What Is Tradition?

 First, tradition, in the sense of it being an ideal,behaves the same way that any sort of high culture behaves. It is a series of ideas and reference points... thus, it is always an imagined, perfect thing, that does not reflect reality completely. Reality is always streaked through with human flaws.

Just like democracy or the idealized monarch, tradition is an ideal that people try to uphold. Of course, it is different from ideals in the sense that it is largely based on something handed down and much of it does not necessarily exist in a way that is ideological...

Tradition could be conceived of as the ideological prior to the popularization of the ideological. It can also be conceived of as a meta-ideology, or an ideology for everything, It is meant to encompass all wisdom, and to be the underpinning of some sort of civilization. Perhaps it can even be said that tradition is open to itself being manifested in a series of ideologies. 

Tradition is to ideology as perhaps civilization is to culture. For it is something that can spawn multiple cultures, and, in addition to spawning culture, it contributes to many other things. 

Of course, we can cut up the concept of tradition infinitely, just as we can cut up the category of culture infinitely, until each region, each age-group, each subdivision of art has a culture, and it is easy to digress infinitely on something like this, and even easier for someone to say that they do not share this lofty view of what constitutes tradition, but remember, we are using tradition here in a way that transcends any sort of normal use. 

Tradition is no longer just a word filling an expected linguistic role. 

In this context, it is part of an ideology, and a way of life.