This piece originally appeared in VoegelinView.
In a complex world, humans have evolved to get by on simple rules of thumb. Our evolutionarily adapted instincts and heuristics let us quickly make good enough decisions amid both uncertainty and information overload. And as conservatives have always understood, one of the best heuristics is deference to tradition: when in doubt, do what people have done in the past. We can’t start from scratch with every decision, collecting data and weighing every option, so following our predecessors and copying what worked last time offer a valuable shortcut to action.
But what happens when that heuristic gets hijacked—when what we take for an old tradition is actually an innovation? After all, since the point is to reduce the amount of information we need to decide well, we can’t then comprehensively study every tradition. The actually practicable heuristic thus becomes when in doubt, do what people say people have done in the past. Unless we understand what the past was really like, then, we can easily find ourselves respecting, not time-tested practices and institutions, but someone’s recent invention.
Further complicating matters, new customs and institutions easily crowd out our remembrance of older ways. Consider the standard in medias res tale about creative destruction under capitalism, which begins with a dominant player settled and ripe for toppling. This presentation misses half the story—the story of that establishment’s prior toppling of a yet-older establishment. And by ignoring that story, we forget what even older institutions, norms, and assumptions previously gave way.
This dynamic recurs in the development of institutions: the once-settled establishment, undermined by an upstart, was only a slightly older upstart that had managed to acquire a sense of time-honored legitimacy. Those seemingly stable institutions are often younger and more plastic than they appear—the norm that developed only a decade ago, the tradition that goes back only to our fathers, the assumption that arose during our lifetime. And in any culture, those venerable institutions will have arisen only by supplanting now-forgotten ones—institutions that were once just as venerable.
Conservatives fail to internalize this truth at our peril. Falling for false traditions turns would-be conservatives into stewards of stagnation, defending past generations’ innovations while foreclosing the possibility of producing our own. Seeing through this mistake, and recognizing the institutional youth and plasticity around us, would give entrepreneurs of tradition new opportunities to jolt us out of acquiescence to a wretched status quo and begin creating again.
A good starting point for investigating this phenomenon is Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s 1983 book The Invention of Tradition, which explores the formation of the traditions that shape national identity. An invented tradition, they argue, includes “both traditions actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in a less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period – a matter of a few years perhaps – and establishing themselves with great rapidity.” The Invention of Tradition goes about revealing the youth of the Highland kilt, British royal pageantry, and other practices that we imagine are venerable and ancient—indeed, venerable because ancient. A pattern emerges from their case studies: older practices are superseded by new ones, which then manage—by deception, amnesia, or simple adaptation to a new status quo—to appear as established as their hidden predecessors once did.
A similar dynamic is at play in America, a country so young that we might think our traditions could only have been invented—we simply haven’t had enough time for “true” traditions to emerge. Consider some of our most American institutions: the Star-Spangled Banner didn’t become the national anthem until 1931; the Pledge of Allegiance wasn’t adopted by Congress until 1942 (and finalized until 1954); and the all-American Super Bowl only began in 1967—little more than half a century ago. But to us, these feel as American as apple pie (which, as it happens, Americans have loved for centuries.)
The concept of the invented tradition could be expanded to cover not just practices “which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition,” but tangible institutions—the accepted organizations and norms organizing society. What we might call an invented institution, then, is one that has established itself so solidly in our imagination and experience that we simply accept its establishment, without studying its foundations or considering its antecedents. This impression of solidity shores up the current establishment and keeps away both an older, dead consensus, and any would-be competitors.
Call this mistake the unprecedented fallacy: deferring to precedent, while forgetting that every precedent was once unprecedented. It is a failure of both retrospective memory and prospective imagination. Retrospectively, one looks to the past (as one understands it) to set the boundaries of the possible. In this case, one copies what others have done, without realizing, as a sharper historical memory would show, that that precedent was set by not doing what others had done. Prospectively, one insists that whatever hasn’t happened before, won’t happen in the future—after all, it would be unprecedented! Here, a failure of imagination prompts one to think, in a riff on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same, that the only things that can occur are those that have already occurred; nothing else is conceivable.
These failures of imagination and memory compound on one another. With a limited imagination, we struggle to see how things could ever be different, leading us to conclude that things have never been different. At the same time, a blinkered memory tells us things have always been this way, leading us to conclude that things always will be this way. Either way, the fallacy prompts us to follow others’ example, without asking how legitimate that example is.
Now, Hobsbawm and Ranger’s point was that the traditions were invented, their histories concocted. But debunking bad history doesn’t debunk the traditions themselves. These traditions had a genuine vitality for their adherents; Brits really do love the crown’s regal pageantry, and Americans really do love the Super Bowl. What matters isn’t that champions of invented traditions appeal to a false history, but rather that traditions can nevertheless rapidly come to matter to their adherents. In this sense, every institution is invented, because it is only through recognizing an institution’s credibility that it becomes credible; it is only through recognizing a tradition’s legitimacy that it becomes legitimate.
