Why I Am a Traditionalist (V)

I said in a previous instalment of this series that I was going to devote a whole post to Christmas. This is it.

When it comes to Christmas and tradition, I have powerfully conflicting feelings.

On the one hand, I love Christmas as much as anybody else loves it-- indeed, I love it more. I don't think anybody is more of a Christmas freak than I am. Christmas stands for everything I love the most-- tradition, cosiness, innocence, celebration, sentimentality, nostalgia, merriment, reverence, domesticity, and a thousand other lovely things. Christmas is my favourite time of year without a doubt. (It helps that winter is my favourite season.)

I think Chesterton, as usual, put it best: "There is nothing really wrong with the whole modern world except that it does not fit in with Christmas."

And yet-- I don't like how Christmas seems to account for ninety per cent of the traditions in our lives. Christmas is like a great black hole of tradition. It sucks all tradition to itself.

William Cobbett, the great Tory radical-- and the subject of a biography of Chesterton-- famously denounced London as "the Great Wen" (a wen is a dialect term for a boil or cyst). I feel the same way about London, which overwhelmed me every time I visited it. I also feel the same way about Christmas. Christmas is like the Great Wen of the calendar. It doesn't overwhelm me-- I can't really get enough Christmas-- but it bothers me that it hogs every tradition to itself.

Christmas has all the traditions. Office parties are at Christmas. Special episodes of TV shows are at Christmas. Family get-togethers are at Christmas. Fairs and sales of work and performances of the Messiah and big movie releases and DVD releases and album releases are at Christmas. The Queen's speech is at Christmas. Midnight Mass is at Christmas. Even ghost stories, which you'd think would rightfully belong to Halloween, are very often stolen by Christmas. (M.R. James, the master of the English ghost story, originally read them to his friends at Christmas, and A Ghost Story for Christmas was a series of TV films made out of stories by M.R. James and others-- they have been revived recently. Apparently, Christmas spooky stories are an English tradition themselves-- which doesn't make me any more favourable to them.)

In fact, writing this series-- and writing about tradition in general, which I have often done-- it's very difficult to keep from veering into talking about Christmas all the time. I deliberately have to avoid it. It bothers me that tradition is Christmas, to a great extent. We think of tradition and we think of Christmas.

I don't really want to take anything anything away from Christmas. (Except the ghost stories.) I just want more traditions for the rest of the year.

I attended a pre-marriage course with Michelle called Engaged Encounter. It was really good, but one thing that bothered me was that the question "What will you do for Christmas?" was almost the only tradition considered. Nobody seems to worry about Easter, or St. Patrick's Day, or Thanksgiving.

And speaking of Thanksgiving....the Thanksgiving Day I spent with Michelle in America, and which I have often mentioned on this blog, has become one of my dearest memories-- and becomes dearer all the time. To an Irishman, it was a revelation to watch Macy's parade on TV, followed by the national dog show. (I still think it's hilarious and wonderful that the entire nation watches a dog show on a major holiday.) But one thing that bothered me was the amount of Christmas floats in Macy's parade. I thought...couldn't Thanksgiving be Thanksgiving, and Christmas be Christmas?

The same thing in Ireland happens with Halloween. The standard lament used to be that the Christmas decorations went up in the shops as soon as Halloween was over. Now they go up before Halloween has started.

As well as sucking the life from other traditions, all of this sucks the life from Christmas itself. As has often been observed, everybody is sick and tired of Christmas by St. Stephens's Day-- instead of revelling till Epiphany, as they should.

And yet...I love Christmas with my whole heart. I don't want it to be ninety per cent of tradition. But I don't mind it being the tradition par excellence, which it is.

It is so immersive. It engages the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth and the fingers. It's everywhere. That is the very best thing about Christmas-- it's everywhere. It's in the background. You don't have to artifically put yourself in the mood, because the whole world is conspiring to put you in the mood. Everything is saturated with it. When you remember a conversation or an incident which happened to take place one Christmas, the pine-scented air of Christmas always comes along with it. When film-makers or novelists or songwriters want a picturesque background, they always go for Christmas.

