from The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right, edited by Joseph Scotchie
pages 60-62
Formerly the word tradition signified oral communication, as distinguished from books or documents; in the twentieth century, however, tradition has been widely employed to mean, also, prescriptive wisdom expressed in literature—and, by extension, to include old ways, beliefs, and even material objects that constitute a part of the modern age's cultural patrimony. The Latin verb tradere, meaning to "hand down" or "hand over," is the root of our word. Tradition implies acceptance, preservation, and passing on. It gives permanence to customs and ideas; it confers upon change the element of continuity, keeping the alteration of society in a regular train. Everything which the living possess has roots in the spiritual and intellectual achievements of the past. Everything man has—his body, his mind, his social order—is in large part an inheritance from people long dead. The passage of times brings new acquisitions; but unless men know the past, they are unable to understand distinctions between what is permanent and what is transient in their lives. Man always is beset by questions, of which the largest is the question of his own existence. He cannot even begin to think about his existence, and lesser questions, until he has acquired the command of means that come to him from the past, such as the names that people customarily use with reference to modes of being and acting.
Man inherits a physical world, a biological world, and a cultural world. Tradition is concerned principally with his cultural world—which, nevertheless, is closely joined to his physical and biological worlds. Tradition is the means by which man comes to understand the principles of his own nature and of society; it joins the individual with the generations that are dead and the generations that are yet to be born. In short, tradition is a way of preserving the wisdom of our ancestors and a means by which we can give some significance and application to our own private reason.
In every age, philosophers have spoken of the power of tradition. Cicero, in his Republic and his Offices, shows how the Roman commonwealth was dependent upon custom and inherited belief for justice, order, and freedom. Fulbert of Chartres, in the eleventh century, observed that "We are dwarfs mounted upon the shoulders of giants," able to see so far only because of the stature of the wise men who have preceded us in time. The present moment, in the eyes of men attached to tradition, is merely a film upon the deep well of the past, an illusory line of demarcation between history and futurity. It is upon tradition that the future must be built. The long essential continuity of culture and human intelligence can be maintained only if the past is conserved through living tradition. The man who respects tradition, then, is not a reckless reformer who would alter society and human nature upon some utopian design, but a thinker who tries to reconcile the best in tradition with the constant necessity for change. Burke said that his model of a statesman was one who combined the disposition to preserve with the ability to reform. A healthy society, he suggested elsewhere, is never wholly old or wholly new, but, like any living thing, is forever casting off its old fabric and acquiring new tissue. Prescription, or tradition, is the means by which this healthy society preserves the wisdom of our ancestors and applies that wisdom to the new problems which it faces.
The process of growth always involves the process of reform—the process by which the acorn becomes the oak. This process is always at work in human affairs. The problem which thinking men always face is the difficulty of distinguishing between necessary and desirable alteration, and unnecessary and undesirable destruction. Tradition is a guide to the permanent qualities in society and thought and private life which need to be preserved, in one form or another, throughout the process of inevitable change.
True progress, improvement, is unthinkable without tradition, as Vazquez de Melia suggests, because progress rests upon addition, not subtraction. Change without reference to tradition runs the risk of aimless alteration for alteration's sake, terminating in anarchy or nihilism. Real progress consists in improvement of private and public morality, private and public intelligence, the increase of justice, order, and freedom, and of those material conditions which contribute to human happiness. It is scarcely possible to judge of what humanity wants, or of what measures are calculated to make men better or happier, without knowledge of what benefits have been gained in the past, and of what mistakes have been made. Tradition is the means by which humanity filters out its mistake from its progressive discoveries. Every great institution among civilized men seems to have tried to recapture or preserve the values of the past. This is especially true of the Church, sifting the pre-Christian inheritance of Western culture and "baptizing" whatever might be adapted to Christianity.
