One of the curiosities of the history of conservative social thought has been its persistent invocation of tradition without rigorously specifying what is being alluded to. It would be possible on this basis for the critic unsympathetic to conservatism to accuse it of a palpable irrationalism: appealing to a justification for its social preferences that is merely a nebulous, pseudo-honorific piece of terminology. Conservative language about “tradition” does not appear to allay misgivings about such an accusation. Such writing, since Burke, has been singularly vague.
But merely because it is vague does not necessarily mean that the appeal to “tradition” is either nonsensical or a bald rhetorical fallacy. It is possible to fault conservatively oriented writers, even the great Burke, for a lack of philosophical rigor and it is certainly fair to criticize some contemporary conservative writers for flabby imprecision in the matter of “tradition,” but such reservations do not, per se, demolish what I take to be a crucial cornerstone in the conservative position.
But what is the “tradition” to which post-Burkean writers refer? Indeed, are they talking about “tradition” qua “tradition”—a general conception of cultural inheritance—or are they referring to an explicit “tradition,” a particular national experience, as with the “British tradition” or the “American tradition”? Surely it must be either the former or both, for it is difficult to invoke a specific national tradition without having some idea of what tradition in general terms is all about. While that would seem to be obvious, I should point out that certain twentieth-century conservatives have tried to do expressly that, the late Willmoore Kendall, for illustration. What results is the claim that a given national tradition (political, constitutional intellectual, etc.) is superior without advancing any philosophical explanation for why that is so. As a matter of fact, the arguments of Kendall and others are really not a traditionalist argument at all (at least not in the philosophical sense). Kendall would contend, in sum, that the products of the Founding Fathers were the result of extraordinary political wisdom, that this wisdom has proven uniquely efficacious and that subsequent departures from these original concepts were the result of distinctly inferior political judgment. What is being appealed to is not a “tradition,” but an explicit historical-political outlook deemed to be qualitatively superior; it is a “tradition” only in the sense that it belongs to a reasonably remote past, despite the frequent employment of phraseology such as the “American political tradition.”
In like fashion, Daniel Boorstin does not offer a philosophically grounded concept of tradition in his reflections on American history. Boorstin believes that he can detect certain singular features in the American historical experience and, no doubt, he is quite correct about that. These perennial motifs are the result of distinctive characteristics (demographic and, in, a wide sense, cultural) that affected the American outlook. But this is not really an appeal to tradition, either, because as the external variables are modified, so are the cultural attitudes: the source of the American “mind” is not some continuous, cross-generational accumulation, but habitual responses to environmental factors. Tradition, for Boorstin, is simply a handy word to use to refer to past patterns of social behavior.
I am not asserting that either Mr. Kendall or Mr. Boorstin are wrong, only that their arguments do not constitute a defense of tradition as I believe historical conservatives conceived it, despite the ambiguities of their language. We confront in an effort to make distinctions regarding the meaning of tradition some semantic problems, the principal one being a common inclination to use the word “tradition” as an omnibus reference to the historical past, thus, a “traditionalist” is thought of as one being fond of retaining or reviving the practices of the past. But this is an awkward usage if any philosophical clarity is sought. The mere fact that I, for sake of argument, might seek to encourage the return of the bustle for feminine fashion hardly places me in the position of being an advocate of tradition. An affection for the past, particularized or even generalized, does not, ipso facto, make one a defender of tradition.
This is true for a fairly obvious reason: “tradition,” whatever it is, is a paradigmatic term; it refers to some pattern or cognizable order that presumably surfaces in historical experience. This must be the case, for the opposite assumption is clearly to contend that history cannot be evaluated or interpreted save on the basis of immediate preferences. This latter viewpoint, I take it, is the fundamental anti-traditionalist outlook. On what basis can we judge the merits of historical experience? We can either refer to some paradigmatic interpretation of history or we can espouse an essentially pragmatic one. How can we evaluate a specific historical practice—like slavery, for instance, certainly a “tradition” in numerous cultures? We do so in use of two ways: the practice is either compatible or not with some paradigmatic theory of human experience or we judge it in terms of a prevailing moral (and I use the word in its strict generic sense) outlook. “Tradition” is, thus, not the “past,” but a segment of the past differentiated from the totality of previous events by one of two assumptions: a) that “tradition” refers to a pattern of some sort that is actualized in the historical process, or b) that it refers to some historical practices retrospectively and contemporaneously deemed to be, for one reason or another, desirable or praiseworthy.
