Kling on Klein

“Clever innovations can improve on tradition, but they do so with much less frequency than intellectuals implicitly believe.”

This is the conservative position, but it is mystical. It presumes that the rationale behind rational traditions are hidden and ungraspable. If that is true, then blindly following them may be justified. If it is not true, and traditions are readily analyzable, then there is never a need to defer to tradition at all, only to reason.

And traditions ARE readily analyzable.