“Traditions are experiments that worked.”

Louise Perry, the British journalist and author who speaks out in high-profile venues about the failings of the “sexual revolution,” mentioned a quote that a reader had sent her from a book about winemaking: “Traditions are experiments that worked.” She brought up the quote in a discussion of marriage in contemporary “Western” society.

I think what Perry has to say is important, regardless of how close she may be to 100% correct.

This is not a piece about that. This is a piece that tries to unpack that statement: “Traditions are experiments that worked.”

I have argued in print, more than once, that ship design and construction in the eighteenth century were conservative for good reason. They had been refined for at least three hundred years at that point, and they served the markets and political ambitions of eighteenth-century societies well. Drastic innovations were dangerous when the cost of failure was likely disastrous, and when “tradition” served well enough.

Incremental innovation and a strong commitment to technological continuity characterized the early-modern European (and colonial) ship. Understanding why means understanding more about those societies.

One could argue that our constitutional democratic republic was an experiment that worked; after all, here in 2025 we are still governed by an eighteenth-century constitution (whether the current occupant likes it or not). And that system of government has been profoundly influential in the modern world.

I think where this gets messier—and thus more interesting—has to do with the tense of the verb “work”: past tense. It doesn’t say “Traditions are experiments that work.” It says “that worked.” And just because they worked in the past does not necessarily mean they work now. Human society—and the biome in which it exists, and the planet on which that exists, are always changing. In every aspect of life, both individually and societally, we’re faced with the need to decide what past ways of doing something to keep, and what to replace with something else.

We can analogize this to evolution by natural selection. By 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs had been a runaway success for about 150 million years. We haven’t even been in our modern biological form for half of one million years. Are we an experiment that worked?

Obviously we can’t know what experiments will work as they are happening. As organisms that have been successful for a long time continue to thrive, the environment in which they live keeps changing, and genetic experiments by random mutation keep happening.

When devotion to tradition—which we call “conservatism”—is dangerous is when its devotees do not understand the changes in society that have taken place since that tradition became a tradition. They want to either keep a tradition going in the face of those changes, even when that tradition is clearly—at least to those who do understand the relevant changes—inappropriate. Inapplicable. Or, they want to undo those changes and revive a tradition that has largely or even fully died out—or has morphed into something different.

But holding up a traditional way of doing something as perhaps preferable to a more recent way of doing it is not necessarily wrong. Advocating for a change in social behavior or norms in favor of something largely discarded is not necessarily wrong.

But it’s only helpful if its advocates understand—and articulate—that this doesn’t mean we can go back to being a society we once were. It doesn’t ignore the core reality of the arrow of time. Louise Perry advocates passionately for some sexual norms that preceded the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 70s—but she does not advocate for the revocation of women’s rights and women’s vastly-expanded options in our society—and the respect that comes with that. Nor does she advocate for prudery, sexual ignorance, and shame. She would never advocate for taking away contraceptives. In fact, her primary motivation is what she sees as the harm being done to women by current, and recently past, dominant modes of sexual attitude and behavior. She points out, rightly, that The Pill has brought “innumerable benefits to women,” but also points out that we fall short when we think we can just use technology to solve our problems without stepping up as human beings. She recounts her graduate work on c-sections and the reality of women undergoing horrible medical procedures because they could no longer safely deliver a baby, and yet “their husbands kept knocking them up.” She read accounts of women dying in childbirth on their tenth pregnancy. The Pill can take this away—but how about, she asks, husbands not doing that?

I’ve banged on this keyboard enough about the fallacy of thinking technology can solve our problems without the full use of our cognitive powers around the development and deployment of it.

I’ve also gone on about how innovation is overrated in our society, because it serves the interests of capitalists. Innovation is still risky and risk is expensive. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t innovate, but it does mean we should not do it reflexively—or, if we do, we should not replace tradition with innovation just because we can.

Capitalism, though, doesn’t care about innovations in sexual or social behavior unless there is potential profit to be made from them. And sometimes there is. Mr. Gillette saw that women were starting to wear less-restrictive clothing, in which more of their actual selves could be seen. So, he decided to convince them they had to shave their legs and armpits in order to be presentable in public, and they bought it—and they bought his razors. And they still do.

So now women shaving themselves is a tradition. Did it “work”? It certainly worked for Mr. Gillette and his investors. But would women be better-off if they did not feel compelled to do this? I believe they would be. And I don’t want to argue about it. I want innovation.

These are just a few musings, but they do point to the following: Yes, traditions are experiments that worked—but for whom? And for whom did they not? Does any given tradition still “work”? For whom? How? Is there something we could do or think instead that’s better? We need tradition, and we need experiment. We need sound judgment to know where to strike that balance in any given area of our individual and social lives.

The discipline of history does not fetishize the past. It does not take the position that past ways of doing things are worth knowing about because we should keep doing them or return to doing them. It just tries to understand the past, to understand more about being a human being and existing in a human society. In fact, history can be subversive of traditions; if I tell you about Mr. Gillette, that is more likely, not less likely, to make you question this “tradition.”

Enough of my rambly thoughts—what are yours? I think this is worth mulling over.