Standing Athwart Geology, Yelling “Stop!”
Some thoughts on tradition, cultural change, and inevitability.
We can readily observe man-made changes to our environment. The building of roads, of houses & offices; a restaurant going out of business and being replaced by another. The progression of these events is observable and noticeable over timespans ranging from weeks to even years. The changes to our physical earth however happen at a much slower pace, barely perceptible over the course of a lifetime. They are happening all the time, just so slowly that we often are not capable of noticing the the difference from one decade to the next, let alone smaller intervals. Somewhere in a more abstract space, the same is true of culture. The beliefs and the behaviors that follow from those beliefs occur in both the physical space (behaviors/actions) and the abstract space of thought, symbolism & meaning, and the communal links (or schisms) that they produce. Of course, at some level all these things are intertwined; our man-made & natural surroundings collide with a culture in a feedback loop that is constantly being redefined, but it was during a recent conversation with my brother about some of the family traditions we participating in growing up, and what he hopes his kid will do, combined with a recent reading of Fustel de Coulanges’ remarkable ‘The Ancient City’ that I began thinking more about the similarities between the slow erosion of the land and the way culture - specifically traditional practices’ change slowly over time.
The figure above allows one to conceptualize the process by which, over the span of eons, our physical environment is shaped and changed through slow-acting but unrelenting forces. In this case, there is a progression through a series of phases: a plateau is reduced to a mesa, then a butte, then a monument, which itself is gradually whittled away into dust. This process of gradual but unceasing change seems a fitting metaphor for thinking about the ways cultures change over time, particularly as the vectors used to transmit values, belief, and a sense of communal integration change. This will necessarily involve vastly simplifying a complex & iterative process, in which no single factor or component can be abstracted and within which everything feeds back on everything else.
As any change typically involves trade offs, and affects different parties positively or negatively, I should make it clear from the beginning that I am seeking only to describe a process, and not making value judgments. Cultural formation, dilution and replacement (re-creation) is an inevitable by-product of the evolution of society and the free movement of peoples. Many communities are defined by “natives” (typically those who were born there, regardless of depth of past lineage) who would like to “pull up the ladder” to outsiders, though this is, of course, unrealistic, if not downright problematic. Nor is this a wistful longing for “bygone times”, even when the nostalgia card is referenced further on.
I. The Plateau
The plateau is a raised expanse of land. A solid and cohesive mass, singular and distinct from the landscape it is situated in. Depending on your coordinates and the size of the plateau, you can be on the plateau and not even realize it. Everything around you appears as uniform, continuous ground; it is effective the landscape. As a metaphorical vehicle, we can think of the plateau as a tightly-knit society, where many people share the same values and traditions. While there may be some local diversity in the topography, the constituent elements of the structure are more often than not bundled in close proximity to similar elements, in this case, largely homogenous populations who share many of the same beliefs and values. The bonds and understanding created through the comfort of shared norms are likewise strong in the sense that they promote broad trust, social capital, and a sense of community. Even when people engage in activities at the family or domestic level, and not necessarily in larger communal groups, there the implicit understanding that the activity is symbolic of something larger, representing a shared experience that roots them in broader context and significance; they feel and would identify themselves as members of a particular group.
II. The Mesa
With enough time, cracks form in all things. Water invades interstitial spaces and carries off sediment, patiently and methodically transforming the territory. When this process happens over a long enough span, the plateau is eventually reduced to a mesa. The mesa as a formation is still distinct, formidable, and cohesive, but unquestionably diminished from its former state. You know you are on or near the mesa because (with exceptions), no matter where on or in its vicinity you are, it stands out in contrast to the surrounding landscape. But then there are things around that are obviously not the mesa. Depending on the extent of the erosion, the mesa may not be sufficiently large to be the map itself, only a feature on it. We can say that it exists within a context, is one of several elements situated amongst the others around it and distinct from it, though it may remain the largest single element.
What is not immediately discernable is the temporal dimension. The knowledge that, of the mesa’s contours and surroundings, these things (even if they are just “empty space”) occupy space that used to be the plateau, but now are something else. Like a Russian nested doll, the contours of the mesa are somewhere within the plateau. The mesa is the plateau minus something. The mesa is the ‘positive’ space remaining during the continual process of the erosion of the plateau. The things surrounding the mesa (i.e. the negative, the parts that were carved away by erosion) that were once the plateau but which are now absent, are invisible.