(He then talks about tradition in the sciences.)
pages 62-67
Yet there can be error in tradition, and even a tradition made up of errors. Man always is compelled to choose among conflicting traditions, and to sort out from the mass of inherited precept the maxims and customs which truly apply to his present situation in the world. This is a problem which cannot be solved by any hard-and-fast role. There would be no problem of tradition if men were not in some important senses free. When men let their moral and intellectual freedom sink altogether into desuetude, and rely uncritically upon pure tradition, their society is liable to pass into decay, or at least find itself unable to resist the pressure of livelier societies: such appears to have been a condition in the civilization of ancient Egypt and of Peru. Routine without change, and change without routine, appear to be almost equally perilous.
Yet it does not follow that all traditions are evanescent. At the core of the body of traditions of any society is to be found a number of customs and precepts, described by some as natural law formulated into traditions, which that society ignores at its peril. And, far from being peculiar to a savage or barbarian condition of society, this seems to be especially true of complex civilizations, which are the more dependent upon certain underlying assumptions about man and society, the more complicated their activities become. Some of these traditions appear to be almost universal in essence, although they are formulated in various ways. The Decalogue expresses some of the more important of these, in the Judeo-Christian culture. The distinctions between good acts and evil acts; the duties within the family; the duties toward other men; the relationship between God and man: these concepts ordinarily are defined and maintained in any society by the force of ancient traditions, accepted almost without question from time out of mind. And when they are doubted or denied by the doctrinaire skeptic, any society is in peril of losing these moral sanctions which make the civil social order possible. Whether regarded as revealed truths or as necessary fictions (Polybius, in the Hellenistic world, took the latter view, as have various cultural relativists since his time), the traditions which govern private and social morality are set too close about the heart of a civilization to bear much tampering with. Skeptics like Hume, and rationalists like Voltaire, have acknowledged the necessity for conventions and traditions to make life in society tolerable.
The religious and ethical convictions which, however weakened in some quarters, still govern Western civilization in large part, are composed of Hebraic, Greek, Roman, and Christian elements; and are sanctioned and sheltered by a complex body of traditions. Shorn of tradition, our modern attitude toward the meaning of life would be meager and feeble. The Christian attitude toward the importance of tradition is suggested in the second epistle of Paul to Timothy, Chapters III and IV: "But continue thou in the things which thou has learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou has learned them. . . . For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears. And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables." To the Christian, conformity to religious tradition is not superstition, but the part of wisdom; it is the doctrines of presumptuous private rationality and interest that are fables. Tradition, in short, to the religious man, is transcendent truth expressed in the filtered opinions of our ancestors.
What purported revelations are true, and what are false; whether revelation still is possible in human experience, or whether it has ceased to work among men; whether a new revelation could undo a major tradition, and by what tests such a revelation ought to be judged—these grave questions, and certain others, are not easily answered. But much of life always remains veiled in mystery, and the simple existence of a tradition, accepted for many generations by a people, logically creates a presumption that such a tradition has purpose and significance, unless proof to the contrary is very strong.
Traditions also have been defended upon empirical grounds. That a society seems to have thrived when it obeyed the dictates of tradition, and seems to have suffered when it sought to substitute some new moral or social scheme for prescriptive wisdom—this test has been applied again and again by philosophers and moralists. The decay of tradition is the theme of the Roman satirists and historians: they judge the importance of tradition by the consequences of the disregard of tradition. And this argument is advanced by the Hebrew prophets and the early Christian fathers. Unfortunately for a society which neglects tradition, this proof can be afforded only when the decay of traditional belief has brought society near to catastrophe, if not actually to positive ruin. A society may for a great while appear to be thriving, despite its rejection of tradition, when in reality that society is decaying, and moving toward dissolution; an outward prosperity may mask a cultural and moral decay, the end of which is as sudden as its progress toward disaster has been gradual. The respecter of tradition argues that to abandon tradition—that is, to abandon respect for prescriptive wisdom, what Chesterton calls ''the democracy of the dead," the voice of the wise men who have lived in ages past—is to commit a society inevitably to such dissolution.
