[00:01.46]Lesson 44
[00:03.43]Patterns of culture
[00:11.29]What influences us from the moment of birth?
[00:17.21]Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment.
[00:22.85]The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation,
[00:29.16]but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at is most commonplace.
[00:36.05]As a matter of fact, it is the other way around.
[00:40.37]Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour
[00:45.94]more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant.
[00:54.40]Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter.
[00:58.38]The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief,
[01:05.67]and the very great varieties it may manifest.
[01:10.17]No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes.
[01:14.85]He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.
[01:21.48]Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes;
[01:27.05]his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs.
[01:34.74]John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual,
[01:42.46]as against any way in which he can affect traditional custom,
[01:46.65]is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue
[01:51.17]against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family.
[01:58.16]When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously,
[02:04.45]the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of -fact observation.
[02:10.08]The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation
[02:15.03]to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.
[02:20.42]From the moment of his birth,
[02:22.30]the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour.
[02:27.34]By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture,
[02:31.65]and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities,
[02:36.29]its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.
[02:45.92]Every child that is born into his group will share them with him,
[02:50.38]and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part.
[02:57.47]There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom.
[03:05.68]Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties,
[03:09.33]the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
[03:15.77]The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted,
[03:22.86]and some of these propositions have been violently opposed.
[03:27.64]In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no
[03:31.63]preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration.
[03:39.20]In all the less controversial fields,
[03:41.92]like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae,
[03:47.81]the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions.
[03:56.75]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.
[04:06.81]It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences
[04:11.37]have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
[04:18.65]Anthropology was by definition impossible,
[04:22.04]as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive,
[04:26.14]ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds.
[04:33.59]It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication
[04:37.74]where we no longer set our own belief against our neighbour's superstition.
[04:42.98]It was necessary to recognize that
[04:45.78]these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural,
[04:51.67]must be considered together, our own among the rest.