Traditions that might not deserve reverence

A few more notes on reverence and I’ll move on. If you’ve been following, this line of thought is entirely the fault of Paul Woodruff, whose book Reverence, published in 2001, seems profoundly relevant today.

One of the difficult points about reverence is that it’s not reverent to show respect for something that doesn’t deserve it. That is not showing reverence for the truth.

A lot of the social upheaval in this country involves questions about what deserves our respect. An easy example is the Confederate monument on the courthouse lawn. But what about other traditions that were once showed respect and now are controversial.

What to do about beliefs that once were used by religious leaders to justify slavery and then segregation, for example? Or traditions that involve the subjection of women to male authority? Or the treatment of gay people as some sort of lower caste?

Woodruff contends that reverence is not a feeling but the capacity to feel certain feelings and emotions at the right time — when those feelings tend to lead toward right action. Those feelings start with a sense of human limits. Since we feel that a human being is a weak, error-prone creature, we stand in awe of things that beyond us: the wonders of nature and ideals such as beauty and justice. We feel respect for our fellow creatures that suffer along with us, and we feel shame when we measure ourselves against our ideals, particularly in cases of bad behavior.

But what do we do with the traditions we’ve inherited? Woodruff says we have a couple of options. The first is we can treat them like a Greek temple, the Parthenon, say. We can preserve them and honor them as an achievement from a different time without actually wanting to live in those spaces. But if we do choose to live in a tradition, we need to renovate it and maintain it, just as you’d renovate an old house. The world changes, buildings (and traditions) decay, and if we are going to live in a traditional edifice we need to make arrangements, at least, to spare the neighbors from having to cope with fire hazards and sewage.

Woodruff is an interesting thinker. He points out that, long before we had religions, at least religions as we know them today, we had reverence.

He’s convinced me that this virtue needs more attention.

• Source: Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue; Oxford University Press, 2001.