Reminding Traditionalists of Progressive Traditions

Must communities always be caught between deference to traditions and concern for progress?

Anti-liberal traditionalists and anti-communitarian progressives have this in common – they both assume that communities are bound tightly by their own traditions, and respect for tradition is incompatible with any progressive change.  And they are both mistaken.

 

Let us start with one basic and important fact – traditions evolve over time.  What is taken as the way that has become customary for a community to behave in one period, will transform in the years and decades to come.  Some changes may be small, but others can be drastic.  Practices which may be new at one stage can become traditional later. Attitudes that are prevalent for some time may come to be mocked and discarded as time passes.

 

All such changes can happen as a result of one or more of four types of community interaction. Firstly, it may be part of a prevailing tradition to ask questions, reflect on certain issues, clear up some contradictions so as to enrich that tradition.  Secondly, followers of the tradition may want to refine it or adapt it in the light of new experiences – since what was cited as various beliefs and practices in the context of specific situations in the past, may be confronted by quite different circumstances that are not covered by previous pronouncements.  Thirdly, few communities have just one distinct, monolithic tradition, and many find that as new traditions emerge, conflicts between different traditions drive new thinking to reconcile those differences (e.g., religious sects, customs of diverse villages/clans).  Fourthly, adherence to some aspects of a tradition may simply fade because the latest generation lose interest in it, or feel there are more important things to hold their attention. 

 

Anti-liberal traditionalists are wrong to think traditions are locked in a time capsule, and communities embracing progressive change must lose their social mooring and drift into moral chaos.  Anti-communitarian progressives are mistaken in assuming that progress can never come from prevailing thoughts and practices, and only the invocation of some absolute principles transcending all communities and traditions can possibly support progressive reforms.

 

In every culture, every society today, progressive traditions can be found alongside more static traditional outlooks.  The progressive aspects of these critical improvement-seeking traditions have grown out of community interactions within the framework of a plurality of traditions. Ideas from the past do not imprison communities into an unchanging form.  They contain the germs that lead to new ways of thinking and social arrangements, and new traditions that promote progressive change.