I want the rest of the year-- indeed, the rest of life-- to be more like Christmas in that way. I don't mean more Christmassy-- not at all.  I mean more itself, whatever that might be, to the glorious extent that Christmas is itself.

Why I Am A Traditionalist (IV)

As I was coming into work this morning, I passed a group of people in Edwardian dress, who were being filmed by a camera crew. For today, June sixteenth, is Bloomsday-- the day on which James Joyce set his novel Ulysses.

I tried to read Ulysses once, but I only got about a hundred pages in. I thought it was boring and pretentious. I think Joyce, though undoubtedly talented, was pretty much a fraud-- even if he believed in his own fraud. And the Joyce industry gives me the shivers.

All the same, I am such a traditionalist that I rejoice (no pun intended) in the institution of Bloomsday. When we began the Irish Chesterton Society, I had the idea of a similar 'Chesterton Day' for G.K. Chesterton. I soon dismissed the idea, however. Should every author have his 'Day'? That would take away from the specialness of Bloomsday, which came about somewhat spontaneously. (You can see some footage of the first Bloomsday here. An account is also given in Anthony Cronin's intriguing book Dead as Doornails, which I have read twice.) If Chesterton admirers want to have some Chesterton-related tradition (other than the various Chesterton conferences, I mean) we should come up with an original idea, and one based on Chesterton's own life, works or character.

I remember, in my teens, looking out at the cityscape of Dublin from a hill in Ballymun, and thinking: "Wow. Today is Bloomsday. Today is Bloomsday. The one day in the year that is Bloomsday. Today. " I felt a kind of amazement at the fact. I thought the bricks of the city themselves must somehow be aware of the fact.

In part four of this continuing post, I want to get a bit more personal and write about my own experience of tradition.

I wrote this recently on my Facebook page, partly as a kind of oblique reflection on the Irish same-sex marriage referendum result:

When I was a kid, I went to a Halloween party that made a big impression on me. I was blown away by how special and Halloweeny everything was. The taste of fruit in my mouth, the crackle of fireworks in the air, kids in costume, the freshness of the Autumn air, horror films on television...Halloween was a special time, different from any others.

And it's always seemed to me a symbol of specialness, tradition and difference. Halloween was Halloween, not Christmas. Christmas was Christmas, not Halloween. Ireland was Ireland, not England or Japan or South Africa. Men were men, not women. Children were children, not adults. Poetry was poetry, not prose. This made the world rich and interesting.

Then I grew up and was distressed that the whole modern world seemed intent on blurring differences, diminishing specialness, and calling this diversity and open-mindedness and cosmopolitanism. It certainly didn't seem like diversity to me. It seemed the opposite! And if it was open-mindedness and cosmopolitanism, well, so much the worst for those things. I preferred specialness. They said specialness was exclusionary. Well, yes. Santa wasn't welcome on Halloween. Banshees weren't welcome at Christmas. So what?

I can't help being like this. I could more easily change my eye colour or fingerprints. And it doesn't matter how many people disagree with me, or what names I might be called. I'm on the side of specialness, always, until my heart stops beating.

I can't remember how old I was when I attended this Halloween party. I do know that by the time I was thirteen I was already mythologising it, as one of the oldest self-written documents in my possession is an account of it. I remember that I wrote it in first year of secondary school. It could have happened the year before or it could have happened years before that. I don't remember.

The actual details of the memory are dim, though it the general impression is vivid. It was in my aunt's flat, and various cousins were present. I am sure I was dressed up, but I don't remember as what. I remember hearing the term 'Catherine wheel' and being fascinated (and pleased) that there were different kinds of firework.I remember nuts and fruits. I think I remember Halloween games, like trying to pick up an apple in a bowl of water with your mouth; but I'm not sure. I remember Halloween movies on the television, though I don't remember what they are. I remember one older boy saying that his favourite part of Halloween was the later part of the night, when all the bonfires had burnt to embers and only a few fireworks were being set off.

Did my fascination with tradition predate this party, or was it born there? I think it must have predated it. Otherwise, why did the experience have such an effect on me?

