There was a very interesting post last week at Crooked Timber about how traditional modern society is:
…we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages.
It also refers to a comment given in a previous post suggesting that even this observation about traditions is traditional:
Ironically, the tradition of insisting that traditions are mostly recent is actually quite old. Centuries before Eric Hobsbawm, philologists like Lorenzo Valla and Isaac Casaubon were demonstrating that ancient texts weren’t ancient at all.