Caste Wars: The Philosophy of Discrimination (Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory)

Caste Wars: The Philosophy of Discrimination (Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory)

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Even when the superficies of the land might be regarded as private, mines were re [Pg 19] served as public. Coulanges gives a similar statement as to the ancient family group: [5]. 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. 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 [Pg 20] 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. 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.

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.

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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.

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 [Pg 21] 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.

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First, however, we notice briefly the most important types of groups. The Kinship Group. It does not matter for our study whether each group has actually sprung from a single ancestor. It is highly probable that the contingencies of food-supply or of war may have been an original cause for the constitution of the group, wholly or in part. But this is of no consequence for our purpose. The important point is that the members of the group regard themselves as of one stock.

In some cases the ancestor is believed to have been an animal. Then we have the so-called totem group, which is found among North American Indians, Africans, and Australians, and was perhaps the early form of Semitic groups. In other cases, some hero or even some god is named as the ancestor.

In any case the essential part of the theory remains the same: namely, that one blood circulates in all the members, and hence that the life of each is a part of the common life of the group. There are then no degrees of kindred.

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This group, it should be noted, is not the same as the family, for in the family, as a rule, husband and wife are of different kinship groups, and continue their several kinship relations. Among some peoples marriage ceremonies, indeed, symbolize the admission of the wife into the husband's kinship, and in this case the family becomes a kinship group, but this is by no means universally the case. The feeling that one is first and foremost a member of [Pg 22] a group, rather than an individual, is furthered among certain kin groups by a scheme of class relationship.

According to this system, instead of having one definite person whom I, and I alone, regard and address as father or mother, grandfather, uncle, brother, sister, I call any one of a given group or class of persons mother, grandfather, brother, sister. And any one else who is in the same class with me calls the same persons, mother, grandfather, brother, or sister. Here there are five classes based upon the generations corresponding to what we call grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters, children, and grandchildren, but the words used to designate them do not imply any such specific parentage as do these words with us.

Bearing this in mind, we may say that every one in the first class is equally grandparent to every one in the third; every one in the third is equally brother or sister to every other in the third, equally father or mother to every one in the fourth, and so on. In Australia the classes are more numerous and the relationships far more intricate and complicated, but this does not, as might be supposed, render the bond relatively unimportant; on the contrary, his relationship to every other class is "one of the most important points with which each individual must be acquainted"; it determines marital relations, food distribution, salutations, and general conduct to an extraordinary degree.

A kinship group was known as "tribe" or "family" English translation among the Israelites; [Pg 23] as genos, phratria, and phyle among the Greeks, gens and curia among the Romans; clan in Scotland; sept in Ireland; Sippe in Germany.

The Family or Household Group. In the maternal family the woman remains among her own kin, and the children are naturally reckoned as belonging to the mother's kin. The husband and father is more or less a guest or outsider. In a blood feud he would have to side with his own clan and against that of his wife if his clan quarreled with hers. Clan and family are thus seen to be distinct.

In the paternal , which easily becomes the patriarchal family the wife leaves her relatives to live in her husband's house and among his kin. She might then, as at Rome, abjure her own kindred and be formally adopted into her husband's gens or clan. The Greek myth of Orestes is an illustration of the clashing of these two conceptions of father kin and mother kin, and Hamlet's sparing of his mother under similar circumstances, shows a more modern point of view.

It is evident that with the prevalence of the paternal type of family, clan and household ties will mutually strengthen each other. This will make an important difference in the father's relation to the children, and gives a much firmer basis for ancestral religion. But in many respects the environing atmosphere, the pressure and support, the group sympathy and group tradition, are essentially similar.

The important thing is that every person is a member of a kindred, and likewise, of some family group, and that he thinks, feels, and acts accordingly. The Land and the Group. Among hunting and pastoral peoples there was, of course, no "ownership" by any group in the strict sense of modern law. But none the less, the group, large or small, had its fairly well-defined territory within which it hunted and fished; in the pastoral life it had its pasture range and its wells of water.

