An Antidote to Modernity’s Problems

Tradition and Why It’s Still Valuable

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” I will go ahead and modestly propose that this extremely metal saying be the motto for those of us in these circles. Let’s not kid ourselves — it’s a pretty sick motto. Tradition is one of the cornerstones of an authentic conservative movement. Not only that, but it is also a remedy for some of the greatest problems that plague us today. In modern America and, for that matter, most of the Western World, we suffer from a crisis of meaning and a lack of identity. Without the prescriptions and proscriptions left to us by our ancestors, we are in a sea of chaos, forced to solve age-old questions on our own. Whether through the insidious indoctrination in our schools or the relentless propaganda in the media that has shamed away any shared common identity, many of us Americans have become now rootless as a people. No longer do we identify ourselves as belonging to this or that people, but instead as consumers of this or that brand. Instead of experiencing what Russell Kirk called the variety and mysteries of life, we are all forced to embrace the same dull existence. Instead of belonging to a great chain of being, united with the dead and the living to come, we are stranded as individual atoms in the present, without the company of the past or a thought for the future.

Given the current trajectory, we can foresee a future where the distinctiveness of America’s local communities and regions has been morphed into the dull, gray, and crowded city life of globalists’ dreams. I could spend all day describing this form of hell; but to save time, I will direct your gaze to the current states of Canada and Europe for illustration — but just imagine it getting worse as time goes on. Tradition is an antidote for many of our issues today, but like most of the hallmarks of conservatism, it has become meaningless and hollowed out by ConInc and their empty platitudes. I understand the natural reluctance to entertain this subject and the instinct to roll one’s eyes upon hearing of this abstract thing we call “tradition,” but I assure you that it is both an antidote to today’s problems and something very much real. If we want to reclaim conservatism, then we will have to reclaim and promote tradition. To do so, our first action must be to understand what tradition is. Next, a cursory examination of how it arises and propagates will demonstrate its immense value. Finally, we can contrast it to the current system and illustrate the seriousness of the predicament we find ourselves in, and how tradition is one of many antidotes.

What Tradition Is

We all recognize tradition to one degree or another. If I asked even the most basic normie on the street what he thinks tradition means, he could give general approximations such as folk music, strange recipes, some kind of bright and odd-looking attire, maybe even some sorts of dances that his grandparents performed back in their days, and so on. And you know what? To a certain extent, he would be right. But tradition is more than just a collection of superficial things we like to hold on to for our own amusement. Tradition is one of the main governing forces in society — possibly the single most important governing force, if I may speak so boldly. Tradition encompasses all that has been passed down from previous generations of a people to its current generation, and also that which will be passed on to the next generation. It isn’t only some dances or dresses; it extends even to attitudes, languages, beliefs, myths, religions, prescriptions, morality, holidays, etiquette, and so on and so forth. Pretty much every aspect of culture can even be said to be tradition, in that it has been handed down to us.

How Tradition Arises and Propagates

I assume that most of us have heard of Aristotle’s famous definition of man as a rational animal, but how many of us also have heard his other definition of man as a political animal? Man is political by nature because he naturally forms societies. If man by his nature forms societies, then he must have the means to devise the rules by which the society will be run. These rules aren’t meant to be arbitrary, however. From Natural Law, man can derive the laws needed to govern his actions justly and to get along with others, as intended by God the Creator. For example, a man can understand that there has to be a way to judge between rival claimants in a case, and that no man should be the judge of his own case. From there, each culture devises a practical means to implement this principle, such as how we have judges and juries of one’s peers in the United States. This extends even to more mundane topics such as proper dress in formal settings. We know that we ought to dress more nicely in certain contexts. Every culture has such occasions, so in turn, every culture devises its own proper dress attire. For Americans and the Anglosphere, we have devised the suit and tie for men.

In other cases, certain issues will plague a society time and again. Tradition often comes to the rescue via prescriptions, which are certain ways to respond to a given problem. Our ancestors used prescription x to solve problem y, and it was useful then, so now we reapply it. In the United States, we recognize the need for citizens to be able to protect themselves from hostile neighbors. Our American tradition prescribes that they have access to firearms; hence, why our Founding Fathers established it as a federally protected right in our Constitution. We go even further in our tradition to prescribe that citizens seek proper firearm handling and so on.

