(Lecturer in Anthropology and Sociology, University of Recife; Honorary Professor of Social Science, University of Bahia)

     Social change has been considerable during the 20th century not only in Europe but in non-European countries. Difficult as it is to separate much of this social charge from technological change - so characteristic of the present century - it is equally difficult to avoid considering the problem of values or morals, when one has to deal with problems of social and technological change. For they seem to be different or particular aspects of a general process: the process of change, as an expression of what seems to be an equally general human tendency towards new experiences - physical and non-physical - as opposed to what seems to be a still more general human tendency towards stability, routine, conservatism: conservatism in physical and conservatism in non-physical or moral activities.

     It has been said that "habit becomes tem times nature". And habit, under the form of "tradition" or "order", and not of the taboos of the so-called primitive societies, is a powerful and almost natural ally of moral codes and moral systems, just as it is an ally of what sociologists call social control. For social control is based mainly on the conscience of a community, or its feeling that it is desirable to guarantee the majority of its members against an excess of differentiation or change or innovation in the behaviour of bohemian as well as of creative individuals or groups; and in referring to bohemian and creative individuals and groups I am using terms whose use in social science became classic, since they were given a particular sociological - or psychosociological - meaning, by Thomas, the American sociologist.

     This being so, it is easy to understand why change, even when called "progress", has been, and continues to be, considered by numerous moralists - and by some sociologists and social anthropologists preoccupied with morals or moral values or attitudes - a menace to national or regional or tribal systems of morals or values, a factor of disintegration for these groups or communities. For maintaining, as most of these moralists, sociologists, and anthropologists do, that "orderliness" is, to a high degree, necessary in social organization, they associate orderliness, in a very intimate way, with moral systems, even when, as moralists or sociologists or anthropologists, they are objective enough not to overlook the fact that moral systems, whether among civilized or primitive groups, have no autonomous existence but are in close interdependence with other systems, that deal, some mainly with physical, others, mainly with non-physical activities, of social and cultural organization: the political, the legal, the economic, the technological, the religious, the aesthetic activities.

     It has been pointed out by more than one sociologist that resistance to change is the main non-rational; that, as S. McKee Rosen and Laura Rosen write ^[1] "groups take, in order to protect themselves, every means" at their disposal "to enforce conformity", non-conformity becoming, in such circumstances, "not the road to personality equilibrium". On the contrary - it becomes the road to personal-social maladjustments that may become disintegrative of a system of morals or values. And in nearly all cases of enforcement of conformity on the members of a community, or large group, conformity, whether national or tribal, and morals, whether national or tribal, seem to become closely associated with protection - usually non-rational protection - against change. Change thus becomes a moral, and not only a legal risk, for individuals or sub-groups who are bold or adventurous enough to break with routine or conformity, for the sake of new physical or non-physical experiences and change also becomes associated with suggestions of immorality. Social historians seem to agree that disintegrating and demoralizing social effects have followed technical changes, as, for instance, the impact of modern industrialism, in non-European as well as in European communities.

     But even before the impact of modern industrialism one finds, within the limits of the modern history of Western civilization and of its contacts with non-European territories - specially in the tropics - a vivid example of the way in which changes in styles of activity or of existence or of behaviour in physical and social space, have meant moral disintegration for those Europeans who have gone through the adventure of radically new experiences in such areas, without protecting themselves against change, by keeping, as others have kept, an almost morbid attachment to material moral values: the values they carried or brought (I am writing in Brazil) - with them, from their mother cultures. This almost morbid attachment characterized the behaviour of some of the Puritans in North America; and also some of the Protestants who, even before the Puritans, came to America - to Brazil - under the severe leadership of Villegaignon, a Frenchman who was a close friend of Calvin, to establish themselves in the tropics as if there was nothing new in the physical and cultural space chose for their Calvinistic adventure: new and contrary to the rigid maintenance, in such an environment, of Calvin's European morals and rules of human behaviour.

