Structural Disconnect from the Adult World
Throughout most of human history in most societies, the lives of youth were closely integrated into the world of adults. One need not hold a romanticized view of “traditional society” to see that, in premodern social settings lacking modernity’s radical splits between public and private, production and consumption, education and work, at relatively early ages youth typically were important contributors to the tasks of survival and economic production. They participated in herding, gathering foods, planting, irrigating, and harvesting, hunting, fishing, fending off predators, running errands, transporting and selling goods, assisting in crafts, caring for animals, and much more. Children and youth were also tightly integrated into the workings of domestic life of families, clans, tribes, villages. Early on in life they took on such responsibilities as tending fires, food preparation and cooking, spinning and weaving, childcare, the construction of shelter, and the disposal of wastes. As recently as 175 years ago, for better or worse, many American boys at the age of 12 were sent away from their families to become apprentices working long days under the eyes of craft masters in whose homes they lived out their teenage years. The days of most American girls at that age, if not younger, consisted of helping older women accomplish household chores and perhaps, in certain times and places, taking in some home-based book learning. Young people in many cultures have often carved out for themselves some minimal degree of distance from the adult world. But the much more striking reality is that the lives of most youth in all but recent generations have generally been closely involved in the productive activities of and supervised by the watchful eyes of adults.
All of that was profoundly changed by the Industrial Revolution and the rapid technological and social transformations that followed in its wake. America’s nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution separated work from home, production from consumption, and public from private life. In larger, related processes, domestic nurture was differentiated from national economic advance, and the education of youth was increasingly formalized and detached from household life. In the early Industrial Revolution, many children and teenage boys and girls worked long hours in the factory under the foreman’s discipline. In due time, however, economic production by youth increasingly came to be viewed, often rightly, as pernicious and exploitative child labor, which was gradually suppressed by social reforms. Throughout, childhood and adolescence were being culturally redefined as particular developmental phases of life profoundly different from adulthood.
Further social changes in the twentieth century accelerated the structural disconnection of youth’s lives from the adult world. The invention of the automobile provided teenagers with a mobility and privacy they had never known before. Commercial movie theaters, dance halls, and other entertainment centers had similar effects. Most important of all, however, was the near complete institutionalization of universal public education. In fact, it was not until the 1930s that the majority of American youth of high school age became school students. Comprehensive national child labor laws were finally put into effect in 1934, and state and local governments made major efforts to get youth into schools. This new crackdown on truancy was fueled in part by the need prompted by the Great Depression to remove youth from the labor force so they would not compete with adult men for scarce jobs. With little work to be done, mandatory schooling for teenagers became a means to keep youth off the streets and from being drawn into “hobo jungles” and other worrisome places and activities.
Throughout most of human history in most societies, the lives of youth were closely integrated into the world of adults. One need not hold a romanticized view of “traditional society” to see that, in premodern social settings lacking modernity’s radical splits between public and private, production and consumption, education and work, at relatively early ages youth typically were important contributors to the tasks of survival and economic production. They participated in herding, gathering foods, planting, irrigating, and harvesting, hunting, fishing, fending off predators, running errands, transporting and selling goods, assisting in crafts, caring for animals, and much more. Children and youth were also tightly integrated into the workings of domestic life of families, clans, tribes, villages. Early on in life they took on such responsibilities as tending fires, food preparation and cooking, spinning and weaving, childcare, the construction of shelter, and the disposal of wastes. As recently as 175 years ago, for better or worse, many American boys at the age of 12 were sent away from their families to become apprentices working long days under the eyes of craft masters in whose homes they lived out their teenage years. The days of most American girls at that age, if not younger, consisted of helping older women accomplish household chores and perhaps, in certain times and places, taking in some home-based book learning. Young people in many cultures have often carved out for themselves some minimal degree of distance from the adult world. But the much more striking reality is that the lives of most youth in all but recent generations have generally been closely involved in the productive activities of and supervised by the watchful eyes of adults.
All of that was profoundly changed by the Industrial Revolution and the rapid technological and social transformations that followed in its wake. America’s nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution separated work from home, production from consumption, and public from private life. In larger, related processes, domestic nurture was differentiated from national economic advance, and the education of youth was increasingly formalized and detached from household life. In the early Industrial Revolution, many children and teenage boys and girls worked long hours in the factory under the foreman’s discipline. In due time, however, economic production by youth increasingly came to be viewed, often rightly, as pernicious and exploitative child labor, which was gradually suppressed by social reforms. Throughout, childhood and adolescence were being culturally redefined as particular developmental phases of life profoundly different from adulthood.
Further social changes in the twentieth century accelerated the structural disconnection of youth’s lives from the adult world. The invention of the automobile provided teenagers with a mobility and privacy they had never known before. Commercial movie theaters, dance halls, and other entertainment centers had similar effects. Most important of all, however, was the near complete institutionalization of universal public education. In fact, it was not until the 1930s that the majority of American youth of high school age became school students. Comprehensive national child labor laws were finally put into effect in 1934, and state and local governments made major efforts to get youth into schools. This new crackdown on truancy was fueled in part by the need prompted by the Great Depression to remove youth from the labor force so they would not compete with adult men for scarce jobs. With little work to be done, mandatory schooling for teenagers became a means to keep youth off the streets and from being drawn into “hobo jungles” and other worrisome places and activities.
A mere 70 years ago, then, the majority of teenagers were for the first time in history gathered up together for most of the day, for most days of the week, with relatively few adults around to supervise and intervene into the details of their lives. Mass schooling was the perfect incubator for a new, distinctive youth culture, which blossomed in the following decades. The word “teen-ager” was coined during WWII, and by 1945 it had become a widely used label naming a cultural reality newly come into being. Postwar prosperity, a widespread perceived “return” to the traditional nuclear family, and the desire of the Depression- and war-weary parents to provide their children all the good things they had never enjoyed provided the resources and attitudes further enhancing adolescents’ free time, mobility and privacy—in short, autonomy from adults. Peer groups now become significant new and powerful sources of knowledge and influence in the lives of youth, competing with parents and other adults in teenagers’ socialization. The postwar GI Bill also helped rapidly to expand American higher education, further postponing entry into the adult world for millions of young college students and further fostering the evolution of a distinct American youth subculture. By the 1960s, the civil rights, student, free speech, and anti-war movements—in all of which youth played major roles—signified new levels of youth independence from the control of the adult world. The trend continued. Macroeconomic changes after 1970 accelerated the entry of women, including mothers of adolescents, into the paid labor force. The no-fault divorce revolution of the 1970s and other social forces significantly increased the number of single-parent households in which teenagers lived. These and other related factors left youth increasingly on their own, both alone and with other youth, for growing numbers of hours of the day and night. The high degree of youth autonomy has become the normalized reality for very many adolescents among working poor, middle-class, and upper-middle-class families alike.
Interacting with this structural disconnect is our society’s cultural construction of adolescence as an incredibly long wait for full participation in genuine adulthood. In American culture adolescence can begin at age 10, 11, or 12; at the latest, official teenage status begins at age 13. On the other end, many youth do not pass the symbolic cultural markers of full adulthood—school graduation, full-time work, financial independence, marriage—until the age of 18, 22, 25, or, for some, even in their late 20s and early 30s. Thus, American youth live for between five and 20 years in a kind of socially constructed developmental limbo, ever waiting, delaying, anticipating, preparing for the day when they will take on and enjoy the freedoms and responsibilities of being real grown-ups. The cultural message to youth is that they are not mature or prepared enough to enter the adult world and so must continue for years to wait, even as other powerful, contradictory messages implore them to act fully responsibly, be self-directed, and make very good choices as individual decision makers. Furthermore, even as improved nutrition (and perhaps the increased use of hormones in some farm products) lowered the age of the onset of puberty by about three years during the twentieth century, extended educational expectations, career startup requirements, and increasing lifestyle consumption expectations postponed the average age of marriage for young men and women from the years 1950 and 2000 by an extra four to five years. Part of adolescents’ incredibly long wait, then, involves the tension of being psychologically able and hormonally very interested in activities that make babies, while normally lacking the emotional, relational, and financial capacity to parent babies.
Interacting with this structural disconnect is our society’s cultural construction of adolescence as an incredibly long wait for full participation in genuine adulthood. In American culture adolescence can begin at age 10, 11, or 12; at the latest, official teenage status begins at age 13. On the other end, many youth do not pass the symbolic cultural markers of full adulthood—school graduation, full-time work, financial independence, marriage—until the age of 18, 22, 25, or, for some, even in their late 20s and early 30s. Thus, American youth live for between five and 20 years in a kind of socially constructed developmental limbo, ever waiting, delaying, anticipating, preparing for the day when they will take on and enjoy the freedoms and responsibilities of being real grown-ups. The cultural message to youth is that they are not mature or prepared enough to enter the adult world and so must continue for years to wait, even as other powerful, contradictory messages implore them to act fully responsibly, be self-directed, and make very good choices as individual decision makers. Furthermore, even as improved nutrition (and perhaps the increased use of hormones in some farm products) lowered the age of the onset of puberty by about three years during the twentieth century, extended educational expectations, career startup requirements, and increasing lifestyle consumption expectations postponed the average age of marriage for young men and women from the years 1950 and 2000 by an extra four to five years. Part of adolescents’ incredibly long wait, then, involves the tension of being psychologically able and hormonally very interested in activities that make babies, while normally lacking the emotional, relational, and financial capacity to parent babies.
