The bones of tradition
Zigong wanted to abolish the sacrifice of the sheep on the first of the month, [a ceremony that had fallen into disuse]. Confucius said, “Zigong, you mourn the loss of the sheep; I mourn the loss of the ceremony.”
Analects 3:17
A few years back there was a Youtube star called Li Ziqi (李子柒). Her videos were not the typical Youtube celebrity fare - no manic editing, no blaring music. Instead, hundreds of millions of viewers would tune in to watch our heroine silently harvest veggies, grind flour, light a wood stove, and turn out beautiful, delicious, down-home meals for herself and her grandma. In a country urbanizing faster than any in history, these videos touched a nerve, evoking memories of growing up in faraway home villages and the simple life their parents and grandparents knew. When you live in one high-rise and work in another, these videos offer a taste of a better life, one in touch with nature and living off the abundance of the land.
Except, of course, Li is very much not living off the abundance of the land. Her ability to keep making videos is reliant on the magic of the internet and the scale of advertising it enables. She partners with content platforms and sustains an intensive routine of high-quality scouting, shooting, and editing. A couple years ago I was browsing the local Asian grocery and I ran across Li Ziqi-branded escargot noodles (螺蛳粉) - a kind of high-end instant noodles that’s become all the rage. They were tasty, but white-labeling instant noodles was hardly the kind of activity that you’d expect our humble village girl to be engaging in.
None of this is a criticism of Li. Her earliest videos showed her teaching primitive skills and her videos continue to simply showcase the sights and sounds and skills of rural life. To the extent they inspire millions to garden or try a new recipe, this is a very good thing. To the extent her viewers project more onto them, making them an argument for an entire way of life, the error is not hers but theirs. But it is an error.
Nor are Li and her fans alone in this. There’s an entire industry around the idea of homesteading, living off the grid, and returning to a traditional way of life. Search Instagram for “homesteading” and you can scroll until your thumb goes numb. But despite the rhetoric about self-sufficiency and living off the land, the hard truth is that most of these hobby farms are loss-making endeavors. Perhaps the clearest illustration is Escape the City by Travis Corcoran, in which he calculates the cost of raising chickens, logging trees, and breeding sheep in admirable detail. The author forthrightly says that he works a remote software engineering job, and some careful reading between the lines reveals that the hobby farm is a loss-making endeavor, even before accounting for the cost of time.
Now, of all hobbies, taking a stab at homesteading is perhaps one of the better ones to cultivate. Homegrown veggies offer a quality and variety unmatched by supermarkets. Working with your hands out in the sunshine is rewarding, good clean fun. But the economic logic of a hobby farm is quite different from a profit-making one, and many of Corcoran’s compatriots are less forthcoming about this reality. Of the many Instagrammers showcasing a homesteading lifestyle, few feature aesthetic photos of the laptop work that sustains it. Worse yet is the more intemperate side of homesteading rhetoric (“off the grid, living off the land”) which actively denies its economic roots. This is actively misleading; if your livelihood depends on a high-speed internet connection, you are not living “off the grid.”
The original homesteaders had a clear economic model: get near-free land from the government and build up a profit-making farm on it. Modern homesteaders, too, have a clear economic model: have a Zoom-class job to make money, then try not to lose too much of it on your farm hobby. Both are can be excellent plans, but they are not the same.
If homesteading influencers use modern economic logic to support traditional aesthetics, there is also the opposite: people who use modern materials and technologies to support elements of a traditional way of life. Many of my recent-immigrant friends have lived under the same roof as their parents well into adulthood, or had their parents live with them for several years to take care of their young children. My in-laws produce a bountiful harvest of veggies and herbs from their backyard, but they use cheap styrofoam trays for their seedlings - hardly a photographer’s dream. Frugal heartlanders1, too, have much wisdom on doing things that just work. Rural households with half-finished chicken coops sitting on their front yard may look messy, but this makes it easy for them to pick up a project and keep working on it, rather than having to dig it out of the toolshed first. This ability to keep tinkering is a core competency in keeping a rural lifestyle working.
