Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/784

 768 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the private ethos is formed under the following conditions : First, the intercourse by which superior ethical elements are selected and gain currency must be long and intimate. Second, the individuals must not be very unlike or prepossessed by clash- ing traditions. Third, the group must not receive many strangers or have close contact with alien groups. Fourth, there must be a matrix of folk-lore, religion, literature, or art, in which the ethical gains may be imbedded and held fast. Fifth, the new ethical varieties are not safe from swamping until they have entered into tradition and the young have been reared under them.

Hitherto, when the genesis of ethical civilization has been considered, the sociologist has stood aside and let the psycholo- gist step to the desk. But if the fitness of the ideals and stand- ards that become paramount in the group is due to a blind selection for which nobody deserves any credit, then we no longer need trace the ethical strand in a civilization to the indi- vidual conscience. We do not need to start from a native sense of right and wrong. Men do not need to be sheep in order to develop the ethos of the herbivore. Even in a band of brigands or buccaneers there spring up after a while certain conventions that are moral. The conscience of the social group, as soon as it appears, is several points better than the private conscience, just because it is social. A wholly wicked idea, in being imparted to another, becomes a little less wicked, because now it excludes the thought of evil toward him. And a wickedness that can be communicated to and adopted by all persons in the group can be directed only against outsiders. There is honor among thieves because they mingle, and so arrive at a professional ethics. Pirates develop among themselves a taboo on pirate property because they live together. Accomplices develop a double standard of right, and the morality of primitive groups everywhere is noth- ing else at bottom than the morality of accomplices. The old notion that only men with good innate ideas can initiate a moral civilization is too much like the saying: "Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat."

In insisting that ethical elements may and do grow up in a natural way out of peaceable intercourse, we do not mean to say