PAPER 69
PRIMITIVE HUMAN INSTITUTIONS
EMOTIONALLY, man transcends his animal ancestors in his ability to appreciate humor, art, and religion. Socially, man exhibits his superiority in that he is a toolmaker, a communicator, and an institution builder.
When human beings long maintain social groups, such aggregations always result in the creation of certain activity trends which culminate in institutionalization. Most of man's institutions have proved to be laborsaving while at the same time contributing something to the enhancement of group security.
Civilized 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.
All human institutions minister to some social need, past or present, notwithstanding that their overdevelopment unfailingly detracts from the worth-whileness of the individual in that personality is overshadowed and initiative is diminished. Man should control his institutions rather than permit himself to be dominated by these creations of advancing civilization.
Human institutions are of three general classes:
1. The institutions of self-maintenance. These institutions embrace those practices growing out of food hunger and its associated instincts of self-preservation. They include industry, property, war for gain, and all the regulative machinery of society. Sooner or later the fear instinct fosters the establishment of these institutions of survival by means of taboo, convention, and religious sanction. But fear, ignorance, and superstition have played a prominent part in the early origin and subsequent development of all human institutions.
2. The institutions of self-perpetuation. These are the establishments of society growing out of sex hunger, maternal instinct, and the higher tender emotions of the races. They embrace the social safeguards of the home and the school, of family life, education, ethics, and religion. They include marriage customs, war for defense, and home building.
3. The institutions of self-gratification. These are the practices growing out of vanity proclivities and pride emotions; and they embrace customs in dress and personal adornment, social usages, war for glory, dancing, amusement, games, and other phases of sensual gratification. But civilization has never evolved distinctive institutions of self-gratification.
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