Is Tradition Bad or Good?
– by Scott Miller.
In a post earlier this summer, I shared how the fleeting scent of lilacs took me back to being five years old in Dubuque, Iowa and an elderly neighbor who had lilacs. The memory was strong, with multiple veiled layers that include smells, and feelings, and a sense of place, all rolled into one.
In Thriving the Future Podcast Ep. 79 with Ashley Colby on Building Community by Rediscovering Tradition, we shared one of Ashley’s recent tweets:
We discussed that 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.
Tradition is a Bad Word
Tradition is seen as stuffy, outdated, and failed. It is scoffed as being full of Privilege, or worse.
Consumerism pushes the Next New Thing. Throw away that Old Thing from last year! (And pay no attention to the fact that the New Thing is really a rehash of 1980s style fashion).
The Present is always Right. And the Future will be even Better.
This is ingrained in us. Even the most Republican person among us is a Progressive. We steadfastly believe in Progress. Growth. A steady, never-ending raise each year. The gold watch at retirement…although our parents, and even some of our grandparents, have not seen that because business had already moved beyond it in their lifetime.
These are all Time Fallacies:
- The Irrelevant Past.
- The Permanent Present. “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless Present…” – 1984.
- And, I will add, the glorious Star Trek Future.
Tradition is Not a Bad Word?
“…tradition makes available to us, for free, rules which have been learned the hard way.” – Lean Logic – by David Fleming.
Your ancestors passed on that knowledge, not through genes, but through memetics – ideas, cultural practices. Traditions.
The entire quote:
“…tradition makes available to us, for free, rules which have been learned the hard way. It may be difficult to work out, off the cuff, why a festival is a good idea in midwinter, why sex at first meeting may be a bad idea, why family meals are advisable, why celebrations are important, why archaic clothes for ceremony and in law courts may help to protect freedoms, why play is essential to a child’s development, or why a musical and literary education teaches the art of thinking—but there is no need to work it out, for tradition affirms it. It supplies (as Edmund Burke wrote) a way of ‘knowing exactly and habitually, without the labour of particular and occasional thinking’. A society without tradition is a society without grown-ups.” – Lean Logic.
Your ancestors passed on that knowledge, not through genes, but through memetics – ideas, cultural practices. Traditions.
Tradition served us well
I am always fascinated when I am foraging and I look up a plant and ask: Is this edible? Several foraged plants have only some of the plant that is edible. The rest is toxic. A few toxic plants can be cooked to make them edible.
Elderberry flowers and berries are edible, but only if you cook the berries. The rest of the plant is toxic. Elephant’s Foot has an edible tuber. Pokeweed is marginally edible if you cook it.
How did our ancestors know this? Some think they were told what they could eat by the spirits or gods.
Trial and error – Did someone try it out and keep notes? Likely yes, and it was passed down through verbal tradition.
Hispanics and people in the Southwest Nixtamalize corn – to boil corn with lime or calcium to bring out the nutrients. Corn is not very nutrient dense, unless you nixtamalize it. This is a key step in making tamales, and you can taste the difference in corn chips if they have gone through this process.
In Landrace Gardening, Joseph Lofthouse shares about how native cultures used special techniques to process beans to remove the toxins, including repeated rinsing with running or flowing water. (I highly recommend this book for developing your own landrace plant from seeds from your garden, adapted to your land and climate).
Traditions of the Ancients are Models for Reality
“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
Perpend dives deeper on this in Tradition Part 2 – Can you have Tradition without Religion?.
