In Defense of Traditional Marriage (Part I)
On the critical distinction between tradition and nostalgia, and why we shouldn't eat lobsters.
Architect Peter Calthorpe believes in traditional neighborhoods: small streets, town squares, and walkable districts. These old, traditional built forms enable the effective interchange of new ideas via the formal and informal networks of a community that, by design, make efficient use of limited natural resources.
In contrast, the “new” cities of today, lined as they are with gas-guzzling SUVs and tract McMansion housing, enable only isolation, ignorance, and wasteful consumption.
And yet Calthorpe is criticized for his traditional beliefs. For believing in human-scale neighborhoods populated by small, local businesses supporting a balanced diversity of life; he is accused of ignoring present-day realities—of indulging in nostalgia.
What the critics miss, Calthorpe maintains, is the critical distinction between tradition and nostalgia.
On the critical distinction between tradition and nostalgia, and why we shouldn't eat lobsters.
Architect Peter Calthorpe believes in traditional neighborhoods: small streets, town squares, and walkable districts. These old, traditional built forms enable the effective interchange of new ideas via the formal and informal networks of a community that, by design, make efficient use of limited natural resources.
In contrast, the “new” cities of today, lined as they are with gas-guzzling SUVs and tract McMansion housing, enable only isolation, ignorance, and wasteful consumption.
And yet Calthorpe is criticized for his traditional beliefs. For believing in human-scale neighborhoods populated by small, local businesses supporting a balanced diversity of life; he is accused of ignoring present-day realities—of indulging in nostalgia.
What the critics miss, Calthorpe maintains, is the critical distinction between tradition and nostalgia.
“Tradition,” he explains, “evolves with time and place while holding strongly to certain formal, cultural, and personal principles. Nostalgia seeks the security of past forms without the inherent principles.”
In other words: Tradition perpetuates meaning through space and time; nostalgia perpetuates ritual and form after all meaning has been lost. It is a subtle, but important distinction.
Left unchecked, nostalgia grows increasingly destructive, destroying historical meaning and leaving future generations without links to their past. This is because nostalgia does not dig deeper: it does not ask why. Nostalgia simply accepts—blindly.
Like literal interpretation of the Bible, nostalgia clings fiercely to the practices of a bygone era, suffocating all meaning beneath a blanket of ritual and form. If nostalgia permeated our legal system today, we would be executing the handicapped, stoning the acne-ridden, and condemning to death those who eat clams, crab or lobster—as the Bible literally commands—without ever asking why.
But where nostalgia accepts, tradition questions.
Tradition asks "why" because it has a faith in the universal. It has faith that there is meaning behind the ritual, and realizes that to seek out and understand this meaning is to pay homage to and celebrate the wisdom and knowledge of our progenitors.
This is what it means to uphold tradition. This is how our ancestors live forever.
Take the issue of shellfish: Nostalgia obediently denies itself the pleasures of eating shellfish, as commanded by the Bible—no questions asked. Tradition on the other hand, understands that shellfish are bottom feeders that consume dead and rotting flesh, and so freely chooses not to eat these abominations.
In understanding why shellfish are abominations unworthy of human consumption (i.e. because they eat some nasty shit), a two thousand year old observation, largely ignored and forgotten by even the most devoutly Christian, is made relevant once again.
Tradition, like a great library, protects and guides future generations, spurring life forward upon a solid foundation of timeless wisdom.
Nostalgia, like a fire set upon that library, destroys such wisdom—leaving future generations to flounder about in the dark.
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