Moving to Another Country Essay

Tradition is vivacious knowledge. A customs duty is a group of related ideas that gift lasted for a long magazine. In many courtings community induce spent that time trying to advance the ideas. Well call that a dynamic tradition because it changes over time. In former(a) cases, the focus has been on keeping the tradition exactly the same over time. Well call that a static tradition because it does non change. Although these approaches are contradictory, both(prenominal) traditions are mixed. Dynamic traditions are important because they deem some of our best knowledge. To twenty-four hours, they contain only the best ideas any participants surrender thought of in the substantial history of the tradition. I dont mean they are perfect, but if they missed a safe(p) idea, it was despite bulks efforts, non intentional. They do a pretty good job of convention the best ideas, and keeping those around, and discarding ideas that are discovered to be mistaken.The reason dynam ic traditions are especially of import is the sheer amount of thought, criticism and error compensateion that has gone into them from many people. Just because traditions contain expensive knowledge doesnt mean they are forever and a day right. Sometimes they arent. I shouldnt defer to traditions however because a lot of smart people didnt see any elan to repair them further. I should defer if I dont see any look to mend them further. If I machinate up a new idea, and I dont see any way to improve it further (in 20 minutes of thought), therefore its not particularly reliable. I could easily have missed something. With a tradition, perhaps thousands of people go under in twenty minutes of thought, and some others allot in years, so even if I dont see any way to improve things, and even if I dont know much about the subject, it has an advantage over s contributetily making something up myself. All the knowledge in traditions can be intimidating. And no one has time to ca refully and critically go through all the details of all the traditional knowledge they use. Thats OK. But one should bear in mind two things. First, if something goes wrong if there seems to be a problem then relying on tradition isnt good enough. Its not working, and youll need to pull off something or sense another tradition. And second, a thoughtful person should critically evaluate some traditions. Its your choice which, but everyone ought to be good at something and have the experience of trying to improve some knowledge. Everyone should put some serious thought into some area.There isnt much point to look if I dont seriously think about some parts of it. In the case of a disagreement, anappeal to tradition is invalid. The tradition might be wrong and someone thinks it is. To address that disagreement, I have to consider their criticism of the tradition, any alternative ideas they have, and any arguments in favor of the traditional idea, and then try to work out what is t rue. Traditions containing peoples best ideas of the past wont always be the best ideas anyone thinks of in the future. The biggest value of traditions is they can frequently give useful ideas that are not controversial, or starting points which partially solve problems. In a disagreement, although we cant say, This is true because a lot of smart people didnt see anything wrong with it, and who are you to say they missed something? the accompaniment that something is a tradition is not irrelevant either. Dynamic traditions have, over the years, faced a lot of criticism. They often already include explanations of why common criticisms of the tradition are mistaken. Major traditions have existing writings that provides arguments and ideas on the subject. This literature can answer many disagreements, which are often made in ignorance. When we brinytain something wrong with a tradition, if at all possible we should improve the tradition, not abandon it. We should seek a way to mod ify the tradition but in any case retain existing knowledge.To keep the most existing knowledge, our change should be as small as possible to solve the problem. If we were to start over from scratch, we may avoid the flaw we found, but were not perfect and our new ideas will contain other flaws. And new ideas wont have the benefit of decades or centuries of people trying to find and correct flaws. We should consequently be respectful of tradition even as we find errors in it, and try to improve it with new ideas of our own. Static traditions are different. Although theyve been around a long time, no one has been trying to find mistakes in them, so they arent very useful. Nor are they innocuous. Consider why does the static tradition sleek over exist? Why didnt it disappear after its original advocates died? With a dynamic tradition, its passed on to the next generation because people find it useful, and teach it. A static tradition, too, must have some mechanism for being passed on. But it cant be that people voluntarily learn it delinquent to its usefulness. Because it never changes, and never corrects errors, its not very useful. Instead, people must in some way be tricked or fooled into it, or indoctrinated, or forced, or brainwashed. Often they are pressured, and madeto feel bad, imp uniform or guilty if they do not fol imprint the tradition.But applyling peoples emotions is difficult. Because people are creative and will try to defend themselves, it takes a lot of knowledge to reliably control or manipulate them. Where does that knowledge come from? Static traditions are not actually entirely static. The main ideas, doctrine or dogma is kept constant. But the way of passing it on changes. The more people try to preserve the tradition unchanged, and make sure it will last forever, the more creativity they put into mechanisms for transmitting the tradition to the next generation. All traditions face a selection effect. For a tradition to last, it has to be passed on from older people to younger people. But only so many ideas can be taught to the next generation. Children are only in school, and in their parents home, for so many years. The amount of ideas is large, but its limited. Only a certain amount of tradition can fit. Only the ones that are better at being passed on will make the cutoff. Dynamic traditions compete by being as useful as possible. Thus the selection effect pushes them to be better and better.They try to be true, and people like the truest ones so much that they teach them to children. Static traditions compete differently. They cant compete with good ideas directly, so they use other approaches such as manipulating or controlling people. In short, in some way they disable the persons creativity so he doesnt realize the tradition is low on useful truth content, and doesnt think of alternative ideas against which a static tradition cant compete. The selection effect for static traditions makes them worse, not better. Any static tradition that fails to create a permanent blind spot in the person runs a serious risk that one day hell realize its not a great tradition and doesnt have a lot of useful knowledge. And if he realizes that, whether he ever changes his mind or improves himself, what he wont want to do is teach it to his kids. There will never come a time when his children have some problem or question, and he thinks if he teaches them this tradition it will help them, since he knows it is not useful. Traditions are important because they contain our best knowledge collected over the years. But they can also be dangerous. Static traditions that induce blind spots in people and are useless at everything except getting themselves taught to children. It is up to us to consider which traditions are which.