Tradition

...What is this value of tradition...

...The grandmother, in knotting two bits of thread, wants them to stay knotted, and an angel, or as idiots call it, evolution, has taught her how to tie it, but the whole point of a reefing knot is that you do not want it to stay tied...

...It has certain dangers and these are of two quite distinct kinds...

...Because, in the first place, tradition is a cumulative knowledge...

...The "granny" is almost impossible to untie...

...No doubt it is human and right, if you have the time, to tell the boy why the reefing knot has its virtues and subserves its end (which is the mark of virtue...

...The moderns who talk as though new surroundings were necessary and had to be conformed to, talk nonsense...

...It is certainly salutary and preservative...

...It creates feelings of content...

...Why is it so important to observe with reverence what our fathers did, to continue their habits, to follow in their footsteps...

...The rule would seem to be, rather try to change your surroundings than change the tradition...

...I am taking for my text the domestic value of tradition to mankind...

...It is tradition that has handed on proportion in the achievement of beauty...

...Men do not only make reefing knots (I wish that most men were more employed in that excellent occupation), they also cook, hunt, read, build, write and so forth, and in all of these they are in their own tradition, and always (or nearly always) the tradition is of the same kind...

...But much more important than these material things, tradition makes a man spiritually full...

...The best example of this is the repetition of words which have lost their meaning to those who repeat them and to those who hear them...

...Sometimes novel surroundings are inevitable...

...When men do a thing without liking it, without the least idea of why they do it, there will be no profit from doing it...

...I TRADITION By HILAIRE BELLOC WRITE here not on tradition in the theological sense— that is, upon the truth that we ought to trust tradition quite as much as documents for the establishment of Christian truth—for such talk is above my level, though sometimes I indulge in it...

...What the perverted will of man has done, the right will of man can undo...

...A man compelled to sail the seas must give up the traditions of the land...

...Dead tradition ought always to be abandoned...

...But it is folly to say that when evils come upon society you must conform to them rather than reform them...

...You want it to hold against a very heavy strain, and yet to let it go at a moment's notice...

...It is tradition that has formed right morals and right manners...

...It is even holy...

...There is a detestable philosophy which tells us that we can become accustomed to evil until it ceases to be an evil...

...It gives him multiplicity and humility and repose...

...It is tradition that makes man altogether man...

...And tradition may be unsuited to a change of surroundings...

...The grandmother does it in her own tradition and she is quite right...

...Our first business is not to yield but to resist...

...Take the reefing knot...

...Let the boy learn to tie a reefing knot and why it is done, and next year or the year after, or on the edge of the grave in extreme old age discover the rationale of it...

...The instinct is right...

...I am writing only of tradition in its most secular sense—I might almost say in its most pagan sense...

...but the sea is a rumbustious place and there is not often time for more than tradition...

...But tradition, harmful through not being in pleasant surroundings, is a very difficult matter to tackle...

...All sane men feel instinctively that it is important, and the more wisdom men acquire by length of days and suffering combined—for these two properly connected together are the constituents of wisdom—the more they require tradition...

...He would not be able to speak (language is traditional) or to cook his food (cooking is traditional) or to shelter himself from cold and wet (all the crafts are traditional...

...When tradition is warped, it is warped by being used as a dead thing...

...The "granny" knot is the instinctive knot of mankind...

...But why is this...

...When your boy first goes out to sea he cannot understand why one knot, when he has to reef a sail, will not do as well as another, and ten to one he will tie what is called a "granny" knot...

...No one is altogether without tradition, for anyone without tradition would die...

...If you ask me how tradition, the cement of unity, can be restored in a society ground to powder—as is ours today—I can only answer, "by individual effort"—by the approach to right doctrine upon all occasions, to the great immediate disadvantage of the preacher and of those whom he is attacking, but to the ultimate advantage of their world...

...For it is the accumulated experience of our fathers, sometimes for a few generations, more often for an incalculable number of generations...

...It feeds him perpetually...

...Their continuance in doing it is an error...

...Has this appetite for tradition, then, which is normal to us, no dangers...

...That is why it is called a "granny...

...If the climate of a people formerly arctic turns tropic they must give up the tradition of thick clothes...

...Tradition may be warped...