[.ca] Folkways: A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals (ISBN 0486424960)

the Fundemental Book for understanding Culture:
The Folkways is the first and most comprehensive study of how human culture is subject to Darwinian evolution. He traces the history of the world, and how humans have crafted customs ("folkways") in the struggle for survival. Fit customs survive and are adopted by foreign societies; weak customs are abandoned or those who practice them are annihilated. Before Bloom, Dawkins, L. Tiger, E.O. Wilson, before sociobiology or evolutionary psychology or any other of those academic faddish studies, there was Sumner, and his work is still about the best: he has less need to try to seem controversial or amazing or new. The book was not intended to impress the public. It is written as a text book, in paragraph and chapter divisions, and its tone throughout is serious and not sensational. The main virtue of his work of course, is that his theories are correct. His main premise is laid out in the main chapter: that humans are in a conflicted state of "antagonistic cooperation" and that culture is evolved through both rational selection (choosing) and natural selection (perishing). Furthermore, all notions of morality, of right and wrong, can be traced back through this evolution. The following chapters consider the history of hunting, slavery, polygamy, the Inquistion, and many other customs both wholesome and unsavory. He proposes those which are thought "wrong" now have been tried and found unsatisfactory for the survival of the society, and not because of any abstract ideal of Ethics. He defends, revolutionarily, a completely nihilistic view. Sumner was a privelged New Englander and a Yale professor, a confirmed elitist, racist and snobbish plutocrat. None of this matters to the validity of the conclusions which he reached. Anyone with a serious interest in human society or history should read this book as a starting point.