Tradition

Traditions are webs of related practices comprised of inherited patterns of thought and actions. They are constituted by beliefs and practices that are handed down from the past. A tradition is a temporal chain that exhibits the historical continuity of the individual beliefs and practices that make it up, each of which expresses some formative influence on subsequent incarnations. In addition to the temporal connections that result from providing the starting point for its later exemplars, the instances properly thought to make a tradition embody conceptual connections with one another. The beliefs and practices of a tradition that are transmitted over time exhibit at least a minimal level of conceptual coherence and consistency, forming an intelligible whole that evinces why they go together. Thus, we call tradition the chain of variant interpretations that people make, as in the Kantian tradition or the liberal tradition. As a sequence or chain of interpretive variations that people receive and transmit over time, traditions are connected by the development of common themes, not limited to the contiguity of presentation and departure or descent from a common origin.

Many things affect human behavior and that which can be socially transmitted through time is a broad category, including ritual practices, habits, images of people and events, and beliefs of all kinds—be they secular or sacred, transmitted orally or through writing, formed through experience or arrived at by ratiocination and logical deduction. Material objects may well be thought to comprise traditions—a particular monument, building, machine, painting, or novel is sometimes invoked as a particular tradition. But it is the cluster of qualities and ideas they embody in representation that are properly thought to make a tradition. No concrete practice, institution, or object itself endures through time, since an action ceases to exist once it is performed and objects are undergoing continuous morphosis due to their inherent molecular activity and by dint of their changing environment. The transmissible parts of human life that can endure as traditions, however, are the mental images, memories, patterns of actions, and clusters of related ideas about them.

Traditions are normative as they constitute conditions for subsequent actions and in most cases also precedents for what future actions should be like. The patterns that guide action have to do with not only the ends sought but the conceptions of appropriate and effective means to attain those ends, along with the relationships that result from and are maintained by those actions. Traditions are thus normative in the sense that they incorporate beliefs for requiring, permitting, recommending, or otherwise regulating its reenactment. For this reason, traditions perform the role of socialization and the inculcation of particular beliefs, value systems, and specific conventions of behavior. Because traditions rely on group [Page 976]membership—in the form of communities that are either real or artificial—they not only symbolize but also legitimize social cohesion. Traditions are further normative in the sense that they establish or endorse particular social institutions and relations of power and authority.

Despite the many normative aspects of traditions, being handed down does not itself logically entail any explicit expectation that it should be accepted, appreciated, or otherwise assimilated. Traditions do not independently establish or reproduce themselves; no tradition can elaborate or promulgate itself. Only living, knowing, and desiring human beings can enact and reenact a tradition. No tradition exists apart from those who propound, subscribe to, and otherwise recognize various conceptions as such. Above all, the characteristic feature of a tradition is that the pattern of thought and action in question is created and recreated by people through their interactions with each other, relayed through several generations of remaking by interpersonal means. When we speak of any tradition, thus, we speak of that which has exemplars and custodians.

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