Folkways / A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals

by William Graham Sumner

111. Optimism of prosperity. "I apprehend that the key to the joyful character of the antique religions known to us [in western Asia] lies in the fact that they took their shape in communities that were progressive and, on the whole, prosperous." Weak groups were exterminated. Those which survived "had all the self-confidence and elasticity that are engendered by success in the struggle of life." "The religious gladness of the Semites tended to assume an orgiastic character and become a sort of intoxication of the senses, in which anxiety and sorrow were drowned for the moment."[142]

112. Antagonism between an individual and the mores. The case of dissent from the mores, which was considered above (sec. 100), is the case in which the individual voluntarily sets himself in antagonism to the mores of the society. There are cases in which the individual finds himself in involuntary antagonism to the mores of the society, or of some subgroup to which he belongs. If a man passes from one class to another, his acts show the contrast between the mores in which he was bred and those in which he finds himself. The satirists have made fun of the parvenu for centuries. His mistakes and misfortunes reveal the nature of the mores, their power over the individual, their pertinacity against later influences, the confusion in character produced by changing them, and the grip of habit which appears both in the persistence of old mores and the weakness of new ones. Every emigrant is forced to change his mores. He loses the sustaining help of use and wont. He has to acquire a new outfit of it. The traveler also experiences the change from life in one set of mores to life in another. The experience gives him the best power to criticise his native mores from a standpoint outside of them. In the North American colonies white children were often stolen by Indians and brought up by them in their ways. Whether they would later, if opportunity offered, return to white society and white mores, or would prefer to remain with the Indians, seems to have depended on the age at which they were captured. Missionaries have often taken men of low civilization out of the society in which they were born, have educated them, and taught them white men's mores. If a single clear and indisputable case could be adduced in which such a person was restored to his own people and did not revert to their mode of life, it would be a very important contribution to ethnology. We are forced to believe that, if a baby born in New England was taken to China and given to a Chinese family to rear and educate, he would become a Chinaman in all which belongs to the mores, that is to say, in his character, conduct, and code of life.

113. Antagonism of earlier and later mores. When, in the course of time, changes occur in the mores, the men of a later generation find themselves in antagonism to the mores of their ancestors. In the Homeric poems cases are to be found of disapproval by a later generation of the mores of a former one. The same is true of the tragedies of the fifth century in respect to the mythology and heroism in Homer. The punishment of Melantheus, the unfaithful goatherd, was savage in the extreme, but when Eurykleia exulted over the dead suitors, Ulysses told her that it was a cruel sin to rejoice over slain enemies.[143] In the Iliad boastful shouts over the dead are frequent. In the Odyssey such shouts are forbidden.[144] Homer thinks that it was unseemly for Achilles to drag the corpse of Hector behind his chariot.[145] He says that the gods disapproved, which is the mystic way of describing a change in the mores.[146] He also disapproves of the sacrifice of Trojan youths on the pyre of Patroclus.[147] It was proposed to Pausanias that he should repay on the corpse of Mardonius the insults which Xerxes had practiced on the corpse of Leonidas at Thermopylæ, but he indignantly refused.[148] In the Eumenides of Æschylus the story of Orestes is represented as a struggle between the mores of the father family and those of the mother family. In the Herakleidæ there is a struggle between old and new mores as to the killing of captives. Many such contrasts are drawn between Greek and barbarian mores, the latter being old and abandoned customs which have become abominable to the Greeks (incest, murder of strangers). In the fourth century the Greeks were so humbled by their own base treatment of each other that this contrast ceased to be drawn.[149] Similar contrasts between earlier and later mores appear in the Bible. Our own mores set us in antagonism to much which we find in the Bible (slavery, polygamy, extirpation of aborigines). The mores always bring down in tradition a code which is old. Infanticide, slavery, murder of the old, human sacrifices, etc., are in it. Later conditions force a new judgment, which is in revolt and antagonism to what always has been done and what everybody does. Slavery is an example of this in recent history.

