Taboo and Genetics Part 6

Racial decay in modern society; Purely "moral" control dysgenic in civilized society; New machinery for social control; Mistaken notion that reproduction is an individual problem; Economic and other factors in the group problem of reproduction.

From the discussion in the preceding chapter, it becomes apparent that for the half of the female element in a savage society possessing the most vigor and initiative to turn away from reproduction would in the long run be fatal to the group. Yet this is what occurs in large measure in modern civilized society. Reproduction is a biological function. It is non-compet.i.tive, as far as the individual is concerned, and offers no material rewards. The breakdown of the group's control over the detailed conduct and behaviour of its members is accompanied by an increasing stress upon material rewards to individuals. So with growing individualism, in the half of the race which can both bear children and compete in the social activities offering rewards, i.e., the women who are specialized to the former and adapted to the latter, there is a growing tendency among the most successful, individualized strains, to choose the social and eschew the biological functions.

Racial degeneration is the result. Recorded history is one succession of barbarous races, under strong, primitive breeding conditions, swamping their more civilized, individualized neighbours, adopting the dysgenic ways of civilization and then being swamped in their turn by barbarians.

This is especially p.r.o.nounced in our own times because popularized biological and medical knowledge makes it possible for a tremendous cla.s.s of the most successful and enlightened to avoid reproduction without foregoing s.e.x activity.

In primitive groups, a "moral" control which kept all women at reproduction was neither eugenic nor dysgenic unless accompanied by systematic destruction of the least fit children. By "moral" control is meant the use of taboo, prejudice, religious abhorrence for certain acts and the like. The carefully nurtured moral ideas about s.e.x and reproduction simply represent the system of coercion which groups have found most effective in enforcing the division of reproductive and other activities among the individual members. When this social machinery grew up, to regulate s.e.xual activity was in general to regulate reproduction. The natural s.e.x desire proved sufficiently powerful and general to still seek its object, even with the group handicaps and regulations imposed to meet the reproductive necessity. But contraceptive knowledge, etc., has now become so general that to regulate s.e.x activity is no longer to regulate reproduction. The taboo or "moral" method of regulation has become peculiarly degenerating to race quality, because the most intelligent, rationalized individuals are least affected by it.

There is no turning back to control by ignorance. Even theoretically, the only way to stop such a disastrous selection of the unfit would be to rationalize reproduction--so that _n.o.body_ shall reproduce the species through sheer ignorance of how to evade or avoid it. This done, some type of social control must be found which will enable civilized societies to breed from their best instead of their worst stock. Under the old scheme, already half broken down, natural selection favours primitive rather than civilized societies through decreased birth-rates and survival of the unfit in the latter. Even this is true only where the savage groups are not interfered with by the civilized, a condition rapidly disappearing through modern occidental imperialism and the inoculation of primitive peoples with "civilized" diseases such as syphilis, rum-drinking and rampant individualism.

To continually encourage the racially most desirable women to disregard their s.e.xual specialization and exploit their social-compet.i.tive adaptation must, obviously destroy the group which pursues such a policy. The only way to make such a course democratic is to carefully instruct all women, rich and poor, wise and ignorant, in the methods of avoiding reproduction and to inject the virus of individualism in all alike. Then the group can get its population supply only by a new system of control. To remove any economic handicaps to child-bearing is certainly not out of harmony with our ideas of justice.

In removing the economic handicaps at present connected with the reproductive function in women, care must also be taken that the very measures which insure this do not themselves become dysgenic influences.

Such schemes as maternity insurance, pensions for mothers, and most of the propositions along this line, may offer an inducement to women of the poorer cla.s.ses to a.s.sume the burdens connected with their specialization for child-bearing. But their more fortunate sisters, who find themselves so well adapted to modern conditions that they are even moderately successful in the compet.i.tion for material rewards, will hardly find recompense thus for turning from their social to their biological functions. To these highly individualized modern women must be presented more cogent reasons for taking upon themselves the burden of reproducing the group.