     Thus the attitude that the Puritans in North America were relatively successful in maintaining (perhaps on account of the fact that social change for them happened in a country similar, in its physical conditions of soil and climate, to the one that they were used to in Europe), was taken, before them, with remarkable success, by the Calvinists or Protestants who were brought to Brazil by Villegaignon, in the 16th century. They, too, adopted - or were forced to adopt - an attitude of rigid puritanical resistance to social and cultural change in a country, tropical Brazil, physically and culturally so different from Europe, as to demand change in moral or morally significant styles of behaviour - dress, for instance - much more than would be the case in a boreal or temperate climate like the one that was to be occupied by English Puritans in the same American continent.

     This brings us to a problem that is, perhaps, more ecological than purely sociological; the problem of the physical conditions of a new territory contributing to make human resistance to social change easier, or more difficult, according to what these physical conditions are in regard to the newcomer's more or less rigid attachment to moral values, brought by them another sociocultural and physical space; or space-time, since one must take into account the fact that the inhabitants of the tropical areas of America, Asia and Africa, were living in a sociocultural time different from the Western European one. Consequently, time and space were found to be fused in a single condition or situation, physical as well as moral and cultural, that made social and cultural change necessary for the newcomers, whose aim was to remain in the new territories as residents. And with social and cultural change, attitudes to values - moral as well as aesthetic values - would either change, or attempt of Europeans to remain as residents or founders of stable colonies in tropical countries would completely fail, as was the case with the French Protestant adventure in Brazil in the 16th century.

     The problem of social change, in cases like this one - and these cases have been numerous since the expansion of Europe has given to Western moral values a continuous mobility outside Europe, so intensive during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century - although, basically ecological, is also sociological; and in its sociological aspects it may be considered an expression of what to be a general tendency of migrant human groups to hesitate, once place in a new situation, between attachment to old moral values and the desire - as Thomas would say - for new experience, through change in behaviour.

     The trousers, for instance, that are now considered by some the most obvious symbol of Westernization - and also of Western moral behaviour, so far as men are concerned - have almost always met in the tropics, or among tropical peoples, a contrast varying from nakedness, to a cloth wrap. Not only this: as Professor Ralph Linton recently pointed out, in an essay on "The Problem of Universal Values" ^[2] nearly all societies "have a conceptual values for modesty which is reflected in specific patterns of coverage for various parts of the body under various circumstances", with "the custom of wearing a garment of a particular type" constituting in itself a value of what Professor Linton calls "the instrumental type", as distinct from a value of conceptual type. To illustrate the distinction between the two classes of values the well-known social anthropologist mentions a very interesting example: "Thus some years ago the head of a great Christian denomination refused to receive the late Mahatma Gandhi because the latter insisted on wearing a loin-cloth instead of trousers. Both the parties involved would certainly have agreed on the conceptual value of modesty, yet for each the behaviour pattern by which this was instrumental in his own culture had acquired meanings and attitudes which made it a value in its own right". And more: "Trousers, as the garb of the politically dominant European, had acquired negative associations. He (Gandhi) no doubt felt that to don them for his reception would be an act of obeisance to the British Raj." This example serves to suggest that the concrete, instrumental moral values of a society tend to carry, as Professor Linton himself says, "higher emotional effect than the conceptual values," the latter trough lying at the base of the whole cultural structure, being abstract and generalized in their expression.

     What non-ecclesiastical European has thought, since the 15th century, of preserving his European dignity and sustaining his European male behaviour - without dressing himself, among tropical peoples, as in Europe since the Middle Ages, in trousers? This non-rational attitude has been preserved for five centuries: rigidly by Nordic Europeans and less rigidly by Southern Europeans, of whom the Portuguese have in some cases gone as far as to adopt, as in East India, certain tropical styles of dress, thus falling into an irregularity of behaviour which made 17th-century Englishmen criticize them for their lack of European and Christian dignity, their moral irregularity. The fact is that by being irregular in their dress, from a strictly moral European point of view, the Portuguese were being rationally adaptive, in their style of dress, to new physical and cultural conditions. And in this change - cultural change and, extension, social change - they were acting scientifically, since as has been pointed out by modern students of clothing in tropical or quasi-tropical climates, women's dresses and skirts are basically more suited to these climates than trousers. As one of these students, Paul Siple, says in his Physiology of Heat Regulation, ^[3] in a generalization that some think may be extended from desert conditions to other tropical and quasi-tropical conditions, "if it were not for the fact that robes or togas have been generally discarded by Western civilization, except for ceremonial indoor usage, a robe worn without underwear would appear to be the best answer for desert clothing". More moderate is this suggestion for a scientific revolution in clothes to be worn by Westerners in warm countries: "The next best approach would seem to be the use of a short, loose jacket and loose trousers suspended rather than belted. By being kept loose, these garments should have some of the benefits of the robe".