Additionally, while invented institutions can be top-down propaganda efforts to warp our collective memories, they can also naturally accrue their legitimacy from the bottom up. Especially when creative destruction is at work, after all, it is the customers who solidify a new cultural establishment, by transferring cachet from one institution to another. Citizens give credence to the new institutions and norms just to the extent that they come to ignore and then forget what preceded them. And what they forget above all is that every established institution was once young, and once challenged a yet-older establishment. Or as historian Jack David Eller has observed, “What is ‘traditional’ today indisputably had a start, even if we do not and cannot know what that start was, and at its beginning it certainly was not yet ‘traditional.’”
An effective emerging institution must therefore do more than displace an older one; it must establish itself so solidly in our collective memory that we don’t care—or even better, struggle to recall—what it replaced. By doing so, our institutions and concepts achieve their own “end of history,” in which reverting to a predecessor and imagining a successor seems equally implausible.
This error pervades political thinking today. Policymakers call America a liberal democracy, a term unheard of before the early twentieth century. Free-traders criticize recent protectionism for breaking with the policy of recent decades, despite tariffs’ ubiquity throughout our longer history. In antitrust policy, advocates of the consumer welfare standard argue that because it has guided policy for 50 years, breaking with it is a shocking rejection of precedent, and then praise the very advocates of that standard for rejecting the older Progressive Era precedent. And despite Bush- and Trump-era fears of a theocratic overhaul of the constitutional order, several states had blasphemy laws and even established religions well into the nineteenth century.
The point isn’t whether the new assumptions and practices are better or worse than the old ones, but rather that either way, what they aren’t is eternal and unchanging; if they are defended as such, any debate on the merits is already burdened by error. Conversely, revisions to these assumptions and practices could be good or bad; what they wouldn’t be is radical introductions of hitherto unknown methods.
There are also less overtly political cases. Older Americans are shocked that teenagers don’t want to drive when mass car ownership began only a few generations ago. “WitchTok” reflects the allure of supposedly hoary customs, but Wicca dates back only to the 1940s. Even the most widely used terminology around sex is quite new; as Foucault noted, the concept of sexual orientation dates only to the mid-nineteenth century. Last summer, the World Health Organization promoted homeopathy as “traditional medicine,” but that practice’s ancient ways also date only to nineteenth-century Europe. In each case, a novelty fools us into adjusting ourselves to the present, then superimposing it back onto the past.
Perhaps every institution eventually overestimates its necessity, and every generation comes to mistake the new and contingent for the old and timeless. But today, the “once was otherwise”-ness of society is even more difficult to recognize, thanks to the long reach of the Boomers. That generation’s uniquely deep influence has been so profound as to become invisible, making the unprecedented fallacy particularly powerful.
Consider, as a case study, what we might call the “Boomer folk theory of legacy media.” Once, both sides heard the same news and watched the same television, and a paper of record could set the story straight; the truth was unambiguous and conceded by all. Today, however, we find ourselves in uniquely troubled waters, as the news system fragments and we find ourselves agreeing on nothing.
It’s a true enough story: there once was consensus, and now there isn’t. But what preceded that consensus? Zoom out of the history a bit, and the strangeness is reversed: that recent homogeneity, not today’s cacophony, is the aberration, an anomaly within a longer timeline of dispersed voices and fragmentation. It was only through particular technological developments such as the television and radio that such a rapid diffusion of consensus could occur; a single figure telling the country “the way it is” in 1900 not only didn’t exist but couldn’t have. It is the invented institution of the mass-media monolith, not the deluge, that is exceptional.
Put another way, the mass media is an ingrained part of American politics for the Boomers, but not for anyone who looks beyond it to an older past. The shock to the media landscape has simply exposed the contingency of one more invented institution that thought itself essential enough to be uniquely enduring.
And yet, here as in so many other cases, we are surprised when these young institutions don’t endure. Why do we struggle to accept that they are a little older than we are? Why do we act as though our traditions are timeless? Perhaps the explanation lies in the fundamental difficulty of accepting all things’ fleetingness. Our traditions are an attempt to participate in something that has endured, and thereby to endure ourselves. But when we realize that our traditions have changed, we are jolted out of our illusion that we, too, could be timeless: if even this could end, then so could I! Repetition—continuing (what we think are) the practices of past generations—lets us dream of continuing beyond our mere lifetimes.
A disruption of repetition, in contrast, raises a disquieting, but energizing, question: what else could be otherwise? If even this could change … what else could be possible?
The consequences of probing into our institutions, and discovering their contingency, are profound. A sense of the way things are done is essential for social stability—and for social control: “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” And nothing shores up an establishment like a sense of timelessness.
Plato discussed this dynamic through his own invented institution, the Republic’s “myth of the metals,” in which Socrates imagines the guardians of the ideal city, Kallipolis, promulgating the story that each citizen is made of gold, silver, or brass. The tale, Socrates argues, will ensure that everyone accepts their status, staving off class struggle.
But surely, one interlocutor objects, the story is too absurd to be accepted: “Do you see any way of getting them to believe this tale?” Socrates’ answer is crucial: “No, not these themselves. … But I do, their sons and successors and the rest of mankind who come after.” The tale will seem ludicrous to the first generation; but the second, we can imagine, will find it odd but plausible, and the third will accept it as a matter of course. By the fourth generation, people will find it unthinkable that this history could be false—and if they did somehow discover the truth, they would be astounded by the myth’s recency.
What always receives attention is the promotion of a noble lie, a useful falsehood, but Plato’s insight into how generations perceive their own history applies equally to the truth. As with The Invention of Tradition’s puncturing of claims of timelessness, the myth’s falsity does not nullify its impact. After only a few generations, the citizens will have fully embraced the myth as if it had been accepted for 10 generations and will act accordingly: with complacency.
Even if the myth somehow were true, and the people were indeed made of different metals, their realization that such a fundamental social principle had emerged only a few generations ago would provoke its own disorientation. For even the most valuable institution, a revelation of its youth would expand people’s horizons of possibility. What Plato shows is that those capable of guiding an institution from renegade ideas to settled norms can wield enormous, and subtle, influence. Conversely, those who insist that the past (never mind how far back it goes) reveals the correct way, unwittingly do the bidding of another.
At its most farcical, this error leads champions of tradition to uphold what, unbeknownst to them, didn’t exist last week. One can easily imagine the third-generation “conservatives” in Kallipolis being the most stalwart defenders of the myth, not realizing that they are enshrining what their ancestors would have considered heretical. What would happen if a gadfly such as the real Socrates appeared on the scene to expose the Metalgate scandal and reveal the city’s true history—and if the citizens then concluded that things should be run differently around town? The myth’s conservative defenders would surely receive a grant from the golden guardians to fund magazines celebrating the metals, host lectures in the Piraeus on the metals’ merits, and generally do their best to quash this “new” thinking.
This error locks us into stagnation, blinding us to the possibilities for something different. The result is a Don Quixote conservatism, in which the slaves of some defunct scribbler strive to preserve a fleeting order they think is permanent. (Bizarrely, those most likely to celebrate the Founding Fathers today shudder at the thought of creating something new.) A dynamic, living society must escape this self-imposed trap, and ensure that history does not end. How?
The first step is dispensing with a procedural fealty that praises practices and institutions for their putative oldness, without bothering to verify it. Rather, assessing them soberly demands a substantive recognition of their successes and failures on the merits themselves. Otherwise, we risk giving an unjustified “past premium” to what is but someone else’s innovation.
One can easily err in the other direction and suppose that the newer institution is always the better, or that disruption is good for its own sake. But this is simply to look through a distorting microscope through the opposite end. A “future premium” that insists that whatever is, is wrong—witness the tech industry’s cult of newness—would be equally misguided.
Second, in assessing our condition and the possibilities for reform, we should apply a “principle of temporal symmetry”: if our ancestors could innovate, so can we, and so can our descendants. The principle cuts both ways, applying to both preservation and innovation: if we want future generations to preserve today’s customs, then we should preserve yesterday’s customs. Past generations honored their predecessors by seeing what should be preserved, and what revised; so can we. Perhaps the current practice is better than any other we can imagine, but appealing to uninterrogated precedent as the reason for continuing to do it one way rather than another will simply beg the question.
None of this entails rejecting the conservative’s appreciation of history and even less replacing one noble lie with another. Rather, we need a greater attention to the past, and to how our traditions and institutions have evolved. But too often, history is defended simply on the grounds that it reveals the similarities between our time and our predecessors’. This reasoning was perfectly articulated by John Dos Passos in 1941:
Every generation rewrites the past. … In times of change and danger when there is fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. That is why, in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily in accord with most men’s preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards.
That’s true, and following the cumulative wisdom of time-tested practices is often the best we can do. But just as important as the continuities with past generations are the discontinuities. The past can be a steadying source of reassurance, propping up our wavering convictions; but also a dizzying source of inspiration, untethering us from what proved to be only a model ship. Only by studying history can we avoid being fooled by it; only by seeing how our traditions have changed can we determine what should stay the same. A stronger sense of history is the only way to avoid cherishing for their solidity and endurance what were last year’s disruptive innovations.
The creation of the next enduring project will be for those who can escape this trap of false traditions and invented institutions. Perhaps conservatives should therefore heed the words of John of Patmos in his Apocalypse: “And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”
