My response was along these lines: Yes, there is something artificial about trying to lay claim to a tradition that one wasn't born into, or that previous generations in one's line have jettisoned -- but what's the alternative? Late modernity has been a catastrophe for nearly all inherited traditions, at least in the West. We are all walking around like survivors of a carpet-bombing, bumbling around in the ruins trying to find a place to take a stand and start the recovery, the rebuilding. I know a number of Episcopalians who have converted to either Orthodoxy or Catholicism. At least one reason they've done so is the conviction that they've got to root themselves in a Christian tradition that can stand the test of time and the lashings of modernity. They are adopting traditions not their own, true, but again, if we don't attempt some sort of Great Re-Learning, what's the alternative?
Here's what Maggie wrote, which I reproduce here with her permission:
I guess what I'm really pointing to is the difference between a chosen identity affirmed by a chosen community and an ascribed identity, affirmed by a community that one does not choose.
The latter feels far firmer and more real to people; it is also far more constraining and inhibits individuation and personalization. People like tradition. But they also really like choice.
We have lots of choices in our society but we don't have the choice to be genuinely traditional, as far as I can see, and nothing in your book suggests otherwise.
Yes, the absence of traditional bases for identity creates a genuine hunger. If you want to try to satisfy that hunger by "attaching" to a tradition, I have no objections. I really don't. I just can't look at that process and see that its will achieve what you claim for it. Its not being traditional, its choosing tradition as the best of all available consumer goods.
You make that choice, other people make other choices. God bless, I hope it works for you.
As to your question "What then"?
Listen, its a fallen world. You do the best you can. I personally think the benefits of the modern condition seriously outweigh its liabilities (and so there we may differ). But don't imagine you are recreating a traditional world. It's not true. You are creating a personal world.
Why is this worth saying? I don't know for sure, but I think if one can pinpoint more accurately one's motivations, needs and desires, one can both avoid nostalgia for an imagined past, and perhaps do a better job of meeting the needs modernity intensifies.
Thoughts, readers?
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Suppose you flew on a very NON-crunchy plane to MI, flipped on the switch in your room provided by a hugely non-crunchy utility, powered up your laptop produced and web=connected by the dons of globalization.
You can't even evangelize the Crunchy Gospel without the ease of the titanic inventions of capitalism.
What what's more non-crunchy than the media firm you work for housed in urban Dallas?
One can take your book more seriously (now out in paperback marketed by industry wizards) if you truely took up dirt farming or pottery.>
Rod,
In this tradition-rooting thing you've been doing double duty: pottering the clay of crunchy-conism and falling into Orthodoxy (odd how the wording is usually Orthodoxy and not the Orthodox Church?).
It must be exhausting.
But, it seems, there's a balling of several thread strands here. How does (or will) it all stay wound up tight and nice?
The more Orthodox you become will you drop this Crunchy-Con ball?>
"What is the alternative"?
Well, we have to admit that we 'can't go home again'. The scientific and industrial revolutions are a sword across the history of mankind.
The traditonal slow-changing agrarian societies of the past are dead in our world and moribund on the planet as a whole. The city and the machine are the common destiny of the human race and it's idle to wax nostalgic for an existance which most of its inhabitants fled at the first opportunity.>
It is nice that you're trying to organize your world. You'd make a good machinest if you weren't a writer.
What I'd like to offer to your conversation is a critical observation.
It failed. Your version of traditionalism failed. We know it failed because it was abandoned.
Succeeding generations abandoned it because it not longer worked as good as it once did. And it once didn't as well as it could have, except in retrospect of course.
You can build your little world based upon whatever theology you want and your children and grandchildren will abandon it too.
The reason it will fail is the same reason they all have failed. They're designed for control.
I happen to be almost twice your age. What you're wanting for your children I'm wanting for my grandchildren. My mission is a little tougher than yours because I have to perform the magic through the hands of my children.
A long time ago I abandoned theology. I didn't stop believing, they're two different things. I'm still very much a believer. I abandoned theology because I felt all of them were created by man for control of man.
As I've gotten older I've modified my reasons for abandoning theology. Where I once viewed theology as all about attempts to control I've now decided it's about attempts at problem solving.
The problem is how to manipulate people to do what's right and best for themselves and those around them.
Theology is the easiest answer when you assume either that man is inherently bad and or stupid. We know that isn't true. And because man isn't inherently stupid and or bad they resent being treated like they are. That's why theology fails and is abandoned by succeeding generations.
Your journey is typical of theological journeys. You've entered into a belief system that you felt had all the answers or at least a methodology for finding the answers. Then as questions arose that couldn't be answered to your satisfaction you've lost faith in that system and have searched for a better definition of the faith you feel.
That one will fail you too. It will fail because theology is designed for control instead of empowerment.
I like that word, "empowerment". I couldn't find it in the dictionary and that's okay. I still like it and I will continue to use it.
So, if theology fails everytime, if there was one success we'd know, the whole world would know, and the obvious reason it fails is because it's design for control. Then we need to consider an alternative because we'd like our children and grandchildren happiness and success.
Maybe the key to success and happiness is empowering them with knowledge. Knowledge will give them their sense of place and responsibility.>
I haven't read the preceding comments, so if this is covered above forgive me:
I guess I have problems with the idea of tradition for its own sake. Christ had something to say about "traditions of men".
The point of tradition, as I think Chesterton said, is that it gives a vote to our ancestors. When I was considering converting to Catholicism, tradition carried a lot of weight with me, but not for its own sake. Rather, I figured that, if most Christians had believed something for 2000 years, then it stood a good chance of being true, because otherwise, someone, somewhere, sometime would have come up with a good argument against it.
Likewise, if most people have been doing something a certain way for a long time, then there's a good chance that it "works" with human nature, and shouldn't be changed lightly.
That's what tradition is for: it's an indicator that a belief is true, or that a practice works. Not a guarantee, but an indicator.
A lot of what appeals to me about the whole "crunchy con" business isn't tradition so much as it is a sense of connectedness. We've all gotten pretty alienated from the world around us. Water comes out of a spigot, heat comes out of ducts, light comes out of glass bulbs in the ceiling. Milk, eggs, and chickens come from refrigerated cases in the supermarket.
Also a sense of humanness. Capitalism has many virtues, but it also has a tendency to exalt efficiency over the human being. People become cogs in the machine. It's Catholic teaching that work is for the sake of the worker, not for the sake of the end product. The "crunchy con" mindset, GKC's distributism, "small is beautiful" all seem to be trying to reconnect with that teaching.
But it's not tradition for its own sake. The Confederacy in the Civil War, for example, was defending tradition. It was a bad tradition, though, and did need to be changed.>
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