I can't pass this memory without mentioning other Halloween memories. One is a rather second-hand memory; a girlfriend texted me one Halloween to tell me she was telling ghost stories with some of her friends. I'd been present at ghost story-telling sessions before, but never a Halloween ghost story session. I still wish I'd been there.

Another Halloween memory is the only year I helped with the local bonfire. The suburb where I grew up, Ballymun, was densely populated and, being mostly high-rise, contained a lot of green spaces. This was an ideal scenario for bonfire-building, as you can imagine. In my memory, Ballymun bonfires were towering affairs. I always suspect such things are enlarged in my memory, but I'm not so sure in this case. We lived on the seventh (and top) floor of one of the flats (apartment complexes), and I distinctly remember that the sparks from the bonfire reached eye level, as we looked at it from our window.

Most of the time I was just a spectator, being incredibly shy as a child; but in my teens I made some friends amongst local kids, and helped build the bonfire. We were stockpiling wood months before the eventual construction. It took hours to make.

Of course, it was all illegal, and probably rightly so. I'd heard that the fire brigade went around extinguishing these bonfires, but I never saw it myself. And I saw them burn for hours at a time.

There were patches of scorched earth in the middle of many a field in Ballymun, where the bonfire had been held year after year. I always found something very evocative in these; the ghosts of Halloween past seemed to hover over them.

As I survey my childhood in search of traditions, something occurs to me (rather astonishingly) for the first time ever; we didn't really have family traditions. The Halloween party was an extended family event. On Christmas Day, as well, all my cousins and aunts and uncles would visit the my grandfather, the patriarch of the family (in the same apartment in which the Halloween parties were held).

But in my own nuclear family, I can't really think of any traditions in the sense of Halloween parties or the like. There were many blessings to my background and upbringing-- a house full of books, lively conversation and debate, encouragement to express ourselves artistically and imaginatively, having poetry recited to me from my earliest age-- but tradition was one that was missing. My mother took myself and my brothers to our aunt's farm in Limerick every summer, we had burgers and chip and baked beans for dinner every Saturday, and I bought my comics every Thursday, but other than that I can't really think of any distinctive family traditions.

Of course, we had Christmas traditions, like every family-- though not many of those. But I want to devote a post of its own to the subject of Christmas and tradition.

Myself and my younger brother had some self-made traditions, though they never really got off the ground. One was 'Dairy's Fair'. This was the name we gave to a 'fair', in our home, in which we resold sweets and chocolates for an extortionate price. I remember we would cut Mars bars into quarters and sell each one for twenty-five pence. Adults were indulgent enough to buy them. This wasn't actually done for the sake of the money; even the money part wasn't for the sake of the money, if that makes any sense. It was the fascination of having a 'fair' in miniature. I suspect Dairy's Fair only happened twice.

My brother and myself also had a running game of cricket each summer with some twins who lived beside my aunt's farm. Their names were James and Gerard; James was thin and Gerard was fat. Come to think of it, I think this was also a twice-off tradition. The first time it happened spontaneously, with plastic baseball bats. The second time we had been looking forward to it for the whole year and acquired special cricket equipment in advance. We even made a little trophy to resemble The Ashes. (It wasn't me and my brother against James and Gerard; I forget what the teams were.)

I do remember the second time around was a big disappointment. But isn't that the great besetting ill of all tradition? Indeed, having been rhapsodising about tradition for many years, I've quite often encountered the complaint that tradition is just one big nuisance of expense, stress, tension, expectation, and disappointment-- more trouble and let-down than it's worth. (C.S. Lewis's essay 'What Christmas Means to Me' is a magnificently curmudgeonly instance of this-- although, to be fair, Lewis is complaining about the 'commercial racket' of Christmas rather than merrymaking per se.)

I acknowledge the reality of this phenomenon, but I think it's excessive to turn against tradition because of it. Do we turn against romance because of broken hearts? Hopefully, only for a week or so. Once again, 'abuse does not disprove use'.

