mores

• Prince’s staff did not impose m. upon tribes

66:6.5For­eign emis­saries were never sent to a race ex­cept upon the spe­cific re­quest of that peo­ple. Those who la­bored for the up­lift and ad­vance­ment of a given tribe or race were al­ways na­tives of that tribe or race. The one hun­dred would not at­tempt to im­pose the habits and mores of even a su­pe­rior race upon an­other tribe. Al­ways they pa­tiently worked to up­lift and ad­vance the time-tried mores of each race. The sim­ple folk of Uran­tia brought their so­cial cus­toms to Dala­ma­tia, not to ex­change them for new and bet­ter prac­tices, but to have them up­lifted by con­tact with a higher cul­ture and by as­so­ci­a­tion with su­pe­rior minds. The pro­cess was slow but very ef­fec­tual.

68:4.1All mod­ern so­cial in­sti­tu­tions arise from the evo­lu­tion of the prim­i­tive cus­toms of your sav­age an­ces­tors; the con­ven­tions of to­day are the mod­i­fied and ex­panded cus­toms of yes­ter­day. What habit is to the in­di­vid­ual, cus­tom is to the group; and group cus­toms de­velop into folk­ways or tribal tra­di­tions—mass con­ven­tions. From these early be­gin­nings all of the in­sti­tu­tions of pres­ent-day hu­man so­ci­ety take their hum­ble ori­gin.

• grew out of effort to avoid pain and humiliation while seeking pleasure and power
• origin of m. always unconscious and unintentional

68:4.2It must be borne in mind that the mores orig­i­nated in an ef­fort to ad­just group liv­ing to the con­di­tions of mass ex­is­tence; the mores were man’s first so­cial in­sti­tu­tion. And all of these tribal re­ac­tions grew out of the ef­fort to avoid pain and hu­mil­i­a­tion while at the same time seek­ing to en­joy plea­sure and power. The ori­gin of folk­ways, like the ori­gin of lan­guages, is al­ways un­con­scious and un­in­ten­tional and there­fore al­ways shrouded in mys­tery.

• crystallized by belief the dead would punish those who disdain rules by which they had lived

68:4.3Ghost fear drove prim­i­tive man to en­vi­sion the super­nat­u­ral and thus se­curely laid the foun­da­tions for those pow­er­ful so­cial in­flu­ences of ethics and re­li­gion which in turn pre­served in­vi­o­late the mores and cus­toms of so­ci­ety from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. The one thing which early es­tab­lished and crys­tal­lized the mores was the be­lief that the dead were jeal­ous of the ways by which they had lived and died; there­fore would they visit dire pun­ish­ment upon those liv­ing mor­tals who dared to treat with care­less dis­dain the rules of liv­ing which they had hon­ored when in the flesh. All this is best il­lus­trated by the pres­ent rev­er­ence of the yel­low race for their an­ces­tors. Later de­vel­op­ing prim­i­tive re­li­gion greatly re­in­forced ghost fear in sta­bi­liz­ing the mores, but ad­vanc­ing civ­i­liza­tion has in­creas­ingly lib­er­ated man­kind from the bond­age of fear and the slav­ery of su­per­sti­tion.

• ancient man was helpless victim of

68:4.4Prior to the lib­er­at­ing and lib­er­al­iz­ing in­struc­tion of the Dala­ma­tia teach­ers, an­cient man was held a help­less vic­tim of the rit­ual of the mores; the prim­i­tive sav­age was hedged about by an end­less cer­e­mo­nial. Ev­ery­thing he did from the time of awak­en­ing in the morn­ing to the mo­ment he fell asleep in his cave at night had to be done just so—in ac­cor­dance with the folk­ways of the tribe. He was a slave to the tyranny of us­age; his life con­tained noth­ing free, spon­ta­neous, or orig­i­nal. There was no nat­u­ral prog­ress to­ward a higher men­tal, moral, or so­cial ex­is­tence.

