Part V, Chapter II, 2

Among peoples he calls savages and barbarians, things are quite different. Every such person undergoes a kind of Spartan discipline, hardened by the necessities of life to every hardship. He lives in constant danger, often suffers the extremes of hunger, and frequently dies from sheer want. His circumstances not only accustom him to every distress but teach him never to yield to the passions that distress arouses. He expects no sympathy or indulgence from his countrymen for such weakness. Before we can feel much for others, we must ourselves have some measure of ease. If our own misery presses us too hard, we have no leisure to attend to our neighbor’s; and these people are too occupied by their own needs to give much thought to anyone else’s. Consequently, whatever his distress, a man expects no sympathy from those around him and scorns to expose himself by betraying the slightest weakness. However fierce his passions, he never lets them disturb the serenity of his face or the composure of his conduct. The Indigenous peoples of North America, we are told, assume the utmost indifference on every occasion and would feel degraded if they appeared overcome in any way by love, grief, or resentment. Their magnanimity and self-command in this respect are almost inconceivable to Europeans. In a country where all people are equal in rank and fortune, one might expect mutual inclination to be the only consideration in marriage, freely indulged. Yet there all marriages, without exception, are arranged by parents; a young man would consider himself disgraced forever if he showed the slightest preference for one woman over another, or failed to profess complete indifference both to when he would marry and to whom. The weakness of love, so freely indulged in humane and polished ages, is regarded among these peoples as an utterly unpardonable softness. Even after marriage, husband and wife seem ashamed of a connection founded on so base a necessity. They do not live together, but see one another only in secret. Both continue living in their respective fathers’ houses, while openly living together as spouses, permitted without censure everywhere else, is considered here the most indecent and unmanly sensuality. Nor is this agreeable passion the only one over which they exercise such absolute self-command. Often, before all their countrymen, they bear injuries, reproaches, and the grossest insults with an appearance of utter insensibility, without showing the slightest resentment. A prisoner of war hears the customary sentence of death from his captors without showing emotion; afterward he submits to the most terrible tortures without lamenting his fate or revealing any passion but contempt for his enemies. Suspended by his shoulders over a slow fire, he mocks his tormentors and tells them how much more ingeniously he himself tortured their countrymen who fell into his hands. After hours of scorching, burning, and laceration of the most tender and sensitive parts of his body, he is often taken down from the stake for a short respite intended to prolong his suffering. He spends it discussing ordinary subjects, asking after news from home, and appearing indifferent to nothing but his own predicament. The spectators display the same insensibility: the horrible sight seems to leave them unmoved. They scarcely look at the prisoner except when they help torture him; at other times they smoke tobacco and amuse themselves with commonplace things, as though nothing were happening. Every person, it is said, prepares for this dreadful end from earliest youth. For this purpose he composes what they call a death song, to sing when captured by his enemies and dying under their tortures. It insults his tormentors and expresses utter contempt for death and pain. He sings it on every extraordinary occasion—going to war, meeting his enemies in battle, or wishing to show that he has accustomed his imagination to the most dreadful misfortunes, and that no human event can daunt his resolve or change his purpose. The same contempt for death and torture prevails among other peoples described as savage. Not a single Black person from the coast of Africa lacks, in this respect, a degree of magnanimity that the soul of his sordid master is too often scarcely capable of imagining. Fortune has never exercised a crueler dominion over humanity than when she subjected these nations of heroes to the refuse of Europe’s jails: wretches possessing the virtues neither of the countries they leave nor of those they enter, whose frivolity, brutality, and baseness rightly earn them the contempt of those they have conquered.

