Alasdair Macinytre and John Henry Newman offer superior ways of thinking about tradition and the types of rationality inherent in tradition. They don’t compare tradition to a lump of gold but to a conversation. For Macintyre, traditions arise out of ongoing discussions about the goods that are the goals of social practices and the ways of achieving and sustaining those goods. Because tradition arises in this way, there will naturally be arguments, disagreements and justifications given. As he says, once a tradition has sunk to the level of unquestioning acceptance, it is a failed tradition. In his “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” Newman gives a similar account of how doctrine and belief develops over time.

In this understanding, conversion can make sense. It isn’t just a sort of leap of faith from individualist, instrumental rationalism to organic tradition. Traditions face various tests and challenges over time and either fail or overcome those difficulties. When one sees that one’s tradition is failing, one can find or devise another tradition that takes the benefits of the previous tradition and put them in a new context or one can live with the contradictions becoming apparent in one’s current tradition. The famous opening chapters of Macintyre’s “After Virtue” are supposed to describe just that situation in modern ethics. The modern attempt to justify ethics without reference to human goods (and nature) has resulted in a situation in which personal interactions are simply instances of manipulation.

I also think tradition must always be subordinate to two things. First the gift of revelation. It was untraditional for early Christians to become Christians; they had been Jews or Gentiles or Pagans or something else before that, but Grace moved them, and they became their true selves precisely because they rejected a bad tradition. If you had followed the family tradition of agnosticism, you would not be better off, just as Christian society is better of for the conversion of St. Paul. Tradition is a way of transmitting the truth. We should be humble before its hidden wisdom, but we should not make a cult of it.

Second, all tradition is at some point invented. It is then refined over time by countless anonymous improvers, improvisers, and tinkerers, plus the hard school of experience. There are at times in history and in our own lives so-called Machivellian moments, moments of creation according to abstract principle and intelligence. Nous, if you will. The only way for a society to be decent is not simply to have the good fortune to inherit a healthy tradition, such as the Anglo-American common law. Societies sometimes benefit from their Solons: wise, creative law givers who establish somethin valuable and enduring by basing it on right-reason informed by experience. Consider the Code of Justinian as an example of this kind of uncommon sense.

We must reinvent things and preserve what we can. The modern conservative must be more philosophical than the conservative of the past precisely because our society is more degraded and less capable of finding its way through mere adherence to tradition. Like Plato and Aristotle in the 300 BC era of Ancient Greece, we must look to philosophy and, luckily, God’s Revelation for answers, as well as the asnwers staring us in the face from our own past. We must evangelize these things, as well as recreate these experiences in our own lives. It may take centuries of re-building, but we know even from a cursory review of Christian history that there are moments of re-growth and re-discovery continually in the history of the Church. Societies decline and, after some “rock bottom” moment, often come to rediscover what is lost while re-creating other new good things in response to contemporary crises. Consider the Sacred Heart of Jesus movement of the 19th Century or the work of Irish monks in re-Christianizing Europe.

We are blessed to have so many tools and the experiences of others with which to build. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need the courage and perseverence to maintain hope and do our own small parts in this drama.

“Culture, as its name denotes, is an artificial product. It is like a city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations, not a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural forces. It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of ‘folkways’ into which the individual has to be initiated.
Hence it is clear that culture in the widest sense of the word is what the anthropologists term ‘enculturation,’ i.e., the process by which culture is handed on by the society and acquired by the individual.” (The Crisis of Western Education, 3)

Dawson’s point here is that tradition does not automatically reproduce itself. Culture must be handed down. Therefore, a completely static “traditional” world in which people “automatically” gain a cultural identity and tradition is a fiction. All tradition is handed on (”traditio” means to “hand down”); all culture has to be transmitted. I am not sure if I am making sense here, but I understand your comments and appreciate them greatly.