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