'Tradition--That Which Is Handed Down'

I’m immune to the charms of theory-making. My thinking is more homely than that. I’m pleased with the smallest insight that might occur to me and have accumulated stacks of unanswered questions. I don’t think of that as a failing. In conversation, when someone starts spinning cosmic explanations, it reminds me of two groups of people I knew long ago – Maoists and habitual users of LSD and other psychedelics. Both were “Big Picture” people – hideous phrase. They had identified the enemy – Capitalism for the first group, Ego or Society for the other, and everything after that fell into place. Both were frighteningly self-confident about their understanding of the world, free of doubt, unburdened by nuance. Though the second group spent a lot of time giggling, neither had a discernable sense of humor. Theory rigorously imposed makes life easy.   

 

On a whim I reread Theodore Dalrymple’s In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, published by Encounter Books in 2007.  He, too, is averse to grandiose theorizing. Here’s a sentence that makes new sense to me, thirteen years after first reading it:

 

“A philosophy that sets out to destroy the influence of custom, tradition, authority, and prejudice does indeed  destroy particular customs, traditions, authorities, and prejudices, but only to replace them by others.”

 

The chapter in Dalrymple’s book where you’ll find that sentence is titled “The Paradox of Radical Individualism Leading to Authoritarianism," a truth played out in the streets of American cities. Scratch a social justice warrior, reveal the Chekist within. Perhaps it's time to scrap the American educational system, kindergarten to graduate school, and start all over – history, literature, composition, science, mathematics. The driver behind this idea is the appallingly prideful ignorance of so many people. Read this passage from Edward Shils’ Tradition (1981) and remind yourself of the recent vogue for destroying buildings, monuments, books and people:

 

“Tradition—that which is handed down—includes material objects, beliefs about all sorts of things, images of persons and events, practices and institutions. It includes buildings, monuments, landscapes, sculptures, painting, books, tools, machines. It includes all that a society of a given time possesses and which already existed when its present possessors came upon it and which is not solely the product of physical processes in the external world or exclusively the result of ecological and physiological necessity. The Iliad, in a recently printed English translation, is a traditum; so is the Parthenon.”