Page 162 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

154 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Thus every tongue eventually had its own race, i.e., its own great family,
whereas, primitively, every family, as I have said, possessed its own tongue.
We have also seen how, in the question of religion, every family originally
had its own cult and was a church in itself, but who, finally, through the
more or less strict interdiction of marriage with infidels and the exclusive
practice of connubium, combined into one race that was expressly created
for its religion. (p. 287)

Within these human groupings, rules emerge regarding what is allowed and
not allowed. The earliest human groups developed folkways (i.e., cus-
toms) regarding all manner of expected behavior in everyday life. As
Sumner (1906) has noted, human beings discovered the advantages of
living together, especially in harsh physical environments where life ex-
pectancies were low. The everyday challenges of living in such harsh
environments meant that people living and traveling together (indeed,
early human groupings were small and nomadic) could observe how
others in the group fared in their encounters with the physical
environment.
For example, a person brave (or foolish) enough to taste an unknown
plant or berry would be keenly observed by any others who were present,
and if the person became ill or died from that plant or berry, warnings
would be carried back to the other members of the group to stay away
from it. By this method, all sorts of rules arose regarding the realities of
living together in groups in particular environments, and the ones that
were considered especially vital to the well-being of the group were en-
shrined as higher-level “truths” called mores. Folkways are everyday cus-
toms that are expected to be followed, and everyone in the group is
expected to abide by them and enforce them on others. It is the condition
of self-help or informal control writ large.
Eventually, as human groupings hit upon standards of conduct backed
by the coercive force of all able-bodied men who could be sent out to deal
with those who violated folk norms (the posse), humans also developed
written language. Advancing beyond oral traditions based on folklore and
the proclamations of elders, the primitive informal systems of folkways
and mores were augmented with formal systems of control, primarily
those of law but also the increasingly professionalized practices of healing
and medicine. It was with the rise of the state—what Hobbes (1940) re-
ferred to as the Leviathan—that modern notions of formal control were
established; today, they characterize civilized society. According to Max
Weber (1947), the state can be understood as a political authoritarian as-
sociation that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a