The One and the Many - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 83

time fretting about whether to wear evening dress or a rabbit costume at a state banquet,
since tradition has decided this for you in advance.
The great majority of men and women who have ever inhabited the planet have lived
in tradition, and many of them still do. Non-traditional living is a recent invention. The
collective wisdom of your ancestors was plainly a more reliable guide to how to live than
any bright idea you might happen to stumble across yourself in a stray moment of inspir-
ation. In this sense, there is a certain humility about a faith in tradition. Most of what you
need to know is already available. God would not have been so outrageously inconsider-
ate as to fail to let us know from the outset all the truths necessary for our salvation. It is
inconceivable that he might forget to tell us not to fornicate, and then belatedly plant this
idea in the mind of some moralist around 1905. Innovation for the traditionalist mind is to
be treated warily, and usually turns out to be bogus. Every so-called novelty is simply a
minor variation on things that have existed from the origin of time. There is no idea that
had not been anticipated by others. Most of our knowledge is a footnote to the ancients.
There are probably proposals for Reality TV and hints on motorcycle maintenance in some
lost manuscript of Aristotle. Any lecturer who declares that toothpaste was invented in the
modern age is simply asking for trouble. A tube of the stuff is bound to turn up three weeks
later in a Mayan temple.
Tradition, then, relieves you of some of your freedom of choice, which some Americans
find objectionable. They prefer to see their lives as a series of strenuously self-defining de-
cisions. This has some positive political implications. What is important in a liberal demo-
cracy is less what you decide than the fact that you decide. This is an admirable kind of
politics, if also a somewhat adolescent one. Teenagers sometimes feel that being able to
make their own decisions matters more than the decisions they make. The oddness of polit-
ical democracy has not been sufficiently appreciated. It means embracing the possibility
of false, even disastrous decisions simply because they are ours. We would reject the idea
of an enlightened despotism even if we knew in advance that the policies it came up with
would be far wiser than those we might concoct ourselves. This is extraordinary, but also
perfectly proper. Human beings may misuse their freedom, but they are not truly human
without it.
Americans suspect that to hand over your choices to tradition or convention is to be inau-
thentic. Forms are Catholic, while personal decisions are Protestant. Rites and conventions
are what link people together for Europeans, and what intrude between them for Americ-
ans. A grotesque caricature of an American General in Dickens's novel Martin Chuzzlewit
cries sorrowfully, “But, oh the conventionalities of that a-mazing Europe! . . . The exclus-
iveness, the pride, the form, the ceremony. . . . The artificial barriers set up between man
and man; the division of the human race into court cards and plain cards, of every denom-
ination, into clubs, diamonds, spades, anything but hearts!” Form in America is at war with
feeling. This is why a folksy remark in a formal setting can get you elected president. Con-