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"Part of the function of parentage is the transmission of a moral code. For the child is more animal than human; it has humanity thrust upon it day by day as it receives the moral and mental heritage of the race. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
"[...] Every vice was once a virtue, necessary in the struggle for existenece; it became a vice only when it survived the conditions that made it indispensable; a vice, therefore, is not an advanced form of behavior, but usually an atavistic throwback to ancient and superseded ways. It is one purpose of a moral code to adjust the unchanged -- or slowly changing -- impulses of human nature to the changing needs and circumstances of social life.
Greed, acquisitiveness, dishonesty, cruelty, and violence were for so many generations useful to animals and men that not all our laws, our education, or morals, and our religions can quite stamp them out; some of them, doubtless, have a certain survival value today. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
"Dishonesty is not so ancient as greed, for hunger is older than property. The simple "savages" seem to be the most honest. "Their word is sacred," said Kolben of the Hottentots; they know "nothing of the corruptness and faithless arts of Europe." As international communications improved, this naive honesty disappeared; Europe has taught the gentle art to the Hottentots. In general, dishonesty rises with civilization, because under civilization the stakes of diplomacy are larger, there are more things to be stolen, and education makes men clever. When property develops among primitive men, lying and stealing come in its train."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935 (italics added)
"Crimes of violence are as old as greed; [...] Primitive man was cruel because he had to be; life taught him that he must have an arm always ready to strike, and a heart apt for "natural killing." The blackest page in anthropology is the story of primitive torture, and of the joy that many primitive men and women seem to have taken in the infliction of pain.
Much of this cruelty was associated with war; within the tribe, manners were less ferocious, and primitive men treated one another -- and even their slaves -- with a quite civilized kindliness. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
"[...] Among many tribes murder, even of another member of the same clan, aroused far less horror than it used to do with us. The Fuegians punished a murderer merely by exiling him until his fellows had forgotten his crime. The Kaffirs considered a murderer unclean, and required that he should blacken his face with charcoal; but after a while, if he washed himself, rinsed his mouth, and dyed himself brown, he was received into society again. The savages of Futuna, like our own, looked upon a murderer as a hero. In several tribes no woman would marry a man who had not killed someone, in fair fight or foul; hence the practice of headhunting, which survives in the Philippines today. The Dyak who brought back most heads from such a man-hunt had the choice of all the girls in his village; these were eager for his favors, feeling that through him they might become the mothers of brave and potent men."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
"To transmit greed into thrift, violence into argument, murder into litigation, and suicide into philosophy has been part of the task of civilization. It was a great advance when the strong consented to eat the weak by due process of law. No society can survive it it allows its members to behave toward one another in the same way in which it encourages them to behave as a group toward other groups; internal cooperation is the first law of external competition. The struggle for existence is not ended by mutual aid, it is incorporated, or transferred to the group. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
[...] Other things equal, the ability to compete with rival groups will be proportionate to the ability of the individual members and families to combine with one another. Hence every society inculcates a moral code, and builds up in the heart of the individual, as its secret allies and aids, social dispositions that mitigate the natural war of life; it encourages -- by calling them virtues -- those qualities or habits which redound to the advantage of the group, and discourages contrary qualities by calling them vices. In this way the individual is in some outward measure socialized, and the animal became a citizen."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
"The struggle for life encouraged communalism, but the struggle for property intensifies individualism. Primitive man was perhaps readier than contemporary man to cooperate with his fellows; social solidarity came more easily to him since he had more perils and interests in common with his group, and less possessions to separate him from the rest. [...]'
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
"Almost all groups agree in holding other groups to be inferior to themselves. The American Indians looked upon themselves as the chosen people, specially created by the Great Spirit as an uplifting example of mankind. One Indian tribe called itself "The Only Men"; another called inself "Men of Men"; the Caribs said, "We alone are people." The Eskimos believed that the Europeans had come to Greenland to learn manners and virtues. Consequently it seldom occurred to primitive man to extend to other tribes the moral restraints which he acknowledged in dealing with his own; he frankly conceived it to be a function of morals to give strength and coherence to his group against other groups. Commandments and tabus applied only to the people of his tribe; with others, except when they were his guests, he might go as far as he dared.
Moral progress in history lies not so much in the improvement of the moral code as in the enlargement of the area within which it is applied. The morals of modern man are not unquestionably superior to those of primitive man, though the two groups of codes may differ considerably in content, practice and profession; but modern morals are, in normal times, extended -- though with decreasing intensity -- to a greater number of people than before. (However, the range within which the moral code is appled has narrowed since the Middle Ages, as the result of the rise of nationalism.) As tribes were gathered up into larger units called states, morality overflowed its tribal bounds; and as communication -- or a common danger -- united and assimilated states, morals seeped through frontiers, and some men began to apply their commandments to all Europeans, to all whites, at last to all men. [...] There are no morals in diplomacy, and la politique n'a pas d'entrailles ("politics has no guts"); but there are morals in international trade, merely because such trade cannot go on without some degree of restraint, regulation, and confidence. Trade began in piracy; it culminates in morality."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
"Few societies have been content to rest their moral codes upon so frankly rational a basis as economic and political utility. For the individual is not endowed by nature with any disposition to subordinate her personal interests to those of the group, or to obey irksome regulations for which there are no visible means of enforcement. To provide, so to speak, an invisible watchman, to strengthen the social impulses against the individualistic by powerful hopes and fears, societies have not invented but made use of, religion. [...] Morals, then, are soon endowed with religious sanctions, because mystery and supernaturalism lend a weight which can never attach to things empirically known and genetically understood; men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science. But was this moral utility the source or origin of religion?"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
"For in dealing with a crowd of women, at least, or with any promiscuous mob, a philosopher cannot influence them by reason or exhort them to reverence, piety and faith; nay, there is need of religious fear also, and this cannot be aroused without myths and marvels. For thunderbolts, aegis, trident, torches, snakes, thyrsuslances— arms of the gods— are myths, and so is the entire ancient theology. But the founders of states gave their sanction to these things as bugbears wherewith to scare the simple-minded. Now since this is the nature of mythology, and since it has come to have its place in the social and civil scheme of life as well as in the history of actual facts, the ancients clung to their system of education for children and applied it up to the age of maturity; and by means of poetry they believed that they could satisfactorily discipline every period of life. But now, after a long time, the writing of history and the present-day philosophy have come to the front. Philosophy, however, is for the few, whereas poetry is more useful to the people at large."
Strabo, Geographica, Ch.2, quoted in Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.4, Section III, 1935
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