Nor is it apparent how extensive the plateau used to be (what % of the plateau is represented by the mesa), how quickly each part changed, and whether all changed at mostly the same rate or not. Without a timelapse sequence playing the event at an accelerated rate, we cannot immediately discern or envision any of these details; how big it once was, where the initial faults formed that eventually turned into rivers, canyons, valleys, carrying material away from the plateau, or how long it took.
As a reduced state of the plateau, the mesa represents a society in which the shared values have been sufficiently diluted such that the society is no longer as tightly knit or cohesive as in its former state. Cracks have formed, creating distance between elements which, although they still share common characteristics, and are still relatable to each other, are drifting further apart with time.
Depending on their proximity to these cracks and negative spaces, they are no longer fully immersed in or bounded by elements fully like themselves; they may share borders with quite different elements - the extent of “enclosure” experienced by a high percentage of the group has diminished. In the context of societies, this represents a dilutive effect, which can itself comprise both processes of addition of some new element and subtraction of existing ones. New factors have been introduced to and mixed with the existing ones, inserting themselves increasingly between the elements that used to be their immediate neighbors.
III. The Butte
Next comes the transition from mesa to butte. The butte stands as a single, individuated object, most notable not for encompassing the terrain, but for its contrast to it. While it can be a commanding presence in the landscape, nobody would define it as being the landscape, only a feature within the landscape. It may be in proximity to a number of other similar features - all of which were once connected as the plateau/mesa - but between which there is now sufficient distance that they appear as, and feel, unique, isolated, and no longer part of a contiguous whole.
We could say that the butte represents a small isolated neighborhood or neighborhood comprised of mostly similar peoples. In terms of sharing a tradition or cultural patterns, there may be a “majority” sentiment, but which exists in a highly diluted form and may be functionally inert with regard to the ability to build new communal bonds, if altogether unable to do much more than slow the fraying of existing bonds. Being sufficiently isolated from others who share like values & traditions, it is unable to build a critical mass of similarly interested parties. Indeed, building or rebuilding such external/communal bonds may sound like - or actually be - a goal, but as the group disperses further and new elements are injected, the reality is that it is simply facing a losing battle against time and inertia. Shared traditions, to the extent they are still practiced, have become divorced from their initial meaning, and no longer possess the same communal resonance they once did.
IV. The Monument
Eventually, we reach the end of the line, and the butte has tapered down into a monument. Similar to, but smaller in scale than the butte, it is the lowest unit of measure in our chain, and for our purposes can encompass the subsequent reduction into so much component dust until it eventually disappears from the landscape forever. Its isolation against the backdrop of a landscape distinct from it gives it its character. Like the butte, it can be in relative proximity to other formations similar to it, but sufficiently separated by the negative space between that they are effectively solitary.
Relating back to society, the monument represents the atomized individual or disintegrating family unit, floating in a sea of alienation and contrast; any activities which could in any way be construed as remnants of traditional gestures are now almost purely vestigial artifacts, culturally inert, run completely on autopilot and, at most, perhaps, producing a twinge of nostalgia for one’s own childhood, but which produces no sensation of having once belonged to anything broader than the immediate family.
The name “monument” is ironic as, in a consumer society, the individual is unmoored from anything approaching a sense of cultural rootedness, and essentially stands as a moment to their own individuality, their own totem of self. More depressingly, yet I think starkly true (and ultimately a good thing to come to grips with early on), they are superficially distinct from, yet spiritually completely interchangeable with, all other monuments/individuals. Their self-appraisal of their worth as individuals is owed almost entirely to the quality of being uniqueness, which is only to say that they share a quality of superficial non-fungibility that has no relation to any actual intrinsic value in itself; it is a fallacious conflation of all conditions of scarcity with value. This misunderstanding of the value of the individual prevents the creation of social capital as the western spirit is more prone to retreat into itself to cultivate what it believes is an even more unique and therefore even more valuable individual, but one that is always a work in progress, and never ready to actually engage with, to actually do anything in the world. (Being unique is not the end all be all, my monument friends. You can do great and important things, even if they are the same great & important things that other generic and ‘boring’ people are doing.)
