On Tradition

Tradition is a strange thing to me. It's got this weird cultish feeling to it. Things are the way they are because they've always been that way. It's the height of ignorance and foolishness. But there's more than one way to look at it.

I remember asking a teacher about traditional versus contemporary songs and what the difference was between them. He told me that the only difference was that traditional songs were ones that we kept on singing and new songs are ones we have only started to sing. In this case, tradition is just a fancy way of saying something's old.

It's easy to reject tradition, but that can be just as foolish. Things that last are usually good, or at least beneficial. Things should be evaluated periodically to make sure that they're still useful, if not optimal. The only thing that can determine whether or not something is of use is not whether o not it is traditional, but whether or not it does what it should.