The family : source materials for the study of family and personality / by Edward Byron Reuter and Jessie Ridgway Runner.

  • Edward Byron Reuter
Date:
1931
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The family : source materials for the study of family and personality / by Edward Byron Reuter and Jessie Ridgway Runner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    nothing contained in such a program to insure that such a result would take place universally. If there were time, it would be instructive to follow this road, bordered by authority on one side and reason on the other; to show how reason has ever been contemptuous of authority, looked upon its ideas as superstitious and its customs as accidents, while authority has ever striven to silence the voice of reason. Far be it from one drilled in the scientific method of approaching questions to throw discredit upon the use of intelligence in this field of human activity. It is enormously superior to the blind government of traditional authority. It contains great promises of future possibilities. But it has not been an unmixed gain. You remember one of the oft- quoted passages from the Bible, Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. This is not a particularly clear statement, but whatever its original intent, it has an eloquent lesson here. It says, freedom may be gained only by finding the truth. Our way has been to place freedom first. The quotation puts truth first, and freedom as a sequence. But when freedom comes first, there is nothing to prevent it from being merely unrestraint, which has neither social nor other value. Freedom to do as one chooses does not insure that the free spirit will find the truth to guide it. Freedom which comes from the mastery of a skill, such as freedom to play a piano, is won; it comes only by hard work. Freedom to play the piano, considered merely as lifting the ban against touching it, may produce hideous discords. Robert Park described the hobo some what along this line; he says in The City: 1 He [the hobo] has gained his freedom, but he has lost his direction. 3. The Lag of Family Mores in Social Culture 2 We live in a dynamic and not a static world. Geological strata are eroded by the ceaseless action of rain, ice, heat, winds, the attack of microorganisms as well as by the eruption of volcanoes and the shattering effects of earthquakes. Similarly there is a change in social stratification although the form of change is dissimilar. Great changes have occurred in our industrial system, or in what may be called our material culture, while our non-material culture has remained practically static. Today the mores of the monogamous family and the mores of the Christian religion are much as they were in the agricultural economy of the eight eenth century. Whereas in modes of producing consumers' goods, the motor tractor, the steam-power looms, and the electric printing press are radically different from the primitive machines of the eighteenth 1 Park, Robert E., The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Behavior in the City Environment, Am. Jour. Sociology, vol. 20, pp. 579-583, 1915. 2 Adapted from Chapín , F. Stuart , The Lag of Family Mores in Social Culture, Jour. Applied Sociology, vol. 9, pp. 243-247, May, 1925.
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