Fault Lines
It may be impossible to determine the exact moment of the phase transition, or line which, on one side unquestionably lies a plateau, and on the other lies something unrecognizable as anything but a mesa (or mesa and butte, butte and monument). The processes of erosion and change work slowly and steadily, transforming the landscape around us, and with it our memory of it and the way we operate within it. The incremental changes are so slight and happen so slowly that they can be difficult to perceive in a lifetime, but every change to the ecosystem produces some cascading effect somewhere down the line. Note that each ‘stage’ is contained fully within the former, but until the change happens, it is impossible to plot with certainty the contours of the subsequent phase and, likewise, from the subsequent phase, it is impossible to look backwards and see the full outline of the prior configuration. As a people in the digital age (and perhaps true enough in any age), we often have a hard enough time seeing where we are, left alone where we’ve been or where we are headed.
As the composition and the values of society changes, the value and practice of traditions that were previously unifying features during the society’s more cohesive phases become degraded and diluted to the point where they an act of conditioned reflex, retaining at best vertical lines of connective sentiment, but whose horizontal connections are stunted or severed altogether. This is the condition of cultural fossilization or inertness.
The original meaning of the gesture has been lost - evolved, from another perspective - and may even be incomprehensible, if not downright offensive to the modern practitioner. We continue to carry out the gestures of tradition until one day they just fall away completely. This aspect of breakdown is important, as things happen so slowly in the process of cultural erosion, that any traditional act or gesture performed by any single individual can often only be seen in the context of the current state of the societal formation in which they are embedded; the act that had real relevance and cohesive power in the plateau or mesa phase can seem arbitrary or purely ceremonial, and therefore of questionable utility, in more eroded states. Eventually, instead of just going through the motions one day, we stop and ask ourselves, “why am I doing this again?“ Finding no satisfactory answer, the practice is finally altogether discarded as so much cultural deadweight, like a layer of skin shed. If it produces anything, it is purely nostalgia, but is incapable of reproducing its originally intended effects.
In the aforementioned “The Ancient City”, Fustel de Coulanges painstakingly (and awesomely, brilliantly; seriously - read it if you like history) plots the formation of the laws that governed ancient Greek, Roman & Hindu peoples. The roots of these laws are traced back to a system of exact & sacred rites followed at the family level to honor the ancestral dead of the family, and which involved very distinct roles, prohibitions, and duties at each level. The basis of the laws understood to govern behavior as these peoples cohered into larger tribal, and ultimately city/societal-sized groups was to be found in this preceding context of family religion in that they were not concerned with “justice”, “fairness”, or anything approaching those concepts (especially as we know them; and yes, it was very hierarchical, with the male head of the family essentially in the role of high priest, but to fixate on that aspect is not the point), but solely for the sake of ensuring that the proper rites are observed in the proper context by the proper people at the proper time and according to the proper procedures, all for the purpose of ensuring the perpetuation of the lineage through homage to the dead. In short, it was not the “content” of the law that really mattered, but simply that the law was observed and regarded as immutable, as indivisible and unbreakable, such was the importance of ensuring the duty & responsibility of all parties involved to carrying out the sacred rites and traditions. Many of the insanely strict rules would strike us as being very arbitrary indeed.
And sure enough, as cultural & societal norms evolved - in this case, with the cohering forces of society moving away from a foundation of family-centered religious practices - they did indeed begin to feel arbitrary. I cannot do all of Foulanges’ work justice in a few sentences, but it was essentially an adopting of the religious rites by groups previously prohibited from practicing those rites, in a bid to achieve some measure of equality with their privileged ‘legitimate’ practitioners, which undermined the vehement arguments of those ‘legitimate’ practitioners” that only those pure of lineage, blood, etc., could possibly hold the status of being ‘legitimate’ practitioners of these rites. Equality of practice upset and revealed as arbitrary the traditional power balances and rendered its exclusivity - and the power that went along with it - inert. Losing their power & context, especially as the religion changed, and with it the governing aspects of ancient society, people continued to practice the rites out of habit, until they simply fell away, or were replaced by participation in new modes of societal engagement and governance.
It is not so much that traditional practices start to suddenly seem arbitrary - they were always arbitrary, they just lose their symbolic meaning over time, or the conditions that conferred status upon their practitioners are diluted, and any exclusivity or power held as a result is likewise diluted. Perhaps most importantly, the subordinate classes of mankind learned the lesson in this process that laws can come not just from gods, but from man.
