The Past Is What We Save
The Paradox of Being Traditional
It’s common to think of tradition as something handed down or inherited. The etymology of the word suggestions tradition is something done to us.
Yet the image of Aeneas (founder of Rome) bearing his father, Anchises, on his shoulders, as they flee the wreckage of the Trojan War, is an under-appreciated image of tradition:
Not the past as something that we stand on, but as something that stands on us. The past is what we save.
Tradition, in other words, has an active dimension. We might even say—though this is a modern way to put it—that tradition is constructed.
We tend to think of tradition as authentic insofar as it is not constructed.
Yet an image like the one above suggests that traditionalists and anti-traditionalists alike often get it wrong.
If we think of tradition in terms of the trolley problem, doing nothing will cause the past to be forgotten. It is pulling the lever, in the form of storytelling, archiving, and commemorating, that keeps tradition alive. Paradoxically, then, the traditionalist who changes nothing may end up being traditionless while the person who seeks to preserve tradition is already untraditional in that she sees the act of preservation as one that requires willfulness and self-consciousness.
There is a way to resolve this apparent paradox and that is to assume that this has always been so, that the effort required to preserve the past is not a unique, modern phenomenon, but as old as the world. Thus, traditionalism itself has always required non-traditional means. The construction of the past may be revisionist, and yet, it is continuous with the past in that we have always been revisionist.
The question then becomes not are you traditional or anti-traditional, but how do you resolve the paradox that it takes novelty to maintain tradition?
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I see this paradox in country music. Traditionalists decry “all that new stuff is pop now” yet it’s evolution is the only reason it’s not a dead genre completely. the “pop country” artists create an alive ecosystem for the “real country” artists to live in and differentiate themselves. rather than a dead ecosystem void of any impact.
This made me think of the following quote:
It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces…Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been – and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past…Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition
- Carse, Finite and Infinite Games