> Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.
No, tradition is ways of living that have stood the test of time. They might not be perfect, but the idea that you can just reinvent all that stuff and do it better than tradition is the kind of thing that the Greek word "hubris" was invented for.
Also, upholding tradition doesn't mean being blindly enslaved to it. Part of the reason traditions got that way is that people adapted them when things changed.
Then it's mostly useless to mention at all. We're all practicing traditions and changing them. The reason people have such a visceral response to a phrase like "uphold tradition" is because so many people don't mean "I'm just doing what my family and community have taught me", they are saying "You must follow my traditions".
I get my hair cut every month because my family instilled the tradition of grooming. But for the kind of people I've encountered who want to "uphold tradition", I'm "corrupting" tradition because I don't get a "traditional" man's haircut (aka a typical cut from their window of reference).
Humans uphold tradition by default, we don't really need a reminder to do it and we certainly don't need a reminder to uphold someone else's idea of tradition.
> The reason people have such a visceral response to a phrase like "uphold tradition" is because so many people don't mean "I'm just doing what my family and community have taught me", they are saying "You must follow my traditions".
I don't see pg saying that in the article under discussion. so this criticism, however justified it might be in some cases, doesn't seem to me to be relevant here.
> Humans uphold tradition by default
True, but defaults can be overridden. And culture often tries to do that. See below.
> we don't really need a reminder to do it
In our current culture, where our so-called "elites" do indeed believe that they can reinvent society from scratch, and have been busily destroying traditions for decades in the process, I think we can indeed benefit from such a reminder.
So change them but don't change them? Cool advice. We're one quiet part away from letting "the right" group of people tell us which traditions are the right ones and which ones are so bad we need to cull them from the group.
Hubris is about not knowing your place with regard to those above you (the Greek pantheon) and the inevitability of the reckoning when the gods decide to put you forcefully and often brutally back in (their opinion of) your place. Implying that someone wanting to do what they think is right is both naive and deserves divine retribution is a nasty take indeed.
This "do what you're told", "don't make waves", and "let others handle government/systems/things outside of your zone" sounds an awful lot like the walrus and the carpenter to me.
Change them when it makes sense to change them, bearing in mind that the way they are now has stood the test of time.
> letting "the right" group of people tell us which traditions are the right ones
I said no such thing. The people who decide when traditions need to be changed are the ones who are living them.
> Hubris is about not knowing your place with regard to those above you
And in my use of that as a metaphor, the traditions themselves are the things "above you".
> Implying that someone wanting to do what they think is right is both naive and deserves divine retribution
Someone who is giving a "hard pass" to tradition, as the poster I responded to did, is going way beyond "do what they think is right", since they clearly have not actually thought at all about what traditions are and why they exist.
> This "do what you're told", "don't make waves", and "let others handle government/systems/things outside of your zone"
Is nothing like what I said. You're attacking a straw man.
No, tradition is ways of living that have stood the test of time. They might not be perfect, but the idea that you can just reinvent all that stuff and do it better than tradition is the kind of thing that the Greek word "hubris" was invented for.
Also, upholding tradition doesn't mean being blindly enslaved to it. Part of the reason traditions got that way is that people adapted them when things changed.