thread: 2006-09-08 : Ben on breaking tradition
On 2006-09-09, Thomas Robertson wrote:
All things being equal, it's stupid to break tradition.
Ben, this phrase is true, but I think that it misses something fundamentally important: all things are not equal.
I don't just mean this in a 'the real world is not the theoretical world, and thus things can not be perfectly the same' sense, but rather I mean this in a 'societies exist within dynamic and shifting circumstances' sense.
That doesn't mean that traditions are bad or anything (far from it), but it does suggest that static adherence to tradition is bad. Sticking to what worked in circumstance X while circumstance Y has replaced X is just as bad as (if not worse) than trying new things that might work in X when you already have traditions that work fine.
All this ends up meaning, for me, that story-telling is one of the ways that societies remain nimble. We've got to be on our toes not just to come up with new ways to handle the same old circumstances, but also to be able to come up with ways to handle brand new circumstances that our traditions don't speak to.
That doesn't make it any less powerful (I'm extremely hesitant to use the word 'dangerous' though I think I see why you feel it applies), but it does put things in a slightly different perspective from the one I feel you are looking at things from.
Thomas