Besides, I think the phenomenon works both ways. Sometimes traditions, rather than being hyped up for weeks and months and ultimately letting us down, take us by surprise. This is especially the joy of communal and cultural traditions.

A humorous example of this is this snatch of dialogue from The American President, a film that, in my marriage, is something of a tradition in itself. This exchange occurs during a White House Christmas party, when one of the President's staff interrupts another two who are talking shop:

Robin: Fellas, we haven’t slept in three years. Can’t we forget work for one night and take this moment to enjoy each other as friends? It’s Christmas.
Lewis: It’s Christmas?
Kodak: Yeah, you didn’t get the memo?

Myself and my two brothers also had a tradition of watching horror films while sitting together on the couch, underneath a blanket. When a too-scary scene seemed imminent, we would hide under the blanket.

Much more recently-- about four or five years ago-- I decided to invent a tradition of my own, purely for the sake of inventing a tradition. This is one of the most eccentric things I have ever done, though I have to admit it was self-consciously eccentric. I roped in four of my friends and staged the first Sliggen's Day. The name comes from Mr. Sliggen's Hour, an obscure one-act play by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany (died 1957). I took it at random from the library shelves. We went to the Library Bar in the International Hotel (also the birthplace of the Irish Chesterton Society) read Mr. Sliggen's Hour out loud, and drank red lemonade-- a fizzy drink distinctive to Ireland. (Second item down on this list.) Then we just had a chat.

There was only ever one Sliggen's Day. I tried to arrange a second one, but it was a disaster. After a couple of people told me they couldn't make it, I decided to call it off-- but I forgot to tell one of my friends. She turned up anyway and she was furious at me. (A few days later she admitted she'd overreacted.)

I'll probably try to revive Sliggen's Day in the future. Maybe. Who knows?

If you think I don't have a whole lot more to say about tradition, you are deluded. There's still the subject of Christmas-- and the American traditions I've experienced-- and wider applications of the term 'tradition'-- and more!

Why I Am A Traditionalist (III)

To continue my musings on the subject of tradition and traditionalism.

In my last post, I suggested that the appeal of tradition may lie in our ambiguous attitude to time. I suggested that, although in a literal sense time goes by at sixty seconds per minute, in a more figurative sense there are many different sorts of time, depending on the experience we are having. The appeal of tradition, partly, is that it gives us access to the more rarefied 'streams' of time.

I want to continue to ponder the appeal of tradition, and it will be no surprise to regular readers that I am going to enlist the help of one Gilbert Keith Chesterton-- specifically, his most famous book Orthodoxy.

In the introduction to that masterpiece, Chesterton writes: The thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired. If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.

The last three lines are the cherry.  Strange and secure. Wonder and welcome. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton is concentrating rather more on our need for the strange and the wonderful, rather than the secure and the welcoming. I think tradition is there, mostly, to supply the other side of the equation.

I think that humankind is constantly see-sawing between two extremes-- a sense of boredom on one hand, and a sense of vertigo on the other. We have the most astonishing capacity to take the stars and the sun and the air and our own bodies and imaginations for granted, and to forget that we are surrounded by miracles- that we are miracles, indeed. On other hand, and perhaps more understandably, we find ourselves thrown into a universe and a reality that never entirely loses its strangeness, its alienness, its utter contingency and weirdness. We can feel lost, lonely, seasick-- strangers in a strange land.

Which is the predominant emotion? I don't think it's easy or even possible to decide. It might seem we spend more time bored than bewildered; but I think we can feel both at once, though perhaps at different levels of consciousness. I even suspect that both of these feelings are ever-present in us at all times, though one may have the upper hand at any given time.

I have described the two extremes as 'a sense of boredom' and 'a sense of vertigo. But this is to view them in their debased forms. That sense of boredom, in its nobler aspect, is Chesterton's feeling of 'welcome'-- belonging, cosiness, recognition, homecoming. (Is there any more powerful word in the English language than 'home'?)

The sense of alienation and seasickness, in its nobler aspect, is an openness to the mystery and wildness and limitless horizons of existence.