     Why has robe no been used instead of the trousers by Western men, in the tropics and quasi tropics, while natives of these regions have usually been strongly pressed to abandon the use of robes and adopt that of trousers? Because of a non-rational resistance to cultural and social change on the part of peoples whose élites have stood for centuries, and continue to stand, as champions of a predominantly rations civilization in contrast with non-rational cultural. Science, however, has been disregarded in favour of a non-rational and nonscientific attitude that has been inspired mainly by an attachment, less to values as concepts, than to values as instruments. Here I am using the very convenient distinction that has recently been suggested by Professor Ralph Linton: a distinction that seems to give a modern development to an old idea of Thomas and his collaborator, Professor Florian Znaniecki, when these two sociologists pointed out, in their famous work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, that men live in a world that is not merely physical, but also moral.

     For such a resistance varies in time and space, not only according to influences of circumstance and environment, but also - as Thomas and Znaniecki pointed out in their epoch-making investigation - according to the different ways that men define, select, and, in a sense create their environment. This seems to explain why European immigrants in the tropics have defined, selected and created environments which vary, as far as morals are concerned, from the extremely plastic adaptation of the Portuguese through changes in the morals of dress to changes in more intimate moral behaviour (e.g. marriage), to the extreme Anglo-Saxon resistance to the same conditions.

     Only the Portuguese seem to have approached ecological or symbiotic harmony with tropical conditions, through an adventure in social change that has been what some modern German scientists would call an adventure in ethnobiological change. Have they become moral outcasts from an European point of view? At first, yes: to the eyes of many Europeans in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries they became a disgrace to Europe, through their disposition to adopt, in the tropics, non-European ways of moral behaviour, through a polygamous activity that included, of course, the union of Europeans with tropical women and the recognization of the products of these unions as children to be raised as "Christians" and "Portuguese". But the present century has brought a new attitude on the part of many North Europeans in regard to that has been the behaviour of the Portuguese in the tropics: the recognition of this behaviour as at least an experiment in social, cultural and ethnobiological activities, that may correspond better than the secretive or isolationist activities of other Europeans - too reluctant to change, when in non-European lands, their morals as well as the physical type of their descendants - to the present, and increasingly pan-human, civilization. The would is being led to this pan-human civilization by its scientific and technical conquests over space as well as time: conquests whose tendency seems to favour a paradoxical moral would at once pan-human and ecological: varying, in its instrumental moral aspects, according to various ecological environments, but increasingly universalistic - with less and less ethnocentric bias - in its general moral concepts.

     It is true that two antagonistic types of civilization dramatically face each other today. But it is possible that technical developments in both groups, and in areas that lei between them, may contribute to increase in both that scientific attitude which Professor Kurt Goldstein has described ^[4] as "the critical use of science", granted that technical advancement is not capable of maintaining itself, for a long time, entirely independent from scientific and critical development. The ways to "the critical use of science", having been opened, men of diverse ideologies may recognize, as Professor Goldstein has suggested, that most differences in social - including moral - behaviour of peoples, are really "only variations in the arrangement of the same factors, corresponding to general differences in life and environment"; and that a process of mutual adaptation between peoples "will permit a fuller actualization of all the different factors that harmoniously combined represent human nature". This does not mean lyrically believing in a world without tension but a world where some antagonisms, now in violent conflict, may coexist, "harmoniously combined", just as Christian and Mahommedan morals, under the impact of the same technical and scientific influences, have developed areas of mutual tolerance of their differently instrumental moral ways of promoting and maintaining common moral concepts.