Adult American culture, working through the media, schools, and other institutions, thus sends its youth the conflicting messages that sex is one of the greatest and most important experiences in life, that youth should abstain from sex until marriage, that boys will be boys (and, increasingly, that girls will be girls) and cannot be expected as teens not to party wildly, that youth should practice “safe” and “responsible sex,” and so on. The wait is therefore not only incredibly long but often very confusing. The larger situation this can create for many youth is a widespread gnawing relentlessness and frustration, underlying tension with parents over continually renegotiating boundaries of freedom and responsibility, and sometimes a feeling of uselessness and inertia. Teenagers are forever waiting, continually preparing, perpetually coming of age, and are meanwhile for the most part socially superfluous. Thus, they experience a disconnect from the adult world not only in the structures of their routine activities and schedules, but also through the many years of limbo through which they must hang in suspension before passing into full-fledged adulthood.
The degree to which specific, individual adolescents today are connected to or disconnected from the adult world is of course highly variable. Some American teens do have close ties to many adults. But viewed in broad historical perspective, contemporary teenage autonomy from adults is unprecedented and astounding. Significant numbers of teens today live their lives with little but the most distant adult direction and oversight. They spend the greater part of most weekdays in schools surrounded almost exclusively by their peers. Their parents are working and otherwise busy. Members of their extended families live in distant cities. Their teachers are largely preoccupied with discipline, classroom instruction, and grading. Their neighbors tend to stay out of each others’ business. These teens may have their own cars, cell phones, spending money, and televisions in their bedrooms. Or they may simply spend their free time hanging out with friends and associates at the mall, on the streets, at friends’ houses, or other places away from home. In any case, when school lets out, it may be hours before a parent gets home from work. If the teen works, his or her coworkers are mostly other teenagers who are also flipping burgers or working cash registers; their supervisors may be adults, but few teens have relationships with them beyond taking orders and collecting paychecks.
The structural disconnection of many contemporary American adolescents from the adult world has potential important ramifications for the character of their religious lives. If a teenager defines serious religion as mostly an adult affair, as many do, then religion comes automatically to feel distant to them, or something that they may “get into” someday when they are older, but not now; this feeds into the age-appropriate life course scripts mentioned in the previous chapter. Furthermore, when teenagers have little daily experience socializing with adults generally, they likely find it more difficult to form meaningful relational ties with members of their congregations who are not their peers. Some youth may demand religious expressions and experiences that resonate with the symbols, images, language, and practices of popular youth culture. This may, in turn, shape the religious programming that religious institutions offer to youth, potentially altering the texture of the religious tradition itself. In addition, our culture’s structural disconnect between youth and adults has fostered among some religious adults an insecurity about their ability to “relate to” youth, a lack of confidence in their capacity to teach and train youth well in matters of faith, a reluctance to speak to teenagers about spiritual or theological issues with direction and authority for fear of coming across as square, boring, or irrelevant to teenagers’ real lives, in which many adults are not very involved.
The degree to which specific, individual adolescents today are connected to or disconnected from the adult world is of course highly variable. Some American teens do have close ties to many adults. But viewed in broad historical perspective, contemporary teenage autonomy from adults is unprecedented and astounding. Significant numbers of teens today live their lives with little but the most distant adult direction and oversight. They spend the greater part of most weekdays in schools surrounded almost exclusively by their peers. Their parents are working and otherwise busy. Members of their extended families live in distant cities. Their teachers are largely preoccupied with discipline, classroom instruction, and grading. Their neighbors tend to stay out of each others’ business. These teens may have their own cars, cell phones, spending money, and televisions in their bedrooms. Or they may simply spend their free time hanging out with friends and associates at the mall, on the streets, at friends’ houses, or other places away from home. In any case, when school lets out, it may be hours before a parent gets home from work. If the teen works, his or her coworkers are mostly other teenagers who are also flipping burgers or working cash registers; their supervisors may be adults, but few teens have relationships with them beyond taking orders and collecting paychecks.
The structural disconnection of many contemporary American adolescents from the adult world has potential important ramifications for the character of their religious lives. If a teenager defines serious religion as mostly an adult affair, as many do, then religion comes automatically to feel distant to them, or something that they may “get into” someday when they are older, but not now; this feeds into the age-appropriate life course scripts mentioned in the previous chapter. Furthermore, when teenagers have little daily experience socializing with adults generally, they likely find it more difficult to form meaningful relational ties with members of their congregations who are not their peers. Some youth may demand religious expressions and experiences that resonate with the symbols, images, language, and practices of popular youth culture. This may, in turn, shape the religious programming that religious institutions offer to youth, potentially altering the texture of the religious tradition itself. In addition, our culture’s structural disconnect between youth and adults has fostered among some religious adults an insecurity about their ability to “relate to” youth, a lack of confidence in their capacity to teach and train youth well in matters of faith, a reluctance to speak to teenagers about spiritual or theological issues with direction and authority for fear of coming across as square, boring, or irrelevant to teenagers’ real lives, in which many adults are not very involved.
The Conditions of Civilization - Will Durant
Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
A people may possess ordered institutions, a lofty moral code, and even a flair for the minor forms of art, like the American Indians; and yet if it remains in the hunting stage, if it depends for its existence upon the precarious fortunes of the chase, it will never quite pass from barbarism to civilization. A nomad stock, like the Bedouins of Arabia, may be exceptionally intelligent and vigorous, it may display high qualities of character like courage, generosity and nobility; but without that simple sine qua non of culture, a continuity of food, its intelligence will be lavished on the perils of the hunt and the tricks of trade, and nothing will remain for the laces and frills, the curtsies and amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization. The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. Within that little circle of security-a reliable supply of water and food-he builds his huts, his temples and his schools; he invents productive tools, and domesticates the dog, the ass, the pig, at last himself. He learns to work with regularity and order, maintains a longer tenure of life, and transmits more completely than before the mental and moral heritage of his race.
Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city. In one aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city. For in the city are gathered, rightly or wrongly, the wealth and brains produced in the countryside; in the city invention and industry multiply comforts, luxuries and leisure; in the city traders meet, and barter goods and ideas; in that cross-fertilization of minds at the cross-roads of trade intelligence is sharpened and stimulated to creative power. In the city some men are set aside from the making of material things, and produce science and philosophy, literature and art. Civilization begins in the peasant's hut, but it comes to flower only in the towns.
There must be political order, even if it be so near to chaos as in Renaissance Florence or Rome; men must feel, by and large, that they need not look for death or taxes at every tum. There must be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange. Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life acknowledged even by those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity, some direction and stimulus. Perhaps there must also be some unity of basic belief, some faith, supernatural or utopian, that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity. And finally there must be education-some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe-its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts-must be handed down to
the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.
The disappearance of these conditions-sometimes of even one of them-may destroy a civilization.
Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
A people may possess ordered institutions, a lofty moral code, and even a flair for the minor forms of art, like the American Indians; and yet if it remains in the hunting stage, if it depends for its existence upon the precarious fortunes of the chase, it will never quite pass from barbarism to civilization. A nomad stock, like the Bedouins of Arabia, may be exceptionally intelligent and vigorous, it may display high qualities of character like courage, generosity and nobility; but without that simple sine qua non of culture, a continuity of food, its intelligence will be lavished on the perils of the hunt and the tricks of trade, and nothing will remain for the laces and frills, the curtsies and amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization. The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. Within that little circle of security-a reliable supply of water and food-he builds his huts, his temples and his schools; he invents productive tools, and domesticates the dog, the ass, the pig, at last himself. He learns to work with regularity and order, maintains a longer tenure of life, and transmits more completely than before the mental and moral heritage of his race.
Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city. In one aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city. For in the city are gathered, rightly or wrongly, the wealth and brains produced in the countryside; in the city invention and industry multiply comforts, luxuries and leisure; in the city traders meet, and barter goods and ideas; in that cross-fertilization of minds at the cross-roads of trade intelligence is sharpened and stimulated to creative power. In the city some men are set aside from the making of material things, and produce science and philosophy, literature and art. Civilization begins in the peasant's hut, but it comes to flower only in the towns.