Now, I actually believe that tradition can open us to both of these emotions. In a way, tradition can open wider (and wilder) horizons to us by making us aware of the past and the future, of the dead and the unborn, and of the sense of wonder and the transcendental which is often less evident in our everyday lives. Halloween seems a good example of that-- indeed, the very idea of Halloween was that the otherworld, for one night, mingled with the world of mortal men.

But, in general, I think tradition is on the side of cosiness-- of familiarity-- of homecoming-- of belonging. The sight of a Christmas tree or the sound of church bells comforts us in our existential vertigo and seasickness. And tradition does not just connect us to other times. It connect us to other people as well.

My favourite episode of Friends (the situation comedy, in case some of my more highbrow readers need such a clarification) is 'The One with All The Thanksgivings'. I happened to see it (not for the first time) at a time when I was suffering from this very seasickness-- from a harrowing sense of the shortness and precariousness of life, of the loneliness of the individual, of the randomness and disconnection of everything that happened. I felt adrift on an endless sea with no land in sight, no stars overhead. And I was immensely comforted by this episode containing flashback scenes from Thanksgivings of years past. Life, it made me think, was not that short-- not if most people had so many experiences of the same landmark festival that everyone was likely to have a story of their worst one. Life could also not be so random and formless and chaotic if there were institutions like Thanksgiving, experiences that were shared and recognised by everybody. (In America, at least. But, of course, non-Americans had their own equivalents.)

This eternal tension between wonder and welcome, between a feeling of being lost and being at home, is (I think) crucial to the whole experience of life. I have described it as a tension-- but of course, the two emotions feed off each other, through their very contrast. Artists and journalists often use the slogan, "make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar". In some of my more rambling reveries, it has occurred to me that my favourite poems and books and movies pull off the miracle of making life strange and familiar at the same time.

I think this is part of the magic of tradition. It makes life familiar and strange at once. More of this in my next post!

A New Irish Catholic Blog!

I want to welcome By Grace and Banners Fallen, a new Irish Catholic blog, full of solid analysis and deep thoughts about the state of the Church in Ireland, and written by a gentleman in his twenties. No knee-jerk reactions or sloganeering here-- he is all about getting to the root of our problems and proposing solutions.

Take a look at it!

Irish cyberspace definitely needs more Catholic and traditional voices. My guests from abroad may not realize just how anti-Catholic and anti-traditional the Irish internet is. A lot is the answer. Like you wouldn't believe.

The harvest of souls online is great and the labourers (in Ireland, anyway) are few. So it is wonderful to see a new blog on our side, and one that is so well-written and thoughtful. God be praised!

Why I Am a Traditionalist (II)

I am more excited about this series on traditionalism than I have been about anything I've written here in some time. It's a subject of immense importance to me-- and not only that, but one of immense delight. It's a subject I dearly love to think about.

What is the appeal of tradition-- to me, and to other people? Why do we prize it?

It may be no surprise to you that I've thought about this a lot. To a great extent, I think it comes down to our attitude towards time.

Poets, philosophers and others have written voluminously on the subject of time, but it remains mysterious to us. However, I am not talking about the nature of time in a hard, metaphysical sense here, but rather in a 'softer', more experiential sense. I mean our perception of time, our experience of time.

I don't see any way to write about this without sounding like a continental philosopher-- Jacques Derrida or one of those people. Please bear in mind that I am, of course, speaking figuratively throughout. I'm not suggesting time really does anything but move forward at sixty seconds a minute. I'm talking, again, about our perception.

I think the appeal of tradition-- and I have written this elsewhere-- is that it reconciles two parts of our nature. We are beings that exist in time, but we also crave the eternal--- the eternal not understood as infinity (though we crave that, too), but as timelessness. I think we are always seeking the eternal. I think this is the appeal of the John Keats poem 'Ode to a Grecian Urn'. We live in time, but we feel as though we don't entirely belong there. In tedious periods, it hangs heavy upon us. In happy periods, the moment is over too soon-- we can't preserve it. Even in living it, we are losing it.

But even the opposition between time and eternity is too simplistic. What do we really know about the eternal? I don't think it's really the eternal we crave, since we can't even comprehend it. It's something akin to the eternal.
 
