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

Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals is an interdisciplinary work of anthropology, sociology, and ethics by the clergyman and political and social scientist William Graham Sumner. It was originally published in 1906. In this work, Sumner introduces the concepts of folkways and mores (mores being customs vital to the welfare of society) as universally regulative principles. Folkways is divided into twenty chapters.

Title
"In 1899 I began to write out a text-book of sociology from material which I had used in lectures during the previous ten or fifteen years. At a certain point in that undertaking I found that I wanted to introduce my own treatment of the "mores." I could not refer to it anywhere in print, and I could not do justice to it in a chapter of another book. I therefore turned aside to write a treatise on the "Folkways," which I now offer. For definitions of "folkways" and "mores" see secs. 1, 2, 34, 39, 43, and 66. I formed the word "folkways" on the analogy of words already in use in sociology. I also took up again the Latin word "mores" as the best I could find for my purpose. I mean by it the popular usages and traditions, when they include a judgment that they are conducive to societal welfare, and when they exert a coercion on the individual to conform to them, although they are not coördinated by any authority (cf. sec. 42). I have also tried to bring the word "Ethos" into familiarity again (secs. 76, 79). "Ethica," or "Ethology," or "The Mores" seemed good titles for the book (secs. 42, 43), but Ethics is already employed otherwise, and the other words were very unfamiliar. Perhaps "folkways" is not less unfamiliar, but its meaning is more obvious. I must add that if any one is liable to be shocked by any folkways, he ought not to read about folkways at all. "Nature her custom holds, let shame say what it will" (Hamlet, IV, 7, ad fin.). I have tried to treat all folkways, including those which are most opposite to our own, with truthfulness, but with dignity and due respect to our own conventions.

Chapter I contains elaborate definitions and expositions of the folkways and the mores, with an analysis of their play in human ivsociety. Chapter II shows the bearing of the folkways on human interests, and the way in which they act or are acted on. The thesis which is expounded in these two chapters is: that the folkways are habits of the individual and customs of the society which arise from efforts to satisfy needs; they are intertwined with goblinism and demonism and primitive notions of luck (sec. 6), and so they win traditional authority. Then they become regulative for succeeding generations and take on the character of a social force. They arise no one knows whence or how. They grow as if by the play of internal life energy. They can be modified, but only to a limited extent, by the purposeful efforts of men. In time they lose power, decline, and die, or are transformed. While they are in vigor they very largely control individual and social undertakings, and they produce and nourish ideas of world philosophy and life policy. Yet they are not organic or material. They belong to a superorganic system of relations, conventions, and institutional arrangements. The study of them is called for by their social character, by virtue of which they are leading factors in the science of society.

When the analysis of the folkways has been concluded it is necessary that it should be justified by a series of illustrations, or by a setting forth of cases in which the operation of the mores is shown to be what is affirmed in the analysis. Any such exposition of the mores in cases, in order to be successful, must go into details. It is in details that all the graphic force and argumentative value of the cases are to be found. It has not been easy to do justice to the details and to observe the necessary limits of space. The ethnographical facts which I present are not subsequent justification of generalizations otherwise obtained. They are selections from a great array of facts from which the generalizations were deduced. A number of other very important cases which I included in my plan of proofs and illustrations I have been obliged to leave out for lack of space. Such are: Demonism, Primitive Religion, and Witchcraft; The Status of Women; War; Evolution and the Mores; Usury; Gambling; Societal Organization and Classes; Mortuary Usages; Oaths; Taboos; Ethics; Æsthetics; and Democracy. The first four of these are written. I may be able to publish them soon, separately. My next task is to finish the sociology."

Fundamental Notions of the Folkways and the Mores
Chapter 1, titled Fundamental Notions of the Folkways and the Mores, introduces the fundamental notions of folkways and the mores, the regulative principles of society which Sumner, in the foregoing chapters, elucidates upon."If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts." Sumner develops the concept of ethnocentrism. He writes:

"Ethnocentrism is the technical name for this view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything,) and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it. Folkways correspond to it to cover both the inner and the outer relation. Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways, these excite its scorn. Opprobrious epithets are derived from these differences. 'Pig-eater,' 'cow-eater,' 'uncircumcised,' 'jabberers,' are epithets of contempt and abomination. The Tupis called the Portuguese by a derisive epithet descriptive of birds which have feathers around their feet, on account of trousers. For our present purpose the most important fact is that ethnocentrism leads a people to exaggerate and intensify everything in their own folkways which is peculiar and which differentiates them from others. It therefore strengthens the folkways."

