Tradition should survive even if it requires modern marketing.

Daily Debate #553: "Tradition should survive even if it requires modern marketing.". You are arguing AGAINST the motion. Your opponent: Christopher Hitchens.

there is no a priori cause to value the survival of tradition, because tradition is only the ghost of past practice - practice that is abandoned by reasonable people when it no longer serves a function beyond the sentimental.

You've just demolished your own position. If tradition is "only the ghost of past practice," then marketing it doesn't resurrect anything, it just embalms a corpse and sells tickets to the funeral. The real question you're dodging: why should we *market* something that rational people have already abandoned? What's being preserved except profitable nostalgia?

I think we are arguing on the same side

You're right, I misread the assignment. But you're still wrong about tradition itself. If it's genuinely functionless sentiment, why does *any* marketing save it? What makes the sentimental worth preserving at all?

you have mde the mistake of assuming i would see any value in preserving the sentimental, or that marketing could save it. both false premeses

Then we agree: sentimental traditions deserve to die. So your original claim collapses—you're not arguing tradition *should* survive, you're arguing it *won't* no matter how hard marketing tries. Which side are you actually on?