Social customs

“ The same may be said of social customs, including habitations, dress, arms, food, as well as ceremonies, beliefs, and laws, in themselves fascinating subjects of study, placed here in the fourth rank, not as possessing any want of interest, but as contributing comparatively little to our knowledge of the natural classification and affinities of the racial divisions of man. ”

“ Though unconsciously, the man conforming Page 420 to a custom is considering his fellows, and the values and traditions which have become current among them.
Customs, moreover, are the first invasion of moral chaos. They establish enduring standards; they give common and permanent bases of action. ”

“ THE ORIGIN AND THE PERSISTENCE OF CUSTOMS.—From the fact that customs are, in general, to be regarded as expressions of the social will, it might be assumed that their purposive character and social utility should be a sufficient explanation of their coming into being. But the matter is not so simple. A man may fall into habits which are no indication of what he regards as useful to him. ”

“ It is only through the establishment and transmission of customary standards that one generation is in any way superior to its predecessors. Customs, in civilized life, include all the established effective ways of civilization, its arts, its sciences, its industries, and its useful modes of coöperation. ”

“ Forms of organization are handed down to successive generations by the same social tradition that transmits customs of every description.
Customs are public habits which are, on the whole, approved by a community. They are ways of acting which are regarded as normal and proper. Where the authority of custom is evoked, pressure is brought to bear upon the individual to adjust himself to the will of the community.
A community, like an individual, may have habits which it does not approve. ”

“ The high development of the individual culminating in powerful personality has been an exceptional occurrence, due to special circumstances. A communal social order, often repressing and invariably failing to evoke the higher human faculties, must express its real nature in the language, literature, and customs of the people. ”

“ Markets, manners, customs, habits, opinions, faiths are brought under this all pervading control. Our industrial processes, our social usages, our religious creeds are all subject to the same law of influence and variation. ”

“ The relations of social life, and the duties resulting from them, must be the same at all times and in all nations: some petty differences may be, indeed, produced, by forms of government or arbitrary customs ”

“ And from this basis the origin of institutions and customs, political, religious, and industrial, is traced. In developing these various customs and institutions, along with the corresponding sentiments, the course of social evolution has had the effect of gradually bringing out and cultivating those feelings and tendencies in the individual which promote the welfare of the organism, while other individual tendencies, hostile to social welfare, have been repressed. ”

“ When we are dealing with customs it is well to remember that customs superficially alike may spring from quite different social organizations, and their real intentions may be divergent or even opposite: in short, they may have nothing in common but external resemblance. ”

“ The varieties of social expression in these ancient customs is witness alike to economic pressure, the effect of climate and immigration, political struggle and the institutions of war and of private property. ”

“ But side by side with these customs, necessary to the life of societies and the preservation of the race, other desires, other passions, and therefore other habits and customs, are evolved in human associations. ”

“ What contribution has western civilization made to human nature, to human society and to mother nature, and what further contribution can it make in the foreseeable future?
Individuals, born or reared in any form of society are adjusted, shaped and conditioned by the social pattern of which they are a part. Each society attempts to stamp the individuals with its own image and likeness. ”

“ Through such social processes as these—through unconscious suggestion, through communication and discussion that mould public opinion, through changes in environment and the influence of new leaders of thought and action—the evolution of folk life has carried whole races, sometimes to oblivion, but generally out of savagery and barbarism into a material and cultural civilization. ”

“ The social history of this sturdy people offers us a very clear-cut example of what really makes a society or a nation. Not mountains, not dynasties, not blood, but common interests, common traditions, common beliefs; in short, mental community. ”

“ The economic conditions—which are the resultant of the ethnical energies and aptitudes acting in a given physical environment—are the determining basis of all the moral, juridical and political phenomenal manifestations of human life, both individual and social. ”

“ In any large community we may see, as between different classes and groups, differences of the same kind as those which exist between communities which we speak of as differing in civilization—differences of knowledge, belief, customs, tastes, and speech, which in their extremes show among people of the same race, living in the same country, differences almost as great as those between civilized and savage communities. ”

“ How impressive to watch its cosmopolitan life, to note the exaggerated love of pleasure exhibited on all hands, the devotion of each active member of the community to money-making, the artificial manners and customs so widely prevailing, the iniquitous pursuits of the desperate and dangerous classes, and the ripe aptitude of their too willing victims! ”

“ The attainment of a high cultural civilization demands, first, the ideal type of citizen and, then, ideal and adequate social mechanisms wherewith such a citizenry may control the economic and political institutions of such an advanced human society. ”

“ The direct result of these primitive human instincts, as they may be called, of division and exchange of the products of labour was to extend among mankind a material and social comity, apart from all tribal or political relations, from which sprung, as on a solid base or framework, the fair but often frail fabric of civilization, arts, sciences, letters, philosophy, religion—all that gives grace and dignity to humanity. ”

“ I cordially subscribe to the remark of one of the greatest thinkers of our time, who says of the supposed differences of race, ‘of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.’ Mill's Principles of Political Economy, vol. ”

