The most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In the former the great majority of people live in a 'given' world and in the latter a chosen world. We all live in a given world, of course, one bounded by history, but those of us born into modern societies are bound by history , for better or worse, in a way significantly different from those born into traditional societies. We are not bound in the same way to a world given to us by the ancestors. In fact, we are rather disposed to reject that world. And unlike people born into premodern societies, we have a wide array of alternative values matrixes, of "belief systems" as they've come to be known, from which we can choose. The essence of modernity as contrasted with premodernity is precisely this attitude toward the ancestors, and everything, for better and for worse, follows from that.
The traditionalist resists living in any world different from that given to him by his ancestors. Contemporay American traditionalists, for instance, object to homosexual marriage/civil unions not primarily, IMO, for religious or spiritual reasons. It has more to do with how gay marriage represents yet another stage in the erosion of what remains of the world given to them by tradition. For moderns, the ancestors are guilty until proved innocent, and their innocence can only be proved in the court of rationally determined utility. For premoderns the tradition embodies the wisdom of the ancestors, the culture heroes who lived in a golden age, who understood things to which we have since become insensible to. For moderns, this is nonsense.
While I agree with traditionalists that there is more in the tradition than is visible to the modern eye, I understand modern skepticism about all things premodern, and I embrace putting tradtion on trial, so to speak, but I think that better criteria need to be developed in making judgements about whether the tradition is guilty or innocent.
For western educated elites, there is nothing much about their traditions that is very attractive. If anything, they are embarrassed about the negative impact that that white males have had on the course of world history. But the same sensibility that finds the traditions of the West so unattracitve is very often attracted to non-western traditions. Think about the recent interest in exotic Asian and aboriginal premodern traditions, like martial arts, Buddhist meditative practices, or shamanism. And what's that tatooing all about? That kind of tradtionalism is driven by a weariness with the soul flatness of modernity, and a longing for something that has texture and depth and soul.
So these non-western traditional forms have a 'cool' factor with significantly more interest and credibility for late modern sensibililities than those traditions whose familiarity to us has bred mostly contempt. But do those exotic traditions make claims that withstand the scrutiny of critical conscisousness more resiliiently than the western tradtions we have find contemptible? I don't think so. We tend to see the exotic "foreign" traditions in their best light, the familiar western traditions in their worst. Ask the Chinese what they think of Tibetan traditionalism. They see it much the same way as western seculars look at Catholics–medieval holdovers.
So there's a part of me that connects with the traditionalists because like them I understand that something precious lies in those traditions, but I would make a distinction between a living traditionalism and a zombie traditionalism. A living traditionalism is supple, adaptive, sacramental; a zombie traditionalism is brittle, rigid, non-adaptive; they are the forms abandoned by the life that shaped them and inhabited by an animating force that is not native to them. They are a mere going through the motions. A living traditionalism is increasingly rare because the cultural ecosystem that supported it has been been destroyed in societies with capitalist economies. In such societies there is no longer a living memory of the ancestors conveyed from generation to generation; there are only the archaeological remains, shriveled museum pieces, that point to but no longer possess the life and creative juice that made them.
Insofar as the forms and rituals continue to be practiced in a state of undeadness, it's a kind of make-believe, like a child playing house or soldier. It's like a modern European who burlarized a museum exhibit of ancient Egyptian pottery, clothing, and furniture, and replaced all his modern stuff with them, and then lived his life as if he were an Egyptian. Using something now created by another culture doesn't change who you are now, and too often that's what traditionalists are really doing. Their understandable distaste for the flatness of modernity has impelled them to "go native" in the past. This is a deep form of alienation.
I would be a traditionalist if there existed a living tradition–i.e., something that conveyed the wisdom and practices of the ancestors that still had the possibitly of enriching one's life in this time and in this place. But I know of nothing like that which has the smell of possibility for me, and when I am with zombie traditionalists, the smell is bad, and it suffocates and depresses me. And I am particularly irritated by them when they make claims to have something that clearly they do not. I don't think they are insincere, but that they just don't know what they are talking about. If they had something, it would produce at least a few great souls, and all I see among these traditionalists are small souls, angry souls, fearful souls. What they have does not interest me in the least. I want the real thing, and I'm happier to live without anything than with some zombie version of something that once lived but does not now.
But because there is nothing there now, does that mean there was always nothing there? I don't believe that. The life was there and is still, but it's gone underground.
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I am amused when people talk about creating “new” traditions. I know what they mean, but probably the word 'practice' or ‘ritual’ would be more accurate. They become traditions when they get passed on over at least two or three generations. They have to stand the test of time, and that test is that they work, and working means that they enrich and ensoul life. And I think creating new rituals needs to be done, but it's no good, it won't work, if these rituals don't tap into that underground life. The real question is not about the forms, but about finding the life.
We need rituals that will en-soul our life together again. But if a ritual or practice is eventually to become a living tradition, it cannot be 'invented'. Its sources have to be 'uncovered' or 'disclosed'. Or perhaps the word is 'discovered' or in some cases 'recovered'. And then it has to be legitimated by broad acceptance of people who refuse the bogus. It has to resonate deeply. It has to have a kind of “authority”; it has has to have some music.
In other words it has to 'work'.
So how are we to think of this discovery/recovery work?
I don't know for sure, but the idea of retrieval/second naiveté offers a clue as to how it might go about it–at least in part. Both come from Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher of religion that I read years ago as an undergraduate. I’m not sure I’m using these terms precisely in the way he does (I should go and reread him, I suppose), but 'first naivete' characterizes the mentality in premodern societies where everything is a given. People simply accept the beliefs and values as the ancestors have passed it on to them, and they wouldn't think about questioning them. With the coming of critical consciousness (through the Greeks in the West), people start questioning the assumptions on which naive consciousness is based and inevitably they lose their naive faith that things are the way they are as “given” by tradition and the ancestors. The experience of 'truth' becomes interior and subjective, and the exterior world loses its enchantment.
But while critical consciousness is good at saying No—at debunking—it’s not very good at saying Yes. And so in order for it to be possible to say a deeply resounding Yes, one finds that he must go back and revisit the world as it was presented to naive consciousness, but now with “second naiveté.” This does not mean 'going native', i.e., reverting to first naiveté, but opening up to or becoming vulnerable to the reality that was self-evident to consciousness with first-naivete–without losing critical consciousness.
So the challenge becomes one of rediscovering what has been lost, remembering what has been forgotten. My hunch is, and that’s all it is, a hunch—that if “new traditions” are to be created, they will not have enough ballast or resonance unless they are in one way or another the retrieval of older, previously rejected rituals and practices, but now adapted to our very different circumstances. And I'd argue that this kind of 'retrieval' is possbile for the traditions of the West, and that some fusion of lost wisdom of East and West is the future of tradition. And in that future also lies the re-enchantment of the earth, and perhaps we will have retrieved what the Psalmist meant when he said, "When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth."
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