There must be political order, even if it be so near to chaos as in Renaissance Florence or Rome; men must feel, by and large, that they need not look for death or taxes at every tum. There must be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange. Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life acknowledged even by those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity, some direction and stimulus. Perhaps there must also be some unity of basic belief, some faith, supernatural or utopian, that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity. And finally there must be education-some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe-its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts-must be handed down to
the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.
The disappearance of these conditions-sometimes of even one of them-may destroy a civilization.
A geological cataclysm or a profound climatic change; an uncontrolled epidemic like that which wiped out half the population of the Roman Empire under the Antonines, or the Black Death that helped to end the Feudal Age; the exhaustion of the land, or the ruin of agriculture through the exploitation of the country by the town, resulting in a precarious dependence upon foreign food supplies; the failure of natural resources, either of fuels or of raw materials; a change in trade routes, leaving a nation off the main line of the world's commerce; mental or moral decay from the strains, stimuli and contacts of urban life, from the breakdown of traditional sources of social discipline and the inability to replace them; the weakening of the stock by a disorderly sexual life, or by an epicurean, pessimist, or quietist philosophy; the decay of leadership through the infertility of the able, and the relative smallness of the families that might bequeath most fully the cultural inheritance of the race; a pathological concentration of wealth, leading to class wars, disruptive revolutions, and financial exhaustion: these are some of the ways in which a civilization may die. For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
Economic Organization
Trade was the great disturber of the primitive world, for until it came, bringing money and profit in its wake, there was no property, and therefore little government. In the early stages of economic development property was limited for the most part to things personally used; the property sense applied so strongly to such articles that they (even the wife) were often buried with their owner; it applied so weakly to things not personally used that in their case the sense of property, far from being innate, required perpetual reinforcement and inculcation.
Almost everywhere, among primitive peoples, land was owned by the community. The North American Indians, the natives of Peru, the Chittagong Hill tribes of India, the Borneans and South Sea Islanders seem to have owned and tilled the soil in common, and to have shared the fruits together. In Samoa the idea of selling land was unknown prior to the coming of the white man. Professor Rivers found communism in land still existing in Melanesia and Polynesia; and in inner Liberia it may be observed today.
Only less widespread was communism in food. It was usual among "savages" for the man who had food to share it with the man who had none, for travelers to be fed at any home they chose to stop at on their way, and for communities harassed with drought to be maintained by their neighbors. The hungry Indian had but to ask to receive; no matter how small the supply was, food was given him if he needed it. Among the Hottentots it was the custom for one who had more than others to share his surplus till all were equal. White travelers in Africa before the advent of civilization noted that a present of food or other valuables to a "black man" was at once distributed; so that when a suit of clothes was given to one of them the donor soon found the recipient wearing the hat, a friend the trousers, another friend the coat. The Eskimo hunter had no personal right to his catch; it had to be divided among the inhabitants of the village, and tools and provisions were the common property of all. The North American Indians were described by Captain Carver as "strangers to all distinctions of property, except in the articles of domestic use. They are extremely liberal to each other, and supply the deficiencies of their friends with any superfluity of their own." "What is extremely surprising," reports a missionary, "is to see them treat one another with a gentleness and consideration which one does not find among common people in the most civilized nations. This, doubtless, arises from the fact that the words 'mine' and 'thine,' which St. Chrysostom says extinguish in our hearts the fire of charity and kindle that of greed, are unknown to these savages. "I have seen them," says another observer, "divide game among themselves when they sometimes had many shares to make; and cannot recollect a single instance of their falling into a dispute or finding fault with the distribution as being unequal or otherwise objectionable. They look upon themselves as but one great family."
Why did this primitive communism disappear as men rose to what we, with some partiality, call civilization? Sumner believed that communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups. Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast as "so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon the expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce with them. Since the industrious thus enjoy no more of the fruits of their labor than the idle, they plant less every year.” Darwin thought that the perfect equality among the Fuegians was fatal to any hope of their becoming civilized; or, as the Fuegians might have put it, civilization would have been fatal to their equality.
Trade was the great disturber of the primitive world, for until it came, bringing money and profit in its wake, there was no property, and therefore little government. In the early stages of economic development property was limited for the most part to things personally used; the property sense applied so strongly to such articles that they (even the wife) were often buried with their owner; it applied so weakly to things not personally used that in their case the sense of property, far from being innate, required perpetual reinforcement and inculcation.
Almost everywhere, among primitive peoples, land was owned by the community. The North American Indians, the natives of Peru, the Chittagong Hill tribes of India, the Borneans and South Sea Islanders seem to have owned and tilled the soil in common, and to have shared the fruits together. In Samoa the idea of selling land was unknown prior to the coming of the white man. Professor Rivers found communism in land still existing in Melanesia and Polynesia; and in inner Liberia it may be observed today.
Only less widespread was communism in food. It was usual among "savages" for the man who had food to share it with the man who had none, for travelers to be fed at any home they chose to stop at on their way, and for communities harassed with drought to be maintained by their neighbors. The hungry Indian had but to ask to receive; no matter how small the supply was, food was given him if he needed it. Among the Hottentots it was the custom for one who had more than others to share his surplus till all were equal. White travelers in Africa before the advent of civilization noted that a present of food or other valuables to a "black man" was at once distributed; so that when a suit of clothes was given to one of them the donor soon found the recipient wearing the hat, a friend the trousers, another friend the coat. The Eskimo hunter had no personal right to his catch; it had to be divided among the inhabitants of the village, and tools and provisions were the common property of all. The North American Indians were described by Captain Carver as "strangers to all distinctions of property, except in the articles of domestic use. They are extremely liberal to each other, and supply the deficiencies of their friends with any superfluity of their own." "What is extremely surprising," reports a missionary, "is to see them treat one another with a gentleness and consideration which one does not find among common people in the most civilized nations. This, doubtless, arises from the fact that the words 'mine' and 'thine,' which St. Chrysostom says extinguish in our hearts the fire of charity and kindle that of greed, are unknown to these savages. "I have seen them," says another observer, "divide game among themselves when they sometimes had many shares to make; and cannot recollect a single instance of their falling into a dispute or finding fault with the distribution as being unequal or otherwise objectionable. They look upon themselves as but one great family."
Why did this primitive communism disappear as men rose to what we, with some partiality, call civilization? Sumner believed that communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups. Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast as "so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon the expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce with them. Since the industrious thus enjoy no more of the fruits of their labor than the idle, they plant less every year.” Darwin thought that the perfect equality among the Fuegians was fatal to any hope of their becoming civilized; or, as the Fuegians might have put it, civilization would have been fatal to their equality.
Communism brought a certain security to all who survived the diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance of primitive society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty. Individualism brought wealth, but it brought, also, insecurity and slavery; it stimulated the latent powers of superior men, but it intensified the competition of life, and made men feel bitterly a poverty which, when all shared it alike, had seemed to oppress none.
Communism could survive more easily in societies where men were always on the move, and danger and want were ever present. Hunters and herders had no need of private property in land; but when agriculture became the settled life of men it soon appeared that the land was most fruitfully tilled when the rewards of careful husbandry accrued to the family that had provided it. Consequently-since there is a natural selection of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups-the passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property to family property; the most economical unit of production became the unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose. Frequently an enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest, the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual property began. As the pressure of population increased, and older lands were exhausted, such reclamation went on in a widening circle, until, in the more complex societies, individual ownership became the order of the day. The invention of money cooperated with these factors by facilitating the accumulation, transport and transmission of property. The old tribal rights and traditions reasserted themselves in the technical ownership of the soil by the village community or the king, and in periodical redistributions of the land; but after an epoch of natural oscillation between the old and the new, private property established itself definitely as the basic economic institution of historical society.
Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery had been unknown; the hunter's wives and children sufficed to do the menial work. The men alternated between the excited activity of hunting or war, and the exhausted lassitude of satiety or peace. The characteristic laziness of primitive peoples had its origin, presumably, in this habit of slowly recuperating from the fatigue of battle or the chase; it was not so much laziness as rest. To transform this spasmodic activity into regular work two things were needed: the routine of tillage, and the organization of labor.
Such organization remains loose and spontaneous where men are working for themselves; where they work for others, the organization of labor depends in the last analysis upon force. The rise of agriculture and the inequality of men led to the employment of the socially weak by the socially strong; not till then did it occur to the victor in war that the only good prisoner is a live one. A similar development on a larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war no longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities. Once slavery had been established and had proved profitable, it was extended
by condemning to it defaulting debtors and obstinate criminals, and by raids undertaken specifically to capture slaves. War helped to make slavery, and slavery helped to make war.
Probably it was through centuries of slavery that our race acquired its traditions and habits of toil. No one would do any hard or persistent work if he could avoid it without physical, economic or social penalty. Slavery became part of the discipline by which man was prepared for industry.
