The Priestly-Prophetic Metabolism

In which a gigantic nutcracker forms a symbol of future-shock, Heraclitus is mistranslated and misunderstood (again), and I continue to say grumpy things about Parmenidean identity

In my family, the holiday season brings out some of my favorite human foibles. We celebrate Christmas, so that holiday is foremost in my mind. But I have no doubt that similar foibles prevail if you are celebrating Chinese New Year, Janmashtami, or Rosh Hashanah. There is an eternal struggle within our holiday traditions. Every year the trenches are dug, the combatants take their place, and in successive battles throughout the season, we determine the outcome of this year’s war. A No Man’s Land divides the Innovators and the Traditionalists. My father and my youngest sister are the innovators. They want to buy new decorations, visit new places, and switch up our Christmas Eve routine. My mother and my younger sister are traditionalists. They want the house looking more or less the way it looked last year, to visit the places we always visit, and to have a Christmas Eve that glows with cozy familiarity. I generally end up casting the swing vote.

If you had a happy and stable family environment, you probably recognize this dynamic. And you understand that—although things do get heated—this conflict between tradition and innovation is actually a fruitful and enjoyable part of the season itself. When the innovators win a skirmish, more often than not, the traditionalists eventually appreciate the new addition. Two years ago my father bought a four-foot tall nutcracker with the political support of my youngest sister and myself, (swing vote, as I said). At the time my mother and younger sister thought he was creepy as hell. But now they acknowledge Otto von Nutter as an indispensable part of the Christmas atmosphere. Likewise the traditionalists will often win plaudits when we choose to keep something the same. The family’s chief innovator will recline in his chair, sip his egg nog, and say he’s actually glad we stayed in this Christmas Eve—going out would probably just have been stressful.  

My family politics display in gentle microcosm a process that can be violent and wrenching in the historical macrocosm. The necessary metabolism between Tradition and Innovation takes place at every level of human life. The origin of this metabolism can be found in the words of Heraclitus:

On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.

This is one of the most famous lines in all of Western philosophy, but it usually appears an English truncation: 

You never step in the same river twice.

This is unfortunate, because the truncation is misleading. It’s been used to paint Heraclitus as a disciple of radical flux, who claimed that all continuity and stability was an illusion. But when we examine the original words, (many variants have come down to us, but those above are generally agreed to be the closest to his actual utterance), we find that Heraclitus is saying something quite different. He is not saying that you never step into the same river twice, but that you simultaneously do and do not step into the same river twice. Heraclitus is playing with questions of identity. When we unpack the full meaning of his words, we find that there are two paradoxes in his river scenario, two relationships of simultaneous identity and non-identity.

Let us imagine that—for some absurd and unknowable reason—every year on Christmas day I go and stand up to my ankles in the river that runs behind my house for a solid fifteen minutes. I’m down to seven toes at this point but damn it, it’s tradition. When I dip my toes into the river on December 25, 2013, there will be two salient questions that we can pose. 

First, am I stepping into the same river? 

Second, am I the same stepping into the river?

Am I stepping into the same river? 

The answer to the first question is obviously yes and obviously no. On the one hand, the river is unquestionably the same river that I stepped in last year. It’s located in the same place, its course is more or less identical, the silt levels are about where they were last year, and it’s still called the Dimecreek. On the other hand, the river is unquestionably not the same river that I stepped in last year. The water that is flowing over my ankles now may not share a single H2O molecule with the water that flowed over my ankles then, the river is five inches higher from rainfall, and a local Wildlife Trust initiative to bring back local fauna has substantially altered the total ecological niche. It really is the same river, but it really isn’t the same river.

Am I the same stepping into the river?

The answer to the second question is obviously yes and obviously no. On the one hand, I am unquestionably the same person that I was last year. I am still a privileged white introvert in his early twenties who has Crohns disease and is usually grumpy. On the other hand, I am unquestionably not the same person that I was last year. Last year I was in college, this year I am employed, last year I had a girlfriend, this year I have a fiancée, last year I had an Ulcerative Colitis diagnosis, this year I have a Crohns diagnosis. I really am the same person, but I’m really not the same person.