The lamentations of Jeremiah very frequently are justified by the event, however much a complacent generation may have mocked at the adherents to traditions allegedly outworn. Yet sometimes such lamentations are merely splenetic or misguided, and some traditions actually do wear out. Each generation is compelled to judge for itself just how far to obey the letter of tradition, and just how far to modify tradition by the admission of salutary change. This faculty of distinguishing between needful and imprudent alteration seems to be granted only to a few persons in each generation. In general, the attitude of the respecter of tradition is that of the farseeing Lord Falkland, in the English Civil Wars: "When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change." The fact that humanity has lumbered along tolerably well in obedience to a tradition creates a legitimate presumption, in short, in favor of retaining that tradition; the burden of proof rests upon the innovator.
Most men and women are good only from habit, or out of deference to the opinions of their neighbors, the friend to tradition argues; and to deprive them of their habits, customs, and precepts, in order to benefit them in some novel way, may leave them morally and socially adrift, more harmed by their loss of ethical sanctions than helped by the fancied new benefit.
Tradition cannot suffice to guide a society, nevertheless, if it is not understood and expounded and, if need be, modified by the better intelligences and consciences in every generation. It is not possible for the living to see with the eyes of the dead. Whatever wisdom exists in any generation is, in a sense, born with that generation; and that generation's wisdom seeks sustenance in tradition, but cannot be kept alive merely by tradition. Wisdom has to be born over and over again; tradition is the element of continuity which enables each generation's wisdom to profit from the wisdom of preceding generations. The past exists only in the living; yet whether the living are aware of it or not, most of their experience and their apprehension of their own experience is determined by their legacy from the past. This is a condition peculiar to man. The vegetable, unaware of its inheritance, is unable to use its inheritance for its own improvement. Man cannot be like the vegetable, for he has reason, conscience, and consciousness, and he inherits an awareness of his ancestors. He is either better or worse than a vegetable, and whether he is better or worse depends upon his relationship to the sources of his being. It is tradition which makes it possible for him, short of mystical experience, to know his part in the "contract of eternal society" that joins him to those who are dead and those who are not yet born, and also to a nature that is more than material and more than human.
If tradition sinks into mere unquestioning routine, it digs its own grave; for man then approximates vegetal nature, disavowing reason and conscience as correctors and restorers of tradition. It was one of the more eloquent apologists for tradition, Chateaubriand (in his Memoires d'outre-tombe) who lamented "the mania for adhering to the past, a mania which I never cease impugning. . . . Political stagnation is impossible; it is absolutely necessary to keep pace with human intelligence. Let us respect the majesty of time; let us reverentially contemplate past centuries, rendered sacred by the memory and the footsteps of our fathers; but let us not try to go back to them, for they no longer possess a vestige of our real nature, and if we endeavored to seize hold of them, they would fade away." This is the traditionalist of elevation, appealing to his generation to hold by living tradition, but not to be governed by a letter from which the spirit has departed.
There exists no danger nowadays that Americans might sink into a social antiquarianism. The expectation of change has come to exceed the expectation of continuity nearly everywhere in the United States. For the annihilation of America's traditional architecture and town patterns moves on apace, though not so swiftly as it did during the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, when purported "urban renewal" became obliteration of nearly everything worth preserving or restoring in America's cities. And so it goes in nearly all lands. In T. S. Eliot's sentence, we are "destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans." It is so in things of the mind and the spirit, as well as in bricks and mortar, and the consequences are immeasurable, but ruinous. It might be possible to establish a direct ratio between the decline of order in the twentieth century, and the widespread decline of belief in the truth of tradition.
A consciousness of our spiritual inheritance, Gabriel Marcel writes in The Decline of Wisdom, is possible only in an atmosphere of diffuse gratitude: and gratitude not merely to the generations that have preceded us in this life, but gratitude toward the eternal order, and the source of that order, which raises man above the brutes, and makes art man's nature. Pietas, in short, the veneration of man's sacred associations and of the wisdom of man's ancestors—this spirit survives only in holes and corners of modern society; and for lack of piety, modern men are bored, impatient, and ready enough to subvert the civil social state which is the source of their own material prosperity.
