Patterns of culture

Custom has not commonly been 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， we 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 probing 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 against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue 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-of-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.