Custom Versus Tradition
We have repeatedly denounced the strange confusion that the moderns constantly make between tradition and custom; indeed, our contemporaries are quite apt to give the name 'tradition' to all sorts of things that are really only customs, and often customs that are altogether insignificant and sometimes of very recent invention. Thus it is enough that some profane festival-established by anyone at all-simply endure a few years in order to be qualified as 'traditional'. This abuse of language is evidently due to modern man's ignorance of everything traditional in the true sense of the word; but one can also detect in this a manifestation of that spirit of 'counterfeit' to which we have drawn attention on so many other occasions: where nothing traditional any longer remains, people seek consciously or unconsciously to substitute for it a sort of parody that can so to speak fill-at least in outward appearance-the void left by its absence. It is then not sufficient to say that custom differs entirely from tradition, for the truth is that it is even in stark contrast to it, and that in more than one way it facilitates the diffusion and maintenance of the anti-traditional spirit.
What must be understood first and foremost is this: all that is of the traditional order implies essentially a 'supra-human' element, custom on the contrary being something purely human, whether by degeneration or by its very origin. Indeed, two cases must here be clearly distinguished. First there are things that might formerly have had a deeper meaning or even a properly ritual character, but which, having ceased to be integrated into a traditional whole, have lost it entirely and so are now no more than a 'dead letter' and a
'superstition' in the etymological sense; and since their purpose is no longer understood, they are particularly likely to be deformed and to become tainted with extrinsic elements arising from mere individual or collective fantasy. This is generally the case with customs to which it is impossible to assign a definite origin, the least that can be said of them being that they bear witness to the loss of the traditional spirit, and that they may be more serious as a symptom of this loss than they are in respect of their own drawbacks. Nonetheless, they still present a double danger: on the one hand, people are thus led to repeat actions simply from habit, that is, in a wholly mechanical fashion and without any valid reason, a result all the more unfortunate in that such a 'passive' attitude predisposes them to accept all sorts of 'suggestions' without reaction; on the other hand, by assimilating tradition to merely mechanical actions, the adversaries of tradition are not slow to take advantage of it by turning it to ridicule, so that this confusion, which with certain people is not entirely involuntary, is used to create an obstacle to any possibility of restoring the traditional spirit.
The second case is that where one can properly speak of 'counterfeits'. The customs we have just mentioned are, despite everything, still vestiges of something that originally possessed a traditional character, and as such they might not yet seem sufficiently profane. Thus the attempt, at a later stage, to replace them as much as possible by other customs that are wholly invented, which will be accepted all the more easily as people are already accustomed to doing things without meaning. And it is here that the 'suggestion' to which we just alluded intervenes. When people have been diverted from the accomplishment of their traditional rites, it is still possible that they will sense what is lacking and feel the need to return to them; to prevent this, 'pseudo-rites' are given them, and even imposed upon them if occasion allows; and this simulation of rites is sometimes pushed so far that there is no difficulty in recognizing the formal and scarcely disguised intention of establishing a sort of 'counter-tradition'. In this same order there are also other customs that, while apparently less offensive, are really far from being so, by which we mean customs that affect the life of each individual in particular rather than that of the whole collectivity; their role is again
to stifle any ritual or traditional activity by substituting for it a preoccupation-it would not be an exaggeration to say obsessionwith a multitude of perfectly insignificant, if not completely absurd, things of which the very 'pettiness' powerfully contributes to the ruin of all intellectuality.