Mores are folkways that have ethical or philosophically suggestive elements. Philosophies of "right living" are a product of utilitarian needs. Notions of "societal welfare" were posterior to utilitarian generalizations of survival.

"We live in a war of two antagonistic ethical philosophies : the ethical policy taught in the books and the schools, and the success policy. The same man acts at one time by the school ethics, disregarding consequences, at another time by the success policy, in which the consequences dictate the conduct ; or we talk the former and act by the latter."

Sumner, following Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius, subscribes to a hereditarian view of human ability and accomplishment. Sumner employs the binomial distribution to quantify and qualify human beings. Sumner notes, however, that societal value cannot be reduced to a number. It can never be verified statistically. Rather, it is an amalgamation of mental power, practical sense, health, and opportunity (luck: the aleatory element). This analysis yields four elements: intellectual, moral, economic, and physical. The highest societal value is achieved when there is congruity between the four: geniuses who are immoral or indolent are worth less than "[a] man of talent, practical sense, industry, perseverance, and moral principle [who may be of a lower grade]." (p. 41)

Institutions and laws grow out of the mores.

"The mores are traits in the specific character (ethos) of a society or a period." (p.59)

"We may now formulate a more complete definition of the mores. They are the ways of doing things which are current in a society to satisfy human needs and desires, together with the faiths, notions, codes, and standards of well living which inhere in those ways, having a genetic connection with them. By virtue of the latter element the mores are traits in the specific character (ethos) of a society or a period. They pervade and control the ways of thinking in all the exigencies of life, returning from the world of abstractions to the world of action, to give guidance and to win revivification.""Modern civilized states of the best form are often called jural states because the concept of rights enters so largely into all their constitutions and regulations. Our political philosophy centers around that concept, and all our social discussions fall into the form of propositions and disputes about rights. The history of the dogma of rights has been such that rights have been believed to be self-evident and self-existent, and as having prevailed especially in primitive society. Rights are also regarded as the opposite of force. These notions only prove the antagonism between our mores and those of earlier generations. In fact, it is a characteristic of our mores that the form of our thinking about all points of political philosophy is set for us by the concept of rights. Nothing but might has ever made right, and if we include in might (as we ought to) elections and the decisions of courts, nothing but might makes right now. We must distinguish between the anterior and the posterior view of the matter in question. If we are about to take some action, and are debating the right of it, the might which can be brought to support one view of it has nothing to do with the right of it. If a thing has been done and is established by force (that is, no force can reverse it), it is right in the only sense we know, and rights will follow from it which are not vitiated at all by the force in it. There would be no security at all for rights if this were not so. We find men and parties protesting, declaiming, complaining of what is done, and which they say is not 'right,' but only force. An election decides that those shall have power who will execute an act of policy. The defeated party denounces the wrong and wickedness of the act. It is done. It may be a war, a conquest, a spoliation ; every one must help to do it by paying taxes and doing military service or other duty which may be demanded of him. The decision of a lawsuit leaves one party protesting and complaining. He always speaks of 'right' and 'rights.' He is forced to acquiesce. The result is right in the only sense which is real and true. It is more to the purpose to note that an indefinite series of consequences follow, and that they create or condition rights which are real and just. Many persons now argue against property that it began in force and therefore has no existence in right and justice. They might say the same of marriage or religion. Some do say the same of the state. The war of the United States with Mexico in 1845 is now generally regarded as unjustified. That cannot affect the rights of all kinds which have been contracted in the territory then ceded by Mexico or under the status created on the land obtained by the treaty of peace with that country. The whole history of mankind is a series of acts which are open to doubt, dispute, and criticism, as to their right and justice, but all subsequent history has been forced to take up the consequences of those acts and go on. The disputants about 'rights' often lose sight of the fact that the world has to go on day by day and dispute must end. It always ends in force. The end always leaves some complaining in terms of right and rights. They are overborne by force of some kind. Therefore might has made all the right which ever has existed or exists now. If it is proposed to reverse, reform, or change anything which ever was done because we now think that it was wrong, that is a new question and a new case, in which the anterior view alone is in place. It is for the new and future cases that we study historical cases and form judgments on them which will enable us to act more wisely. If we recognize the great extent to which force now enters into all which happens in society, we shall cease to be shocked to learn the extent to which it has been active in the entire history of civilization. The habit of using jural concepts, which is now so characteristic of our mores, leads us into vague and impossible dreams of social affairs, in which metaphysical concepts are supposed to realize themselves, or are assumed to be real."

