Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
1 day ago
I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese optical equipment manufacturer. It had a lot of institutional memory (detractors like to call it “tribal memory.” I guess, because it makes it sound more primitive).
Lots of “wise old men,” lots of rituals, and “we just do things this way” practices. Long apprenticeships, tons of training, and a metric shitton of paper trails.
But I could always get an explanation for why something was the way it was. Not many Chesterton’s Fences, and some damn interesting stories.
It could be maddening, especially for a software engineering manager (Yours Truly), but they got outstanding results. In fact, they suffered some real damage, when they tried to leave a lot of that behind, and have since returned to “the old ways.”
That's fascinating. I really do like that you found that you could get an explanation for everything.
It's a real problem for any culture when the explanations for why things are are either forgotten or actively suppressed. This is what tradition means. Sadly, in recent history, tradition has been attacked as thoughtless, if quaint convention, and discarded without prior investigation when it stands in the way of something someone wants. This view makes it easier to discard it in order to fill the void with something else; power becomes the rule. And sure, most people do follow convention without a deeper or thorough grasp of its reasons -- it is difficult to expect too much from the average person in this regard -- but part of what a cultural elite is for is to maintain tradition, to transmit it to the next generation along with its explanations, so that it can develop, so that it avoid both the calcification into mere empty convention as well as the loss of the wisdom that constitutes is. A cultural elite acts like a kind of referee to modulate cultural developments in light of prior knowledge.
The most interesting thing, was that most folks could answer without looking it up.
In that company, age was actually celebrated and respected (kind of alien, to Silicon Valley).