Or, just maybe, progress itself is a tradition that deserves its own reverence. Sometimes, Chesterson's fence was erected by a shepherd who no longer uses the field that you'd rather play soccer on. It was useful in its day, but no longer.
I mean, that's the point of the metaphor: before knocking down the fence, figure out what purpose it served in the first place. It's not a question of "don't ever knock down a fence" or "always knock down fences".
Exactly my point. "Tradition is smarter than you" implies that I won't be able to out-think it. When, in fact, tradition is overturned quite regularly and quite often with extremely good reasoning.
Always doing the same thing is dumb -- be that holding or throwing out tradition. Mindless adherence to tradition is just as stupid as mindlessly discarding tradition. Tradition is not smarter than me, tradition is mindless. Critical thinking wins.
I think we'd be much better off being un-ironic sun-worshipers than hollowed-out atomised atheists.
And I see that as someone who is sadly in the latter category.
Better off worshipping unintelligent and non-existent beings, and all the foolish memes that inevitably accrete with magical thinking?
> hollowed-out atomised atheists.
Hollowed of what? Mostly harmful traditions many of which were designed to entrench unearned power and influence?
Imagine of instead of typing all that negative conspiracy theory rubbish on HN, you were outside intermingling at your local sun temple.
There were deities associated with the sun. Sol Invictus is the most commonly known, but was a relatively late addition to the Roman pantheon, intentionally appropriated from traditions from Syria and elevated by the empire for what they perceived to be civic benefit. Hardly traditional, but perhaps an early example of bureaucrats recognizing the value of a tradition they did not personally respect.
It was long thought that Sol Invictus was a Syrian sun-god, and that Aurelian imported his cult into Rome after he had vanquished Zenobia and captured Palmyra. This sun-god, it was postulated, differed fundamentally from the old Roman sungod Sol Indiges, whose cult had long since disappeared from Rome. Scholars thus tended to postulate a hiatus in the first centuries of imperial rule during which there was little or no cult of the sun in Rome. Recent studies, however, have shown that Aurelian’s Sol Invictus was neither new nor foreign, and that the cult of the sun was maintained in Rome without interruption from the city’s earliest history until the demise of Roman religion(s). This continuity of the Roman cult of Sol sheds a new light on the evidence for priests and temples of Sol in Rome.
http://romanrepublic.org/roma/wp-content/uploads/attachments...
a. You don't know my parents, don't be so sure.
b. You're right, I should have gone with "washing hands before surgery" to avoid these low-effort rebuttals.
But we are very prone to assume that tradition is always brain-dead. That's a very dangerous assumption...
The problem with progress is that it makes people so comfortable and privileged that they dream up inane fantasy ideologies that question progress and harken back to the imaginary golden ages from which their ancestors painfully crawled.
Question Everything, Even This (but not too much because that's overthinking).
Maybe you should also live everyday as though the possibility of the sun never rising again were real, then maybe you might get busy doing those important things in your life.
Again, tradition is smarter than you.
Again, progress trumps tradition.
Source for this? Searching for the claim only turned up results saying more time outdoors is associated with better long-term health outcomes.
Also: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heres-something-unexpect...
But no, as somebody with usually-moderate, sometimes-acute photosensitivity, even your usually-correct conventional wisdom isn't what the doctor orders in my case.
The point is to never tear down fences, because you can never quite know why it was put up. You can know that a fence isn't useful to what you want to do, but Chesterton's fence just doesn't apply
Did we ever stop? Praise the sun! solaire pose