Now "the contract of eternal society," that phrase which describes the concept of social obligation presently decaying among us, is the idea which forms the kernel of Burke's Reflections. Society is indeed a contract, Burke says, but not a contract in any mere historical or commercial sense. It is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. It is a contract, too, between God and man, "linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible worlds, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place." We have no right to break this contract of eternal society; and if we do, we are cast out of this world of love and order into the antagonist world of hate and discord. Burke does not believe that wisdom began with the eighteenth century. He employs the words "contract" and "compact" in their most venerable meaning, the bond between God and man. ''I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth." This is the thirteenth verse of the ninth chapter of the book of Genesis. This contract, this covenant, is the free promise of God, and its terms are obeyed by man in gratitude and in fear. Far from being a grandiloquent transcendence of real meaning, as some of Burke's critics have protested, Burke's employment of "contract" has the sanction of the Bible, the Schoolmen, and the whole body of ethical conviction which carries us back to Job and beyond Job.
Pages 70-73
The eternal contract, the sense of continuity among men, has been made known to succeeding generations, from the dawn of culture, by the agency of tradition. Tradition is the process of handing on beliefs, not so much through formal schooling, or through books, as through the life of the family and the observances of the church. Until the end of the eighteenth century, no one thought it conceivable that most men could obtain most of their knowledge in any other way than this; and though cheap books and eleemosynary schooling have supplanted to some extent the old functions of traditionary instruction, still tradition remains the principal source of our moral beliefs and our worldly wisdom. Young persons do not acquire in school, to any considerable extent, the sense of continuity and the veneration for the eternal contract which makes possible willing obedience to social order; children acquire this sense from their parents and other elders, and from their gradual introduction to religion, if they obtain any; the process is illative, rather than deliberate. Now let us suppose that parents cease to impart such instruction, or come to regard tradition as superstition; suppose that young people never become acquainted with the church—what happens to tradition? Why, its empire is destroyed, and the young join the crowd of the other-directed whom David Riesman describes.
In a looser sense, by "tradition" we mean all that body of knowledge which is bound up with prescription and prejudice and authority, the accepted beliefs of a people, as distinguished from "scientific" knowledge; and this, too, is greatly weakened in its influence among the rising generation by a growing contempt for any belief that is not founded upon demonstrable "fact.'' Almost nothing of importance really can be irrefutably demonstrated by finally ascertained "fact"; but the limitations of science are not apprehended by the throng of the quarter-educated who think themselves emancipated from their spiritual heritage. When we confront these people, we are dealing not merely with persons ignorant of tradition, but actively hostile toward it.
Now cheap books and free schooling are not the principal reasons for this decay of the influence of tradition. The really decisive factors are the industrialization and urbanization of modern life. Tradition thrives where men follow naturally in the ways of their fathers, and live in the same houses, and experience in their own lives that continuity of existence which assures them that the great things in human nature do not much alter from one generation to another. This is the mood of Ecclesiastes. But the tremendous physical and social changes that have come with the later stages of our industrial growth, and the concentration of population in raw new cities, shake men's confidence that things will be with them as they were with their fathers. The sanction of permanence seems to have been dissolved. Men doubt the validity of their own opinions, founded upon tradition, and hesitate to impart them to their children—indeed, they may thrust all this vast obligation upon the unfortunate school-teacher, and then grow annoyed when the teacher turns out to be incapable of bestowing moral certitude, scientific knowledge, and decent manners upon a class of fifty or sixty bewildered and distracted children. Most natural keepers of tradition, in short, abdicate their function when modern life makes them doubt their own virtue.
