Tradition Works
By Karl Zinsmeister
A week ago I was in a cab in Washington, D.C., when my driver (a Nigerian immigrant, like many D.C. cabbies) began to do something interesting. He started talking on his two-way radio with at least two other drivers in a fast, repetitive, sing-song. All three of them started to guffaw and giggle through the static, and the pace became fast and furious. They seemed to be trying to "top" each other in some sort of orating contest.
Just before we reached the airport I smiled at the driver and told him I was dying to know what was going on. He said he and his friends were just having fun, discussing issues of the day, and wisecracking in their Yoruban language. "It sounded like you were doing a lot of rhyming, and kind of chanting in meter," I said.
"Yes, exactly," he answered. "That’s something we learned from our parents as little children. It’s a way of talking and joking by using rhymes and repeating words with a beat. Some lines we make up, some are memorized. We try to make sentences that will make each other laugh." What I was listening to, in other words, was oral folk poetry. Very traditional folk poetry.
This incident occurred just after I had finished editing Fred Turner’s article (see page 58) on the inextinguishable power of the traditional poem. Today’s poetry establishment mostly loathes the constraints of formal meter and rhyming. Given this disdain, there is only one reason traditional poems continue to be made: Because they "work."
Formal poetry moves people. It makes them laugh. It taps the primordial power of a thumping heartbeat, an echoing human voice, a repetitive strain of bird or insect music. Traditional poetry simply captures our imagination more easily than formless "free" verse. This power is recognized by everybody from rap musicians to greeting card makers. Everybody, that is, except modern intellectuals.
No question about it: Among educated elites, "traditional" practices now have a bad name. They’re stodgy. Unimaginative. Boring. Intolerant. Dangerously right-wing. Unworkable. Out of date. With futurists claiming that "the total stock of human knowledge now doubles every 15 years," the question looms: What relevance do traditional ways of thinking, acting, and working still have, if any?
The cumulative evidence of the articles you are about to read—touching on everything from music to schooling methods—is that older wisdoms still have lots of relevance. Tradition, you see, isn’t simply the sum of old prejudices. Rather, it is a series of highly evolved, deep understandings of human nature. That Corinthian column fronting a classic building near you isn’t some arbitrary construct, architect Allan Greenberg notes on pages 54-57, but something based on innate human perceptions and mathematical proportions. It’s never going to lose its visual power, its "right" look, due to changing fashions. Nor is the traditional family ever going to be overridden or become irrelevant—because it suits the unchanging basic needs of human beings (see pages 28-33). The traditional family is our "natural" dwelling unit; it is history’s verdict on the family.
The media chatter on things like traditional families and traditional values is that they are just "wedges" used to divide Americans, mere cudgels for bashing cultural opponents. Actually, the truest reason for defending traditional institutions is that they are likeliest to make people happy and secure in the long run. A little story may illustrate this.
It seems two individuals were driving down a highway in a large truck when they came to a bridge underpass with a big, stern sign in front of it reading "Absolutely no vehicles over 10'3" allowed." They pulled over to the shoulder, got out their measuring tape, and it turned out their truck was 11'4" tall.
At this point, the second guy looked to the driver and asked "What should we do?" The driver glanced both ways, then answered: "Not a cop in sight. Let’s chance it."
There are some rules and conventions, obviously, that it is futile to flout. All we do in ignoring them is endanger ourselves and those traveling with us. This is especially true when cultural, rather than legal, rules are involved. Most often, those guidelines are there for our own good.
Tradition’s big yellow "Not Allowed" signs are usually erected not to punish or harass, but to try to save people from finding out what can happen when you drive unprepared into the hard rocks or steel girders of reality. How many of the critics claiming that traditional ideas are needlessly restrictive or mean-spirited realize that children growing up in non-traditional families are three times likelier to end up with behavioral problems and six times likelier to be poor? The truth is, upholding time-tested traditional practices is humane.
Tradition isn’t only humane. It is also practical. Opponents often charge that tradition is built on empty symbols and ineffectual nostalgia. Old ways, it’s often said, offer no solution to today’s problems. That’s badly mistaken.
Consider the continuing power of traditional religion to change lives. Careful studies published a few years ago by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that church attendance is a more accurate predictor of whether someone will commit a crime, use drugs, or drop out of school than knowing whether the individual lived in public housing, or grew up in a single-parent household, or had parents who received welfare. Churchgoing, concluded researcher Richard Freeman, is the factor that most affects who escapes from inner-city poverty.
