The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖
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consideration goes far, I think, to establish an opinion that the
constitution of the living universe is a pure theism and that its
form of activity is what may he described as cooperative. It
points to the conclusion that all life is single in its essence,
but various, ever-varying and interactive in its manifestations,
and that men and all other living animals are active workers and
sharers in a vastly more extended system of cosmic action than
any of ourselves, much less of them, can possibly comprehend. It
also suggests that they may contribute, more or less
unconsciously, to the manifestation of a far higher life than our
own, somewhat as … the individual cells of one of the more
complex animals contribute to the manifestations of its higher
order of personality.” Perhaps such a unity is the basis of
instinct, of knowledge without teaching, of desire and wish that
has not the individual welfare as its basis. No man can reject
such phenomena as telepathy or thought transference merely
because he cannot understand them on a basis of strict human
individuality. To reject because one cannot understand is the
arrogance of the “clerico-academic” type of William James.
No one can read the stories of travelers or the writings of
anthropologists without concluding that codes of belief and
action arise out of the efforts of groups to understand and to
influence nature and that out of this practical effort AND
seeking of a harmonious reality arises morality. “Man seeks the
truth, a world that does not contradict itself, that does not
deceive, that does not change; a real world,—a world in which
there is no suffering. Contradiction, deception and variability
are the causes of suffering. He does not doubt there is such a
thing as, a world as it might be, and he would fain find a road
to it.”[1] But alas, intelligence and knowledge both are
imperfect, and one group seeking a truth that will bring them
good crops, fine families, victory over enemies, riches, power
and fellowship, as well as a harmonious universe, finds it in
idol worship and polygamy; another group seeking the same truth
finds it in Christianity and monogamy. And the members of some
groups are born to ideals, customs and habits that make it right
for a member to sing obscene songs and to be obscene at certain
periods, to kill and destroy the enemy, to sacrifice the
unbeliever, to worship a clay image, to have as many wives as
possible, and that make it WRONG to do otherwise. Indeed, he who
wishes a child to believe absolutely in a code of morals would
better postpone teaching him the customs and beliefs of other
people until habit has made him adamant to new ideas.
[1] Nietzsche.
It is with pleasure that I turn the attention of the reader to
the work of Frazier in the growth of human belief, custom and
institutions that he has incorporated into the stupendous series
of books called “The Golden Bough.” The things that influence us
most in our lives are heritages, not much changed, from the
beliefs of primitive societies. Believing that the forces of the
world were animate, like himself, and that they might be moved,
persuaded, cajoled and frightened into favorable action,
undeveloped man based most of his customs on efforts to obtain
some desired result from the gods. Out of these customs grew the
majority of our institutions; out of these queer beliefs and
superstitions, out of witchcraft, sympathetic magic, the “Old
Man” idea, the primitive reaction to sleep, epilepsy and death
grew medicine, science, religion, festivals, the kingship, the
idea of soul and most of the other governing and directing ideas
of our lives. It is true that the noble beliefs and sciences also
grew from these rude seeds, but with them and permeating our
social structure are crops of atrophied ideas, hampering customs,
cramping ideals. Further, in every race in every country, in
every family, there are somewhat different assortments of these
directing traditional forces; and it is these social inheritances
which are more responsible for difference in people than a native
difference in stock.
Consider the difference that being born and brought up in Turkey
and being born, let us say, in New York City, would make in two
children of exactly the same disposition, mental caliber and
physical structure. One would grow up a Turk and the other a New
Yorker, and the mere fact that they had the same original
capacity for thought, feeling and action would not alter the
result that in character the two men would stand almost at
opposite poles. One need not judge between them and say that one
was superior to the other, for while I feel that the New Yorker
might stand OUR inspection better, I am certain that the Turk
would be more pleasing to Turkish ideas. The point is that they
would be different and that the differences would result solely
from the environmental forces of natural conditions and social
inheritance.
Study the immigrant to the United States and his descendant,
American born and bred. Compare Irishman and Irish-American,
Russian Jew and his American-born descendant; compare Englishman
and the Anglo-Saxon New England descendant. Here is a race, the
Jew, which in the Ghetto and under circumstances that built up a
tremendously powerful set of traditions and customs developed a
very distinctive type of human being. Poor in physique, with
little physical pugnacity, but worshiping, learning and reaching
out for wealth and power in an unusually successful manner, the
crucible of an adverse and hostile environment rendered him
totally different in manners from his Gentile neighbors. With a
high birth rate and an intensely close and pure family life, the
Ghetto Jew lived and died shut off by the restrictions placed
upon him and his own social heredity from the life of the country
of his birth. Then came immigration to the United States through
one cause or another,—and note the results.
