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1054

(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Note: Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.

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1054 An American Dilemma
out with the purpose of proving the inefficacy of legislation. With reference to race
relations in the ^uth after the Civil War, Sumner said:
The two races have not yet made new mores. Vain attempts have been made to control
the new order by legislation. The only result is the proof that legislation cannot make
mores. ... It is only just now that the new society seems to be taking shape. There is a
trend in the mores now as they begin to form under the new state of things. It is not at
all what the humanitarians hoped and expected. . . . Some are anxious to interfere and
try to control. They take their stand on ethical views of what is going on. It is evidently
impossible for any one to interfere. We are like spectators at a great natural convulsion.
The results will be such as the facts and forces call for. We cannot foresee them. They
do not depend on ethical views any more than the volcanic eruption on Martinique con-
tained an ethical element.*
It should be noted that—in spite of its psychologism, its ethical relativism, its
modernized terminology, and the abundant anthropological illustrations—this theory
is nothing else than a reformulation and slight modification of the old laissez-faire
doctrine of the “natural order” as it was more naively set forth in the Enlightenment
period: human relations are governed by “natural laws”; “natural laws” are not only
the right laws but are also, in the main, and in spite of all the interferences of foolish
governments, actually permeating real life; they do not need to be legalized—if
legislation adheres to the “natural laws,” it is not exactly damaging but useless; if legis-
lation conflicts with the “natural laws” it will be inefficacious though slightly damaging
fads in games and sports, to realize the enormous flexibility of folkways. Stateways tend
toward uniformity. Governments attempt to standardize not only rights at law but also
legal procedure, administrative rules, and the conduct of citizens. Legislators are intolerant
of exceptions, bureaucrats abominate them, and courts, while finding precedents for them
when moral justice or the rule of reason requires, do not otherwise make them. Trial by
jury, however, which mediates between folkways and stateways, is a venerable if not always
a venerated defense against the govemmentalists, who would dictate and ration our food
and drink, write our medical prescriptions, cut our clothes, tell us what we may read and
look at, and send us to bed at curfew.
“Stateways are instituted by command, backed up by physical force. They are formal, as
machine-like as they can be made, and relentless. Folkways exert pressure which may be
resistless, but it is indefinite, elastic, and automatically variable.” (Studies in the Theory
of Human Society [1922], p. 193.)
•William Graham Sumner, Folkways (1906), pp. 77-78. Other statements by Sumner, in
his least opinionated book, revealing his attitude toward legislation, are the following;
“Acts of legislation come out of the mores. . . . Legislation, however, has to seek standing
ground on the existing mores, and it soon becomes apparent that legislation, to be strong,
must be consistent with the mores. Things which have been in the mores are put under
police regulation and later under positive law. It is sometimes said that ‘public opinion*
must ratify and approve police regulations, but this statement rests on an imperfect analysis.
The regulations must conform to the mores, so that the public will not think them too lax
or too strict.** (Ibid,y p. 55.)
“[The mores] never contain any provision for their own amendment.** (ibid.y p. 79.)
“The combination in the mores of persistency and variability determines the extent to
which it is possible to modify them by arbitrary action. It is not possible to change them,
by any artifice or device, to a great extent, or suddenly, or in any essential clement; it is
possible to modify them by slow and long-continued effort if the ritual is changed by minute
variations.** (Ibtd,^ p. 87.)

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