"I am really not interested"

Amy Welborn has been doing some substantial posts recently and part of one today caught my eye.

2) Too many Catholic liturgists have done their work over the past thirty years, happily, with no reference to the past at all. They have been quite busy dreaming up new pardigms of liturgy for a new people in a new spirit, and they need to be reigned in. To put it bluntly: I am not interested in the new paradigm someone dreamed up in graduate school, I am not interested in your individual stylings and creations and I am especially not interested in your recreation of the liturgy every week. I am really not interested. Sorry about that. The focus needs to be redirected, the reference points shifted. "Freeing" the Tridentine Mass, sends a message. This way…not that.

Her comments on liturgist kind of reminds me of G.K. Chesterton critique of education in "What’s wrong with the world." The educator would flock to the new theory that is younger than the child they are teaching.

Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer,
than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea; for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience. But this, as I say, is all due to the mere fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes that men who govern themselves will govern their children. To-day we all use Popular Education as meaning education of the people.I wish I could use it as meaning education by the people.

It seems that same types of things that have happened in education happened to people working with the liturgy. That new liturgical practices came about not because they understood the older practices and wanted to reform parts of them, but as something divorced from them and the only thing to recommend them was that they were new or different. We always have a temptation when something is passed down to us to improve upon it, and to improve upon it in such a manner that the improvement is directly attributed to us. Professors publish to make their mark and modern liturgists create new liturgies to make theirs. A liturgist that only passed on accurately the liturgy would never make a name for themselves or receive any acclaim in their circles. When liturgists became wedded to modern academia they brought all of the errors of their thinking into the liturgy.