Are both interpretations of “tradition” equally valid, granting the necessity to endow the word “tradition” with some cogent meaning? I don’t think so, because the second conception contains a fatal defect: it “begs the question.” Let us return to the example of slavery. If I apply the second conception of tradition I may well condemn slavery on the following grounds: slavery is immoral, but it is immoral because it violates concepts of morality I currently espouse. What I have done is not to appeal to tradition at all, but rather to identify tradition with prevailing ideas, good or bad, that I presently hold. I have said nothing at all about history other than to discriminate among historical events on the basis of my immediate prejudices. ‘The validity of those prejudices or preferences turn upon criteria totally unrelated to the historical process, per se. Put another way: the “traditionalist” seeks to learn from history, the “anti-traditionalist” seeks to employ his present insights as a means of making judgments about history.
It is not my intention to suggest here that one viewpoint is finally superior to the other, but only to introduce some useful clarity to the discussion by limiting the meaning of tradition to the first interpretation for the reasons set forth. But to accept, initially, a paradigmatic view of tradition is not to disclose much about it or to give reasons why the inferences drawn from tradition ought to be highly regarded in contemporary social decision-making. In fact, this preliminary orientation is qualitatively neutral—it does not tell us what paradigms are to be preferred to other ones. It does not imply that an ethical mandate necessarily follows from the discovery of tradition.
Of course, some arguments have been made on behalf of tradition on the grounds of sheer endurance. It is often assumed, wrongly, I think, that Burke’s doctrine of “prescription” (which I shall return to later) falls into this category—as, indeed, he defended the English Constitution on the basis that it had “existed time out of mind.” It may well be that certain human proclivities appear to have a trans-temporal character; certain characteristics appear to persist in the face of cultural modification. I am inclined to believe that this is true, but I am equally of the view that these enduring factors do not in themselves offer direct recommendation or justification for social action. They may well constitute the objective data within which social options must be exercised, but they are not simply “binding” upon human choice. Conservatives are wont to allude to reverence or aesthetic awareness as immemorial human motifs—and I have no doubt that they are constant factors, so to speak. But savage predation and carnality are equally “immemorial” and hardly would seem to posit ethical imperatives, except to the extent that such human predilections are factors in the ethical predicament not to be lightly dismissed.
Endurance is, in itself, no qualitative justification for the mandate of tradition, except as it is indicative of what I might call “optic strength,” the relative potency of objective elements that form the ontological skeleton, as it were, of cognate nature. Such an observation, of course, brings us full tilt toward sonic discursive definition of the nature of tradition.
Tradition vs. Dialectical History
If tradition is thought to refer to paradigmatic themes in the historical process. one must, I think, attempt to differentiate “tradition” from other “dialectical” or even deterministic theories of history. Tradition is distinct from various dialectical accounts of the historical process in two principal ways: 1) tradition is not simply the sufficing of biological imperatives (at least not as construed in reductionistic varieties of naturalism, such as that of Marx); 2) tradition is not the configuration of the historical process by a superior, supernatural stratum of reality, especially as that configuration is presumed to be conveyed in pan-logistic terms, as with Hegel. These distinctions require comment.
1) The first account of the undeniably paradigmatic character of the historical process must be rejected on grounds of adequacy stemming, principally, from the vulnerabilities of reductionistic theories of human nature. It is duhious to assume that the elements that conform to the historical process could emerge from a concept of human nature so radically constricted. Man certainly is more than “what he eats” and to suppose that the subtle complexities of historical patterns are wholly attributable to animalistic appetition (as suggested by the dialectical materialists) is unacceptable.