Chapter 2 is titled Characteristics of the Mores.

"The mores come down to us from the past. Each individual is born into them as he is born into the atmosphere, and he does not reflect on them, or criticise them any more than a baby analyzes the atmosphere before he begins to breathe it. Each one is subjected to the influence of the mores, and formed by them, before he is capable of reasoning about them."

Chapter 3 is titled The Struggle For Existence (Tools, Arts, Language, Money)

"Language is a product of the folkways which illustrates their operation in a number of most important details. Language is a product of the need of cooperative understanding in all the work, and in connection with all the interests, of life. It is a societal phenomenon. It was necessary in war, the chase, and industry so soon as these interests were pursued cooperatively. Each group produced its own language which held that group together and sundered it from others. All are now agreed that, whatever may have been the origin of language, it owes its form and development to usage. 'Men's usage makes language.' The maxim that 'usage is the rule of speech' is of supreme and uncontrolled validity in every part and parcel of every human tongue.' 'Language is only the imperfect means of men to find their bearings in the world of their memories; to make use of their memory, that is, their own experience and that of their ancestors, with all probability that this world of memory will be like the world of reality.' ^ The origin of language is one of those origins which must ever remain enveloped in mystery.** How can a child understand the combinations of sound and sense when it must know language in order to learn them .? It must learn to speak without previously knowing how to speak, without any previous suspicion that the words of its mother mean more than the buzzing of a fly. The child learns to speak from an absolute beginning, just as, not the original man, but the original beast, learned to speak before any creature could speak.' * The beasts evidently did not learn to speak. They only learned to use the beast cries, by which they transmitted warnings, sex invitations, calls to united struggles, etc. The cries answered the purpose and went no further. Men, by virtue of the expanding power in them which enthused their zeal and their play, broke through the limitations of beast language, and went on to use the sounds of the human speech instrument for ever richer communications. Poetic power in blossom guides the development of a child's language as it guided that of the men who made the first languages.^ ** The original languages must be, in comparison with our languages, like the wildest love-passion compared with marital custom.' ^ Every word has a history of accidents which have befallen it, the beginnings of which are lost in the abyss of time.^ In the Middle Ages the word 'Word' came to mean the Word of God with such distinctness that the romance languages adopted parabola, or derivatives from it, for *'word.'^ The students of linguistics recognize metaphor as another great mode of modifying the signification of words. By metaphor they mean the assembling of like things, and the selection and extirpation of unlike things.

1 Gumplowicz, Social, und Folitik, 93. 2 Whitney, Language and the Study of Language^ 37, 40. 8 Mauthner, Kritik der Sprache, III, 2. 4 Ibid., II, 403. 6 Ibid., II, 426, 427."

Chapter 4 is titled Labor, Wealth

There was a change in the view of labor from burden to blessing. Timocracy has been defeated by plutocracy. There is a disjunction between philosophy, which teaches what ought to be, and actualities, which are determined by the forces at play. The effect of opening up of new land leads the people to believe in democracy. (This is the same sentiment found in 'The Science of Society': land-value). That there is a tension between aristocracy and democracy which is played out on the amount of land that is available for use. Mores conform to changes in life conditions. Societal order necessitates ruling classes (cf. elite theory) which define its political form and system. Total justice for all, that is to say, justice without abuse of said system is a fantasy. What is graft?

Chapter 5 is titled Societal Selection.

"The most important fact about the mores is their dominion over the individual. Arising he knows not whence or how, they meet his opening mind in earliest childhood, give him his outfit of ideas, faiths, and tastes, and lead him into prescribed mental processes. They bring to him codes of action, standards, and rules of ethics. They have a model of the man-as-he-should-be to which they mold him, in spite of himself and without his knowledge. If he submits and consents, he is taken up and may attain great social success. If he resists and dissents, he is thrown out and may be trodden under foot. The mores are therefore an engine of social selection. Their coercion of the individual is the mode in which they operate the selection, and the details of the process deserve study."

Literature is useful in inculcating a shared ethic for the group. "Epic poems have powerfully influenced the group." (p.174) The Iliad and the Odyssey were textbooks in Ancient Greek pedagogy. Notions of courage and duty were set collectively which could be re-aroused though allusion. The morale of the nation was tied to epic literature; skepticism eroded shared ideals; skepticism "marked a decline in the morale of the nation" (p.175) These popular epics had their reflorescence in the writings of Seneca the Younger, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Pliny the Younger during the late Hellenistic period and Roman Empire; it is questionable whether the reformative essence of the aforementioned writers reached the masses.

