Martin LeFevre: Knowledge, Tradition, and Insight

In ancient times, and not so long ago in many parts of the world, each tradition was completely distinct and whole. Tradition wasn’t something that a people had; it was the total way of life in which people were completely immersed.

Now many people speak of honoring all traditions, and that’s good. But to a person in whom tradition is still intact, there is only one tradition—his and her own. Only those who have no real tradition speak of honoring all traditions.

Ask a person in one of the few remaining isolated cultures in South America about their tradition, and they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. That’s because their tradition is all encompassing--a lived, breathed, and given reality.

Tradition in the anthropological sense is the totality of a people’s past and present culture. It’s only possible to step outside one’s tradition and examine it in contrast with other traditions when the continuous thread of the primeval past has been broken.

Has humankind moved beyond traditions? Is tradition dead? Certainly the idea that we can take traditions from here and there, as a kind of smorgasbord, isn’t working.

Tradition is organic, entire, and old beyond memory. Each generation inherited and added to their primal tradition, and then passed it down, a tapestry of the past into which succeeding generation was woven.

There is no point in lamenting what is past, or denying what is. The human race, to grow into human beings, has to leave tradition behind. Tradition was a thing of our childhood as a species.

The continuity of thought precludes the flowering of insight. Ancient peoples, and the few intact indigenous groups that remain today, had their own insight, but it was deeply symbolic, embedded in tradition.

In modern terms, the primeval past is somewhat analogous to a mystic in the Middle Ages, couching his or her transcendent insights in terms of Christian theology. To do otherwise was to invite torture and death.

Likewise, it was unthinkable for ancient peoples to go outside their traditions in their vision quests. To do otherwise would mean being cast out of the clan.

We can only learn from the remnants of traditions if there is a larger whole to which we belong. That whole is humanity. The fragments cannot be woven together into a whole, because each tradition was whole, and emerged from the ground of a given people.

Put another way, no gathering of the world’s existing traditions could make a whole, because each tradition represented the whole. ‘Diverse traditions’ can only represent fragments.

We moderns have been cut from our roots. Clinging to the strands of tradition that remain only serves to weaken us. There are limits to multiculturalism, and we have reached them.

We can honor traditions while realizing that our continuity with them no longer exists. We have become unmoored as a species, and must find our anchor in another source, beyond tradition.

Human beings no longer need to mediate experience with symbols. Indeed, I would argue that we can no longer do so without losing our basic humanness.

The soil of humankind, which is tens and even hundreds of thousands of years old, is eroding fast. The pace and disconnectedness of technological life, the effects of our machines and especially the computer, and the juggernaut of scientific knowledge are some of the reasons for this radical break with the past.

There are two completely different kinds of learning. There is learning that can be passed on to others, and learning that cannot.

The learning that can be passed on is knowledge and tradition. The learning that cannot be passed on is intelligence, or wisdom. Only questioning and insight can awaken the latter within oneself.

Humankind has started a momentum of knowledge that will soon be carried forth by the computers we have made. Computers are on the verge of going from housing knowledge, including the knowledge of traditions, to generating knowledge.

From that point on, theoretically even if every human being on earth disappeared in an instant (the misanthropic fantasy of shows like “Life After People”), computers would continue to expand knowledge as long as they had a power source.

Neuroscientists have shown that the brain is not hard-wired. Programs do not have to rule, not in adults, and not in children.

The future of humanity does not reside in knowledge and tradition. The brain that is embedded in them, and the brain that’s essentially free of symbols, are ‘wired’ very differently, wired for freedom.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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