2) The metaphysical ambiguities aside (the primary being the basic Idealist premise), it is questionable that the historical process can be described as the peregrinations of ideas (with either an upper or a lower case “i”). While it is likely true that the human act of discovery is itself predicated upon pre-experiential capacities and even predispositions, it is difficult to suppose that the underlying fabric of historical phenomena consists of categories that appear to be less elemental than those which are involved with man’s awareness of his universe. We do not, in fact, confront that universe in ideational terms, at least not initially and fundamentally. Our cognitive apprehensions are the products, not the causes, of our being able to confront the universe and render it intelligible—and, indeed, the genius of tradition may well he involved with this elemental confrontation. It seems altogether questionable to suppose that our rudimentary knowledges are essentially conscious and rational and the historical phenomena that are the reflections of the underlying universal processes seem, as well, to be essentially apprehended not by conscious dialectic, but by the similar means by which we possess elemental natural knowledge.
Tradition vs. a “Code” Theory
Approaching from a somewhat different angle, tradition (the emergence of continuities of historical patterns) is projected by an essentially monistic worldview. Those patterns which are recognized and labeled as “tradition” are neither the cultural manifestations of a strictly physical nature nor are they symbolic constructs of an active and immanent supernatural being or Idea. Some conservatives have leaned heavily on this latter interpretation (recalling, perhaps, Burke’s “divine tactic” reference). Such a position is fraught with philosophical perils, not the least of which is a full-blown historical determinism, ultimately reminiscent of St. Augustine’s. This argument, theological disputes aside, reduces to a “code” theory of history in which it must he assumed that buried in the welter of historical intransigence is a rational plan open to “decoding” by human reason. Apart from speculation regarding why God would choose, thus, to he so secret or perverse in disclosing his inexorable intentions, this conjecture features all those disabilities of historical “positivism” rightly castigated by R. G. Collingwood. Its prime defect is a confusion between a teleological concept of history and a finally deterministic one or atleast one predicated upon the manipulation of a divine codex, the nature of which presumes a notion of an original deception.
I have referred to a concept of tradition as being “monistic” simply because one cannot, I assert, take tradition very seriously if one is an ontological dualist. If one is the latter, one is obliged to know (whatever the means) what is the ultimate meaning of history before one confronts it and interprets it. For the true traditionalist, therefore, with his monistic perspective, history must be self-interpreting. He may require self-knowledge as a prerequisite for observation, but he assumes that tradition will tell him something, asagainst one who assumes that tradition will confirm something he already knows.
Four Prior Types of Knowledge
Of course, the traditionalist does not come to reflect on tradition tabula rasa. He confronts tradition with four types of prior knowledge: a) he operates (as I will argue momentarily) with an intentional predisposition toward traditional insight; b) he functions with a subrational continuity of knowledge; c) he possesses an instinctual base of behavior; and d) he has conscious knowledge, extensive or limited, of the explicit cultural continuities of which he is a part.
a) Tradition (and, perhaps, to avoid a holistic impression, “traditions” might be a more useful term) must enjoy, in a generative sense, an ontological status. That is to say that the patterns or paradigms designated as “tradition” (as apart from conventions) are not accidental confluences or theoretically originated “systems” imposed on phenomena by the observer. To suppose that tradition is the latter is to deny, quite obviously, tradition altogether. This is not, of course, a disreputable position and the existence of tradition (as we have so far defined it) is, I submit, an empirical question—are there or are there not indisputable enduring paradigms in historical phenomena? I am not trying to avoid this empirical question, but only to limit this essay to a clarification of tradition on the admittedly contentious grounds that it exists.
