Custom (social practice)

“ It has long been known that custom is the chief form of social control in the lower culture conditions. Those life-conditions which, on the one hand, are subsequently codified as laws and enforced by the police power of the state, and, on the other hand, are remitted to the free consent of the cultivated and trained individual socius, are, in narrower and primitive circles, guaranteed by that peculiar, immediate control of the individual by his environment which we call custom. ”

“ Every social custom has a foundation established by usage as a recognition of social needs, and intended to prevent rudeness and confusion; intended also to make polite society polite. We must conform, according to our circle, to social conventions as thus established, since they are the ripened results of long and varied experience in what is most suitable and becoming. Not to observe them is to advertise our ignorance and expose ourselves to criticism. ”

“ Some Important Social Forces.—The basis of custom is habit. Customs, in other words, are habits which extend 10|Two important social forces: habit and imitation.| to the whole community and receive its approval. We do not always realize how great a part habit plays in our daily lives. ”

“ On the other hand, early codification of custom in a system of written laws secures that thereafter custom shall not develop in this blind unintelligent and socially prejudicial manner, but shall be developed only by deliberate intention and the reasoned fore-thought of the ruling powers of society; it will then develop in the main, in spite of many mistakes, in a way which promotes the efficiency of social life and the welfare of society. ”

“ Sanctioned by law, by the custom of long tradition, by economic and social valuations, the home calls for personal devotion of will and purpose from every individual for the welfare of the group of which he is a privileged member. ”

“ EVOLUTION OF THE MORES
All modern social institutions arise from the evolution of the primitive customs of your savage ancestors; the conventions of today are the modified and expanded customs of yesterday. What habit is to the individual, custom is to the group; and group customs develop into folkways or tribal traditions—mass conventions. From these early beginnings all of the institutions of present-day human society take their humble origin. ”

“ Though unconsciously, the man conforming Page 420 to a custom is considering his fellows, and the values and traditions which have become current among them.
Customs, moreover, are the first invasion of moral chaos. They establish enduring standards; they give common and permanent bases of action. ”

“ Custom has introduced into society vices of all descriptions. Not long since it was the custom to pass the social glass, and it has been the means of making a great many inebriates, and making beggars of a great many families ”

“ While custom is thus valuable as a moral agent in establishing standards of social life and rendering them continuous and enduring, a morality that is completely based upon it has serious defects. Though customs may start as allegedly or actually useful practices, they tend, so strong is the influence of habit over the individual, to outlive their usefulness, and may become, indeed, altogether disadvantageous conventions. ”

“ In short, the primary facts of social psychology center about collective habit, custom. In addition to the general psychology of habit—which is general not individual in any intelligible sense of that word—we need to find out just how different customs shape the desires, beliefs, purposes of those who are affected by them. The problem of social psychology is not how either individual or collective mind forms social groups and customs, but how different customs, established interacting arrangements, form and nurture different minds. ”

“ We include within social environment such things as family life, the schools, the churches, the organization and methods of industry, the form of government—everything that society develops in the way of institutions. Many of these, as has been pointed out, are natural growths, but the mind of man has also had a large part in shaping their course.
How customs and laws create a social environment. 9Most of the things we do, whether as a body of people or as individuals, are merely the result of custom or general habit. Why do men have their hair cut short while women let their hair grow long? ”

“ If education has become a generally approved social habit, we can spend our time on instruments and methods. Every useful custom firmly established gives a basis of operations. That much is settled; that much does not demand our alert attention and inquiry. A society without any fixed habits would be sheer anarchy. The aim of intelligent consideration of morals is not to abolish customs, but to bring about their Page 430 modification so that they will be the most effective adjustment of the individual and the group to their environment. ”

“ It is difficult for us in America, who live under customs and laws in which the individual is the social unit and the family a union of individuals, to understand a system of society in which the individual is little or nothing and the family the social unit recognized both by law and custom. ”

“ In this way, then, it may be possible to prove the general utility, for the present, of those actions, which in our society are both generally recognized as duties and generally practised; but it seems very doubtful whether a conclusive case can be established for any proposed change in social custom, without an independent investigation of what things are good or bad in themselves. ”

“ Out of rights grow duties; the first of which is to live an honest, truthful, self-loyal life, acting and speaking always and everywhere in accordance with the laws of our being, as revealed in our own physical and mental organization. It is by the light of this fact that we must look upon all social requirements, whether in dress, manners, or morals. All that is fundamental and genuine in these will be found to harmonize with universal principles, and consequently with our primary duty in reference to ourselves. ”

“ That means that every community, through the very character of the environment which it imposes upon the individuals that compose it, tends to determine the personal traits as it does determine the language, the vocation, social values, and, eventually, the personal opinions, of the individuals who compose it. ”

