IN DEFENSE OF TRADITION

Nato makes such an alarming statement on his blog that I had to respond.

Appeals to 'tradition' should OBVIOUSLY cut ZERO ice.

In France in 1789, some people came to power who thought that tradition should OBVIOUSLY cut ZERO ice. Six years later French society had been torn apart in an orgy of bloodshed. Twenty-five years later the orgy of bloodshed had spilled over all of Europe before the genie was rammed back into the bottle at Waterloo.

Edmund Burke, in his 1791 classic Reflections on the Revolution in France, accurately predicted that the revolution could only end in military dictatorship, and articulated the value of tradition; other thinkers emphasized that development should be "organic," i.e. building on tradition. He convinced most of Europe's leaders, who met in the Congress of Vienna determined to set up a conservative traditional order. They laid the foundation for an unprecedented 99 years of peace and economic and technological progress, like none the world had ever seen (although, in the course of these years, people's understanding of the value of tradition gradually faded).

In 1917 the Bolsheviks came to power, who once again thought tradition should OBVIOUSLY cut ZERO ice. Millions died, a culture was raped, colossal suffering ensued; fascists reacted to but also emulated them and a bloody war ensued; when fascism fell, more nations fell under the icy grip of communist tyranny.

In this crisis, F.A. Hayek and others stepped forward to articulate the value of the Anglo-American tradition of liberty and markets. A conservative movement arose in America culminating in Ronald Reagan, and communism fell.

It may sound "colorful" to describe the nation that won the Cold War as the world's most traditional. But think about it. Tocqueville commented long ago that American lawyers, in contrast to French ones, are obsessed with precedent. They do not acknowledge great principles at stake; rather, they refer to this case and that case. The backbone of American democracy is the common law, which has evolved for a thousand years to protect rights and property. Ours is the oldest regime in the world, and the philosophy it is founded on is 18th-century liberalism. We are traditional in other ways, too: strongly religious, for example. No other country in the modern world has managed to maintain its traditions intact with such success.

Tradition is alleged to be static, yet history shows the opposite. The 19th century, launched by the traditionalist Congress of Vienna, was an age of cumulatively stunning progress. America, too, has been a powerful engine of change. It is those who overturn tradition who are static. Napoleon's era saw a resurgence of dueling, and an archaic ceremony of being crowned as emperor by the pope. The Soviet economy got stuck in paleo-industrial stagnation. Why is this?

The value of tradition is an extension of the logic of "two heads are better than one." It is a recognition that my own mind and reasoning are unlikely to be a match for the collective wisdom of all humanity: instead, I will create static traps through sheer lack of imagination if I cut myself off from the great conversation among the ages. At the end of the day, knowledge is social rather than individual.

Of course, some things that become embedded in tradition are wrong. Nato points out that:

disenfranchisement of women is traditional. Racial discrimination and even slavery encrust every written history stretching back more than a hundred years.

As for slavery, to be precise, it was an innovation for the Portuguese when they re-introduced it to European culture in the 1400s, or for the English colonists in Virginia. Later it became traditional, but a critique of slavery existed alongside it and was equally traditional: this contradiction is embodied, for example, in Jefferson. The tradition of the equality of man, and humanitarian traditions embedded in Christianity, opposed slavery, and ultimately overpowered it. Slavery is no longer traditional in any sense; what is deeply and essentially traditional is liberty, which depends on the reliable and reflexive observation by the state and individuals of complex restraints. We may consider this illustrated by the historical record, for those who overthrow tradition rapidly invent new forms of slavery.

To respect tradition is an essential part of all wisdom and indeed all sanity, but not to submit to it completely. Indeed, one can never "submit to tradition completely," because tradition is full of complexities and seeming (or real) contradictions: genuine respect for tradition forces an open mind. Self-conscious "traditionalists" are always innovators, who have to dumb tradition down in order to render it into something that can be deliberately "obeyed" or "followed." What narrow-minded "traditionalists" lack is adequate respect for tradition. Students of contemporary Islam, such as Bernard Lewis, are keenly aware of this.

Nato's argument will perhaps serve to illustrate the need to respect tradition:

if one wishes to curtail freedom of any kind, it is incumbent on one to explain why. If one wants to curtain freedom in a discriminatory way, one must explain not just why the freedom should ever be abridged, but why it is valid to abridge in a special case.

He assumes that gay marriage is a "freedom" being "curtailed" in a "discriminatory way." Presumably the freedom in question is the freedom to marry, but marriage can be interpreted just as (or more) easily as the surrender of freedom, for if there is one core aspect of marriage it is sexual exclusivity. The question of the "right to marry" may therefore be phrased: does my present self have the right to restrict the rights of my future selves? We certainly would not grant this in all cases. If I promise my mother never to leave her side, the promise has no legally binding status in the eyes of the law. It would even be inhumane to hold people to certain kinds of crazy promises they might make. (How many times do people get angry with each other and shout "I'll never speak to you again?") Marriage, then, is a special case, where we do grant to my present self the right to restrict the rights of my future selves, and must be justified. Why do we do this? (Hint: why might marriage have been embodied in tradition?)

Another way to look at this is an ad absurdum argument. If two men can marry, why can't a man marry an animal, or his car, or two women, or himself, or his mother? There may be good reasons, but they are incompatible with the simplistic nondiscrimination rule Nato proposes. To decide if a rule is being applied in a nondiscriminatory way, we have to first define the rule, and if we are to define that rule as (for example) "only two human beings may marry," then there is no logical reason not to restrict the rule further, and say "only one man and one woman may marry."

This is enough to refute Nato's argument, but it is not a case against gay marriage. It simply makes it clear that the task is to explain why a man should have a right to bind his future to another man, as (for some reason) he is considered to have a right to do with a woman, but as he is not considered to be allowed to do with an animal, an inanimate object, a place, a member of his immediate family, etc. I hope it illuminates, however, how reason is often a poor substitute for tradition. In the realm of argument, so much rests on how you define terms, and there is so much scope for manipulation. To respect tradition is to doubt oneself whenever one draws conclusions contrary to tradition, and to insist on understanding it at least before dismissing, or, more often, modifying it. It spares you convincing yourself that you have hit upon truths when you don't have your concepts straight.