What happens when cultural assumptions turn into tradition?

The transition from we do this to this is always how it's been done.

Let's turn to the late author David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College for some help.

Greetings, thanks, and congratulations to Kenyan's graduating class of 2005.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish

swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, morning boys, how's the water?

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually

one of them looks over at the other and goes, what the hell is water? This is a standard

requirement of U.S. commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish

stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshiny conventions of the genre.

But if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you, younger fish,

please don't be. I am not the wise old fish.

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are

often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence,

of course, this is just a banal platitude. But the fact is that in the day-to-day trenches

of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance. Or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

As the famed Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor put it,

what we assume to be tradition

is but a certain culture's way of doing things

extended over a long period of time.

We don't realize the water we're swimming in

because we've been swimming in it for so long.

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