Tim Stanley, Whatever Happened to Tradition?

 

Tim Stanley, Whatever Happened to Tradition? History, belonging and the future of the West (Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/whatever-happened-to-tradition-9781472974129/

 

I found this book enjoyable and thought provoking. Stanley’s Roman Catholic faith is frequently mentioned. Stanley has a PhD in history but is also an accomplished journalist and some of his examples are quite up to date.

 

A few of my favourite moments:

 

“Tradition is not just a pretty thing, much less dead or to be curated - it is the past brought to life, guiding us through the present, offering us a roadmap to the future" (1).

 

He says that - a former Marxist - for a long time he was lost. "My embrace of religion, plugging me into a ready-made community and giving me something to live for other than myself, lifted me out of the doldrums.... tradition can be useful to those looking for ballast, which I think a lot of us are." (8)

 

Tradition has a "fidelity to history" that "rather than tear things up" aims to refine and improve (9).

 

"As Gustav Mahler is supposed to have said, tradition 'is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.'" (9)

 

Leo Tolstoy's 1882 description fits present day social media rather well: "We were all then convinced that it was necessary for us to speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed and wrote – teaching others. And without noticing that we knew nothing, and that to the simplest of life’s questions: What is good and what is evil? We did not know how to reply, we all talked at the same time, not listening to one another, sometimes seconding and praising one another in order to be seconded and praised in turn, sometimes getting angry with one another – just as in a lunatic asylum." (A Confession, p8) (Stanley, p56)

 

Victorian women enjoyed taking afternoon tea away from the perils of men and of alcohol. But some (perfectly legally) put opium in their cups. For most of the 19th Century, there was more concern about the side-effects of green tea than of cocaine. (Stanley, Tradition p71 citing Sweet, Inventing The Victorians, p100f)

 

The sickness of Nostalgia was first described by Johannes Hofer in 1688 when a man went from home in Berne to study in Basel and developed a terrible fever. He recovered the closer he got to home.

 

In 1733, when the Russian army crossed into Germany, soldiers complained of homesickness. The generals ordered that the next person to make a fuss about it would be buried alive. The problem disappeared. During the American Civil war, doctors diagnosed more than 5000 men with nostalgia (homesickness) and 74 were said to have died from it. (Stanley, Tradition, p79f)