Tradition works: that’s a refrain that appears over and over in this issue. Everyday courtesies and manners are not just decorative, warns Judith Martin—they are our only alternative to strict laws, more coercion, and rampant incivility. Traditional courtship rules lay the groundwork for successful marriages, notes Mary Elizabeth Podles. Military traditions are not just brass-plated balderdash, states James Webb; they are the glue that keeps men from falling apart in the face of war’s viciousness. And traditional schools and teaching methods, E.D. Hirsch says, are unquestionably the best instruments for helping underprivileged children.
Hirsch is an avowed political liberal. But he recognizes that respecting and using tradition is not an ideological act or something that makes sense only if you are a conservative. It is simply smart, he believes—because traditional schools are more successful.
Hirsch is not alone in this. Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, whom we interview on pages 20 to 23, aren’t really men of the right, or even particularly political. They admire and defend tradition in the jazz world, where they work, primarily because that’s where the finest artistry lies. For a jazzman, respect for tradition means connecting yourself with the best that’s already been discovered. It means measuring yourself against the very highest standards. He who apprentices himself to tradition gains humility and creative continuity and excellence.
When Raymond Kaskey, a traditional figural sculptor, had one of his works picked to adorn what may be the most famous building erected in the 1980s (Michael Graves’ Portland, Oregon municipal center), he was attacked by modernists. One suggested that his proposal ought to be "thrown out" on the grounds that its style had "died of old age" more than a hundred years earlier. Kaskey responded that if modernism was "all about inventing yourself," then his interest was in "keeping everything everybody else does." The "great tradition of Western sculpture," he noted, "is thousands of years old, it is part of our minds, part of the baggage we carry around in our heads. Why not use it?"
Neither Kaskey nor anyone else edging us toward tradition today is doing anything nearly so simple as taking dictation from the past. These men and women are putting distinctive temporal stamps on their work. But they are doing so within a common inherited language.
Tradition is not something dusty and dead. It is a living, evolving, organic thing to which we can profitably connect ourselves as we seek grandness. It is something we can occasionally make even grander through our own subtle deflections and refinements. When we listen to Marsalis and Crouch talking about the importance of being loyal to previous generations, we could just as easily be hearing two guys talking about writing great novels, practicing an ancient religion, admiring great buildings, or respecting one’s family elders.
As further evidence that one can appreciate tradition no matter what one’s political perspective, tae contributor and art aficionado Paul Cantor points to a Norwegian painter of rising greatness named Odd Nerdrum. Nerdrum has chosen to paint in the old master style of Rembrandt and Caravaggio—despite being a political radical whose paintings have celebrated subjects like Andreas Baader of the infamous Baader-Meinhof anarchist gang. While Nerdrum’s personal sympathies are sharply left-wing, he harnesses the power of tradition to express them because he recognizes that there is no higher or more persuasive medium of artistic communication.
Interestingly, the modernist art establishment has rejected Nerdrum (just as the liberal establishment has scorned Hirsch, Kaskey, Crouch, and Marsalis). No matter what the rest of their program amounts to, people who defend traditional forms will forfeit all acceptance by liberal modernists. Yet all of the individuals I’ve mentioned above have found an audience anyway—by going around elites (often with the help of friendly conservatives) to reach the public directly.
And the intriguing thing is that everyday people have responded warmly to their traditionalist messages. Hirsch, for instance, has inspired his own grassroots movement. The little secret that anti-traditionalists would rather not have advertised is that tradition is popular.
Contrary to claims, it isn’t intensive nursing from a bunch of fuddy-duddy old graybeards that keeps tradition from dying. Rather, it is the spontaneous love and delight of the people. This is illustrated well by our article on the return of traditional baseball parks (page 52). Starting in the 1960s, planners tried to herd fans in many cities into new "rationalized" stadiums. But the previous generation of beautiful, human-scale parks like Wrigley and Fenway remained standing, and they ended up serving as everyday rebukes to the chilly, Brave New Rings of concrete. Then, after a generation of fumbling, someone was smart enough to recognize that there is a market for tradition, that regular people like to take their families to places that feel cozy, and old, and personal. Places that are made of brick and real grass, that are lumpy and quirky, like people, not machines. The boom in old-style baseball parks now sweeping the country isn’t some fashion flash; it’s a return to more permanent, highly evolved styles of building that respect and accurately reflect human nature.
Near the end of our feature section (pages 66 and 67) you’ll encounter an essay that may surprise you at first. In it, British-American critic Mark Steyn argues strongly that Americans are the Western world’s natural traditionalists. Europeans, meanwhile, despite the patina of ancient castles and old concertos, have become unmoored from their roots. The consequences of this, Steyn demonstrates, have been tragic for European societies.
