Tradition is said to be a dead thing. Those old ways and old
faces are dead and gone, and too close a connection with them is corrupting, as
residing in a charnel house would be. We may like traditions; we may retain, as
quaint mementos from a foreign holiday, some few habits from our family’s past.
We may give the nod to one or two social traditions – usually innocuous holiday
habits, such as Christmas stocking or Easter Egg hunts. Beyond those, however, this
generation upon the earth rejoices that it is the freest yet of antiquated
traditions and the darkness of inherited prejudices. We will, surely, ascend to
the greatest heights of achievements our self-divinising species has yet known.
There are many reasons this Whiggery is a foolish phantasm,
but a most significant one is that the abandonment of tradition is a great retardant
to excellence. This is true in at least two ways, which can be connected but
may also be distinguished.
The first we shall dispose of briefly. All art of any kind
must exist in a tradition – it draws upon the “meat” of the past for its
sustenance, not merely when "conforming" especially when it is rebelling. Eliot put the general point like
this: “No poet, no artist of any art, has
his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the
appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value
him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”
The cow-preservers and menses-framers amongst the lead
popular plastic artists of the last generation were not somehow moving away
from the Great Tradition, or performing a real act of iconoclasm. Their secular
blasphemies can only make sense to us in the context of a tradition stretching
from the Apollo Belvedere via Michaelangelo all the way to Henry Moore.
Rebellion, after all, is never an act of escape – only the loss of the ability
to speak sensibly about oneself. Art – or any endeavour – can only be great
when it is cognizant of its suprahistorical situation and in sympathy with it.
The second way in which tradition is a necessary motivator
to excellence is in what we may call a moral sense. When the University of
Oxford bestowed its highest honour upon Charles F. Adams – great-grandson and
grandson of Presidents, son of an ambassador, himself a war hero and admired
historian – the Orator of the University said this, in adverting to his family
connections, “in these recollections we
seem to be unrolling the annals of some Roman family – of the Bruti or the
Decii – annals bearing witness to the fact that the ‘strong are born to the
strong’, and that by the examples and
traditions of their ancestors the descendants are incited to distinguished
achievement” (emphasis, evidently, mine).
Tradition is the great corpus of the annals of the tribe; it
is a mode of transmission; and it is an explanatory story. The traditions that
we are most likely to retain in this mayfly era are those fragments and
folktales of our family. Great-Uncle Albert used to take his false eye out and
put it in his sherry glass; Aunt Ethel was known never to lie in any way to anyone
but policemen; Grandad fought in Malaya and never speaks about it. These do not
seem like a “family tradition”, but they are the bones of one. They put you in
context. They give you a peopled universe from your birth – they besiege our
instinctive solipsism.
They begin to imply moral values, too. Albert never cared
who thought what others thought about him. Ethel had a rigid code of honour, never
compromising, even where it seemed convenient. Grandad served his nation and,
indeed, the free world – but war is hell. The prodigal may travel a long way
and drink gallons of pigswill, but the deep poem of his life will always use
those lines for a refrain.
Notwithstanding our Enlightened fellow citoyennes, no-one has ever autonomously reasoned herself into
moral health. Not only is moral health a matter that does indeed encompass but also
surpasses reason – it is an aesthetic and spiritual quality, too – it is also
something that desires a salubrious environment in which to flourish. This might
include good education and the addition of analytic logic, of course – but it
must be a tremendous disappointment to the Pure Reasonabilists that the
soundest moral instinct is quite often to be found amongst very dull and ordinary
people, with nary a doctorate to show for their ethical insights. You may well
be emotionally erratic and undignified – but the memory of your entirely
controlled grandmother will always be one last restraint upon your excess. You
might be quick to lay out every man who comes within six feet of you when you’re
drunk, but you never hit a woman or a child, because that’s the Iron Code
handed down to you.
Of course, this sort of morally spurring tradition is not
always a family one, though it most often is so. The better sort of
revolutionary – or, at least, the more cynical ones – always connects their
plans of effacement to the Good Old Cause. There is a throughline in history
which explains the need for radical change. It is a compelling counter-story to
the prevailing tradition. As Simone Weil observes, even Marx recognizes this,
by attempting to riddle the whole mountain of history with the class conflict
he identified in the 19th century. For his account to be
authoritative, it must be historically ubiquitous; if class conflict were to
disappear without Communism, it would render his insights ephemeral. He
therefore had to discover what is, in essence, a tradition.
Similarly, one upholds the traditions of one’s College, of
one’s cricket club, of one’s town or region. (The North-Easterner must, by
natural duty, defend gravy on chips; she must never confess her own aesthetic
loathing; loyalty and tradition demand the last full measure of devotion to
spiced meat sauce on takeaway fried potato.) This is, of course, partly a means
of being “in” rather than “out”, but that is not at all disconnected to our
wider point. The weight of tradition, the expectations of the past, the story
which frames our lives, is the greatest possible spur to “moral” behaviour and
great achievement.
I do not argue that all such traditions are good, or that
ill morals and dark achievements cannot be spurred by them. I merely assert
that traditions are inescapable and indispensable motivators of moral
behaviour; only a madman would seek to abolish them or dismiss them (and so our
world is full of madmen, giving it the air of an asylum); we must instead first
bow to them, understand their ancient strength and vision, and then digest them
and make them our own, correcting them where we must but always cognizant that
they are our moral lifeblood. Without them we will achieve no great deeds. We
will be like the man who loses his short-term memory every morning, unable to
compass any high and noble task. Rather we ought to desire to march forward
under the well-patched banners of the past, to take the heights and win the day.
Let me close by quoting, at some length, George Orwell, in The Lion and the Unicorn, offering advice on the nature,
acceptance, and cultivation of tradition:
Yes, there is something
distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as
individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and
gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red
pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it
stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists,
as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the
England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose
photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you
happen to be the same person.
And above all, it
is your civilization, it is you. However much you
hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of
time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul.
Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will
never get away from the marks that it has given you.
Meanwhile England,
together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it
can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen.
That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives
are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a
turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest
importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing
what part England can play in the huge events that are
happening.
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