The dissolving character of custom can be discerned very clearly today in Eastern countries, as far as concerns the West it has long since passed the stage where it was even conceivable that all human actions might have a traditional character; but where the idea of 'ordinary life' (understood in the profane sense that we have explained elsewhere) has not yet become general, one can as it were catch in the act the manner in which such a notion takes shape and the role played in this by the substitution of custom for tradition. It goes without saying that we are speaking of a mentality that, at least for the present, [1] is hardly that of most people of the East, and belongs only to those who can be said to be more or less 'modernized' or 'Westernized', the two words basically expressing one and the same thing: when someone acts in a way that he cannot justify except by declaring that 'it is the custom', one can be sure that one is dealing with an individual detached from his tradition and no longer capable of understanding it; not only does he no longer accomplish its essential rites, but if he does keep some of its secondary 'observances', this is solely 'by custom' and for purely human reasons, among which concern for 'opinion' holds a preponderant place; and above all he will never be found wanting in the scrupulous observance of a host of those invented customs of which we were just speaking, customs that are in no way different from the silliness that constitutes the 'good manners' of modern Westerners, and that are sometimes pure and simple imitations of them.
What is perhaps most striking in these wholly profane customs, whether of the East or the West, is the incredible 'pettiness' we have already mentioned; it seems that they aim at nothing more than
directing all attention, not only to things that are entirely exterior and emptied of all meaning, but even to the very details of these things, to what is most banal and limited, which is obviously one of the best ways that exist to bring about a veritable intellectual atrophy in those who submit to it, and in the West what is called the 'worldly' mentality is the best example. Those in whom such preoccupations come to predominate, even without reaching this extreme degree, are only too manifestly incapable of conceiving any reality of a profound order; there is an incompatibility here so evident that it would be useless to dwell upon it further, and it is also clear that such people find themselves enclosed thenceforth in the circle of 'ordinary life', which is nothing, precisely, but a thick fabric of outward appearances like those on which they have been 'trained' to exclusively exercise all their mental activity. For them one might say that the world has lost all its 'transparency', for they no longer see in it anything that could be a sign or an expression of higher truths, and even if one were to speak to them of the inner meaning of things, not only would they fail to understand, but they would immediately begin to wonder what their peers might think or say of them if by chance they were to admit such a viewpoint, and even more conform their lives to it!
It is indeed the fear of 'opinion' that more than anything else allows custom to impose itself as it does and to take on the character of a veritable obsession: man can never act without some motive, legitimate or illegitimate, and when there can no longer exist any valid motive, as is the case here since we are speaking of actions that truly have no significance, one must then be found in an order that is as basely contingent and as deprived of all effective importance as is that to which these actions themselves belong. It might be objected that for this to be possible an opinion must already have been formed about the customs in question; but in fact it is enough that they be established in a very restricted milieu, even if at first merely as a 'fashion', for this factor to come into play. From this point, having become fixed by the very fact that no one dares any longer abstain from observing them, they can thereafter spread gradually, and correlatively what was initially only the opinion of a few ends by becoming what is called 'public opinion'. It could be
said that respect for custom as such is fundamentally nothing other than respect for human stupidity, for in such a case this is what is naturally expressed in public opinion; moreover, 'doing as everyone else does'-to use the current expression-which for some seems to take the place of sufficient reason in all their actions, is necessarily to assimilate oneself to the vulgar and to endeavor to become wholly indistinguishable from them; it surely would be difficult to imagine anything more base and also more contrary to the traditional attitude, according to which each person must constantly strive to raise himself in the full measure of his possibilities, rather than sink down to the sort of intellectual nullity represented by a life wholly absorbed in the observation of the silliest customs, all for puerile fear of being judged unfavorably by whomsoever may happen along, that is to say by the foolish and the ignorant. [2]
It is said in traditional Arab countries that in the most ancient times men were distinguished from one another only by their knowledge; later, birth and descent were considered; later still, wealth became a mark of superiority; and finally, in the last times, men are judged solely by outward appearance. It is easy to see that this is an exact description of the successive predominance, in descending order, of the respective points of view of the four castes, or, if one prefers, of the natural divisions to which these correspond. Now custom incontestably belongs to the domain of those purely outward appearances behind which nothing is concealed: to observe custom in order to fall in line with opinion that honors such appearances only is therefore properly the action of a Shūdra.