Matthew Crawford on democracy, tradition, & authority 🔗

Here’s a very good essay by Matthew Crawford, drawing on Michael Polanyi, about how democracy depends upon forms of tradition & authority. Crawford also shows how Americans' reflexive anti-traditionalism “traps us in the present”:

How does this work? In the Lockean or Cartesian dispensation that Americans tacitly adopt, tradition is subject to a hermeneutic of suspicion. Our default is to think that inherited wisdom does little more that perpetuate forms of oppression, offered in bad faith as so-called knowledge. But cutting ourselves off from the past in this way, out of a determination not to be duped, we find that we have little ground to stand on against the tyranny of the majority. Intellectually, we find ourselves trapped in the present. This amounts to a kind of anti-culture, as the word “culture” implies something that grows over time, and it led Tocqueville to worry that America would be prone to a creeping “soft despotism.”