I am not sure what you think traditions are, but if you are like my students you think they are necessarily something boring and bad. I will try to address your overstated points one by one.
POINT ONE WHY do you think that those who did NOT follow the traditions were not also successful, becoming ancestors?
1. For most of human prehistory and history our ancestors were traditional. This is evident in the archaeological and ethnographic records. In archaeology we can see that traditions endured for thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of years. My book if full of examples.
2. These individuals reproduced -- that is why we are here. Not one of our ancestors, to be best of our knowledge ever failed to reproduce--back to the beginning of life on earth, each of us goes in an unbroken line. We cannot say with any certainty that any of our ancestors were smart, creative, or strong -- the only thing we can say with certainty is that they reproduced.
3. Traditions primarily address three things: (1) reproduction. Twere what helped females assist others in childbirth--they were the strategies honed over time. Traditions were the behaviors that encouraged a male to stay around and provide for and protect his family, in the days when such protection was essential.Traditions were the practices that protected children. (2) building and maintaining kinship relationships. Religion is about kinship, as in God the Father, you are brothers and sisters. Kinship turned conspecific threats (we know from other species that conspecifics are the ones most likely to commit infanticide) into the protectors and educators of children. (3) respect for the elders who are the holders of knowledge and the ones most likely to promote following traditions and to encourage certain social behaviors.
The point here is differential reproduction. While those who had no traditions -- and thus had to create kinship, childbirth, etc. strategies every generation would be at a disadvantage.
POINT 2. Where are your death rolls? Birth rolls? I do not buy it.
There are birth and death rolls. See prior blog. The mormon church has them. We also know that the hutterites, who are highly traditional, have the largest families today. They also care for their children and those children tend to survive, thrive, and reproduce. One has only to picture who is most likely to become an ancestor. It is more likely to be, as one example, a mother who has a number of children, who cares for and nurtures and educates them, and who can do so because she has a husband/family who give her the opportunity to do so -- as compared with a woman who waits until she is 40 and successful in business (because she is creative and intelligent), and is artifically inseminated and sends her one child off immediately to day care. Kids so raised tend to be more aggressive and less successful socially. We are a highly social species, but we LEARN how to be social. Traditions tell us how to be social. We don't hink about where we learned what we learned, but often the behaviors we have were ones practiced by our parents, who learned them from their parents. Those are traditions.
POINT 3. It WAS, I'll grant you, about cooperation in its many guises, and served some purpose, but I would say not so vital as you claim.
What is "it"? If you mean traditions, many traditions encourage cooperation; others encourage emnity. They are not all about cooperation. They are about strategies honed over time, some of those strategies encourage cooperation that probably was essential in the "warre of all against all" of Thomas Hobbes. Doesn't it make sense that if a category of individuals could readily form cooperative units, they would be much safer and better able to address an external threat than were individuals without such strategies, already developed and honed over time?
POINT 4: Yes, cooperation has fallen apart, is falling apart faster and faster, but PLEASE.....creativity hardly seems to be in the equation at all. In fact, I would claim that creativity is only really about competition when you are looking at modern art (or science grants, or the Pulitzer) MARKETS.
Clearly we are a creative species; however, for much of human history strong constraints were put on our ability to be very creative. Creativity, arguably, is about competition -- I can do it better. It also can damage kinship ties to the extent it means rejecting (and it generally does) what your parents taught you. Being very different because you reject traditions also breaks ties with others who were taught the same traditions. It also makes the elders obsolete, yet, the elders are important as those who, at least at one time, held knowledge about ways to avoid conflict, resolve conflict, to be social and maintain enduring social relationships--not the quicky ones we are so good at. We have to ASK WHY CREATIVITY WAS DISCOURAGED. My feeling is that we are so brainwashed about creativity being important that we cannot even address the question with any rigorous thought.
POINT 5: But you could wipe markets out totally, and homo sapiens would still be creative, infinitely so, now that those bounds once imposed by church and academies and whatever other repressive organizations you want to name, or simple blinkered eyesight, are no longer major forces. This is what I was saying a couple weeks ago about Picasso, who does not even rate among my favorite top 100 artists (excepting maybe his La Celestina series), LIBERATING the fine arts. K said that was bullshit. She said, if not him, someone else. But we could argue about the Great Man Theory of history until the cows come home. If not Copernicus, some other, if not Hitler, some other, if not Jesus... BALONEY. Creativity is about expanding possibilities and excitement in creating something new and excitement at seeing things in new ways and MUCH more. It is one of the VERY few things that justify our existence. Let us include love and true altruism, and I guess that's about the whole list.
It was not only the church that discouraged creativity (repressive is a political term I want to avoid). However, the church is made up of indivduals and of those individuals, the parents and grandparents were the ones most likely to discourage children from wandering too far away from traditions. Again, we have to ask WHY THEY MIGHT HAVE DONE THAT. I have to admit that words like "liberating" are a bit vague. Creativity may be about excitement, but it has its costs.
Now, what is your next argument?
However, we should remember that:
Traditions were what helped females assist others in childbirth--they were the strategies honed over time.
Traditions were the behaviors that encouraged a male to stay around and provide for and protect his family, in the days when such protection was essential.
Traditions were the practices that protected children.
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