Don't Forget Traditions & History

 

What About Tradition?

If tradition is the handing on of cultural and artisanal knowledge, and if we have taught ourselves in our smugness that we can dispense with it, then we will become cultural and artisanal incompetents.  Your grandfather might be a repository of many generations of know-how -- and I am not speaking principally of technological know-how.  If you will not learn from him, from whom will you learn what he knows -- from the pimply teenager next door?  Inane actors on television?  Teachers whose credentials are mainly in the new and improved Methods for Teaching but who do not know the subject they are supposed to teach?  Newspapers? Advertisements on the walls of a bus?  Politicians? Bubble gum cards?

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.9

Tradition Refuses to Submit to Oligarchy

There is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand.  I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition.  It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.  It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. … If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable.  Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.  Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.   It is the democracy of the dead.  Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg.40-41