114. Antagonism between groups in respect to mores. When different groups come in contact with each other their mores are brought into contrast and antagonism. Some Australian girls consider that their honor requires that they shall be knocked senseless and carried off by the men who thereby become their husbands. If they are the victims of violence, they need not be ashamed. Eskimo girls would be ashamed to go away with husbands without crying and lamenting, glad as they are to go. They are shocked to hear that European women publicly consent in church to be wives, and then go with their husbands without pretending to regret it. In Homer girls are proud to be bought and to bring to their fathers a bride price of many cows. In India gandharva marriage is one of the not-honorable forms. It is love marriage. It rests on passion and is considered sensual; moreover, it is due to a transitory emotion. If property is involved in marriage the institution rests on a permanent interest and is guaranteed. Kaffirs also ridicule Christian love marriage. They say that it puts a woman on a level with a cat, the only animal which, amongst them, has no value.[150] Where polygamy prevails women are ashamed to be wives of men who can afford only one each; under monogamy they think it a disgrace to be wives of men who have other wives. The Japanese think the tie to one's father the most sacred. A man who should leave father and mother and cleave to his wife would become an outcast. Therefore the Japanese think the Bible immoral and irreligious.[151] Such a view in the mores of the masses will long outlast the "adoption of western civilization." The Egyptians thought the Greeks unclean. Herodotus says that the reason was because they ate cow's flesh.[152] The Greeks, as wine drinkers, thought themselves superior to the Egyptians, who drank beer. A Greek people was considered inferior if it had no city life, no agora, no athletics, no share in the games, no group character, and if it kept on a robber life.[153] The real reason for the hatred of Jews by Christians has always been the strange and foreign mores of the former. When Jews conform to the mores of the people amongst whom they live prejudice and hatred are greatly diminished, and in time will probably disappear. The dislike of the colored people in the old slave states of the United States and the hostility to whites who "associate with negroes " is to be attributed to the difference in the mores of whites and blacks. Under slavery the blacks were forced to conform to white ways, as indeed they are now if they are servants. In the North, also, where they are in a small minority, they conform to white ways. It is when they are free and form a large community that they live by their own mores. The civil war in the United States was due to a great divergence in the mores of the North and the South, produced by the presence or absence of slavery. The passionate dislike and contempt of the people of one section for those of the other was due to the conception each had formed of the other's character and ways. Since the abolition of slavery the mores of the two sections have become similar and the sectional dislike has disappeared. The contrast between the mores of English America and Spanish America is very great. It would long outlast any political combination of parts of the two, if such should be brought about.

115. Missions and mores. The contrasts and antagonisms of the mores of different groups are the stumbling-blocks in the way of all missionary enterprise, and they explain many of the phenomena which missions present. We think that our "ways" are the best, and that their superiority is so obvious that all heathen, Mohammedans, Buddhists, etc., will, as soon as they learn what our ways are, eagerly embrace them. Nothing could be further from the truth. "It is difficult to an untraveled Englishman, who has not had an opportunity of throwing himself into the spirit of the East, to credit the disgust and detestation that numerous everyday acts, which appear perfectly harmless to his countrymen, excite in many Orientals."[154] If our women are shocked at polygamy and the harem, Mohammedan women are equally shocked at the ball and dinner dresses of our ladies, at our dances, and at the manners of social intercourse between the sexes. Negroes in East Africa are as much disgusted to see white men eat fowl or eggs as we are at any of their messes. Missions always offer something from above downwards. They contain an assumption of superiority and beneficence. Half-civilized people never admit the assumption. They meet it just as we would meet a mission of Mohammedans or Buddhists to us. Savages and barbarians dismiss "white man's ways" with indifference. The virtues and arts of civilization are almost as disastrous to the uncivilized as its vices. It is really the great tragedy of civilization that the contact of lower and higher is disastrous to the former, no matter what may be the point of contact, or how little the civilized may desire to do harm.

