Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [90]
Thus arose mental attitudes that regarded with deepest abhorrence all those acts, often quite innocent in modern eyes, which might release malign influences upon the community. Such acts were inhibited by the taboo, infraction of which was more severely punished than was the mere murder of a fellow group member. Often the penalty was expulsion from the community, which to primitive people was almost equivalent to a death sentence. Nor was there a lack of other expedients for discouraging divergent conduct and enforcing conformity to tribal mores. In some tribes, including among the Bantu peoples of Africa, an outstanding innovation might be attributed to witchcraft and punished with the most fearful cruelty This attitude discouraged progress as we now measure it; but perhaps, on the whole, the enforced external stagnation was beneficial rather than deplorable. Humans needed to grow inwardly, to come to terms with their dawning intelligence,
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before they were ready to embark upon a course of rapid changes in their lifestyles. We sometimes suspect that our contemporary world would be happier if the flood of innovations could somehow be retarded.
Despite taboos and punishments for witchcraft, tribal societies appear to have been less able to control self-willed, forceful individuals than modern states are. How precariously balanced is the character of people in the ruder stages of human development, how inadequate their inhibitions and superstitions for the control of conduct, is attested by the history of contacts between less and more advanced cultures. Whether the "savage" or "barbarian" meets "civilization'' in the guise of conqueror, as did the Germanic hordes that overran the Roman Empire, or as the abject vanquished people, innumerable pathetic examples of which are provided by the annals of the expansion of Western Europe in the last four or five centuries, the result is typically the same: profound disorientation, greater readiness to adopt the vices than the virtues of the more advanced culture, sometimes relaxation of the will to live.
The severest test of a mature intellect and developed character is the ability to pursue a steadfast course amid all the world's fluctuating circumstances, to be immune alike to the numbing blasts of adversity and the flattering solicitations of prosperity, to preserve in solitude or amid the crowd the same principles of conduct. Whatever their level of material culture, people who have achieved this integrity are civilized in the best meaning of the word. On the whole, traditional peoples are too dependent upon their group for guidance and moral support to preserve such constancy of character when tribal bonds are loosened by foreign contacts. As though instinctively aware of this danger, some tribes resort to the most drastic means to avoid all intercourse with alien cultures. When he planned the model community described in the Laws, Plato recognized that such isolation contributes greatly to social and moral stability.
Barbaric Magnificence and Barbarous Ideals
The dawn of written history in southern Asia and around the eastern Mediterranean reveals peoples who in the arts and politics have
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passed beyond the earlier stages when people of approximately equal status lived in small groups ruled by tradition instead of a king. We behold a stratified society, in which the governing classes enjoyed great power and almost unlimited opportunities for the indulgence of their whims. Despite the glamor that auroral tints and the fancy of inspired bards have cast over this dawn of civilization, the pictures presented by the Homeric epics, by the Greek tragedies woven about half-mythical events already some centuries past, by the Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, by the historical passages of the Old Testament, or by the Mahabharata of ancient Indiathese