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
The rights of the parties,
and the right and wrong of conduct, after the mores have conformed to
new life conditions, are new deductions. The philosophers follow with
their systems by which they try to construe the whole new order of acts
and thoughts with reference to some thought fabric which they put before
the mores, although it was found out after the mores had established the
relations. In the case in which the fixed mores do not conform to new
interests and needs crises arise. Moses, Zoroaster, Manu, Solon,
Lycurgus, and Numa are either mythical or historical culture heroes, who
are said to have solved such crises by new "laws," and set the society
in motion again. The fiction of the intervention of a god or a hero is
necessary to account for a reconstruction of the mores of the ancestors
without crime.
+89. Mores of New England.+ The Puritan code of early New England has
been almost entirely abandoned, so far as its positive details are
concerned, while at the same time some new restrictions on conduct have
been introduced, especially as to the use of spirituous liquors, so
that not all the changes have been in the way of relaxation. The mores
of New England, however, still show deep traces of the Puritan temper
and world philosophy. Perhaps nowhere else in the world can so strong an
illustration be seen both of the persistency of the spirit of the mores
and of their variability and adaptability. The mores of New England have
extended to a large immigrant population and have won large control over
them. They have also been carried to the new states by immigrants, and
their perpetuation there is an often-noticed phenomenon. The
extravagances in doctrine and behavior of the seventeenth-century
Puritans have been thrown off and their code of morals has been shorn of
its angularity, but their life policy and standards have become to a
very large extent those of the civilized world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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