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

FUNDAMENTAL NOTIONS OF THE FOLKWAYS AND OF THE MORES

Definition and mode of origin of the folkways.--The folkways are a societal force.--Folkways are made unconsciously.--Impulse and instinct; primeval stupidity; magic.--The strain of improvement and consistency.--The aleatory element.--All origins are lost in mystery.--Spencer on primitive custom.-- Good and bad luck; ills of life; goodness and happiness.-- Illustrations.--Immortality and compensation.--Tradition and its restraints.--The concepts of "primitive society"; "we-groups" and "others-groups."--Sentiments in the in-group towards out-groups.--Ethnocentrism.--Illustrations.-- Patriotism.--Chauvinism.--The struggle for existence and the competition of life; antagonistic cooperation.--Four motives: hunger, love, vanity, fear.--The process of making folkways.-- Suggestion and suggestibility.--Suggestion in education.-- Manias.--Suggestion in politics.--Suggestion and criticism.-- Folkways based on false inferences.--Harmful folkways.--How "true" and "right" are found.--The folkways are right; rights; morals.--The folkways are true.--Relations of world philosophy to folkways.--Definition of the mores.--Taboos.--No primitive philosophizing; myths; fables; notion of social welfare.--The imaginative element.--The ethical policy and the success policy.--Recapitulation.--Scope and method of the mores.-- Integration of the mores of a group or age.--Purpose of the present work.--Why use the word "mores."--The mores are a directive force.--Consistency in the mores.--The mores of subgroups.--What are classes?--Classes rated by societal value.--Class; race; group solidarity.--The masses and the mores.--Fallacies about the classes and the masses.--Action of the masses on ideas.--Organization of the masses.--Institutions of civil liberty.--The common man.--The "people"; popular impulses.--Agitation.--The ruling element in the masses.--The mores and institutions.--Laws.--How laws and institutions differ from mores.--Difference between mores and some cognate things.--Goodness or badness of the mores.--More exact definition of the mores.--Ritual.--The ritual of the mores.-- Group interests and policy.--Group interests and folkways.-- Force in the folkways.--Might and right.--Status.-- Conventionalization.--Conventions indispensable.--The "ethos" or group character; Japan.--Chinese ethos.--Hindoo ethos.-- European ethos.

+1. Definition and mode of origin of the folkways.+ If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts. Every moment brings necessities which must be satisfied at once. Need was the first experience, and it was followed at once by a blundering effort to satisfy it. It is generally taken for granted that men inherited some guiding instincts from their beast ancestry, and it may be true, although it has never been proved. If there were such inheritances, they controlled and aided the first efforts to satisfy needs. Analogy makes it easy to assume that the ways of beasts had produced channels of habit and predisposition along which dexterities and other psychophysical activities would run easily. Experiments with newborn animals show that in the absence of any experience of the relation of means to ends, efforts to satisfy needs are clumsy and blundering. The method is that of trial and failure, which produces repeated pain, loss, and disappointments. Nevertheless, it is a method of rude experiment and selection.

The earliest efforts of men were of this kind. Need was the impelling force. Pleasure and pain, on the one side and the other, were the rude constraints which defined the line on which efforts must proceed. The ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain is the only psychical power which is to be assumed. Thus ways of doing things were selected, which were expedient. They answered the purpose better than other ways, or with less toil and pain. Along the course on which efforts were compelled to go, habit, routine, and skill were developed. The struggle to maintain existence was carried on, not individually, but in groups. Each profited by the other's experience; hence there was concurrence towards that which proved to be most expedient. All at last adopted the same way for the same purpose; hence the ways turned into customs and became mass phenomena. Instincts were developed in connection with them. In this way folkways arise. The young learn them by tradition, imitation, and authority. The folkways, at a time, provide for all the needs of life then and there. They are uniform, universal in the group, imperative, and invariable.

As time goes on, the folkways become more and more arbitrary, positive, and imperative. If asked why they act in a certain way in certain cases, primitive people always answer that it is because they and their ancestors always have done so. A sanction also arises from ghost fear. The ghosts of ancestors would be angry if the living should change the ancient folkways (see sec. 6).

+2. The folkways are a societal force.+ The operation by which folkways are produced consists in the frequent repetition of petty acts, often by great numbers acting in concert or, at least, acting in the same way when face to face with the same need. The immediate motive is interest. It produces habit in the individual and custom in the group. It is, therefore, in the highest degree original and primitive. By habit and custom it exerts a strain on every individual within its range; therefore it rises to a societal force to which great classes of societal phenomena are due. Its earliest stages, its course, and laws may be studied; also its influence on individuals and their reaction on it. It is our present purpose so to study it. We have to recognize it as one of the chief forces by which a society is made to be what it is. Out of the unconscious experiment which every repetition of the ways includes, there issues pleasure or pain, and then, so far as the men are capable of reflection, convictions that the ways are conducive to societal welfare. These two experiences are not the same. The most uncivilized men, both in the food quest and in war, do things which are painful, but which have been found to be expedient. Perhaps these cases teach the sense of social welfare better than those which are pleasurable and favorable to welfare. The former cases call for some intelligent reflection on experience. When this conviction as to the relation to welfare is added to the folkways they are converted into mores, and, by virtue of the philosophical and ethical element added to them, they win utility and importance and become the source of the science and the art of living.

+3. Folkways are made unconsciously.+ It is of the first importance to notice that, from the first acts by which men try to satisfy needs, each act stands by itself, and looks no further than the immediate satisfaction. From recurrent needs arise habits for the individual and customs for the group, but these results are consequences which were never conscious, and never foreseen or intended. They are not noticed until they have long existed, and it is still longer before they are appreciated. Another long time must pass, and a higher stage of mental development must be reached, before they can be used as a basis from which to deduce rules for meeting, in the future, problems whose pressure can be foreseen. The folkways, therefore, are not creations of human purpose and wit.

They are like products of natural forces which men unconsciously set in operation, or they are like the instinctive ways of animals, which are developed out of experience, which reach a final form of maximum adaptation to an interest, which are handed down by tradition and admit of no exception or variation, yet change to meet new conditions, still within the same limited methods, and without rational reflection or purpose. From this it results that all the life of human beings, in all ages and stages of culture, is primarily controlled by a vast mass of folkways handed down from the earliest existence of the race, having the nature of the ways of other animals, only the topmost layers of which are subject to change and control, and have been somewhat modified by human philosophy, ethics, and religion, or by other acts of intelligent reflection. We are told of savages that "It is difficult to exhaust the customs and small ceremonial usages of a savage people. Custom regulates the whole of a man's actions,--his bathing, washing, cutting his hair, eating, drinking, and fasting. From his cradle to his grave he is the slave of ancient usage.

In his life there is nothing free, nothing original, nothing spontaneous, no progress towards a higher and better life, and no attempt to improve his condition, mentally, morally, or spiritually." All men act in this way with only a little wider margin of voluntary variation.