Daniel is raising such thorny and (yes!) interesting issues that I feel better taking up small bits than trying to chew on it all at one go.
So here’s some thoughts (and some questions) about tradition. One fairly common way to describe “modernity” is to claim that modern humans (for a variety of reasons) are more likely to encounter other humans who live by values and in practices fairly different than one’s own. In other words, a modern person is acutely aware that their are multiple traditions, multiple cultures. And that makes modern people more self-conscious about their own tradition–and about whether it is justifiable and about whether it is preferable to some other tradition. Ethnocentrism is a concept that only becomes possible when at least one acknowledges that there are cultures different from one’s own.
We need not accept this description of the modern; we might argue that humans all the way back were always encountering other tribes and were always acutely conscious of the differences between “us” and “them.” I have nothing invested in claiming “modern” humans are different in this particular way (or in any other for that matter) from “pre-modern” humans. On the whole, I am mildly skeptical that the term “modern” designates much of anything. It’s a structuring term for lots of thinking, but may not actually point out anything “real.” (Daniel talks about Taylor’s desire to “get it right.” “Modern” may be a term that is a serious obstacle to getting it right.)
But here comes the kicker. The really questionable (and I am sure, to Daniel, objectionable) move is to say that this modern self-consciousness enables the modern person to gain some kind of critical distance from her own tradition. Once my tradition is juxtaposed to another tradition, I am better able to understand that my tradition is not self-evident and, in fact, stands in need of justification. Why should I follow my tradition when that guy over there follows his?
This, to me, is the key point. Is an individual in a position to evaluate her own tradition? And doesn’t the ability to evaluate also entail the ability to accept some parts of that tradition and reject other parts? Must one automatically live out the prejudices and practices of one’s tradition? Or is there some place from which to make choices to do this, but not do that? And if (as I do) one believes that some choices are possible, how to explain how that possibility arises? I am hardly claiming to have a good account of the fact that one can make choices.
A final note in a somewhat different key. The coherence of tradition also poses big problems. All our traditions appear highly heterogeneous. So, as my last post suggested, even if we talk about a Christian tradition, there are so many different ways of being Christian (Daniel’s liberal, conservative, and crazy just one way of parsing those differences), that it is very possible to become skeptical about what work the term “tradition” can do. If a person is raised Baptist, but then converts to Catholicism, has she made a choice? Has she changed traditions? Will her new self be some kind of hybrid between beliefs ingrained in her since birth and her attempted embrace (sometime after childhood) of a new set of beliefs? You can see the puzzles.
hayesmcgowan 