It is obvious that from just this energetic female stock we should obtain a large part of the next generation if we are at all concerned over the welfare of the group and its chances of survival. One suggestion is that we may be able to turn their very individualism to account and use it as a potent factor in the social control of their reproductive activities. If we can demonstrate on the basis of sound biological data that the bearing of children is necessary for the full and complete development of the individual woman, physically and mentally, we shall have gone a long way toward securing voluntary motherhood. Only such argument will induce the highly individualized, who may also be the most vital, woman to turn of her own accord from compet.i.tive social activities to the performance of the biological function for which she is specialized. This is especially true, as has been intimated above, since contraceptive knowledge now permits the exercise of s.e.xual functions without the natural consequences, and the avoidance of motherhood no longer involves the denial of expression to the s.e.xual urge.

Even if we are able to utilize this method of control, it will not obtain the requisite number of offspring to maintain the eugenic quality of the group, since the bearing of one or two children would be all that individual development would require. If the group must have on the average three children from each of its women in order to replace itself, the larger part of the reproductive activities will still be confined to the more ignorant, or if they also make use of contraceptive knowledge, the group will simply die out from the effects of its own democratic enlightenment. Thus it becomes apparent that we must find some more potent force than this narrow form of self-interest to accomplish the social purposes of reproduction. When reproduction is generally understood to be as thoroughly a matter of group survival as for example the defensive side in a war of extermination, the same sentiment of group loyalty which now takes such forms as patriotism can be appealed to. If the human race is unsocial it will perish anyway. If it has not become unsocial--and it does not display any such tendency, but only the use of such impulses in mistaken directions--then a group necessity like reproduction can be met. Whatever is required of the individual will become "moral" and "patriotic"--i.e., it will be wreathed in the imperishable sentiments which group themselves around socially necessary and hence socially approved acts everywhere and always.

In whatever races finally survive, the women of good stock as well as poor--perhaps eventually the good even more than the poor--will reproduce themselves. Because of our ideals of individual liberty, this may not be achieved by taboo, ignorance or conscription for motherhood.

But when it is found to be the personal interest to bear children, both as a means of complete physical and mental development and as a way of winning social approval and esteem, it will become as imperative for woman to fulfil the biological function to which she is specialized as it was under the old system of moral and taboo control. The increasing emphasis on the necessity of motherhood for the maintenance of a normal, health personality, and the growing tendency to look upon this function as the greatest service which woman can render to society, are manifest signs that this time is approaching. There is little doubt that woman will be as amenable to these newer and more rationalized mores as human nature has always been to the irrationally formed customs and traditions of the past.

To ignore the female specialization involved in furnis.h.i.+ng the intramaternal environment for three children, on an average, to the group, is simply foolish. If undertaken at maturity--say from twenty-two to twenty-five years of age--and a two-year interval left between the three in the interest of both mother and children, it puts woman in an entirely different relation toward extra-reproductive activities than man. It does imply a division of labour.

In general, it would seem socially expedient to encourage each woman to have her own three children, instead of s.h.i.+fting the burden upon the shoulders of some other. If such activities of nursing and caring for the very young can be pooled, so much the better. Doubtless some women who find them distasteful would be much more useful to society at other work. But let us not disregard fundamentals. It is obviously advantageous for children of normal, able parents to be cared for in the home environment. In a _biologically healthy_ society the presumption must be that the average woman has some three children of her own. Since this obviously includes nurses and governesses, we see at once the futility of the oft-proposed cla.s.s solution of hiring single women to care for the children of the fortunate. If such a servant is undesirable, she is not hired; if normal, in a biologically healthy society she would have her own children.

The female handicap incident to reproduction may be ill.u.s.trated by the case of Hambletonian 10 mentioned in Chapter II. We saw that a female could not have borne the hundredth part of his colts. This simply means that the effort or individual cost of impressing his characters upon the new generation is less than one one-hundredth that required of a female.

Among domestic animals this is made use of to multiply the better males to the exclusion of the others, a valuable biological expedient which we are denied in human groups because it would upset all our social inst.i.tutions. So we do the next best thing and make the males do more than half in the extra-biological activities of society, since they are by their structure prevented from having an equal share in the reproductive burden. This is an absolutely necessary equation, and there will always be some sort of division of labour on the basis of it.