Corrosive Convenience
Learning from Fulanges, the erosive process often takes forms that seem quite harmless, often good - because what is more good than equality? Fast forwarding back to the current day, we can examine an extremely innocuous example: the holiday “meal kit”, which is now a staple offered by many restaurants. Just as we can set aside the patriarchical/hierarchical aspects of the ancient laws, for we are not here to judge, but examine, we can just observe that the meal kits are neither intrinsically good nor bad in and of themselves. They are simply an artifact of laws being shaped by the needs of the mores operating in the environment in which they are situated - in this case a market economy, in which components of tradition can be reframed as “effort” or “drudgery”, thus creating a problem which the market then heroically rushes in to solve for (at a competitive price which buyers and sellers come to a mutual agreement upon such that everyone benefits, so it goes.) No judgment, it’s just doing what it does.
So, so much of culture & tradition is bound up in the planting / harvesting / preparing / consumption of food. Its role in unifying peoples throughout history is almost impossible to overstate, and thus it is with sad irony that we pay an aside here to note that food, at least in the west, has become a source of (and palliative solution to) so many pathologies in our society, and that so many of us now have a fundamentally unhealthy relationship with it, particularly during the holidays, no less.
Growing up in the 1980s, my immediate family, grandparents, and my parent’s siblings were all concentrated in New England, and thus we got together often; Thanksgiving & Christmas dinners, 4th of July cookouts. I looked as forward to seeing everyone as I looked forward to the aroma of my grandmother’s green bean casserole, the splendor of the pecan pie, or the ham. But beyond the food itself was the communal process of preparing it; the banter and hustle & bustle of the kitchen, the index cards with the old family recipes in my grandmother’s beautiful handwriting, the pots, pans & utensils that we all inherited, and through them the bonds that were strengthened in the laborious but fun process of carrying out these traditions.
In the philosophy of the holiday meal kit, this is overhead that can be reduced, additional work, [implicitly] low-class, and that, after many long weeks of juggling a work/life balance leading up to the holidays, there are enough additional things to worry about [mainly shopping] that you should not only take the opportunity to - but not feel guilty about - kicking back, and letting somebody else handle the cooking this year. Because you’ve earned it. And probably you have; the point is that the solution is never framed as a more convenient alternative to “bonding with your family, friends, and loved ones during the communal preparation of a holiday meal”, but an avoidance of something unpleasant; just another chore. The former probably does less well in focus groups.
Life is a Chore
And the labor-intensive quality of tradition is very important to emphasize, precisely as it must be emphasized in both the positive and negative aspects; it absolutely IS an expenditure of time and work. But it is also an investment. There is a connection between spending time together, the release of energy in pursuit of a common goal which exists across the generations present not just in the particular moment - of this holiday - but also temporally, reaching into the past and future for those involved, for all holidays. We remember past holidays, and the participants no longer with us, and look forward to future holidays with the same people and new additions as the family grows. And while we may not think explicitly of them, the surrounding community is simultaneously undertaking the same actions in their nearby homes all around us, with the same thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
Regularly spending time together with family working towards a common task of hosting & feeding relatives, friends, neighbors, and the purpose that those tasks served makes the statement that we care about these people, and our connection to them enough to put that effort in, that these relationships were worth preserving. Yes, preparing food is hard work - cutting butter into pie dough, chopping vegetables, making ham glaze - but performing the same tasks year after year provided a connection to the past, enabling us to mentally place ourselves in the same roles from holidays of prior years, while simultaneously signaling that it was important to carry this on in the future and enjoying the present. Even if the holiday meal kit tastes superior, the vibe is different; spending a couple hours in the kitchen - laughing about mistakes, assuring your hapless aunt that the green bean casserole that turned out ‘disastrously’ is ‘not so bad!’, bantering, bonding, catching up on the candid conversation that such situations foster - is an entirely different holiday atmosphere to showing up, eating a $65/person pre-made ensemble meal, even if you have some dim awareness that the hours the purchaser spent toiling on spreadsheets to purchase that meal had the same good intentions of ‘investing in the family.’ The effect, and what you get out of it, is not the same. It is not just about having a good meal; you can do that any time of the year if you have the money.
