This return of truth to social existence is complicated by one basic factor. The truth to which men return cannot be the identical truth that was lost

The Restoration of Tradition

by Stanley Parry

A guide to the paths that remain open when 

“tradition falls out of existence.” 

The position this paper will attempt to illustrate, if not demonstrate, is that once lost or weakened the tradition of a society can be restored only by a creative and even radical reconstruction of the tradition itself. The problem to which we address ourselves is as complex as it is profound. And clear thought about it is inhibited by the corroded vocabulary and the stylized modes of conception that distort the very formulation of the problem. In a society where the substance of tradition is already thin and unpersuasive, the term tradition is taken to indicate habitual modes of behavior normally concerned with the periphery of life, reaching at most the dignity of a campus “tradition” when they rise above the level of etiquette. More obfuscating still is the conception of tradition as the element of sameness within a world of change, so that the changing and the traditional are viewed as antithetic. To be “progressive” is to be anti-traditional. The truth is that tradition itself changes in the sense of unfolds; it undergoes permutations. So that the disruption of tradition is encompassed not simply by change but by certain kinds of change. Once “bad” change eviscerates tradition, it can be brought back to life only by vigorous and even radical “good” change. To make this point we must first refurbish the idea of tradition.

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