Ethics · John Dewey
EARLY GROUP LIFE
To understand the origin and growth of moral life, it is essential to understand primitive society. And while there is much that is uncertain, there is one fact of capital importance which stands out clearly. This is _the dominant influence of group life_. It is not asserted that all peoples have had precisely the same type of groups, or the same degree of group solidarity. It is beyond question that the ancestors of modern civilized races lived under the general types of group life which will be outlined, and that these types or their survivals are found among the great mass of peoples to-day. Sec. 1. TYPICAL FACTS OF GROUP LIFE Consider the following incident as related by Dr. Gray: "A Chinese aided by his wife flogged his mother. The imperial order not only commanded that the criminals should be put to death; it further directed that the head of the clan should be put to death; that the immediate neighbors each receive eighty blows and be sent into exile; that the head or representatives of the graduates of the first degree (or B.A.) among whom the male offender ranked should be flogged and exiled; that the granduncle, the uncle, and two elder brothers should be put to death; that the prefect and the rulers should for a time be deprived of their rank; that on the face of the mother of the female offender four Chinese characters expressive of neglect of duty towards her daughter should be tattooed, and that she be exiled to a distant province; that the father of the female offender, a bachelor of arts, should not be allowed to take any higher literary degrees, and that he be flogged and exiled; that the son of the offenders should receive another name, and that the lands of the offender for a time remain fallow." (J. H. GRAY, _China_, Vol. I., pp. 237 f.)
Put beside this the story of Achan: Achan had taken for his own possession certain articles from the spoil of Jericho which had been set apart or "devoted" to Jehovah. Israel then suffered a defeat in battle. When Achan's act became known, "Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan, the son of Zerah, and the mantle, and the wedge of gold, and his sons and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had.... And all Israel stoned him with stones; and they burned them with fire and stoned them with stones." (JOSHUA vii: 24, 25.) The converse of these situations is brought out in the regulations of the Kumi, a Japanese local institution comprising five or more households: "As members of a Kumi we will cultivate friendly feelings even more than with our relatives, and will promote each other's happiness as well as share each other's grief. If there is an unprincipled or lawless person in a Kumi, we shall all share the responsibility for him." (SIMMONS and WIGMORE, _Transactions, Asiatic Society of Japan_, xix., 177 f.) For another aspect of the group take Caesar's description of landholding among the Germans: "No one possesses privately a definite extent of land; no one has limited fields of his own; but every year the magistrates and chiefs distribute the land to the clans and the kindred groups (_gentibus cognationibusque hominum_) and to those (_other_ groups) who live together." (_De Bell. Gall._, VI., 22.)
Of the Greeks, our intellectual ancestors, as well as fellow Aryans, it is stated that in Attica, even to a late period, the land remained to a large degree in possession of ideal persons, gods, phylae (tribes) or phratries, kinships, political communities. Even when the superficies of the land might be regarded as private, mines were reserved as public.[3] The basis on which these kinship groups rested is thus stated by Grote:[4] "All these phratric and gentile associations, the larger as well as the smaller, were founded upon the same principles and tendencies of the Grecian mind--a coalescence of the idea of worship with that of ancestry, or of communion in certain special religious rites with communion of blood, real or supposed." "The god or hero, to whom the assembled members offered their sacrifices, was conceived as the primitive ancestor to whom they owed their origin." Coulanges gives a similar statement as to the ancient family group:[5] "The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire, and of dead ancestors. This caused the family to form a single body both in this life and in the next." Finally, the following passage on clanship among the Kafirs brings out two points: (1) That such a group life implies feelings and ideas of a distinctive sort; and (2) that it has a strength rooted in the very necessities of life.
"A Kafir feels that the 'frame that binds him in' extends to the clan. The sense of solidarity of the family in Europe is thin and feeble compared to the full-blooded sense of corporate union of the Kafir clan. The claims of the clan entirely swamp the rights of the individual. The system of tribal solidarity, which has worked so well in its smoothness that it might satisfy the utmost dreams of the socialist, is a standing proof of the sense of corporate union of the clan. In olden days a man did not have any feeling of personal injury when a chief made him work for white men and then told him to give all, or nearly all of his wages to his chief; the money was kept within the clan, and what was the good of the clan was the good of the individual and _vice versa_. The striking thing about this unity of the clan is that it was not a thought-out plan imposed from without by legislation upon an unwilling people, but it was a _felt-out_ plan which arose spontaneously along the line of least resistance. If one member of the clan suffered, all the members suffered, not in sentimental phraseology, but in real fact." (DUDLEY KIDD, _Savage Childhood_, pp. 74 f.)