This heroic and unconquerable firmness, demanded of everyone by the customs and upbringing of such a country, is not required of people raised in civilized societies. If they complain when in pain, grieve when distressed, or allow love to overwhelm them or anger to unsettle them, they are readily forgiven. Such weaknesses are not thought to touch the essential elements of their character. Provided they do not let themselves be carried into actions contrary to justice or humanity, they lose little standing even if their faces lose some serenity or their speech and conduct some composure. A humane and polished people, more sensitive to others’ passions, can more readily enter into passionate, animated behavior and more easily pardon a slight excess. Knowing this, and assured that he will be judged fairly, the person involved permits himself stronger expressions of passion, less afraid that violent emotion will expose him to contempt. We can show more emotion before a friend than a stranger, since we expect greater indulgence from the former. Likewise, the rules of decorum in civilized nations permit livelier behavior than barbarians approve. The former converse with the openness of friends, the latter with the reserve of strangers. The feeling and liveliness with which the French and Italians, the two most polished nations on the continent, speak on any engaging occasion at first surprise visitors raised among people of less lively sensibility, who cannot enter into behavior they have never witnessed at home. A young French nobleman will weep before the whole court when refused a regiment. An Italian, says the abbé Dû Bos, shows more feeling on being fined twenty shillings than an Englishman upon being sentenced to death. At the height of Roman refinement, Cicero could weep with all the bitterness of grief before the entire senate and people without lowering himself in their eyes, as he evidently did at the end of almost every oration. Orators in the earlier, rougher ages of Rome probably could not have displayed so much emotion without violating the manners of their time. It would, I imagine, have been regarded as contrary to nature and propriety for the Scipios, the Leliuses, or the elder Cato to expose so much tenderness to the public. Those ancient warriors could speak with order, gravity, and sound judgment, but are said to have lacked the sublime and passionate eloquence first brought to Rome not many years before Cicero’s birth by the two Gracchi, Crassus, and Sulpitius. Such animated eloquence, long practiced in France and Italy with varying success, is only now beginning to enter England. So widely do civilized and barbarous nations differ in the self-command they demand, and by such different standards do they judge the propriety of conduct.

This difference gives rise to others no less important. Polished people, accustomed to yielding somewhat to natural impulses, become frank, open, and sincere. Barbarians, compelled to suppress and conceal every outward sign of passion, necessarily acquire habits of falsehood and dissimulation. Everyone familiar with peoples termed savage in Asia, Africa, or America observes that all are equally impenetrable: when they wish to conceal the truth, no examination can draw it from them. Even the cleverest questions cannot trap them, nor can torture force them to confess anything they choose not to tell. Their passions, meanwhile, though never outwardly expressed and hidden in the sufferer’s breast, reach the highest pitch of fury. He seldom shows anger, but when he yields to vengeance it is always bloody and terrible. The slightest insult drives him to despair. His face and speech remain sober and composed, expressing perfect tranquility, while his actions are often furiously violent. Among North Americans, it is not uncommon for people of the tenderest age and of the sex deemed more fearful to drown themselves after no more than a mild rebuke from their mothers, without showing emotion or saying anything but, “You shall no longer have a daughter.” In civilized nations, people’s passions are not generally so fierce or desperate. They are often loud and clamorous but seldom very harmful; frequently they seem to seek nothing beyond convincing a spectator that they are justified in feeling so strongly and obtaining his sympathy and approval.

Yet all these effects of custom and fashion on humanity’s moral sentiments are slight compared with the effects they produce in other cases. These forces distort judgment most not about the general style of character and behavior, but about the propriety or impropriety of particular practices.

The manners custom teaches us to approve in different professions and walks of life do not concern matters of the greatest importance. We expect truth and justice from old and young alike, from clergy and officers alike; it is only in minor matters that we look for their distinctive traits. Even there, some unnoticed circumstance often explains why the character assigned by custom to each profession would be proper independently of custom. We cannot therefore complain of any great distortion of natural sentiment here. Although nations expect different degrees of the same quality in people they esteem, at worst the duties of one virtue sometimes extend slightly into another’s province. The rustic hospitality customary among Poles may encroach a little on economy and good order; the frugality esteemed in Holland may encroach on generosity and conviviality. The toughness demanded of peoples called savage diminishes their humanity, while the delicate sensibility expected in civilized nations may sometimes destroy firmness of character. In general, the prevailing manners of a nation may fairly be said to suit its circumstances best: toughness suits the life of a person in such harsh conditions, sensibility the life of one in a highly civilized society. Even here, then, we cannot say that people’s moral sentiments are grossly distorted.

It is not, therefore, in the general style of conduct that custom permits the greatest departure from the natural propriety of action. Its influence over particular practices often does much more harm to morals, establishing as lawful and blameless actions that violate the plainest principles of right and wrong.

