Today they blah-blah-something about “tradition” as their latest defense for disdaining an evolution of common decency and fairness in how we treat other human beings.
Instead of enjoying the benefits of following traditions born of gosh-knows-how-many-years of hard-learned wisdom, now everyone’s spouting off personal experience as though doing so is itself proof of the new term for all that, i.e. “wokeness”.
For some reason they link to a piece on the recently-hoaxed Quillette because they were attracted by the following statement: “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.”
It’s pulled from a longer bit about just what sorts of traditions we apparently have been throwing away.
… But if he were to visit us in 2019, Durkheim would be surprised at the extent to which once-dominant ideas with no connection to economics have been marginalized as regressive and hateful—such as nationalism, patriotism and even masculinity.
This is one reason why so many people now feel unmoored. As Canadian science fiction writer Donald Kingsbury eloquently put it in his novel Courtship Rite, “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.” Faith in god, country and manhood might be seen as regressive by modern lights. But insofar as they were holding back male anomie, we perhaps neglected to consider what damage would be done if we discredited those ideas before finding replacements.
I’m bothering to let the original poster provoke me into a response yet again because traditional “masculinity” very much is at issue right now, since the toxicity of that tradition tends to be the link across most mass shooting events in the U.S., as examined today by The New York Times.
The motivations of men who commit mass shootings are often muddled, complex or unknown. But one common thread that connects many of them — other than access to powerful firearms — is a history of hating women, assaulting wives, girlfriends and female family members, or sharing misogynistic views online, researchers say.
As the nation grapples with last weekend’s mass shootings and debates new red-flag laws and tighter background checks, some gun control advocates say the role of misogyny in these attacks should be considered in efforts to prevent them.
The thing is, we haven’t “discredited” traditional masculinity “before finding replacements” for it; it’s just that men aren’t listening. We live in a time when the voices of those most negatively impacted by traditional masculinity are finding more opportunities to be heard.
The problem for “traditional men” is that when they say we shouldn’t replace tradition before we have a replacement for it, what they mean is that the replacement needs to allow the same privilege and the same power as did the tradition its replacing—which isn’t a replacement, it’s a rebranding.
Tradition itself was based on “personal experience”, just the personal experience of the powerful few. Those “gosh-knows-how-many-years of hard-learned wisdom” referred to by the original poster isn’t sacrosanct, and it isn’t inscribed on stone tablets.
It’s the accumulated cultural norms of a narrow slice of humanity that only ever listened to itself.
One final note: I find it sadly ironic that the Times article about the misogyny of gun violence itself continues the days-long inertia of the mainstream media in misgendering and/or misnaming the Dayton shooter’s sibling.
Misgendering and misnaming itself is a part of the very toxic masculinity the article seeks to examine—perhaps in addition to being directly relevant to the Dayton shooting itself–and a little self-examination perhaps is required by its authors and editors as to why the fact of Jordan Cofer seemed to them besides the point.