[al:新概念英语（四）] [ar:MP3 同步字幕版（美音）] [ti:Patterns of Culture] [by:更多学习内容，请到yingyu.chazidian.com搜索“新概念”] [00:00.78]Lesson 44 [00:02.62]Patterns of culture [00:09.88]What influences us from the moment of birth? [00:15.46]Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. [00:20.81]The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, [00:26.82]but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at is most commonplace. [00:33.35]As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. [00:36.88]Traditional custom, taken the world over, [00:39.96]is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, [00:48.53]no matter how aberrant. [00:50.73]Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. [00:54.70]The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, [01:02.52]and the very great varieties it may manifest. [01:07.28]No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. [01:11.45]He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. [01:18.15]Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; [01:23.66]his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. [01:31.50]John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual, [01:39.36]as against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, [01:43.65]is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue [01:48.64]against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. [01:56.17]When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, [02:03.58]the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. [02:09.12]The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation [02:14.42]to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. [02:20.21]From the moment of his birth, [02:22.20]the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. [02:27.53]By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, [02:32.38]and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, [02:37.30]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. [02:57.64]There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. [03:05.73]Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, [03:09.78]the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible. [03:15.99]The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, [03:23.68]and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. [03:28.49]In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no [03:33.38]preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. [03:40.88]In all the less controversial fields, like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, [03:48.21]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. [04:06.01]It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences [04:11.19]have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization. [04:18.21]Anthropology was by definition impossible, [04:21.58]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. [04:32.65]It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication