In the Ecuadorian Andes mountains in the late 1990s, the people in a potato-growing community asked the Quito government to help them buy simple metal hoes and plows to replace the wooden ones pulled behind their horses.

The government turned to USAID.

The agency sent an agricultural specialist who recommended that the farmers stop growing the several dozen varieties of potatoes that had been their tradition for hundreds of years. He told them to concentrate instead on just four of the most profitable ones and, if they did so, offered to give them a tractor and mechanized potato planting and harvesting equipment. He would also arrange loans to buy glyphosate-based herbicides and other ‘miracle chemicals’ that would bring them into the modern age of science.

The tractor alone was worth about ten years of the entire community’s gross income. It was an offer they couldn’t refuse. They planted the four potato varieties.

Within a few years, blight killed their entire crop. I stood on a hillside that had been ravaged with erosion by the tractor. I heard the heart-wrenching stories of people whose lives had been shattered by crop failures, mudslides, and flooding. Families were forced to leave their homes. Many ended up begging on the streets of Quito.

— Confessions of an Economic Hitman, Third Edition

 

There is nothing in this story to surprise anyone who has paid attention to the past three hundred years. It is a miniature of the modern world: a flourishing if imperfect arrangement; an expert who understands everything except the arrangement before him; a government eager to help; a loan; a machine; a chemical; a promise of wealth; and, at the end, ruin.

The people of the Andes had asked for metal hoes and ploughs. These were intelligible improvements. They would have performed familiar tasks somewhat better. They could have been fitted into the life of the community without turning that life upside down. Instead, the farmers were offered an agricultural revolution.

The revolution had every mark of rationality. Several dozen varieties of potato must have looked inefficient to the visiting specialist. Why cultivate so many when four produced the highest return? Why scratch at the soil with horses when a tractor could tear through it in a fraction of the time? Why tolerate weeds and pests when modern chemistry could sweep them away? Every item in the proposal could be defended separately. Taken together, they destroyed the community.

The many potato varieties had not been selected by a committee. No one had written a comprehensive plan for them. They were the accumulated result of generations of experiment, accident, imitation and failure. One variety grew well in this soil, another on that slope. One survived drought, another resisted cold, another escaped a particular disease. Some may have tasted better, stored longer or ripened at a useful moment. Others may have survived for reasons that no agricultural specialist could have identified. Their diversity was untidy. It was also insurance.

The wooden implements and horses may likewise have appeared primitive. But they belonged to the scale of the landscape. They did not gouge the hillsides with the power of a tractor. They required no imported fuel, no distant manufacturer and no debt raised against future crops. If a wooden plough broke, a man who lived nearby could mend it. If the tractor broke, the community became dependent on parts, money and knowledge supplied from somewhere else. The old system was not maximally productive in any one year. It was capable of surviving many years.

This distinction is at the heart of traditionalism. A custom may look foolish when judged by the narrow purpose visible to an outsider. It may nevertheless be performing half a dozen other functions of which he knows nothing. Indeed, those who follow the custom may themselves be unable to explain it. Ask them why something is done in a particular way, and they may reply that their fathers did it, or that it is unlucky to do otherwise, or that God forbids it. Their explanation may be nonsense. The practice may still embody wisdom.

This offends the educated mind. We are trained to demand reasons, and there is much to be said for reasons. But a society is not created by reason in the same manner as a bridge or a steam engine. It is more like a language. No academy designed English. No Minister for Speech decided where the verbs should go. The language emerged from innumerable human choices spread across many centuries. Its irregularities are irritating, but anyone who proposes to rationalise it will produce something that no one wishes to speak.

The same is true of law, manners, markets, families, neighbourhoods, and political constitutions. Their workings are dispersed through millions of minds. Much of the relevant knowledge is never expressed because it cannot easily be expressed. It exists as habit, expectation, prejudice and instinct. We know how close to stand to a stranger, when a promise has been made, what may be joked about at a funeral and how far a neighbour’s intrusion may be tolerated. We know these things without having derived them from first principles. Traditionalism begins with the admission that the civilisation surrounding us is more complicated than we are.

