Ethics · John Dewey
GROUP MORALITY--CUSTOMS OR MORES
This attitude is reenforced by the views about good luck and bad luck. Primitive man--and civilized man--is not ruled by a purely rational theory of success and failure. "One might use the best known means with the greatest care, yet fail of the result. On the other hand, one might get a great result with no effort at all. One might also incur a calamity without any fault of his own."[24] "Grimm gives more than a thousand ancient German apothegms, dicta, and proverbs about 'luck.'"[25] Both good and bad fortune are attributed to the unseen powers, hence a case of bad luck is not thought of as a mere chance. If the ship that sailed Friday meets a storm, or one of thirteen falls sick, the inference is that this is sure to happen again. And at this point the conception of the group welfare as bound up with the acts of every member, comes in to make individual conformity a matter for group concern--to make conduct a matter of mores and not merely a private affair. One most important, if not the most important, object of early legislation was the enforcement of lucky rites to prevent the individual from doing what might bring ill luck on all the tribe.
For the conception always was that the ill luck does not attach itself simply to the doer, but may fall upon any member of the group. "The act of one member is conceived to make all the tribe impious, to offend its particular god, to expose all the tribe to penalties from heaven. When the street statues of Hermes were mutilated, all the Athenians were frightened and furious; they thought they should all be ruined because some one had mutilated a god's image and so offended him."[26] "The children were reproved for cutting and burning embers, on the ground that this might be the cause for the accidental cutting of some member of the family."[27] In the third place, besides these sources of custom, in the usefulness or lucky character of certain acts, there is also the more immediate reaction of individuals or groups to certain ways of acting according "as things jump with the feelings or displease them."[28] An act of daring is applauded, whether useful or not. The individual judgment is caught up, repeated, and plays its part in the formation of group opinion. "Individual impulse and social tradition are thus the two poles between which we move." Or there may even be a more conscious discussion analogous to the action of legislatures or philosophic discussion. The old men among the Australians deliberate carefully as to each step of the initiation ceremonies. They make customs to be handed down.
Sec. 2. MEANS OF ENFORCING CUSTOMS The most general means for enforcing customs are public opinion, taboos, ritual or ceremony, and physical force. =Public Approval= uses both language and form to express its judgments. Its praise is likely to be emphasized by some form of art. The songs that greet the returning victor, the decorations, costumes, and tattoos for those who are honored, serve to voice the general sentiment. On the other hand ridicule or contempt is a sufficient penalty to enforce compliance with many customs that may be personally irksome. It is very largely the ridicule of the men's house which enforces certain customs among the men of peoples which have that institution. It is the ridicule or scorn of both men and women which forbids the Indian to marry before he has proved his manhood by some notable deed of prowess in war or chase. =Taboos.=--Taboos 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. Any events supposed to indicate the activity of spirits, such as birth and death, are likely to be sanctified by taboos. The danger is contagious; if a Polynesian chief is taboo, the ordinary man fears even to touch his footprints. But the taboos are not all based on mere dread of the unseen.
"They include such acts as have been found by experience to produce unwelcome results.--The primitive taboos correspond to the fact that the life of man is environed by perils: His food quest must be limited by shunning poisonous plants. His appetite must be restrained from excess. His physical strength and health must be guarded from dangers. The taboos carry on the accumulated wisdom of generations which has almost always been purchased by pain, loss, disease, and death. Other taboos contain inhibitions of what will be injurious to the group. The laws about the sexes, about property, about war, and about ghosts, have this character. They always include some social philosophy." (SUMNER, _Folkways_, pp. 33 f.) They may be used with conscious purpose. In order to have a supply of cocoanuts for a religious festival the head men may place a taboo upon the young cocoanuts to prevent them from being consumed before they are fully ripe. The conception works in certain respects to supply the purpose which is later subserved by ideas of property. But it serves also as a powerful agency to maintain respect for the authority of the group.
Sec. 3. CONDITIONS WHICH BRING OUT THE IMPORTANCE OF GROUP STANDARDS AND RENDER GROUP CONTROL CONSCIOUS Although customs or mores have in them an element of social approval which makes them vehicles of moral judgment, they tend in many cases to sink to the level of mere habits. The reason--such as it was--for their original force--is forgotten. They become, like many of our forms of etiquette, mere conventions. There are, however, certain conditions which center attention upon their importance and lift them to the level of conscious agencies. These conditions may be grouped under three heads. (1) The education of the younger, immature members of the group and their preparation for full membership. (2) The constraint and restraint of refractory members and the adjustment of conflicting interests. (3) Occasions which involve some notable danger or crisis and therefore call for the greatest attention to secure the favor of the gods and avert disaster. =1. Educational Customs.=--Among the most striking and significant of these are the initiation ceremonies which are so widely observed among primitive peoples. They 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 participation in the mystic dance and song and decorations, serve to reenforce the ties that bind the tribe.
