TRADITION VS. THE PAST: When people talk about tradition and “traditionalism,” they’re often thinking of something that I would consider to be closer to nostalgia than to love of tradition. Jaroslav Pelikan has the sharp one-liner, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living,” and I think there’s a lot of truth there. I had never entered into an explicitly traditional institution until college, and so figuring out what tradition is, how it operates, its development and its beauties and its characteristic drawbacks and tensions, has interested me for years.

The first and most basic point is that tradition is not about restoring some real or imagined past era. Tradition gives an institution (a nation, a debating society, a university) a persona; it makes the institution more like a person. And this is necessary in order to make the institution a possible object of human loyalties, since all our loyalties are to persons. (This was what I found the most interesting insight of Reflections on the Revolution in France.) But like a personality, a tradition-based persona must be adaptive and constantly renewed. Traditions need to link the present to the future as well as to the past. A society with a living tradition is instantly distinguishable from a Miss Havisham society desperately trying to capture the past in amber (or a Miniver Cheevy society seeking to revive some imaginary version of the past).

A member of the debating society that prompted these thoughts once said that he believed conservatism should be felt, as a wound. I think that’s eloquent, compelling, and true; but the temptation for so many conservatives is to localize the source of that wound. It’s the Industrial Revolution’s fault, or it’s the 1960s’ fault, or it’s Constantine’s fault, or Ockham’s, etc. When the source of the wound is identified as certain historical events, rather than the Fall, there’s a strong tendency to either seek a utopian restoration (which shares all the problems common to utopian projects) or nurture one’s nostalgia, cultivating and taking pride in one’s useless alienation from the present times. (And, of course, denying how decisively one has been shaped by those times!) A living tradition works against this tendency, by showing how a society can adapt and respond even to radical changes without losing its distinctive character. (My debating society has weathered–and more than weathered, has gained immensely from its responses to–the rise of the drug culture; Yale College’s first class of women; the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the campus right; and many, many intra-Yale and intra-POR upheavals. A debate caucus today looks very different from one in 1953, and yet the accumulated traditions have only made the organization more aesthetically rich and philosophically and personally intense.)

I’ve also found that tradition’s roots are often very odd–and that isn’t a point against tradition! Tradition often develops and accumulates in a Hayekish spontaneous-order kind of way, but along the way traditions also result from jokes, accidents, and misreadings. The misunderstanding, or intentional redirection, of a tradition can actually be much richer than the initial tradition. Learning the history of these traditions need not become an exercise in debunking; it can instead prompt self-consciousness, a sense of humor and humility, and a desire to engage in similar re-understandings or re-envisionings oneself. There’s a contemporary tendency to think that something’s genesis is its explanation, but if you experience a living tradition and study its history you find that how other people receive and reshape a tradition is usually at least as important as what the initial intent behind it was. You can even see this in the root of the word, which, if I’m remembering this right, is the same as the root for “translate” and “traitor”–“to pass on.” [Does this mean you’re a “living Constitution” type now?–Ed. No, because there are significant differences between how a tradition and a law work in society; for only one example, there’s a huge difference between a misreading or re-interpretation that’s embraced in a bottom-up fashion by the people it affects, and a misreading or re-interpretation that’s imposed from the top down by judicial oligarchs. But that is probably a topic for another day… next week.]