This is not a mystical doctrine. It makes no claim that our ancestors were wiser in themselves than we are. Most of them were superstitious and frightened of things that a schoolboy can now explain. But a tradition need not be the deliberate invention of a wise man. It may instead be the surviving residue of a long process in which destructive practices disappeared and useful practices were retained. The man who follows such a tradition may know less than the reformer. The tradition may know more than either of them.

There are two ways to respond to an institution whose purpose is not immediately apparent. The first is to assume that it has no purpose and sweep it away. The second is to investigate how it arose, what interests have gathered around it, what expectations depend on it and what unforeseen work it may be doing. The first approach is more exciting. It produces White Papers, conferences, reorganisations and newspaper headlines. It gives politicians the sensation of greatness and experts the pleasure of command. The second approach is slower and less flattering. It begins with curiosity and continues in humility. It is therefore seldom attractive to those whose careers depend on the appearance of knowing what everyone else should do.

The USAID specialist did not only offer the farmers new tools. He imposed a theory of agriculture. According to this theory, the purpose of farming was to maximise the monetary return from a selected crop. Everything that could not be measured against this purpose was treated as waste. The old arrangement was judged by one visible output; its resilience, independence and adaptation to place were ignored.

This is how modern reform usually proceeds. A school is judged by examination results, a hospital by waiting times, a police force by recorded offences, a university by publications, and an economy by gross domestic product. The chosen measurement is rarely meaningless. The mistake is to suppose that it measures the whole. Once the measurement becomes a target, the institution is reorganised around it. Teachers cease educating and prepare children for tests. Police officers manipulate classifications. Universities produce unread papers. Hospitals avoid difficult cases or multiply administrators who specialise in making the figures attractive. The statistic improves while the reality decays.

The Andean farmers increased the theoretical profitability of their potatoes. They also increased the probability that a single disease would destroy them all.

The traditionalist is not obliged to oppose metal ploughs, tractors, chemicals or agricultural science. That would be as foolish as assuming that every new device must be beneficial. His concern is with the manner and scale of change. Had those farmers received the tools they requested, they might gradually have discovered which were useful. A few might have experimented with a tractor on suitable ground. Some of the old potato varieties might have been abandoned after repeated failures; new varieties might have been added. Chemicals could have been tested in small quantities, with their advantages and disadvantages becoming apparent before the whole community depended on them.

Change of this kind is not the enemy of tradition. It is how living traditions develop. Every durable custom was new at some point. The difference between growth and revolution is that growth preserves the possibility of retreat. It alters one thing while leaving others in place. If the experiment fails, the damage is limited and the old ways remain available. Revolution abolishes the old arrangement before the new one has proved itself. It burns the bridge behind us and congratulates itself on preventing a return to backwardness.

Yet traditionalism cannot amount to the worship of whatever happens to exist. Slavery was traditional. So were religious persecution, hereditary disabilities, judicial torture and the legal subjection of women. A doctrine that had nothing to say against such institutions would be morally empty. It would also be politically useless, since every tyranny acquires traditions if allowed to survive long enough. We need, therefore, some means of distinguishing between traditions that deserve reverence and arrangements that deserve removal.

Duration gives us a presumption, but no final answer. An institution that has endured for centuries without producing obvious disaster probably serves purposes that are not immediately visible. This is reason for caution. It is not reason for obedience in all circumstances. A stronger test is whether an institution arises from voluntary human relations or depends upon systematic coercion. Customs, associations and exchanges that people maintain without being forced deserve a wide presumption in their favour. Those that survive only through legal privilege or violence bear a greater burden of proof.

This distinction allows traditionalism to escape the museum. It can defend the common law, private property, family autonomy, free association, local custom and the innumerable courtesies of civilised life without having to defend every ancient abuse. It can value inherited institutions while recognising that some traditions are not the spontaneous achievements of a people, but the sediment left by conquest and power.

