Is Tradition Bad or Good?
Tradition is seen as stuffy, outdated, and failed. It is scoffed as being full of Privilege, or worse.
Consumerism pushes the Next New Thing. Throw away that Old Thing from last year! (And pay no attention to the fact that the New Thing is really a rehash of 1980s style fashion).
The Present is always Right. And the Future will be even Better.
This is ingrained in us. Even the most Republican person among us is a Progressive. We steadfastly believe in Progress. Growth. A steady, never-ending raise each year. The gold watch at retirement…although our parents, and even some of our grandparents, have not seen that because business had already moved beyond it in their lifetime.
These are all Time Fallacies:
- The Irrelevant Past.
- The Permanent Present. “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless Present…” – 1984.
- And, I will add, the glorious Star Trek Future.
Tradition is Not a Bad Word?
“…tradition makes available to us, for free, rules which have been learned the hard way.” – Lean Logic – by David Fleming.
Your ancestors passed on that knowledge, not through genes, but through memetics – ideas, cultural practices. Traditions.
The entire quote:
“…tradition makes available to us, for free, rules which have been learned the hard way. It may be difficult to work out, off the cuff, why a festival is a good idea in midwinter, why sex at first meeting may be a bad idea, why family meals are advisable, why celebrations are important, why archaic clothes for ceremony and in law courts may help to protect freedoms, why play is essential to a child’s development, or why a musical and literary education teaches the art of thinking—but there is no need to work it out, for tradition affirms it. It supplies (as Edmund Burke wrote) a way of ‘knowing exactly and habitually, without the labour of particular and occasional thinking’. A society without tradition is a society without grown-ups.” – Lean Logic.
Your ancestors passed on that knowledge, not through genes, but through memetics – ideas, cultural practices. Traditions.
Tradition served us well
Elderberry flowers and berries are edible, but only if you cook the berries. The rest of the plant is toxic. Elephant’s Foot has an edible tuber. Pokeweed is marginally edible if you cook it.
How did our ancestors know this? Some think they were told what they could eat by the spirits or gods.
Trial and error – Did someone try it out and keep notes? Likely yes, and it was passed down through verbal tradition.
Hispanics and people in the Southwest Nixtamalize corn – to boil corn with lime or calcium to bring out the nutrients. Corn is not very nutrient dense, unless you nixtamalize it. This is a key step in making tamales, and you can taste the difference in corn chips if they have gone through this process.
In Landrace Gardening, Joseph Lofthouse shares about how native cultures used special techniques to process beans to remove the toxins, including repeated rinsing with running or flowing water. (I highly recommend this book for developing your own landrace plant from seeds from your garden, adapted to your land and climate).
Traditions of the Ancients are Models for Reality
“The traditions of the ancients are perfectly viable models of reality for people with the technological capacity (and limits) of the ancients who maintained those traditions.
This is self evident. Only things that work can become tradition.”
Cyprian
Perpend dives deeper on this in Part 2 – Can We Have Tradition Without Religion?
Thriving Food Forest Design: Let us create an edible foodscape, perennial paradise for you so you can grow more food and be more self sufficient. Schedule a free consult session with me at:
Chestnuts, hazelnuts, elderberry, and comfrey that are adapted to the Midwest.
GrowNutTrees.com
Raised beds that I am building to test Perennial Kitchen Garden layouts:
Vego Garden Modular Metal Raised Bed (which I will make 5′ x 3.5′, 17″ tall).
I use this for a perennial kitchen garden – growing herbs to use daily in the kitchen. Just come along and pick what you need for tonight’s dinner.
Meadow Creature Broadfork is my favorite tool for starting new garden beds. I turn over the sod, add a layer of compost, then Milpa, and cover with woodchips.
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from video courses, to blueprints, to books.