     A few years ago - in 1937 - Professor Crane Brinton, published an essay on The Anatomy of Revolution, where this very interesting point is suggested: that the analysis of four typically Western revolutions as the English Revolution of 1640, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and what he then considered "the present Revolution in Russia" - probably the most violent social change that so far has happened in the 20th century - seem to indicate that all revolutions, after having a "thermidor period" (p. 280) go through an opposite period of tolerance, and even glorification, of traditional moral values, or concepts, presented - one might add - under the from of new instrumental morals. It is generally known that the Russian Revolution, after an attempt to violently destroy what was considered, by most of its leaders, corrupting moral institutions derived from capitalism and Christianity, has changed its attitude in such a way as to hedge legalized abortion "so much as to limit it to cases of the strictest medical necessity" and to "actually set up premiums for large families", at the same time making divorce more difficult and holding in high honour in press, cinema, stage and school, such apparently bourgeois virtues as filial piety. The anti-thermidor tendency may go so far as to glorify positive archaisms, as the Soviet Russians have done in considering homosexuality a crime, after holding it as a simple abnormality, open to scientific treatment.

     This tendency to stability, in the opposite direction to social and moral change, is evident in an epoch like the one we are now going through, of intensive and extensive technological change brought about by different kinds of revolution, political or economic, or total revolutions, like the one that Russians went through in 1917 and the Chinese seem to be going through at present; or revolutions towards Westernization, as the ones among the Japanese, the Turks, and some of the Arabs; or towards industrialization and urbanization, as the revolutions that the Brazilians, the Argentinians the Mexicans, the East Indians, are going through in the present century; these last revolutions being also like the Chinese one, anti-Anglo-American. Observers, like Professor Brinton, of changes that began to happen a quarter of a century ago, would find, in present developments, a wealth of evidence to confirm their prognostication of "certain forces pulling in the opposite direction, in the direction of stability", though in a rather undramatic way: so much so that these forces do not seem to interest intellectuals as much as the forces making for change.

     Here there seems to be a new situation: intellectuals who, though revolutionary in some of their attitudes and methods, have allied themselves with forces pulling in the direction of stability - social and moral stability, not intellectual stagnation - are perhaps more numerous now than they were in the beginning of the century. The Aprista movement in South America - for some time so active - has been a movement for social and economic change, at the same time characterized by a glorification of archaic values which were once the vivid expression of an ecological culture or civilization, among the most culturally and technically advanced natives of what is now Spanish America. It is absurd to imagine that a complete return to these values is possible. But there seems to be no doubt that this movement, and other similar 20th century movements of glorification of the Indian or Amerindian, the Spanish, the Portuguese and even of the Negro past have contributed, or are contributing, to a possibly healthy equilibrium between change and stability in the attitudes and the mores of these peoples. Perhaps it has liberated some of them from an excess of subordination to mores and attitudes of the French, the English, the Germans and the Anglo-Americans, that did not correspond to their environment - usually a tropical environment - and to their civilized inheritance: an Iberian inheritance very much influenced, in its moral attitudes and in its mores, by contacts with non-European civilizations, previous to the colonization of America by the Spaniards, and the Portuguese.

     Nevertheless, the moral conceptual values that have become decisive among these peoples have been European moral values with an increasing tendency to diversity from Europe so far as instrumental moral forms are concerned. One may see in modern tropical Latin America, as well as in other non-European areas where European techniques and styles of living were once passively followed by considerable groups of people even with sacrifice of human adaptation to a tropical or quasi-tropical environment, the beginning of a consciously un-European, though not anti-European, moral world, where technical concepts imported from Europe may be adapted to moral instruments different from the European ones and vice-versa.

