Social Psychology
Chapter 15: Relation of Custom Imitation to Conventionality Imitation
Edward Alsworth Ross
Table of Contents | Next | Previous
1. There is a contrast between societies in respect to the relative power Of custom and conventionality.
Profound contrast between a traditional and an untraditional society
In Some Societies "old" equals "beloved." Nihil I mihi antiquius est said Cicero, meaning " Nothing is dearer time." In China "my elder brother" and "How old you look!" are forms of greeting. In such societies status, n competition, determines men's relations. Social consideration depends on one's birth. Religion is usually ancestor worship, in any case, tribal, exclusive, and non-proselyting. The hereditary principle prevails in government and priesthood, perhaps even in occupations. The family is patriarchal and the patria potestas is well-nigh unlimited. Local customary law prevails. The language differentiates into local and class dialects. Duties are more emphasized than rights. Morality imposes upon the individual sacrifices in view of certain permanent wants of his walled-in group - his family, tribe, city, canton, or country. Respect for old age, faithfulness to blood revenge, and feudal loyalty are resplendent virtues.
In other societies (as in the United States to-day) the watchwords are " progress ... .. enlightenment," "the age." The cant commendations are "brand new," " up-to-date," "latest and best," "new blood." No phrase is so damning as "behind the times." Society is individualistic and
(276) competitive. Rights are more emphasized than duties. The spirit is cosmopolitan. Familism, clannishness, and Chauvinistic patriotism are considered "narrow." Pretensions founded on family, or the worthiness of some ancestor, are laughed at. Social grading is on the basis of some present fact -money, efficiency, achievement education, or character. Language grows by incorporating terms which make their début as slang. Customary law is supplemented by legislation. The patriarchate dissolves. Religion proselytes. Philanthropy is honored. Morality summons the individual to sacrifice himself for certain wide interests - the public, humanity, posterity, race elevation. Its sanction is not divine command, but public opinion, honor, and self-respect.
2. In the life history of a society there are alternating epochs of outlook and backlook, of "our time" and "our country."
A society oscillates between nationalism and cosmopolitanism
These give us alternations of "breaking" and subsoiling, of expansion and deepening, of innovation and pause, of the rule of the Liberals and the rule of the Tories. France, in the last half of the eighteenth century, was all outlook, infatuated with classic, English, and American political models; now, with her cult of Joan of Arc and of Napoleon, her glance is backward. Germany was cosmopolitan in tone under Frederick the Great and his successors, but after 18o6 (Fichte, Stein, Hardenberg), and again after 1870, backlook supervened. In American society there has been a great deal of outlook, but, since the series of Centennial celebrations (1875-1889), there has been a certain backlook showing itself in the revival of historical studies, in the formation of hereditary patriotic societies, and in the dread of " drifting away from the
(277) ancient landmarks." In Japan an epoch of wholesale borrowing has been followed by backlook, while China, after long rusting in her bearings, is just beginning to mould herself after foreign models. After an epoch of cosmopolitanism, and reform on the basis of foreign example, a nation seems to experience a certain decay in the forces of social control. Law, religion, and morality suffer, and signs of disintegration in the form of rampant individualism or bitter class antagonism appear; thereupon there is an instinctive turning to and brooding over the past in the futile hope of recovering thereby solidarity and moral health.
3. In times, in circles, and in matters, where custom imitation rules, new things try to appear old.
When age lends prestige, the new pretends to be old
In early society, adoption of an outsider into the family was disguised as sonship, and naturalization into the tribe was the feigning of kinship. just as Menelik, " King of kings" of Abyssinia, claims descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, so the successful Germanic warrior king felt obliged to acquire an aristocratic pedigree. Says Jenks: [1] "Leaders like Clovis, and Theodoric, and Alaric, and Egbert. . . . began to buttress up their authority by appeals to other sanctions (than military prestige). One of the most skilful of these appeals was the appropriation by the kings of the character and attributes of the tribal chief whom they had conquered or dispossessed. It is possible that, in a few cases, they were really and truly, members of tribal aristocracies, though probably not of the aristocracies of the tribes whom they had conquered. In most cases, they were simply adventurers who had obtained their positions by sheer
(278) hard fighting. But they soon, by a series of fictions which could only have been accepted in a simple age, persuaded their subjects that they really were members of the ancient families whom they had overcome. The pedigree of an early European king generally led up to some well-known Hero who had long been regarded with reverence as a mythical ancestor of the tribe or tribes over which he was ruling."
