On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 03:59:04PM -0800, rone <rone at ennui.org> wrote: > Gomi no Sensei writes: > The Edmund Burke quote on tradition has always seemed apropos to me: > "Tradition means giving a vote to 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. Democracy tells us not > to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition > asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our > father." > > Tradition is only useful if a) we understand its genesis, and b) the > context in which it originated is still pertinent. Otherwise, it's > just doing things "because we've always done it this way." Actually, tradition is useful in precisely those situations where we do not understand its genesis or the context in which it originated. That is, tradition is the force that argues for continuing to do things the way that *is known to work* (at least, for evolutionary values of "work") rather than changing something that we think we understand as being safe to change... but are not necessarily correct. Consider one of the most ancient (known) bodies of "tradition" in our history, that of Judaism. There are many elements of the Jewish tradition that are wholly practical; I shall put forth kosher food as an excellent example. Nowadays, we can look at the traditions concerning kosher food and understand that food prepared in that specific way was less prone to disease or spoilage than foods prepared in other ways. (I don't know enough about kosher to give any really good examples). But at the time, did the Jews understand that they were preventing germs or parasites from infecting their food, and that their kosher food practices resulted in substantially improved food quality, reduced disease rates, and so on? It is doubtful that they understood the *why* of any of this, even if some of them understood the relationship. But they did not HAVE to understand the relationship. It was a tradition. For so long as the tradition remained strong, they would follow it *whether they understood or not*. Sometimes that "follow blindly" course has good results, and sometimes it has bad results. It's hard to tell when you don't understand the reasons for the results you get. But tradition allows for an additional fact: anything that has become a tradition *is survivable*. That is, your ancestors did it *and they lived*, at least as a culture. You should try to understand the root causes of a particular tradition before advocating it be tossed out, but that understanding is not required in order for the tradition to be useful; in fact, the tradition is most useful in the absence of understanding. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp