Scruton on tradition

Roger Scruton’s essay “Rousseau and the Origins of Liberalism” first appeared in The New Criterion in 1998, and was reprinted in The Betrayal of Liberalism, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball.  Among the many good things in it, there is an important expression and defense of the conservative understanding of tradition.  Scruton writes:

Modern liberals tend to scoff at the idea of tradition.  All traditions, they tell us, are “invented,” implying that they can therefore be replaced with impunity.  This idea is plausible only if you take the trivial examples – Scottish country dancing, Highland dress, the Coronation ceremony, Christmas cards, and whatever else comes with a “heritage” label.  A real tradition is not an invention; it is the unintended byproduct of invention, which also makes invention possible… [A] tradition, precisely because it is not invented, has authority.  “Unintended byproducts” of invention contain more knowledge than any person can discover unaided.

The specific example Scruton focuses on in the essay is the Western system of musical notation (which was criticized by Rousseau).  He also mentions common law, parliamentary procedures, manners and social conventions, dress, and morality.  (In order to see his point vis-à-vis this last example, one need not regard all moral principles to be the products of tradition in the relevant sense.  One can recognize a natural law that is deeper than tradition and unalterable, while allowing that there is also a layer of moral principles that are of greater binding force than mere etiquette, even if not having the absolute or unalterable status of natural law – a layer sometimes called the ius gentium or law of peoples.)

Part of what Scruton is saying here is that traditional practices and principles of these kinds, though not infallible or absolutely unalterable, nevertheless have a presumption in their favor, precisely because they have so far stood the test of time.  That is, of course, a familiar enough conservative theme. 

But there is more to it than that.  The most important kinds of tradition, Scruton notes, are not practices or principles that were deliberately invented by some particular individual and then went on to last.  Rather, they are practices or principles that were not the product of any one person’s ingenuity, but rather evolved gradually as a byproduct of the actions of multiple individuals operating over a span of time, none of whom was deliberately trying to produce them.  No one person invented the system of musical notation, for example, or came up with the principles implicit in common law, or decided what the prevailing rules of etiquette would be.  These are rather what the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson famously characterized as “the products of human action but not human design.”

A further point is that, precisely because such practices and principles evolve in this way, they often reflect more information about the world than any one individual is likely to have available to him.  Consider, for example, a system of rules of etiquette that includes principles like the following: When you first meet someone, offer your name and acknowledge him with a handshake or nod; do not bring up controversial matters of religion or politics in conversation with people you do not know well; when dining with others, wait until they have been served their meal before beginning to eat your own; when dining with others, do not smack your lips, slurp your beverage, lick your fingers, belch, or otherwise behave in a manner likely to be off-putting to those around you; when in an elevator, on a bus, using a public walkway, or the like, allow a few feet of space if possible between you and those around you; do not speak loudly or in any manner that might disturb others when in a library, movie theater, or the like; etc.

Any system of etiquette is going to include innumerably many such rules.  It will also typically acknowledge qualifications or exceptions to the rules.  And it will reflect broader cultural circumstances (which may not prevail in other societies, which is one reason not all cultures have the same rules of etiquette).  No one person could come up with such a system, because no one person could foresee all the contexts in which such rules might be needed, all the cultural circumstances relevant to determining exactly what the rules should be, all the considerations that might justify exceptions to the rules or call for qualifications, and so on.  Such rules instead develop over generations by trial and error, and gradually harden into a set of customs that people simply take for granted. 

In no way does this make them arbitrary, though.  On the contrary, they serve a crucial function of letting people know how to act in a manner conducive to amiable and efficient social interaction, and they are able to do so because they answer real human needs that follow upon both human nature and concrete cultural circumstances.  The impersonal process by which such traditional practices form reflects all the relevant considerations, which no single human mind could have information about in advance. 

There is in this sense a kind of wisdom embodied in tradition that gives it an authority no individual could have, because no individual could have the wisdom in question.  This is what Scruton means when he says that “a tradition, precisely because it is not invented, has authority.” 

Scruton observes that tradition, which is an “unintended byproduct of invention,” also “makes invention possible.”  Naturally, he doesn’t mean that it makes all invention possible, which would entail a paradox (insofar as invention would presuppose tradition but tradition also presuppose invention).  What he means is that it makes certain further kinds of invention possible.  Individuals can, of course, deliberately bring about novelties in common law, parliamentary procedure, etiquette and other social conventions, and for that matter morality.  No one denies that.  Scruton’s point, and that of other conservative thinkers, is that individuals can do this, and do it with beneficial results, only insofar as the novelties are piecemeal additions to or alterations of a larger preexisting body of practices and principles that they did not invent, and could not themselves have invented wholesale. 