116. Missions and antagonistic mores. Missionaries always have to try to act on the mores. The ritual and creed of a religion, and reading and writing, would not fulfill the purpose. The attempt is to teach the social ritual of civilized people. Missionaries almost always first insist on the use of clothing and monogamy. The first of these has, in a great number of cases, produced disease and hastened the extinction of the aborigines. The second very often causes a revolution in the societal organization, either in the family form, the productive industry, or the political discipline. The Hawaiians were a people of a very cheerful and playful disposition. The missionaries trained the children in the schools to serious manners and decorum. Such was the method in fashion in our own schools at the time. The missionary society refused the petition of the Hawaiians for teachers who would teach them the mechanic arts.[155] This is like the refusal of the English missionary society to support Livingstone's policy in South Africa because it was not religious. Until very recent times no white men have understood the difference between the mother family and the father family. Missionaries have all grown up in the latter. Miss Kingsley describes the antagonism which arises in the mind of a West African negro, brought up in the mother family, against the teaching of the missionary. The negro husband and wife have separate property. Neither likes the white man's doctrine of the community of goods. The woman knows that that would mean that she would have none. The man would not take her goods if he must take her children too. "White culture expects a man to think more of his wife and children than he does of his mother and sisters, which to the uncultured African is absurd."[156] Evidently it is these collisions and antagonisms of the mores which constitute the problems of missions. We can quote but a single bit of evidence that an aboriginal people has gained benefit from contact with the civilized. Of the Bantu negroes it is said that such contact has increased their vigor and vitality.[157] The "missionary-made man" is not a good type, according to the military, travelers, and ethnographers.[158] Of the Basutos it is said that the converted ones are the worst. They are dishonest and dirty.[159] In Central America it is said that the judgment is often expressed that "an Indian who can read and write is a good-for-nothing." The teachers in the schools teach the Indian children to despise the ways of their race. Then they lose the virtues of trustworthiness and honesty, for which the Indians were noteworthy.[160] There is no such thing as "benevolent assimilation." To one who knows the facts such a phrase sounds like flippant ignorance or a cruel jest. Even if one group is reduced to a small remnant in the midst of a great nation, assimilation of the residue does not follow. Black and white, in the United States, are now tending to more strict segregation. The remnants of our Indians partly retain Indian mores, partly adopt white mores. They languish in moral isolation and homelessness. They have no adjustment to any social environment. Gypsies have never adopted the mores of civilized life. They are morally and physically afloat in the world. There are in India and in the Russian empire great numbers of remnants of aboriginal tribes, and there are, all over the world, groups of pariahs, or races maudites, which the great groups will not assimilate. The Jews, although more numerous, and economically far stronger, are in the same attitude to the peoples amongst which they live.

117. Modification of the mores by agitation. To this point all projects of missions and reform must come. It must be recognized that what is proposed is an arbitrary action on the mores. Therefore nothing sudden or big is possible. The enterprise is possible only if the mores are ready for it. The conditions of success lie in the mores. The methods must conform to the mores. That is why the agitator, reformer, prophet, reorganizer of society, who has found out "the truth" and wants to "get a law passed" to realize it right away, is only a mischief-maker. He has won considerable prestige in the last hundred years, but if the cases are examined it will be found that when he had success it was because he took up something for which the mores were ready. Wilberforce did not overthrow slavery. Natural forces reduced to the service of man and the discovery of new land set men "free" from great labor, and new ways suggested new sentiments of humanity and ethics. The mores changed and all the wider deductions in them were repugnant to slavery. The free-trade agitators did not abolish the corn laws. The interests of the English population had undergone a new distribution. It was the redistribution of population and political power in the United States which made the civil war. Witchcraft and trial by torture were not abolished by argument. Critical knowledge and thirst for reality made them absurd. In Queen Anne's reign prisons in England were frightful sinks of vice, misery, disease, and cruel extortion. "So the prisons continued until the time of Howard,"[161] seventy-five years later. The mores had then become humanitarian. Howard was able to get a response.

