In The Beginning There Was Hunger
A powerful reflection on human hunger—both physical and spiritual—and the evolving nature of tradition in a rapidly changing world.
To be human is to be bound by hunger—hunger of the flesh, hunger of the soul. This obligation to feed both is not a choice, but a condition—eternal, inexhaustible, and inextricably tied to the very essence of our destiny as beings conscious of our incompleteness. An eternal obligation. Unlike rights, an obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. Humans, considered in isolation, only has duties, among which are certain duties towards themselves. To feed his hunger.
On this point, the human concise has little to no variation. Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians believed that no soul could justify itself in the afterlife unless it could say “I have never let anyone suffer from hunger”. All Christians know they are liable to hear Christ himself say to them one day; “I was hungered and you gave no meat.” The notion of progress or what it means to progress in the first place is the transition to state of human society in which the people will not suffer from hunger. It is equally valid to assert that one may be deemed truly evil if they refuse to share their food with someone who is three-parts of death from hunger. This is to say that it is an eternal obligation toward fellow humans, do not let one suffer from hunger, when one has the chance of coming to his assistance.
Among such needs there are some which are physical like hunger, which can be fairly easy to enumerate. While others are abstract, with no physical connection. But they form and formulate and present like a physical need, a necessary condition of life. If this abstract hunger is not met then we fall into a stage resembling death. These abstract hungers are much more difficult to recognize, enumerate and explore. But everyone recognizes, that it exists.
II
Here, perhaps arbitrarily, I would like to bring forth, identify and name, Tradition as one of the food, to satisfy the so-called abstract hunger. The food for the soul, where one can spread their roots deep and grow. Tradition is our first source of identity (you were first an Ao before anything else)— It is where we inherit a sense of belonging. However, in this recent past, there is an unsettling anxiety within the collective: the gradual erosion of tradition. The fear induced by this so-called state of decay is not merely a nostalgic lament for lost customs but a harbinger that the very framework defining who we are is under siege. In the casual practice of cultural critique, the notion of cultural erosion has become a staple parlance in the lexicon of our narratives, galvanizing a devoted collective to save, protect, and promote the idea of returning to our roots.
All of this is a natural progression. When something valuable is threatened, enthusiastic vanguards emerge to defend it — both in rhetoric and in practice. In today’s political, economic, and cultural climate, returning to tradition has become a vital counterpoint in the struggle and combat against capitalism, especially when that tradition is intertwined with the long, global legacy of colonialism. Embracing these traditional elements has undeniably become a hot topic, a trend—used here not pejoratively, but as a signifier of its current prominence in discourse. There is no doubt that preserving tradition is a noble endeavor, for it nourishes the soul and anchors our identity. It is from these roots that we derive our belonging and sustain our very essence.
III
However, I wish to articulate a perspective that has not been satisfactorily argued at large, nor broken into print as serious thought that accords certain level of attention that is desired. Even when it is engaged, such discourse remains few and far between. Thus, the primary aim of this perspective is the felt need to push back against uncritical invocation of understanding tradition as a fixed or unchanging entity. Though this seems like a fairly simple statement and despite its widespread agreement in principle that tradition must be understood as dynamic and evolving, this uncritical invocation of tradition as immutable persists, virtually unassailed.
In the year of our Lord 2025, science has solved and continues to solve the complex issues of our time. And yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. What I mean is that we fail to engage with ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, selection, comparison, contingency, interrelation of means to an end. Seems like, the use of expressions like ‘the extent that’ is beyond our Intellectual capacity. We seem to take ideas in terms of absolute. This or that.
This is not an attempt to decry that tradition and culture has no value, nor this is an illustration of points to cancel out the idea or ideas of “Back to roots”. Rather, it is a call to awaken the critical spirit— urging to engage with ideas in their full, unruly complexity.
The allure of the idea — “going back to roots”, rests on the assumption that identity is anchored in an unchanging foundation—an inherited stable foundation upon which our very sense of self is built. While this perspective may hold a kernel of truth, there is also the present assumption that culture and tradition are unchanging, a reservoir of authenticity. Perhaps this appeal of returning to our origins is not a sincere yearning at all but rather a symptom—a byproduct of capitalism’s relentless drive for speed and efficiency in a rapidly changing global landscape. In this modern style of existence, rapidity is the virtue of the age. Speed is desired, demanded. And as much as many profess a longing for a slow-paced life, however, they also demand speed, faster internet, faster travel, faster processing, faster recovery, faster results and so on the list and requirements goes on.
IV
Sobaliba—the ethical framework of communal solidarity among the Ao—is not the fruit of some preordained moral sensibility, but rather the product of a brutal logic of survival: the grim byproduct of social discord, inequality, and the ceaseless struggle of existence. In such conditions, cohesion is not a luxury but an imperative. Communal ethics like Sobaliba are forged in the light of defense—a collective stand against external threats. However, it can also be argued that its origins lie in a primal relationship between the peculiar forces of nature and human life itself. My point here being, that traditions emerge as a response to the contemporary needs of the people.
