Long Live Tradition — The Democracy of the Dead
We hear much talk today about an “attack on democracy,” and, actually, there has long been one. That is, an attack on that “democracy extended through time,” that “democracy of the dead,” to quote G.K. Chesterton, that we call tradition. Tradition, it could be said, is the glue that binds society together. Oh, this is where the older among us might hear in our minds “Tradition!” bellowed in that famous song from the play Fiddler on the Roof. Unfortunately, we’ve done more than just fiddle with tradition in our civilization; we’ve thrown it off the roof. This may seem of little consequence to many, since they may be much like the play’s Tevye character, who confessed that he didn’t know why his people’s traditions existed.
Yet tradition’s importance has been emphasized by thinkers from Chesterton to Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke to ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius. Interestingly, too, upon being denied tradition, people will manufacture their own. Why, advanced tennis players and golfers even have their own personal “tradition,” a ritual known as a “pre-shot routine,” which for a given individual will be the same every time (e.g., bouncing the tennis ball five times before serving).
But most significant are the traditions that stood the test of time, even if they’re not withstanding the test of our time. And perhaps no one mounted a better defense of them than the aforementioned Chesterton. It “is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time,” he wrote in his 1908 book Orthodoxy, Chapter IV, “The Ethics of Elfland.” “Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club [an exclusive, hoity-toity private members’ club in London].” “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors,” Chesterton later added. “It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”
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