Since reproduction is a group, not an individual, necessity, whatever economic burden it entails must eventually be a.s.sumed by society and divided up among the individuals, like the cost of war or any other group activity. Ideally, then, from the standpoint of democracy, every individual, male or female, should bear his share as a matter of course.

This att.i.tude toward reproduction, as an individual duty but a group economic burden, would lead to the solution of most of the problems involved. Negative eugenics should be an immediate a.s.sumption--if the state must pay for offspring, the quality will immediately begin to be considered. A poor race-contribution, not worth paying for, would certainly be prevented as far as possible.

Some well-meaning radical writers mistakenly suppose that the emanc.i.p.ation of women means the withdrawal by the group of any interest in, or any attempt to regulate, such things as the hours and conditions of female labour. That would simply imply that the group takes no interest in reproduction--in its own survival. For if the group does not make some equation for the greater burden of reproduction upon women, the inevitable result will be that that particular service will not be rendered by those most desirable to be preserved.

Given the fundamental a.s.sumption that the group is to survive--to be perpetuated by the one possible means--if it withdraws all solicitude about the handicap this entails to women as a whole, introducing a spirit of laissez-faire compet.i.tion between men and women, the women with sense enough to see the point will not enc.u.mber themselves with children. For each one of these who has no children, some other woman must have six instead of three. And some people encourage this in the name of democracy!

The most involved problems must inevitably centre around the women who, to quote Mrs. Hollingworth, "vary from the mode," but are yet functional for s.e.x. Some have no s.e.x desires at all, some no craving for or attachment to children, some neither of these. It is a question still to be solved whether some of them ought, in the interest of the race, to be encouraged to reproduce themselves. In less individualized primitive society, seclusion, taboo and ignorance coerced them into reproduction.

Any type of control involving the inculcation of "moral" ideas is open to the objection that it may work on those who should not reproduce themselves as well as those who should.

In a sense, this problem will tend to solve itself. With the subst.i.tution of the more rationalized standards of self-interest and group loyalty for the irrational taboo control of reproductive activities, there will be as much freedom for women to choose whether they will accept maternity as there is now, in the period of transition from the old standards to the new. The chief difference will be that many of the artificial forces which are acting as barriers to motherhood at the present time--as for example the economic handicap involved--will be removed, and woman's choice will therefore be more entirely in harmony with her native instinctive tendencies. Thus those women endowed with the most impelling desire for children will, as a rule, have the largest number. In all probability their offspring will inherit the same strong parental instinct. The stocks more poorly endowed with this impulse will tend to die out by the very lack of any tendency to self-perpetuation. It is only logical to conclude, therefore, that as we set up the new forces of social control outlined in this chapter, we are at the same time providing more scope for natural selection, and that the problem of aberrant types consequently becomes only a transitory one.

PART II

THE INSt.i.tUTIONALIZED s.e.x TABOO

BY

IVA LOWTHER PETERS, PH.D.

CHAPTER I

THE PRIMITIVE ATt.i.tUDE TOWARD s.e.x AND WOMANHOOD

Primitive social control; Its rigidity; Its necessity; Universality of this control in the form of taboos; Connection between the universal att.i.tude of primitive peoples towards woman as shown in the Inst.i.tutionalized s.e.x Taboo and the magic-religious belief in Mana; Relation of Mana to Taboo; Discussion of Sympathetic Magic and the a.s.sociated idea of danger from contact; Difficulties in the way of an inclusive definition of Taboo; Its dual nature; Comparison of concepts of Crawley, Frazer, Marett and others; Conclusion that Taboo is Negative Mana; Contribution of modern psychology to the study of Taboo; Freud's a.n.a.logy between the dualistic att.i.tude toward the tabooed object and the ambivalence of the emotions; The understanding of this dualism together with the primitive belief in Mana and Sympathetic Magic explains much in the att.i.tude of man toward woman; The vast amount of evidence in the taboos of many peoples of dualism in the att.i.tude toward woman. Possible physiological explanation of this dualistic att.i.tude of man toward woman found in a period before self-control had in some measure replaced social control, in the reaction of weakness and disgust following s.e.x festivals.

