Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and MoralsSumner, William Graham
General
Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals
Sumner, William Graham
Manners and customs
+223. Discipline by pain.+ He who wants to make another do something, or
to prevent him from doing something, may, if the former is the stronger,
connect act or omission with the infliction of pain. This is only an
imitation of nature, in which pain is a sanction and a deterrent. Family
and school discipline have always rested on this artificial use of pain.
It is, apparently, the most primary application of force or coercion. It
combines directly with vengeance, which is a primary passion of human
nature. Punishment is of this philosophy, for by punishment we furnish,
or add, a painful consequence to acts which we desire to restrain, in
the hope that the consequence will cause reflection and make the victim
desist. The punishment may be imprisonment (i.e. temporary exclusion
from the society), or fine, or scourging, or other painful treatment.
The sense of punishment is the same whether the punishment be physical
pain or other disagreeable experience. Although we have come to adopt
modern ideas about the infliction of physical pain in punishment, we
cannot depart far from its fundamental theory and motive. In the past,
physical pain has been employed also, in lynching and in regular
proceedings, to enforce conformity, and to suppress dissent from the
current mores of the society. The physical proceedings are measures to
produce conformity which differ from boycotting and other methods of
manifesting disapproval and inflicting unpopularity in that they are
positive and physical. Then the selection is positive and is pursued by
external and physical sanctions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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