Legal fictions
In the same vein Napoleon, finding mere efficiency no solid basis for his rule, summoned the Pope from Rome to anoint him Emperor, received the acclamations of his army in the iron chair of Dagobert, held court at Aachen, first capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and in Milan crowned himself king of Italy with the Iron Crown of Charlemagne. Jesus represents himself as the "fulfilling of the Law," the Messiah. St. Paul in his epistle to the Romans endeavors to establish a sympathetic bond between Jewish law and Christianity. New legal principles masquerade as old ones. Maine[2] shows that both English Case-Law and the Roman Responsa Prudentum rest on fictions, and adds: "It is not difficult to understand why fictions in all their forms are particularly congenial to the infancy of society. They satisfy the desire for improvement, which is not quite wanting, at the same time that they do not offend the superstitious disrelish for change which is always present. At a particular stage of social progress they are invaluable expedients for overcoming the rigidity of law and, indeed, without one of them, the fiction of Adoption, which permits the family tie to be artificially created, it is difficult to understand how society would ever have escaped from its swaddling clothes, an
(279) taken its first steps towards civilization." Of the Barbarian Codes Jenks observes:[3] "Written custom cannot be altered imperceptibly; it is always possible to point to the exact text, and show what it says. Nevertheless customs must alter in a progressive society; and so it was necessary to have successive editions of the written Codes, as in fact happen. Thus people came gradually to accept the idea that custom could be altered; and occasionally they even allowed the king, by way of bargain or agreement, to introduce certain deliberate alterations. No doubt a good many more alterations were secretly slipped in by the royal scribes who drew up the Codes."
English liberties held as an inheritance
Gallic logic recognizes the new for what it is, but in England every great political reform has posed as a hark back to the "ancient liberties" of the much-overworked Magna Charta. Says Burke:[4] "We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity. . . . You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him to Blackstone, are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. They endeavor to prove that the ancient charter, the Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another positive charter from Henry I, and that both the one and the other were nothing more than a re-affirmance of the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom. . . . In the famous
(280) law called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, 'Your subjects have inherited this freedom,, claiming their franchises, not on abstract principles as the 'rights of men,' but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers. . . . You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors. . . . By this means our liberty becomes noble freedom, it carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men, -on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended."
Thanks to our rigid Constitution, the powers that enable the Federal government to cope with difficulties beyond the ken or foresight of the fathers cannot be granted by the present will of the people. We expect our judges to draw them out of the Constitution as a juggler draws rabbits out of a hat.
(281)
Columbus found it useless to urge his idea of the rotundity of the earth unless he could prove it to be old. Filmer in his Patriarcha sought to ground the authority of Charles II on the authority granted by Jehovah to the patriarchs of the Old Testament! Rousseau appealed to an imaginary "state of nature" in justification of his political ideals. The French revolutionaries found warrant for their acts in the history of Athens and Sparta. Henry George made much of primitive land-holding policy in urging his single-tax reform. The Mussulman sect of Wahabees poses as a return to primitive Islam, just as sect after sect of Protestants has proclaimed itself a restoration of Apostolic Christianity. Theosophy aims to be impressive by surrounding itself with the glamour of hoary Hindu antiquity. A Methodist convert to Darwinism seeks to commend the doctrine to his brethren by proving John Wesley to be an evolutionist. It was, again, the dread of newness that made Charles 11 claim the reign of Cromwell as part of his own and Louis XVIII, in 1814, date his earliest state papers " in the nineteenth year of our reign.
