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On all levels of society, privacy has become a lost Eden, pursued only by a few stubborn eccentrics. Everyone praises privacy, of course, but few really practice it. More and more people operate in the spirit of the jet-set character who gives each new wife a press agent for a wedding present. But then, how can privacy be prized when the President of the U.S. bares his surgical scar on television for all the world to see?
Faced with this restless panorama, many are trying deliberately to rescue tradition. The result has been not only a wave of scholarly books re-examining and celebrating the American past, but also a passion for antiques and a new concern for the preservation of monuments and landmarks from the bulldozer—including, it is hoped, Manhattan's splendid old Metropolitan Opera House, which last week saw its last regular performance amid a flood of nostalgia and champagne. Many younger communities tend to adopt the social traditions of the older centers; qualified Los Angelenos frequently refer to themselves as "fourth" or "fifth" generation Californians in their social announcements. Sometimes this leads to an attempt at creating instant age; at ceremonies marking the opening of its original library building, U.C.L.A. authorities issued a statement that it was hereby declared "traditional" never to step on the seal embedded in the middle of the main hallway. But such exercises in nostalgia or the manufacture of new traditions do not change the fact of rampant change, which evokes a turn-of-the-century observation from the Tascosa (Texas) Pioneer: "Truly this is a world which has no regard for the established order of things, but knocks them sky west and crooked, and lo, the upstart hath the land and its fatness."
The Need for Rigidity
Not all traditions are equally important. Changes in customs and manners are most visible and affect people most immediately. But the U.S. will undoubtedly survive the frug and the cutout dress as it did the disappearance of the napkin ring and the morning coat. Far more significant is the break with intellectual and moral tradition, the questioning not of a particular authority but of the concept of authority itself. A nation needs a sense of history as much as it needs a sense of the future; it needs tradition not as a soporific, but as a means of measuring itself. Anthropologist Loren Eiseley defines the problem: "It would be an awful bother to have to reorient oneself every morning. If you build a skyscraper so rigid that it cannot sway, it will crack and break under the tension. The same is true of social institutions; change must be allowed for. But for an institution to be an institution, it must perforce have some rigidity." The U.S. has long managed to maintain a unique compromise between change and rigidity. Its earliest colonists came in flight from or defiance of an established order. Their earliest pride was that of the fresh start. "Under their hand, political principles, laws, and human institutions seem malleable, capable of being shaped and combined at will," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. "A course almost without limits, a field without horizon, is revealed." Americans on the whole have tended to agree with Chesterton, who said: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead."