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
+69. Group interests and policy.+ Groups select, consciously and
unconsciously, standards of group well living. They plan group careers,
and adopt purposes through which they hope to attain to group
self-realization. The historical classes adopt the decisions which
constitute these group plans and acts, and they impose them on the
group. The Greeks were enthused at one time by a national purpose to
destroy Troy, at another time by a national necessity to ward off
Persian conquest. The Romans conceived of their rivalry with Carthage as
a struggle from which only one state could survive. Spain, through an
effort to overthrow the political power of the Moors in the peninsula
and to make it all Christian, was educated up to a national purpose to
make Spain a pure "Christian" state, in the dogmatic and ecclesiastical
sense of the word. Moors and Jews were expelled at great cost and loss.
Germany and Italy cherished for generations a national hope and desire
to become unified states. Some attempts to formulate or interpret the
Monroe doctrine would make it a national policy and programme for the
United States. In lower civilization group interests and purposes are
less definite. We must believe that barbarous tribes often form notions
of their group interests, and adopt group policies, especially in their
relations with neighboring groups. The Iroquois, after forming their
confederation, made war on neighboring tribes in order either to
subjugate them or to force them to come into the peace pact. Pontiac and
Tecumseh united the red men in a race effort to drive the whites out of
North America.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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