Tradition is not a welcome word on the left of the political spectrum, linked with conservative values and anti-progressive actions. Marxists look upon tradition with a Bakunin-esque glee and enjoy seeing old institutions dismantled. There are plenty of people in the UK who wish to see an end to monarchy, an end to Parliamentary rule, an end to unelected Peers in the House of Lords. Progressives will point to all manner of hideous activities that occur in ‘traditional societies’ such as child marriage, patriarchy and slavery.

But tradition is a fragile and overlooked phenomenon. To conserve a tradition is to participate in an activity which was started before you were born and will hopefully continue after you are gone. The political thinker Edmund Burke is probably the best defender of tradition in recent centuries, to quote –

“But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation – and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.”

Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

What Burke is highlighting is the damage caused when the unbroken chain of tradition is finally broken. He argued that it left people untethered to the wiser decisions that had been made for them over time by their ancestors and instead allowed them to shape society on a whim. This is where conservative thought crosses over with evolutionary thought. The evolution of species occurs through small inter-generational changes which preserves the species as a whole and creates more adapted individuals. Tradition, argues Burke, operates in a similar way – decisions and actions taken before you were born have necessarily been filtered for their fitness through the passage of time, meaning that they must have some value, some longevity, since they survived they must be useful.

I’m not however arguing for political conservatism. Although there is nothing conservative about the current conservative government. I’m arguing for other types of living traditions and also the dangers of trying to resurrect them.

An example which keeps coming up in society is religion. Most British aren’t religious and if they are they aren’t religious as their ancestors were. Britain has a history of fractured religious practices, the schisms and wars between Protestants and Catholics. But as a living tradition Protestantism has little to go on. It was forged from internal disagreement over the role of hierarchy and authority and as such broke with many significant aspects of Catholicism. Now the Church of England looks outdated, silly and boring. So instead the generations have turned towards non-Western sources of spirituality – Buddhism, Yoga, Taoism, meditiations of various types and the endless proliferation of New Age oddness – quantum healing and crystal neck pressure point water bath purification…

There’s nothing wrong with Buddhism and Yoga. But they belong to their own living traditions which most Westerners have no access to, nor should they. Yoga is not a commodity to be bought and sold, it is part of a spiritual tradition that you’re either born into or you’re not. The Dalai Lama, speaking in Edinburgh in 2005, urged Christians and Westerners NOT to convert to Buddhism and to look to their own religious heritage for guidance. Wise words. Buddhism is not from Western Europe, it has no roots or tradition here, and neither do the Westerners who practice it. You might argue that this is some form of exclusiveness, but to take it back to Burke, if you have no tradition then you end up making decisions based on a whim. You can be a Buddhist this week and then drop it, and even those Westerners who have stuck with it for their entire lives, are they going to pass it on?

Philosophers that I admire such as Nietzsche, John Gray and Nassim Taleb, argue for ‘Species Thinking’. To think beyond just yourself and your own needs and desires. You are part of a wider group and a wider community and embracing this goes against the aspects of modernity which are so pernicious – selfishness, mindless consumption, pursuit of growth at the expense of the future. Running around looking for spiritual satisfaction from any other source but your own heritage seems to counter this principle.

So what do we have as a living religious tradition in the UK?

The most obvious is Christianity. Personally I would argue that Catholicism has the deepest ties and connections and is still a living religion, despite the self-inflicted destruction of Vatican II. I was raised a Catholic, and while I’m not a believer in the strict sense of the word, I do find value and comfort in the Mass, the music, the architecture and the ritual actions. If you’re Irish then Catholicism is obviously the established religion, which is tested on a daily basis by the literny of horrors that have emerged from the actions of the Church in recent decades. Nevertheless, there is a tradition within the Church that goes back to Rome and incorporates many local beliefs and shrines within the pantheon of Saints. Other religions have been in Britain for long periods of time, especially Judaism, and if you were born into those traditions then maybe those are your source of comfort and connections.

The other source of spiritual tradition we have on these islands are the diverse forms of pre-Christian beliefs. Celtic polytheism, Anglo-Saxon paganism, DaneLaw and Viking traditions, Manx, Cornish, Welsh, Scottish traditions of folklore and history. This is where the problem of a broken tradition arises. All of these were suppressed and faded away with the rise of Christianity after the Fall of Rome. While there are new and reconstructed forms of Celtic Druidism, Viking Asatru etc, there is no living link that we can draw from, no ancestral ties recent enough to be clear about what those practices even were. We have glimpses – antler headresses from Mesolithic Star Carr, stone circles and engravings from the Neolithic, mummified bodies in barrows from the Bronze Age, descriptions of Iron Age tribes from Caesar and poems from the Anglo-Saxons. But these are fragments. The question is can we rehabilitate anything of value from these shards?

I would like to think so, but this is a journey not a simple answer. For me there are themes which occur time and time again. Gods with horns who live in the deep forests, trees, especially oak, which have significance, offering being deposited into bodies of water. But these are like shadows being projected from another time, blurry and indistinct. The challenge is to build something new and meaningful with the wreckage of the old. We need traditions, we need to keep traditions, from hay-making to bonfires, from offerings at wishing wells to Midsummer feasts. We need to think about what we leave behind, is it a legacy to be proud of or did we just trash the planet in search of pleasure? Can we hand something precious to our children.

As Burke said, society is a pact, between the living, the dead and those yet to be born. What could be more of a challenge to modernity than that!