Two Ways to Get Tradition Wrong
Friday, May 18, 2007
By Nicholas Desai
Hearing so often the phrase “Lest the old traditions fail” at panel discussions and reading it so repeatedly in mass blitzes and college promotional literature has become like watching a cod being beaten to death on a dock. In this instance, I feel sorry for the cod. That line is in that song, after all, so we ought to revisit it with fresh eyes. The phrasing in Richard Hovey’s original lyrics is a bit ambiguous:
Men of Dartmouth, set a watch
Lest the old traditions fail
Are the men to intervene if they see the traditions failing? Or are they simply to figure out when they’ve failed, take note, and move on? One suspects Hovey meant the former. And when has a tradition failed? Of course there are myriad ways, but two are the most current. They operate by getting the very idea of tradition wrong.
In the first, wrong version, tradition is reverence bordering on fetishism for old things. But the old things—trinkets, apparel, names, sayings—are inevitably appropriate only for the museum gift shop. They’re kitschy in flavor. Typing rotten poems in Olde English font is a shining example of debased ‘tradition’ that flows from fetishism for the old. Using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ to sound old-timey (though you unknowingly use them incorrectly) is egregiously in this same direction. Preoccupation with traditionalist outward appearances is ominous. Other examples include asking people to call you “the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock.” Stating emphatically that you just love tradition is often a symptom of the onset of this disease—extra points if you make this known via e-mail, gold star if you research traditions in which to participate using Wikipedia.
What is interesting about times that preceded ours is not superficial difference, which can be reproduced as a kind of joke, in mock solidarity with the past. Rather, it is the meaningful differences that are interesting. (“For what cause would they give their lives?” is an interesting question.) Still, these faux-traditionalists tend to maintain lives extremely similar to those of their peers, ‘traditionalist’ or not. Lifestyle to them is just a costume. In this sense, I compare the old-timey festishists to hipsters, who revel in camping it up. A low blow, it’s true, but there it is.
In the second, wrong version, tradition is just a codeword for what’s around. Here, the superficiality of tradition becomes all the more crucial. It means believing that when Daniel Webster said, “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And, yet there are those who love it!” he was referring to our small student-professor ratio. At one point, an official task of the ‘Director of Student Life’ Linda Kennedy was to ‘create traditions,’ as if the kids needed something with which to fill their days. The ‘Regurgitator,’ a strange, well-paid man who swallows and vomits up all sorts of zany objects, comes around every year; I suppose he’s angling for the status of tradition. Maybe recycling paper and plastic will become a tradition. There’s the Salty Dog Rag—well, here the phrase ‘just going through the motions’ no longer needs to stay figurative. The song sounds old, what with its cracklin’; something about “Great Grandma” and “Great Grandpa”—O.K.; the class before yours danced it during orientation; they call it a tradition, for Pete’s sake—hell, it’s a tradition! Except not at all. That’s like an atheist who paints an Easter egg and says he ‘gets’ religion.
Tradition is not merely mimicking the previous generation. Sheer repetition shares with tradition its tediousness, its difficulty, and its need for enforcers. But tradition goes further and means something, even if that meaning is foisted onto it for completely irrational reasons. If it’s invested with some purpose, it doesn’t have to be created by the Director of Student Life. Not only does it occur but people—spontaneously!—care. The Salty Dog Rag is not life-changing, unless, for example, you meet your future spouse in the midst of it, or you trip on a root and kill yourself, and so forth—these are usually unintentional results. Meanwhile, feeling that Illuminati scepter tap your shoulder sends a mild chill down the spine, because, well, unfortunately I can’t tell you. And in between these two occurrences is a whole spectrum of human interactions considered significant by participants. If tradition were to disappear, purpose would have to disappear first. (Not an impossible scenario, however.)
Both of these terrible versions of tradition have something in common: in them, tradition is effectively dead; it has no effect on day-to-day life except superficially; there is no risk in accepting it. But the desire to have tradition without risk is nonsensical; tradition, by its very nature, alters behavior in significant ways, and anytime one makes an important choice, one foregoes alternatives. (In a less abstract sense, traditions can themselves be physically dangerous, if you recall the various gauntlets, kidnappings, and ‘running seasons.’) Tradition is not really defensible through reason. Throwing tennis balls onto an ice rink makes zero sense, neither does jumping over several kegs on ice. Such rituals tend to have quasi-rational origins, which become obscure and finally unimportant. People persist in them for purposes that are unknown to them, and perhaps they know they are unknown. For instance, this weekend, approximately one billion parties will be thrown for no reason. This is tremendous. We ought to enjoy it while we can.
|
