a custom, involving an obligation.[XVIII-22] There may be certain practices which are more or less common in society, but which at the same time are generally condemned. The disapproval of these is as a rule not very deep or genuine.
Dr. Westermarck has indicated that there is a close similarity between the conscience of a community and of an individual.[XVIII-23] If a group commits a sin twice, it is likely to be considered allowable. In order to get at the real nature of societal life, the “bad habits” as well as the professed opinions of groups must be examined.
“Society” says Dr. Westermarck, “is the birthplace of the moral consciousness.”[XVIII-24] Emotions which are felt by the community at large tend to take the form of conduct standards. The moral emotions lead to a variety of moral concepts. These fall into two main classes: concepts of disapproval, such as the concepts, bad, vice, wrong; and concepts of approval, such as good, virtue, and merit.
Professor Westermarck is convinced of the tremendous influence that religious beliefs have exerted upon the moral ideas of mankind.[XVIII-25] This influence has been exceedingly varied. Religion has taught the principles of love and yet has indulged in cruel persecutions. It has condemned murder and yet been a party to child sacrifice. “It has emphasized the duty of truth-speaking, and has itself been a cause of pious fraud.” Professor Westermarck has contributed to social thought not only in his valuable descriptions of the rise and evolution of moral ideas, but also in his _History of Human Marriage_, to which reference will be made in