“ Here a word must be said about the subjective aspect of society, which, in its objective aspect, as we have seen, is merely the struggle and process of adjustment. What is the relation of adjustment to sympathy and to understanding, to communication and to concerted purpose, to the evolution of a social constraint through which the community controls and shapes the individual, to cooperation and to social organization? ”

“ More positively influential in the formation of moral ideas and feelings are social institutions. Thus the place which a whole group of moral qualities that we designate as domestic virtues are assigned in the ethical standard is determined by the place which circumstances may have given the family in the social organism. ”

“ The institutions of self-perpetuation. These are the establishments of society growing out of sex hunger, maternal instinct, and the higher tender emotions of the races. They embrace the social safeguards of the home and the school, of family life, education, ethics, and religion. ”

“ Every one of our actions, whether we wish it or not, exercises some influence on other human beings in the social community in which we live. By our conduct we help to uphold or undermine the principles on which the various social institutions are based ”

“ The same is true of the large array of people who, in the domestic and ecclesiastical institutions, are teaching the children at home or in the schools and churches ; of the policemen and prison officials who are dealing with anti-social classes ; of the charity workers and pauper overseers who are dealing with the sub-social classes ; these are fitting social material for society, just as the other technical workers are fitting natural material for society's uses. ”

“ We have already alluded to the fact that our moral conceptions are absorbed from the social milieu in which we are reared. The prevailing ideals of family, business, the social, political or national group of which we happen to be members we absorb as part of our "social copy" and build into the fabric of our social selves. ”

“ There is no group of (let us say) ethical institutions answering to domestic, industrial or professional institutions. Social control, as I shall show, is exercised through all kinds of instruments in turn—through religious, governmental and professional organizations, through amorphous masses of people, through individuals and through super-organic products, such as folk-lore, tradition, ceremonial poetry and works of art. A classification, therefore, according to the institution, organ or agency by which control is exercised will not be satisfactory. ”

“ That which, when we become capable of reflection, we term conscience, consists in pleasure in forms of action furthering the welfare of society—forms gradually moulded to habit with the development of social relations,—and in a corresponding pain at the realization of having failed of such action; the knowledge of the demand, by society as a whole or by a part of society, of action in accord with the general welfare, and the sense of the justice of this demand, constituting the feeling of obligation and duty. ”

“ THE ORIGIN AND THE PERSISTENCE OF CUSTOMS.—From the fact that customs are, in general, to be regarded as expressions of the social will, it might be assumed that their purposive character and social utility should be a sufficient explanation of their coming into being. But the matter is not so simple. A man may fall into habits which are no indication of what he regards as useful to him. ”

“ We remind our young people from time to time that conventions established in sophisticated society have usually a sound basis in social experience, and the cultivation of the minor morals of good manners develops consideration for others. ”

“ By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society [190] and class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment. ”

“ Briefly, a wholesome social condition implies that every social organ discharges a useful function; it renders some service to the community which is equivalent to the support which it derives; brain and stomach each get their due share of supply; and there is a thorough reciprocity between all the different members of the body. But what kind of equality should be desired in order to secure this desirable organic balance? ”

“ Much, too, and this in the pleasantest fashion, may be done to extend one’s knowledge of good form by observation of people who have unusual tact and social discrimination. In every city, town and village, there are such persons who are distinguished above their fellow citizens by social instinct, by the talent for performing gracefully and acceptably the offices of society. ”

“ Nevertheless, whether actually existing or only approached, we must here recognize as hypothetically possible a state in which these primary moral laws are conformed to; for the purpose of observing, in their uncomplicated forms, what are the negative conditions to harmonious social life. Whether the members of a social group do or do not co-operate, certain limitations to their individual activities are necessitated by their association ”

“ More important is it to deal with the springs of action, to teach the equal standard of purity for men and women, and the moral responsibility of parenthood to adolescent youth, and at the same time to impress upon [47] the whole community its responsibility of oversight of morals for the good of the next generation. Conviction of personal and social responsibility as superior to individual preferences is the only safety of society in all its relations, from eugenics through economics to ethics and religion. ”

“ Our ethics is only a vague outline, not a matured system, and in the details of social contact—as between employer and workman, rich and poor, Negro and white, and so on—there is such a lack of accepted standards that men have little to go by but their crude impulses. ”

“ All I wish to enforce is, that the three common causes of the social and moral differences of individuals are to be found in race, organization, and circumstances—that none of us are entirely proof against the influence of these three conditions—the ethnological, the physiological, and the associative elements of our idiosincracy. ”

“ Let us put the canon of equality in a different shape, namely, that there should always be a sufficient reason for any difference in the treatment of our fellows. This rule does not imply that I should act in all cases as though all men were equal in character or mind, but that my action should in all cases be justified by some appropriate consideration. ”