A study of the elaborate, standardized, and authoritative systems of social control found among all primitive peoples gives a vivid impression of the difficulty of the task of compelling man to die to himself, that is, to become a socius. The rigors and rituals of initiation ceremonies at adolescence impressed the duties of sociality at that impressionable period. The individual who refused to bow his head to the social yoke became a vagabond, an outcast, an excommunicate.

In view of the fierceness of the struggle for food and the att.i.tude toward the stranger among all primitives, the outcast's life chances were unenviable. It was preferable to adapt one's self to the social order. "Bad" traits were the more easily suppressed in return for the re-enforcement of power which was the striking feature of group life; power over enemies, power over nature, and a re-enforcement of the emotional life of the individual which became the basis on which were built up the magico-religious ceremonies of inst.i.tutionalized religion.

It is the purpose of this study to consider a phase of social life in which there can be traced a persistence into modern times of a primitive form of control which in a pre-rational stage of group life made possible the comparatively harmonious interplay of antagonistic forces.

This form of control is called Taboo. A student of the phenomenon, a recognized authority on its ethnological interpretation, says of it: "To ill.u.s.trate the continuity of culture and the ident.i.ty of the elementary human ideas in all ages, it is sufficient to point to the ease with which the Polynesian word _tabu_ has pa.s.sed into modern language."[1, p.16]

We shall attempt to show that at least one form of taboo, the Inst.i.tutionalized s.e.x Taboo, is co-extensive with human social experience, and exists to-day at the base of family life, the socialized form of s.e.x relations.h.i.+p. The family as a social inst.i.tution has been scarcely touched until a very recent historical period by the rationalizing process that has affected religious and political inst.i.tutions. Economic changes resultant upon the introduction of an industrial era which showed the importance of women in diverse social relations were causes of this new effort at adaptation to changing conditions. It became apparent that taboos in the form of customs, ceremonials, beliefs, and conventions, all electrically charged with emotional content, have guarded the life of woman from change, and with her the functions peculiar to family life. There has doubtless been present in some of these taboos "a good hard common-sense element." But there are also irrational elements whose persistence has resulted in hards.h.i.+p, blind cruelty, and over-standardization.

In order to comprehend the att.i.tude of early man toward s.e.x and womanhood, and to understand the system of taboo control which grew out of this att.i.tude, it is only reasonable to suppose that the prehistoric races, like the uncivilized peoples of the present time, were inclined to explain all phenomena as the result of the action of spiritistic forces partaking of both a magical and religious nature. This supernatural principle which the primitive mind conceived as an all-pervading, universal essence, is most widely known as _mana_, although it has been discussed under other names.[A]

Certain persons, animals and objects[B] are often held to be imbued to an unusual degree with this _mana_, and hence are to be regarded as holy and held in awe. Inasmuch as man may wish to use this power for his own purposes, a ceremonial cult would naturally grow up by which this would become possible. Otherwise, to come in contact with these objects directly or indirectly, besides profaning their sanct.i.ty would be exceedingly dangerous for the transgressor, because of this same power of transmission of a dread and little understood force. Therefore, all such persons, animals or objects are taboo and must be avoided. Under these circ.u.mstances it can be seen that taboos are una.n.a.lyzed, unrationalized "Don'ts," connected with the use and wont which have crystallized around the wish of man to manipulate the mysterious and often desirable features of his environment, notably those connected with possession, food, and s.e.x.

[Footnote A: The Australians call it Arunkulta, the Iroquis Indians Orenda and other North American tribes Wakonda, the Melanesians Mana.]

[Footnote B: Dr F.B. Jevons[2] says: "These things ... are alike taboo: the dead body; the new-born child; blood and the shedder of blood; the divine being as well as the criminal; the sick, outcasts, and foreigners; animals as well as men; women especially, the married woman as well as the sacred virgin; food, clothes, vessels, property, house, bed, canoes, the thres.h.i.+ng floor, the winnowing fan, a name, a word, a day; all are or may be taboo because dangerous. This short list does not contain one-hundredth part of the things which are supposed to be dangerous; but even if it were filled out and made tolerably complete, it would, by itself, fail to give any idea of the actual extent and importance of the inst.i.tution of taboo."]