Communism could survive more easily in societies where men were always on the move, and danger and want were ever present. Hunters and herders had no need of private property in land; but when agriculture became the settled life of men it soon appeared that the land was most fruitfully tilled when the rewards of careful husbandry accrued to the family that had provided it. Consequently-since there is a natural selection of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups-the passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property to family property; the most economical unit of production became the unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose. Frequently an enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest, the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual property began. As the pressure of population increased, and older lands were exhausted, such reclamation went on in a widening circle, until, in the more complex societies, individual ownership became the order of the day. The invention of money cooperated with these factors by facilitating the accumulation, transport and transmission of property. The old tribal rights and traditions reasserted themselves in the technical ownership of the soil by the village community or the king, and in periodical redistributions of the land; but after an epoch of natural oscillation between the old and the new, private property established itself definitely as the basic economic institution of historical society.
Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery had been unknown; the hunter's wives and children sufficed to do the menial work. The men alternated between the excited activity of hunting or war, and the exhausted lassitude of satiety or peace. The characteristic laziness of primitive peoples had its origin, presumably, in this habit of slowly recuperating from the fatigue of battle or the chase; it was not so much laziness as rest. To transform this spasmodic activity into regular work two things were needed: the routine of tillage, and the organization of labor.
Such organization remains loose and spontaneous where men are working for themselves; where they work for others, the organization of labor depends in the last analysis upon force. The rise of agriculture and the inequality of men led to the employment of the socially weak by the socially strong; not till then did it occur to the victor in war that the only good prisoner is a live one. A similar development on a larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war no longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities. Once slavery had been established and had proved profitable, it was extended
by condemning to it defaulting debtors and obstinate criminals, and by raids undertaken specifically to capture slaves. War helped to make slavery, and slavery helped to make war.
Probably it was through centuries of slavery that our race acquired its traditions and habits of toil. No one would do any hard or persistent work if he could avoid it without physical, economic or social penalty. Slavery became part of the discipline by which man was prepared for industry.
Indirectly it furthered civilization, in so far as it increased wealth and-for a minority-created leisure. After some centuries men took it for granted; Aristode argued for slavery as natural and inevitable, and St. Paul gave his benediction to what must have seemed, by his time, a divinely ordained institution.
Gradually, through agriculture and slavery, through the division of labor and the inherent diversity of men, the comparative equality of natural society was replaced by inequality and class divisions. In the primitive group we find as a rule no distinction between slave and free, no serfdom, no caste, and little if any distinction between chief and followers. Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the weak. Inheritance added superior opportunity to superior possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies into a maze of classes and castes. Rich and poor became disruptively conscious of wealth and poverty; the class war began to run as a red thread through all history; and the state arose as an indispensable instrument for the regulation of classes, the protection of property, the waging of war, and the organization of peace.
Gradually, through agriculture and slavery, through the division of labor and the inherent diversity of men, the comparative equality of natural society was replaced by inequality and class divisions. In the primitive group we find as a rule no distinction between slave and free, no serfdom, no caste, and little if any distinction between chief and followers. Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the weak. Inheritance added superior opportunity to superior possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies into a maze of classes and castes. Rich and poor became disruptively conscious of wealth and poverty; the class war began to run as a red thread through all history; and the state arose as an indispensable instrument for the regulation of classes, the protection of property, the waging of war, and the organization of peace.
Political Organization
In the simplest societies there is hardly any government. Primitive hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the hunting pack and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in solitary families; the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of Australia admit only temporarily of political organization, and then scatter away to their family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs, no laws, no regular government; the Veddahs of Ceylon formed small circles according to family relationship, but had no government; and so on.
The earliest form of continuous social organization was the clan-a group of related families occupying a common tract of land, having the same totem, and governed by the same customs or laws. When a group of clans united under the same chief the tribe was formed, and became the second step on the way to the state. But this was a slow development; many groups had no chiefs at all, and many more seem to have tolerated them only in time of war. Instead of democracy being a wilted feather in the cap of our own age, it appears at its best in several primitive groups where such government as exists is merely the rule of the family-heads of the clan, and no arbitrary authority is allowed. The Iroquois and Delaware Indians recognized no laws or restraints beyond the natural order of the family and the clan; their chiefs had modest powers, which might at any time be ended by the elders of the tribe. The Omaha Indians were ruled by a Council of Seven, who deliberated until they came to a unanimous agreement; add this to the famous League of the Iroquois, by which many tribes bound themselves-and honored their pledge-to keep the peace,
and one sees no great gap between these "savages" and the modern states that bind themselves revocably to peace in the League of Nations.
It is war that makes the chief, the king and the state, just as it is these that make war. In the intervals of peace it was the priest, or head magician, who had most authority and influence; and when at last a permanent kingship developed as the usual mode of government among a majority of tribes, it combined-and derived from-the offices of warrior, father and priest. Societies are ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crises by the sword; force is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries, cooperating or taking turns in the management of mankind; until our own day no state dared separate them, and perhaps tomorrow they will be united again.
How did war lead to the state? It is not that men were naturally inclined to war. Some lowly peoples are quite peaceful; and the Eskimos could not understand why Europeans of the same pacific faith should hunt one another like seals and steal one another's land. Nevertheless, primitive life was incarnadined with intermittent war. Hunters fought for happy hunting grounds still rich in prey, herders fought for new pastures for their flocks, tillers fought for virgin soil; all of them, at times, fought to avenge a murder, or to harden and discipline their youth, or to interrupt the monotony of life, or for simple plunder and rape; very rarely for religion. There were institutions and customs for the limitation of slaughter, as among ourselves-certain hours, days, weeks or months during which no gentleman savage would kill; certain functionaries who were inviolable, certain roads neutralized, certain markets and asylums set aside for peace; and the League of the Iroquois maintained the "Great Peace" for three hundred years. But for the most part war was the favorite instrument of natural selection among primitive nations and groups.
Its results were endless. It acted as a ruthless eliminator of weak peoples, and raised the level of the race in courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence and skill. It stimulated invention, made weapons that became useful tools, and arts of war that became arts of peace.
In the simplest societies there is hardly any government. Primitive hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the hunting pack and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in solitary families; the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of Australia admit only temporarily of political organization, and then scatter away to their family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs, no laws, no regular government; the Veddahs of Ceylon formed small circles according to family relationship, but had no government; and so on.
The earliest form of continuous social organization was the clan-a group of related families occupying a common tract of land, having the same totem, and governed by the same customs or laws. When a group of clans united under the same chief the tribe was formed, and became the second step on the way to the state. But this was a slow development; many groups had no chiefs at all, and many more seem to have tolerated them only in time of war. Instead of democracy being a wilted feather in the cap of our own age, it appears at its best in several primitive groups where such government as exists is merely the rule of the family-heads of the clan, and no arbitrary authority is allowed. The Iroquois and Delaware Indians recognized no laws or restraints beyond the natural order of the family and the clan; their chiefs had modest powers, which might at any time be ended by the elders of the tribe. The Omaha Indians were ruled by a Council of Seven, who deliberated until they came to a unanimous agreement; add this to the famous League of the Iroquois, by which many tribes bound themselves-and honored their pledge-to keep the peace,
and one sees no great gap between these "savages" and the modern states that bind themselves revocably to peace in the League of Nations.
It is war that makes the chief, the king and the state, just as it is these that make war. In the intervals of peace it was the priest, or head magician, who had most authority and influence; and when at last a permanent kingship developed as the usual mode of government among a majority of tribes, it combined-and derived from-the offices of warrior, father and priest. Societies are ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crises by the sword; force is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries, cooperating or taking turns in the management of mankind; until our own day no state dared separate them, and perhaps tomorrow they will be united again.
How did war lead to the state? It is not that men were naturally inclined to war. Some lowly peoples are quite peaceful; and the Eskimos could not understand why Europeans of the same pacific faith should hunt one another like seals and steal one another's land. Nevertheless, primitive life was incarnadined with intermittent war. Hunters fought for happy hunting grounds still rich in prey, herders fought for new pastures for their flocks, tillers fought for virgin soil; all of them, at times, fought to avenge a murder, or to harden and discipline their youth, or to interrupt the monotony of life, or for simple plunder and rape; very rarely for religion. There were institutions and customs for the limitation of slaughter, as among ourselves-certain hours, days, weeks or months during which no gentleman savage would kill; certain functionaries who were inviolable, certain roads neutralized, certain markets and asylums set aside for peace; and the League of the Iroquois maintained the "Great Peace" for three hundred years. But for the most part war was the favorite instrument of natural selection among primitive nations and groups.
Its results were endless. It acted as a ruthless eliminator of weak peoples, and raised the level of the race in courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence and skill. It stimulated invention, made weapons that became useful tools, and arts of war that became arts of peace.
