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370 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1967)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0370 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Where tropic suns beat down at midday, where winds scream off glaciers into the mountain passes, where mighty oceans hurl their fury at granite cliffs, where desert winds scorch the withered earth, where monsoons periodically reduce the land to quagmire, one may still find man-seeking to eke out a living, forming communities, molding the environment into forms closer to his heart's desire, transforming the world with dreams. Endlessly ingenious, man is surely the world's original changeling. Infinitely varied are the ways of life his cunning hands and versitile mind contrive. Yet how hopeless his haunting quest for his true self-as if there could ever be a single true self for a creature whose very nature is so largely subject to his own contrivance. The inquiry into national character is a form of the timeless interest by man in the forces that mold his nature. The evolutionary trends in the biological lines terminating with man, which gradually raised the temperature of intelligence and melted away the instinctive predetermination of behavior, resulted in an unusually plastic creature. Since he is almost completely lacking in instincts, man must learn or invent what he requires in order to survive. His dependence on social life increased in proportion to his loss of instinctive precommitment to any special form of social life. The growth of plasticity that permitted him to penetrate and master the most varied environments insured the multiplication of alternative ways of life. Since he could not create alternative ways of life without simultaneously inventing forms of individuality appropriate to each, man was launched upon the exploration of the infinite richness of his own nature. When men create distinctive communities such as tribes, peasant villages, cities, or nations, they also create distinctive social characters. Social character is a set of traits (attitudes and evaluations, conceptions of the nature of the natural and social world, notions of appropriate and inappropriate ways of solving life's problems) that the members of a community come to share with one another over and beyond their individual differences and the personality traits that they share as members of some subcommunity formation (as members of a social class or ethnic group, or of familial, religious, economic, educational, or other institu- tions). Only empirical investigation can determine the extent to which the various components of a given social character are present in the individual members of a community. However, without shared beliefs and values of some sort, no social life is possible., Moreover, in most communities it is recognized that there are some social conditions which more fully typify the community than others and some individuals who more completely than others embody its dis- tinctive formulas. Consisting of shared suppositions, attitudes, and definitions, social character is normally unconscious in the day-to-day activities of members of a community. Social character, however, rises abruptly to self-consciousness in confrontations of individuals across community boundaries. An individual who finds himself in an alien tribe will quickly discover differences in social character between himself and others, for the things he could formerly take for granted may now be a source of ix

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