Tradition and Social Change

Tradition is one of those fundamental concepts which today is overused, with the result that its futurist opponents ignorantly despise it, while its faithful defenders often do not really understand it. The first believe that tradition is the opposite of change, the latter are unsure about the manner of distinguishing between tradition and the merely old; both tend to think of tradition as the bottom of the time-ocean, covered by layers upon heavy layers of time, hardly lit by anything but arbitrarily focusing memory.

In a recent series of lectures on tradition and social change, I attempted to describe tradition as a more dynamic concept than what is today consecrated as a cliché. I spoke of the “sacred model” in archaic societies, serving as an archetype in foundation myths, to which the community periodically returned for self renewal. From this regular “immersion in the origins” (in illo tempore, as Mircea Eliade calls it), archaic man derived the energy to continue societal existence; without the sacred model, the community was incapable of “repairing” (reforming) itself; with its help, natural degeneracy was arrested, or rather abolished, so that life might begin again.