4. In times, in circles, and in matters, where conventionality imitation rules, the old tries to appear new.
When novelty lend prestige, the old pretends to be new
In our own society the new has unusual prestige, and hence the old hides her gray locks with a wig and decks out her withered countenance with the finery of youth. Aristocracy pretends to find its scientific vindication in the Darwinian doctrine of natural inequality and survival of the fittest. The truth is, of course, that privilege suspends for its darlings that very struggle for existence which conduces to the survival of the fittest. Defenders of the ecclesiastical "prohibited degrees" -within which mar-
(282) -riage will not be solemnized - justify their anachronism by citing facts on the evils of in-and-in breeding; whereas union with a deceased wife's sister is not in-and-in breeding at all. Sabbatarianism eagerly identifies its "holy day 'I with the "day of rest " that social science finds to be necessary for the well-being of toilers. Divines pretend that the mystical transmission of Adam's guilt to all his descendants is confirmed by the modern investigations into heredity. Exploitive imperialism arrogates to itself the support of sociology, and talks finely about a " civilizing mission" and " the duty of the higher races to the lower." A brutal selfishness as old as the Ice Age struts about in phrases borrowed from the Darwinists, and bids us see in the prosperity of the wicked the Success of the Adapted!
The confirmation of dogma by "science"
Even the dogma of the Immaculate Conception finds countenance in the "latest science." Fiske [5] gives a specimen of Rev. Joseph Cook's manner of vindicating orthodoxy. "According to Mr. Cook, Professor Huxley says: 'Throughout almost the whole series of living beings, we find agamogenesis, or not-sexual generation.' After a pause, Mr. Cook proceeded in a lower voice: 'When the topic of the origin of the life of our Lord on the earth is approached from the point of view of the microscope, some men, who know not what the holy of holies in physical and religious science is, say that we have no example of the origin of life without two parents.' He went on to cite the familiar instances of parthenogenesis in bees and silk moths, and then proceeded as follows: 'Take up your Mivart, your Lyell, your Owen, and you will read [where ?] this same important fact which Huxley here asserts, when he says that the law that perfect individuals may be virginally
(283) born extends to the higher forms of life. 1 am in the presence of Almighty God; and yet, when a great soul like that tender spirit of our sainted Lincoln, in his early days, with little knowledge but with great thoughtfulness, was troubled by this difficulty, and almost thrown into infidelity by not knowing that the law that there must be two parents is not universal, I am willing to allude, even in such a presence as this, to the latest science concerning miraculous conception.' (Sensation.)"
The old denies the newness of the new
If, however, the old cannot assume the guise of youth, it strives to discredit the new by making it out to be old. Fromundus in his "Ant-Aristarchus" pretends that the discovery of Copernicus is only the exploded theory of a Pagan philosopher. The doctrine of evolution is declared to be merely "a rehash of Lucretius." The conclusions of the Higher Critics of the Scriptures are dismissed as an "old heresy" that has been disposed of again and again. The agnosticism of the modern scientific man is assimilated to the Athenian worship of "the Unknown God." The philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer is waved aside as only a current version of the pessimism of the author of the book of Ecclesiastes. Collectivists are refuted by reciting Aristotle's critique of Plato's communal republic. Extension of state activity is represented as a revival of the régime by which the Incas exploited the subject Peruvians. Contemporary divorce, which is chiefly at the instance of the woman, is identified with ancient divorce, which was at the instance of the man and wrought the degradation of woman.
(284)
SUMMARY
It makes a profound difference in the characteristics of a society whether its members imitate in the longitudinal plane or the transverse plane.
There is a swing of the pendulum between the cosmopolitan spirit and the spirit of tradition.
When the spirit of custom rules, every innovation seeks to commend itself by feigning age and pedigree.
When the liberal spirit reigns, every hoary dogma or institution strives to furnish up-to-date reasons and support.
If it cannot do so, it tries to discredit its antagonist by making it out to be old and passe.
EXERCISES
1. What doctrines are most helpful to a proselyting religion ?
2. Show that in large societies socialization is much more complete if conventionality rules than if custom rules.
3. Contrast the effects of foreign war and of civil war upon the spirit of tradition.
4. What are the disadvantages of the way of deriving popular liberties recommended by Burke?
5. Why is easy amendment better than spurious interpretation as a means of making a written constitution elastic?
6. Should the divorce problem be settled by Biblical texts? If not, what should settle it?
7. Why does lawless love now call itself an " affinity " ?
