The challenge of modernity is to thus balance the benefits of scaled-up systems of cooperation with the human impulse to belong to, and integrate with, robust ethical communities

From The two Christian Nationalisms by Samuel Hammond.  He is actually focused on a different topic but in the process of making his argument, has this detour.

A bit of genuine integralism is unavoidable. Every well-functioning society integrates its members in some fashion. Traditionalist societies depend more on normative integration through custom and ritual, while modernist societies achieve scale by supplanting traditional mores with explicit laws, regulations, and professional bureaucracies.

Habermas describes this dichotomy as being between the “lifeworld” and “system.” The lifeworld is the world you self-evidently inhabit, replete with tacit moral commitments and an intersubjective understanding of one’s social role. The system makes those tacit commitments formal and objective through things like laws, bureaucratic process and market prices. Both the lifeworld and system offer mechanisms for coordinating social action but come with different trade-offs. While systems offer scale, they also risk creating social alienation by “colonizing the lifeworld,” i.e. replacing actions undertaken through interpersonal communication with incentive schemes and administrative processes. The challenge of modernity is to thus balance the benefits of scaled-up systems of cooperation with the human impulse to belong to, and integrate with, robust ethical communities (a recurring theme of this blog!).

For individuals, there is mass benefit to habitualizing the routine.  Things that are done routinely should be made into routines, into habits, which require no thought.  The time can then be used considering issues which do require thought.  

Similarly all groups need systems, rules of the road that reduce the need to consider everything from the ground up and from first principles.  Easier to understand the basic rules and laws than to hope that everyone reasons from the same first principles to the same logic conclusions.  

But there are always trade-offs.  Too much habitualization disconnects us from an evolving reality.  Too much systemization does segregate us from the actions and interactions which make us profoundly human.