What greater barbarity could there be, for example, than harming an infant? Its helplessness, innocence, and lovableness awaken compassion even in an enemy; failing to spare so tender an age is seen as the fiercest act of an enraged and cruel conqueror. What, then, must we think of a parent’s heart if that parent could injure the helplessness that even a furious enemy hesitates to violate? Yet exposing newborn infants—that is, killing them—was permitted in nearly every Greek state, even among the refined and civilized Athenians. Whenever a parent’s circumstances made raising a child inconvenient, abandoning it to hunger or wild animals brought no blame or censure. The practice probably began in times of utmost barbarity. People first grew familiar with it in society’s earliest age, and its unbroken continuation afterward kept them from recognizing its enormity. We find it prevalent today among all peoples described as savage, and in that roughest and poorest condition of society it is surely more pardonable than anywhere else. A person’s poverty there is often so extreme that he himself faces terrible hunger, sometimes dies of sheer want, and frequently cannot support both himself and his child. We need not wonder, then, that he abandons the child in such a case. Someone fleeing an enemy he could not resist would surely be excusable for putting down an infant who slowed his escape, since trying to save the infant could bring only the consolation of dying together. It should not greatly surprise us, therefore, if parents in such a society were allowed to judge whether they could raise a child. In the later ages of Greece, however, the same act was permitted for reasons of distant advantage or convenience that could never excuse it. By then, uninterrupted custom had so completely sanctioned the practice that not only the world’s lax maxims tolerated this barbarous privilege, but even philosophers’ teachings, which should have been more just and exact, yielded to established custom. On this occasion, as on many others, they supported the horrible abuse rather than condemning it, appealing to far-fetched arguments about public utility. Aristotle speaks of it as something magistrates should encourage on many occasions. Humane Plato agrees, and despite the love of humanity apparent throughout his writings, nowhere condemns the practice. If custom can sanction so dreadful a violation of humanity, we may readily imagine that there is scarcely any particular practice, however gross, that it cannot authorize. “That is commonly done,” people say every day, as though this sufficiently excused conduct that is inherently unjust and unreasonable.

There is an obvious reason custom can never distort our sentiments about the general character and style of conduct as thoroughly as it can distort them about the propriety or unlawfulness of particular practices: there could never be such a general custom. No society could survive for a moment if people’s usual conduct matched the horrible practice I have just described.

Among peoples he calls savage and barbarous, things are quite different. Every such person goes through something like Spartan training. The demands of life accustom him to every kind of hardship. He is always in danger. He often faces extreme hunger and frequently dies simply for lack of food. His circumstances not only get him used to suffering. They also teach him not to show the feelings that suffering tends to produce. He can expect no sympathy or patience from his own people if he shows such weakness. Before we can feel deeply for others, we need some measure of comfort ourselves. When our own misery hurts us badly, we have no time to attend to a neighbor's. These people are too busy meeting their own needs to pay much attention to anyone else's. So, whatever distress one of them experiences, he expects no sympathy from those around him. For that reason, he refuses to expose himself by letting the slightest sign of weakness escape. However fierce his feelings may be, he never allows them to disturb his calm expression or controlled behavior. We are told that the Indigenous people of North America show complete indifference on every occasion. They would think it beneath them to appear overcome in any way by love, grief, or resentment. Their courage and self-command in this respect are almost beyond what Europeans can imagine. In a country where everyone has equal rank and wealth, we might expect the wishes of the two people involved to be all that matters in marriage. We might expect them to be free to follow those wishes. Yet this is the country where parents arrange every marriage without exception. A young man would think himself disgraced forever if he showed even the slightest preference for one woman over another. He must appear completely indifferent both to when he marries and to whom he marries. The weakness associated with love, so freely indulged in humane and courteous societies, is considered among these peoples the most unforgivable lack of manliness. Even after marriage, the two partners seem ashamed of a connection founded on such a basic physical need. They do not live together. They meet only in secret. Each continues living in their father's house. In other countries a man and woman may openly live together without blame. Here that is considered the most indecent and unmanly surrender to physical desire. And this strict self-command applies to more than this pleasant feeling. They often endure injuries, accusations, and the worst insults in full view of their people. They appear entirely unmoved and show not the slightest resentment. When a warrior is taken prisoner and, as usual, sentenced to death by his captors, he hears the sentence without showing any feeling. He then submits to the most terrible torture without ever complaining or showing any emotion except contempt for his enemies. While he hangs by his shoulders above a slow fire, he mocks his torturers. He tells them how much more skillfully he tortured their people when he captured them. After hours of being scorched, burned, and cut in the most sensitive parts of his body, he is often taken down from the stake for a short break, to prolong his suffering. He uses that time to talk about ordinary matters and ask for news from home. He seems to care about everything except his own condition. The onlookers seem just as unmoved. This horrifying sight appears to make no impression on them. They hardly look at the prisoner except when they help torture him. At other times they smoke tobacco and amuse themselves with ordinary things, as though nothing were happening. Every person among them is said to prepare from early youth for this dreadful end. For this purpose he composes what they call a death song. He will sing it if he falls into enemy hands and dies under their torture. The song insults his torturers and expresses complete contempt for death and pain. He sings it on any exceptional occasion: when he goes to war, when he meets his enemies in battle, or whenever he wants to show that he has grown familiar in his imagination with the worst possible disasters. No human event can frighten him out of his resolve or change his purpose. The same contempt for death and torture is found among all other peoples Smith calls savage. Every Black person from the African coast has, in this respect, a degree of courage that his mean-spirited master can often barely imagine. Fortune has never exercised crueler power over humanity than when she placed these nations of heroes under the control of men from Europe's jails. These wretches have the virtues neither of the countries they come from nor of those they go to. Their frivolity, brutality, and meanness rightly earn them the contempt of the people they have conquered.