Initiation into the full privileges of manhood among the tribes of Central Australia, for instance, includes three sets of ceremonies which occupy weeks, and even months, for their completion. The first set, called "throwing up in the air," is performed for the boy when he has reached the age of from ten to twelve. In connection with being thrown up in the air by certain prescribed members of his tribe, he is decorated with various totem emblems and afterward the septum of his nose is bored for the insertion of the nose-bone. At a period some three or four years later a larger and more formidable series of ceremonies is undertaken, lasting for ten days. A screen of bushes is built, behind which the boy is kept during the whole period, unless he is brought out on the ceremonial ground to witness some performance. During this whole period of ten days, he is forbidden to speak except in answer to questions. He is decorated with various totem emblems, for which every detail is prescribed by the council of the tribal fathers and tribal elder brothers. He is charged to obey every command and never to tell any woman or boy what he may see.
The sense that something out of the ordinary is to happen to him helps to impress him strongly with a feeling of the deep importance of compliance with the tribal rules, and further still, with a strong sense of the superiority of the older men who know and are familiar with the mysterious rites of which he is about to learn the meaning for the first time. At intervals he watches symbolic performances of men decorated like various totem animals, who represent the doings of the animal ancestors of the clan; he hears mysterious sounds of the so-called bull-roarers, which are supposed by the women and uninitiated to be due to unseen spirits; and the whole ends with the operation which symbolizes his induction into young manhood. But even this is not all; when the young man has reached the age of discretion, when it is felt that he can fully comprehend the traditions of the tribe, at the age of from twenty to twenty-five, a still more impressive series of ceremonies is conducted, which in the instance reported lasted from September to January.
This period was filled up with dances, "corroborees," and inspection of the churinga or sacred emblems--stones or sticks which were supposed to be the dwellings of ancestral spirits and which are carefully preserved in the tribe, guarded from the sight of women and boys, but known individually to the elders as the sacred dwelling-place of father or grandfather. As these were shown and passed around, great solemnity was manifest and the relatives sometimes wept at the sight of the sacred object. Ceremonies imitating various totem animals, frequently of the most elaborate sort, were also performed. The young men were told the traditions of the past history of the tribe, and at the close of the recital they felt added reverence for the old men who had been their instructors, a sense of pride in the possession of this mysterious knowledge, and a deeper unity because of what they now have in common. One is at a loss whether to wonder most at the possibility of the whole tribe devoting itself for three months to these elaborate functions of initiation, or at the marvelous adaptability of such ceremonies to train the young into an attitude of docility and reverence. A tribe that can enforce such a process is not likely to be wanting in one side, at least, of the moral consciousness, namely, reverence for authority and regard for the social welfare.[30]
In all these cases it is of course no abstract theory of crime which leads the community to react; it is self-preservation. The tribe must be kept together for protection against enemies. Achan's sin is felt to be the cause of defeat. The violation of sex taboos may ruin the clan. The sorcerer may cause disease, or inflict torture and death, or bring a pestilence or famine upon the whole group. None the less all such cases bring to consciousness one aspect of moral authority, the social control over the individual. And it is a _social_ control--not an exercise of brute force or a mere terrorizing by ghosts. For the chief or judge generally wins his authority by his powerful service to his tribesmen. A Gideon or Barak or Ehud or Jephthah judged Israel because he had delivered them. "Three things, if possessed by a man, make him fit to be a chief of kindred: That he should speak on behalf of his kin and be listened to, that he should fight on behalf of his kin and be feared, and that he should be security on behalf of his kin and be accepted."[32] If, as is often the case, the king or judge or chief regards himself as acting by divine right, the authority is still _within the group_. It is the group judging itself.
In its _standards_ this primitive court is naturally on the level of customary morality, of which it is an agent. There is usually neither the conception of a general principle of justice (our Common Law), nor of a positive law enacted as the express will of the people. At first the judge or ruler may not act by any fixed law except that of upholding the customs. Each decision is then a special case. A step in advance is found when the heads or elders or priests of the tribe decide cases, not independently of all others, but in accordance with certain precedents or customs. A legal tradition is thus established, which, however imperfect, is likely to be more impartial than the arbitrary caprice of the moment, influenced as such special decisions are likely to be by the rank or power of the parties concerned.[33] A law of precedents or tradition is thus the normal method at this level. The progress toward a more rational standard belongs under the next chapter, but it is interesting to note that even at an early age the myths show a conception of a divine judge who is righteous, and a divine judgment which is ideal. Rhadamanthus is an embodiment of the demand for justice which human collisions and decisions awakened.