(How many railroads today begin in strategy and end in trade!) Above all, war dissolved primitive communism and anarchism, introduced organization and discipline, and led to the enslavement of prisoners, the subordination of classes, and the growth of government. Property was the mother, war was the father, of the state.
II. The State
"A herd of blonde beasts of prey," says Nietzsche, "a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and all its organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless… such is the origin of the state. "The state as distinct from tribal organization," says Lester Ward, "begins with the conquest of one race by another." "Everywhere," says Oppenheimer, "we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state." "Violence," says Ratzenhofer, "is the agent which has created the state." “The state,” says Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished.” "The state," says Sumner, "is the product of force, and exists by force.”
This violent subjection is usually of a settled agricultural group by a tribe of hunters and herders. For agriculture teaches men pacific ways, inures them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day's toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of the chase, and hardly more perilous; when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modem ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.
The state is a late development, and hardly appears before the time of written history. For it presupposes a change in the very principle of social organization-from kinship to domination; and in primitive societies the former is the rule. Domination succeeds best where it binds diverse natural groups into an advantageous unity of order and trade. Even such conquest is seldom lasting except where the progress of invention has strengthened the strong by putting into their hands new tools and weapons for suppressing revolt. In permanent conquest the principle of domination tends to become concealed and almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789 hardly realized, until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aristocracy that had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany and had subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber's grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.
The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and tribes, relations spring up that depend not on kinship but on contiguity, and therefore require an artificial principle of regulation. The village community may serve as an example: it displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through a concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such communities created a need for some external force that could regulate their interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The state, ogre though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became not merely an organized force, but an instrument for adjusting the interests of the thousand conflicting groups that constitute a complex society. It spread the tentacles of its power and law over wider and wider areas, and though it made external war more destructive than before, it extended and maintained internal peace; the state may be defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.
"A herd of blonde beasts of prey," says Nietzsche, "a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and all its organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless… such is the origin of the state. "The state as distinct from tribal organization," says Lester Ward, "begins with the conquest of one race by another." "Everywhere," says Oppenheimer, "we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state." "Violence," says Ratzenhofer, "is the agent which has created the state." “The state,” says Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished.” "The state," says Sumner, "is the product of force, and exists by force.”
This violent subjection is usually of a settled agricultural group by a tribe of hunters and herders. For agriculture teaches men pacific ways, inures them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day's toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of the chase, and hardly more perilous; when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modem ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.
The state is a late development, and hardly appears before the time of written history. For it presupposes a change in the very principle of social organization-from kinship to domination; and in primitive societies the former is the rule. Domination succeeds best where it binds diverse natural groups into an advantageous unity of order and trade. Even such conquest is seldom lasting except where the progress of invention has strengthened the strong by putting into their hands new tools and weapons for suppressing revolt. In permanent conquest the principle of domination tends to become concealed and almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789 hardly realized, until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aristocracy that had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany and had subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber's grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.
The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and tribes, relations spring up that depend not on kinship but on contiguity, and therefore require an artificial principle of regulation. The village community may serve as an example: it displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through a concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such communities created a need for some external force that could regulate their interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The state, ogre though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became not merely an organized force, but an instrument for adjusting the interests of the thousand conflicting groups that constitute a complex society. It spread the tentacles of its power and law over wider and wider areas, and though it made external war more destructive than before, it extended and maintained internal peace; the state may be defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.
What an interregnum meant to a society accustomed to government may be judged from the behavior of the Baganda, among whom, when the king died, every man had to arm himself; for the lawless ran riot, killing and plundering everywhere. "Without autocratic rule," as Spencer said, "the evolution of society could not have commenced.”
A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination-the family, the church, the school-to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the public mind for that docile coherence which is indispensable in war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the "subject" sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the State.
A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination-the family, the church, the school-to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the public mind for that docile coherence which is indispensable in war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the "subject" sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the State.
III. Law
Law comes with property, marriage and government; the lowest societies manage to get along without it. "I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East," said Alfred Russel Wallace, "who have no law or law-courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellows, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community all are nearly equal." The old Russian Government established courts of law in the Aleutian Islands, but in fifty years those courts found no employment. "Crime and offenses," reports Brinton, "were so infrequent under the social system of the Iroquois that they can scarcely be said to have had a penal code." Such are the ideal-perhaps the idealized-conditions for whose return the anarchist perennially pines.
Certain amendments must be made to these descriptions. Natural societies are comparatively free from law first because they are ruled by customs as rigid and inviolable as any law; and secondly because crimes of violence, in the beginning, are considered to be private matters, and are left to bloody personal revenge. Underneath all the phenomena of society is the great terra firma of custom, that bedrock of time-hallowed modes of thought and action which provides a society with some measure of steadiness and order through all absence, changes, and interruptions of law. Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy. A law of economy works in instinct and habit, in custom and convention: the most convenient mode of response to repeated stimuli or traditional situations is automatic response. Thought and innovation are disturbances of regularity, and are tolerated only for indispensable readaptations, or promised gold.
When to this natural basis of custom a supernatural sanction is added by religion, and the ways of one's ancestors are also the will of the gods, then custom becomes stronger than law, and subtracts substantially from primitive freedom. To violate law is to win the admiration of half the populace, who secretly envy anyone who can outwit this ancient enemy; to violate custom is to incur almost universal hostility. For custom rises out of the people, whereas law is forced upon them from above; law is usually a decree of the master, but custom is the natural selection of those modes of action that have been found most convenient in the experience of the group. Law partly replaces custom when the state replaces the natural order of the family, the clan, the tribe, and the village community; it more fully replaces custom when writing appears, and laws graduate from a code carried down in the memory of elders and priests into a system of legislation proclaimed in written tables. But the replacement is never complete; in the determination and judgment of human conduct custom remains to the end the force behind the law, the power behind the throne, the last "magistrate of men's lives."
The first stage in the evolution of law is personal revenge. "Vengeance is mine," says the primitive individual. Among the Indian tribes of Lower California every man was his own policeman, and administered justice in the form of such vengeance as he was strong enough to take. So in many early societies the murder of A by B led to the murder of B by A's son or friend C, the murder of C by B's son or friend D, and so on perhaps to the end of the alphabet; we may find examples among the purest-blooded American families of today.
Law comes with property, marriage and government; the lowest societies manage to get along without it. "I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East," said Alfred Russel Wallace, "who have no law or law-courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellows, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community all are nearly equal." The old Russian Government established courts of law in the Aleutian Islands, but in fifty years those courts found no employment. "Crime and offenses," reports Brinton, "were so infrequent under the social system of the Iroquois that they can scarcely be said to have had a penal code." Such are the ideal-perhaps the idealized-conditions for whose return the anarchist perennially pines.
Certain amendments must be made to these descriptions. Natural societies are comparatively free from law first because they are ruled by customs as rigid and inviolable as any law; and secondly because crimes of violence, in the beginning, are considered to be private matters, and are left to bloody personal revenge. Underneath all the phenomena of society is the great terra firma of custom, that bedrock of time-hallowed modes of thought and action which provides a society with some measure of steadiness and order through all absence, changes, and interruptions of law. Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy. A law of economy works in instinct and habit, in custom and convention: the most convenient mode of response to repeated stimuli or traditional situations is automatic response. Thought and innovation are disturbances of regularity, and are tolerated only for indispensable readaptations, or promised gold.
When to this natural basis of custom a supernatural sanction is added by religion, and the ways of one's ancestors are also the will of the gods, then custom becomes stronger than law, and subtracts substantially from primitive freedom. To violate law is to win the admiration of half the populace, who secretly envy anyone who can outwit this ancient enemy; to violate custom is to incur almost universal hostility. For custom rises out of the people, whereas law is forced upon them from above; law is usually a decree of the master, but custom is the natural selection of those modes of action that have been found most convenient in the experience of the group. Law partly replaces custom when the state replaces the natural order of the family, the clan, the tribe, and the village community; it more fully replaces custom when writing appears, and laws graduate from a code carried down in the memory of elders and priests into a system of legislation proclaimed in written tables. But the replacement is never complete; in the determination and judgment of human conduct custom remains to the end the force behind the law, the power behind the throne, the last "magistrate of men's lives."
The first stage in the evolution of law is personal revenge. "Vengeance is mine," says the primitive individual. Among the Indian tribes of Lower California every man was his own policeman, and administered justice in the form of such vengeance as he was strong enough to take. So in many early societies the murder of A by B led to the murder of B by A's son or friend C, the murder of C by B's son or friend D, and so on perhaps to the end of the alphabet; we may find examples among the purest-blooded American families of today.
This principle of revenge persists throughout the history of law: it appears in the Lex Talionis-or Law of Retaliation-embodied in Roman Law; it plays a large role in the Code of Hammurabi, and in the "Mosaic” demand of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth"; and it lurks behind most legal punishments even in our day.