I think there is (in a manner of speaking) a whole spectrum of different 'times'. Time seems to move differently in different situations, in different atmospheres. It seems to have a different frame of reference, too.

One of the most vivid experiences of my life-- and one that I chronicled in my purple notebook, famous (or infamous) to regular readers-- is a time when I was studying my history text-book during a free class in school, when I was about sixteen or seventeen. I was sitting in the central hall of the school, from which radiated all its various corridors and passages. It was quite a nice hall, with religious statues and other works of art dotted around the walls, and with the Dominican emblem worked into the tiles on the floor. It was coming to the end of the day, and a kind of hush had fallen over the school--- as though from a mixture of fatigue and waiting for the final bell. There was hardly anybody in the hall.

My difficulty in history was always fixing dates in my head, so I was trying to memorize a series of dates in Irish history. (My textbook helpfully had a list of key dates after every chapter.) I suppose I felt into a bit of a trance from the peacefulness of the atmosphere, and from my concentration on the subject matter.

And suddenly, I seemed to see history as a real sequence of events, rather than a succession of self-contained episodes. It was like looking down a long, long corridor, or down a long, long street. The reality of the past struck me. All these people had been living, breathing people like me-- and there was no one moment when they all suddenly vanished. There was no one moment when the past became the present. I was downstream of them in exactly the same current of time, and 1870 really wasn't so long ago. Of course, I had always known this-- but now it really came home to me.

For those few moments, I was occupying historic time-- time with a frame of reference of generations, not of moments. Time itself seemed to move differently for those moments.

(But even to say time 'moves differently' is an attempt to express the ineffable-- it's more fine-grained than that. Time seems to have a different pulse, a different flavour, a different level of compression when we are in these different 'flows' of time. Every one differs from every other.)

Here are some situations where the flow of ordinary time seems to give way to a different flow-- and please bear in mind, each one is different. It's not just a question of 'ordinary time' versus 'extraordinary time'.

You are standing on a mountain and looking at the landscape below. The shadow of clouds glide over the fields. Cars, tiny from this distance, creep along far-distant roads. The only sound is the song of birds and the faint, muffled drone of a far-away airplane.

You are looking at a photograph-- an old, inky photograph from the nineteen-seventies, say. It might be a photograph of a street celebration, or a political convention, or a crowd coming out of a football match-- something involving motion and drama. But now it is suspended, frozen. You examine the expressions of the people in the photo, their body language, their interactions. The more you look, the more you seem to see, the more you become absorbed in this moment that seems to have its own solidity. The kettle boils and you awake as if from a reverie.

You are at a wedding and you are dancing, along with everybody around you. You lose yourself in the motion, the patterns, the sense of togetherness. The world around you seems to be swirling.

You are having a conversation with a close friend in an all-but-empty hotel lounge. A small fire is burning at the other end of the lounge. Soft music is playing, unobtrusively, in the background. You are sitting beside a window that looks out onto the pedestrianised town square. It is almost ten p.m. and very few people are about. You are talking about some deep subject-- perhaps about how society has changed since your childhood, or about the language of dreams, or about strange things that you have witnessed. The profundity of the conversation seems to give all the sights and sounds around you a kind of heightened reality.

You are sitting on a bed, cross-legged, writing out Christmas cards with your beloved. Christmas songs are playing on your smartphone. (This one is a real memory.)

You are looking at a bonfire on Halloween night, as fireworks crackle on the crisp winter air, and thinking of all the Halloweens you have known, all the Halloweens you have heard about, all the Halloweens you have vicarously lived in horror movies and scary stories.

You are walking through a leafy suburb on a day when you are not working but everybody else is. From a distance, you hear the haunting sound of children playing in a school playground. The sound makes you dreamy, reflective. You are in no hurry at all.

You are in a cinema lobby, well ahead of time for the movie you came to see. It's too early to take your seat so you linger. There are posters from several decades of movie history framed in the lobby. You go from poster to poster, examining them, taking pleasure in how each one savours of its particular era.

