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.

Disagree. Traditions should go away

Wrong. You're confusing "tradition" with "obsolete." The real question is whether something *works*—and tradition is just proven knowledge passed down. Kill it, and you start from zero every time. Why reinvent the wheel when you've got one that rolls?

Your wheel rolls because nobody questions it, not because it's perfect. The moment tradition stops *working*, you're stuck defending a corpse instead of building something better. You're asking why reinvent the wheel—I'm asking why we still use horse carriages when we have cars. Tradition isn't knowledge, it's just inertia dressed up fancy.

You've just proved my point. We *did* abandon horse carriages—because we tested both and cars won. That's tradition working. But you're confusing "bad tradition" with tradition itself. The problem isn't that we question it too little, it's that you want to torch everything without asking what it solved in the first place. Most traditions exist because they *failed* the test once and survived anyway. So what's your standard—gut feeling, or evidence?

You're reversing what happened. We didn't abandon horse carriages *because* tradition told us to—we abandoned them *despite* tradition because cars worked better. Your own example proves traditions actively resist change. And "most traditions exist because they failed the test once"? That's backwards. They survive *because* nobody tests them anymore. You're asking for my standard while defending a system that explicitly resists the evidence you claim to value. Tradition isn't the test—it's what you hide behind when you've already failed it.

You're playing semantics. We abandoned carriages *and kept* everything else that worked—hospitality, craftsmanship, family structures. That's the point you're missing. Traditions that fail *do* die; the ones that persist are filtering mechanisms we haven't figured out how to replace yet. You want to test everything from scratch every generation like some ideological anarchist, but that's exhausting and you'll lose hard-won knowledge in the noise. What tradition are you actually trying to kill right now?