The second step toward law and civilization in the treatment of crime was the substitution of damages for revenge. Very often the chief, to maintain internal harmony, used his power or influence to have the revengeful family content itself with gold or goods instead of blood. Soon a regular tariff arose, determining how much must be paid for an eye, a tooth, an arm, or a life; Hammurabi legislated extensively in such terms. The penalties assessed in cases of composition might vary with the sex, age and rank of the offender and the injured; among the Fijians, for example, petty larceny by a common man was considered a more heinous crime than murder by a chief. Throughout the history of law the magnitude of the crime has been lessened by the magnitude of the criminal. Since these fines or compositions, paid to avert revenge, required some adjudication of offenses and damages, a third step towards law was taken by the formation of courts; the chief or the elders or the priests sat in judgment to settle the conflicts of their people. Such courts were not always judgment seats; often they were boards of voluntary conciliation, which arranged some amicable settlement of the dispute. For many centuries, and among many peoples, resort to courts remained optional; and where the offended party was dissatisfied with the judgment rendered, he was still free to seek personal revenge."
In many cases disputes were settled by a public contest between the parties, varying in bloodiness from a harmless boxing match-as among the wise Eskimos-to a duel to the death. Frequently the primitive mind resorted to an ordeal not so much on the medieval theory that a deity would reveal the culprit as in the hope that the ordeal, however unjust, would end a feud that might otherwise embroil the tribe for generations. Sometimes accuser and accused were asked to choose between two bowls of food of which one was poisoned; the wrong party might be poisoned
(usually not beyond redemption), but then the dispute was ended, since both parties ordinarily believed in the righteousness of the ordeal.
From such early forms the ordeal persisted through the laws of Moses and Hammurabi and down into the Middle Ages; the duel, which is one form of the ordeal, and which historians thought dead, is being revived in our own day. So brief and narrow, in some respects, is the span between primitive and modern man; so short is the history of civilization.
The fourth advance in the growth of law was the assumption, by the chief or the state, of the obligation to prevent and punish wrongs. It is but a step from settling disputes and punishing offenses to making some effort to prevent them. So the chief becomes not merely a judge but a lawgiver; and to the general body of "common law" derived from the customs of the group is added a body of "positive law," derived from the decrees of the government; in the one case the laws grow up, in the other they are handed down. In either case the laws carry with them the mark of their ancestry, and reek with the vengeance which they tried to replace. Primitive punishments are cruel because primitive society feels insecure; as social organization becomes more stable, punishments become less severe. In general the individual has fewer "rights" in natural society than under civilization. Everywhere man is born in chains: the chains of heredity, of environment, of custom, and of law. The primitive individual moves always within a web of regulations incredibly stringent and detailed; a thousand tabus restrict his action, a thousand terrors limit his will. The natives of New Zealand were apparently without laws, but in actual fact rigid custom ruled every aspect of their lives.
The second step toward law and civilization in the treatment of crime was the substitution of damages for revenge. Very often the chief, to maintain internal harmony, used his power or influence to have the revengeful family content itself with gold or goods instead of blood. Soon a regular tariff arose, determining how much must be paid for an eye, a tooth, an arm, or a life; Hammurabi legislated extensively in such terms. The penalties assessed in cases of composition might vary with the sex, age and rank of the offender and the injured; among the Fijians, for example, petty larceny by a common man was considered a more heinous crime than murder by a chief. Throughout the history of law the magnitude of the crime has been lessened by the magnitude of the criminal. Since these fines or compositions, paid to avert revenge, required some adjudication of offenses and damages, a third step towards law was taken by the formation of courts; the chief or the elders or the priests sat in judgment to settle the conflicts of their people. Such courts were not always judgment seats; often they were boards of voluntary conciliation, which arranged some amicable settlement of the dispute. For many centuries, and among many peoples, resort to courts remained optional; and where the offended party was dissatisfied with the judgment rendered, he was still free to seek personal revenge."
In many cases disputes were settled by a public contest between the parties, varying in bloodiness from a harmless boxing match-as among the wise Eskimos-to a duel to the death. Frequently the primitive mind resorted to an ordeal not so much on the medieval theory that a deity would reveal the culprit as in the hope that the ordeal, however unjust, would end a feud that might otherwise embroil the tribe for generations. Sometimes accuser and accused were asked to choose between two bowls of food of which one was poisoned; the wrong party might be poisoned
(usually not beyond redemption), but then the dispute was ended, since both parties ordinarily believed in the righteousness of the ordeal.
From such early forms the ordeal persisted through the laws of Moses and Hammurabi and down into the Middle Ages; the duel, which is one form of the ordeal, and which historians thought dead, is being revived in our own day. So brief and narrow, in some respects, is the span between primitive and modern man; so short is the history of civilization.
The fourth advance in the growth of law was the assumption, by the chief or the state, of the obligation to prevent and punish wrongs. It is but a step from settling disputes and punishing offenses to making some effort to prevent them. So the chief becomes not merely a judge but a lawgiver; and to the general body of "common law" derived from the customs of the group is added a body of "positive law," derived from the decrees of the government; in the one case the laws grow up, in the other they are handed down. In either case the laws carry with them the mark of their ancestry, and reek with the vengeance which they tried to replace. Primitive punishments are cruel because primitive society feels insecure; as social organization becomes more stable, punishments become less severe. In general the individual has fewer "rights" in natural society than under civilization. Everywhere man is born in chains: the chains of heredity, of environment, of custom, and of law. The primitive individual moves always within a web of regulations incredibly stringent and detailed; a thousand tabus restrict his action, a thousand terrors limit his will. The natives of New Zealand were apparently without laws, but in actual fact rigid custom ruled every aspect of their lives.
Unchangeable and unquestionable conventions determined the sitting and the rising, the standing and the walking, the eating, drinking and sleeping of the natives of Bengal. The individual was hardly recognized as a separate entity in natural society; what existed was the family and the clan, the tribe and the village community; it was these that owned land and exercised power. Only with the coming of private property, which gave him economic authority, and of the state, which gave him a legal status and defined rights, did the individual begin to stand out as a distinct reality. Rights do not come to us from nature, which knows no rights except cunning and strength; they are privileges assured to individuals by the community as advantageous to the common good. Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
IV. Family
As the basic needs of man are hunger and love, so the fundamental functions of social organization are economic provision and biological maintenance; a stream of children is as vital as a continuity of food. To institutions which seek material welfare and political order, society always adds institutions for the perpetuation of the race. Until the state-towards the dawn of the historic civilizations-becomes the central and permanent source of social order, the clan undertakes the delicate task of regulating the relations between the sexes and between the generations; and even after the state has been established, the essential government of mankind remains in that most deep-rooted of all historic institutions, the family.
It is highly improbable that the first human beings lived in isolated families, even in the hunting stage; for the inferiority of man in physiological organs of defense would have left such families a prey to marauding beasts. Usually, in nature, those organisms that are poorly equipped for individual defense live in groups, and find in united action a means of survival in a world bristling with tusks and claws and impenetrable hides. Presumably it was so with man; he saved himself by solidarity in the hunting-pack and the clan. When economic relations and political mastery replaced kinship as the principle of social organization, the clan lost its position as the substructure of society; at the bottom it was supplanted by the family, at the top it was superseded by the state. Government took over the problem of maintaining order, while the family assumed the tasks of reorganizing industry and carrying on the race.
Among the lower animals there is no care of progeny; consequently eggs are spawned in great number, and some survive and develop while the great majority are eaten or destroyed. Most fish lay a million eggs per year; a few species of fish show a modest solicitude for their offspring, and find half a hundred eggs per year sufficient for their purposes. Birds care better for their young, and hatch from five to twelve eggs yearly; mammals, whose very name suggests parental care, master the earth with an average of three young per female per year. Throughout the animal world fertility and destruction decrease as parental care increases; throughout the human world the birth rate and the death rate fall together as civilization rises. Better family care makes possible a longer adolescence, in which the young receive fuller training and development before they are flung upon their own resources; and the lowered birth rate releases human energy for other activities than reproduction.
The simplest form of the family, then, was the woman and her children, living with her mother or her brother in the clan; such an arrangement was a natural outgrowth of the animal family of the mother and her litter, and of the biological ignorance of primitive man. An alternative early form was "matrilocal marriage": the husband left his clan and went to live with the clan and family of his wife, laboring for her or with her in the service of her parents. Descent, in such cases, was traced through the female line, and inheritance was through the mother; sometimes even the kingship passed down through her rather than through the male. This "mother-right" was not a "matriarchate"-it did not imply the rule of women over men. Even when property was transmitted through the woman she had little power over it; she was used as a means of tracing relationships which, through primitive laxity or freedom, were otherwise obscure. It is true that in any system of society the woman exercises a certain authority, rising naturally out of her importance in the home, out of her function as the dispenser of food, and out of the need that the male has of her, and her power to refuse him. It is also true that there have been, occasionally, women rulers among some South Mrican tribes; that in the Pelew Islands the chief did nothing of consequence without
As the basic needs of man are hunger and love, so the fundamental functions of social organization are economic provision and biological maintenance; a stream of children is as vital as a continuity of food. To institutions which seek material welfare and political order, society always adds institutions for the perpetuation of the race. Until the state-towards the dawn of the historic civilizations-becomes the central and permanent source of social order, the clan undertakes the delicate task of regulating the relations between the sexes and between the generations; and even after the state has been established, the essential government of mankind remains in that most deep-rooted of all historic institutions, the family.
