Tradition is about learning to apply love and fear to their proper objects, and passing on that knowledge. And it’s not that easy a thing to figure out. Knowing which things are most loveable, what will genuinely benefit us on the deepest and widest timescale, and which are most fearful, which we should genuinely be afraid of on a deep and wide timescale, requires an immense and lengthy process of experimentation and selection. This process carries devastating consequences and has to be developed over the course of uncounted years of practical experience and experimentation, in the ultimate petri dish (the varied and unstable environment of the world), with the highest stakes (life or death).

    The idea that you personally could figure all that out, with your limited amount of perspective, intelligence, and time; with no need to rely on the wisdom of others, especially the wisdom of the past; is hubris on the level of delusions of godhood. And that’s what we believe today. We think that we’re God. We think we can dictate terms to the universe and judge all of time and creation from our lofty perch and direct the world to all its proper ends. We believe that wisdom was born with us and we no longer need the wisdom of anything that came before us. But in the vast scale of life our ideas and passions are so small and so young and so untested that we have more in common with the babe born yesterday than with any great and timeless sage. 

    Our own smallness shouldn’t cause us to give up or despair or stop innovating or thinking, but we need to maintain our perspective. As much as we posses many advantages over the people of the past when it comes to gaining individual understanding, we also possess some serious disadvantages. For one, our technology and our longevity place us at a much farther remove from the consequences of our own actions. We gain our knowledge and spend our efforts very cheaply.

    The wealth and security and knowledge purchased by long effort through the struggles of hundreds of generations places us in a position where we are insulated from the consequences of our choices, and our mistakes and blind spots. We have far greater inheritances and safety nets than they did, which means we must carry far less of our wealth and safety within our own persons.

   That’s what traditions did for us. They were largely internal, not external. They were a technology, an inheritance, we could carry with us to give us power and security whereever we went. And if you didn’t have them or lost them or tried to avoid them, the consequences accrued very quickly and directly. Because you didn’t have a lot else to sustain you, and nothing so well-developed and effective and reliable. Today, we no longer need to carry our traditions within us because we have so much outside us to provide their function of protecting us and providing for us. We have built, or inherited, so much structural power in our environment that we are no longer required to submit to or spend resources on an internal tradition. We can do as we please and expect fairly good results. 
    The truth is, we don’t have the slightest idea yet whether our supposed advancements and innovations are actually good or bad. They haven’t had time to accrue. They’re still too near, they take too long to work out their meaning before we’re already on to the next thing. And as innovation piles on innovation, theory on theory, how can you take the time or even make sense of their overlapping effects to see what they have truly done? You have a verification crisis, where the only real incentive is to keep producing novel creations. 

    And there is always glory and creativity to be claimed in taking apart the things of the past. We possess the accumulated structures of centuries, so we have plenty to keep busy with pulling them down, noting no immediate differences, before moving on to the next set. But bit by bit the effect is accumulating, working itself out. The new terrain slowly, slowly emerges. We can tear things down in a year, but because of the sheer quantity of all that we have inherited and the sheer length of human life, and how long it takes for the generations to turn over, it requires decades for the meaning of our actions to be realized.

    The impact of your choices on the world isn’t really felt until you’ve left it, or at least until two generations on, when your grandchildren are standing in the same point you were when you decided how to live your adult life. That’s when you start to see. How will you be seen by your grandchildren, as they begin to make lives and families of their own. How will they see themselves? That is when you begin to see. True knowledge is always multi-generational.
    I’ve sometimes said that there is no such thing as a human life. There is only one life, and we all share in it; each take it up for our portion of time, and hand it on to those who must come after. There is no division between us and the people of the past. We are them. Their life never ceased. There was never a clean break, never a moment when the life that was in them ended and the life that is us began. A living part of them became the life that is us. It is still alive. And we hand it on. It becomes others. Life is a tradition. There is no us standing alone and seperate, by our own devices. There is only the small part we play in the great story, how well we play it, what we take from the past, and how well we hand it on.

   A tradition that has not been handed on and lived, or that cannot be handed in, that is only for you, is no tradition. It is not a viable life. It is not viable knowledge. It has not been lived. Innovation and reinterpretation is always needed to keep tradition alive and comprehensible for the current moment and the people who must live in it. But the people and the knowledge of the moment must live to become part of the tradition.

    If you cannot find your place within it, then you aren’t anywhere yet. You are merely in the first stage of an explosion of novelty and experimentation that will play out across generations and be littered with the corpses of failed attempts, to be dissected in the fossil record of time when some distant others look back. We love for our moment, in the eternal present, for the unique future we creatively devise. But we live to become part of the past, as the present embodiment of the past reaching into the future, with the foundation and essence of all that came before us, and which we shall in time ourselves become a part of. One more layer of growth on a tree whose roots reach back beyond our imagining. And whose branches must reach far beyond where we now stand. 

    That is the power of tradition. It is the life we are handed, the life we live, and the life we hand on. We cannot despise it without despising what we were, what we are, and what we will be.