GROUP LIFE
To understand the origin and growth of moral life, it is essential to understand primitive society. And while there is much that is uncertain, there is one fact of capital importance which stands out clearly. This is the dominant influence of group life. It is not asserted that all peoples have had precisely the same type of groups, or the same degree of group solidarity. It is beyond question that the ancestors of modern civilized races lived under the general types of group life which will be outlined, and that these types or their survivals are found among the great mass of peoples to-day.
§ 1. TYPICAL FACTS OF GROUP LIFE
Consider the following incident as related by Dr. Gray:
"A Chinese aided by his wife flogged his mother. The imperial order not only commanded that the criminals should be put to death; it further directed that the head of the clan should be put to death; that the immediate neighbors each receive eighty blows and be sent into exile; that the head or representatives of the graduates of the first degree (or B.A.) among whom the male offender ranked should be flogged and exiled; that the granduncle, the uncle, and two elder brothers should be put to death; that the prefect and the rulers should for a time be deprived of their rank; that on the face of the mother of the female offender four Chinese characters expressive of neglect of duty towards her daughter should be tattooed, and that she be exiled to a distant province; that the father of the female offender, a bachelor of arts, should not be allowed to take any higher literary degrees, and that he be flogged and exiled; that the son of the offenders should receive another name, and that the lands of the offender for a time remain fallow." (J. H. Gray, China, Vol. I., pp. 237 f.)
Put beside this the story of Achan:
Achan had taken for his own possession certain articles from the spoil of Jericho which had been set apart or "devoted" to Jehovah. Israel then suffered a defeat in battle. When Achan's act became known, "Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan, the son of Zerah, and the mantle, and the wedge of gold, and his sons and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had. … And all Israel stoned him with stones; and they burned them with fire and stoned them with stones." (Joshua vii: 24, 25.)
The converse of these situations is brought out in the regulations of the Kumi, a Japanese local institution comprising five or more households:
"As members of a Kumi we will cultivate friendly feelings even more than with our relatives, and will promote each other's happiness as well as share each other's grief. If there is an unprincipled or lawless person in a Kumi, we shall all share the responsibility for him." (Simmons and Wigmore, Transactions, Asiatic Society of Japan, xix., 177 f.)
For another aspect of the group take Cæsar's description of landholding among the Germans:
"No one possesses privately a definite extent of land; no one has limited fields of his own; but every year the magistrates and chiefs distribute the land to the clans and the kindred groups (gentibus cognationibusque hominum) and to those (other groups) who live together." (De Bell. Gall., VI., 22.)
Of the Greeks, our intellectual ancestors, as well as fellow Aryans, it is stated that in Attica, even to a late period, the land remained to a large degree in possession of ideal persons, gods, phylæ (tribes) or phratries, kinships, political communities. Even when the superficies of the land might be regarded as private, mines were reserved as public.[3] The basis on which these kinship groups rested is thus stated by Grote:[4]
"All these phratric and gentile associations, the larger as well as the smaller, were founded upon the same principles and tendencies of the Grecian mind—a coalescence of the idea of worship with that of ancestry, or of communion in certain special religious rites with communion of blood, real or supposed." "The god or hero, to whom the assembled members offered their sacrifices, was conceived as the primitive ancestor to whom they owed their origin."
Coulanges gives a similar statement as to the ancient family group:[5]
"The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire, and of dead ancestors. This caused the family to form a single body both in this life and in the next."
Finally, the following passage on clanship among the Kafirs brings out two points: (1) That such a group life implies feelings and ideas of a distinctive sort; and (2) that it has a strength rooted in the very necessities of life.
"A Kafir feels that the 'frame that binds him in' extends to the clan. The sense of solidarity of the family in Europe is thin and feeble compared to the full-blooded sense of corporate union of the Kafir clan. The claims of the clan entirely swamp the rights of the individual. The system of tribal solidarity, which has worked so well in its smoothness that it might satisfy the utmost dreams of the socialist, is a standing proof of the sense of corporate union of the clan. In olden days a man did not have any feeling of personal injury when a chief made him work for white men and then told him to give all, or nearly all of his wages to his chief; the money was kept within the clan, and what was the good of the clan was the good of the individual and vice versa. The striking thing about this unity of the clan is that it was not a thought-out plan imposed from without by legislation upon an unwilling people, but it was a felt-out plan which arose spontaneously along the line of least resistance. If one member of the clan suffered, all the members suffered, not in sentimental phraseology, but in real fact." (Dudley Kidd, Savage Childhood, pp. 74 f.)
The above passages refer to Aryan, Semitic, Mongolian, and Kafir peoples. They could be matched by similar statements concerning nearly every people. They suggest a way of living, and a view of life very different from that of the American or of most Europeans.[6] The American or European belongs to groups of various kinds, but he "joins" most of them. He of course is born into a family, but he does not stay in it all his life unless he pleases. And he may choose his own occupation, residence, wife, political party, religion, social club, or even national allegiance. He may own or sell his own house, give or bequeath his property, and is responsible generally speaking for no one's acts but his own. This makes him an "individual" in a much fuller sense than he would be if all these relations were settled for him. On the other hand, the member of such groups as are referred to in our examples above, has all, or nearly all, his relations fixed when he is born into a certain clan or family group. This settles his occupation, dwelling, gods, and politics. If it doesn't decide upon his wife, it at least usually fixes the group from which she must be taken. His conditions, in the words of Maine, are thus of "status," not of "contract." This makes a vast difference in his whole attitude. It will help to bring out more clearly by contrast the character of present morality, as well as to see moral life in the making, if we examine more carefully this group life. We shall find, as brought out in the passages already quoted, that the most important type of group is at once a kindred or family, an economic, a political, a religious, and a moral unit. First, however, we notice briefly the most important types of groups.
§ 2. KINSHIP AND HOUSEHOLD GROUPS
1. The Kinship Group.—The kinship group is a body of persons who conceive of themselves as sprung from one ancestor, and hence as having in their veins one blood. It does not matter for our study whether each group has actually sprung