The conscious authority of the group is also evoked in the case of feuds or disputes between its members. The case of the blood feud, indeed, might well be treated as belonging under war and international law rather than as a case of private conflict. For so far as the members of the victim's clan are concerned, it is a case of war. It is a patriotic duty of every kinsman to avenge the shed blood. The groups concerned were smaller than modern nations which go to war for similar reasons, but the principle is the same. The chief difference in favor of modern international wars is that since the groups are larger they do not fight so often and require a more serious consideration of the possibility of peaceable adjustment. Orestes and Hamlet feel it a sacred duty to avenge their fathers' murders. But the case is not simply that of clan against clan. For the smaller group of kin, who are bound to avenge, are nearly always part of a larger group. And the larger group may at once recognize the duty of vengeance and also the need of keeping it within bounds, or of substituting other practices. The larger group may see in the murder a pollution, dangerous to all;[34] the blood which "cries from the ground"[35] renders the ground "unclean" and the curse of gods or the spirits of the dead may work woe upon the whole region. But an unending blood feud is likewise an evil. And if the injured kin can be appeased by less than blood in return, so much the better. Hence the wergeld, or indemnity, a custom which persisted among the Irish until late, and seemed to the English judges a scandalous procedure.
For lesser offenses a sort of regulated duel is sometimes allowed. For example, among the Australians the incident is related of the treatment of a man who had eloped with his neighbor's wife. When the recreant parties returned the old men considered what should be done, and finally arranged the following penalty. The offender stood and called out to the injured husband, "I stole your woman; come and growl." The husband then proceeded to throw a spear at him from a distance, and afterwards to attack him with a knife, although he did not attempt to wound him in a vital part. The offender was allowed to evade injury, though not to resent the attack. Finally the old men said, "Enough." A curious form of private agencies for securing justice is also found in the Japanese custom of hara-kiri, according to which an injured man kills himself before the door of his offender, in order that he may bring public odium upon the man who has injured him. An Indian custom of Dharna is of similar significance, though less violent. The creditor fasts before the door of the debtor until he either is paid, or dies of starvation. It may be that he thinks that his double or spirit will haunt the cruel debtor who has thus permitted him to starve to death, but it also has the effect of bringing public opinion to bear.
In all these cases of kindred feuds there is little personal responsibility, and likewise little distinction between the accidental and intentional. These facts are brought out in the opening quotations in Chapter II. The important thing for the student to observe is that like our present practices in international affairs they show a _grade_ of morality, a limited social unity, whether it is called kinship feeling or patriotism; complete morality is not possible so long as there is no complete way of settling disputes by justice instead of force.[36] =3. Occasions Which Involve Some Special Danger or Crisis.=--Such occasions call for the greatest attention to secure success or avoid disaster. Under this head we note as typical (a) the occasions of birth, marriage, death; (b) seed time and harvest, or other seasons important for the maintenance of the group; (c) war; (d) hospitality.
The regulations for marriage are scarcely less important; indeed, they are often seemingly the most important of the customs. The phrases "marriage by capture" and "marriage by purchase," are quite misleading if they give the impression that in early culture any man may have any woman. It is an almost universal part of the clan system that the man must marry out of his own clan or totem (exogamy), and it is frequently specified exactly into what other clan he must marry. Among some the regulations are minute as to which of the age classes, as well as to which of the kin groups, a man of specific group must choose from. The courtship may follow different rules from ours, and the relation of the sexes in certain respects may seem so loose as to shock the student, but the regulation is in many respects stricter than with us, and punishment of its violation often severer. There can be no doubt of the meaning of the control, however mistaken some of its features. Whether the regulations for exogamy, which provide so effectually for avoiding incest, are reinforced by an instinctive element of aversion to sex relations with intimates, is uncertain; in any case, they are enforced by the strongest taboos. Nor does primitive society stop with the negative side. The actual marriage is invested with the social values and religious sanctions which raise the relation to a higher level. Art, in garments and ornament, in dance and epithalamium, lends ideal values. The sacred meal at the encircled hearth secures the participation of the kindred gods.
