I feel like this post misses one of the most important ways in which a tradition stays alive, that is through contact with the world.
The knowledge in a tradition of knowledge is clearly about something, and the test of that knowledge is to bring it into contact with the thing it is about.
As an example, a tradition of knowledge about effective farming can stay alive without the institutions discussed in the post through the action of individual farmers. If a farmer has failed to correctly learn the knowledge of the tradition, he’ll fail to efficiently raise crops. And because this is an iterative process that allows for learning individual techniques with many chances for failure or success, failures of understanding can be corrected by contact with the real world at many points along the way, as each component of knowledge is learned.
Another example is in martial arts. Some “traditional martial arts” are said to be dead traditions that simply go through forms of technique but whose training practices are not effective in actual physical combat, whereas other martial arts have maintained a living tradition. But this difference isn’t down so much to having an institutionalized form of passing down the knowledge of martial arts techniques that has survived in Judo or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Boxing, but rather because some martial arts have maintained contact with the test of the real world with sparing and competition that emulates real combat. Those techniques and training methodologies that fail in these environments are discarded.
I think there’s an analogy here to biology. Yes, biological systems use many mechanisms to “transfer knowledge” from one generation to the next. There is plenty of error correction, for instance, necessary to maintain the usefulness of the genome. But there is also the final corrective of selection where errors that are too large fail to replicate as they come in contact with the world.
And so I would suggest that one test of a living tradition is simply the degree to which it is being put toward it purported purpose and tested against it. If you have a tradition of sword making and people who study texts of how to make swords and discussing the theory but who never actually make swords, they are at risk of becoming a ’dead tradition”. If they make swords but they are only used ceremonially they are at less risk, but still the risk is somewhat high because the quality of the swords as weapons is not being tested against real world conditions but only against proxies (they may have some tests of hardness, etc. but usefulness here rests on the quality of the tests). If the swords are actually used in combat or a very good proxy to it, then the tradition is likely to stay alive, even in the absence of other institutional methods discussed in the post.
This methodology obviously applies more to some traditions than others. Some traditions have much more clear purposes whose use can be more easily put in contact with the world than others, and so this is not necessarily a panacea for the maintenance of all knowledge, but it is certainly something that should be used as much as possible. Nor does this suggest that contact with the world negates the usefulness of other institutional techniques for passing on knowledge, in fact it may be the thing that informs such techniques and makes their usefulness clear.
I feel like this post misses one of the most important ways in which a tradition stays alive, that is through contact with the world.
The knowledge in a tradition of knowledge is clearly about something, and the test of that knowledge is to bring it into contact with the thing it is about.
As an example, a tradition of knowledge about effective farming can stay alive without the institutions discussed in the post through the action of individual farmers. If a farmer has failed to correctly learn the knowledge of the tradition, he’ll fail to efficiently raise crops. And because this is an iterative process that allows for learning individual techniques with many chances for failure or success, failures of understanding can be corrected by contact with the real world at many points along the way, as each component of knowledge is learned.
Another example is in martial arts. Some “traditional martial arts” are said to be dead traditions that simply go through forms of technique but whose training practices are not effective in actual physical combat, whereas other martial arts have maintained a living tradition. But this difference isn’t down so much to having an institutionalized form of passing down the knowledge of martial arts techniques that has survived in Judo or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Boxing, but rather because some martial arts have maintained contact with the test of the real world with sparing and competition that emulates real combat. Those techniques and training methodologies that fail in these environments are discarded.
I think there’s an analogy here to biology. Yes, biological systems use many mechanisms to “transfer knowledge” from one generation to the next. There is plenty of error correction, for instance, necessary to maintain the usefulness of the genome. But there is also the final corrective of selection where errors that are too large fail to replicate as they come in contact with the world.
And so I would suggest that one test of a living tradition is simply the degree to which it is being put toward it purported purpose and tested against it. If you have a tradition of sword making and people who study texts of how to make swords and discussing the theory but who never actually make swords, they are at risk of becoming a ’dead tradition”. If they make swords but they are only used ceremonially they are at less risk, but still the risk is somewhat high because the quality of the swords as weapons is not being tested against real world conditions but only against proxies (they may have some tests of hardness, etc. but usefulness here rests on the quality of the tests). If the swords are actually used in combat or a very good proxy to it, then the tradition is likely to stay alive, even in the absence of other institutional methods discussed in the post.
This methodology obviously applies more to some traditions than others. Some traditions have much more clear purposes whose use can be more easily put in contact with the world than others, and so this is not necessarily a panacea for the maintenance of all knowledge, but it is certainly something that should be used as much as possible. Nor does this suggest that contact with the world negates the usefulness of other institutional techniques for passing on knowledge, in fact it may be the thing that informs such techniques and makes their usefulness clear.