The above passages refer to Aryan, Semitic, Mongolian, and Kafir peoples. They could be matched by similar statements concerning nearly every people. They suggest a way of living, and a view of life very different from that of the American or of most Europeans.[6] The American or European belongs to groups of various kinds, but he "joins" most of them. He of course is born into a family, but he does not stay in it all his life unless he pleases. And he may choose his own occupation, residence, wife, political party, religion, social club, or even national allegiance. He may own or sell his own house, give or bequeath his property, and is responsible generally speaking for no one's acts but his own. This makes him an "individual" in a much fuller sense than he would be if all these relations were settled for him. On the other hand, the member of such groups as are referred to in our examples above, has all, or nearly all, his relations fixed when he is born into a certain clan or family group. This settles his occupation, dwelling, gods, and politics. If it doesn't decide upon his wife, it at least usually fixes the group from which she must be taken. His conditions, in the words of Maine, are thus of "status," not of "contract." This makes a vast difference in his whole attitude. It will help to bring out more clearly by contrast the character of present morality, as well as to see moral life in the making, if we examine more carefully this group life. We shall find, as brought out in the passages already quoted, that the most important type of group is at once a kindred or family, an economic, a political, a religious, and a moral unit. First, however, we notice briefly the most important types of groups.
Sec. 2. KINSHIP AND HOUSEHOLD GROUPS =1. The Kinship Group.=--The kinship group is a body of persons who conceive of themselves as sprung from one ancestor, and hence as having in their veins one blood. It does not matter for our study whether each group has actually sprung from a single ancestor. It is highly probable that the contingencies of food-supply or of war may have been an original cause for the constitution of the group, wholly or in part. But this is of no consequence for our purpose. The important point is that the members of the group regard themselves as of one stock. In some cases the ancestor is believed to have been an animal. Then we have the so-called totem group, which is found among North American Indians, Africans, and Australians, and was perhaps the early form of Semitic groups. In other cases, some hero or even some god is named as the ancestor. In any case the essential part of the theory remains the same: namely, that one blood circulates in all the members, and hence that the life of each is a part of the common life of the group. There are then no degrees of kindred. This group, it should be noted, is not the same as the family, for in the family, as a rule, husband and wife are of different kinship groups, and continue their several kinship relations. Among some peoples marriage ceremonies, indeed, symbolize the admission of the wife into the husband's kinship, and in this case the family becomes a kinship group, but this is by no means universally the case.
The feeling that one is first and foremost a member of a group, rather than an individual, is furthered among certain kin groups by a scheme of class relationship. According to this system, instead of having one definite person whom I, and I alone, regard and address as father or mother, grandfather, uncle, brother, sister, I call any one of a given group or class of persons mother, grandfather, brother, sister. And any one else who is in the same class with me calls the same persons, mother, grandfather, brother, or sister.[7] The simplest form of such a class system is that found among the Hawaiians. Here there are five classes based upon the generations corresponding to what we call grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters, children, and grandchildren, but the words used to designate them do not imply any such specific parentage as do these words with us. Bearing this in mind, we may say that every one in the first class is equally grandparent to every one in the third; every one in the third is equally brother or sister to every other in the third, equally father or mother to every one in the fourth, and so on. In Australia the classes are more numerous and the relationships far more intricate and complicated, but this does not, as might be supposed, render the bond relatively unimportant; on the contrary, his relationship to every other class is "one of the most important points with which each individual must be acquainted"; it determines marital relations, food distribution, salutations, and general conduct to an extraordinary degree. A kinship group was known as "tribe" or "family" (English translation) among the Israelites; as genos, phratria, and phyle among the Greeks, gens and curia among the Romans; clan in Scotland; sept in Ireland; Sippe in Germany.
Sec. 3. THE KINSHIP AND FAMILY GROUPS ARE ALSO ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL UNITS =1. The Land and the Group.=--In land, as a rule, no individual ownership in the modern sense was recognized. Among hunting and pastoral peoples there was, of course, no "ownership" by any group in the strict sense of modern law. But none the less, the group, large or small, had its fairly well-defined territory within which it hunted and fished; in the pastoral life it had its pasture range and its wells of water. With agriculture a more definite sense of possession arose. But possession was by the tribe or gens or household, not by the individual: "The land belonged to the clan, and the clan was settled upon the land. A man was thus not a member of the clan, because he lived upon, or even owned, the land; but he lived upon the land, and had interests in it, because he was a member of the clan."[9]
Greek and German customs were quoted at the outset. Among the Celts the laws of ancient Ireland show a transitional stage. "The land of the tribe consisted of two distinct allotments, the 'fechfine' or tribeland, and the 'orta' or inheritance land. This latter belonged as individual property to the men of the chieftain groups."[10] The Hindoo joint-family and the house-community of the Southern Slavonians are present examples of group ownership. They are joint in food, worship, and estate. They have a common home, a common table. Maxims of the Slavs express their appreciation of community life: "The common household waxes rich"; "The more bees in the hive, the heavier it weighs." One difficulty in the English administration of Ireland has been this radical difference between the modern Englishman's individualistic conception of property and the Irishman's more primitive conception of group or clan ownership. Whether rightly or not, the Irish tenant refuses to regard himself as merely a tenant. He considers himself as a member of a family or group which formerly owned the land, and he does not admit the justice, even though he cannot disprove the legality, of an alienation of the group possession. For such a clan or household as we have described is not merely equivalent to the persons who compose it at a given time. Its property belongs to the ancestors and to the posterity as well as to the present possessors; and hence in some groups which admit an individual possession or use during life, no right of devise or inheritance is permitted. The property reverts at death to the whole gens or clan. In other cases a child may inherit, but in default of such an heir the property passes to the common possession. The right to bequeath property to the church was long a point on which civil law and canon law were at variance. The relations of the primitive clan or household group to land were therefore decidedly adapted to keep the individual's good bound up with the good of the group.
