Can you really go back?
– by Perpend.
This is Part 2 of a series about Tradition. Check out Part 1 of the Series: Tradition – Embrace Sense of Self, Sense of Place, Sense of Time
The Homesteader groups and Doomer Optimists on the Twittersphere (now “X”) have been musing for several months on Tradition: Instead of building from scratch, look to the past. Pull from the past, realizing that there was always context and a tradeoff in that tradition.
On Thriving the Future Podcast Ep. 79 with Ashley Colby on Building Community by Rediscovering Tradition, we shared one of Ashley’s recent tweets:
As part of the online discussion about Tradition, there has been side conversations on “Can you have tradition without religion?”
This seems like a misleading question, but it is not; it is blunt and it makes a point. From my perspective the point is: tradition is religion. Tradition is how you live out your religion. The mechanics of tradition show what you believe about the world and how you should live in it.
Let me take a tangent before I come back to this. I want to walk you through my struggles to come to this understanding. That will do a better job of getting us on the same page than my trying to prove a point.
Long time listeners to the Thriving the Future podcast will be familiar with this story. You listened to it evolve in my thinking. But there are aspects you may not be completely aware of. In the great Before Time, I had listened to many podcasts on community building. I read many blogs, articles and message threads on what was falling apart in American culture. A thread running through all of that was the idea that you can build culture by starting your own traditions.
Every community has a culture that is expressed in art, food, rituals and traditions. Underlying this thread is the concept that one only need look at history and pull forward to a modern context elements of culture that inspire you. With years of that logic running around my mind, 2019 flowed into 2020 and the Great Apocalypse of Year 0 became more and more apparent to the world populace as a whole. (reminder that “apocalypse” also means “revealing or unveiling”).
This was where Scott and our local Kansas comrades entered the scene, seeing that no crisis should be left to wither on the vine. Having embraced similar ideas and with concern for the loss of social cohesion, we began to build a community. The plan was simple: combine our resources, talents, and time, and not only survive the apocalypse but come out on top Thriving like we never had before! Well, no plan survives the first punch to the face. Hmm, it seems I quote him wrong. Oh well, you get the point.
We struggled along, as we pressed apples into cider, had workshops and butchered chickens, ducks, and rabbits, visited gardens, bartered blankets. Oh, you were still paying attention – we had barter blanket events. That was a punch to the mouth for sure. Turns out barter is a historical academic economy explanation that doesn’t hold up well in real life or history when you look at it. I mean, why else would ancient Mesopotamian cultures have coins?
Ok, so maybe you can’t build an alternative economy with a barter system.
Second punch to the face: Likewise wait you need multiple people with technology skills to build and support a cryptocurrency economy. But people don’t want to understand crypto systems. (Knees hit the mat).
Staggering to my feet, I start to understand that everyone wants to be self-sufficient. Yes, it gets dressed up in fancy definitions that are excuses about why it is not a bunker mentality, but then in wandered a comment from Vin Armani on Pete’s podcast: “If you are self-sufficient you don’t need to trade with anyone else.” (POW!! Stars…counting begins)
Vin continued on that “if goods don’t cross borders, then armies will”.
“If you are self-sufficient you don’t need to trade with anyone else.”
Vin Armani/Cyprian
I will add to this. As we saw played out in real life: “If you are self-sufficient you don’t need community.”
Let’s look to history!
(Starting to stand…Oh, that’s the bell – it’s Round 2).
Oh well, we still have History. Let’s go find some good examples and pull them forward. I know it was not going to be easy, but we can do this!
We need good traditions and culture that will attract the right people to our community and we can Thrive this disaster. With the right people we can make a currency work. With the right people we will have craftsmen that produces goods and food – a basis for a good economy.
Then in May 2022 we visited Watkin’s Mill, a living history museum in Bethany, MO. We recorded a Thriving the Future Podcast episode after that visit. But the episode did not work out well and sat in the backlog for six months. If you are on the Thriving Patreon you can listen to the unedited version of that episode. From the moment Scott hit stop on the recorder he kept saying “Are you Ok? That is too depressing. I don’t think I can salvage anything from that. Well, maybe I can get something.” He did and in . Episode 61 there is a less depressing version that was published publicly. But if you want to hear what it is like when it hits the fan then get the Patreon episode.
I am not always happy go lucky. That is one problem with a podcast – you don’t really get to hear me on days where I am losing the battle with my pessimistic default attitude. What I really got out of the Watkins Mill visit was that “you can’t cherry pick aspects of tradition”. It doesn’t work. It is out of context. It has taken this long to be able to properly articulate it and I am not fully able yet. But I will try.
You can’t remove from the mill that there was a drudgery to the life. Americans have been taught a lie and they believe it to their core, but in their core they know its a lie.
You are not the Hero. Life is not easy and care free. Material prosperity is not Thriving.
