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Lesson 44 |
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Patterns of culture |
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What influences us from the moment of birth? |
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Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. |
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The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, |
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but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at is most commonplace. |
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As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. |
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Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour |
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more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant. |
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Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. |
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The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, |
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and the very great varieties it may manifest. |
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No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. |
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He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. |
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Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; |
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his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. |
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John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual, |
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as against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, |
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is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue |
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against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. |
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When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, |
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the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of -fact observation. |
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The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation |
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to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. |
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From the moment of his birth, |
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the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. |
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By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, |
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and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, |
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its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. |
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Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, |
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and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. |
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There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. |
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Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, |
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the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible. |
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The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, |
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and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. |
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In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no |
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preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. |
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In all the less controversial fields, |
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like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, |
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the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. |
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In this way, we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. |
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It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences |
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have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization. |
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Anthropology was by definition impossible, |
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as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, |
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ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds. |
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It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication |
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where we no longer set our own belief against our neighbour's superstition. |
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It was necessary to recognize that |
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these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, |
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must be considered together, our own among the rest. |