Civilized societies do not require their members to show the heroic, unconquerable firmness that custom and upbringing demand of every person in the societies just described. If civilized people complain when they are in pain, grieve when they are distressed, let love overwhelm them, or get upset by anger, others readily forgive them. These weaknesses are not thought to affect the essential parts of their character. As long as they are not carried away into doing anything contrary to justice or humanity, they lose little standing. That remains true even if their faces lose some calm or their speech and behavior become somewhat unsettled. A humane and refined people are more sensitive to the feelings of others. They can more easily relate to lively, passionate behavior and forgive some small excess. The person directly affected knows this. Trusting his judges to be fair, he allows himself to express stronger feelings. He is less afraid that their force will expose him to contempt. We dare show more emotion before a friend than a stranger because we expect a friend to be more forgiving. Likewise, the standards of decorum in civilized nations allow livelier behavior than those of peoples called barbarous. The former talk to each other openly, as friends do; the latter hold back, as strangers do. The French and Italians are the two most refined peoples on the continent. When they speak about anything that interests them, their feeling and liveliness initially surprise visitors. People raised among a less emotionally responsive nation have never seen behavior like this at home and cannot share in it. A young French nobleman will weep before the whole court if refused command of a regiment. According to the abbot Dû Bos, an Italian shows more emotion at being fined twenty shillings than an Englishman does at being sentenced to death. At the height of Roman refinement, Cicero could weep bitterly before the entire senate and people without lowering himself in their eyes. He clearly must have done so at the end of almost every speech. Earlier Roman speakers probably could not have expressed such feeling without violating the manners of their less refined age. I suppose that for the Scipios, the Leliuses, and the elder Cato to display so much tenderness in public would have been considered unnatural and improper. Those ancient warriors could speak with order, seriousness, and good judgment. But they are said to have lacked the lofty, passionate eloquence brought to Rome not many years before Cicero's birth by the two Gracchi, Crassus, and Sulpitius. That lively style of speaking has long been practiced, successfully or not, in France and Italy. It is only just beginning to appear in England. This is how far civilized and barbarous nations differ in the self-command they require, and how different their standards are for judging proper behavior.

This difference gives rise to many others that matter just as much. Refined people are used to giving some room to their natural feelings, so they become direct, open, and sincere. Those whom Smith calls barbarians must suppress and hide every visible sign of feeling, so they necessarily develop habits of dishonesty and concealment. Everyone familiar with peoples called savage in Asia, Africa, or America observes that they are equally hard to read. If they want to hide the truth, no questioning can get it out of them. Even the cleverest questions cannot trick them. Not even torture can make them confess what they do not want to tell. Moreover, the feelings of a person raised this way may be hidden without any outward sign, yet still reach the highest pitch of fury. He rarely shows anger, but when he finally takes revenge, it is always bloody and terrible. Even the smallest insult drives him to despair. His face and speech stay restrained and calm, showing only complete peace of mind. But his actions are often extremely fierce and violent. Among North Americans, it is not uncommon, Smith says, for very young people of the sex he considers more timid to drown themselves after a slight scolding from their mothers. They show no feeling and say nothing except, “You shall no longer have a daughter.” In civilized nations, people's feelings are not usually so fierce or desperate. They often express them loudly, but rarely do much harm. Often their only apparent aim is to convince observers that they are right to be so upset and to win their sympathy and approval.