But you’ll rarely find people celebrating these as traditional lifestyles, or yearning to return to them. To those in the midst of a tradition, tradition is not something exciting and beautiful and novel, it’s just part of the way things work. And in truth, in a visual-first world, there is little to commend mere practicality. The experienced beauty of these lifestyles is not in visual aesthetics, but in the experiences they enable: regular family feasts and bonding time with grandparents, a vast array of seedlings each spring, making chicken coops or mending tractors on your own.2
Those who study traditions must maintain a sharp distinction between the appearance of tradition and the bones of one. We cannot rely on practices to tell the true story of how they came to be. They may hide new bones under a traditional appearance or maintain traditional logic in new guises.
Take corporate worship. Many religious oblige or at least strongly encourage their adherents to attend regular services. During COVID, many switched to streaming services online, and the faithful gathered around their TV to follow along a service - maybe from the local church, but maybe slowly switching to ones that featured more dynamic preaching and better sound quality. Years into the pandemic, it has become clear that although online and in person services may be spiritually equivalent in a technical sense, they are not the same thing. Online services may edify, they may be sacramentally valid, but they lack the immediacy of in-person services, and do not serve as focal points of community life. As in-person services reopen, this might be an opportunity to reflect on this difference, and wonder whether even a normal suburban drive-in service might be a qualitatively different thing than the traditional (or Orthodox Jewish) concept of church as a neighborhood affair, one attended by those in walking distance who you’ll see every day of the week.
A similar confusion can be seen in many Asian-American families around education. The Confucian tradition emphasizes learning as a duty and an honor, part of what orients us in life and makes for a life worth living. Many families therefore dutifully encourage their children to excel in school and apply for top universities. But what gets lost in translation (sometimes literally) is that education in the modern sense is very different from in the Confucian tradition. In the Confucian tradition, learning is humanistic and values-laden, not unlike the traditional Western notion of a liberal education. And book-learning is only one step, and not always the most important one, in a cycle of reading, discussion, application, reflection, and rereading. But instead, students arriving at top universities find themselves tracked towards specialized vocational endeavors - STEM, academia, finance - in an environment that aims to produce the next generation of managers.
The goal of Confucian education is to create self-reflective elites with the confidence to know what changes they want to make in the world and the knowledge of how to develop their virtues and talents to elevate themselves, their family, their country, and the world. Learning a salable skill is a fine thing, but as Confucius put it, “the gentleman is not a tool.” If what we now call education is white collar vocational training, then thoughtful students must supplement that with their own humanistic self-education, and thoughtful parents in the Confucian tradition should realize that they need to take an active hand in shaping an education that looks very different than what the term now means.
All of this requires a substantive degree of reinvention as we adapt old traditions to new technologies and lifestyles - and this is exactly as it should be. After all, every tradition was itself an adaptation of old lifeways to new materials, economics, and ways of life. We should warmly embrace the ability of technology to extend the logic of traditions to help us thrive in the modern world: the ability of modern construction to bring multigenerational housing within reach of most families; the ability of online video to propagate traditions of tacit knowledge at scale. But this effort requires the discernment to ensure that we are working on the bones of a live tradition, not the taxidermied pelt of a dead one. If we attend too much to the mere appearance of tradition, we may end up like a naïve city boy who quits his job to raise chickens and is flummoxed as to why the ways of his forefathers aren’t helping him pay the bills.
“Frugal heartlanders are simply frugal immigrants who’ve steeped a bit longer” - Feast of Assumption
The preeminence of visual aesthetics in the internet age is a major distractor. Instagram naturally selects for visually beautiful scenes. But visual perception is not the only, nor even the most important way in which we interact with a space. When we perceive a scene, one of the earliest layers of perceptual processing sorts them into tools and obstacles, opportunities and threats. When we inhabit a space, what we mainly perceive are the affordances it provides and the experiences it enables. Thus a beautiful space is a space which enables beautiful experiences. There are of course spaces which are both beautiful and useful - a chaotic mess is neither beautiful nor useful. But there are visually beautiful spaces that are utterly impractical (rustic wood-paneled backsplashes, glass cutting boards) which emerge specifically when media are rewarded only for being visually striking.