us 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. "Dr. Arthur Smith
tells of the advantage it would be in some parts of China to
build a door on the south side of the house, in order to get
the breeze, in hot weather." The simple and sufficient
answer to such a suggestion is, "We don't build doors on the
south side."

We have but to examine our own civilization to see that
there are many customs which are practiced not for any
good assignable reason, but simply because they have become
fixed and traditional. This is not to say that everything
that has become "merely conventional" is evil. It is
to suggest how, even in civilized society, groups may fall
into modes of action that are practiced simply because they
_have been_ practiced, rather than from any reasoned
consideration that they _should_ be. An illustration may be taken
from the experience of civilians drawn into the military
routine during the Great War. Men engaged in war work
at Washington in civilian capacities reported repeatedly
their impatience at the "red tape" of tradition with which
certain classes of business were conducted by the military
establishment. In law also, progressive practitioners and
students have pointed out the well-known fact of the immense
and beclogging ritual which has come to surround
legal procedure. It is the contention of critics of one or
another of our contemporary social habits and institutions
that traditionalism, the persistence of custom simply because
it _is_ custom, is responsible for many of the anachronisms
in our social, political, and industrial life. Space does
not permit here a detailed consideration of this question,
but it must be noted that social habits, when they are acquired,
as they are, unreflectively by the vast majority of
people, will tend to be repeated and supported, apart from
any consideration of their consequences. This tendency
toward social inertia, earlier noted in connection with habit,
can only be checked by reflective criticism and appraisement
of our current accustomed ways of action.[1]

[Footnote 1: See chapter on "Cultural Continuity."]

In the case of the group, too complete a domination by
custom is dangerous in that it sanctions and promotes the
continuance of habits that have become useles