COHESION AND RIVALRY

Social institutions have two main roots in human nature: internally, the correlative impulses to command and to obedience determine the social hierarchy and give authority to government; externally, another pair, cohesion and rivalry, are the determining factors. Impulses of co-operation and impulses of combat are equally primitive. The perpetuation of the species requires co-operation between a male and a female; and wherever infancy is prolonged, as it is in man, it requires something in the nature of the family. We inherit the family from our pre-human ancestry, and it is perhaps the only human group which is completely in line with natural impulses. But the limits of the family are not well-defined. Are those who have the same grandparents to be regarded as belonging to the family? If we answer in the affirmative, then how about those who have the same greatgrandparents? Human beings, unlike even the most highly developed animals, can transmit traditions. Very primitive tribes will recite long genealogies and will thus preserve a record of relationships which may be very remote. In this way the family

develops into the tribe. The tribe, if it is nomadic, moves as a unit. It gradually develops the authority of a chief, or of a council of elders, whose decision is accepted in difficult situations. It is in this way that the first extension of social cohesion beyond the family has taken place. Further extensions have been mainly the result of rivalry. The natural man thinks well of the members of his own tribe, except when he has some special reason to quarrel with them, but he thinks ill of all other tribes, except precariously when there is an alliance against a common enemy. It is obvious that in combat the larger tribe is likely to be victorious, and if two tribes form an alliance, they may, while the alliance lasts, be able to overwhelm enemies against whom neither singly could succeed. Through this cause, self-interest tends to enlarge the size of the social group. Gradually self-interest comes to be re-enforced by other sources of cohesion: a common ancestry is invented; common beliefs, perhaps at first enforced by government, come to be gradually accepted; hatred of common enemies is a bond, since there is a tendency to love those who hate what we hate. If such a conglomeration is successful, it comes in time to celebrate common glories. If it is in danger from without, it becomes united by having the same fears. In all these various ways, social units larger than the tribe gradually acquire common sentiments, common hopes and common fears; and when this process has gone far enough, they can act with the same unity as is shown by a primitive tribe.