Tradition with a capital “T”

26 Jul 2013

By Robert Hiini

UNDA Sydney Senior Vice Chancellor Hayden Ramsey chats with Paramatta Bishop Anthony Fisher OP, another Tradition keynote speaker. PHOTO: Robert Hiini

Earlier this month, the University of Notre Dame Australia stuck its proverbial neck out to bring a neglected, and often maligned concept to national and international academic prominence.

Around 200 people, many of them academics and lay professionals from throughout Australia and further afield, converged at the university’s Sydney campus to hear from leading international and Australia-based philosophers on the subject of tradition.

Quoting the thought of Joseph Ratzinger, Tradition 2013’s opening speaker Bishop Anthony Fisher OP said that differing attitudes toward the subject had marked a deep rift running through the whole modern age.

On the one hand were those who counted tradition as being “a prerequisite to humanity”, and on the other “those who count modernity’s abandonment of tradition as essential to rationality and progress”.

In his opening remarks on the first day of the conference, UNDA Senior Vice Chancellor Professor Hayden Ramsey said the university had been proud to have brought together some of the fields heavy hitters from the US, UK, Canada and Australia, to tackle the issue head on.

“It is fair to say that, as yet at least, tradition has not received the scholarly attention shown to concepts such as community, ethnicity, culture, state, nation, and so on,” Prof Ramsey said.

“The idea from the start was in this place, at a Catholic university, there could and should be a respectful, appropriate, but strong critique of the notion of tradition so that we can really work out what it’s all about and why it matters – if indeed it does.

“The question [is] what makes for a tradition or whether traditions are pernicious and anti-individualist, or whether redeeming, or whether incomplete without some broader social and political framework or whether traditions are just conservative nonsense of the past which now ought to be junked albeit slowly.

“These are questions for moral and political philosophy and theology.”

Although spruiking a diverse bevy of speakers – Catholic, Protestant, and Atheist – the relationship between small ‘t’ traditions and the Sacred Tradition of the Catholic Church held a special focus throughout the conference.

Prefiguring similar comments from several conference speakers, prominent ethicist Professor John Haldane, one of the conference’s international headliners, said tradition is now too readily dismissed from serious consideration as a concept.

“Just as anybody who talks about ‘authority’ very quickly is associated with authoritarianism, so there is a tendency in speaking of tradition and the values of tradition and the meaning and values of tradition, to be associated with traditionalism,” Prof Haldane said at the conference’s opening reception.

But, he added, “To value tradition is not necessarily to value traditionalism, just as to value authority is not necessarily to value authoritarianism.”

Prof Haldane spoke of contradictory trends in his native Scotland as typifying tensions felt throughout the world as the country moved ever closer to a vote on Scottish independence. “There is a felt tension currently… that things are moving so rapidly in the world it is very difficult, as it were, to keep one’s balance,” he said.

“Part of the rhetoric, particularly on the side of those who wish to see Scotland go independent, is the idea that everything is new – new, new, new – that we are to be ‘forward-moving’, that we ‘embrace the future’, whatever that means – I’m not exactly sure.

“The other trend that is seen is the sense of loss of balance… people who are not sure that they want to run forward, into the future.

“If they want to do anything they want to try and hold on to something – and it is understandable – in that circumstance, that talk of tradition and secure structures and the past, and so on, has its appeal.”

While he was sympathetic to a yearning for security and identity, he said he was weary of a kind of ‘obsessive traditionalism’ which was “sometimes a substitute for trying to engage the present”.

Prof Haldane also recently met in Rome with Cardinal Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, giving participants a humorous snapshot into the friendly encounter.

“Rome is holding its breath while it tries to work out what exactly the style and manner and tone and substance of what the new pontificate is going to amount to, but I think it won’t be very long before your cardinal has an impact on that,” Prof Haldane reported.

“He clearly is a man who knows what needs to be done. If he’s not in the right position to do it, he won’t hesitate to tell the man who is. So it may not be too long before you find the pope speaking with an Australian accent.”

Prof Haldane, a papal advisor and prominent philosopher in the Thomist tradition who appears regularly on British television and in the media, said the city of Sydney and Australia could be the locus of practical solutions to inter-cultural convergence.

“It is a very exciting experience to walk around Sydney and to get the sense that this is where a very serious and profound issue is probably going to be resolved…not exclusively in Sydney, but really the relationship between the Anglophone world and the residue of the cultural traditions of the Anglophone world, and the Asiatic world,” he said.

“Part of that is the meeting of different kinds of traditions and, interestingly, societies which are highly traditional in one respect and people who have escaped from, or chosen to leave, for one reason or another, societies where tradition is increasingly weakened.”