The concept of economic institutions developed so far is cold and impersonal; to be fruitful for the study of persons, there is need to consider the warmth, the vitality, the personal meaning of institutions. A great deal of help to this end is offered by the way of thinking. We shall make full use of their suggestions, but shall feel free to offer some modifications.
The life of society is expressed through a group of interrelated social institutions. The institutions have a psychological basis, but it is not enough to say that society has habits. Habit is a convenience, but it has no necessary continuity; it can be made or broken. Institutions are a convenience to those who use them. But most social institutions take on a moral hue; one lives by and swears by them. It is right to spend less than one earns, wrong to dress solely with reference to keeping warm. If one has a fancy for idols it is correct to exploit them as works of art, and wrong to prostrate oneself before them. To maintain one's place in society one must do certain things and love to do them; one must not do other things, which are prohibited, and must not want to do them. The mores, the affectively toned rules of social living, have become axiomatic among all who pretend to share fully in the life of the group. It is characteristic of social institutions in their moral form (their form as mores) that they cannot be frontally attacked or directly questioned. They are right; that is all there is to it. The rightness of the mores, according to Sumner and Keller, springs from the fact that the prosperity of the group is conceived to depend upon observing them.
Our emphasis here will be upon the interrelations between four fundamental groups of mores. The first are the self-maintenance mores, the mores that sustain and preserve the group and enable it to carry on in the face of obstacles. The term comprises a much broader field than is covered by the word "economic." It includes not only hunting, fishing, mining, forestry, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation, but also science and the art of war; for these are a primary means of enabling the group to survive against obstacles. The self-maintenance mores likewise constitute a "prosperity policy"; they represent the core of the customs that act as bulwarks against danger. Things like stealing, forgery, and ideological attack upon the group's way of living are therefore all in the same general category, and are responded to affectively in similar fashion. The introduction of new ways of earning a living involves grave moral questions because the prevailing ways are morally right.
The self-perpetuation mores comprise courtship, marriage, family, sex relations generally, and the early training of children. These mores, like all the others, have to do with society as a whole, not simply with the biological aspects of self-perpetuation. The self-perpetuation mores take care of the capacity of the social group to perpetuate itself as a social group, not simply as a biological stock; therefore courtship can be morally right or wrong, and the early rearing of children can be right or wrong. The problem of society is whether the early rearing of children does provide continuity in the mores. If it does not, it is immoral. The educator who wishes to give the individual child "freedom" may easily scandalize the group. The self-perpetuation mores, however, agree with our hypothesis about a certain type of "economic determinism," for they tend to change as self-maintenance changes; they must fit with the "prosperity policy." The status of women and the pattern of the family must conform to definite economic meanings.
The self-gratification mores have to do with the deriving of satisfaction from all the surpluses of energy and time. This may seem casual and unorganized, but it is not. The use of fire to cook food not only saved energy in digestion; it introduced culinary amenities, substituted postprandial reflection for stupor. In the caves of Spain and France, men painted not only for ulterior purposes but for their own gratification; the stone ornaments and monoliths of Switzerland and Brittany lead us to infer that the people were interested in order and beauty, as well as in utility. The arts and sciences have always been intellectual and emotional satisfiers. But these, too, have their moral value; it would be a grave error to infer that in his leisure time a person may develop the arts and sciences as freely as he wishes. Many a creative artist has been denounced because he used his freedom to rhyme, paint, or compose solely in accordance with a creative impulse that was contrary to the mores of society. It is not only that the arts must not challenge the mores; if the impulse takes a strange form, it is perverse. But the dependence of the arts on the self-maintenance mores is direct and obvious; they use the techniques and the subject matter provided by the economic, arts, the ways of the dominant military, religious, or political group, and they must gratify first of all those who sit in high places. The arts have always reflected he way in which society maintains itself. Modern art, for example, moves in the functional direction, rejoicing in its close articulation with the general self-maintenance pattern; in particular, the characteristically modern forms of architecture, interior decorating, and photography take delight in our modern technological culture.
Finally, there are the self-regulation mores, for even the rather rigid system of mores based on self-maintenance does not provide complete safety. It has always been necessary to have men-at-arms, policemen, laws, penalties. There is always a system of coercion, and this system naturally expresses what supports it.
Some of the mores do not fit easily into this fourfold scheme. Religion, for example, falls into several categories: it has much to do with marriage and the family, with the arts, and with the self-regulation mores. And of course some of us may prefer to group social institutions in terms of six areas of life, as do the Lynds, or nine, as does Wissler. All these "areas" or "categories" of activity involve abstraction from the flowing interdependence of behavior, and it must be granted that many acts supported by strong moral feelings --like maintaining personal honor--are not objectively classifiable. But the rough crude generalization remains: the mores prescribing how life is maintained affect the form of the other mores.
But since the mores are affectively laden, and since we know that perception and thought are anchored in terms of the fundamental values, it may be reasonable to suspect that the figure in the figure-ground pattern of life will tend to consist of the self-maintenance mores of the group. Our task is to demonstrate that ultimately the individual personality is in a broad way guided and controlled by these mores. Obviously, the only possible validation lies in the study of simple and straightforward examples. First, however, by way of clarifying the hypothesis, let us take a composite example, ridiculously abstract like a composite photograph; we shall use a hypothetical tribe of primitive woodsmen which from time immemorial has used a stone axhead for chopping down trees. Men need wood for barricades, stockades, agricultural instruments, household tools; they sell timber to their neighbors. This group constitutes a relatively simple patriarchal society, for it takes a boy many years to acquire enough of the axman's prowess to achieve power and status in competition with the older males, and women cannot compete at all. We find polygamy, a polytheistic religion, a crude art form--in general, a very primitive society whose life is, in Thomas Hobbes' words, "dull, nasty, brutish, and short." Now into this community come white men with steel axheads. This is a mystery; these instruments are at first nefarious and diabolical. But the white man shows how the steel axhead can in a few minutes bring down a tree that a strong man would require hours to cut down with the stone axhead. Some hearty soul tries the new thing himself. The tree actually comes down without benefit of any further magic, and he who has felled it does not suddenly die, but rejoices in the fact that he has accomplished far more than his fellows in the same amount of time. Before very long it comes about that the people have rationalized or excused the new process; those whose eyes have witnessed such a demonstration will soon be chopping down trees with steel axheads.
The consequences upon the whole institutional pattern are terrific. The first effect is that the energy of the group is enormously extended; a large part of their activity can go into other things than chopping down trees. They have time and energy for other economic exploits; for the beautiful as well as for the practical arts; for the invention of better carpentry, as well as for conversation, the amenities, philosophy; time and opportunity to enlarge their sphere and travel farther into the jungle, making roads and going where they never went before.
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