Tradition arises from the need to govern society in a stable and continuous manner, even down to the most mundane of details such as dress, as established above. As a result, a tradition undergoes a selection pressure whereby its usefulness to the current generation dictates its survival. Generally speaking, an older tradition means that it’s been more useful than a newer solution and should have more weight when we discern which to follow. At other times, tradition survives because it begins providing another benefit beyond its original purpose, even sometimes when the original purpose is no longer met. The Scottish Kilt still exists, not because it’s worn for practical purposes, but because it conveys a unique Scottish identity. Wearing it now signals to others that one is Scottish or is of Scottish descent, thereby reinforcing community identity. I will posit that many traditions are so kept alive because it benefits communities to differentiate themselves from each other. I am quite confident that we could have a field day picking out examples similar to the kilt.

Similar to the phenomena mentioned before, many traditions are kept alive in families because it benefits the family to cement an identity or promote cohesion between the members. It also illustrates another way in which tradition is kept alive. This is seen most often in family heirlooms: although they are often quite useless practically, a family nonetheless cherishes them to a great extent. The family passes an heirloom on simply because a parent or grandparent passed it on. Why does the family keep it? Simple: it’s done out of love for the parents or grandparents who once owned it. Heirlooms are a form of tradition, and many traditions act like heirlooms, since they are retained simply out of love, respect, and nostalgia for the previous generations. The benefits to community and family cohesion can be seen plainly here.

A final method by which traditions are kept alive is by the plain fact that it’s the only manner in which a people might know how to act. We aren’t born into cultural vacuums or a blank slate. Once born, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, and devise new rules to live by with one another. It’s already there. Whatever society we are born into and expected to participate in, the rules have been decided, and a proper education will see that we learn how to acclimate ourselves towards it. I was born an American, and so were my parents. They raised me to be an American because they are Americans as well. They couldn’t have raised me to be Japanese, Ethiopian, Moroccan, or whatever non-American culture you could name, plainly because they knew not how to attempt it if they even wanted to. Therein lies another great advantage of tradition.

We know how to act properly in our environments. We know what is expected of us, and we know how to avoid trouble. The rules are for all purposes not open to debate, and we can focus instead on more practical issues affecting politics and society. In our modern era, from which many of the more important traditions have been purged, our politics now has been forced to come back to seeking answers to the larger questions of life. Instead of focusing on building this bridge or taxing this much, we now constantly have to ask who we are, what it means to be an American, and so on. We once knew what all of that meant when we embraced our national tradition; but now, we must reinvent ourselves and fight a cold civil war with the Left who desire to eradicate our identity and traditions even further. Once upon a time, tradition would have supplied an answer to put an end to the type of nonsense that the Left is trying to ram through our politics.

Tradition under this aspect of dictating how to act properly is a prerequisite and guarantor of freedom. A clearly laid-out and knowable tradition protects a people from arbitrary use of power. How can you know whether you’re being unfairly targeted unless you have a standard of normality to compare to? There’s a reason the tyrant’s weapon is to abolish tradition and to unleash upon the populace ever-changing and unknowable laws. We can go further between this link of liberty and tradition. The ideas of particular rights belonging to the citizenry and of how the society formulates those rights can even themselves be considered forms of tradition. This is so because, from Natural Law, a society sees the need for its people to perform a given action or pursue a given end, and therein it formulates its own rules on how to enforce and protect it. Of course, a given society might not necessarily refer to it as “rights” as we do in the Anglosphere, but it may seem to have similar or vague ideas about it, cross-culturally speaking. We can observe, for example, that every culture recognizes a right or a duty to self-defense to an extent, and it formulates it according to its own received traditions.