With the old social heredity still at work, another set of
customs, traditions and beliefs comes into open competition with
it in the bosom of the American Jew. Nowhere is the struggle
between the old and the new generations so intense as in the home
of the Orthodox Jew. His descendant is clean-shaven and no longer
observes (or observes only perfunctorily or with many a gross
inconsistency) the dietary and household laws. He is a free
spender and luxurious in his habits as compared with his
economical, ascetic forefathers. He marries late and the birth
rate drops with most astonishing rapidity, so that in one
generation the children of parents who had eight or ten children
have families of one or two or three children. He becomes a
follower of sports, and with his love for scholarship still
strong, as witness his production of scholars and scientists, the
remarkable rise of the Jewish prize fighter stands out as a
divergence from tradition that mocks at theories of inborn racial
characters. And a third generation differs in customs, manners,
ideals, purposes and physique but little from the social class of
Americans in which the individual members move. The names become
Anglicized; gone are the Abrahams and Isaacs and Jacobs, the
Rachels and Leahs and Rebeccas, and in their place are Vernon,
Mortimer, Winthrop, Alice, Helen and Elizabeth. And this change
in name symbolizes the revolution in essential characters.
Has the racial stock changed in one generation or two? No. A new
social heredity has overcome—or at least in part supplanted—an
older social heredity and released and developed characters
hitherto held in check. In every human being—and this is a theme
we shall enlarge upon later—there are potential lines of
development far outnumbering those that can be manifested, and
each environment and tradition calls forth some and suppresses
others. Every man is a garden planted with all kinds of seeds;
tradition and teaching are the gardeners that allow only certain
ones to come to bloom. In each age, each country and each family
there is a different gardener at work, repressing certain trends
in the individual, favoring and bringing to an exaggerated growth
other trends.
That each family, or type of family, acts in this way is
recognized in the value given to the home life. The home, because
of its sequestration, allows for the growth of individual types
better than would a community house where the same traditions and
ideals governed the life of each child. In the home the parents
seek to cultivate the specific type of character they favor. The
home is par excellence the place where prejudice and social
attitude are fostered. Though the mother and father seek to give
broadmindedness and wide culture to the child, their efforts must
largely be governed by their own attitudes and reactions,—in
short, by their own character and the resultant examples and
teaching. It is true that the native character of the child may
make him resistant to the teachings of the parents or may even
develop counter-prejudices, to react violently against the
gardening. This is the case when the child is of an opposing
temperament or when in the course of time he falls under the
influence of ideals and traditions that are opposed to those of
his home. Unless the home combines interest and freedom, together
with teaching, certain children become violent rebels, and,
seeking freedom and interest outside of the home, find themselves
in a conflict, both with their home teaching and the home
teachers, that shakes the unity and the happiness of parent and
child. Like all civil wars this war between new and old
generations reaches great bitterness.
In studying the cases of several hundred delinquent girls, as a
consultant to the Parole Department of Massachusetts, it was
found that the family life of the girls could be classified in
two ways. The majority of the girls that reached the Reformatory
came from bad homes,—homes in which drunkenness, prostitution,
feeblemindedness, and insanity were common traits of the
parents. Or else the girls were orphans brought up by a
stepmother or some careless foster mother. In any case, through
either example, cruelty or neglect, they drifted into the
streets.
And the streets! Only the poor child (or the child brought up
over strictly) can know the lure of the streets. THERE is
excitement, THERE is freedom from prohibitions and inhibitions.
So the boy or girl finds a world without discipline, is without
the restraints imposed on the sex instincts and comes under the
influence of derelicts, sex-adventurers, thieves, vagabonds and
the aimless of all sorts. Into this university of the vices most
of the girls I am speaking of drifted, largely because the home
influence either was of the street type or had no advantages to
offer in competition with the street.
But the child on the streets is no more a solitary individual
than the savage is, or for that matter the civilized man. He
quickly forms part of a group, a roving group, called “The Gang.”
In the large cities gangs are usually composed of boys of one age
or nearly so; in the small towns the gangs will consist of the
boys of a neighborhood. In fact, regardless of whether they are
street children or home children, boys form gangs spontaneously.
The gang is the first voluntary organization of society, for the
home, in so far as the child is concerned, is an involuntary
organization. The gang has its leader or leaders, usually the
strongest or the best fighter. At any rate, the best fighter is
the nominal leader, though a shrewder lad may assume the real
power. The gang has rules, it plays according to regulations, its
quarrels are settled according to a code, property has a definite
status and distribution.[1] The members of the gang are always
quarreling with each other, but here, as in the larger
aggregations of older
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