Tradition gives a vote to the dead, extending democracy across generations by counting the judgement of those who came before.
Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy (1908): tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. Refusing tradition, he argued, amounts to an oligarchy of the living, the small arrogant group who merely happen to be walking about.
In practice
- A club keeps a rule whose purpose nobody remembers, until the first year without it.
- A family keeps a recipe unchanged for four generations because each generation found it worth keeping.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation for tradition's value is that surviving practices have been tested by many generations. Another is humility: the living have little reason to think themselves wiser than all their predecessors together.
- In its favour
- Consistent with Chesterton's fence and Lindy's law, and with research on cumulative culture, in which customs carry knowledge no single generation could work out.
- Against it
- The dead cannot learn from new evidence, and traditions also preserve injustices that past generations accepted. A practice's survival shows it was tolerable, not that it was best.
- Standing
- Compare Chesterton's fence and Lindy's law.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- Proverbs that recur across cultures