In a modern family the parents exercise a certain degree of control over the children, but this is limited in several respects. No parent is allowed to put a child to death, or to permit him to grow up in ignorance. On the other hand, the parent is not allowed to protect the child from arrest if a serious injury has been done by him. The _State_, through its laws and officers, is regarded by us as the highest authority in a certain great sphere of action. It must settle conflicting claims and protect life and property; in the opinion of many it must organize the life of its members where the cooperation of every member is necessary for some common good. In early group life there may or may not be some political body over and above the clan or family, but in any case the _kin or family is itself a sort of political State_. Not a State in the sense that the political powers are deliberately separated from personal, religious, and family ties; men gained a new conception of authority and rose to a higher level of possibilities when they consciously separated and defined government and laws from the undifferentiated whole of a religious and kindred group. But yet this primitive group was after all a State, not a mob, or a voluntary society, or a mere family; for (1) it was a more or less permanently organized body; (2) it exercised control over its members which they regarded as rightful authority, not as mere force; (3) it was not limited by any higher authority, and acted more or less effectively for the interest of the whole. The representatives of this political aspect of the group may be chiefs or sachems, a council of elders, or, as in Rome, the House Father, whose _patria potestas_ marks the extreme development of the patriarchal family.
The control exercised by the group over individual members assumes various forms among the different peoples. The more important aspects are a right over life and bodily freedom, in some cases extending to power of putting to death, maiming, chastising, deciding whether newly born children shall be preserved or not; the right of betrothal, which includes control over the marriage portion received for its women; and the right to administer property of the kin in behalf of the kin as a whole. It is probable that among all these various forms of control, the control over the marriage relations of women has been most persistent. One reason for this control may have been the fact that the group was bound to resent injuries of a member of the group who had been married to another. Hence this responsibility seemed naturally to involve the right of decision as to her marriage.
Sec. 5. THE KINSHIP OR HOUSEHOLD GROUP WAS A RELIGIOUS UNIT The kinship or household group determined largely both the ideas and the cultus of primitive religion; conversely religion gave completeness, value, and sacredness to the group life. Kinship with unseen powers or persons was the fundamental religious idea. The kinship group as a religious body _simply extended the kin to include invisible as well as visible members_. The essential feature of religion is not unseen beings who are feared, or cajoled, or controlled by magic. It is rather _kindred_ unseen beings, who may be feared, but who are also reverenced and loved. The kinship may be physical or spiritual, but however conceived it makes gods and worshippers members of one group.[15]
Sec. 6. GROUPS OR CLASSES ON THE BASIS OF AGE AND SEX While the kindred and family groups are by far the most important for early morality, other groupings are significant. The division by ages is widespread. The simplest scheme gives three classes: (1) children, (2) young men and maidens, (3) married persons. Puberty forms the bound between the first and second; marriage that between the second and third. Distinct modes of dress and ornament, frequently also different residences and standards of conduct, belong to these several classes. Of groups on the basis of sex, the _men's clubs_ are especially worthy of note. They flourish now chiefly in the islands of the Pacific, but there are indications, such as the common meals of the Spartans, of a wide spread among European peoples in early times. The fundamental idea[16] seems to be that of a common house for the unmarried young men, where they eat, sleep, and pass their time, whereas the women, children, and married men sleep and eat in the family dwelling. But in most cases all the men resort to the clubhouse by day. Strangers may be entertained there. It thus forms a sort of general center for the men's activities, and for the men's conversation. As such, it is an important agency for forming and expressing public opinion, and for impressing upon the young men just entering the house the standards of the older members. Further, in some cases these houses become the center of rites to the dead, and thus add the impressiveness of religious significance to their other activities.
"To loathe whate'er our state does hateful hold, To reverence what it loves."[17] The gregarious instinct may be the most elemental of the impulses which bind the group together, but it is reinforced by sympathies and sentiments growing out of common life, common work, common danger, common religion. The morality is already implicit, it needs only to become conscious. The standards are embodied in the old men or the gods; the rational good is in the inherited wisdom; the respect for sex, for property rights, and for the common good, is embodied in the system--but it is there. Nor are the union and control a wholly objective affair. "The corporate union was not a pretty religious fancy with which to please the mind, but was so truly felt that it formed an excellent basis from which the altruistic sentiment might start. Gross selfishness was curbed, and the turbulent passions were restrained by an impulse which the man felt welling up within him, instinctive and unbidden. Clannish camaraderie was thus of immense value to the native races."[18]
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.