Bad Words

Why 'tradition' and 'conservative' need to be re-called and re-membered, for without them we cannot develop or alter or complicate.

T. S. Eliot’s published an essay called “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in the September 1919 issue of The Egoist. I appreciate that irony from my hundred years distance. This was pre-conversion Eliot, the young up and coming poet of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” but before his great breakdown piece “The Waste Land.”

I’m not exactly sure why or who or what he was responding to. But it has stuck with me since I first read it as an undergrad in the early 90’s. In it, Eliot attempts to sketch out (1) what this word tradition means, (2) how it is vital, (3) what we have forgotten, and (4) what we lose if ignored. Though he did later call it a “juvenile” essay I will forgive him and say that his essay contains a necessary corrective to our wholesale abandonment of tradition, and the adoption of dangerous, soul-sucking on-purpose amnesia. Tradition has become a condensed symbol for bigotry, hatred, power, greed, “white supremacy” and a whole host of other bads. Just take a look at the de-colonize the classroom movement. We need a healthy sense of tradition and Eliot’s insights provide a path back.

We desperately need tradition, for in it holds necessary wisdom that we have forsaken and by it we can re-open our access to what is necessary to live. Tradition properly held is not pre-packaged scripts, a sterile and ossified "dead letters,” but tradition as Eliot lays it out in this essay is alive and vital, dynamic even. As Faulkner cryptically quipped: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I fear that we are on the verge of proving him wrong. We are trying our best to kill it off. Without the dead we lose who we are.

The word tradition, even in 1919 when he wrote the essay, has already taken on a negative valence. It was even then a word of opprobrium. The century since he the essay was published has done nothing but double-down on this negativity. But this pre-conversion Eliot he wants to resurrect an idea of tradition different from its negative connotation. He wants us to see tradition as a way to build out a proper mechanism by which we make sense of things. He wants us to understand our own likes and dislikes, a sense of what is good and why it might be so. We all possess “a critical turn of mind” he notes, and importantly, “criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and … we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.” 

(There is a McGilchrist tie-in, here, but I’ll save it for another post)

“[C]riticism is as inevitable as breathing” yet like breathing, we are rarely conscious. We remain ignorant or unconscious of the various ‘whys’ of our lives: why do we do this, why do we say this, hate this, love this, think this. Why are we so disdainful of criticism? And why must we raise it to the level of consciousness?

Perhaps the ghost that haunts this piece is the spontaneity espoused by the generation of poets and artists before him, inspired by the romantic ethos of novelty and emotion above all. Implicit in the cult of spontaneity is the sense that if we spend too much time exploring and explaining our ‘whys’ we will arrive at a place of disappointment, or staleness, or death. Eliot goes in the opposite direction: we must be prepared to render an account for why we like what we like. But we cannot remain in this place of analysis. We must take that insight back into the plane of experience and enjoyment. So what does criticism have to do with tradition? What is tradition for? What does it accomplish?

For Eliot the past must haunt the present. It has to presence and the artist’s job is to hear and see it, not as a script to imitate, but as a spirit of elan and vitality. Tradition is not a code of conformity, not a straight jacket of creativity, nor a spirit of condemnatory fussiness. Quite the contrary. Eliot conceives of a dynamic and nimble force, a standpoint steeped in the awareness of what has come before and a willingness to extend and alter that labored-for inheritance.  

We have downloaded a faulty script. Tradition is not the boogie man. Being traditional is an affect, a standpoint, an ethos that belies the smear of “timid adherence” to the past. The artist who has developed the historical sense, one who has labored for his inheritance, understands that no poet or artist has his complete meaning alone. His significance and importance is judged on his relation to the dead. The dead judge the living every bit as much as the living judge the dead. There is no single, solitary meaning or greatness. The work must be set in the context of all the greatness that precedes. And what happens with the emergence of something truly new and great is fascinating. Eliot argues that it actually alters the past greats in dynamic fashion, and it even alters the way we see the past. The two works, say, are judged and compared by each other.  

So the truly great is always the truly new. But the new never “superannuates” but develops, or refines, or complicates. This is the task.

In my favorite pull quote from the essay he says:

Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we *know* so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are what we know. 

The dead are what we know, whether we acknowledge it or not.  Recency bias is mortal.

It is time to rescue the words “tradition” and its close cousin “conservative.” Tradition is that which is worth re-calling and re-membering: to summon forth from the depths and to put back together. And con-serving is the guarding and protecting, with a sense of keeping it together. 

Eliot gives us the impetus to chart a path back so that we can chart a path forward. We have forgotten so much…and it is the dead writers we have forgotten.