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
When, then, it is observed within the group that this, that, and
the other man has died of poison, each interprets this in terms of
himself, and no one feels safe. The use of poison is not only a means
of checking activities and doing hurt socially, but this form is most
foul and unnatural because it involves a death without the possibility
of motor resistance (except the inadequate opportunity on the
strategic side of taking precautionary measures against poison) and
a victory and social reward without a struggle. The group, therefore,
early adopts very severe methods in this regard. Death is the usual
penalty for the use of poison, and even the possession of poison,
among tribes not employing it for poisoning weapons, is punished.
Among the Karens of India, if a man is found with poison in his
possession, he is bound and placed for three days in the hot sun, his
poison is destroyed, and he is pledged not to obtain any more. If
he is suspected of killing anyone, he is executed.[204] Particularly
distressing modes of death, and other means of penalizing death by
poison more severely than motor modes of killing, were adopted. The
Chinese punish the preparation of poisons or capture of poisonous
animals with beheading, confiscation, and banishment of wife and
children. In Athens insanity caused by poison was punished with death.
The _Sachsenspiegel_ provides death by fire. In the lawbook of the
tsar Wachtang a double composition price was exacted for death by
poison. And in ancient Wales death and confiscation were the penalty
for death by poison, and death or banishment the penalty of the
manufacturer of poisons. The same quality of disapproval is expressed
in early law of sorcery, and it is unnecessary to give details of this
also. But, stated in emotional terms, both poison and sorcery, and
other underhand practices arouse one of the most distressing of the
emotions--the emotion of dread, if we understand by this term that
form of fear which has no tangible or visible embodiment, which
is apprehended but not located, and which in consequence cannot be
resisted; the distress, in fact, lying in the inability to function.
The organism which has developed structure and function through action
is unsatisfied by an un-motor mode of decision. We thus detect in the
love of fair play, in the Golden Rule, and in all moral practices a
motor element; and with changing conditions there is progressively
a tendency, mediated by natural selection and conscious choice, to
select those modes of reaction in which the element of chance is
as far as possible eliminated. This preference for functional over
chance or quasi-chance forms of decision is expressed first within
the group, but is slowly extended, along with increasing commercial
communication, treaties of peace, and with supernatural assistance, to
neighboring groups. The case of Odysseus is an instance of a moment
in the life of the race when a disapproval is becoming of general
application.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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