There is reason to believe that societal traditions, and the habits they impart in a people, are actually more important now than ever before. The key to success in the future will be what economists describe cooly as "human capital"—the productive habits and personal disciplines accumulated within a citizenry. Our present day is characterized by a declining significance of things material and a great upswing in the importance of capacities of mind and soul. Lodes of ore and inches of fertile loam have little bearing on a nation’s prosperity and influence anymore. Riches are now measured in human attitudes and aptitudes—things heavily influenced by tradition.
The importance of tradition to societal success is perhaps the most profound point that philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek made in his writings. Tradition, he explains, is not something arbitrary, mindless, or accidental. Rather, it is the hard-won product of millions of human trials and millions of human errors. It is a kind of science, a series of valuable verdicts that have evolved directly from lived life.
As civilization progressed, Hayek writes, "learnt moral rules and customs progressively displaced innate responses, not because men recognized by reason that they were better but because they made possible the growth of an extended order exceeding anyone’s vision." Traditions evolved, in other words, because they caused their practitioners to prosper. Hayek further explains that:
Learning how to behave is more the source than the result of insight, reason, and understanding. Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. It is not our intellect that created our morals; rather, human interactions governed by our morals make possible the growth of reason and those capabilities associated with it. Man became intelligent because there was tradition—that which lies between instinct and reason—for him to learn. This tradition, in turn, originated not from a capacity rationally to interpret observed facts but from habits of responding. It told man primarily what he ought or ought not to do under certain conditions.
This is not some thundering moralist I am quoting, but the premier modern defender of individual liberty. And his is an extremely important point, particularly for twentieth-century Americans who are regularly told that anything more than one generation old must be out of date and worthless.
In 1948, the great English historian Christopher Dawson observed that "the world of my childhood is already as far away from the contemporary world as it was from the world of the middle ages, and there is a danger that whole ranges of experience will be so lost that in the future they may be inaccessible." One wonders what Dawson would think of the breathtaking rate at which we’ve discarded "whole ranges of experience" in the years since 1948.
As bigger and bigger chunks of traditional Western culture are jettisoned, Dawson warned, many people end up feeling "culturally naked in an alien world." He went on to suggest that modern Westerners could end up imperiled in this way, just as American Indians were after they became detached from their traditional culture following the European deluge.
Without much question, our culture, morality, and domestic life are in trouble today, with many signs of serious breakdown. Part of the problem is that repair is so arduous. To borrow James Webb’s clipped formulation from page 48: "It takes 300 years to build a tradition and three days to destroy one." How, in an era like ours, can the essential traditional knowledge that our predecessors distilled out of centuries of hard human experience be kept alive?
Tradition can, I believe, continue to be honored and protected in America, and without requiring Americans to withdraw too much from modernity. Sometimes, in fact, modernity can be harnessed to extend and even amplify tradition. Small examples of this might include moviemaking bringing old history to life, improved recording technology making once-disappeared music available again, or new book-marketing channels disseminating classic works that were previously available only to residents of a few big cities.
Or consider the heavy use many homeschoolers now make of computers. Homeschoolers are often people who have chosen, at some level, to step off the modern merry-go-round. In trying to create for their children something different from the mtv blur that childhood has now become in many American homes, homeschoolers look to earlier traditions for direction. In my own family we use a popular homeschool curriculum that I like to describe as a breath of fresh air directly from the nineteenth century. It is the type of Great Books and basic-knowledge course of study that was the norm in this country two generations ago, but unfortunately has become quite rare today. My son is currently reading Famous Men of Rome (copyright 1904, revised 1989). His Child’s History of the World was written in 1924 (and updated several times since), and is vastly superior to any more recent text I have seen on the subject. It is kept in print solely by a special arrangement with homeschoolers. Because they work, even McGuffey’s Readers are still being sold in homeschooling catalogs. But those same catalogs—and this is my real point—are also packed with computer-based products. And the parent networks are often built on fax and e-mail. These are not, in other words, people who are allergic to technology or broadly hostile to modernity. In my experience, in fact, homeschoolers tend to be technological enthusiasts. They are simply selective in what they pick and choose from modern life, with their skepticism being especially finely tuned regarding cultural and moral innovations.