     Prefabricated housing, adapted to tropical spaces, may cause another revolution among non-European populations, now said to be morally as well as materially inferior to Western European populations on account of being unable to "live decently". There is a distinctly moral implication in the words of Europeans who say, as Mr. P. Johnson-Marshall recently said in a Conference on Tropical Architecture held at University College, London, in 1953, before giving his fellow architects a report on architectural problems in the tropics. "The vast size and population of tropical land masses and their present condition of widespread poverty, overcrowding and sub-standard living conditions constitute a world problem of great urgency". They do. But perhaps one should bear in mind the fact that houses are not as closely associated with morals, among tropical populations, as they are among boreal peoples or inhabitants of temperate regions. It is preferable to have a slow development of an inexpensive type of sanitary house adapted to the tropics, than to build quickly prefabricated houses of a European type, with European material and according to European standards of domestic morals, which, instead of contributing to greater morality among tropical poor populations, will break their present harmony, imperfect but still considerable, with their environment. As Professor Morston Bates writes ^[5], "Latin America" - he refers particularly to tropical Latin America - "might possibly be used to support the thesis that Western civilization, in its pure form, is not readily adaptable to tropical conditions; but this is hardly damning except to those who consider the Western variety to be the only possible form of civilization in general. Latin America is, in fact, most interesting in the ways and places where it has diverged from the typical Western, picking up elements from the local environment, as in the development of Mexican art". As in the development, also, of a Brazilian cuisine - for a long time considered by elegant Europeans to be un-European to the point of being "uncivilized" and even "indecent"; indecent, according to European and Anglo-American bourgeois Puritans who have disapproved of Afro-Brazilian dishes such as "vatapá" and "carurú" for reasons perhaps more moral than aesthetic, since corrupting standards of supposed good taste are often associated, among these bourgeois, with moral standards.

     This moral disapproval, by European and by Anglo-American bourgeois of everyday non-European expressions of art such as the cuisine (so closely associated among non-European peoples with other aspects of culture), takes us to the consideration of the disturbing effect of the presence of that European type of civilization - the bourgeois one, with its conviction of being morally superior to other civilizations in every respect: even in regard to the selection, preparation and decoration of food and the ritual of eating - upon mores not obviously or apparently connected with this ritual and with cookery. In China, for instance, as well as among other peoples of the East who are carriers of old non-European civilizations, such superior expressions of human wisdom as the humanism of Confucius and that of Ghautama have endeavoured, since the 18th century, to defend their civilizations not much against Christianity or Western science and technology, as such, as against the disturbing effects of these upon their morals. If this is true, the moral conflict among modern civilizations in not always a conflict between scientific and non-scientific cultures, monotheistic and non-monotheistic cultures, but between sub-civilizations, e.g. between the triumphant post 18th-century bourgeois European and Anglo-American sub-civilizations and the patriarchal sub-civilizations of the East: specially that of humanistic China. China would possibly have assimilated more easily into its civilization, what is scientific and technical in European and Anglo-American civilization, and would have developed a new civilization of its own, with new morals that would reflect its assimilation of Western science and technology, if it were not for the fact that, from the decisive days of Chinese contact with Europe, Europe has systematically tried to impose upon non-European peoples, not a European Christian, scientific and technological blend of civilization, but a blend of these values within a rigid bourgeois from or structure: a bourgeois moral system, based on a narrow European experience - narrow in time and narrow in space; a narrowly bourgeois interpretation of Christianity; a narrowly bourgeois utilization of science and technology in industry, agriculture, public works, architecture, urbanization, bank organization and international trade. This has had a demoralizing effect upon a number of non-European and non-bourgeois vital inter-relationships, aesthetic, intellectual and moral or ethical. Otherwise, some of these civilizations, would possibly have been able to assimilate Western values without sacrificing to this assimilation their particular love of flowers, gardens, landscape architecture, poetry, painting and of what European historians of Chinese civilization call "a highly cultivated culinary art". This sacrifice has been made under the spell of Westernization and Americanization that for time dominated progressive Chinese, as it dominated Latin Americans. In both areas, ultra-progressive youths for some time shocked their elders, not, as in more recent times, with their "Communism" or their repudiation of bourgeois Christian morals, but with their adoption of such exoticism as the abuse of American cigarettes by both sexes and of chewing gum even by "refined society" boys and girls, together with an enthusiasm, also shocking to their elders, for commercial or business success, with its new moral implications. For we know that morals are not, as it was thought for some-time, an unchanging system of behaviour, as opposed to manners which change and are contingent. Techniques of conduct also change and as sociologists who have specialized in the study of this aspect of human behaviour point out, overlap manners, folkways and mores in such a way that they become expressions of prevailing general attitudes not only in regard to right and wrong but also in regard to success and failure. Value-attitudes, consequently vary from one epoch to another. That is why Professor Horace M. Kallen, in his sociological definition of morals, points out that foodstuffs and sex objects, clothing, shelter, defence against diseases and enemies, "are such necessities," causing, in relation to food and eating, for instance, different attitudes - different in space and time - concerning what to eat and what not to eat, how to secure it and prepare it, in what company to eat and so on; attitudes that, in some cases, are responsible for rigid differences in social space within the same physical space, as in some parts of the East in regard to the space socially and even physically occupied by the various castes or groups of the same population.