It is highly improbable that the first human beings lived in isolated families, even in the hunting stage; for the inferiority of man in physiological organs of defense would have left such families a prey to marauding beasts. Usually, in nature, those organisms that are poorly equipped for individual defense live in groups, and find in united action a means of survival in a world bristling with tusks and claws and impenetrable hides. Presumably it was so with man; he saved himself by solidarity in the hunting-pack and the clan. When economic relations and political mastery replaced kinship as the principle of social organization, the clan lost its position as the substructure of society; at the bottom it was supplanted by the family, at the top it was superseded by the state. Government took over the problem of maintaining order, while the family assumed the tasks of reorganizing industry and carrying on the race.
Among the lower animals there is no care of progeny; consequently eggs are spawned in great number, and some survive and develop while the great majority are eaten or destroyed. Most fish lay a million eggs per year; a few species of fish show a modest solicitude for their offspring, and find half a hundred eggs per year sufficient for their purposes. Birds care better for their young, and hatch from five to twelve eggs yearly; mammals, whose very name suggests parental care, master the earth with an average of three young per female per year. Throughout the animal world fertility and destruction decrease as parental care increases; throughout the human world the birth rate and the death rate fall together as civilization rises. Better family care makes possible a longer adolescence, in which the young receive fuller training and development before they are flung upon their own resources; and the lowered birth rate releases human energy for other activities than reproduction.
The simplest form of the family, then, was the woman and her children, living with her mother or her brother in the clan; such an arrangement was a natural outgrowth of the animal family of the mother and her litter, and of the biological ignorance of primitive man. An alternative early form was "matrilocal marriage": the husband left his clan and went to live with the clan and family of his wife, laboring for her or with her in the service of her parents. Descent, in such cases, was traced through the female line, and inheritance was through the mother; sometimes even the kingship passed down through her rather than through the male. This "mother-right" was not a "matriarchate"-it did not imply the rule of women over men. Even when property was transmitted through the woman she had little power over it; she was used as a means of tracing relationships which, through primitive laxity or freedom, were otherwise obscure. It is true that in any system of society the woman exercises a certain authority, rising naturally out of her importance in the home, out of her function as the dispenser of food, and out of the need that the male has of her, and her power to refuse him. It is also true that there have been, occasionally, women rulers among some South Mrican tribes; that in the Pelew Islands the chief did nothing of consequence without
the advice of a council of elder women; that among the Iroquois the squaws had an equal right, with the men, of speaking and voting in the tribal council; and that among the Seneca Indians women held great power, even to the selection of the chief. But these are rare and exceptional cases. All in all the position of woman in early societies was one of subjection verging upon slavery. Her periodic disability, her unfamiliarity with weapons, the biological absorption of her strength in carrying, nursing and rearing children, handicapped her in the war of the sexes, and doomed her to a subordinate status in all but the very lowest and the very highest societies. Nor was her position necessarily to rise with the development of civilization; it was destined to be lower in Periclean Greece than among the North American Indians; it was to rise and fall with her strategic importance rather than with the culture and morals of men.
In the hunting stage she did almost all the work except the actual capture of the game. In return for exposing himself to the hardships and risks of the chase, the male rested magnificently for the greater part of the year. The woman bore her children abundantly, reared them, kept the hut or home in repair, gathered food in woods and fields, cooked, cleaned, and made the clothing and the boots. Because the men, when the tribe moved, had to be ready at any moment to fight off attack, they carried nothing but their weapons; the women carried all the rest. Bush-women were used as servants and beasts of burden; if they proved too weak to keep up with the march, they were abandoned. When the natives of the Lower Murray saw pack oxen they thought that these were the wives of the whites. The differences in strength which now divide the sexes hardly existed in those days, and are now environmental rather than innate: woman, apart from her biological disabilities, was almost the equal of man in stature, endurance, resourcefulness and courage; she was not yet an ornament, a thing of beauty, or a sexual toy; she was a robust animal, able to perform arduous work for long hours, and, if necessary, to fight to the death for her children or her clan. "Women," said a chieftain of the Chippewas, "are created for work. One of them can draw or carry as much as two men. They also pitch our tents, make our clothes, mend them, and keep us warm at night•.•. We absolutely cannot get along without them on a journey. They do everything and cost only a little; for since they must be forever cooking, they can be satisfied in lean times by licking their fingers.
Most economic advances, in early society, were made by the woman rather than the man. While for centuries he clung to his ancient ways of hunting and herding, she developed agriculture near the camp, and those busy arts of the home which were to become the most important industries of later days. From the "wool-bearing tree," as the Greeks called the cotton plant, the primitive woman rolled thread and made cotton cloth." It was she, apparently, who developed sewing, weaving, basketry, pottery, woodworking, and building; and in many cases it was she who carried on primitive trade. It was she who developed the home, slowly adding man to the list of her domesticated animals, and training him in those social dispositions and amenities which are the psychological basis and cement of civilization.
But as agriculture became more complex and brought larger rewards, the stronger sex took more and more of it into its own hands. The growth of cattle-breeding gave the man a new source of wealth, stability and power; even agriculture, which must have seemed so prosaic to the mighty Nimrods of antiquity, was at last accepted by the wandering male, and the economic leadership which tillage had for a time given to women was wrested from them by the men.
In the hunting stage she did almost all the work except the actual capture of the game. In return for exposing himself to the hardships and risks of the chase, the male rested magnificently for the greater part of the year. The woman bore her children abundantly, reared them, kept the hut or home in repair, gathered food in woods and fields, cooked, cleaned, and made the clothing and the boots. Because the men, when the tribe moved, had to be ready at any moment to fight off attack, they carried nothing but their weapons; the women carried all the rest. Bush-women were used as servants and beasts of burden; if they proved too weak to keep up with the march, they were abandoned. When the natives of the Lower Murray saw pack oxen they thought that these were the wives of the whites. The differences in strength which now divide the sexes hardly existed in those days, and are now environmental rather than innate: woman, apart from her biological disabilities, was almost the equal of man in stature, endurance, resourcefulness and courage; she was not yet an ornament, a thing of beauty, or a sexual toy; she was a robust animal, able to perform arduous work for long hours, and, if necessary, to fight to the death for her children or her clan. "Women," said a chieftain of the Chippewas, "are created for work. One of them can draw or carry as much as two men. They also pitch our tents, make our clothes, mend them, and keep us warm at night•.•. We absolutely cannot get along without them on a journey. They do everything and cost only a little; for since they must be forever cooking, they can be satisfied in lean times by licking their fingers.
Most economic advances, in early society, were made by the woman rather than the man. While for centuries he clung to his ancient ways of hunting and herding, she developed agriculture near the camp, and those busy arts of the home which were to become the most important industries of later days. From the "wool-bearing tree," as the Greeks called the cotton plant, the primitive woman rolled thread and made cotton cloth." It was she, apparently, who developed sewing, weaving, basketry, pottery, woodworking, and building; and in many cases it was she who carried on primitive trade. It was she who developed the home, slowly adding man to the list of her domesticated animals, and training him in those social dispositions and amenities which are the psychological basis and cement of civilization.
But as agriculture became more complex and brought larger rewards, the stronger sex took more and more of it into its own hands. The growth of cattle-breeding gave the man a new source of wealth, stability and power; even agriculture, which must have seemed so prosaic to the mighty Nimrods of antiquity, was at last accepted by the wandering male, and the economic leadership which tillage had for a time given to women was wrested from them by the men.
The application to agriculture of those very animals that woman had first domesticated led to her replacement by the male in the control of the fields; the advance from the hoe to the plough put a premium upon physical strength, and enabled the man to assert his supremacy. The growth of transmissible property in cattle and in the products of the soil led to the sexual subordination of woman, for the male now demanded from her that fidelity which he thought would enable him to pass on his accumulations to children presumably his own. Gradually the man had his way: fatherhood became recognized, and property began to descend through the male; mother-right yielded to father-right; and the patriarchal family, with the oldest male at its head, became the economic, legal, political and moral unit of society. The gods, who had been mostly feminine, became great bearded patriarchs, with such harems as ambitious men dreamed of in their solitude.