If a pious reverence for the principle of non-contradiction compels me to resolve either paradox in either direction, I am missing something crucial. If I insist on believing that this year’s river is exactly the same as last year’s river, I could crack my head like an eggshell after tumbling down a once-stable embankment from which Hurricane Sandy has recently taken a healthy bite. If I insist on believing that I am the same person I was last year, I could succumb to hypothermia—perhaps I’ve lost a lot of weight and need to roll back the usual fifteen minutes in deference to my reduced insulation reserves. 

But I would be equally stupid if I refused to use the past as a guide to the future. If I know a safe and reliable way to get to the bottom of the embankment, then I should try that first. If I insist on looking for a new and exciting way to reach the pebble beach, I could crack my head like a watermelon filled with mayonnaise. Likewise I should use the accumulated wisdom of many Christmases as a guide to how long my toes can handle the water. If I insist on believing that I am a radically new and better person than I was last year—as we so often do— I’m likely to overshoot my tolerance and thump out the year with toe-clipped flesh-clogs. In short, a healthy relationship with reality demands that we take account of the relationships of simultaneous identity and non-identity that exist in ourselves and in the world around us.

But this is a difficult balance to maintain, and almost everyone winds up overcorrecting in one direction or another. This is what produces the No Man’s Land between Innovators and Traditionalists. The former group is quick to see how the situation has changed, how we have changed, and consequently how our way of life must change. They are sensitive to Novelty. The latter group is quick to see that old patterns re-assert themselves, that the past can serve as a guide to the future, and that if it ain’t broke you shouldn’t fix it. They are sensitive to Continuity. 

Just as the perceptions of innovators and traditionalists differ in the pragmatic realm, their intuitions differ in the moral realm. The former group is eager to make things better, to cast off unhealthy patterns and improve on what we have been given, to make tomorrow brighter than today. They are oriented towards Improvement. The latter group is eager to appreciate what we already have, to live happily with what is instead of brooding anxiously over what might be, and to affirm our connection with those who came before and those who will come after. They are oriented towards Identity and its continuing preservation.

Within every unit of identity, the component parts segregate themselves into innovators and traditionalists, prophets and priests. These divisions reproduce themselves—in fractal fashion—at every level of human organization. I can recognize innovative and traditional impulses within myself, I can divide my family into innovators and traditionalists, and I can talk about societies that value innovation as opposed to those that value tradition, (this is of course the way that the collision of the Muslim world with the West is generally framed—though this generalisation is probably of dubious value when compared to the influence of the colonial heritage and all it stands for).

Thinking in these terms can bring a lot of interesting things to light. The first thing to become obvious for a Western audience is that we are passing through a cultural period that idolizes innovation and detests tradition. Think of the contemporary buzz-words with the sleekest, slimmest, and sexiest patina: innovation, entrepreneurship, originality, spontaneity. Countries fall behind in the global market because they fail to embrace creative destruction and marriages break apart because the partners find each other boring. This fetishization of the innovative pole has generated extremist counter-corrections in the societies surrounding us and in micro-societies within us. The radical forms of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism that prevail today insist that a wholesale return to the way of life prevailing at the time their scriptures were written down is both possible and desirable. This idea would have bewildered their medieval forebears, who were more likely to recognize that growth and development was the proper guarantee of continuity.

(By way of a parenthetical note: Given the skew of internet readership towards the self-understood sleek, slim, and sexy, I understand that the value of tradition can be a hard sell. But as a counterexample from biology, I would advance the crocodile, which hasn’t changed up its evolutionary formula all that much since the Eocene, yet continues to stick around long after other species innovated their way into hyper-efficiency in a tiny ecological niche that subsequently vanished, extinguishing them along with it.)

The extremism that now prevails makes it difficult to maintain our balance when investigating the human condition. Everything in our environment tempts us to make a fetish of progress or nostalgia, Innovation or Tradition. But neither pole is ever going to go away. It will always be important to recognise Novelty and work for Improvement, and it will always be important to recognize Continuity and affirm a common Identity, with our past and future selves, with the ones we love, and with humanity as a whole. Consequently, I want to use this blog to advance an understanding of Tradition and Innovation as eternally interdependent. Rather than painting their relationship as one of conflict and contradiction, I want to paint it instead as one of metabolism.