Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
As the vigorous and aggressive activities of the male have a very
conspicuous value for the group when exercised for the benefit of
the group, they become particularly harmful when directed against the
safety or interests of the group or the members of the group, and we
find that civil and criminal law, and contract, and also conventional
morality, are closely connected with the motility of the male. The
establishment of moral standards is mediated through the sense of
strain--strain to the personal self, and strain to the social self.
Whether a man is injured by an assault upon his life or upon his
property, he suffers violence, and the first resort of the injured
individual or group is to similar violence; but this results in a
vicious tit-for-tat reaction whereby the stimulus to violence is
reinstated by every fresh act of violence. Within the group this
vicious action and reaction is broken up by the intervention of public
opinion, either in an informal expression of disapproval, or through
the headmen. The man who continues to kill may be killed in turn, but
by order of the council of the tribe; and one of his kinsmen may be
appointed to execute him, as under that condition no feud can follow.
But there is always a reluctance to banish or take the life of the
member of the group, both because no definite machinery is developed
for accomplishing either, and because the loss of an able-bodied
member of a group is a loss to the group itself. The group does not
seek, therefore, immediately to be rid of an offensive member, but
to modify his habits, to convert him. Jones says of the Ojibways that
there were occasionally bad ones among them, "but the good council of
the wise sachems and the mark of disgrace put upon unruly persons had
a very desirable influence."[199] The extreme form of punishment in
the power of the folk-moot of the Tuschinen is to be excluded from the
public feasts, and to be made a spectator while stoned in effigy and
cursed.[200] Sending a man to Coventry is in vogue among the Fejir
Beduins: one who kills a friend is so despised that he is never
spoken to again, nor allowed to sit in the tent of any member of the
tribe.[201]
The formulation of sentiment about an act depends also on the
repetition of the act. The act is more irritating, and the irritation
more widespread, with each repetition, and there is an increase of
the penalty for a second offense, and death for a slight offense when
frequently repeated: in the Netherlands stealing of linen left in the
fields to be bleached led to the death penalty for stealing a pocket
handkerchief. And with increasing definiteness of authority there
follows increasing definiteness of punishment; and when finally
the habit becomes fixed, conformity with it becomes a paramount
consideration, and a deed is no longer viewed with reference to its
intrinsic import so much as to its conformity or nonconformity with a
standard in the law: _summum jus, summa injuria_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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