“ It is that which is handed on by tradition and forms the mould into which each new mind is cast as it grows up. Thus, while for society it is custom, for the individual it has something of the force of habit and more than habit." [2] I seek to show that in this small area, where with all its diversity of custom there is substantial homogeneity of culture, the end which these rites serve is often consciously realised as a social end, beneficial to them as organised communities. ”

“ Even as they all, whether traveling in Pullman, private car, or emigrant train, passed over the same rails, so they all, in whatever class they traveled on the road of Life, were guided by the Traditions—the established customs—the fixed habits—that are common to their race or nation. And the strength of a people, as a people, is in this oneness—this force that makes them one—the Traditions and customs and habits of life that are common to all. It is the fences of the family dooryards that hold the children of men together and make the people of a race or nation one. ”

“ These are, in whole nations, as in individuals, but the conduct, or general system of will and action which necessarily results from their education, their government, their laws, their religious opinions, their wise or foolish institutions. In short, manners and customs are the habits of nations; good when they produce solid and true happiness for society, and detestable in the eyes of reason, in spite of the sanction of laws, usage, religion, public opinion or example, when they have the support only of habit and prejudice, which seldom consult experience and good sense. ”

“ For the inference is plain that, if the progress of the race in intellectual culture and in social organization is attended with a certain moral development in some particulars of conduct more distinctly than in others, there must be reasons for this difference, and most likely they will be found in some bearing which the one process of culture has upon the other. ”

“ Using the word ‘tradition’ in the wide sense just now indicated, the traditions of a people may be said to include the recognised social organisation of the whole people into classes, castes, clans, phratries, or groups of any kind, whose relations to one another and whose place in the national system are determined by law, custom and conventions of various kinds. ”

“ Society is something like that of North American cities, for the lines between classes are not sharply drawn, and the spirit of social equality has gone further than in France, and, of course, far further than in Germany or Spain. ”

“ How far is occupation, rather than association, responsible for the mental attitude and moral predilections? Do men in the same profession or trade, but representing different nationalities and different cultural groups, hold characteristic and identical opinions? To what extent is the social or political creed, that is, socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, etc., determined by occupation? by temperament? To what extent have social doctrine and social idealism superseded and taken the place of religious faith in the different occupations, and why? ”

“ Even in speaking of levels of culture we may do so only with the reservation that each level in its turn includes within it a large number of separate forms of culture, of numerous sorts and gradations. Moreover, the external culture, reflected in dress and habitation, in personal decoration, in implements and weapons, in food and its preparation, does not in the least parallel the social phenomena represented by tribal organization, marriage relations, and forms of rulership. ”

“ Now this known diversity of character is the distributing social force among people in this world, whereby they are arranged into different groups or societies. In general, different races and nationalities do not incline to associate. But Africans prefer the society of Africans; Chinamen the society of Chinese; English. French. Germans, Italians, etc., the society of those of their own nation. And for this obvious reason: that people of the same nation are usually most alike in their tastes, habits and feelings; and people everywhere prefer the society of those who are most like themselves. ”

“ All I wish to enforce is, that the three common causes of the social and moral differences of individuals are to be found in race, organization, and circumstances—that none of us are entirely proof against the influence of these three conditions—the ethnological, the physiological, and the associative elements of our idiosincracy. ”

“ There I agree with you; in the present high state of civilization there will be found little or no difference in the manners and customs of people; in the courts, none; very little in the best society, in which you will of course mix; and not so very much as people may imagine among the mass of population ”

“ If we thus set apart for consideration under a distinct head the evolution of social organisation, the rest of the body of national traditions may be said to constitute the civilisation of a people. For the civilisation of a people at any time is essentially the sum of the moral and intellectual traditions that are living and operative among them at that particular time. ”

“ But believe me, dear reader, the times and the country, the climate and the water, do make very great difference in the notions which obtain regarding customs, and even morals,—ay, morals. Half the morals in the world are made by society,—and all the customs. ”

“ A fourth collective goal of civilization has been the establishment and maintenance of social structure, including classes and/or caste lines based partly upon tradition, partly on function and partly upon proximity to the honey-pot, the wellspring of wealth, income, prestige and power. ”

“ Furthermore, as a part of this common life, there grows up a body of custom, convention, tradition, ceremonial, language, social ritual, public opinion, in short all that Sumner includes under the term "mores" and all that ethnologists include under the term "culture." ”

“ We gain knowledge of the forms of socialization by bringing together inductively the manifestations of these forms which have had actual historical existence. In other words we have to collect and exhibit that element of form which these historical manifestations have in common, abstracted from the variety of material—economical, ethical, ecclesiastical, social, political, etc.—with respect to which they differ. ”

“ Or, similarly, another author might take political institutions, or perhaps economic conditions—i.e., wealth, labour, capital, commerce, or, again, the fundamental social institutions, such as the family, and the relations of the ranks and classes in a community, and build up round one or other of these manifestations and embodiments of the creative energy of mankind the general story of man’s movement from barbarism to civilisation. ”

“ That each society, small or great, necessarily weaves for itself a web of knowledge, beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions, and laws. Into this web, woven by each society, or rather, into these webs, for each community above the simplest is made up of minor societies, which overlap and interlace each other, the individual is received at birth and continues until his death. ”