There is, to Sumner, a dualism pervasive in the efficacy of the pedagogical and moral quality of epic works of literature. "Modes of action" and "principle" are effective when acted upon the masses while the cultured classes are less influenced by this mode of inculcation; they "make of them only poses and affectation". (p.175)

Sumner is dubious of ideals, considering them a "phantasm". In contradistinction with models, which are deduced and delimited by something real, ideals "are entirely unscientific" (p.201) and an escape from dealing with facts, the function of science and art.

"Whenever pathos is in play the subject is privileged. It is regarded with a kind of affection, and is protected from severe examination. It is made holy or sacred. The thing is cherished with such a preestab�lished preference and faith that it is thought wrong to verify it. Pathos, therefore, is unfavorable to truth. It has always been an element in religion. It is an element now in patriotism, and in regard to the history of one's own country. The coercion of pathos on the individual comes in popular disapproval of truth- teUing about the matter in question. The toleration for forgery and fraud in the Christian church until modern times, which to modern people seems so shocking and inexplicable, was chiefly due to pathos about religion and the church. If a forgery would help the church or religion, any one who opposed it would seem to be an enemy of religion and the church and willing to violate the pathos which surrounded them."

Pathos and truth (179)

Implicita fides reduced all of Chrisendom by the fifteenth century to.

"Thus the apparatus and devices for putting down dissent and enforcing submission to such authority as the great number were willing to recognize had attained a superficial success. Opposition was silenced. Dissent was made so dangerous that no one dared express it, except here and there a hero, and outward conformity to church discipline was almost universal. The mores also underwent influence from a societal power which was great and pervading. The external and artificial character of the conformity was so well known that a name was given to it, —implicita fides —and this was discussed as to its nature and value. The mores are gravely affected by implicita fides when it is held by a great number of persons. The selection which had destroyed honest thinkers and sincere churchmen had cultivated a class of smooth hypocrites and submissive cowards. In the fifteenth century the whole of Christendom had accepted the church system with its concepts of welfare and its dictates of duty, and had adopted the ritual means of holiness and salvation which it prescribed. In fact, at no other time were men ever so busy as then with 'good works,' or so fussy about church ritual. Everybody was anxious not to be a heretic. At the same time the whole mediaeval system was falling to pieces, and the inventions and discoveries were disproving all received and approved ideas about the world and welfare in it. Gross sensuality and carnal lust got possession of society, and the church system was an independent system of balancing accounts with the other world. The theater declined into obscenity and coarseness, and the popular pulpit was hardly better. The learned world was returning to classical paganism. The popes had their children in the Vatican and publicly married them there. Under Sextus IV the courtesans at Rome paid a tax which produced 20,000 ducats per annum. Prelates owned brothels. Innocent VIII tried to stop the scandal. In 1490 his vicar published an .edict against all concubinage, but the pope forced him to recall it because all ecclesiastics had concubines. There were 6800 public meretrices at Rome besides private ones and concubines. Concubinage was really tolerated, subject to the payment of an amercement. The proceedings under Alexander VI were only the culmination of the license taken by men who were irresponsible masters of the world and who showed the insanity of despotism just as the Roman emperors did. The church had broken down under the reaction of its own efforts to rule the world. It had made moral hypocrisy and religious humbug characteristic of Christians, for he who indulges in sensual vice and balances it off by ritual devices is morally subject to the deepest corruption of character. The church system had corrupted the mores by adding casuistry and dialectic smartness to the devices for regulating conduct and satisfying interests. The men of the Renaissance, especially in Italy, acted always from passionate motives and went to great excess. Their only system of conduct was success in what they wanted to do, and so they were often heroes of crime. Yet they all conformed to church ritual and discipline."

Chapter 6 is titled Slavery Slavery has a

Chapter 7 is titled Abortion, Infanticide, Killing the Old

Chapter 8 is titled Cannibalism. It is one of the "primordial mores". (p.329) Like all of the mores, cannibalism is not abominable. Its ascription to anathema status is as a result of habit.

Chapter 9 is titled Sex Mores. The sex mores are, to Sumner, "one of the greatest and important division of the mores". (p. 342) Here the different customs, from the Hindu to the Russian, are explored.

Chapter 10 is titled The Marriage Institution. Mores, according the Sumner, lead to institutions. While the sex mores control and fashion all the relations of the sexes to each other, marriage crystalizes those imperfect institutions and gives them stability making them a definable whole covering a great field of human interest and life policy.