• safety brake against too rapid advancement

68:4.5Early man was might­ily gripped by cus­tom; the sav­age was a ver­i­ta­ble slave to us­age; but there have arisen ever and anon those vari­a­tions from type who have dared to in­au­gu­rate new ways of think­ing and im­proved meth­ods of liv­ing. Nev­er­the­less, the in­er­tia of prim­i­tive man con­sti­tutes the bi­o­logic safety brake against pre­cip­i­ta­tion too sud­denly into the ru­inous mal­ad­just­ment of a too rapidly ad­vanc­ing civ­i­liza­tion.

68:4.6But these cus­toms are not an un­mit­i­gated evil; their evo­lu­tion should con­tinue. It is nearly fa­tal to the con­tin­u­ance of civ­i­liza­tion to un­der­take their whole­sale mod­i­fi­ca­tion by rad­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion. Cus­tom has been the thread of con­ti­nu­ity which has held civ­i­liza­tion to­gether. The path of hu­man his­tory is strewn with the rem­nants of dis­carded cus­toms and ob­so­lete so­cial prac­tices; but no civ­i­liza­tion has en­dured which aban­doned its mores ex­cept for the adop­tion of bet­ter and more fit cus­toms.

68:4.7The sur­vival of a so­ci­ety de­pends chiefly on the pro­gres­sive evo­lu­tion of its mores. The pro­cess of cus­tom evo­lu­tion grows out of the de­sire for ex­per­i­men­ta­tion; new ideas are put for­ward—com­pe­ti­tion en­sues. A pro­gress­ing civ­i­liza­tion em­braces the pro­gres­sive idea and en­dures; time and cir­cum­stance fi­nally se­lect the fit­ter group for sur­vival. But this does not mean that each sep­a­rate and iso­lated change in the com­po­si­tion of hu­man so­ci­ety has been for the bet­ter. No! in­deed no! for there have been many, many ret­ro­gres­sions in the long for­ward strug­gle of Uran­tia civ­i­liza­tion.

• dependent on land-man ratio

68:5.1Land is the stage of so­ci­ety; men are the ac­tors. And man must ever ad­just his per­for­mances to con­form to the land sit­u­a­tion. The evo­lu­tion of the mores is al­ways de­pen­dent on the land-man ra­tio. This is true not­with­stand­ing the dif­fi­culty of its dis­cern­ment. Man’s land tech­nique, or main­te­nance arts, plus his stan­dards of liv­ing, equal the sum to­tal of the folk­ways, the mores. And the sum of man’s ad­just­ment to the life de­mands equals his cul­tural civ­i­liza­tion.

• dependent on land-man ratio

68:6.1Man is a crea­ture of the soil, a child of na­ture; no mat­ter how earnestly he may try to es­cape from the land, in the last reck­on­ing he is cer­tain to fail. “Dust you are and to dust shall you re­turn” is lit­er­ally true of all man­kind. The ba­sic strug­gle of man was, and is, and ever shall be, for land. The first so­cial as­so­ci­a­tions of prim­i­tive hu­man be­ings were for the pur­pose of win­ning these land strug­gles. The land-man ra­tio un­der­lies all so­cial civ­i­liza­tion.

• human institutions are merely accumulated m.

69:0.3Civ­i­lized man takes great pride in the char­ac­ter, sta­bil­ity, and con­ti­nu­ity of his es­tab­lished in­sti­tu­tions, but all hu­man in­sti­tu­tions are merely the ac­cu­mu­lated mores of the past as they have been con­served by taboos and dig­ni­fied by re­li­gion. Such lega­cies be­come tra­di­tions, and tra­di­tions ul­ti­mately meta­mor­phose into con­ven­tions.

• helped man subordinate present to future

69:5.41. Hunger—as­so­ci­ated with fore­sight. Food sav­ing and preser­va­tion meant power and com­fort for those who pos­sessed suf­fi­cient fore­sight thus to pro­vide for fu­ture needs. Food stor­age was ad­e­quate in­sur­ance against famine and dis­as­ter. And the en­tire body of prim­i­tive mores was re­ally de­signed to help man sub­or­di­nate the pres­ent to the fu­ture.

