On Tradition, Or What is Left of It

"THE youth of America is their oldest tradition," observed J. Oscar Wilde. Although the U.S. is not as young as it used to be, it still views all kinds of tradition with more youthful irreverence than any other nation, past or present. In fact, there is a widespread suspicion that tradition--the sense of continuity that is part faith, part convention and part habit--is disappearing altogether from the American scene.

In other and older countries, tradition is the visible testament to established order; referring to the matches between amateur and professional cricketers, the British still speak of The Gentlemen and The Players. Sometimes tradition is a means of reassurance in an uncertain world; "Do not introduce innovations," warns a Taoist maxim. Tradition ranges from philosophy to fashion, from faith to manners, from the highest regions of polity to the humdrum level of a city sidewalk. (Will the last woman who saw the last man tip the last hat please stand up?) At least on the surface of U.S. life today, it is difficult to find any institution or idea that people dare uphold primarily in the name of tradition--not God, not country, and certainly not Yale, not the sanctity of motherhood or of private property, not even baseball, the automobile or psychoanalysis. As U.C.L.A. Sociologist Ralph Turner put it, only half in jest: "A tradition is something you did last year and would like to do again."

Rebels without Targets

The evidence is everywhere the eye lights, the ear listens, the commentator prowls, or the station wagon travels. If there is anything left of the Puritan tradition, it is hard to detect. Perhaps its strongest remaining element is what sociologists call the "work ethic." Executives and businessmen seem to work harder than ever (and certainly harder than the average union members), and so do students, whatever their other diversions. At the same time, thrift is no longer a virtue--it is, in fact, nearly subversive--pleasure is an unashamed good, leisure is the general goal and the subsidized life, from Government benefits to foundation grants, is eagerly welcomed. Such notions as waiting to marry until one can support a wife now seem incredibly quaint.

As to sexual morality, the traditional rules are giving way to "situation ethics"--meaning that nothing is inherently right or wrong, but must be judged in context on the spur of the moment. This is particularly true among the young, and many adults simply go along with what they feel they cannot change. Dr. Ruth Adams, incoming president of Wellesley, proposed that the college issue birth-control materials to the students. Chastity, however, is possibly not the most important tradition questioned by youth. Society expects the young to be rebellious, but the trouble today is that they don't even know what to rebel against. Says Author Paul Goodman, a middle-aged and professional rebel: "When the young today look back to the Bible, John Locke and Immanuel Kant, they cannot realize that all this was for real. They will have to make their own way. The loss of tradition is tragic because a generation cannot break away from a past into bold new creative patterns if it has no relationship to the past."

The situation is similar in the arts. If tradition means restraint, there is scarcely any restraint about what may be publicly expressed or represented. U.S. audiences seem to have become unshockable. Dramas of incest and homosexuality are commonplace, total (if momentary) nudity has occurred onstage in Marat/Sade and in a "happening" at Manhattan's Judson Memorial Church playhouse, in which a nude couple was seen slowly crossing the stage clasped in each other's arms. As for literature, even though the Supreme Court decision on Publisher Ralph Ginzburg and Eros suggests a reassertion of older standards (TIME, April 1), nearly every drugstore or bookshop is loaded with hard-core pornography, much of it solemnly reviewed by serious critics.

In other ways, art has gone beyond all limits. Americans have quickly run through abstract expressionism, action painting, pop, op, kinetic and minimal art. With gravely innocent eye, the public contemplates art consisting of a real chair or a coiled rope, of limp sculpted toilets, of nudes that go through movements of coition. Like the young, artists are traditionally supposed to break with tradition, but there is hardly any tradition to break with. Irish, Southern and Jewish writers have been among the most productive in the U.S.--probably because they still have a tradition to work in, or to flout, if they so choose. In what might be called situation esthetics, new styles are eagerly seized even before they are fully formed, and almost automatically accepted; as Critic Harold Rosenberg noted in The Tradition of the New: "An appetite for a new look is now a professional requirement, as in Russia to be accredited as a revolutionist is to qualify for privileges."

