The Democracy of the Dead

On 20 July 1997, the USS Constitution, the oldest warship in the US Navy, and the oldest warship still afloat made her first unassisted cruise in 116 years. One of the greatest challenges facing her commander was training a crew to sail her since no one alive had ever sailed a fighting frigate. With the help of a naval training manual published in 1819, it still took nearly ten years of planning and training before a crew was ready to man her for her forty minute cruise. The skills required to safely operate such an antiquated piece of equipment had languished and been forgotten.

On a more personal level, in the early 1990's, while assigned to National Guard unit in Cleveland, I participated in a project to restore portions of an old retaining wall in Wade Park. The wall had been constructed by the Works Project Administration (WPA) in the 1930's as part of Roosevelt's New Deal. The wall was a massive structure, several hundred feet long, terraced, and 20-25 feet high at its highest. The most impressive feature of the wall, though, was the method used in its construction. I can't recall the name of the construction method, but it consisted of lying limestone stones one on top of the other, fitting them together carefully without mortar. We were unable to do much restoration of that wall because the method hadn't been practiced in decades. No one knew how to do it. It was a skill which had been lost since it hadn't been used in decades.

Now you may ask, what exactly do these two incidents have to do with anything? Well, here's my point. The tradition had been broken. People had thought that we had progressed beyond the point of needing to know how to sail wooden fighting ships or build mortarless masonry walls. Nobody thought it necessary that sailing skills, nobody thought it necessary that such masonry skills be handed on to the next generations. Certainly, they thought, we have progressed beyond the need for that. Most likely it was those to whom these traditions were to be handed as opposed to those who were to hand them on who denied their relevance.

For we moderns (or more accurately, I suppose, for we post-moderns), the word "tradition" is laden with all kinds of baggage. It conjures up images of ancient rituals whose origins are lost in the mists of time; we think of rustic folk dances, or perhaps hidebound bureaucrats, maybe the reading room filled with cigar smoking elderly men at an old fashioned gentleman's club. But an examination for the origins of the word itself belies such notions. From the Latin tradere, meaning "to hand on" the word "tradition" shares a lineage with the word "trade". In that sense then, tradition is our legacy. Like heirlooms, traditions are possessions for which our forebears have paid dearly which generally had great meaning for them and which they believed would be of great values to their posterity.

Traditions have found their way into our culture at multiple points. They are to be found in our speech and in our laws, in our music and in our literature. Chesterton says of tradition that it is "...an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead....All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of their birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death."

But, like the sailor and the stonemason, we have decided that the skills and opinions of our forebears are of little account. We have decided that we have progressed beyond the point of needing the opinions of our fathers. We have discarded their hard earned wisdom and disregarded the foundations they established for our benefit. By doing so, we risk much. We will have to relearn that life is valuable, but not a commodity. We will have to rediscover that monogamy is unitive, not bondage. We will have to rediscover that sons are a blessing and daughters are a treasure, not burdens. That's just for starters.

Look around and see those areas where the disregard of the opinions of those who have gone before us have degraded our culture. That disregard is bringing us closer to a precipice that our ancestors saw clearly. The economic straits we currently find ourselves in is just the beginning. More hard lessons lie ahead.

To paraphrase the Bard of Avon, "Ah, the tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive..." ourselves.

Til next time, all the best. Joe