If, then, to return to the main argument, tradition is not accident or a priori systematization (or some version of a historical dialectic), what is it? It is the manifestation within the historical process of partial actualizations of the objective order of nature—or, to use the language of Whitehead to whom I am invariably indebted, tradition is the nexus of “eternal objects” as they actualize in patterns of historical “durations” or “events.” In this sense, the cognizable paradigms are recurring ontological motifs, clothed in the historical and symbolic dress of human cultural experience. As such, these patterns, these traditions, are “lures for feeling,” they exert a “requiredness” to which human nature is attuned for the altogether cogent reason that the human being is himself an actualization of the very same class of “eternal objects” that participate in the on-going patterns which he recognizes. Itis in this sense that the observer of traditions has an “intentional” vector toward recognition of tradition and, by implication, a response to the directives of that tradition. This is what, I believe, Burke meant by his concept of “prescription,” the communication of ontological data via tradition, a transmission made possible by the compatibility of human receptivity to these directives. I would wish to define, by the way, a “traditionalist” as one with a particularly high level of intensity of feeling in regard to the“lure” of tradition.
b) We cannot view tradition and the observer in a subject-object relationship (except for explanatory metaphor). Tradition is not only as we have partially defined it in (a). It is an “enduring occasion”—a continuity, a transmission of subrational knowledge. Tradition is not the perpetuation of a fixed code, conveyed in necessarily random human experience. Only in part is it the manifestation of the natural ontology. The very act of actualization in the historical flow renders tradition in part novel, dynamic, reflective of cultural variations. To the degree that it is cognitively specific, it is expressive of unique cultural experience. It is also cumulative in the sense that its vehicle is human culture, the aggregate experiences of cognate human societies and communities. Its paradigmatic aspect is reflective of the accumulations that are made specific in the evolutionary processes of given societies. This social accumulation is transferable on two levels; first, a cognitive communal history that participates in the “enculturadon” of the individual and, second, a subrational transmission of the social accumulations, the general and particularized aspects of tradition. I do not pretend to be able to explain the nature of this “social imprinting” which is vastly more resistant to empirical inquiry than is that artifactual culture well-described by anthropology. But I do contend that it is observable as a phenomenon and no account of culture seems complete without its addition.
Thus, the observer of tradition is at once observer and participant—and in a process never static and always in change. Further, (c), his relationship with tradition is founded upon his own instinctual composition which represents an ontological compatibility between the basis of his self-knowledge and behavior and the tradition to which he responds. His internal “wiring” is teleological, not only in the semi-mechanistic sense advanced by cybernetics, but also in a meta-psychological sense. Thus, tradition and instinctual motivation are both teleological in nature (as I will argue presently), harmonious, and mutually reinforcing. It is likely that tradition restrains human behavior, as virtually all conservatives have contended, but not in the fashion advanced by numerous contemporary conservatives who rather view tradition as some culturally generated set of social habits that happily restrain the “natural man” with his antisocial proclivities. If the base of tradition is naturalistic, as I am content that it is, tradition cannot war with the self as correspondingly defined; they are, rather, parallel manifestations of natural directive.
d) Finally, of course, the observer of tradition comes to his task armed with a conscious awareness of his social continuity, its immediate cognitive protocols. It is here that he must distinguish between tradition and convention. He may be far more aware, initially, of the latter than the former. There are two principal means of differentiating between a tradition and a convention or more. The first method involves, by implication, a definition of a “convention” as being a social practice with two distinguishable features: a) it is a fairly explicit and limited social or institutional practice or arrangement, and b) it is not directly concerned with the survival potentiality of the society. Put another way: conventions are non-imperative social options, perhaps of long standing, relating to reasonably specific aspects of human activity. It is not a convention, for example, that murder is socially prohibited, but it is a convention to be required to rise when hearing the national anthem. The family is very likely not merely a conventional human institution, but having the male as head of the family may very well be only conventional.
