Effects of Tradition on Modern Thai society

 All cultures, were traditionally, established according to social characteristics indigenous to their locations. From this viewpoint, this writer insists that societies existed before culture. Culture was acquired over time and did not grow from the ground like the tree. Thai cultural and social traditions, mostly, are admirable. Even the foreign tourist enjoys them. However, Thai tradition has certain limitations which often cannot withstand the rapid change in society. It may finally bewilder their adherents, isolate people from society and produce or sustain misconceptions about the world generally. Adherents to tradition are usually narrow-minded because they depend upon only the ideas they have been taught by tradition. This may be that they are lazy and would rather accept the information given them instead of “investigating for the truth” as taught by the Khamma whenever they encounter untraditional or specially difficult problem, they try to solve them through traditional means and, failing in this, they become bewildered. Society needs to be flexible and curious toward new concepts in order to accept them and utilize them. People who stubbornly cling to traditions while their societies change and adapt to new circumstances will finally be ignored by more modern, progressive numbers of society and feel isolated. They may feel bitter because they cannot, or will not change themselves to keep abreast of the times. Societies are perceived by all members thereof as "cold, unemotional and survival-conscious" synonymous of Nature itself. Unwillingness to adapt to change is both unnatural and self-destructive. People who conduct their lives in society must certainly weigh and balance all events before changing. In order to keep what is good and discard what is useless or improper; yet, they must certain change to remain members in that society. As before, people who tend to accept tradition instead of fact-finding may finally form wrong ideas about their environment. Traditional thinking makes them stubbornly follow what was reasonable and correct for the time when those traditions were created. However, they have followed them so long that they forgot that traditions started as relatively new ideas and became accepted. They continue to follow these traditions rather than to create new ones, more appropriate for the time. Their ideas become outdated because they are too lazy or stubborn to update them with new information and these concepts conflict with what is true at the time. It finally makes them feel wrongly about their world. Not all traditions are useless, and those which are good should be maintained. However, people nowadays too easily discard good traditions in a blind follow-the-leader trend of “ in with the new, out with the old.” This is practiced without consideration of effect and leads to coldness in society. Yet, blindly following a useless tradition is equally dangerous. The above topic was prepared, simply, to warn against either extreme-total discard of tradition, or total acceptance including some which may be harmful to one person or to everyone as a whole.