The trouble with tradition is that it becomes its own enemy.
As we romance and deify our religions and ways of life, we are increasingly incapable of adapting to the future. We fear the loss of something that was (as it was) beautiful and wholesome, the future always seems to destructive to our sensibilities. And often nostalgia or fundamentalism become our means of coping with this.
Of course, the new world today also brings such irreverence and lack of responsibility that you are inclined to believe that the world is getting worser. Maybe it is, but this may too be a result of our ineffective adaptations. That we cannot catch the essence and the truly liberal and beautiful aspects of our traditions (and all they all have it) and move those forward along with the swiftly moving times.
For the times are always a changing, and it takes a free mind and spirit to move with it, without also getting carried with the current.
A mind that has understood the spirit of humanity and also its abysses.
90 per cent of the original species of the world have gone extinct since the living world began. It is probably the nature of life to outlive itself. but this destruction happens in the natural world with relative (only relative) harmony, while in the human world it bring infinite pain - wars, riots, feuds and anger.
If only we can surrender to our own demise, we shall find that we rise as phoenixes.
Our cultures are not our identity alone, they are only vehicles, to experience something that shadow dances behind them. But the uncertainty of being socially undefined is much.
This is of course the tug of war of life, between our own spirits of freedom and security, we are at the end fighting our own selves more than anyone around us. But this realisation does make me less antagonistic to people who are holding on, for hey they're not just blind bad people, but are trying to make sense of their place in this world. I am probably doing it in the same way, in other areas. And the old too has its place in the new, so must these people who are romancing the past.