I am not the Hero either. You connect in life in the mundane, routine, ordinary and boring moments. The discomfort you feel reading that truth is why social media, Netflix, and Youtube are addicting. They are some of the drugs we use to numb ourselves to the discomfort and unwillingness to face it. I know, you think I have lost my subject, but actually this is all on-point and you’re ready for some distraction and numbing.
Tradition is a model of reality
Tradition is best understood as an anthropologist or historian’s academic tool that frames context. They take a period of time and people of an area with their everyday way of living, their cycles of rituals and festivals, and then apply words like “culture” and “tradition” to classify them. To the people living in ancient Mayan culture, they don’t see tradition and culture. From inside it is just living in harmony with reality.
Let’s look at another Quote from our friend Cyprian:
“The traditions of the ancients are perfectly viable models of reality for people with the technological capacity (and limits) of the ancients who maintained those traditions.
This is self evident. Only things that work can become tradition.”
Cyprian
There are several important things here, so I will break it down and point some out. Models of reality – this is important to understand because you don’t know reality; you only have a model to guide your decision. When necessary, you adjust your model with changing realities. For example, a farmer using a horse and plow transitions to a tractor and plow because reality changed and so did his model. Not because a guy with a tractor says “hey this is a horse and plow analogue, lets use it and adopt horse and plow era culture around that idea”.
Too many other aspects of reality have shifted. Music for one, and therefore dancing. As well as the distance that you can travel in a day so inns become motels.
Technological capacity (and limits) means you can’t go back and apply scientific advancement and call them “backwards” for not using the internal combustion engine. This also tells you that you are limited by your techniques and reality. You can’t compete against a tractor and combine with a horse and plow. Yes, you can add narrative and marketing to carve a niche and make money farming that way, but you can’t really live that culture. You have exited that model and context.
I will leave you to ponder other aspects of that quote and will move to the last line. “only things that work can become tradition.” All the talk about tradition that I heard before Year 0 downplayed this part. Sure, they all said “hand it down to your children and grandchildren”. They never dove into an interesting aspect of that: it has to still be relevant.
The way I used a phone as a kid is irrelevant to kids born today. The way I used a computer that had no internet connection is irrelevant. Irrelevant doesn’t mean without value. Tradition does not stay static, it moves. Did I hear you say “Ah ha, I got you! Religion doesn’t change so you are wrong!” Well maybe, but I think it does.
Farming at its base is growing food. The techniques for doing it have changed but it is still seeds, water, air, and soil. The relevant part of reality didn’t change in that equation, the technology did. The same with religion. Electricity changes things like the lighting, heating and cooling in the building, but the cosmology expressed didn’t change. This is what ultimately makes tradition your model of how the world works and determines how you behave.
“Let’s be like the Amish!”
People hold up the Amish as the perfect model of Tradition.
Let’s look at the Amish and the Mennonites. They both come from the same religious tradition. I am not going to comment deeply just highlight a point since both groups are often used as proof you can live a historical culture. Their cosmology informs their belief that they should be in the world but not of it. The Amish say an electrical line is a confection to the world. It interferes with their ability to stay separate. The Mennonites take a bit of a different perspective and say a computer and cell phone are a reality in the business world so “for business we will use them but not for home life”. Neither group is stuck in their history. They had to have a discussion about electric lines, computers and cell phones. They didn’t ignore the change of reality; they made conscious decisions about how to live in that reality. They decided to forgo certain technology in their lives, because their cosmology says their soul’s fate is on the line and it is more important than comforts and ease in the present. Your cosmology may tell you differently, but that is not the point. Their tradition survived not by ignoring the shift in reality, but by adjusting the model around the shift.
Can you create tradition?
If you don’t get to cherry pick history to live our lives what is the point of looking at historical cultures and traditions. Well Cyprian told you “…Only things that work can become tradition.”
This is why fundamentally you can’t create tradition. It emerges from how you live your life. Yes, the boring everyday decision about “what’s for dinner?” spawns tradition and culture. Americans’ belief that pleasure and right-this-second are the highest priority is what gives you a culture of fast food and Door Dash. Americans belief that mechanizing all output will lead to lives of plenty and leisure, but it spawns industrialization, automation, and email. The American belief that consumption and consumerism will lead to fulfillment spawned on-demand supply lines and Amazon orders. These are all tenets of the world religion, because America exported these beliefs. Well, that model doesn’t meet reality well. That “punch in the mouth” has us confronting the Great Before and our choices since Year 0 are birthing a new culture and tradition from a historical perspective.
So what is one to do in the face of all this? You use history to question your current model of reality.
What has always been relevant in each traditional and cultural context?
Does my current religion meet reality in a viable way?
You also dive deeper into the mundane of life and stir up the courage to make decisions that matter. That is what you are leaving your kids and grandkids. Get it right and they will Thrive! Get the model correct and you will Thrive.
