I’m continuing my reporting on the next installment from Conservative Estimate, the recently founded website that is devoted to demolishing Conservatism.
Yesterday, Alfred George talked about the extent to which Tradition should be respected, and he showed that caring about Tradition stops at the point when it becomes harmful or unjust to society at large.
Today he looks at the combination of Religion and Tradition, and shows that society must disregard both Religion and Tradition when their customs have grown old through the passage of time and begin to be harmful to society.
A skip over the twin orange twinings will take you to our account of his post.
Mr. George begins with the connection between Religion and Tradition: religious people tend to be devoted to the traditions of their faith, and thus they are inclined to grant Tradition the same kind of force as Religion. While this is fine when the religious beliefs and traditions are beneficial to society at large, it is detrimental when they are harmful to society at large.
[B]elievers in the Myth of Tradition tend to have the same myopia about Tradition that they have about Religion. They are so close to the religious beliefs that are meaningful and comforting to them that they either cannot see, or choose not to see, that their religion also contains beliefs that are unjust. Most religions have such beliefs, as well as traditions based on those beliefs.
So religious people connect their implicit faith in the rightness of their religion with an implicit faith in Tradition, because they see their religion as a very large part of Tradition. Unfortunately, this connection locks together two very bad traits: unexamined faith and status-quo thinking.
He goes on to say that such people often justify their harmful traditions, together with their beneficial traditions, with the argument that they provide stability in society. But how much stability does society really need?
It certainly needs some.
It would be a continual torment if we had to think up a new way to do things every time we set about a task—and especially if that task involves other people. By relying on Tradition, we know what is expected of us, and what other people will think of our actions. This predictability and ease is the principal benefit we derive from Tradition.
But there is a limit to how much society can rely on Tradition.
[T]his comfortable stability engendered by Tradition should not be overvalued. Stability is not the chief aim of society—justice is. So stability needs to be weighed against other factors when deciding whether traditions need to change. . . .
Stability, therefore, can only justify a certain amount of Tradition. Beyond that amount, other factors may well demand that we alter our traditions.
You can read the whole post
here.
Tomorrow, Mr. George will examine the dangers of too much reliance on Tradition, and he will show what a bad idea it is to rely too much on Tradition in a world that contains far more change than standstill.
I’ll be reporting back each day as a new installment appears.