There is another difference. Human responses to conventions (as being more or less the result of free choices) are only intense when it is assumed that they are, in fact, traditions, otherwise conventions can come and go like the lengths of skirts. But traditions are never so specific in nature that they can be postulated as limited aspects of human activity. And to say this clearly implies that not all that we deem necessary or desirable can be justified by tradition. We do not prohibit murder on traditional grounds, but on directly ethical ones. Our knowledge of the ethical character of the natural order is only in part traditional; it is in large measure directly observable or cognizable. Further, many of our social arrangements are justifiable because they are beneficial, efficient, pleasant, and so on, not because they are traditional. But to say that tradition is not the sole basis for social life is not to deny its mandate where applicable. Genuine tradition deserves conservation, Practices in direct violation of the insight of tradition ought to be avoided, as being suggestive of the aberrational. Moreover, it is necessary in order to preserve bona fide tradition to extricate it from narrow and more ephemeral conventions. To insist zealously upon the ultimately transient and superficial may obscure the permanent and real in the sense that conventions are free choices as against the natural mandates and are, in a social context, expendable.
Tradition and Purpose
These observations still leave much to be said on the nature of tradition. The salient assumption, if one concedes the existence of tradition, is that the natural order from which tradition emerges is teleological. Tradition presupposes purpose. This conclusion is not a very radical one if one has already acquiesced to the general definition of tradition offered. At a very fundamental level, one must ask oneself if one thinks the natural order to be teleologically structured or not? I do not deny that this is a sweeping question and one cannot be categorical in answering it. It is a matter of weighing and interpreting the evidence, but I conclude that anyone who is willing to think about tradition seriously must have made some type of assent, however tentative, to the proposition that, on balance, the probabilities are that the universe is not merely an accidental, chaotic, fortuitous, or inscrutable entity.
But when one concedes to the rudimentary premise that the universe is a teleological entity, what then? What kind of purpose? To what extent? To what end? Here the imponderables multiply disturbingly. I cannot trace down all the inferences in this brief essay, but I wish to disengage the concept of tradition from a more or less explicit teleological concept, especially one with marked eschatological overtones. I am struck, for example, by the peculiar tension in Burke’s teleological viewpoint in which an orthodox religious eschatology is wedded with an implicitly vitalistic view of nature—almost as if Burke were some sort of latter-day Averroist. I think the issue, pro and con, regarding the inseparability of theism and traditionalism (so beloved by conservative writers) is largely irrelevant, except for the truly Augustinian Christians for whom no doctrine of tradition could make any sense, save some trivial regard for accustomed pieties. The nature of the teleologically conceived natural order has, I think, very little to do with theistic propositions. If one accounts for the genesis of the teleologically structured natural order in terms of God, the prima mobile, the logos, the Absolute, so be it. The matter is of intense personal significance on theological grounds, perhaps, but it does not affect the foundation of tradition. Burke’s apparent tension is really reflective of a healthy philosophical outlook (despite an effort, now and again, to enlist his authority on behalf of various religious preferences; a recent ludicrous example being an attempt to describe Burke as a “Christian activist”!). I am tempted to say that far too many conservative writers who invoke “tradition” do so under the regrettably parochial assumption that “tradition” really means the “Christian tradition.” What they fail to perceive is that the ultimate effect of that contention would be to destroy the philosophical credibility of tradition.
Another conservative penchant, which is another form of the “code” theory, is the notion that tradition is “something” conveyed by the “great books” of the wise men of the past or some such allegation. Of course, if one read all the serious philosophical and literary works of history (not just the “pet” lists), one could come to no other conclusion except that every tradition, every worldview, under the sun was at one time or another advocated. The philosophical Tower of Babel, indeed. The argument, of course, really consists of asserting that there were “correct” and “incorrect” thinkers of the past and that “tradition” is carried forth by the “correct thinking” variety. Such a conclusion may appeal to the “ultramontanes,” but it rests, willy-nilly, not on the wisdom of tradition, but on the literary tastes and philosophical preferences of living commentators. Indeed, it is finally extremely awkward, I think, to be a traditionalist (as earlier defined) and a transcendentalist. Traditional wisdom is the antithesis of mysticism. The wisdom of tradition is, actually, an “earthy” wisdom, at least it is a naturalistic one; it rests upon a universality of knowledge and a regard for historical and empirical analysis over revelation. To conclude that the universe is a purposive system is not to contend that its processes necessarily imply the realization of some dominant and discrete end, the fruition of an exhaustively elaborate plan. Such a viewpoint is too extravagant a concept, going far beyond the intimations of either traditional and empirical knowledge. Tradition itself is not the unfolding of an explicit code for human existence; it is, rather, a continuity constructed both of the actualizations of the natural order and the superorganic accumulations of culture. It is a supportive but not a dominant factor in social life. It provides both a general criterion and a guide to human discretion. It is purposive in that the natural order from which it, in part, springs is purposive and the human faculties that respond to it are purposive, and it participates in the perpetuation of forms of life that transcend the transient character of individual life.
