Part 36 (2/2)
The adjustment of these problems is at once complicated and facilitated by the fact that one of man's most powerful native desires is, as we have already seen, his desire to please other men. This extreme sensitivity to the praise and blame of his fellows operates powerfully to qualify men's other instincts. The ruthlessness with which men might otherwise fulfill their desires is checked by the fact that within themselves there is a conflict between the desire to win other sorts of gratification, and the desire to win the praise of others and to avoid their blame. This is simply one instance of what we shall have occasion presently to note, that not only is there a conflict between men in the fulfillment of their native instincts, but within individuals an adjustment must be made between competing impulses themselves.
The kinds of conflict that occur between men in the fulfillment of their original native tendencies, are as various as those tendencies and their combinations. It may be a conflict, as in primitive life, between individuals seeking food from the same source. It may be a clash in the pursuit of one form or another of self-enhancement, enhancement which can come to only some individual out of a group. The s.e.x instinct has afforded, in the case of the ”eternal triangle,”
an example of the sharing by two people of an imperious desire for precisely the same object of satisfaction. These conflicts of interest are an inevitable result of the const.i.tution of human nature. It is perfectly natural that human beings const.i.tuted with largely identical impulses should not infrequently seek identical satisfactions. Groups as well as individuals may come into collision, and for a.n.a.logous reasons.
Cla.s.s divisions over the distribution of wealth, international wars over the distribution of territory, are sufficiently familiar examples.
THE LEVELS OF MORAL ACTION--CUSTOM--THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ”FOLKWAYS.” No anthropologist seems to have discovered anywhere individuals living totally alone or in total oblivion to the needs or interests of others. The human necessity for cooperation and the human desire for companions.h.i.+p bring individuals together. And individuals, once living together, find some _modus vivendi_. Adjustments are, in general, effected through established and authoritative ”folkways.”[1]
That is, certain acts come to be recognized as sanctioned or as disapproved by the group. And these sanctions or disapprovals are powerful in the control of human action.
The fact that individuals live and must live together is thus the surest guarantee that they will not, once they have grown old enough to communicate with other people, altogether follow their immediate capricious desires.
[Footnote 1: Professor Sumner's convenient term.]
The reason for the power of social approvals and disapprovals over individuals lies partly in the fact, already noted, of the human being's extremely high sensitivity to the praise and blame of others. But part of the explanation is social rather than psychological. Even primitive tribes take special pains to make public and pervasive the commands and prohibitions which have become affixed to given acts. The mere fact that an act _is_ customary is itself a sufficiently strong guarantee that it will be practiced, since the human being tends to perform, as he likes to perform, the habitual. But in primitive life, the enforcement of custom is not left to the influence of habit. The prohibitions and sanctions, both in savage and in civilized society, are made into law. In the former instance, there are most elaborate devices and inst.i.tutions for enforcing the traditional approvals and disapprovals.
Tabus are one important instrument of the enforcement of social checks upon individual action; ”tabus are perhaps not so much a means for enforcing custom as they are themselves customs invested with peculiar and awful sanction. They prohibit or ban any contact with certain persons or objects under penalty of danger from unseen beings.”
Through ritual certain acts come to be performed with great regularity, thoroughness, detail, and solemnity. ”In primitive life it [ritual] is widely and effectively used to insure for educational, political, and domestic customs obedience to the group standards.” In contemporary life, certain social forms and observances, as well as certain religious ceremonies, are examples of the enforcement of given acts, by ritual.
Praise and blame are equally effective enforcements of certain types of action and of the avoidance of others. In primitive life, praise is as likely as not to take the form of art--decorations, costumes, songs, and tattoos. In modern life, as we have seen, praise and blame take the form of public opinion, as expressed by friends, acquaintances, newspapers, and the like.[1] Praise and blame are not so fixed and rigid in civilized communities; individuals move freely among diverse groups whose standards differ. But group approval is none the less effective.
[Footnote 1: See page 106.]
