The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (color ebook reader .TXT) 📕

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