Читать книгу Ethics - Джон Дьюи - Страница 20

The moral in this early stage is not to be looked for as something distinct from the political, religious, kindred, and sympathetic aspects of the clan, family, and other groups. The question rather is, How far are these very political, religious, and other aspects implicitly moral? If by moral we mean a conscious testing of conduct by an inner and self-imposed standard, if we mean a freely chosen as contrasted with a habitual or customary standard, then evidently we have the moral only in germ. For the standards are group standards, rather than those of individual conscience; they operate largely through habit rather than through choice. Nevertheless they are not set for the individual by outsiders. They are set by a group of which he is a member. They are enforced by a group of which he is a member. Conduct is praised or blamed, punished or rewarded by the group of which he is a member. Property is administered, industry is carried on, wars and feuds prosecuted for the common good. What the group does, each member joins in doing. It is a reciprocal matter: A helps enforce a rule or impose a service on B; he cannot help feeling it fair when the same rule is applied to himself. He has to "play the game," and usually he expects to play it as a matter of course. Each member, therefore, is practicing certain acts, standing in certain relations, maintaining certain attitudes, just because he is one of the group which does these things and maintains these standards. And he does not act in common with the group without sharing in the group emotions. It is a grotesque perversion to conceive the restraints of gods and chiefs as purely external terrors. The primitive group could enter into the spirit implied in the words of the Athenian chorus, which required of an alien upon adoption

"To loathe whate'er our state does hateful hold,

To reverence what it loves."[17]

The gregarious instinct may be the most elemental of the impulses which bind the group together, but it is reinforced by sympathies and sentiments growing out of common life, common work, common danger, common religion. The morality is already implicit, it needs only to become conscious. The standards are embodied in the old men or the gods; the rational good is in the inherited wisdom; the respect for sex, for property rights, and for the common good, is embodied in the system—but it is there. Nor are the union and control a wholly objective affair. "The corporate union was not a pretty religious fancy with which to please the mind, but was so truly felt that it formed an excellent basis from which the altruistic sentiment might start. Gross selfishness was curbed, and the turbulent passions were restrained by an impulse which the man felt welling up within him, instinctive and unbidden. Clannish camaraderie was thus of immense value to the native races."[18]