     It seems that morals are connected not only with value-attitudes with regard to right and wrong but also - I insist on this point - with regard to success or failure. We often find morals connected with prestige: with the prestige of a class in face of other classes within the same civilization; and with the prestige of a civilization in face of other civilizations within a certain social epoch. This seems to explain why progressive young members of a society whose civilization has been invaded by a scientifically and technically superior one - as China was invaded by bourgeois European and Anglo-American civilization during the 19th century - have a tendency to imitate the morals and the manners of the invaders, becoming disdainful of ancestral manners and ancestral morals. Disdainful even of traditional foods, they prefer ham and eggs and canned Boston pork and beans. Within a national civilization, acquiescence in "the supremacy of the ruling classes and their ways" - a moral pressure - has been pointed out by sociologists as a process of moral assimilation, where imitation seems to play an equally important part through value-attitudes not only with regard to right and wrong - here-worship, for instance, and repudiation of traitors - but also with regard to success and failure. In the civilization of the United States, for instance, it is morally desirable for the young immigrant or the young country boy who comes to a metropolitan centre to become a successful business man. This ideal of material success, as an expression of moral victory, has spread to such vigorous new Latin-American civilizations as the Argentinian, the Cuban, the Mexican and even the Brazilian where a monarchic and aristocratic tradition was responsible for a stronger resistance to the adoption of this characteristically bourgeois value-attitude, now almost as Brazilian as it is Argentinian or Cuban, though among a minority of ultra-progressive youths this attitude has been surpassed by one of radical repudiation of bourgeois success.

     How much is this the pure consequence of the fact that these non-bourgeois and more or less feudalistic, patriarchal, civilizations, are being increasingly reached by modern science and modern technology, spread from Western Europe and from the United States as expressions of a superiority not only technical but moral, as well? This is a delicate point. For peoples have a tendency to follow a different rhythm of social and cultural change, through the adoption of technical and scientific advantages. This adoption may take place without a passive imitation of morals and manners, which are not all inherent in certain technical and scientific styles of living, work, transportation, production. A non-European community does not seem to have to become passively bourgeois in its morals and manners, as a fatal consequence of its adopting from Europe or Anglo-America such technical conveniences as air transportation and radio; or such scientific modernisms as Einstein's theory or Professor Moreno's sociometic sociology. The Russians, through their mystique of extreme idealization and glorification of the Proletariat, have avoided following some of the bourgeois morals and manners of Western Europe and of the United States, without ceasing to be followers and imitators of technical conveniences developed by the scientific genius and technical skill of Western Europeans and Anglo-Americans. Professor Eric Fischer, a German geographer, goes as far as to write that "it sounds paradoxical, but it is nevertheless undeniable, that the Soviet Union, though most remote in its ideas and ideals, is quite exceptionally fascinated by America, specially by her technical standards and achievements in organization, but also by certain things in the intellectual sphere as, for example, educational ideals". How far "technical standards", "achievements in organization," "certain things in the intellectual sphere, as for example, educational ideals," may be separated from moral techniques of behaviour that make these standards and ideals effective, would be difficult to say. But it is easy to accept Professor Fischer's suggestion that Russian susceptibility to these American values may be traced to the fact that both Russians and Americans cherish or, at least, feel "the pioneer spirit", that to a considerable extent is inseparable from an orthodox bourgeois civilization during its heroic, expansive phase, just as it is inseparable from a 'proletarian" civilization during its equally expansive phase ^[6].

