thread: 2006-09-08 : Ben on breaking tradition
On 2006-09-08, Ben Lehman wrote:
Ah! Spotlight on me. Pressure and sweating.
Of course, this is what I believe, and if you don't think it's true, I don't have issue with that. I'm not interested in defending my argument, simply in presenting my viewpoint. I'd also like to see your viewpoint presented!
So I think that absolutely the smartest thing to do is to stick with tradition. Frankly, tradition + tradition + tradition (rather than the Anglican tradition + scripture + reason) seems to be the way to go, in terms of your own happiness and safety as a person.
When people break with tradition, it's damaging. It's damaging to them, and it's damaging to those they love. This is above-and-beyond any particular damage that their breaking has: breaking tradition is psychologically bad for humans. When we're operating outside of our familiar sphere, we get nervous, jumpy, paranoid. We can't sleep. We become total wrecks.
All things being equal, it's stupid to break tradition. Usually, it's even worse than that, because the tradition exists for a damned good reason, and we're just blind to it, and will suffer the material consequences in addition to the psychological ones above.
But we do it. We are constantly breaking with tradition and doing our own crazy thing. Not only doing things that have never been done before, but trying things which have been done countless times before and failed, repeatedly and decidedly. I want to make it clear: we do these things at great cost to ourselves and our loved ones, and even people we don't know will suffer for our foolishness.
But let's unpack that "we" a bit. I use it consciously, and I think that a lot of us here are at the intersection of multiple radical traditions (that is ... the tradition of breaking traditions) and it's a little hard to unpack that.
A lot of us here are Americans. America is a strange country. It was founded breaking with millenia of human governing tradition, trying to establish a new sort of government, completely unprecedented, with no indication that it would work at all (indeed, some would say it hadn't.) Our revolutionary tradition runs deeper than that, though. There's a reason that America is home to a constant stream of new religions, revolutionary groups, theocrat idealists, and isolationist communes. It's what we were made to do. There is nothing more American than revolution.
Look at (arguably) our highest document. We are entitled to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." We're not, specifically not, entitled to happiness, but rather to its pursuit. If we were all entitled to happiness, the proper thing for us to do would be not innovate at all, to live life exactly as our fathers and mothers had lived it, and to change little at all. But we're not. We're entitled to pursuit of happiness. And look what it has yielded: "I think I'll be happy if I worship Cthulu," "I think I'll be happy if I live in a communal farming household," "I think I'll be happy if I'm the seventh wife of the Prophet," "I think I'll be happy shooting heroin." I mean, seriously, what the hell? These things look patently stupid to a reasonable individual, steeped in tradition. But that doesn't matter. We're not looking at maximizing happiness, but maximizing it's pursuit. And that means experimentation, revolution, iconoclasty, and spitting in the face of the smart way of doing things.
(There was a note here about protestant religion, and how Catholicism is at this point also protestant, and on and on, and also Atheism, but I'm not going to get into it, because I'm neither religious nor atheist and I don't want to tread on the deeply held beliefs of the audience of this blog without good reason.)
Okay, so what about the non-Americans? We'll, a more important note is our own endeavour, what we talk about a lot on this blog. We are all of us here storytellers, of the excellent sort, which is to say we are storymakers and not simply storyrepeaters. We (and I'm talking about live fiction players, here, not designers) are in the business of making new stories. This isn't just a big deal, this is a huge deal.
For those who don't get it yet:
Each and every tradition is a story
Each and every religion is a story
Each and every nation is a story
Each and every revolution is a story
And we are in the business of making new ones, ill-advised and in a novel manner, for no our own personal purposes, without thought or care to our poor traditions, religions, nations, and revolutions, and how much violence we must be doing to them.
All right, let's sink that in. If you're going "holy shit, Ben, are you saying that what we're doing is like using a nuclear bomb to heat our soup?" then yes, that is what I'm saying.
(Aside to designers: do you realize what we're doing? We're not just making new stories, we're giving the untrained and quite-possibly-unethical masses tools to do so on their own, to make their stories more effective, more powerful, and more personal. The ethics of this situation are insane.)
So what? So, here's what I have to say, in a nutshell. Breaking tradition is stupid. There's no good reason to do it, as a person. But yet we do it anyway. I have some guesses as to why, some justifications really, but it doesn't matter.
Is breaking tradition—which is really just a different way to say "making new stories—" right or wrong? Stupid or smart?
I don't know. I really don't. But if it was wrong and stupid, I would do it anyway. And I think that goes for a lot of people reading this. So I guess it doesn't really matter to us, does it?
yrs—
—Ben
P.S. And here's my justification: I think it's for the best. I think that, for the whole species, it's just a good thing to have crazy nutjobs trying their own thing, on the off-chance that they stumble on something that just works better, and then everyone can adopt it, and that's just good for the whole, even though the radical individual and those close to her will invariably suffer.
See? Pretty lame.
