Traditions

People have had a need to structure their lives within the calendar year. These twelve months had been organized mostly according to the seed-harvest cycle.

Spring time was generally devoted to the seeding as a natural condition to the future harvest i.e. the survival of the people. During the spring a lot of traditions are connected to the fertility and beginning of new life and those additional responsibilities – parenthood.

The Summer time was usually reserved for the harvest and celebration of a good and successful season which in turn give the people a feeling of a secure life.

When Autumn arrives it is traditionally linked with the preparation for the forth coming cold winter. The collection of various resources needed for the cold winter days and nights, securing enough food and warm shelter which usually meant getting the house repaired which would protect the people and their animals from the snow and freezing weather.

Apart from these manually orientated traditions there exists a lot of social or collective celebrations which was used to enforce a unity of the of family, the tribe, the village or country. These activities started as legends, stories, fairy tales and existed in the social aspects of drama and the spoken word which encouraged the generations to repeat every year for a common good.

Traditions are important for us in understanding of our roles or behaviors within the society. Some traditions can give us some great insights to our life’s repetitions and provide continuity during our lifetime. One of the most universally adopted traditions is the one in which we celebrate the joining of two people, which is called the Marriage. On every continent is the passing of a new marriage the reason to celebrate the perspective of the new life which is to be born. This is like this so that the highest level of social and human evolution is continued generation by generation. Married couples are generally twice and more likely to survive a crisis due to the predisposed link with another person, which increases the chances of success. This is due to the fact that they can support each other in any situation that may occur regardless of their own difficulties.

On the other side of our traditions during our long and colored pathway is the certainty of death. Mourning, grieving and the full respect to the families suffering their loss is again very universal across the cultures around our planet. One of the general traditions is to remember those people who have passed away and to pay our respect to their legacy of our heritage and culture.

Traditions are here to remind us mostly of the things associated with our birth, our death or anything between that makes our values stronger because we can enrich them day by day. Our values depend on mutual acceptance by most of the community. Just a few exceptions may occur, and hopefully society will eliminate these individuals. These people may be found interesting but after some time their uncooperative nature will be its very essence make most of the population push them away to the grey areas on the outskirts of acceptable society. There is a case of various clans, communities adoring violence or mass destruction or mad prophets having their own faith where these people may find solice or limited power.

Traditions can also be based on a religion of the people. During the Christmas most of the Christians keep the tradition of the family unity and exchange gifts as symbols of love and respect to each other. These traditions have the power to give us understanding of our own position in life and society.

Traditions may be seen on the national scale as well.

Every nation celebrates its new formal head of the state. It doesn’t matter if this is a President, Prime Minister, King or General Secretary. The putting a person into the heart of the national administration is usually a good reason for a celebration. One ancient reason may be to show this new face to the nation so the social, family or business connections might better establish a reason to foresee a better future. Other important things is to give the new person in change the opportunity to declare publicly his/her priorities and plans for the communities future.

Another tradition for the most democratic states is voting. Once per given fixed number of years the citizens of the nation may use their power to demonstratively select their representatives to the governing structures of the state. We may discuss the legacy, fairness of the voting principles but since the time of the ancient Greeks no one has overcome this principle.

Another part of universally accepted tradition are national symbols as a flag or a crest. Citizens around the globe are educated to respect these symbols and pay attention in their use.

Traditions are here to educate us and will help us to survive. But some traditions may be unproductive by the part of the community adoring another value. When communists took the power anywhere on the world their first intention was to disrupt the long and respected traditions of some generally accepted values and replace them by “their new own” symbols. This action may be symbolized by many single actions i.e. from the replacement of single and universal character of Christmas to the eliminating of the old tradition and respect of the land-owners giving their harvests to the population and community at large. The communist regime tried to unbalance the traditional ladder of values, but in part they failed. It is sometimes impossible to avoid the collective memory stored in some many individual minds and hearts, that a complete change will be meant with a respectful resistance.

Traditions are the vital and important makeup of human nature and culture. Artificial intelligence seems to us as an unpredictable enemy because with the new version of the operational system our smart phones may behave differently to the way we conceive how we feel we need to interact with these new additions to our lives. Computers in general are not acknowledging the traditions from the past as they do not have a history to rely on as to them these traditions are often unproductive. The future of society may start adoring the super efficiency so much so that they may start to recognize the weekend as something to be eliminated. Weekends were created in the days of the manual work for people needed some time buffer between the work days to keep their skills and to refresh. Nowadays when most of the manual work has been given to the machines the time to rest may become another useless tradition.

Computers and machine-learning principles will change our world. In which case will we allow them to change our respected and sometimes illogical traditions to be superseded by our society to become less human and more autonomist very soon. Respect to the traditions makes our world round and understandable to all those that live in it. If in the case our traditions will be slowly eliminated than our value chains will be broken and society shaken to its core. New ideologies which will be developed, new religions which may be implemented must pay attention to the human traditions. Otherwise we will be lost as ships at sea without compass.