Tradition
In his sermon He Has Set Us Free, John Webster gives a very good summary of the virtue of tradition:
In and of itself tradition is both innocent and, indeed, positively helpful. Traditions are orderly ways of living human life, ways of living that work with given, inherited values and try to negotiate all sorts of human situations with the resources that those inherited values offer. The great strength of tradition is that it refuses to believe that in every situation we have to start afresh — that we never have anything to learn from the accumulated wisdom of the past. To live in traditions is to live a life with a shape that I don’t just make up as I go along along but which comes from before me, which gives me a shape, which helps me make sense of the world, and which puts me in touch with resources that I can’t just pull out of my own stores.
People often lament the lack of traditions in a good deal of modern life, and there’s a truth in the lament. The need for roots is something very deep in us; the lack of roots is very destructive. It’s destructive above all when faced with challenges from new situations. Wise communities take stock of their situations by looking to their past and trying to figure out from that vantage point what they’re called to do.
Two other quotations came to mind when reading this. The first is a long excerpt from On Human Conduct:
Part of what moral imagination gives us is the possibility of reconciliation to the unavoidable dissonances of a human conduct, a reconciliation which is neither a denial, nor a substitute for remedial effort, nor a theoretical understanding in which the mystery of their occurrence is abated or even dispelled, but a mode of acceptance, ‘ a “graceful” response. The general character of a man’s religion, like the language he speaks and the poetic utterances evoked from it, is a historical contingency, and if it were not so it would be worthless: he is, himself, a “history”. It is composed of sentiments, beliefs, images, etc., from which he may draw something particularly his own, answering to his own understood situation. He is fortunate where he has a…tradition of notable imaginative splendour to draw upon; and while this reconciliation may be no more than that of a somewhat anxious equanimity or a patiently nurtured hope, it is as complete as it may be when it is a release from care and generates an unostentatious, unaccusing serenity in conduct.
The second from Peter Winch, as quoted by John Kekes in his book Wisdom, strikes harder on fallibility:
A man’s sense of importance of something to him shows itself in all sorts of ways: not merely in precautions to safeguard that thing. He may…contemplate it, to gain some sense of his life in relation to it. He may wish thereby, in a certain sense, to free himself from dependence on it. I do not mean by making sure that it does not let him down, because the point is that, whatever, he does, he may still be let down. The important thing is that he should understand that and come to terms with it…He must see that he can still go on even if he is let down by what is vitally important to him; and he must so order his life that he still can go on in such circumstances.
There is a reifying and fetishising of tradition that is to be avoided both by individuals and communities.