They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Is that sin on the part of the dog? Isn’t the opposite of a bad habit a good one? I really don’t think we believe that today. We think the opposite of a bad habit is no habits. It all has to come from the heart, free flowing, spontaneous goodness. We are obsessed with breaking tradition or not being part of tradition for the sake of repetition or it’s oldness or the fact that it is something done without feeling it like the first time. It’s almost like we think every second of our day should be taken up constantly reevaluating everything in our lives to make sure we are doing it genuinely. Maybe you should contemplate constantly whether or not to be faithful to your spouse. Do I love her this second? How about this second? Do I want to sleep with that woman on the street, more than my wife? How about that woman? Do I love my kids this second? How about this second? Do I want to feed the crying baby this time? I think it’s easy to see that this would only lead to adultery and child abuse. Many habits are good. Many times repetition is good. Many times repetition without questioning is good.
So how did we get to the point where we are so obsessed with breaking tradition and bashing habits? I think it is based on some cultural factors. Science was born out of Christianity. Because the God of Christianity was the faithful creator, Christians believed that they could systematically study his faithfulness as it presented itself in the natural world. But of course observing was not enough, we wanted to use our knowledge to control the earth. Which is why C. S. Lewis made connections between applied science and magic. Both sought to manipulate the world for one’s own ends. But some of it was good. In came the industrial revolution. We built machines that could save much labor they could feed the world, with much less labor. Which gave us time to cure diseases and create all sorts of Art and Literature. And so things began to change more and more rapidly. Because new technology could do more things, we began to despise everything old, even old wisdom. The effect seems to have snowballed. Today we have no respect for old people, we put them in homes so we have more time to worship our technology. They can’t work computers so they must be worthless.
There is a unique American factor as well. Even all of our movies are about old people doing young things. We are a people separated from our past by an ocean. We were always making fresh starts, first on the Easter seaboard, and then again and again as we moved west. We threw off our parents the British and set out on a new better course. Or so the story goes. Except that’s not really what happen at all. The reality is that the English were the ones breaking the tradition. They were the ones with the ‘fresh’ ‘new’ ideas about government. It was the American founders who wanted to hold faithfully to the British Common Law tradition. And so they issued their list of grievances agains King George. They were appealing to something older, not something newer. And so it goes that often new ideas lead to new problems.
We have even adapted our view of scripture to fit this new worship of youth. We are constantly bashing the Pharisees for their old religion. But we forget the words of Jesus, along with our common sense.
He also told them a parable:“No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good. ’” –Luke 5:36-39
Leonardo da Vinci, Two Heads in Profile.
Da Vinci had a theory that you could not appreciate beauty without the ugly. And so the two are in tension, in Paradox.
The old is good? How can this be? I’m not sure how well we grasp Jesus’ metaphors these days. Most people don’t patch their clothes anymore. But back then their fabrics shrunk. If you sewed a piece of new cloth on and then washed the garment it would shrink and rip the old even more. Similarly with the wineskins. You make wine and put it into a soft skin. As you dip out the wine the skin gets crusty, new wine would break it. You don’t go buy moisturizers and waste your time keeping it soft, you realize it becomes better with age. It’s not evil it’s just the way it is.
It’s easy to criticize old people when you are young. New pastors come in and change everything and shake things up. Every problem they see is old, they have all the answers and new solutions. But a couple decades later when the new guys come in to fix the problems they created, it’s not so fun anymore. This is silly, it’s taking only one half of the paradox that God created. There are many paradoxes in this world, our God loves them. Men and women are completely different, yet God’s order smashes one man and one woman together in the same household. And it works. G. K. Chesterton realized this he loved paradox, and so he wove it into everything he wrote:
““The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
And so it is with old and young, they come from opposite perspectives. But that’s what makes it work. Old people need to not push the young to hard, but the young need to have respect for the old. That’s the part we forget these days. Generally the old surrender to the young, and so we keep making the same mistakes over and over. It’s insanity. Jesus didn’t try, to throw out the old, he trained up the young to help the old see the Old Testament again, through new eyes. It was a slow process of generations, we read about the conflict all through Acts. What I can now eat pork?(Acts 10) What, I can join the church without being circumcised?(Acts 11) The struggle and tension in the paradox is what makes it work. If either side had given up, they would have ended up in heresy. Which is often what happens when there are splits in the church.
But the existence of habits was not the problem, the problem was that the habits were wrong. The Bible is constantly telling the people of God to turn from their sinful habits and embrace new habits of obedience. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” –Proverbs 22:6 Establish good habits early and as the skin hardens it will be set in good habits. Then when you are old and you don’t have the ability to change on a dime, you won’t have to, because what you do is good. Go to church every sunday, love your spouse every day, pray every day, read your Bible every day. It’s not a matter of if you will be set in your ways, it’s a matter of which ways you will be set in. There is nothing dirtier than an old man. And there is nothing sweeter than a sweet old lady. Should the old lady question her sweetness, because it is rote?
In a sense changing constantly is easy, which is why young people with no experience can do it, you never have to really deal with problems you can just sweep them under the rug and move on. But a culture with no old problems is a culture with none of the benefits of oldness. We don’t have any good wine. We have disposable wine. We don’t think generationally. We don’t build on the shoulders of our forefathers. We are always questioning and knocking down. And so our buildings get shorter every generation. Our habits become worse every generation. We never solve hard problems because we are always solving the simple problems over and over. And then the simple problems multiply, as we deconstruct everything. I think the solution is not to throw out the last few generations, but to go back and embrace generations before them, before the conformity of modernism led to the chaos of post-modernism. Are even the young flexible enough to make this change? And so C. S. Lewis is my guide:
“Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in this case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
I think a good start is to be aware of all the wrong turns we have made. I can think of no better way of doing this than Lewis’ book The Pilgrim’s Regress. Good luck on your way back.