Tradition, The Great Motivator of Excellence

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 19^th 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.