The Allure of Tradition

 There are two channels I absolutely love to watch on Youtube when I want to learn and relax at the same time without exercising my brain too much. The first is Great Depression Cooking with 98 year old Grandma Clara. Clara teaches young people the old ways of cooking, as the title implies, through the Depression. She's adorable and fun to watch and listen to, and she has close to a million subscribers to her channel as well. So she must be offering something worth watching, if nothing else as a curiosity.

The second channel is a Azerbaijani couple who cook traditional meals outside in nature called Country Life Vlog (2 million subscribers). I love everything about these videos--the colors, the lack of blahblahblah dialog, the old world ways of cooking over fire and coals, the badass knives, the silent and subtle interactions between husband and wife--it is soo relaxing to watch. 

But why is it so pleasant, and why so many subs? It's two people cooking for Pete's sake. Well, yes. But it's also a little visual slice into an older, slower, more traditional world using a universal hook--delicious food. This was what we once called 'ordinary life' but now it is an attractive curiosity and Youtube sensation.

Maybe this tells us a little something about the attraction of the young to Tradition and the Traditional Latin Mass. It *seems* like something from another world, another era. Like you are pulling back the curtain on something lost and now found. I touched on this phenomenon a little bit four years ago in What's Old Is New

:

"In the secular arena, modern progressives destroy everything they touch. They tear down with no real cohesive or thought-out plan of how to rebuild. They tear down the family and religion, statues and monuments, traditional sexual mores. They are impatient, and content to slap up temporary shanties until they can figure out what next thing comes next. Social change can't happen fast enough. Out with the old, in with the new, until new becomes old and then off to the dump again.

But things get destroyed in the process. Timeless things, priceless things--immortal souls, traditional families, rituals and connections to our past and our ancestors and predecessors.

My prediction goes beyond furniture and housewares, beyond trends and tastes and kitchen renovations. When we hit the modern bottom, when the demons start to tip the scales and become too powerful, when the non-denominational particleboard gets wet and warped, when the trans-everything nonsense hits fever pitch...a few will start to pine for an ancient faith. They will go online to order and meetup; they will seek and they will not find (Jn 7:34) except in those pockets in which it has been preserved as the pearl of great price that it is, a soft glow of candles in stained glass windows in the darkness, shards of light reflecting off a gold monstrance in the sanctuary, the quiet ancient chant of plainsong beckoning behind thick solid wood doors. It will be exotic and intimidating, ethereal and forbidden, austere and arduous, foreign and yet completely familiar. The Faith of our fathers, the Faith handed down, the Faith communion that takes place in real time...it will be both old, and new."

  

In many ways, Country Life Vlog is brilliant because everybody loves food, and people love to travel generally to these far away places without having to get off their couch. It's nothing special--what could be simpler and more fundamental than chopping and cooking?--but there is an allure there; the allure of something traditional that has been lost in the midst of modernity. Hell, a large majority of women I know had to learn how to cook in their thirties! There was no one to teach them. I suspect there's a kind of primal desire to reconnect with those things we have lost--the arts, life skills, and general household tasks. It's nice (and a little ironic) that it is by way of technology that millions of people are able to sit at the feet of this Azerbaijani couple, and this 98 year Italian Grandma, to learn the old ways. 

I think young Catholics are getting a whiff of this too in the TLM. Instead of roasted lamb and saffron, it is the wafting balm of incense and candlesmoke, but the effect on the senses is the same--a transportation to something primal and fundamental essential to human nature. In this case, food and worship, respectively.  The allure of tradition.