• laws in the making

70:11.1It is just as dif­fi­cult to draw sharp dis­tinc­tions be­tween mores and laws as to in­di­cate ex­actly when, at the dawn­ing, night is suc­ceeded by day. Mores are laws and po­lice reg­u­la­tions in the mak­ing. When long es­tab­lished, the un­de­fined mores tend to crys­tal­lize into pre­cise laws, con­crete reg­u­la­tions, and well-de­fined so­cial con­ven­tions.

• have ample power to restrain sex urge

82:3.3The mores, when re­spected, have am­ple power to re­strain and con­trol the sex urge, as has been shown among all races. Mar­riage stan­dards have al­ways been a true in­di­ca­tor of the cur­rent power of the mores and the func­tional in­tegrity of the civil gov­ern­ment. But the early sex and mat­ing mores were a mass of in­con­sis­tent and crude reg­u­la­tions. Par­ents, chil­dren, rel­a­tives, and so­ci­ety all had con­flict­ing in­ter­ests in the mar­riage reg­u­la­tions. But in spite of all this, those races which ex­alted and prac­ticed mar­riage nat­u­rally evolved to higher lev­els and sur­vived in in­creased num­bers.

• m. change, but instinct never

84:5.13Civ­i­liza­tion never can oblit­er­ate the be­hav­ior gulf be­tween the sexes. From age to age the mores change, but in­stinct never. In­nate ma­ter­nal af­fec­tion will never per­mit eman­ci­pated woman to be­come man’s se­ri­ous ri­val in in­dus­try. For­ever each sex will re­main su­preme in its own do­main, do­mains de­ter­mined by bi­o­logic dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and by men­tal dis­sim­i­lar­ity.

• mistake for evangelists to attempt to reform

95:1.6The early prog­ress of the Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ing was highly grat­i­fy­ing un­til Na­bo­dad, the leader of the school at Kish, de­cided to make a con­certed at­tack upon the preva­lent prac­tices of tem­ple har­lotry. But the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies failed in their ef­fort to bring about this so­cial re­form, and in the wreck of this fail­ure all their more im­por­tant spir­i­tual and philo­sophic teach­ings went down in de­feat.

• mistake for evangelists to attempt to reform

95:1.8Mel­chiz­e­dek had warned his fol­low­ers to teach about the one God, the Fa­ther and Maker of all, and to preach only the gospel of di­vine fa­vor through faith alone. But it has of­ten been the er­ror of the teach­ers of new truth to at­tempt too much, to at­tempt to sup­plant slow evo­lu­tion by sud­den rev­o­lu­tion. The Mel­chiz­e­dek mis­sion­ar­ies in Mes­o­po­ta­mia raised a moral stan­dard too high for the peo­ple; they at­tempted too much, and their no­ble cause went down in de­feat. They had been com­mis­sioned to preach a def­i­nite gospel, to pro­claim the truth of the re­al­ity of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, but they be­came en­tan­gled in the ap­par­ently wor­thy cause of re­form­ing the mores, and thus was their great mis­sion side­tracked and vir­tu­ally lost in frus­tra­tion and obliv­ion.

• mistake for evangelists to attempt to reform

95:7.3Here and there through­out Ara­bia were fam­i­lies and clans that held on to the hazy idea of the one God. Such groups trea­sured the tra­di­tions of Mel­chiz­e­dek, Abra­ham, Moses, and Zoroaster. There were nu­mer­ous cen­ters that might have re­sponded to the Je­su­so­nian gospel, but the Chris­tian mis­sion­ar­ies of the desert lands were an aus­tere and un­yield­ing group in con­trast with the com­pro­mis­ers and in­no­va­tors who func­tioned as mis­sion­ar­ies in the Med­i­ter­ra­nean coun­tries. Had the fol­low­ers of Je­sus taken more se­ri­ously his in­junc­tion to “go into all the world and preach the gospel,” and had they been more gra­cious in that preach­ing, less strin­gent in col­lat­eral so­cial re­quire­ments of their own de­vis­ing, then many lands would gladly have re­ceived the sim­ple gospel of the car­pen­ter’s son, Ara­bia among them.