DEBATENATE

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The challenge

“Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Tradition is advice from people who already tried the alternatives. G. K. Chesterton called it the democracy of the dead. Your great-grandparents get a vote, and the handful of people who happen to be walking around today don't get to overrule everyone who came before. He also had a rule. If you find a fence across a road and can't see why it's there, you don't tear it down until you find out. A culture with no tradition and no order isn't free. It's lost. You'll say slavery was a tradition. It was, and it was evil, and it was beaten by an older truth, that every person bears God's image. Tradition corrected tradition. Let me ask you this. Did you think for yourself and invent the alphabet, or did dead people hand you that too? Tradition isn't peer pressure. It's peer review.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. Tradition widens the vote. The people alive this minute don't get to overrule everyone who came before.

    In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton described tradition as the democracy of the dead, giving a vote to our ancestors.

  2. Before you tear down a custom, find out why it was built. Old practices often solve problems we forgot we had.

    In The Thing, Chesterton argued that a reformer who finds a fence across a road should not remove it until he understands why it was put there.

  3. Society is a partnership across generations. We inherit from the dead and owe something to the unborn.

    In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke described society as a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Slavery and segregation were traditions too, so tradition can't be trusted as a guide.

Nate: And they were wrong. But they were beaten by an appeal to something older and deeper, that every person is made in God's image. You test a custom by truth, not by its age, and the truth that beat slavery was the oldest one in the room.

What he grants the other side

Some traditions were plain wrong, slavery among them.

The lines

Sources

  1. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)
  2. G. K. Chesterton, The Thing (1929)
  3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
  4. The Bible, Genesis 1:27

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