"But as for us," says Ulysses to the Cyclops, "we have lighted here, and come to these thy knees, if perchance they will give us a stranger's gift, or make any present, as is the due of strangers. Nay, lord, have regard to the gods, for we are thy suppliants, and Zeus is the avenger of suppliants and sojourners, Zeus, the god of the stranger, who fareth in the company of reverend strangers." The duty of hospitality is one of the most widely recognized. Westermarck has brought together a series of maxims from a great variety of races which show this forcibly.[38] Indians, Kalmucks, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Arabs, Africans, Ainos, and other peoples are drawn upon and tell the same story. The stranger is to be respected sacredly. His person must be guarded from insult even if the honor of the daughter of the house must be sacrificed.[39] "Jehovah preserveth the sojourners," and they are grouped with the fatherless and the widow in Israel's law.[40] The Romans had their _dii hospitales_ and the "duties toward a guest were even more stringent than those toward a relative"--_primum tutelae_, _delude hospiti_, _deinde clienti_, _tum cognato_, _postea affini_.[41] "He who has a spark of caution in him," says Plato, "will do his best to pass through life without sinning against the stranger." And there is no doubt that this sanctity of the guest's person was not due to pure kindness. The whole conduct of group life is opposed to a general spirit of consideration for those outside. The word "guest" is akin to _hostis_, from which comes "hostile." The stranger or the guest was looked upon rather as a being who was specially potent. He was a "live wire."
He might be a medium of blessing, or he might be a medium of hurt. But it was highly important to fail in no duty toward him. The definite possibility of entertaining angels unawares might not be always present to consciousness, but there seems reason to believe that the possibility of good luck or bad luck as attending on a visitor was generally believed in. It is also plausible that the importance attached to sharing a meal, or to bodily contact, is based on magical ideas of the way in which blessing or curse may be communicated. To cross a threshold or touch a tent-rope or to eat "salt," gives a sacred claim. In the right of asylum, the refugee takes advantage of his contact with the god. He lays hold of the altar and assumes that the god will protect him. The whole practice of hospitality is thus the converse of the custom of blood revenge. They are alike sacred--or rather the duty of hospitality may protect even the man whom the host is bound to pursue. But, whereas the one makes for group solidarity by acts of exclusive and hostile character, the other tends to set aside temporarily the division between the "we-group" and the "others-group." Under the sanction of religion it keeps open a way of communication which trade and other social interchange will widen. It adds to family and the men's house a powerful agency in maintaining at least the possibility of humaneness and sympathy.
Sec. 4. VALUES AND DEFECTS OF CUSTOMARY MORALITY These have been suggested, in the main, in the description of the nature of custom and its regulation of conduct. We may, however, summarize them as a preparation for the next stage of morality. =1. The Forming of Standards.=--There is a standard, a "good," a "right," which is to some degree rational and to some degree social. We have seen that custom rests in part on rational conceptions of welfare. It is really nothing against this that a large element of luck enters into the idea of welfare. For this means merely that the actual conditions of welfare are not understood. The next generation may be able to point out as equally absurd our present ignorance about health and disease. The members of the group embodied in custom what they thought to be important; they were approving some acts and forbidding or condemning others; they were using the elders, and the wisdom of all the past, in order to govern life. So far, then, they were acting morally. They were also, to a degree, using a rational and social standard when they made custom binding on all, and conceived its origin as immemorial. When further they conceived it as approved by the gods, they gave it all the value they knew how to put into it.
The standards and valuations of custom are, however, only partly rational. Many customs are irrational; some are injurious. But in them all the habitual is a large, if not the largest, factor. And this is often strong enough to resist any attempt at rational testing. Dr. Arthur Smith tells us of the advantage it would be in certain parts of China to build a door on the south side of the house in order to get the breeze in hot weather. The simple and sufficient answer to such a suggestion is, "We don't build doors on the south side." An additional weakness in the character of such irrational, or partly rational standards, is the misplaced energy they involve. What is merely trivial is made as important and impressive as what has real significance. Tithing mint, anise, and cummin is quite likely to involve neglect of the weightier matters of the law. Moral life requires men to estimate the value of acts. If the irrelevant or the petty is made important, it not only prevents a high level of value for the really important act, it loads up conduct with burdens which keep it back; it introduces elements which must be got rid of later, often with heavy loss of what is genuinely valuable. When there are so many ways of offending the gods and when these turn so often upon mere observance of routine or formula, it may require much subsequent time and energy to make amends. The morals get an expiatory character.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.