The counsel provided by the “wisdom experts” of previous eras is hardly to be slighted. No one would deny that we are the descendants, in a manner of speaking, of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Lucretius, and so on. Their writings do reveal common concerns. Perhaps central to all is a preoccupation with the question of value. However their express viewpoints may differ, this virtually universal attention to the activity of valuation suggests certain discriminations between the human tradition and other teleological natural processes. Regardless of other potential differences between men and beasts, man alone is a “valuing animal” in the sense that he consciously makes value choices and endows objects or activities with valuational significance. He is a complex valuing animal, because there are, at base, three sources of his valuing process: 1) Instinctual response, 2) Tradition, 3) Conscious discriminatory capability.
The first source he shares with other natural species (although the clarity and vigor of these responses may be progressively obscured due to the fact that man’s instinctual responses can be “short-circuited” by independent acts of will). The second source—tradition—is, in fact, a via media between instinctual response and conscious deliberative value discrimination, because it contains elements of both the elemental, subrational communication characteristic of instinctual awareness (“feeling”) and cognitive apprehension. Tradition relates man as a conscious valuing animal (as a moral philosopher, indeed) to his primordial natural status. It renders possible a compatibility between man’s intellectual grasp of values and his instinctual responses. In this sense, tradition is a monitor of our conscious acts of valuation, it provides a unique insight into more rudimentary and non-cognitive foundations of value.
Tradition and Specific Values
But tradition is not, I think, a repository of specific values, at least in the sense that it is not a progressive unveiling of those articulated “values” or “moral principles” or “ethical verities” that we associate with consciously-constructed value systems. That tradition may comprehensively project the “Good” in the precise sense employed by G. E. Moore is an interesting possibility and, in any event, our awareness of tradition as a form of transmission of knowledge may certainly be non-cognitive. Again, we both feel and perceive tradition; it links the particularities of the two other modes of value apprehension. Tradition invokes the rudimentary moral order that is at once the natural order and relates these consciously indeterminate ethical commands with the value-actualizations that emerge from a specific cultural experience. Such a synthesis is not, I believe, morally imperative —by that I mean that tradition is more ethically suggestive than it is mandatory. Viewed from another perspective, the defense of a moral axiom on grounds of tradition is “second-best evidence”—the best evidence is the noetic justification. Indeed, there is a hierarchical relationship between “instinct,” “tradition,” and noetic judgment. The first is the most universal, undifferentiated, and behaviorally obligatory; the second represents the impact of the particularities and novelties of human culture upon the first; the third represents man’s discrete ethical potentiality, less universal and less mechanistically compelling, but revealing the creative possibilities inherent in human reason and being more expressly pertinent to human value resolution. Man’s ethical life involves all three elements, but his immediate life is dominated by the quality of his reason, the ethical choices he consciously makes, hopefully the creative extension of the intimations of instinct and tradition. Tradition is synthetic, historically and ontologically; we add to it by the wisdom of our present decisions and acts. We can also obscure and depress it by temporary aberrations and hubristic insensitivities. But we are never totally free of its influences, if only for the reason that we are never wholly liberated from those natural configurations that, in part, comprise it.
