Today, Carolina Journal Radio’s Mitch Kokai talks to Louisiana State University Political Science Professor James Stoner about the founding of the United States, the Age of Reason and the balancing of science and tradition. (Go here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: You say the American Founders respected both science and tradition.
Stoner: That’s the argument, that they really thought there was a harmony between them. I think to us they are very, very different, science and tradition. To them, they were certainly aware of the differences, I mean of proving something in itself as science does, and accepting something as a given, as tradition does. But they built on what they were given, and they passed along what they built. And they meant to, they meant to. So, in that way, they thought science and tradition really could work in harmony, that you would expect them to work in harmony.
Kokai: What are some of the ways science influenced the Founders?
Stoner: Science honed their minds. It inoculated them against utopian expectations. They knew that utopias were nowhere — that’s what utopia means, right, nowhere land — and they used that term, again showing that they read Renaissance humanist literature. But science got them thinking in terms of cause and effect, in terms of precision, of thinking precisely, of distinguishing one thing from another. And these capacities of mind serve them well in their political thinking, too, where it’s so easy to be misled by partisan ideologies, or by one’s interests or passions or ambitions, just to use their own language.
Kokai: But the Founders also relied on tradition?
Stoner: Well, sure, I mean in a way they brought these scientifically honed minds to work upon traditions. The thing about tradition is, they still have to sort out which traditions — and I guess that is a very American thing — to sort out which traditions you adopt and which traditions you allow to expire. It’s like the bride who wants a traditional wedding, but she is still going to choose what she wants that is traditional and what she doesn’t want that is traditional. It is not tradition in that strong sense, in which there is really a law behind the tradition that says this is the way it has to be done. Not tradition in the sense that the parents choose the husband for the bride and then dictate the way it is all going to happen. So it is tradition freely chosen, as it were. They choose in that way to accept tradition. I guess that is, at some level, a weaker sense of tradition. But on the other hand, it strengthens the traditions that are chosen. It really means they’ve been chosen for reasons. I guess they are always, then, chosen for reasons or kept for reasons, at least for the reason that they were accepted and practiced and found to be good.
Kokai: You make the case that in today’s United States, science seems to have prevailed over tradition.
Stoner: Tradition isn’t an argument; it’s not even a presumption. You see, I think the common law way of thinking was that — which I think the Founders still inherited — was that the presumption is, you do things the way it’s always been done unless you have a very good reason not to. And nowadays, so often, if people can’t give a reason for a tradition, then the tradition falls, whether or not there’s a better reason for what claims to replace it. So the presumption, in some ways, in a scientific age has been reversed, so that instead of presuming that the tradition is right, unless it has been shown that there is something better, we now presume that tradition has no privilege. We don’t privilege it, I think. And so we want the reasons all the way up from the ground. Look at the whole debate about marriage today. Tradition is now called prejudice. So, it’s true I suppose — I mean there is an aspect of tradition that is pre-judgment, right? It is something that you are given before you have experienced it. But in that way, you’re always given something before you experience it. It could be one side; it could be the other side in any of these things we debate. In another way, though, tradition isn’t prejudiced at all. It’s based on the judgment of the past, which means not the judgment of some abstract thing called the past, but of the actual human beings who lived lives and found things to be good. So, it seems to me that that way of thinking — that you make a presumption in favor of tradition and then admit reasons to correct the presumption, reasons that come either because new knowledge has been discovered or because circumstances have changed so that something that once was good isn’t good anymore in the new circumstances — that you admit changes to tradition when good reasons come along. But you start with the presumption of tradition. That way you don’t lose the goods that have been handed down, the things that have been found to be good. Give them a hearing. At least give them a hearing. Whereas today, I think we’ve drifted in our culture to a situation that really doesn’t do that. I guess what I’ve been saying is that there’s something about the scientific method that gets us thinking this way.
Kokai: What is the danger if we downplay or ignore tradition?
Stoner: Well, we lose the good things that tradition gives us. I mean in some ways, it is an accident whether or not somebody comes along who can really give a good reason for some of these traditions. It might be that someone came along a while ago and recognized the good in traditional marriage, to take sort of the most striking example. Maybe not just someone, but the experience of many who lived according to that law. Now, if an articulate defense of that is lacking, you could lose the good, the real experience, life good that goes along with it, just because the accident that there wasn’t an articulate defender. Now, I mean on the one hand, that is a call for articulate defense of these good things. And again, that’s a challenge to all of us in the academy, to be able to articulate the goodness of the things we experience as good. But still, there are a lot of people experiencing a lot of misery because we’ve failed in that job, or insofar as we’ve failed in that job. I think a kind of presumption in favor of tradition could, in these circumstances, have counterbalanced that.