Primitive people were inquisitive. They thought about what happened and they sought explanations. Their attention was centered on the tangible phenomena of life. Their imagination worked out fantastic and superstitious interpretations. They reasoned about the daily occurrences of life in concrete, graphic, and personal terms.
Primitive people everywhere, apparently, sensed in a piecemeal and microscopic way the meaning of social relationships. Archeological records disclose crude and simple, but nevertheless genuine social implications. Early mythologies recognize the importance of social bonds. Out of the dim dawn of tribal life there appeared a rough-hewn sense of social property. The proverbs of primitive people include implications, if not definite statements, of social responsibility.
Primitive people lived simple group lives. If the paternal relationship was not always known or recognized, the maternal relationship functioned for at least a few years. The loose family ties harbored a degree of social responsibility. Wherever ancestor worship developed, the family group assumed large proportions and manifested strong social characteristics. The clan, or gens, betokened social fealty.
Communal property testified to communal thinking. The existence of common hunting grounds and tribal flocks was indicative of folk thought. Group dances, feasts, building enterprises, celebrations delineated the social spirit. Warfare produced bursts of tribal loyalty. An examination of the folkways reveals indistinct but incipient notions of societal welfare. Such a treatise as Sumner’s Folkways chronicles a vast amount of elemental folk thinking.
Folk thinking permeated primitive religions. The earliest forms of religion presupposed societies of spirits or gods. The conduct of the individual was regulated by his ideas concerning the ways in which he had pleased or offended the spirits or gods. An infant was born into a society peopled with human and spirit beings. The latter were often more numerous than the former; they frequently were more feared; and hence were more powerful. The living people, the departed spirits, and the gods in a hierarchal order constituted an effective society for the exercise of many vigorous forms of social control.
If pestilence came, it was because the gods had been offended by some human being. As a result of the offense of one individual, the whole tribe was considered to be liable to punishment. Consequently, the tribe in turn would punish the offending member and through the use of force and fear would exert a tremendous power over the conduct and thought of individuals.
Primitive people were dominated by custom. They were subject to the autocracy of the past. They were hopelessly caught between ancestral ascendance and current fears. They threaded their way, mentally, through tantalizingly uncertain and narrow apertures. They learned the meaning of obedience, but obedience to a harsh and rigorous past and a fickle and disconcerting future. Leadership was drastic and capricious; followership was frantic and tremulous.
Some of the incipient social concepts of primitive peoples have been preserved in the form of proverbs, maxims, fables, and myths. Many of the subtler social relationships of life were recognized by early man. His limited thinking drifted into simple formulae. His vocabulary was scanty; his ideas were few. He spoke in conventional sayings. “Primitive man spoke in proverbs.”
Many folkthoughts, or primitive conceptions of social obligations, have been preserved. The early proverbs of man reveal the beginnings of social thought. Equally valuable and similar materials are found in the sayings of the tribes which today are in a state of arrested development. A few illustrations of embryonic social thought will be given here.[II-1]
The first examples will be selected from the folkthoughts of the Africans of the Guinea Coast. The proverb, Ashes fly back in the face of him who throws them, recognizes that evil deeds return upon the doer, or as moderns declare, Curses come home to roost. In the saying, Cowries are men, primitive man roughly but succinctly stated the theory of the economic determination of human history. It is cowries, or money, which molds human thought, determines human evaluations and attitudes, gives social power, and “makes the man.” An age-long conception, indicative of a low sense of social feeling, but possessing great force in society, is revealed in the dictum, Full-belly child says to hungry-belly child, “Keep good cheer.” Throughout human history, the fortunate glutton has always recommended patience and tranquility to the unfortunate, hard-working brother. An eminent American financier of the multi-millionaire class expressed pity for telephone girls who undergo hard labor, but declared that their harsh conditions were what the good Lord had made for them. But how far has this well-groomed citizen of our century advanced beyond the “full-belly” social philosophy of savage man?