The immediate effect of tradition is “conservative.” Its influence tends to both conserve the social continuities that it itself projects and to restrain the range of social options thought to be acceptable by offering an implicit definition of cultural tolerability. Tradition makes the sense of community possible because it invests a form of significant knowledge in those members of the community who might not be equipped to make ethical judgments on a purely noetic basis. Tradition alone makes the idea of popular government intellectually respectable—without it there is no really rational defense against the claim of the intellectually superior to rule by fiat. Of course, traditional wisdom by itself is likely an inadequate basis for social leadership, as it is not, by itself, an adequate basis for moral judgment. But traditional knowledge makes participation in the ethical and political life of the community at once possible and desirable. It provides a brake—far better than the paper checks of constitutions—on the despotic exercise of power. It provides, as well, the firmest available base for law, superior to either the declaration of transcendentally-delivered statutes or to some shifting “consensus.”
It is popular in our times to deride tradition. We like to think that we are emancipated from it. This really means that we are convinced that the recognition of tradition, the entertainment of its knowledge, will inhibit our desires, will constrict the free play of our egos. This is correct in a sense, since tradition reinforces the primacy of community over individual self-interest, but the anti-traditionalist thesis is founded on an erroneous psychology: the assumption that the sublimation of the self occurs in defiance of the social paradigms implied by tradition. The reverse is true. The attainment of self-realization involves participation, participation in the natural order, participation in the cultural-social paradigms. Traditional knowledge offers a means of relating self to existence beyond the requirements of physical appetition; it provides a guide to vital participation. Tradition, I repeat, is not the only knowledge, but it is an immensely formidable variety.
The significance of tradition is also denigrated because of the frequently spurious modes of its defense by self-announced “traditionalists” who are, in fact, special pleaders of one type or another who wish to use the venerable word “tradition” to lend authority to their conventional preferences. Put another way, these pseudo-traditionalists are guilty of “over-selling” tradition by giving it a particularity, an express social mandate that it does not possess. For example: it is highly doubtful that the cultural traditions of Western man reveal any explicit recommendations regarding the conformation of political institutions. I see, historically, no valid “traditional” defense of legislative supremacy, separation of powers, majority rule, separation of church and state, proportional representation, and so on, ad infinitum. The desirability of these and other political arrangements may well involve some appeal to traditional knowledge as a basis for judgment, but the “Western” or even “American” experience does not vouchsafe so precise a disclosure of traditional wisdom so as to allow us to insist, prima facie, on one or another form of political institution. Institutions and practices of a political nature are rarely creatures of “prescription.” To defend them, not on the grounds of social efficacy, but by an appeal to tradition is not only rationally discreditable, but also does a disservice to the real importance of tradition. An appeal to tradition does not, per se, really settle immediate social issues. Consider private property as an illustration. A very persuasive case can be made for the retention of private property on the grounds that it represents a traditional mandate. It may conceivably even be a natural paradigm that it would be aberrational to tamper with. Traditional wisdom would seem to support strongly private property as a persistent historical pattern. But the argument is not conclusive, only highly suggestive. Some cultures have not featured this institution and yet have not disintegrated thereby nor lost their regard for more elemental human values. It may be that private property is best defended, within our cultural framework, on broadly utilitarian grounds, denying it a “prescriptive” justification. I am not attempting to resolve the question; on the contrary, I am trying to show the difficulty in transposing traditional wisdom into specific recommendations on immediate social questions.
It may well be that tradition is not only fundamentally subrational, but that its Phenomenal articulations in a culture are almost wholly symbolic or mythic, in contrast to being discursive, Perhaps tradition is essentially conveyed, trans-temporally, by art and ritual, in contrast to philosophy and social theory. Perhaps we can see in art and in the central cultural myths those patterns and motifs that configure history and convince us that there is intelligibility in the human experience, that there is a “great chain of being” after all.
The traditionalist is thus open not only to the instruction of history, but to an expansive range of transmissions wherein the wisdom of accumulated experience might lie. He dare not have an insular outlook or one predicated on some neo-gnostic exclusiveness. He is open to experience, because he believes experience to reflect more than the spontaneous interaction of forces; in experience he sees order and purpose and an explanation for the peculiarities of his private existence. Regardless of his ultimate metaphysical convictions, the traditionalist sees in tradition a sort of eschatology after all: that there is a significance to human life beyond immediate sensation, an on-going natural economy to which he belongs, contributes, and shares.