The point of this digression is simply to suggest that such people may end up being important in leading America out of today’s anti-traditional wilderness. It may take a kind of traditionalist counterculture to show us how to reconcile all that is good and liberating about modern life with all that is great and essential about traditional life. It will not be Luddites who will lead us on this delicate peace-making exploration, but experienced wisemen and -women who will know the route simply because they fumbled with these questions themselves and finally figured out solutions. It will be people like Michael Medved and Kathleen Howley, who on pages 61-63 tell us how a TV/radio host and Boston Globe writer, respectively, became deeply attached to daily rituals that are medieval to ancient in their origins.
One reason I don’t feel hopeless about the fate of tradition in this country is because restoration movements that aim to revive and extend all that is good about traditional practices are now arising. The argument over the value of the traditional family, for instance, has swung sharply in the direction of sanity in just the last half-dozen years, with much of the sneering disdain for "the Donna Reed lifestyle" being replaced by a soberer appreciation of what’s lost when two-parent families decline.
Likewise, we see the seeds today of various character reform, back-to-basics, crime control, and civic-excellence programs that openly aspire to return us to earlier community standards. As we explained in our November/December issue, the frank aim of the most intelligent home builders and designers these days is literally to re-create pre-1940s-style towns.
Even on the Left, it’s stunning to note that many of the most energetic reform movements are now "reactionary," aiming to bring us back to an earlier status quo. Environmentalists want to restore wolves and bears and bison on land where they traditionally roamed, and to re-create grasslands and marshes in places where they traditionally grew. Historic preservationists want to save old buildings. Mass transit enthusiasts want to restore city rail systems. As self-described "progressive" Charles Siegel acknowledges, "all these proposals are meant to undo some of the damage done by the twentieth century. They are ‘trying to turn back the clock.’"
Of course, these ideas are wildly uneven. Some have merit, others have none. And obviously there continues to be lots of countervailing pressure, especially from the Left, in favor of throwing away everything old and sprinting as fast as possible away from tradition and toward that bridge to the twenty-first century. My only point here is that lots of Americans now have reservations about the rate at which we have been forgetting older ways. Many are beginning to recognize that our grandparents weren’t idiots, that on questions like love, marriage, schooling, discipline, beauty, truth, and decency, many of our grandparents’ rules are just as wise and fresh now as on the day they first got codified into a "thou shalt..." command.
As Americans become more cautious about the know-it-all arrogance of modernism, our next step will not be to simply and stupidly revive all things old. People who’ve driven a Nash Rambler don’t really want to bring it back. Instead, our goal for tomorrow will be to bridge the gap between preserving and designing anew. That, of course, is exactly what tradition has always existed to help us with. Tradition has never been something frozen; it is more like a process for finding one’s way into the future.
G.K. Chesterton’s wondrous encapsulation of this subject was that tradition is "the democracy of the dead." The dead aren’t the only ones with a vote under this schema. They can be over-ruled. But they have a place at the table. In this way, tradition becomes a kind of conveyor belt that transmits the memory and life’s lessons of earlier people across the barrier of time.
It’s important not to think of tradition, old things, and time-tested ideas as spinach that you must eat just because it’s good for you. The good news is that there is usually pleasure and comfort to be had in partaking of tradition.
Why do people like old houses and historic towns? Because of their scant electrical systems, or the satisfying howl that comes from their drafty windows on a cold night? Hardly. People like old houses for their human workmanship and, even more, for their human ghosts. When you step onto the cupped stair tread of an old farm cottage or Victorian rambler you think of all the people who passed this way before you. You think of the children who slid on the banister before growing into old men, you imagine the radiant bride who may have descended those very stairs, to the measured sound of a fiddle, on the way to being joined to her husband in front of the fireplace. Most people find it comforting to recognize that they exist within a web of other human lives, unknown as well as known. A proper respect for tradition can lend life an extra dimension in this way.
I don’t know much about Horace Shaw, the carpenter who in 1897 built and then lived in the house that I now occupy. But I do feel connected to him. Though he and I are Americans separated by more than three generations, we’ve shared some pretty intimate experiences. (Horace, I’d like to talk to you about that low ceiling at the top of the stairs.)
On page 36, Bill Kauffman quotes Ray Bradbury’s line that "No person ever died that had a family." A couple of articles later, Jim Webb suggests that erecting a memorial for dead soldiers allows them to live forever, as "one small part of something so big and great that it’ll never die." In a certain way, the 1897 carpenter of South Geneva Street is also still alive, in my mind, and the minds of my wife and children.
Tradition is an eternity machine. It transports the wisdom of the ages to us for our own benefit. And it offers an assurance to those of us lucky enough to be breathing and learning things today that we will still be alive tomorrow. And a generation from now. And even a hundred years into the future.