118. Capricious interest of the masses. Whether the masses will think certain things wrong, cruel, base, unjust, and disgusting; whether they will think certain pleas and demands reasonable; whether they will regard certain projects as sensible, ridiculous, or fantastic, and will give attention to certain topics, depends on the convictions and feelings which at the time are dominant in the mores. No one can predict with confidence what the response will be to any stimulus which may be applied. The fact that certain American products of protected industries are sold abroad cheaper than at home, so that the protective tariff taxes us to make presents to foreigners, has been published scores of times. It might be expected to produce a storm of popular indignation. It does not do so. The abuses of the pension system have been exposed again and again. There is no popular response in condemnation of the abuse, or demand for reform. The error and folly of protection have been very fully exposed, but the free-trade agitation has not won ground. In truth, however, that agitation has never been carried on sincerely and persistently. Many of those who have taken part in it have not aimed to put an end to the steal, but to be taken into it. The notion of "making something out of the government" in one way or another has got into the mores. It is the vice of modern representative government. Civil-service reform has won but little popular support because the masses have learned that the successful party has a right to distribute the offices amongst its members. That has become accepted doctrine in the mores. A local boss said: "There is but one issue in the Fifth Maryland district. It is this, Can any man get more from Uncle Sam for the hard-working Republicans of the district than I can?"[162] This sentiment wins wide sympathy. Prohibitory legislation accords with the mores of the rural, but not of the urban, population. It therefore produces in cities deceit and blackmail, and we meet with the strange phenomenon, in a constitutional state, that publicists argue that administrative officers in cities ought to ignore the law. Antipolygamy is in the mores; antidivorce is not. Any injustice or arbitrary action against polygamy is possible. Reform of divorce legislation is slow and difficult. We are told that "respect for law" is in our mores, but the frequency of lynching disproves it. Let those who believe in the psychology of crowds write for us a logic of crowds and tell how the corporate mind operates.

119. How the group becomes homogeneous. The only way in which, in the course of time, remnants of foreign groups are apparently absorbed and the group becomes homogeneous, is that the foreign element dies out. In like manner people who live by aberrant mores die. The aberrant forms then cease to be, and the mores become uniform. In the meantime, there is a selection which determines which mores shall survive and which perish. This is accomplished by syncretism.

120. Syncretism. Although folkways for the same purpose have a great similarity in all groups, yet they present variations and characteristic differences from group to group. These variations are sometimes due to differences in the life conditions, but generally causes for them are unascertainable, or the variations appear capricious. Therefore each in-group forms its own ways, and looks with contempt and abhorrence upon the ways of any out-group (sec. 13). Dialectical differences in language or pronunciation are a sufficient instance. They cannot be accounted for, but they call out contempt and ridicule, and are taken to be signs of barbarism and inferiority. When groups are compounded by intermarriage, intercourse, conquest, immigration, or slavery, syncretism of the folkways takes place. One of the component groups takes precedence and sets the standards. The inferior groups or classes imitate the ways of the dominant group, and eradicate from their children the traditions of their own ancestors. Amongst Englishmen the correct or incorrect placing of the h is a mark of caste. It is a matter of education to put an end to the incorrect use. Contiguity, neighborhood, or even literature may suffice to bring about syncretism of the mores. One group learns that the people of another group regard some one of its ways or notions as base. This knowledge may produce shame and an effort to breed out the custom. Thus whenever two groups are brought into contact and contagion, there is, by syncretism, a selection of the folkways which is destructive to some of them. This is the process by which folkways are rendered obsolete. The notion of a gradual refinement of the mores in time, which is assumed to go on of itself, or by virtue of some inherent tendency in that direction, is entirely unfounded. Christian mores in the western empire were formed by syncretism of Jewish and pagan mores. Christian mores therefore contain war, slavery, concubinage, demonism, and base amusements, together with some abstract ascetic doctrines with which these things are inconsistent. The strain of the mores towards consistency produced elimination of some of these customs. The church embraced in its fold Latin, Teutonic, Greek, and Slavonic nations, and it produced a grand syncretism of their mores, while it favored those which were Latin. The Teutonic mores suffered elimination. Those which were Greek and Slavonic were saved by the division of the church. Those which now pass for Christian in western Europe are the result of the syncretism of two thousand years. When now western Christians come in contact with heathen, Mohammedans, Buddhists, or alien forms of Christianity, they endeavor to put an end to polygamy, slavery, infanticide, idolatry, etc., which have been extruded from western Christian mores. In Egypt at the present time the political power and economic prosperity of the English causes the Mohammedans to envy, emulate, and imitate them in all those peculiarities which are supposed to be causes of their success. Hence we hear of movements to educate children, change the status of women, and otherwise modify traditional mores. It is another case of the operation by which inferior mores are rendered obsolete.