[Daily Beacon] We live in an age of skepticism, and there is nothing more vulnerable to the skeptic than everyday human experience. Tradition and cultural inheritance, which shape human experience, are especially subject to doubt. One need only observe the decline in church attendance and in the number of married women under thirty in Britain, France, and the United States to understand that doubting tradition and custom is more fashionable than embracing them.Doubt closes us to the fullness of human experience by rendering us aloof or apart, like a child who wants to go swimming but hovers, afraid, at the water’s edge. This doubt is regrettable because on the other side of some seemingly mundane, instrumental activities lies transcendent meaning. Rather than doubting everyday human experience, embracing that experience allows for deeper immersion into it.
Take eating. The skeptic will scrutinize the ceremonies surrounding the meal and wonder whether the fare is actually good for the diner. By focusing on such questions, he misses the pleasure of conversation, the tasty morsels in front of him, the fact that passing food from one diner to another is a form of intimacy that facilitates friendship, and the peace of soul contained in thanking God or gods at the beginning of the meal.
Everyday human experience, its depth, and its connection with the sacred has been a major theme of Sir Roger Scruton’s work. The philosopher has written many works on features of human experience--architecture and music, sexual desire, community and country, custom and land, whiskey and wine. Through experience of these things, human beings approach what is highest and best. And since the principles of each of these things are passed down from generation to generation, doubting the cultural inheritance we receive in traditional institutions such as the family, the town, and the school is a mistake. The seed of doubt closes young people off from both their cultural inheritance and what is highest and best in human experience.