You are clearing out your attic and lingering over old magazines, old copy-books, old invitation cards, yellowed old newspapers that you originally used for wrapping but that have now taken on an interest of their own. You started this as a chore but find yourself becoming more absorbed in the process.

You are watching a documentary about Christmas movies on television. The curtains are drawn. In the corner, the lights of your Christmas tree are blinking in the semi-darkness. You spent the morning Christmad decorating, and later on you are going to be meeting some old friends for drinks. But now, you are deliciously at your ease, out of time.

Well, I may be enjoying this more than my reader. (I have been listening to Bach's cello suites while write.) I could multiply examples forever. But I think, or at least I hope, that you know what I'm getting at.

I think these sort of experiences of altered time-- heightened time, slowed time, curved time, time out of time, whatever term you might give to each one-- are essential to the appeal of tradition. I hope to analyse this further in future posts in this series.

As for this one, I have enoyed writing it more than almost anything else I've written on this blog.

Almost a Quarter of a Million Pageviews!

I've just noticed that this blog now has 246,000 pageviews. Last month I had almost seven thousand pageviews. So presumably I should hit a quarter of a million some time next month.

I really don't know if this is anything to get excited about. Maybe it's just a function of how many posts I've got up, and how long the blog has been around. Maybe it's mostly webcrawlers and spambots. (I get a huge amount of spam comments, telling me that my posts are fastidious-- don't ask me why 'fastidious'-- and offering to introduce me to hot Russian girls. And I thought it was cold in Russia.)

But, what the heck. I'm going to be pleased (and grateful) about it anyway.

I'm rather sceptical about the statistics, but it's hard to gauge how many people are reading, or who is reading. I'm often surprised when somebody in 'real life' tells me that they read my blog.The fact that I don't get a huge amount of comments (though I really appreciate the comments I do get) used to make me assume there weren't so many people reading, but I see from elsewhere on the internet that people are surprisingly slow to comment. I often post on the Irish Catholic Forum, and those who post there regularly are constantly wondering why the number of readers outnumbers the number of participants by orders of magnitude.

I like the idea that, at any time of the day, somebody might be reading one of my essays or poems or stories.

Any way, many thanks to all those who formed part of that mighty flood of humanity, my quarter of a million guests! I will keep trying to be fastidious, although I must emphasise that I am not interested in Russian girls, hot or cold. Thanks all the same, though.

Why I Am a Traditionalist (I)

How is it that I have never written directly on the subject of tradition, in four years of having this blog? I have touched on it in other posts, but never written about it directly. Few things are more important to me than the idea of tradition.

I think tradition is a positive good, in itself. Anyone can rattle off any amount of traditions that were (and are) obviously bad. Slavery and human sacrifice spring to mind. But this is a rather silly argument. It could apply to anything. 'Abuse does not disprove use' as the saying goes.

But as for the usefulness or desirability of tradition, I'm not so sure I know how to argue in favour of that. It's not really something you can prove, or demonstrate. 

It's often assumed that public debate, or public discourse in general, should be a matter of argument. If you have a particular position, you should be able to make a case for that in rational terms, to counter objections, and to eventually (if you are right) coerce the intellect of your opponent into agreeing with you.

I feel like this about so few of the positions I espouse. It's true that I believe that the existence of God and the truth of Catholicism are objectively true, and that solid arguments can be made for both. Indeed, I believe that the existence of God can be known with certainty by the rational mind-- for that, indeed, is the Catholic doctrine. I also believe that the truth of the Catholic faith is something we not only can argue for, but must argue for. 

But even then...I do believe that God works in mysterious ways, and that faith is rarely something that you can argue somebody into. The arguments need to be there, and need to be made, but they are rarely the main factor in propelling somebody towards religious faith.

Anyway, it isn't religion I'm thinking about, when it comes to beliefs that are hard to argue for in narrowly rational terms. It's all the many non-religious opinions I hold, such as the desirability of tradition. There is an argument to be made for this in rational terms-- for instance, Edmund Burke's argument: "We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence."