This passage to the patriarchal-father-ruled-family was fatal to the position of woman. In all essential aspects she and her children became the property first of her father or oldest brother, then of her husband. She was bought in marriage precisely as a slave was bought in the market. She was bequeathed as property when her husband died; and in some places (New Guinea, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, India, etc.) she was strangled and buried with her dead husband, or was expected to commit suicide, in order to attend upon him in the other world. The father had now the right to treat, give, sell or lend his wives and daughters very much as he pleased, subject only to the social condemnation of other fathers exercising the same rights. While the male reserved the privilege of extending his sexual favors beyond his home, the woman-under patriarchal institutions-was vowed to complete chastity before marriage, and complete fidelity after it. The double standard was born.
The general subjection of woman which had existed in the hunting stage, and had persisted, in diminished form, through the period of mother-right, became now more pronounced and merciless than before. In ancient Russia, on the marriage of a daughter, the father struck her gently with a whip, and then presented the whip to the bridegroom, as a sign that her beatings were now to come from a rejuvenated hand. Even the American Indians, among whom mother-right survived indefinitely, treated their women harshly, consigned to them all drudgery, and often called them dogs. Everywhere the life of a woman was considered cheaper than that of a man; and when girls were born there was none of the rejoicing that marked the coming of a male. Mothers sometimes destroyed their female children to keep them from misery. In Fiji wives might be sold at pleasure, and the usual price was a musket. Among some tribes man and wife did not sleep together, lest the breath of the woman should enfeeble the man; in Fiji it was not thought proper for a man to sleep regularly at home; in New Caledonia the wife slept in a shed, while the man slept in the house. In Fiji dogs were allowed in some of the temples, but women were excluded from all; such exclusion of women from religious services survives in Islam to this day. Doubtless woman enjoyed at all times the mastery that comes of long-continued speech; the men might be rebuffed, harangued, even-now and then-beaten, but all in all the man was lord, the woman was servant. The Kaffir bought women like slaves, as a form of life-income insurance; when he had a sufficient number of wives he could rest for the remainder of his days; they would do all the work for him. Some tribes of ancient India reckoned the women of a family as part of the property inheritance, along with the domestic animals; nor did the last commandment of Moses distinguish very clearly in this matter. Throughout negro Africa women hardly differed from slaves, except that they were expected to provide sexual as well as economic satisfaction.
This passage to the patriarchal-father-ruled-family was fatal to the position of woman. In all essential aspects she and her children became the property first of her father or oldest brother, then of her husband. She was bought in marriage precisely as a slave was bought in the market. She was bequeathed as property when her husband died; and in some places (New Guinea, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, India, etc.) she was strangled and buried with her dead husband, or was expected to commit suicide, in order to attend upon him in the other world. The father had now the right to treat, give, sell or lend his wives and daughters very much as he pleased, subject only to the social condemnation of other fathers exercising the same rights. While the male reserved the privilege of extending his sexual favors beyond his home, the woman-under patriarchal institutions-was vowed to complete chastity before marriage, and complete fidelity after it. The double standard was born.
The general subjection of woman which had existed in the hunting stage, and had persisted, in diminished form, through the period of mother-right, became now more pronounced and merciless than before. In ancient Russia, on the marriage of a daughter, the father struck her gently with a whip, and then presented the whip to the bridegroom, as a sign that her beatings were now to come from a rejuvenated hand. Even the American Indians, among whom mother-right survived indefinitely, treated their women harshly, consigned to them all drudgery, and often called them dogs. Everywhere the life of a woman was considered cheaper than that of a man; and when girls were born there was none of the rejoicing that marked the coming of a male. Mothers sometimes destroyed their female children to keep them from misery. In Fiji wives might be sold at pleasure, and the usual price was a musket. Among some tribes man and wife did not sleep together, lest the breath of the woman should enfeeble the man; in Fiji it was not thought proper for a man to sleep regularly at home; in New Caledonia the wife slept in a shed, while the man slept in the house. In Fiji dogs were allowed in some of the temples, but women were excluded from all; such exclusion of women from religious services survives in Islam to this day. Doubtless woman enjoyed at all times the mastery that comes of long-continued speech; the men might be rebuffed, harangued, even-now and then-beaten, but all in all the man was lord, the woman was servant. The Kaffir bought women like slaves, as a form of life-income insurance; when he had a sufficient number of wives he could rest for the remainder of his days; they would do all the work for him. Some tribes of ancient India reckoned the women of a family as part of the property inheritance, along with the domestic animals; nor did the last commandment of Moses distinguish very clearly in this matter. Throughout negro Africa women hardly differed from slaves, except that they were expected to provide sexual as well as economic satisfaction.
Forwarded from /CIG/ Telegram | Counter Intelligence Global (jd)
📝 At its core, Democracy is built on the principle of equality: the idea that each individual has an equal say in the political process. But this notion is fundamentally at odds with how human societies naturally function. Societies were historically hierarchical, organic entities where individuals were bound by duty, rank, and purpose within a larger whole. Once Democracy shattered this traditional order with the onset of the French Revolution, it set in motion a series of events that inevitably dragged society into progressively more radical forms of egalitarianism.
Perhaps my most "Reactionary" take is that far from being an antidote to Marxism, Democracy and Liberalism are the very forces which enable it. In a Democracy, politicians have a high-time preference and practically zero incentive to think about long-term planning. Even worse, Democracy incentivizes politicians to cater to the lowest common denominator because they have as much political sway as everyone else. Inevitably, the political system simply becomes a mechanism to redistribute wealth (which is what the overwhelming majority of the Federal budget is now geared towards). This sort of feeds upon the impulse that exists within the underlying premise of Liberalism itself: that inequality is unjust and must be eradicated.
As the entire political system gets dragged down to the lowest common denominator, the logic of Democracy inevitably demands further leveling of society. After all, if all individuals are equal, why not extend that principle to all areas of life? Why stop at political equality? Why not enforce economic equality too? And why even stop at equality at all? “Equity” now enters the picture. This is where Marxism (and particularly Cultural Marxism) emerges as a natural extension of Democracy’s core premise. Marx's call for an international revolution among the proletariat is not a break from Democracy but its fulfillment in a system that abolishes all remaining hierarchies.
So what happens over the course of decades and even centuries is that Liberalism enables Democracy, which enables Socialism, which eventually enables Marxism. They're all part of the same process of decay, just different steps in a continuous march toward destroying the traditional and hierarchical societies that had existed prior to the 19th century.
And this more than anything else is why I constantly criticize “Liberal Democracy.” Because the real issue is that so many people—even on the "Right"—believe that Democracy can somehow stop Marxism, when in reality it paves the way for it. The fact that Liberal Democracy, by its very nature, fails to uphold any higher authority or principle beyond the "will of the people" means it is easily hijacked by those who push for more extreme forms of egalitarianism.
🔗 Christian Heiens
Perhaps my most "Reactionary" take is that far from being an antidote to Marxism, Democracy and Liberalism are the very forces which enable it. In a Democracy, politicians have a high-time preference and practically zero incentive to think about long-term planning. Even worse, Democracy incentivizes politicians to cater to the lowest common denominator because they have as much political sway as everyone else. Inevitably, the political system simply becomes a mechanism to redistribute wealth (which is what the overwhelming majority of the Federal budget is now geared towards). This sort of feeds upon the impulse that exists within the underlying premise of Liberalism itself: that inequality is unjust and must be eradicated.
As the entire political system gets dragged down to the lowest common denominator, the logic of Democracy inevitably demands further leveling of society. After all, if all individuals are equal, why not extend that principle to all areas of life? Why stop at political equality? Why not enforce economic equality too? And why even stop at equality at all? “Equity” now enters the picture. This is where Marxism (and particularly Cultural Marxism) emerges as a natural extension of Democracy’s core premise. Marx's call for an international revolution among the proletariat is not a break from Democracy but its fulfillment in a system that abolishes all remaining hierarchies.
So what happens over the course of decades and even centuries is that Liberalism enables Democracy, which enables Socialism, which eventually enables Marxism. They're all part of the same process of decay, just different steps in a continuous march toward destroying the traditional and hierarchical societies that had existed prior to the 19th century.
And this more than anything else is why I constantly criticize “Liberal Democracy.” Because the real issue is that so many people—even on the "Right"—believe that Democracy can somehow stop Marxism, when in reality it paves the way for it. The fact that Liberal Democracy, by its very nature, fails to uphold any higher authority or principle beyond the "will of the people" means it is easily hijacked by those who push for more extreme forms of egalitarianism.
🔗 Christian Heiens
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Christian Heiens 🏛 (@ChristianHeiens) on X
At its core, Democracy is built on the principle of equality: the idea that each individual has an equal say in the political process. But this notion is fundamentally at odds with how human societies naturally function. Societies were historically hierarchical…