The idea of the transmission of _mana_ through contact is concomitant with the notion of _sympathetic magic_, defined as the belief that the qualities of one thing can be mysteriously transferred to another. The most familiar ill.u.s.tration is that of the hunter who will not eat the heart of the deer he has killed lest he become timid like that animal, while to eat the heart of a lion would be to gain all the fierce courage of that beast.[A] This belief becomes so elaborated that the qualities of one object are finally thought to be transferred to another which has never come into direct contact with the first, the transition being accomplished through the agency of a third object which has been in contact with both the others and thus acts as the conducting medium through which the qualities of one pa.s.s into the other.

[Footnote A: E.B. Tylor[3] has called attention to the belief that the qualities of the eaten pa.s.s into the eater as an explanation of the food taboos and prejudices of savage peoples.]

Just as the holy thing, which is to be feared as the seat of a mystic, supernatural force, is to be avoided lest harm befall from contact with it, or lest it be denied by human touch and its divine essence be affected, so the unclean thing is also made taboo lest it infect man with its own evil nature. Even as the savage will not have his idol polluted by contact with his own personality, however indirect, so he would himself avoid pollution in similar fas.h.i.+on by shunning that which is unclean. Here also the avoidance of the tabooed person or thing is based on the principle of sympathetic magic understood as a method of transference of qualities, and on belief in the possibility of infection by contact.

The dual nature of taboo as the avoidance of both the sacred and the unclean is noted by authorities on the subject who differ in other respects as to the definition of taboo, such as in the relation of taboo to the magical ceremonies by which man undertook to mould his environment to his wishes. Whether the tabooed object be regarded in one light or the other, the breaking of taboo is a.s.sociated with dread of the unknown--besides the fear of infection with the qualities of the tabooed object according to the laws of sympathetic magic. There is also the fear of the mysterious and supernatural, whether conceived as the mana force or as a principle of "bad magic."

Dr. J.G. Frazer has collected into the many volumes of "The Golden Bough" a ma.s.s of evidence concerning the taboos of primitive society. On the basis of his definition of magic as "a misapplication of the ideas of a.s.sociation by similarity and contiguity," Dr. Frazer divided magic into "positive magic," or charms, and "negative magic," or taboo.

"Positive magic says, 'Do this in order that so and so may happen.'

Negative magic or taboo says 'Do not do this lest so and so should happen.'"[4, p.111, v.I.]

But Dr. Frazer's conclusion, which he himself considered only tentative, was not long left una.s.sailed. Prof. R.R. Marett in his essay "Is Taboo a Negative Magic?"[5] called attention to the very evident fact that Dr.

Frazer's definition would not cover the characteristics of some of the best known taboos, the food taboos of Prof. Tylor to which we have previously alluded in this study, as a consequence of which "the flesh of timid animals is avoided by warriors, but they love the meat of tigers, boars, and stags, for their courage and speed."[3, p.131.] Are not these food taboos rather, Dr. Marett asks, a "misapplication of the ideas of a.s.sociation by similarity and contiguity" amounting to the sympathetic taboos so carefully described by such writers on Magic as MM. Hubert and Mauss of L'Annee Sociologique? Still another kind of taboos mentioned by Dr. Frazer but amplified by Mr. Crawley in "The Mystic Rose," the taboos on knots at childbirth, marriage, and death, are much better described by the term "sympathetic taboo." Moreover, if taboo were a form of magic as defined by Dr. Frazer, it would be a somewhat definite and measurable quant.i.ty; whereas the distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of taboo everywhere is the "infinite plus of awfulness"

always accompanying its violation. As Dr. Marett observes, there may be certain definite results, such as prescribed punishment for violations against which a legal code is in process of growth. There may be also social "growlings," showing the opposition of public opinion to which the savage is at least as keenly sensitive as the modern. But it is the "infinite plus" always attached to the violation of taboo that puts it into the realm of the mystical, the magical. It would seem that Dr.

Frazer's definition does not include enough.