Whatever Happened to Tradition: History, Belonging, and the Future of the West
by Tim Stanley (Bloomsbury Continuum, $38, 266 pages)
Tradition and especially traditionalism has a bad reputation. It is often conflated with the old-fashioned and nostalgia, which barely begin to scratch the surface of the richness of tradition. Tim Stanley, an editorial writer for the Daily Telegraph in London comes to a timely defense of tradition in his Whatever Happened to Tradition: History, Belonging, and the Future of the West, an intelligent but conversational description of tradition and why it is an essential element for a society to flourish.
Stanley says in his introduction that the book is not a defense of “pickling things in aspic” because “progress is integral to tradition.” Tradition is not reactionary, but a way of mooring society so that change is organic and deliberate, not imposed from above by elites or the result of the population simply following fashionable trends and novel ideas.
Borrowing from the German philosopher Josef Pieper, Stanley explains tradition is “handed down from one generation to the next” and the “generation that briefly takes charge of it does their best not to tinker with it, so that they can pass on as much of what they received as possible.” Understanding this patrimony helps us appreciate the origin of things and aids in the “search for the ‘Truth’ with a capital T’.” Tradition can change “while remaining recognizably itself thanks to its historic roots and its loyalty to certain core principles.” As the Irish politician Edmund Burke understood, an inherited tradition includes the lessons learned from history, from trial and error – or trial and success. In other words, tradition is more than customs and rituals, although those are certainly a part of tradition. Tradition is something deeper, much richer.
Stanley says there are three essential characteristics of tradition: it ties the individual to the collective, it provides a social architecture that imposes order on its adherents, and it affects “how a human being experiences the phenomenon of time” by encouraging an understanding of the past and thoughts about posterity. Modernism emphasizes the here and now because the past is a foreign country not worth visiting and the future might not happen. In short, tradition “is the art of passing things on.”
Without tradition, there is a “tragic poverty of imagination” that leads to a decline art, family, and faith. Faith is meaningless if one cannot escape the immediate and an excessive focus on today limits the depth of art or commitment to family. Without tradition and it anchoring to something beyond ourselves, our happiness, well-being, and even survival is at risk.
Stanley argues that there has been a post-Enlightenment “war against tradition” with sustained attacks on religion and rootedness. These attacks come from both Marxism and capitalism. Marxism is a view of history that seeks to uproot the past through class consciousness and a synthesis to achieve communism sometime in the future; it is anti-historical. Some readers might find Stanley’s concern with the effects of free markets difficult to countenance. Yet, it is hard to argue that the logic of relentless consumption of novel products and services has not undermined many of the traditions that root people in something greater that consumerism; Stanley offers two examples that poignantly make his case: the alternate reality of social media and the post-1950s decline in the earning power of workers that has led to the necessity of two-income earners in many families.
Without tradition – without the moorings it provides – we are susceptible to novel and untried ideas. Perhaps the most obvious example is sexual morality; while there have always been perversions that some people joined, they were still considered sins by the Church and often outlawed in society. Sexual immorality was considered aberrant behaviour. Today it is celebrated as normal, even healthy. At some point we lost that part of moral tradition, in part because of direct attacks from hostile forces, but also from indifference and ignorance from adherents. Christian sexual morality, says Stanley, “has had two thousand years to study human nature, and, far from being unworldly, it sees with upmost clarity the conflict between freedom and order.” Admittedly, this observation reduces Christian moral truths to best practices learned by experience rather than being Divinely ordained, but Stanley’s observation is still correct: the test of Christian morality, especially on sexual matters, has withstood the test of time and we ignore them at our peril.
Indeed, we ignore all of tradition at our peril. That is not to say that our behaviours, expectations, understandings, and goals are static, but it is to say that we all should have the humility to acknowledge that the collective wisdom of the ages and our forebearers might be worth living by.
Tradition is a great inheritance but one that is sometimes only appreciated when squandered. Stanley says there are few examples of traditions being regained once lost, which is why his clarion call to acknowledge the importance of tradition is vital. I often refer to progressives as vandals, but it is not only progressivism but a neutered conservatism that is vandalizing our institutions and inherited wisdom.
There are parts of the book that disappoint. Stanley, a Catholic, has made peace with same-sex “marriage” and like many Britons has a great tolerance for gender-bending behaviours. But a few errors, like the mistakes of the past, do not illegitimize (if I may coin a new word) Stanley’s larger project of upholding the wisdom of tradition.