The Virtues of Vulgarity

Architecture has broken out of the glass-and-steel box that long held sway, and which itself represented a rebellion against older forms. A new skyscraper may be built in the shape of an obelisk, a new air terminal constructed on the principle of an Arab's silken tent, a new garage like a Pueblo chiefs dwelling. Among the most daring patrons of the new architecture are U.S. churches, Mrs. Porter Brown, general secretary of the Methodist Board of Missions, argued recently that cathedrals were symbolic of a static community, while today's churches should be "fellowship buildings created to serve persons on the move or in pilgrimage."

The new music is often made up of electronic squeals, tics, toes, street noises and shaped silences--in a recent recital at Manhattan's Y.M.C.A., three musicians solemnly performed a modern work composed of exhaling in unison, slapping thighs, rhythmic stamping and throwing things. New dances almost always alarm the conventional, but more than a conventional change seems to have occurred with the frug and its successors--including the alligator, in which a couple lies down on the floor and starts writhing rhythmically.

In fashion, skirts are as high as an elephant's knee, cleavage has plunged so far down the middle that there is no place to go except around the side, cutouts appear in the darndest places, exposing undiscovered areas from whose bourn no traveling eye willingly returns. When the dress is not cut out, it is transparent. Slacks can and do go anywhere. Even men are abandoning their traditional drabness; tuxedo jackets now come in cerise, vests may be flowered. The New York Herald Tribune's Eugenia Sheppard points out that "vulgar" is no longer a nasty word. "For the last few years there hasn't been an all-out new and exciting fashion that hasn't been just a little vulgar," she says, and quotes an interior decorator to the effect that "there is nothing worse today than a room in good taste."

The tradition of the family continues to decline. While some see it as the individual's last refuge from Big Organization, it has lost much of its cohesiveness--joint vacations for parents and even slightly older children have become a rarity. Paternal authority, long on the wane, is being undermined further. What the doctrines of Freud failed to do to father--and Freud himself is now old hat among the young--the knowledge explosion accomplished. After all, it is difficult to remain the fount of wisdom while the junior members of the family discourse expertly on the new physics. There is little force left in family rulings as to what careers to choose or where to go to school. For that matter, not going to college at all for a year or two--working instead or joining the Peace Corps--does not cause the sky to fall either.

Society used to be one of the chief guardians of tradition, but what was once a fortress is now at best a series of scattered camps. Snobbery will always exist, but it is now on the defensive and increasingly hard to uphold against bright, moneyed or attractive outsiders. The chief question is no longer who belongs to a certain class and who doesn't, but who at a given moment is in or out of a particular clique--and the rule of in-and-out can be more tyrannical than any old-line social arbiter. Parties can mean anything from a small conversational dinner with a string quartet in the next room to taking over a discotheque or having a couple of short-order cooks come in at midnight to make omelettes for 50. The grand, slumbering old men's clubs have lost much of their importance or have taken on alarming new guises: New York City's refurbished Princeton Club, for instance, now evokes Conrad Hilton more than F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The debutante business is still going strong, but almost anyone with a little money can now have a coming out, and if a debutante will choose to forgo her party and take a trip to Kenya instead, not even the caterers will care. Weddings still have the traditional trimmings, including white lace and tears, but many couples now insist on writing their own wedding service or at least varying the hallowed music; the customary wedding marches have begun to give way to Handel's Water Music, Haydn's St. Anthony Chorale, or even Spanish guitar tunes.

On all levels of society, privacy has become a lost Eden, pursued only by a few stubborn eccentrics. Everyone praises privacy, of course, but few really practice it. More and more people operate in the spirit of the jet-set character who gives each new wife a press agent for a wedding present. But then, how can privacy be prized when the President of the U.S. bares his surgical scar on television for all the world to see?

Faced with this restless panorama, many are trying deliberately to rescue tradition. The result has been not only a wave of scholarly books re-examining and celebrating the American past, but also a passion for antiques and a new concern for the preservation of monuments and landmarks from the bulldozer--including, it is hoped, Manhattan's splendid old Metropolitan Opera House, which last week saw its last regular performance amid a flood of nostalgia and champagne. Many younger communities tend to adopt the social traditions of the older centers; qualified Los Angelenos frequently refer to themselves as "fourth" or "fifth" generation Californians in their social announcements. Sometimes this leads to an attempt at creating instant age; at ceremonies marking the opening of its original library building, U.C.L.A. authorities issued a statement that it was hereby declared "traditional" never to step on the seal embedded in the middle of the main hallway. But such exercises in nostalgia or the manufacture of new traditions do not change the fact of rampant change, which evokes a turn-of-the-century observation from the Tascosa (Texas) Pioneer: "Truly this is a world which has no regard for the established order of things, but knocks them sky west and crooked, and lo, the upstart hath the land and its fatness."