I would like to consider, an important event which brought a behemoth change in the Aoer tradition — the embrace of Christianity. The radical adoption of Christianity resulted in transition, evolution and transformation of certain age-old traditions. It is safe to assert that Christianity did not win over the Aos just with its superior doctrine but with it also came better ideological and cultural tools for survival which were the reason why the Aos embraced Christianity —not always and necessarily propelled by a spiritual yearning, but by a stark material necessity. They recognized in it the pragmatic arsenal for survival. Here, one could make rather a lazy and hurried argument that Christianity is the whole reason for the uprooting of tradition and culture. But it is paramount to note that the Aoer were not a passive recipient of Christianity. The Christian missionaries did not seek to dismantle the fundamental structure, family, clan lineage, Inheritance, laws, descent and traditional practices. Christianity merely added another dimension to that tradition. It is a scene of evolution not erosion. This is where I want the stress to fall, that identity via tradition is a changeling, agile and nimble, always evolving, always on the move.
Having said that. Now if we accept that traditions were born out of certain historical pressures, then the idea of returning to them uncritically assumes that the condition that created the space remains the same. But they do not. The same forces that shaped the traditions also destabilize them. Such, is the paradox that in a different historical moment, that same ethic might be reshaped by economic structure, culture influence, etc. What I am trying to lay out here, is that, the very fact that we can historicize the emergence of traditional process, shows that traditions were fluid rather than fixed.
V
In every epoch, the forces of resistance (critics) have been mistaken for destruction. The hysteric, the heretic, the traitor—these figures haunt the margins of tradition, yet they are the ones who keep it alive. What we call tradition is merely that which has survived, that which has adapted in order to endure. But survival is no guarantee of vitality. A tradition that does not contain its own negation is not a living thing—it is a relic, embalmed and venerated, a monument to the dead. The true agents of destruction are not those who interrogate tradition but they are namely the sentimentalists and the nostalgists—the ones who flatten its dynamic complexity, they mute lived experience.
In our media-choked world, tradition is too often reduced to an aesthetic, making tradition subjected to glamour, a spectacle to be admired rather than a condition to be inhabited. The process of glamorization leaves tradition as something to be viewed from afar, preserved in its image rather than engaged with, questioned, or evolved. It makes tradition exclusive, unapproachable, uninviting. Glamour is about social distance, not social integration. They also idealize tradition to the point of glorification. Glorification is not an innocent act of admiration; it is a seductive and “sanctified” invitation to certain type of cultural blindness, the refusal of negotiation. To glorify is to refuse to see the flaws, the contradictions, the sometimes-harmful residues of practices that once served a purpose but now impede our progress. It is dangerous precisely because in its exalted state, tradition becomes untouchable, frozen in the illusion of its own greatness. And greatness, once proclaimed, admits no room for change. By glorifying the past, we foreclose the possibility of transformation, locking in a binary that denies us the chance to reexamine and reform practices that no longer serve us. In short, to embrace tradition without question is to shackle it, turning what should be a dynamic force for renewal into a static monument of outmoded thought and behavior.
So then, what kind of perspective, comments on tradition are desirable today? For, I am not saying that the practices of the past should be abandoned. They can be preserved in their essence, reinterpreted to meet contemporary needs, and celebrated. The question is how. What would a critique of tradition look like that serves the living, that the living can ingrained to grow. What is needed is more attention to the form of tradition—the way it is structured, the manner in which it evolves, the texture of its daily, mundane presence in our lives. Excessive stress on the literal alone, on the raw, unexamined claims of the past, provokes the arrogance of uncritical glorification. Instead, we should adopt a mundane vocabulary—a language that treats tradition as we do our daily meal. Just as food is both a necessity and, on occasion, an elevated feast, so too should our engagement with tradition be seen. Our obligation to nourish ourselves with cultural meaning should be as ordinary as the act of eating, and yet it must also allow room for the sublime—never to be idolized or frozen in time. Tradition must be inhabited, not enshrined. It must be fed, like the body—necessary, mundane, vital. Not an ornament, not a relic. The question, then, is not whether tradition should survive, but how it should be lived.
Our task, then, is not to extract every last morsel of meaning from a static past, nor to turn tradition into a museum piece. It is to treat tradition as the everyday nourishment that sustains us—a practice that is as vital and mundane as eating our daily meal, yet capable of being elevated in moments of communal celebration and critical reflection. In this way, we honor the obligation to live within our cultural inheritance without allowing it to ossify. Tradition must remain, like our daily bread, a sustenance that is always subject to renewal and change—a dynamic interplay of the old and the new that keeps our collective self-alive, critical, and ever-evolving.
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