The Future of Tradition

Peter Edman

The Wall Street Journal has published a long but extremely thoughtful essay on “The Future of Tradition” by novelist and essayist Lee Harris (22 July 2005).

In this article, originally published in Policy Review, Harris discusses how tradition has been defended and attacked by the Enlightenment and its elites and suggests some different ways of talking about tradition that are well worth pondering—particularly for those of us in Western societies who are having difficulty maintaining our population and tradition—Italians and other Europeans, pay attention! Actually, everybody should probably pay attention to this one. The second parts of the essay are much more concrete, so skim the first section if you must, but do not miss the later discussion. Moral abstraction, he says, is not enough. Good historical context for the culture wars. Interesting discussion of the unintended consequences of Maimonides trying to defend Jewish dietary laws as if they were a health code. Fascinating discussion of language and the repsponsibilities of the elites. Read toward the end for some unexpected personal revelations by the author. Take that, Andrew Sullivan.

Basically, take the time to read this.

. . . in the view outlined here, a tradition is viable if it effectively keeps future generations from backsliding to a lower ethical or civilizational state. The track record of a tradition is irrelevant here; it may have been supremely useful in the past, but if its continuing embodiment in the rising generation begins to lower the society’s civilizational standards, the tradition must be discarded and replaced, and it makes no difference how many evolutionary challenges it may have successfully overcome in the past.

Harris is also the author of Civilization and its Enemies (Free Press 2004) and several mystery novels.

Another few quotes from the article:

A society that wishes to reproduce itself must take care to pass on to the next generation the knowledge required to maintain itself at more or less the same level of civilization. It is not enough to pass on the good china; you must also pass on the family recipe for making the pot roast. Yet even that is not quite enough; you must also find a way to pass along the culinary skills needed to transform a recipe written in words into an actual plate of pot roast. Figuratively speaking, a civilization must pass on the china, the recipe and the cook. But even this is not quite enough. You must also make the cook realize that in addition to cooking, he must know how to replace himself, and, most critically, he must feel that he has a duty to replace himself. Not only must he teach his children to cook, but he must also teach them how to teach their children to cook.

. . . For us, it is imperative that an 8-year-old boy should have esteem for himself, for the person that he is. We do not want him thinking, “I wish I could be like John”; instead, we demand that he think, “I’m just fine the way I am. I don’t need to model my behavior on anyone else.” But our insistence on creating self-esteem in an 8-year-old boy comes with a high price tag—by refusing to encourage the boy’s dissatisfaction with himself as he is, we are inadvertently taking from him the primary human motivation to change oneself for the better. By pumping him full of self-esteem, we rob him of the will to set himself transformative projects and goals. Totally at peace with what he is, he ceases to have any reason to become something more—and certainly no reason at all to become what he could be.

. . . A question that is out of order does not require or deserve an answer. The moment you begin to answer the question as if it were in order, it is too late to point out your original objection to the question in the first place, which really was: Over my dead body.

Gleanings, Arts and Culture, Faiths and Worldviews, Meaning and Calling, Public Square, Society, Fri 22 Jul 2005