Physics and Politics by Walter Bagehot

Author:Walter Bagehot [Bagehot, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Politikwissenschaft
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2017-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

The traces of it are endless. You can hardly take up a book of travels in rude regions without finding 'I wanted to do so and so. But I was not permitted, for the natives feared it might bring ill luck on the "party," or perhaps the tribe.' Mr. Galton, for instance, could hardly feed his people. The Damaras, he says, have numberless superstitions about meat which are very troublesome. In the first place, each tribe, or rather family, is prohibited from eating cattle of certain colours, savages 'who come from the sun' eschewing sheep spotted in a particular way, which those 'who come from the rain' have no objection to. 'As,' he says, 'there are five or six eandas or descents, and I had men from most of them with me, I could hardly kill a sheep that everybody would eat;' and he could not keep his meat, for it had to be given away because it was commanded by one superstition, nor buy milk, the staple food of those parts, because it was prohibited by another. And so on without end. Doing anything unlucky is in their idea what putting on something that attracts the electric fluid is in fact, you cannot be sure that harm will not be done, not only to the person in fault, but to those about him too. As in the Scriptural phrase, doing what is of evil omen is 'like one that letteth out water.' He cannot tell what are the consequences of his act, who will share them, or how they can be prevented.

In the earliest historical nations I need not say that the corporate liabilities of states is to a modern student their most curious feature. The belief is indeed raised far above the notion of mere 'luck,' because there is a distinct belief in gods or a god whom the act offends, But the indiscriminate character of the punishment still survives; not only the mutilator of the Hermae, but all the Athenians—not only the violator of the rites of the Bona dea, but all the Romans—are liable to the curse engendered; and so all through ancient history. The strength of the corporate anxiety so created is known to every one. Not only was it greately than any anxiety about personal property, but it was immeasurably greater. Naturally, even reasonably we may say, it was greater. The dread of the powers of nature, or of the beings who rule those powers, is properly, upon grounds of reason, as much greater than any other dread as the might of the powers of nature is superior to that of any other powers. If a tribe or a nation have, by a contagious fancy, come to believe that the doing of any one thing by any number will be 'unlucky,' that is, will bring an intense and vast liability on them all, then that tribe and that nation will prevent the doing of that thing more than anything else. They will deal with

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