Still, all these effects of custom and fashion on people's moral sentiments are small compared with their effects in other cases. Custom and fashion do not distort judgment most deeply about a person's general character and conduct. They do so when people judge whether particular practices are proper.

The different kinds of behavior that custom teaches us to approve in different professions and walks of life do not involve the most important matters. We expect truth and justice from old and young alike, and from clergy and officers alike. We look for the distinctive traits of their roles only in less important matters. Even there, some overlooked fact would often show us that a role's expected character is fitting for reasons other than custom. So we cannot complain that natural moral feeling is greatly distorted in this case. Different nations do demand different degrees of the same quality in someone they esteem. But at worst, the duties of one virtue sometimes stretch a little into the territory of another. The warm rural hospitality customary among the Poles may interfere a little with thrift and good order. The frugality admired in Holland may interfere with generosity and sociability. The toughness demanded of peoples called savage reduces their humanity. Perhaps the delicate sensitivity expected in civilized nations sometimes destroys firm courage. In general, the prevailing manners of a nation can usually be said to fit its circumstances best, taken as a whole. Toughness best suits the circumstances of a person facing a harsh way of life; sensitivity suits a person living in a highly civilized society. Even here, then, we cannot say that people's moral sentiments are grossly distorted.

Custom does not allow the greatest departure from naturally proper conduct in its rules for behavior in general. Its influence on particular practices is often much more damaging to morals. It can establish particular actions as lawful and blameless even though they shock our clearest sense of right and wrong.

For example, what could be more cruel than hurting an infant? Its helplessness, innocence, and endearing nature move even an enemy to compassion. Refusing to spare someone so young is seen as an act of extreme violence by an enraged and cruel conqueror. What, then, should we think of a parent who could hurt a defenseless child whom even a furious enemy is reluctant to harm? Yet exposing newborn infants to die was permitted in almost every Greek state, even among the refined and civilized Athenians. When a parent's circumstances made it inconvenient to raise a child, abandoning it to hunger or wild animals drew no blame or condemnation. This practice probably began in a time of extreme brutality. People first became familiar with it in the earliest period of society. Its unbroken continuation then kept them from seeing how terrible it was. We find the practice today among all peoples called savage. In the harshest and least developed social conditions, it is certainly more forgivable than anywhere else. A person in such a society may be so desperately poor that he himself often faces extreme hunger or dies for lack of food. He may be unable to support both himself and his child. We cannot be surprised, then, if he abandons the child. A person fleeing an enemy he could not resist would surely be excused for putting down his infant if carrying the child slowed his escape. Trying to save it would offer him nothing but the prospect of dying with it. It should not greatly surprise us, then, that in such a society parents are allowed to judge whether they can raise their children. In later Greek times, however, the same act was permitted for reasons of future advantage or convenience that could not possibly excuse it. By then, long-standing custom had so thoroughly accepted the practice that ordinary, lax moral standards tolerated this cruel parental power. Even philosophers' teachings, which should have been fairer and more exact, followed established custom. Here, as in many other cases, philosophers did not condemn the horrible abuse. Instead, they supported it with far-fetched arguments about its usefulness to the public. Aristotle discusses it as something officials ought to encourage on many occasions. The humane Plato shares that opinion. Despite the love of humanity apparent throughout his writings, he never disapproves of the practice. If custom can sanction such a terrible violation of humanity, we can imagine scarcely any particular practice so awful that custom could not sanction it. Every day we hear people say, “That is commonly done.” They seem to think this is enough to excuse conduct that is, in itself, utterly unjust and unreasonable.

There is an obvious reason why custom never distorts our views of someone's general way of acting and behaving as much as it distorts our judgments about whether particular practices are proper or lawful. There could never be a custom of that general kind. A society could not survive for a moment if people's usual conduct matched the horrible practice I have just described.