In primitive life and, though less patently, in contemporary society, physical force is the ultimate power for enforcing custom. Primitive chiefs are usually the strong men of the tribes; and behind law in modern social organization is the physical power of the State to enforce it.
MORALITY AS CONFORMITY TO THE ESTABLISHED. The beginning of morals is thus to be found in conformity to the established or customary. The criterion of morality is compliance--compliance with the regular, the socially approved, the common (that is, the communal) ways of action. Apart from the consequences of violation, violation _per se_ is impure, unholy, immoral. The terms are, in some cases, interchangeable.
In primitive life, violations are regarded with particular horror, because they are frequently held to be not only infringements of established ways of the tribe, but as offenses against the G.o.ds, offenses which involve the whole tribe in the retributive punishments of the G.o.ds. Violation of the customary may, indeed, apart from arousing intellectual disapproval, provoke a genuine revulsion of feeling on the part of a group which has acquired certain fixed habits. We still feel emotionally shocked by the infringement of a custom that we do not intellectually value highly. If we examine our moral furniture we find it made up of an immense number of early acquired inhibitions or ”checks.” These not only prevent us from violating, at least without qualms, standards to which we have early been trained; they make deviations or irregularities on the part of others appear as ”immoral,” even before or without our intellectually cla.s.sifying them as such.
There are adults, for example, who cannot outgrow the feeling to which they have early been habituated, that card-playing at any time, or baseball-playing on Sunday, is ”evil,” even though they are no longer intellectually affected by scruples in those respects. There is significance in the fact that by speaking of ”irregularities” in a man's conduct, we signify.
or imply moral disapproval.
The group, in any stage of civilization, rewards in some form conformity to group standards, and punishes infringements of them. Punishment may be nothing more tangible than disrepute or ostracism; it may be as serious as execution.
Reward may range from a decoration or a chorus of praise to all forms of compensation in the way of wealth, rank, and power.
We have noted how sanctions and prohibitions are made public and effective among the members of a group. But it is further regarded as important by the group that these customs, positive and negative, should be handed down from the current to succeeding generations. In primitive life transmission of the traditional practices is made a very special occasion in the form of initiation ceremonies.
[Initiation ceremonies] are held with the purpose of inducting boys into the privileges of manhood and into the full life of the group.
They are calculated at every step to impress upon the initiate his own ignorance and helplessness in contrast with the wisdom and power of the group; and as the mystery with which they are conducted imposes reverence for the elders and the authorities of the group, so the recital of the traditions and performances of the tribe, the long series of ritual acts, common partic.i.p.ation in the mystic dance and song and decorations, serve to reinforce the ties that bind the tribe.[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey and Tufts: _Ethics_, pp. 57-58.]
In civilized life, the whole inst.i.tution of education, as has been repeatedly emphasized in these pages, is designed to transmit to the young those habits of thought, feeling, and action which their influential elders wish to perpetuate.
As was noted in connection with man's gregariousness, the normal becomes the ”respectable,” the regular becomes the ”proper.” We still speak of things that it is not ”nice” to do. This tendency to identify the moral with the customary is brought about through early habituating the members of the group to the group standards and securing for them thereby the emotional support that goes with all habitual action.
Morality at this stage is clearly social in its origins and its operations. The standards are group standards, and the individual's single duty is obedience and conformity to the established social sanctions.
THE VALUES OF CUSTOMARY MORALITY. The problem of morals begins, as we have seen, in the collision of interests of similarly const.i.tuted individuals living together. Adjustments of conflicting interests are effected by group standards more or less consciously transmitted and enforced by education, public opinion, and law. We shall note presently that reflection operates to modify and criticize these customary approvals and disapprovals and to subst.i.tute more effective standards. But whether on the level of custom or reflection, the moral problem is essentially a _social_ problem, the problem of the adjustment of the desires of individuals living together.
For an individual living altogether alone in the world there could hardly be a moral problem, a question of ”ought.”
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