Thus tradition is a gestalt which has the unfortunate aspect of potentially being perceived as a series of tedious chores which can be easily outsourced. However while you can outsource the food component, the bonding component is harder to substitute; the trade off with the meal kit is you free up the hours of cooking, but then you spend it watching television “together”, or, people just show up, eat, and then leave. It may be ‘more relaxing’ in one sense, but the lack of a shared goal or project means that, at the end of the afternoon you do not have the sense that the day and all the memories of it were made possible by the collective contributions of everyone involved. When nothing is produced or overcome, the resulting bonds are weaker than if the group accomplishes a collective task, the fruits of which are subsequently enjoyed together. Putting it another way, everybody may cheer on the same football team, but in a broader societal context, football carries a much broader & less personal appeal than a family shoo-fly pie recipe; groups that are formed around narrower and more esoteric or exclusive criteria will, on average, share stronger bonds than groups formed on broader, less exclusive criteria (duh).
Erosion by Atrophy
Fundamental in the mix of our meal kit example is the recasting of “work” as purely laborious, of being only a means to end, and something therefore to be approached with an entrepreneurial mindset of making it as expedient as possible, of embracing every available tool to reduce the time spent, if not avoid it altogether by outsourcing it. This framing of work ignores the aforementioned benefits you only get by doing the actual work, and which make the end product something larger than the sum of its parts. Work becomes a chore to be avoided, and not a process of exercise through which we become stronger.
The work & exercise aspect is important in another dimension: to the extent that tradition relies on the use of specific skills or knowledge, if we increasingly drink from the well of convenience, the less we need to rely on such skills at all. And skills not practiced atrophy, and skills not possessed are skills not passed down. Stated more simply: the lack of a conduit through which to make a generational connection results in the lack of connection if it is not replaced by something with equivalent connective power. Many basic skills - cooking, changing oil or a flat tire, mending a tear in a piece of clothing - have been obsolesced by progress, and with their growing scarcity, their relevance as cultural vectors and opportunities to forge generational bonds diminishes accordingly. And I do not have a sense of the skills or activities that are replacing tradition; are families bonding at the holidays as their kids showing the adults how to buy crypto? What are the new vectors of tradition?
The randomly googled recipe that we trust by the number of reviews (by total strangers) replaces the position previously held by the aforementioned index card recipes; who wants to dig through a drawer in another room for a recipe when the same thing is more or less accessible through a device that is never out of arm’s reach -(if you can’t just order it via UberEats)?
There is seemingly no tradition that the market cannot provide a solution for, cannot find some crack in the surface of that it can penetrate and exploit, wearing away the entire edifice given enough time.
Standing Athwart Geology, Yelling “Stop!”
We must pause here to acknowledge that, absent stubborn, concerted resistance, this seems like simply the way of progress; churning butter, darning socks, and making candles were all once vectors of tradition as well, but vanished well before my lifetime, and I must admit I feel no real unhappiness about never having to do any of them. There is little reason to go out of our way to make life more difficult.
Once shed, particular traditions may return only in the form of niche/kitsch interest, and are devoid of the bonding & transmissive power they once possessed. I’m sure there are some examples to the contrary, but typically, just as a butte will never accrue enough material to ever become a mesa again, once gone, these things do not come back. The new ‘negative space’ created as the landmass erodes is not filled with nothing, but with new forces and ideas which exert their own influence upon the remaining features of the original landmass; dwindling and less concentrated with time, the margins of the remnants become increasingly exposed to things that are not them, and thus as the greater landmass erodes, the remaining nucleus becomes weaker and more scattered. Resistance fades as the apparent ‘cost’ of retaining any element of tradition increases - or as the perceived benefits decrease - and there seems less incentive for any remaining participant to “hold on” to the past. The more no one around us cares, the less we should care.