Tradition as an Antidote

As established from a brief tour of how traditions arise and propagate, traditions survive based on the values they provide to the peoples who embrace them. It is because of this aspect that we, as conservatives, should approach traditions in a state of reverence. Instead of the Left, who fancy themselves innovators, we need to act in contrast as stewards of our people’s traditions. Our model should be the conservative in Chesterton’s parable of the fence, who wishes to understand the reason for there being a fence in the middle of a field; this is in contrast to the reformer/liberal, who decides on a whim that there must be no reason for the fence to be there, and so he begins to dismantle it.

With stewardship comes responsibility, but that yoke placed upon our necks is also sweet, for it gives us a newfound sense of meaning in our lives. For if we now act as stewards, we are doing it out of love for our parents and forefathers to continue their legacies; also, we act out of love for our children, for we are passing down to them a sweet inheritance to live their lives by. We are thus incorporated into a great chain of being, so to speak. Tradition is “the democracy of the dead,” as G.K. Chesterton wonderfully quipped. Their memory is kept alive in us, and ours will be kept alive by our progeny. Is this not enough motivation for you to fight for tradition? Well, if not, then you’re in luck, because now we shall continue to see how tradition is the foe of the tyrannical system under which we find ourselves.

The tyrannical system we live in today has been aptly termed “the Total State” by Auron MacIntyre. It grows in power by devouring all competing sources of power, and, like the monstrous Attila the Hun or the barbarous Genghis Khan, it leaves nothing behind except devastated communities and the ruins of vibrant cultures. The Total State subsists solely on the spoils of conquest. Any center of power that challenges its hegemony must be leveled. The Total State wages war on any kind of community or institution from which an individual can derive a sense of meaning and identity. The Total State demands from individuals total allegiance and dependency upon it, and it competes with traditional centers of power. There is a reason that the Total State has waged war on all sorts of communities, ranging from churches and regional identities to even the most fundamental social unit of them all, the family. When an individual has been isolated from normal communities and identities, he can only find solace and protection in life from the Total State, being forced to pledge his allegiance to that hideous leviathan. Tradition is the source of all these sorts of competing and diffuse power centers; hence, why the Total State seeks to eradicate any vestiges of it. Tradition establishes the diversity and uniqueness of communities, with communities taken in its widest sense. It gives them the mandate for their existence, and it is the impetus for perpetuating its existence onwards.

Man is both a corporeal and a spiritual being. The Total State, with its philosophy based solely around materialism, can at most provide for its adherents’ material needs, even though in recent years we have begun to see it fail at even that. It will never fulfill anyone’s spiritual needs. A society dominated by such a state will have nothing but a meaningless and dull existence. Instead of fulfilling relationships and identities, this materialistic state can only offer the citizenry identities as consumers of Walmart or Amazon. What is left, other than to drown out one’s life of mediocrity with the newest gadget or to be forced to despair over the lack of meaning in one’s life? On the other hand, tradition offers us a place at the table of something much greater than ourselves, something that will outlast us for generations to come. What is more fulfilling and meaningful? Being a father who goes to this church, from that region, descended from those settlers of this great nation… or being a collector of Funko Pops?

Today, the peoples of these United States and the rest of the Western World stand at a junction. The innovators have done tremendous damage over the last few centuries, and they have waged a fearsome war on tradition. It is beyond horrific to assess how much the old social order, alongside other traditions, has been consigned to the trash bin of history by the mad revolutionaries ushering in the new state of tyranny and the all-pervading dullness of modern life. What has survived now lives in a state of constant danger, much like how the endangered animal lives in a constant state of agitation avoiding the poacher.

But should we ourselves despair? Should we declare game over and that the West has fallen? Of course not! I won’t sugarcoat it, because it is by no means going to be a walk in the park. But you know what? We have something that these madmen do not, and that is tradition. We have the wisdom of countless generations of ancestors at our disposal. Besides that, we have our identities bound up as a part of the great chain of being as our motivation to continue this uphill fight. While our enemies have nothing to fight for except spite, hate, and brand loyalty, we have the honor of being stewards of something that will be passed down to our progeny. That should be sufficient motivation for us to continue the fight. And in the end, we will become a part of that tradition where we shall be remembered by future generations for our struggle against this tyrannical source. “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” This is our motto, and this is our fight.