Keeping traditions or replacing them?

By Benedict Lam

Traditions and cultures vary from country to country. For example, Chinese people celebrate the Double Ninth Festival and the Dragon Boat Festival, British people celebrate Christmas and Easter, and the Portuguese celebrate the Festival of Sardines, the country's most valuable seafood ingredient. All of these differing traditions and festivals influence the future and development of countries — suggesting that many new inventions are influenced by heritage. But is this good for the development of countries?

Culture acts as a transfer of knowledge when people preserve their traditions and pass them on to the next generation. For example, in Chinese tradition, Chinese people eat rice cakes during the Lunar New Year. According to a recipe published in “The Works Of Life” by Judy Leung, you would have to use the steaming technique to make rice cakes. This allowed young people to understand the superb cooking skills of the ancients since, in the past, there was no modern cooking technology in ancient times to help the ancients steam Nian Gao. These traditions can help young people to develop the cooking skills of different artificial intelligence chefs today.

Although preserving traditions has positive effects, we still cannot ignore traditions that may cause harm to people. One such tradition that has held onto survival to this day is arranged marriages, which are done by parents often for financial or political gain. Without eradicating this tradition, it can continue to harm many young people and violate their free will.

Some people also suggest that replacing tradition with new technology is better for society. When people don’t need to follow the old traditions, there are numerous positive impacts – for example, disagreement between traditions is almost inevitable, which could reduce cooperation between countries and decrease the speed of development if people hold on to them vigorously. But if people are less tied to their traditions, they can have more opportunities to try new things restricted by the traditions.

However, disregarding traditions may create unintended consequences. Ultimately, the primary goal of tradition is to preserve history and customs. By ignoring tradition, we might set aside the fundamental principles and knowledge that people understood in the past, embodied in the form of traditions. This can cause people to lose out on the knowledge and teachings from their ancestors’ passed-down traditions and practices.

Considering all of the above, unthinkingly following all traditions can cause harm to the younger generation and potentially devastate society. But we still can’t ignore all traditions, as they contain knowledge and wisdom from the past. Therefore, we must understand the tradition first before practising, and we cannot blindly follow all of it.