Letter #40: Tradition, Tradition

What we lose in hair, we gain in wisdom.

O Ancient One,

When you write about grey-bearded priests sacrificing rams and goats in Solomon’s ancient Temple, I assume you speak from experience. Since you were there. You know, cuz you old.

Which, besides being inherently funny, is also a major advantage for us in this exchange. I mean the fact that between the two of us, we cross a generational divide—me, the vigorous and handsome youth, handsomely putting forward my vigorous ideas in a handsome and vigorous fashion. You, the tottering pile of joint disorders, wheezing and muttering your way through responses that would surely be very enlightening if anybody understood the Medieval Latin in which they are delivered. It’s a beautiful thing.

Wisecracks aside, what you’re talking about is the essential link that makes the difference between death and life when it comes to the passage of time: tradition. Our midwit intellectuals sneer at tradition because they think it means keeping things the same, always. But it’s really the opposite. Tradition is the lifeblood that runs through the veins of time, making good change possible. Like your pal Burke said, society is a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” So jealous that you got to hear him live in Parliament.

The Japanese word for tradition is dentou—it’s made out of the word for “transmission,” and the word for “unity.” In your native Latin, we get the same idea: traditio just means “handing down.” We pass rituals and customs, beliefs and stories from hand to hand. In the process they do change to suit the times—but unlike the violent transformations forced on us by activists and ideologues, the changes of tradition have an underlying unity. It’s the unity not of stasis, but of transmission.

When we’re facing all these technological changes, I think that’s the kind of change we should be aiming at: not rupture, but growth. Again, it’s like poetry. T.S. Eliot writes that “if an English poet is to learn how to use words in our time, he must devote close study to those who have used them best in their time; to those who, in their own day, have made language new.”

Everything that is now traditional was once fresh and daring—sometimes conservatives forget this. But the most brilliant visionary will wreak havoc unless he draws his new insights out of what came before—that’s what the radicals miss. William F. Buckley said that old ideas need new expressions, “not because of any alleged anachronisms in the old ideas...but because the idiom of life is always changing, and we need to say things in such a way as to get inside the vibrations of modern life.” The best of our humanity, like the best of our thought, lives in the interchange of generations—in the space between father and son.

You’re still old though.

Love,
Spencer