Tradition

Tradition is underrated. Tradition is the impulse to keep doing things the way they’ve been done in the past, and to reject deviations from that pattern. It comes in for a lot of criticism these days; it is fashionable to question tradition, and to put its proponents on the defensive. This is foolish; tradition is essential to the existence of society, let alone civilization.

The Attack

A typical line is something like this:

Why do you believe [traditional thing]? It’s silly to cling to practices and beliefs just because they’ve been around for a while. Let’s have a debate about them. I’ve spent 5 years in grad school studying this question, and I’ve concluded that [traditional thing] isn’t true. You know, you really ought to be embarrassed to believe something that you can’t justify. You don’t want to come off like a know-nothing boob, do you? It seems to me that, unless you can construct a solid argument for your position, you should adopt mine. After all, I have an argument, and you don’t.

Consequence

This sort of thinking is destructive. To begin with, as I’ve mentioned before, reason is limited. If we were trying to create a society from philosophical first principles, we’d be back to living in caves and bashing each other’s heads in with rocks (assuming that we even had rocks to spare) in no time. Then there’s the simple question of time; there are a very large number of seemingly arbitrary customs that make up a society, and if one were required to argue about each of them, one would have little time for anything else. The idea that one has no standing to defend a tradition unless one has time to devote to study of and argument for it is pernicious. It is an attempt to empower those who don’t have real jobs.

Gratitude

We should be grateful that thousands of years of societal evolution have bequeathed to us workable traditions that keep the whole thing ticking over. While traditions will and should evolve, the current bias against them has gone too far.

A little humility from the theorists is called for, and if they can’t manage it themselves, we should feel no shame in indulgently patting them on the head, telling them their arguments are very clever, and encouraging them to run along and play with the other children. And then ignoring them.