With agriculture a more definite sense of possession arose. But possession was by the tribe or gens or household, not by the individual:. A man was thus not a member of the clan, because he lived upon, or even owned, the land; but he lived upon the land, and had interests in it, because he was a member of the clan.

Greek and German customs were quoted at the outset. Among the Celts the laws of ancient Ireland show a transitional stage. This latter belonged as individual property to the men of the chieftain groups. They are joint in food, worship, and estate. They have a common home, a common table. Maxims of the Slavs express their appreciation of community life: "The common household waxes rich"; "The more bees in the hive, the heavier it weighs. Whether rightly or not, the Irish tenant refuses to regard himself as merely a tenant.

He considers himself as a member of a family or group which formerly owned the land, and he does not admit the justice, even though he cannot disprove the legality, of an alienation of the group possession. For such a clan or household as we have described is not merely equivalent to the persons who compose it at a given time. Its property belongs to the ancestors and to the posterity as well as to the present possessors; and hence in some groups which admit an individual possession or use during life, no right of devise or inheritance is permitted.

The property reverts at death to the whole gens or clan. In other cases a child may inherit, but in default of such an heir the property passes to the common possession.

The right to bequeath property to the church was long a point on which civil law and canon law were at variance. The relations of the primitive clan or household group to land were therefore decidedly adapted to keep the individual's good bound up with the good of the group. Movable Goods. When the goods are the product of the individual's own skill or prowess they are usually his. Tools, weapons, slaves or women captured, products of some special craft or skill, are thus usually private.

But when the group acts as a unit the product is usually shared.

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The buffalo and salmon and large game were thus for the whole Indian [Pg 26] group which hunted or fished together; and in like manner the maize which was tended by the women belonged to the household in common. Slavic and Indian house communities at the present day have a common interest in the household property. Even women and children among some tribes are regarded as the property of the group. In a modern family the parents exercise a certain degree of control over the children, but this is limited in several respects.

No parent is allowed to put a child to death, or to permit him to grow up in ignorance. On the other hand, the parent is not allowed to protect the child from arrest if a serious injury has been done by him. The State , through its laws and officers, is regarded by us as the highest authority in a certain great sphere of action.

In early group life there may or may not be some political body over and above the clan or family, but in any case the kin or family is itself a sort of political State. Not a State in the sense that the political powers are deliberately separated from personal, religious, and family ties; men gained a new conception of authority and rose to a higher level of possibilities when they consciously separated and defined government and laws from the undifferentiated whole of a religious and kindred group. But yet this primitive group was after all a State, not a mob, or a voluntary society, or a mere family; for 1 it was a more or less permanently organized body; 2 it exercised control over its members which they regarded as rightful authority, not as mere force; 3 it was not limited by any higher author [Pg 27] ity, and acted more or less effectively for the interest of the whole.

The representatives of this political aspect of the group may be chiefs or sachems, a council of elders, or, as in Rome, the House Father, whose patria potestas marks the extreme development of the patriarchal family. The control exercised by the group over individual members assumes various forms among the different peoples.

The more important aspects are a right over life and bodily freedom, in some cases extending to power of putting to death, maiming, chastising, deciding whether newly born children shall be preserved or not; the right of betrothal, which includes control over the marriage portion received for its women; and the right to administer property of the kin in behalf of the kin as a whole.

It is probable that among all these various forms of control, the control over the marriage relations of women has been most persistent. One reason for this control may have been the fact that the group was bound to resent injuries of a member of the group who had been married to another. Hence this responsibility seemed naturally to involve the right of decision as to her marriage.

A State may allow a citizen of another country to own land, to sue in its courts, and will usually give him a certain amount of protection, but the first-named rights are apt to be limited, and it is only a few years since Chief Justice Taney's dictum stated the existing legal theory of the United States to be that the negro "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

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