The test must still be applied with care. No society can exist without law, and law ultimately involves compulsion. Property itself requires protection. Contracts must sometimes be enforced and violent men restrained. The point is not that all coercion can be abolished by reciting a formula. It is that coercion should be treated as exceptional and made to justify itself. The more an arrangement depends upon force, the less respect it can claim merely because it is old.

There is an irony here. The institutions most loudly described as modern are often imposed by central authority, while many traditions condemned as oppressive survive only because people continue to choose them. The moderniser may praise diversity in the abstract while abolishing every actual difference he encounters. He wants local colour, provided that every locality has the same schools, planning rules, administrative structures, employment practices and approved opinions.

Real tradition is decentralised. It produces different answers in different places. Some of these answers will be ugly or irrational. But uniformity has dangers of its own. The several dozen potato varieties were individually less profitable than the approved four. Collectively, they prevented one blight from becoming an extinction event.

What diversity does for crops, dispersed custom does for civilisation. A country of independent institutions can survive mistakes that would destroy a centrally managed order. If one school teaches badly, another may teach well. If one business fails, its competitors remain. If one community adopts an idiotic fashion, others can refuse it. But when the same reform is imposed everywhere at once, error becomes national policy. The traditionalist argument is therefore not only about the past. It is about the distribution of risk. It asks us not to place an entire civilisation on a single throw of the dice.

The attraction of comprehensive reform is understandable. Existing arrangements are always disappointing because they are real. They contain injustice, inefficiency, ugliness and compromise. The imagined alternative contains none of these things because it has not yet encountered human beings. It exists in reports and speeches, where every worker is competent, every official disinterested and every consequence intended.

Tradition has no such advantage. Its faults are visible. Its benefits are often hidden within the ordinary life that it makes possible. We notice the old roof when it leaks, not during the thousand nights when it keeps us dry. This is why the burden of proof is so often reversed. A custom must justify itself in every particular, while the scheme proposed to replace it is excused from producing evidence because its promised results are so desirable. The old is condemned for failing to achieve perfection. The new is praised for intending it.

A sensible traditionalism reverses the reversal. It asks the reformer to identify not only the visible fault he wishes to cure, but the less visible functions he may disturb. It asks whether the proposed change can be tested locally, whether it can be undone, and whether those who will bear the consequences have agreed to it. Above all, it asks whether people may keep the old arrangement if they prefer it.

The Andean farmers were not conquered by soldiers. They were conquered by an offer they could not refuse: a machine worth ten years of their income, tied to a transformation they had never requested. Their formal consent did not alter the immense imbalance between an international agency armed with money and prestige and a poor community asking for simple tools. Assistance became leverage. Leverage became uniformity. Uniformity became disaster.

The lesson is not that poverty should be preserved in picturesque isolation. Nor is it that experts are always wrong. It is that help should begin by respecting the purposes of those being helped. Improvement should enlarge their range of choices, not make them dependent upon one plan, one creditor, one technology and four varieties of potato.

We should be especially suspicious when the replacement of inherited ways is financed by debt. A gift may be mistaken; a loan chains the victim to the mistake. Once an entire way of life has been reorganised around borrowed machinery and purchased chemicals, failure no longer permits a quiet return to the old methods. The failure takes the land, the home and the future with it.

Traditionalism, properly understood, is neither nostalgia nor paralysis. It does not demand that we live as our grandparents lived, still less as their remote ancestors did. It is a disposition towards inheritance: grateful where gratitude is due, sceptical of sudden improvement, hostile to compulsory uniformity and conscious of the narrow limits of individual reason.

It tells us to mend before demolishing, to test before imposing, and to preserve old knowledge until new knowledge has proved that it can replace it. It tells us that a custom may contain reasons even when no living person can state them, and that what appears to be redundancy may be the margin by which a society survives calamity. Most of all, it warns us against the peculiar arrogance of the man who arrives in a place he does not understand and announces that its inhabitants have been doing everything wrongly for centuries.

He may have a university degree, a tractor and a chemical named by scientists. The people before him may have only wooden ploughs, old stories and several dozen kinds of potato. It is still possible that they know something he does not.