As Scruton notes, this conception of tradition, or ideas in the general ballpark, have been put forward by thinkers like Burke, Mises, Oakeshott, and Hayek.  While there is a broad sense in which these thinkers can be called “conservative,” they are also all in the broad “classical liberal” tradition associated with the likes of John Locke and Adam Smith.  Should that in some way cast doubt on the conservative credentials of what they have to say about tradition, at least from the point of view a postliberal conservative?

No.  For one thing, it would be foolish and indeed fallacious (specifically, an instance of the genetic fallacy) to assume that an idea must be suspect merely because it is associated with thinkers with whom one otherwise disagrees.  Moreover, there is an obvious respect in which the conception of tradition described by Scruton echoes themes to be found in the more traditional sort of conservatism that looks to Aristotle and Aquinas for its primary inspiration.  As Aristotle emphasizes, moral virtue is acquired first and foremost by habituation, and theoretical understanding comes only later if at all.  He was talking about the individual human being, but something analogous can be said of the social organism.  The habits embodied in its morals, conventions, and culture more generally can exhibit a kind of virtue even if those who make up society do not have a theoretical understanding of the value of the practices and principles they are following.  Just as Aristotle would say that it is an error to suppose that theoretical understanding of morality should or could precede the practice of morality, so too do thinkers like Burke, Oakeshott, Hayek and Scruton argue that it is a mistake to suppose that theoretical understanding of the value of various specific traditional principles and practices can or should precede our adherence to those principles and practices.  The point is decidedly Aristotelian, even if the thinkers in question have other commitments with which an Aristotelian would not agree.

There is also, I would suggest, at least a very general parallel between the conception of tradition described by Scruton and the conception of tradition operative in Catholic theology (albeit I am by no means claiming they are exactly the same).  Newman famously theorized about the development of dogma, and part of his point is that the system of Christian doctrine is not and could not have been explicitly and entirely formulated all at once.  Rather, precise and explicit formulations came about gradually in response to specific historical circumstances, such as the rise of certain heresies that needed to be rebutted, applications to concrete cases that hadn’t previously been foreseen or addressed, and so on.  For example, no one person hammered out the entirety of what become the Church’s settled doctrine on the main points of Christology.  Rather, it was the result of centuries of reflection by Fathers of the Church, the teaching of various councils, and so on, each stage being a response to specific aspects of the issue that arose under specific circumstances. 

As understood by Newman, “development” is something that happens with doctrine as a consequence of the contribution of many individuals.  It is not some action that a particular individual performs (even if the actions of particular individuals, such as popes, and bishops gathered in councils, contribute to the overall development).  In recent years, however, churchmen and theologians often do speak of “development” as something active, something that a pope, for example, might decide to do. 

The results are not always salutary.  An example would be the statements many contemporary churchmen have made on the topic of capital punishment.  There have in Catholic tradition always been theologians and churchmen who tended to oppose the death penalty, just as there have been those who tended to support it.  But in recent decades, the rhetoric against it has often been far more extreme than what can be found in the earlier Catholic tradition, and indeed sometimes directly contradicts that tradition.  This rhetoric is grounded less in considerations about mercy or the facilitation of repentance (as earlier Catholic reservations about capital punishment were) than in an exaggerated conception of human dignity that owes more to Kant and modern philosophical liberalism than it does to scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, or the consistent papal teaching of two millennia.  While scriptural texts and earlier magisterial statements are sometimes appealed to in its defense, they are given novel interpretations, and scriptural and magisterial texts that point the other way are ignored.

Scruton points out that the liberal in politics who tosses aside traditional practices and principles naively and arrogantly supposes that he can do better, when in fact his novelties are grounded in a far more short-sighted view of things than is embodied in tradition.  He often ends up generating chaos, and the tradition he has undermined cannot easily be revived.  (To borrow a famous analogy of Wittgenstein’s, restoring the common sense embodied in tradition after it has been lost is like trying to repair a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers.)

Something similar is true in theology – indeed, it is more true in theology, since the credibility of any claim to represent the deliverances of divine revelation crucially depends on consistency with what that revelation has always been understood to say.  For modern churchmen to imply by their words and actions that even two millennia of consistent traditional teaching cannot be trusted can only generate skepticism about the trustworthiness of these churchmen themselves.  In theology as in politics, those who undermine tradition saw off the branch on which they are themselves sitting.