If I say that it is useless to resist this cultural erosion, I think I must attribute this to at least two reasons:
Firstly, to the extent that I am nostalgic about practices shed in my lifetime, I must try to examine them from the perspective of which “geological” state they were in when I practiced them, which will always be in a stronger state than they are in by the time we come to to find ourselves lamenting how they’ve faded. Take the simple example of Christmas. In my youth, this was already somewhere between the “mesa” to “butte” phases. Most families in the area I lived celebrated Christmas in some form, but very few went to church, went caroling, or participated in any aspect of it that could really be called communal; it was an intra-family thing, a similar but siloed activity that each family did privately among themselves, but was not necessarily declarative of any broader transcendent connection. Hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree is remembered as something we did with our families as a child, and can be a cherished memory. However, while there was maybe some awareness that other people like you were engaging in a similar act at the same time, the history of why these people collectively engaged in that act in the first place is not only lost, but not even considered.
This is to say that Christmas was already only capable of weak-bond formation during the mode in which I experienced it as a child. Within our community, its power had been sufficiently eroded - long before I was born - such that I was unable to see or understand it had previously represented something completely different to prior generations than it did to me. In other words, while I didn’t feel it as a lesser version of something that it previously was, that anything about it was lacking - to me it was all great, and always had been - its culture power had already been deteriorating for some time.
Growing up in the 80’s, I didn't understand that it wasn’t always this purely commercial phenomenon. I knew it is primarily being about stuff; about presents, and the most important ritual was the sober Christmas morning accounting process of reconciling my Christmas wish list to what was actually under the tree. I remember my siblings and I playing with our new toys, but, as presents eventually transitioned from things that required interaction and imagination to almost exclusively video games by the late 80s/90s, even the ability to bond over shared experience become limited & mediated by an electronic device that served more as a barrier to interaction than a facilitator (though I will recognize that many have bonded over videogames, and certainly there was some of that, but it was also offset by memories of fighting over video games, e.g. “mom! he’s hogging the Nintendo / I want a turn”, etc.). When I talked about Christmas with my friends, it was only ever about what we hoped to get / what we got for Christmas.
And today, true as it ever was, to talk about Christmas is to talk about buying stuff, time off work, hassles of traveling around the holidays, family we don’t want to see, Covid was a great excuse for “staying put” the last two years. People sort of talk regretfully about the ‘crass commercialization’ of Christmas (and every other holiday), and yet… it is regret with acceptance; regret that regards the fact that everybody else treats it that way as a means of providing permission for them to do the same. There are seemingly no ways to proceed in any other manner.
(Take the following with a grain of salt; it’s just a hypothesis)
Second, because my concept of what constitutes “tradition” is rooted in a prior time and personal context, I must acknowledge a sense of out-of-touchness with contemporary practices & forms. It could be the case that much large-scale, communal level traditional practices are dying out, or it could be the case that they exist in other forms all around me, but which I do not recognize. Just anecdotally, when I ask my friends, especially those with children, and around the holidays, whether they have any family traditions they look forward to, or anything they hope that their children will continue to pass along, the answer is almost invariably “no.” Occasionally a single “family dish” is referenced, but little beyond that. There could be some availability bias at work here, of course.
Nonetheless, it is difficult for me to see what new forms cultural transmission takes nowadays. As technology changes, the experiences of older generations seem increasingly irrelevant to the issues of the younger. What can our parents tell us about dating, navigating social politics, and the like? My personal belief is that it is actually quite a lot - provided the parents are willing to do so. I think we can, if not rebuild tight-knit communities, at least try to provide solid moral principles, grounded in firm bedrock to younger generations. The two main issues rest with each party. Partially as a consequence perhaps of having fewer children, and partially one of a rising expert class of child psychology professionals, parents are terrified of fucking up their children, of instilling anything in them which could possibly lead them astray - perhaps most notably because of the fear of accompanying stigma. Many people do not want to take the responsibility for making a bad decision, and so we do what we have become so good at - deferring, aka outsourcing - to experts. Increasingly believing the experiences of their own parents to be irrelevant in the digital age, newer parents are becoming hesitant to listen to the advice of their own parents and instead deferring to the generalized guidance of strangers. While this seems an extremely arrogant & presumptuous on my part, and obviously is a huge generalization, I feel like this is both deeply true and exactly the opposite of what they should be doing; parenting itself is a tradition; a process through which values are instilled, and through which generational bonds are forged, and in which authority, trust, competency, legitimacy and signaling that the parent cares about and is invested in the child are recognized & established.
