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Townhall.com::Why it's foolish to turn your back on tradition::By Jonah Goldberg

In his brilliant essay "The Great Relearning," Tom Wolfe recounts a "curious footnote to the hippie movement." In 1968, at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, doctors found themselves treating diseases "no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names." These maladies had such names as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the rot.

These afflictions materialized because those hippie pilgrims believed the Man had nothing to teach them, so they turned their backs on "bourgeois" morality, a category of knowledge that included this thing called "hygiene." So they enjoyed communal toothbrushes, communal sheets, communal sex, communal bathwater and communal, like, whatever. Living like Rousseau's noble savages brought back the twitch, the thrush and the rot because it was a grand lie that savagery was ever noble in the first place, and because a lot of that stuff your grandmother taught you about everything from washing your hands to not sleeping around actually had practical relevance.
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Those hippies got the itch and twitch because they rejected what their parents taught them. They believed that we could act as if this was Year Zero and the world could be reinvented and reimagined from scratch. It's inconceivable that their parents knew what the exact consequences of rejecting traditional morality would be, but they knew on a dogmatic level that it was a bad idea.

Traditional rules of conduct emerge over time through a process of trial and error. To pick an extreme example, the Shakers banned sex and - surprise! - America is not overrun with Shakers today. Successful societies learn from their mistakes in time to make adjustments. Those adjustments become best practices that in turn become customs, and eventually, those customs become traditions. Those traditions are passed along from generation to generation, usually without us knowing all the reasons why they became traditions in the first place.

Obviously, some of these traditions are outdated and silly. Others are vital. Even leftists and libertarians who display ritualized contempt for tradition understand that we do some things today because we've learned from the mistakes of our forefathers. If everything is open to revision, then slavery is still a viable option. Fundamentally, this isn't a point about political conservatism so much as civilization itself. Cultures have roots - a point we're learning the hard way in Iraq, where there is no liberal democratic tradition and we are trying to create one from scratch.
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In this season of giving thanks, we should thank God for our good fortune. But we also owe a deep debt of gratitude to the papas - and mamas - who preached from one generation to the next.

This is why sudden change is almost always harmful to a society or culture. Any society has a large numberof unspoken traditions or customs that are commonly agreed upon. We don't know where they came from or why we do them, but we all do them. Think of shaking hands. There's many theories as to how it started, and we're not really sure which one (if any of them) is correct. But don't you get offended when you offer your hand to someone and they don't take it? In many ways, it's a stupid and pointless practice (to me, anyway), but I wouldn't think of singlehandedly trying to abolish through by refusing to shake hands, because it's perceived as rude not to shake hands and could cause people to shun me or just think less of me. We don't know why we do it, but we're not going to stop because that's the way things are done.

And so it should be with changing any ingrained societal practice or institution. We may not know why we do something, and may even find it foolish. But customs usually develop for a reason, even if we can't recall what that reason was. Before we jettison that custom, we need to make very sure that the reasons are no longer valid or needed. If we don't we risk doing to society as a whole, what I would do to myself were I to stop shaking hands.