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Tradition: Who Speaks for the Dead?

00:13 / 22.08.01

The notion of "tradition"—of doing things as they've always been done, precisely because they've always been done so--is, of course, entirely counter-revolutionary (despite being entirely circular). The only constant in life is change, life is change, why not change for its own sake? To argue for the sanctity of tradition, to hold those of us living now to standards not of our own making, is deeply undemocratic.

Or is it? quote:Tradition is only democracy extended over time. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.(I'm going to leave the quote unattributed for now, so as not to poison the well: consider what is said, not who said it.)

Thoughts on the quote above?

What, if anything, can we learn from the past in general?

Is xenophilia at play in our attitudes towards tradition—i.e., the traditions of other cultures are cool, while our own are slightly embarrassing? Or is that attitude towards the "exotic" instead a subtle sort of ethnocentrism—a defining of oneself in opposition to the "other"?

Is tradition really the enemy of progress?

[ 22-08-2001: Message edited by: Jack Fear ]

01:04 / 22.08.01

quote:Originally posted by Jack Fear:
Is tradition really the enemy of progress?

Why should it be? I think the first difficulty here will be how you define 'tradition'. Is it just 'the process of how things were done previously' or is it more. Its more obviously. Its about what people wear, its about how people interact with each other, its about what people like and what they have in common.

Lets take the first definition. Tradition as
'the process of how things were done previously'. Its opposite being 'change to the processes'. If we had no tradition or no past understanding of how something was done, how would we learn anything new. All new understandings would be the same as old understandings. It would become its own tradition - 'the process of how things were done previously'. Constant change is no different to no change at all.

I don't think you can have tradition without change. As without anything to measure itself against or refine itself with it does not exist.

All traditions change and are refined over time. To think Tradition and Change are mutually exclusive I think is an error. One requires the other for either word to have any meaning. Like most dicotomies...

Stagnant Tradition is the enemy of change. But its really stagnation thats the enemy. Though to much change can be like a landslide and bury people.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

08:02 / 22.08.01

Related question: who speaks for the unborn?

Ganesh

10:08 / 22.08.01

The Pope...

13:02 / 22.08.01

Har-dee-har.

Nick’s larger point is one well taken, I think, and is the flipside of the argument presented above: can we extend democracy through time in both directions--instead of thinking only of the Now in which we live?

Apocalyptic traditions make for bad management of long-term problems. James Watt, Secretary of Interior in the Reagan administration and a fundamentalist Christian, was able to say with a straight face that he wasn’t worried about environmental degradation because Christ could be returning any day now, making the question moot. Of course he’s a fundy wacko...

...but he’s hardly alone in his thinking. In THE INVISIBLES, Grant implied that widescale ecological destruction was okay in the long run--humanity was an insect consuming everything around it in preparation for its bursting forth from the chrysalis and heading for the stars: besides, the World As We Know It is going to end in 2012 anyway, so why worry?

In a way, we are all--religious or atheist, materialist or spiritualist--living in an apocalyptic tradition, if only because of that quirk of human consciousness that makes it so goddam difficult to really contemplate the consequences of our own mortality, and to imagine the world continuing after we’re gone.

In Cold War Poland, there used to be a joke:
—What do we do if the Russians invade?
—Well, we fight, of course.
—Yes... but... what do we do if the Russians don’t invade?

So what the fuck do we do if the world isn’t going to end after all?

13:20 / 22.08.01

Isn't tradition, rather than being the democracy of the dead, the tyranny of the dead? I mean, it's kind of hard to have a political argument with Thomas Jefferson now, isn't it? And yet the tradition made by Jefferson and his band of "founding fathers" has largely set the limits of the agenda of political argument in the United States for the past 200+ years.

14:31 / 22.08.01

quote:Originally posted by Jack Fear:
Is tradition really the enemy of progress?

[ 22-08-2001: Message edited by: Jack Fear ]

Absolutely, definitively, you've hit the nail on the head. Tradition is dogma, and dogma is the enemy of progress/happiness/the future. Can I propose that the best of our past ideas are actually functionally, utilitarianally(sic?) valuable, and that's why they don't suffer revolution (see democracy, scienctific method etc). That's not to say that these ideas won't become tradtions (lacking value) in time, however.

Fuck the dead. They're dead. They don't matter anymore. The sufferings and happinesses of the living are more important, always.

15:47 / 22.08.01

quote:Originally posted by Dee Vapr:
Fuck the dead. They're dead. They don't matter anymore. The sufferings and happinesses of the living are more important, always.I am so gonna haunt you for that, Dee...

BOO!!

To return to Nick's interesting point: what about future generations? Do they count, in your scheme of things, since they're not yet among "the living"? or should we just let them worry about themselves when their time comes?

Molly Shortcake

16:00 / 22.08.01

quote:Fuck the dead. They're dead. They don't matter anymore. The sufferings and happinesses of the living are more important, always.

Ouch. The dead don't speak to us in a literal sence, more of an inescapeable habitual hallunication, embeded through culture and possibly biology. One day, we too will be 'the dead'.

Common thought is the dead are either warning us of their mistakes or leading us repeat to them. Worth listening for in my mind...

In answer to question Jack; I'd say steadily increasing, it's established media instiutions (organized religion, science, authors) and sub-media (seculded cults, etc).

Try to be your neighborhood shaman and speak for the dead. It's not gonna go over too well.

Are we speaking for the dead in these posts???

[ 22-08-2001: Message edited by: Ice Honkey/Grim Rapper ]

16:06 / 22.08.01

You would hope, that in an ideal world, that the current world populace would be able to create a sustainable utopia that would through necessity be a wonderful place for future generations to arrive into. HA HA!

The happiness of the living world populace is paramount - and seeing as we seem to be very fucking far from acheiving THAT, it seems to be a fairly large moral leap to start suggesting that we should be foregoing present resources to ensure a stable future.

i.e 2 waring moral imperatives - i.e eradicting poverty, or avoiding future ecological catastrophe.

Notice I am not justifying Dubya's behaviour here - maybe if he was channeling the economic benefits from abandoning Kyoto to paying off Third World Debt, I'd think differently, but whats the likelihood of **that**?!??

18:05 / 22.08.01

Tradition carries with it two fairly nice things. First is the reassurance that it hasn't killed us yet. If a social norm has been successful for a good 300 years, then we probably don't want to tear it down. At best, we may wish to modify it. The other is that it provides a kind of ritual, and a certainty that "this is the way things are done."

We couldn't do nearly as well without tradition. Many traditions may serve an important role that we don't really recognize. Would you call it a tradition in India that they don't eat cows? It's a damn good thing for then that they don't.

quote:....why not change for its own sake?

Because we are not the champions of chaos. It is a grave error to equate subversion with good, or even democracy with good. There's no harm in questioning tradition, but there are good reasons for not fixing something that isn't broken. There are even good reasons for not fixing something that is broken, if the cost of repair is too high. It often is.