VI. Morals and History
Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by
which it seeks to compel) its members and associations to behavior
consistent with its order, security, and growth. So for sixteen centuries the
Jewish enclaves in Christendom maintained their continuity and internal
peace by a strict and detailed moral code, almost without help from the
state and its laws.
A little knowledge of history stresses the variability of moral codes, and
concludes that they are negligible because they differ in time and place, and
sometimes contradict each other. A larger knowledge stresses the
universality of moral codes, and concludes to their necessity.
Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and
environmental conditions. If we divide economic history into three stages–
hunting, agriculture, industry–we may expect that the moral code of one
stage will be changed in the next. In the hunting stage a man had to be
ready to chase and fight and kill. When he had caught his prey he ate to the
cubic capacity of his stomach, being uncertain when he might eat again;
insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the memory–if only in the
blood–of a time when the test of survival (as now between states) was the
ability to kill. Presumably the death rate in men–so often risking their lives
in the hunt–was higher than in women; some men had to take several
women, and every man was expected to help women to frequent pregnancy.
Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were advantages in the
struggle for existence. Probably every vice was once a virtue–i.e., a quality
making for the survival of the individual, the family, or the group. Man’s
sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.
History does not tell us just when men passed from hunting to
agriculture–perhaps in the Neolithic Age, and through the discovery that
grain could be sown to add to the spontaneous growth of wild wheat. We
may reasonably assume that the new regime demanded new virtues, and
