Folkways. William Graham Sumner

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Folkways - William Graham Sumner


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all prosperity. The epic heroes suffered painful ends, and when the tragedians took up the stories again they heaped up crime and woe.131 Pessimism was in the myths. While things went well the life policy of joyous carelessness overbore the pessimism, but when things began to go ill the conviction arose that life is not worth living. The abuses of democracy in the cities took away all the joy of success. It was wisdom just to take things as they came. Life was not worth having, for itself. If circumstances turned the balance of joy and pain so that the latter predominated a little, suicide was a rational relief. Religion did not cause this pessimism, but also it did not oppose it. Suicide was no offense to the gods, because they did not give life.132 The Greeks held their doctrine of pessimism, the envy of the gods, etc., to be a correct induction from observation of life. Herodotus brought back a conviction of it from his travels.133 Tradition ascribed to Solon the saying that "there is not a single happy mortal to be found amongst all the sun shines on."134

      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.


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