This may be true; it certainly seems plausible to me; but, even if it is not true, I love tradition for its own sake. I don't value tradition for utilitarian reasons, so how can I argue for it on utilitarian
grounds? It woud seem dishonest. It woud be missing the entire point. The importance of tradition is not only not utilitarian, I might even call it anti-utlitarian. Upholding tradition on utilitarian grounds would be like marrying a woman because she is a good cook. (Not the worst reason, granted, but one would hope that there would be more to it than that.)

So how can I argue for tradition, then, if I don't have any rational, utilitarian arguments? I can only try to inspire others with a similar love of tradition, or to bring out their latent regard for it. Indeed, this is one of the reasons I took to writing fiction some years ago. Anyone who read the Bard's Apprentice novel that I serialised here will remember that the importance of tradition was a central theme.

(Indeed, the thing has been done before. Apparently, Sir Walter Scott helped to awaken the entire British people to a greater respect for their own national traditions and national past, with the Waverley novels. I can't claim to be a great admirer of Scott, though-- I read Heart of Midlothian and it bored me.)

I think fiction, poetry and art can be used to argue for something intangible like tradition. Perhaps it is more an appeal than an argument. It seems to me a great impoverishment of public discourse that arguments have to be framed in terms of costs and benefits, both construed in very material terms. 

C.S. Lewis put this point very well, in relation to the particular tradition of monarchy: ""It would be much more rational to abolish the English monarchy. But how if, by doing so, you leave out the one element in our state which matters most? How if the Monarchy is the channel through which all the vital elements of citizenship – loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principal, splendour, ceremony, continuity – still trickle down to irrigate the dustbowl of modern economic Statecraft?”

But what do I mean by tradition? I mean it in a broad sense; but in a narrow sense, too. I mean it especially in the most vulgar and obvious sense, the sense that makes many people roll their eyes. I mean it in the "Ye Olde Shoppe" sense. I mean it in the 'warm fuzzies' sense.

I mean Halloween, confetti at weddings, the Angelus bells being broadcast on RTE in Ireland, blowing out birthday candles, the FA Cup final, the Budweiser Clydesdales, white smoke at Papal elections (a relatively recent innovation, by the way), using the feminine pronoun for ships, bishops in the House of Lords, Corpus Christi processions, Valentine's Day cards, men proposing to women, poetry that rhymes, terrace chants, James Bond, cloth caps, the Two Ronnies Christmas special, the Oberammergau passion play, singing on the last night of the Proms, Guy Fawkes night, popcorn at the cinema, Toby jugs, the Late Late Toy Show, and so on.

In other words; traditions new and old, national and regional, secular and sacred, dignified and corny, commercialised and not commercialised, particular and general, obscure and popular-- I love them all and hold them all as precious, though (obviously) to different extents.

It's the very self-consciousness of tradition that appeals to me. It could be argued that tradition is something unconscious and all-pervading. I once read a book on Folklore (Folklore and Folklife: an Introduction, edited by Richard Dorson) in which it was argued that modern skyscrapers and office blocks are a form of 'folk' architecture in that they preserve the same simple approach as the houses ordinary people built through the centuries. I'm sure it's a valid point, but that's not the sense in which I understand tradition. It's close to being the opposite.

Many earnest and clever people expend a lot of effort on explaining on how this or that 'tradition' is invented or inauthentic, as though this undermines all traditionalism. Examples often given are Scottish tartans belonging to particular clans, the 'Dickensian' Christmas, and the English sandwich called 'the Ploughman's Lunch'.

This is just another example of one of our era's favourite sports, that of debunking. I see nothing clever about debunking; if pursued indefinitely, it surely leads to nihilism. 

I am not tremendously exercised about whether a particular tradition is as old as it claims to be, or whether it is even a tradition at all. As far as I'm concerned, it becomes a tradition as soon as it is accepted as a tradition. In any case, there are certainly a great number of bona fide venerable traditions, so I am not going to fret about whether any given tradition is 'authentic' or not. Tradition is as much something subjective as it is something objective.

I have a great deal more to say about tradition. Readers who want to leave the hall should do so now. This could go on for some time.