Chapter 11 is titled The Social Codes. Here, Sumner attacks the idea of an objective morality. Sumer writes that "'immoral' never means anything but contrary to the mores of the time and place." Morality has its benchmark in expediency; experience produces judgement of right and wrong. Pederasty, Sumner writes, was once considered "harmless and trivial" (p.418) while contemporary commentators deem it "corrupting both to individual and social vigor, and harmful to interests, both individual and collective." In a similar vein, "cannibalism, polygamy, incest, harlotry, and other primitive customs have been discarded by a very wide and, in the case of some of them, unanimous judgement that they are harmful." (p.418)

Chapter 12 is titled Incest. Incest is defined as "the marital union of a man and a woman who are akin within the limits of a prohibition current at the time in the laws or the mores of the group." (p.479)

Chapter 13 is titled Kinship, Blood Revenge, Primitive Justice, Peace Unions.

Chapter 14 is titled Uncleanliness and the Evil Eye. It concerns demonism and the aleatory interest. Sumner states that "religion always arises out of the mores." (p.510) "Changes in religion are produced by changes in the mores." (p.510)

Chapter 15 is titled The Mores Can Make Anything Right and Prevent the Condemnation of Anything.

Chapter 16 is titled Sacral Harlotry, Child Sacrifice.

"Religion never has been an independent force acting from outside creatively to mold the mores or the ideas of men. Evidently such an idea is the extreme form of the world philosophy in which another (spiritual) world is conceived of as impinging upon this one from 'above,' to give it laws and guidance. The mores grow out of the life as a whole. They change with the life conditions, density of population, and life experience. Then they become strange or hostile to traditional religion. In our own experience our mores have reached views about ritual practices, polygamy, slavery, celibacy, etc., which are strange or hostile to those in the Bible. Since the sixteenth century we have reconstructed our religion to fit our modern ideas and mores. Every religious reform in history has come about in this way. All religious doctrines and ritual acts are held immutable by strong interests and notions of religious duty. Therefore they fall out of consistency with the mores, which are in constant change, being acted on by all the observation or experience of life."

Chapter 17 is titled Popular Sport, Exhibitions and Drama. Sumner adopts a purely utilitarian perspective on poetry.

Chapter 18 is titled Asceticism.

Chapter 19 is titled Education, History. To Sumner, the immense value of genius to society is the one thing which justifies popular education to the masses. Education, to Sumner, is not a panacea: while book learning is addressed to the intellect, not the feelings, the feelings are the springs of action. Education teaches us to act by judgement. The critical faculty -- our ability to apprehend reality -- is a product of education and training. Education is only "good" insofar as it cultivates a critical faculty in its pupils. Religious catechisms, like those of the Schoolmen, "could never train children to criticism." (p. 633) Education of this type is virtuous: it is "the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens." (p. 633) On the other hand, the belief in a "big steal" -- either to war with the government or among other citizens who are not privy to the "big steal" provides a different sort of education: one faster and deeper than any school can provide. Sumner believes that who believe in the "big steal" have nothing to learn from political economy or political science. Education means more than book-learning, however. "It means a development and training of all useful powers which the pupil possesses, and repression of all bad prepossessions which he has inherited." (p.634) The ethical value of this education, writes Donald K. Pickens of the University of North Texas, is how it is used in the marketplace of life. "This type of moral education was only for an elite because the majority of men always took short-term and unreflective pleasure in the world, ignoring the objective moral workings of nature. Such activity might be successful briefly but never in the fullness of time."

Chapter 20, ''Life Policy. Virtue vs. Success'', illustrates the antipodal approaches to life policy. That is to say, the difference between a success policy which is immediately expedient and satisfies mundane interests and needs and a virtue policy of universal right and necessary conduct. Sumner, who was known for his animadversion towards philosophy, theology, and metaphysics, ends his work with this concluding remark. "The antagonism between a virtue policy and a success policy is a constant ethical problem. The Renaissance in Italy shows that although moral traditions may be narrow and mistaken, any morality is better than moral anarchy. Moral traditions are guides which no one can afford to neglect. They are in the mores and they are lost in every great revolution of the mores. Then the men are morally lost. Their notions, desires, purposes, and means become false, and even the notion of crime is arbitrary and untrue. If all try the policy of dishonesty, the result will be the firmest conviction that honesty is the best policy. The mores aim always to arrive at correct notions of virtue. In so far as they reach correct results the virtue policy proves to be the only success policy."

Intellectual Influences
William Graham Sumner, according to historian Donald K. Pickens, was indebted to Scottish moral philosophy.