Though of course I did not understand all this at the time, it was this decay of the force of tradition which was sweeping away the old mill-pond almost before my eyes, as I lay on the hill under my oak. For my part, I still was a tradition-guided boy; but the planners who altered the landscape, presently, were Benthamites confident in the sufficiency of pure rationality, and the man who demolished the octagon-house was an other-directed individual who positively dreaded identification with anything dead and gone, and longed to be associated, however vaguely, with the milieu of Beverly Hills. The Utilitarians and the other-directed people were using up the moral and intellectual capital which had been accumulated by a traditionary society, I came to realize much later; and that process has been in the ascendant, with an increasing velocity, throughout the United States, for two generations now.
It cannot continue forever. Our guardians of tradition have been recruited principally, although not wholly, from our farms and small towns; the incertitude of the cities disturbs the equanimity of the tradition-guided man. And our great cities have been swelling at the expense of our country and village population, so that the immense majority of young people today have no direct acquaintance with the old rural verities. Our reservoir of tradition will be drained dry within a very few decades, if we do not deliberately open up once more the springs of tradition. The size of the United States, and the comparative gradualness of industrial development in many regions, until now saved us from a complete exhaustion of tradition, such as Sweden seems to have experienced. At the beginning of this century, Sweden had seven people in the country for one in the city; now that ratio is worse than inverted; and one may obtain some hint of what the death of tradition means to a people from the fact that the Swedes, previously celebrated for their placidity and old-fashioned heartiness, now endure remarkably high rates of abortion and suicide, dismayed at the thought of bringing life into this world or even of enduring one's own life.
I do not wish our traditions to run out, because I do not believe that formal indoctrination, or pure rationality, or simple imitation of our contemporaries, can replace traditions. Traditions are the wisdom of the race; they are the only sure instruments of moral instruction; they have about them a solemnity and a mystery that Dr. Dryasdust the cultural anthropologist never can compensate for; and they teach us the solemn veneration of the eternal contract which cannot be imparted by pure reason. Even our political institutions are sustained principally by tradition, rather than by utilitarian expediency. A people who have exhausted their traditions are starved for imagination and devoid of any general assumptions to give coherence to their life.
Yet I do not say that tradition ought to be our only guide, nor that tradition is always beneficent. There have been ages and societies in which tradition, stifling the creative faculty among men, put an end to variety and change, and so oppressed mankind with the boredom of everlasting worship of the past. In a healthy nation, tradition must be balanced by some strong element of curiosity and individual dissent. Some people who today are conservatives because they protest against the tyranny of neoterism, in another age or nation would be radicals, because they could not endure the tyranny of tradition. It is a question of degree and balance. But I am writing of modern society, especially in the United States; and among us there is not the slightest danger that we shall be crushed beneath the dead weight of tradition; the danger is altogether on the other side. Our modern affliction is the flux of ceaseless change, the repudiation of all enduring values, the agonies of indecision and the social neuroses that come with a questioning of everything in heaven and earth. We are not in the plight of the old Egyptians or Peruvians; it is not prescription which enslaves us, but the lust for innovation. A young novelist, visiting George Santayana in his Roman convent in the last year of the philosopher's life, remarked that he could not endure to live in America, where everything was forever changing and shifting. Santayana replied, with urbane irony, that he supposed if it were not for kaleidoscopic change in America, life there would be unbearable. A people infatuated with novelty presently cannot bear to amble along; but the trouble with this is that the pace becomes vertiginous, and the laws of centrifugal force begin to operate.
I know there are people who maintain that nothing is seriously wrong with life in the United States, and that we need not fret about tradition one way or the other; but I confess, at the risk of being accused of arrogance, that I take these people for fools, whether they call themselves liberals or conservatives. They have a fondness for pointing to the comfortable routine of our suburbs as a demonstration of our mastery over the ancient tragedy of life. Now I am not one of those critics of society who look upon residence in suburbia a stain worse than the mark of the beast; but neither am I disposed to think that a commuter's ticket and a lawn-sprinkler are the proofs of national greatness and personal exaltation. And I am convinced that, if the reservoir of our traditions is drained dry, there will not be ten thousand tidy little suburbs in America, very long thereafter; for the suburbs are dependent upon an older order of social organization, as well as upon an intricate modern apparatus of industrial technology, for their being.
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