The Need for Rigidity

Not all traditions are equally important. Changes in customs and manners are most visible and affect people most immediately. But the U.S. will undoubtedly survive the frug and the cutout dress as it did the disappearance of the napkin ring and the morning coat. Far more significant is the break with intellectual and moral tradition, the questioning not of a particular authority but of the concept of authority itself. A nation needs a sense of history as much as it needs a sense of the future; it needs tradition not as a soporific, but as a means of measuring itself. Anthropologist Loren Eiseley defines the problem: "It would be an awful bother to have to reorient oneself every morning. If you build a skyscraper so rigid that it cannot sway, it will crack and break under the tension. The same is true of social institutions; change must be allowed for. But for an institution to be an institution, it must perforce have some rigidity." The U.S. has long managed to maintain a unique compromise between change and rigidity. Its earliest colonists came in flight from or defiance of an established order. Their earliest pride was that of the fresh start. "Under their hand, political principles, laws, and human institutions seem malleable, capable of being shaped and combined at will," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. "A course almost without limits, a field without horizon, is revealed." Americans on the whole have tended to agree with Chesterton, who said: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes--our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead."

In shaping a democracy of the living, the U.S. Constitution itself was a conscious reaction against the tradition of monarchial government. The rejection of tradition was equally important in building the American economic system; the interchangeable part, basis of all mass production, was invented because a Yankee engineer named Eli Whitney refused to accede to the European notion that even a rifle was an individual creation that could only be handcrafted by a skilled gunsmith. Later, in its relations with the rest of the world, the ever more powerful U.S. had to abandon both the Machiavellian tradition of old Europe and its own tradition of isolation; only a nation uninhibited by conventional thinking could have conceived the Marshall Plan.

A Faith in Flux

The U.S. has always combined its readiness to innovate not only with a strain of political conservatism--stronger at some times than at others--but with an unshakable confidence in the American idea. American politics have changed profoundly. While the Senate may retain its quill pens and snuffboxes as hallmarks of tradition, a whole world of florid political oratory, provincialism and paternalism has given way to a youthful, hard, professional approach. Still, such major innovations as the New Deal were possible only because they could take place within the framework of basic American tradition. Some of the most drastic recent changes in American life--the emergence of unprecedented strong federal authority, the growth of what is in effect a welfare state, the election of a Roman Catholic to the presidency--could have torn or distorted the fabric of less firmly based societies. In the U.S. they were possible without major upheavals precisely because the underlying tradition of freedom under law and of responsible citizenship is so strong. Despite the disappearance of so many familiar landmarks, Sociologist David Riesman sees "incredible durability and tenacity" and suggests that tradition is strongest when it is least self-conscious or ideological: "If you're in it, you're not self-conscious."

Not all changes are breaks with tradition; some represent the discarding of a recent for a much older tradition. In religion, for example, some new trends have been startling and even disturbing. Yet such drives as the ecumenical movement and use of the liturgy in the vernacular are really intended to recover the forms of an older, deeper Christianity. From the churches to the laboratories, change itself has become the only constant. Says Stanford's Dr. Dwight Allen: "We are not shifting from one sort of tradition to another; we are in flux for keeps. We have to adjust institutions, attitudes, professions to the fact that change is here to stay."

In the classic context, tradition tends to embalm the moment in time when the culture feels it is at its peak. British sovereigns ride to their coronations in an 18th century coach with an escort of cavalrymen wearing plumed helmets, and the guards at the Vatican are still dressed in the costumes Michelangelo reputedly designed for them. It is impossible to imagine a guard of honor for a U.S. President dressed as Minutemen. For Americans believe profoundly that the best is yet to be; that whatever it is--a building, a custom, an institution--they can do it better next time.

If this sometimes heedless energy destroys monuments of the quiet past, the underlying impulse is the U.S.'s basic tradition: a feeling that no problem is insoluble, that no defeat is final, that there is no established order that cannot be questioned. In the words of Robert Frost, most traditional of U.S. poets, "We have ideas yet that we haven't tried."

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