The Reinvention of Tradition

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/ireland-america-tradition.html

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There are different ways to read the resonant phrase “the invention of tradition,” coined by the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm many years ago. One reading is debunking, skeptical, emphasizing the artificiality of all traditions, the extent to which all cultural narratives flatten or caricature the past.

Another reading is more favorable: It treats the element of invention in cultural traditionalism as a necessary way to bridge the gulf of years and keep the past alive. To invent or reinvent a tradition, in this sense, is not to craft a falsehood; it is to add your own bit of labor to a larger inheritance, which your heirs may renew and reinvent in their own turn.

The second understanding is implicit throughout Michael Brendan Dougherty’s lovely little book, “My Father Left Me Ireland,” about his complex relationship with his father and his father’s country. Dougherty was raised by an Irish-American single mother, the son of a far-off Irish father whom he barely saw, and the hole left by paternal absence was filled — through his mother’s efforts, then his own — by the attempt to claim an inheritance of Irish culture and language and tradition.

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Much of that inheritance is now regarded skeptically in Ireland itself, which in the flush of prosperity has embraced a more technocratic, end-of-history vision of itself — one that regards the old sentimental nationalism with suspicion or embarrassment, the old Catholic religion with anger or contempt. This transformation is the work of Dougherty’s father’s generation, and the American son frames his book as a series of letters to his father, carrying on a meditative argument for the importance of inheritance, of a healthy nationalism as a “spiritual ecology” that links “the living, the unborn and the dead.”

The complication at the heart of this argument, of which Dougherty is well aware, is that he did not really inherit the tradition in this way; he and his mother were re-inventors, by necessity, of the Irishness he now seeks to pass down to his children. But something similar was true of the Irish nationalists who fascinate him, the intellectuals and poets associated with the 1916 Easter Rising, who strove not only to free their country politically but also to revive its language and impose a specifically Irish vision on its culture.

Were those men really responding, as the most mystical of them insisted, to the demands of Ireland’s Gaelic-speaking ghosts? Or were they pilfering the past for usable relics, to invent a tradition that had not heretofore existed?

The answer to both questions could be yes. And that tension and complexity makes Dougherty’s book important — as a testimony, rather than a mere argument, about what’s lacking in late cosmopolitanism, and how a creative traditionalism might occupy the void that darker impulses are currently rushing in to fill.

But it also left me feeling a curious kind of envy for its author — not for his childhood fatherlessness, but for his potent personal connection to a tradition that even in its weakness, its abandonment by many modern Irish, still seems like a potentially coherent national narrative, an integrated thing.

I have some Irish blood and I like the same ballads as Dougherty, but my lineage and loyalties are more purely American, and what a similar creative traditionalism would mean for Americans seems to me about as clear as mud.

Of course we Americans have reinvented our traditions repeatedly over the years — going from a Protestant religious consensus to a “Judeo-Christian” one, from an Anglo-Saxon settler nation to a 20th-century melting pot.

But since the crackups of the 1960s, and especially lately, we have felt as divided over our national story as the factions of Dreyfus-Affair-era France — with polarized narratives of Who We Are that don’t seem reconcilable, with partisan identities overriding communal ties, and without a common understanding of Americanness that doesn’t just seem like a thin proceduralism, or the self-serving claims of the white man’s past.

Like Dougherty I have young children, and I want to give them a story of America that coheres as an inheritance. But I’m not sure what that means, exactly, if I’m raising them Catholic in an increasingly post-Protestant or even pantheist America. Or if I want them to honor old ancestors whose commitments our culture now repudiates. Or if I want them to be conservative, in some sense, without being trapped by nostalgia or tempted by the darker side of nationalism. Or if I want them to see their country’s sins clearly — as the left often sees more clearly than the right — without falling prey to the progressive tendency to remember the past only in order to hold it in contempt.

Some of the creative reinvention involved in answering these questions is every father’s task. But it is also a common task, at which our society is failing. And our collapsing birthrate, our increasing failure to even have children to inherit, feels almost like a judgment on our inability to figure out, in common, what it is that we should wish to have passed down.

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