Good article, but I take issue with one statement by the author

"Defended this way, tradition becomes merely a primitive method for doing what empirical science does better."

No, empirical science doens't do it better. If that was the case, the Soviets and French would have built paradises by now.

Tradition can be thought of as a genetic program, that discards losing actions and keeps winning ones to further evolve. It is a gigantic hyper-multiprocessor computer. Empirical science and Tradition are both ways of approximating the same thing -- truth -- to different degrees of accuracy in different domains.