If parents are going to outsource every important decision of what to allow or not, what to do vs don’t do, and be continually petrified of traumatizing their children (and the associated stigma) not to their parents, but to some third party “expert”, not only are they weakening bonds between themselves and their parents, but why should the child view them as any kind of authority figure? We are not here to be our children’s “friends”, but to raise them. Regardless of how “weird”, “fraught” or uncharted the current terrain looks - guess what - our parents went through the same thing, and even if some of the decisions weren’t the greatest, none of the experts we’ve come to depend on have lived through these moments either , and thus have no better knowledge as to how any particular decision will turn out in the long run. It seems to me though that, given the obviously true fact that nobody has yet lived through the ‘current moment that seems to unlike every other moment in history’, it may makes more sense to give less weight to the advice of professionals - well meaning though they be, but strangers to you and your children nonetheless, and more weight to the advice of your peers and parents.
The other side is the children themselves, and their believing that the experience of their parents is relevant, that it is possible that, even though their parents never navigated these exact waters, that there is some chain of constancy whereby the virtues that were historically prized are still applicable today and can have relevance to their lives. Combine this to the somewhat common sentiment of “you just do you”, which goes so far towards emphasizing individual autonomy in a manner that leaves people unmoored from any firm moral bedrock, on the one hand, with the act of constantly seeing their seemingly clueless, flustered, and helpless parents defer continually to expert advice when it comes to raising them (theoretically the most important decisions a parent can make) on the other hand, the learned lesson may be one of deferment not to the parent, but to some credentialed expert?
In this, they learn that their parent doesn’t know what they are talking about, and likewise that they should be at least equally deferential to experts as their parents are when it comes to making their own decisions. When the parents lose confidence in the relevance of their own parents’ intuition, while not even daring to trust their own, this perpetuates an effect which simultaneously erodes the existing bonds of trust & competence, while hamstringing the means of creating new bonds with and transmitting timeless moral values to the new generation. The chains are broken, and the the family unit continues to disintegrate further from a collection of proximal monuments, and thereafter so much dust. Raising children is - yes - hard work, but, it is work that requires exercise to get good at, and the consequences of outsourcing it are the atrophy of those skills and the rewards that come with them.
Back to Flat Earth
From the final stages of erosion and decay, is it even possible to restart a tradition, or kindle a new one? It requires a lot of people wanting it to happen, for starters, which is a difficult thing for a society that is ‘too busy’ and obsessed with convenience, with taking the path of least resistance (which is exactly what the water that erodes our formations does) to mobilize behind, even if they really like the idea of it.
Though this essay has taken a bleaker turn than I envisioned at the onset, one final note must be said regarding autonomy & abstraction. Any individual can decide for themselves to continue a tradition or not, to spend the time to practice skills worth passing down, to defer to the parenting manuals vs trusting their gut. In practice however, these decisions are ultimate community-level ones. In making them individually, we are signally what kinds of communities we want to create, and things within them we value. The more people pursue a path or a choice, the less support, resonance, and relevance it retains in the community. It is not always that the specific acts or rituals entailed in any tradition extend beyond the home and into interaction with the broader community, but rather the knowledge that the broader community shares (largely) the same beliefs, and practices the same traditions that builds trust and social capital and promotes cohesive societies. Broad belief provides a scaffolding upon which trust & relationships may take root and grow. In the absence of that scaffolding, such connections must take root at the individual level, and with no shared substrate, relationships tend to become increasingly transactional in nature; they must constantly justify their existence through some benefit, which is not conducive to forming lasting bonds or establishing a sense of community.
This last point, by the way, is not meant to imply that we all need commune or Amish style living, or to lament some “long lost golden age”, but only to suggest that a little bit of social capital can go a long way in reducing the alienation and disconnectedness so many people experience today. Nor do I think that preserving tradition requires anything approaching a luddite mentality. Instead it requires reclaiming the notion that not all work is bad, of shedding the attitude that we need to subject everything to maximum efficiency and cost-effectiveness, outsourcing and cutting corners where we can. If all that leaves us with is leisure time spent staring at devices, is the “efficiency” not more of a cost than the “onerous” work we’ve avoided? As I would not hold my breath for the monument to reconstitute itself into a butte, eventually back to a mesa, neither would I hold my breath for people willingly adopting, if not the path of most resistance, at least the path of some resistance, of a little more resistance. If all this sounds very conservative and wistful, perhaps that is a consequence of making sentiment a liability.