     Besides this, some Russians and some Americans seem to be engaged in the task of transplanting to new regions - the Russians, mainly to Asia, the Anglo-Americans mainly to Latin America - attitudes and values which some of them seem to know will become in these new something different from what they are in Russia and in the United States: new techniques, including new technical of moral behaviour. The pioneer in a new region has to be selective even of the moral techniques that he carries with him to apply to new conditions, for if he does otherwise - as some Europeans and Anglo-Americans have done - he will have to expand though coercion and violence: a method of expansion that will cause only a superficial spread of the expanding civilization. It is through a pioneering spirit that is ready to be selective, adaptive, plastic - as the Portuguese were in the East with such a success that populations such as most of the population of Goa, for instance, remain morally and culturally Portuguese, though ethnically East Indian - that new types of civilization, somewhat morally and technically different from the older one, are possible. This may confirm the very interesting thesis of Professor Fischer that transformed Western civilization may survive in new centres outside Europe; transformed in its moral as well as in its technical, aesthetic and intellectual aspects: especially in the intellectual and moral field - to specify what Professor Fischer describes somewhat vaguely as the "cultural" field, as distinct from the political, the economic and the technical ones. The rise of such new centres "need not spell decline for the old", for the "survival of the old centres beside the new ones may enrich all of them".

     Only it is becoming increasingly difficult for Europeans to be so strict in their European manners and morals; for an important European or Anglo-American personality to refuse, on moral grounds, to receive a non-European like Gandhi because this non-European insists, as Gandhi used to insist while in Western countries, in wearing oriental clothes instead of European trousers. Reciprocity, tolerance and broadness in this, as well as in other points of morals - both conceptual and instrumental - and manners, seem to be necessary if European moral values and value-attitudes which Europeans and non-Europeans seem to consider as of universal validity, are to be saved as essential concepts. To remain as vital concepts, some of them seem to have to change as instruments - to use a very convenient discrimination between concepts and instruments; and even to take entirely non-bourgeois and even non-European instrumental aspects. The modern development of civilization - most of it taken Europe - in tropical areas, may mean a readaptation of European styles of dress, food, habitation, to Oriental, Moorish, Indian traditions, with new moral implications and new hygienic and even biological connotations. This may give to moral change, as well as to other aspects of social change, a firmer ecological foundation for its instrumental diversity, as well as a firmer basis for a really conceptual universality. But the subject, here as well as in other of its margins, tends to become more philosophical than sociological, more normative than scientific.

     In a very stimulating essay published in New York in 1940, J. D. Unwin, a British social philosopher, wrote that changes, within what he calls an "energetic society", are inevitable as an effect on the groups that make a society of this type, of "their experiences"; and that cultural - including moral - behaviour - is part of a cultural as well as of biological process ^[7]. Adaptation of morals and manners taken, or brought, from Europe or Anglo-America, to tropical spaces, seems to be an example of this double process: cultural and biological. For dress and food habits - with their moral implications - have to correspond to ecological realities in a way that is not only cultural but also biological.

     Social philosophers may consider it against the best interests of a human society ecologically organised in regional societies differing in their cultural and moral adaptation to conditions of life, for modern men to favour absolute standardisation of morals and manners, with the entire sacrifice of regional diversity. For this reason, it seems to some of them that modern commercial advertisement, with its stimulation of similar desires in men, women and children of different areas - British wool or flannel for men's trousers, French furs for women, Scandinavian skates as toys for children - acts against those interests and in favour of an undesirable type of standardisation: of mores as well as of morals. For tropical ladies who wear furs in the tropics not only behave anti-ecologically but - from a social philosophical point of view - are culturally and morally disloyal to their civilisations. They disregard something vital in their own civilisations to fall under the spell of advertisements from other civilizations, and become "marginal" instead of "liberated", in the sense of "the liberated man" conceived by Professor Howard Becker ^[8].

     Social change in our time seem to be meeting with reaction against too passive imitation of European and Anglo-American morals and manners by non-European peoples or societies. The problem, now, for these peoples, whose nationalism has become so intensively cultural, seems to be for them to combine assimilation of European and Anglo-American values and techniques of moral behaviour, with their new élan - a predominantly moral élan - towards the relative preservation of ancestral values and attitudes. Relative because, as Professor Edward H. Spicer points out ^[9], no generation, within a particular culture, "seems to behave precisely like a former generation": "the out-standing fact of constant change... remains".