FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Re: Tradition
[Caleb Stegall 03/22 02:25 PM]An interesting comment by the parody guy here: I live in Boston which is in many cultural senses a deeply "crunchy" city. Part of what I love about the city is that tradition here isn't spelled with a capital t, it's an honest and uncompelled aspect of daily life. The Warren Tavern, where revolutionary war heros ate and drank, is still a popular place with locals because it's still a damn good bar. Locke Ober is as sparkling a restaraunt as it was a century ago, but I don't think they served sashimi tuna tartare back then. In college I worked in a cigar shop that had been in business since 1868 and felt like it. On Saturdays regular customers would bring their sons in, and say, "when I was your age you grandfather brought me here, and when you are my age, you will bring your grandson here." Sadly, that store is gone, victim partly of the anti-smoking zealots and partly mismanagement when the store passed from the father to the son. What the crunchies have is Tradition, polished to a mirror finish, sealed in lucite, and placed on a pedestal in a museum. I do not think I, or any of the traditionalists here have idolized tradition in the manner suggested here. In fact, a perusal of the blog shows that I began with a caution concerning the dangers of overarticulating tradition — or of tradition with a capital T. Instead the focus should be on those “honest and uncompelled aspects of daily life” that arise when one daily disciplines “the body and mind to order themselves according to their place and heritage.” Later, during the Homer Simpson imbroglio, I emphasized the need for traditionalists to have a deep respect for the vernacular; or for the “ways that ordinary people try through all the difficulties to preserve what is good and permanent in life.” Elsewhere I described the need to preserve, protect, and in some cases, revive, a truly social sphere distinct from either the state or the individual which can create a sense of home — which I hear echoed in the comments about Boston above — that is “not just four walls and a roof” but encompasses “the highways and byways that weave together the strands of memory, church, kin, work, and play into a place of belonging; home in this sense is seen and ought to be experienced as the central focal point of man’s contact with God; with the divine and holy ground of being.” None of this is aimed at fetishizing tradition for tradition’s sake.
But then the parody guy follows his sensible comments up with this: Stegall talks about the allegiance to "abstractions" as being somehow lesser than fealty to "the land," when it is precisely the fact that we are a nation founded on ideas rather than blood and soil that makes us special. Here the divisions Lukacs was talking about become more apparent: “the division between a true love of one's country and the rhetorical love of symbols such as the flag, in the name of a mythical people; between the ideals of American domesticity and those of a near-nomadic life; between privacy and publicity; between the ideals of stability and those of endless ‘growth.’” Ideas are not wholly fungible or portable apart from an embodiment in something particular — some “honest and uncompelled aspect of daily life.” This is a lesson Nisbet discusses in Quest for Community and a lesson I daresay we are learning anew in Iraq right now. What makes the Boston small-t traditionalism that is admired above special is a certain idea incarnate in a whole web of particular places, people, and common practices and memories which can be passed down from one generation to the next. When you see the incarnate places and traditions being destroyed in the name of the idea, you know something has gone really awry. You know battle lines are being drawn; and you ought to know that one side is fighting under false colors. And conservatives, at least, ought to know on which side they stand.
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