My younger brother and I have developed a tradition of going head to head in a complex betting contest that spans the NFL season through the Super Bowl. We call it DR2 after our shared initials.
While the monetary stakes are low, the emotional stakes are high and the fun is enormous. Throughout the season we have a constant back and forth about sensationalist coverage of DR2 in the tabloids, rumors of locker room dissent and staff shake-ups when one of us is on a bad losing streak, and solemn recollections of various hallowed memories like the Thanksgiving “massacre” weekend when I lost every game. Our tradition has many charms, not least of which is the opportunity for us to be as silly as we please.
(Painful disclosure: my brother has a considerable edge over me in winning seasons.)
We are deep enough into this tradition to scrutinize with skepticism any proposed changes to our abstruse rules and rites. Sometimes, during the (too) long off-season, we forget the purpose of a particular rule and have to remind ourselves why it’s there.
You could call our approach conservative in that any wholesale change would disturb us deeply. Of course, there is nothing unusual about this; traditions among family and friends only become traditions when they are approached with a similar sense of preservation, consistency, and history.
As the new season (DR2 and NFL in that order) is about to begin, I was thinking about how the word “conservative” in the sense of conserving tradition has become rare in our political discourse. Having brought up politics, I’ll now follow the well-worn path of referencing an apt metaphor called “Chesterton’s Fence.” The short summary is “Before you knock down an apparently useless fence, first find out why it was built.” But the longer form, below, does it better justice:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Written about one hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton’s respect for the past is different than the Conservatism of William F. Buckley’s “standing athwart history and yelling stop.”
Unlike Buckley, Chesterton did not leave us with a catchy enough slogan to swell a movement. Nevertheless, “before you change something, understand its history” is excellent advice.
In the matter of current American politics, I wish that all factions and political leaders would take Chesterton’s advice to heart. Doing so won’t prevent reform, but, rather, will reduce miscalculations, make change smoother and more successful, and be less likely to provoke angry counter reactions that divide people further. For most individuals, change tends to provoke some level of anxiety. That anxiety can turn to fear when change is sudden or is accompanied by incendiary slogans and provocative language.
I think of the “defund the police” push after the George Floyd murder. It hurt rather than helped the worthwhile cause of police reforms and served to exacerbate the blue/red divide. In the fall of 2020, I was walking through Central Park in the middle of a bright day, happy crowds around me, talking to a friend in Virginia who was sincerely worried about my safety, because he’d been fed an apocalyptic vision of a lawless, unprotected New York.
I think of the reversal of Roe, cancelling out fifty years of established law resulting in so much fear and misery and divisiveness. Not only the fear of the elimination of the protection afforded by minimum abortion rights, but the fear of a similar sudden elimination of other rights related to the concept of privacy such as marriage equality. Roe is a fence that should never have been knocked down, especially because the alternative was to move the Roe fence by simply upholding the Mississippi law in question. I’m pro-choice so I wouldn’t have liked that outcome, but I think it would have been a far lesser evil.
To get back to the level of the individual, which is what really matters, I believe we are all traditionalists in our own fashion. Without traditions, life would be far more brutish, nasty, and humorless. Stale, flat, and empty are words that come to mind.
Starting a new tradition is perhaps a little like planting a tree and taking pleasure in its growth not only for yourself and for your friends and family, but possibly for future generations.
Which is another way of saying that when my brother and I decide to hand down our DR2 tradition, we will take care to choose members of the next generation who will honor our traditions not in the breach but in the observance.
David, perhaps you have more of a conservative streak than you had thought. On Roe, a deeply complex issue, I always thought the Roe finding was problematic and the reversal proved that to be true. The real problem was in the original decision. It was a matter that should have been decided in legislative fashion, meaning nationally in Congress and otherwise in state legislatures. Now the states have it back. A national law must be the product of Congress, not the courts. That would mean looking at all aspects and deciding if the fence needs to be there and, if so, how it should be designed. Such a task was not meant for the court. I know that is a conservative approach, but it could have yielded a better outcome and, if not, because Congress could not reach a consensus it could pass, then it might have been best to leave it to the states until a future Congress could manage legislation reflective of the population it serves.
On a more important note, as a father I established a football betting tradition, though it only lasted a few years. When the boys were young, and Budweiser was running the Bud v Bud Light superbowl commercials, I organized betting on the outcome of the Bud series. Each of us put in $.25 and the winner took the pot of $1.00. We watched every Bud commercial.
I agree we all have that conservative impulse and that is healthy. Too often, we confuse that with political conservatism. It's a shame there aren't different words for those two.