The difficulty of being a traditionalist

In an excellent but troubling post at Wise Man’s Heart, blogger Hermes, who has recently entered medical school, reflects on the difficulties of being a conservative in a liberal society, especially when engaged in demanding professional pursuits that do not leave one much leisure time for study and thought. In a society where liberalism is the default position, he writes, conservatism takes much more work than liberalism.

Beyond that practical dilemma, Hermes wonders (in a very good comment he had sent to me some weeks ago but I hadn’t published, my apologies) about the overall prospects for traditionalism in a society in which any experienced connection with a tradition is rapidly fading or gone, and in which more and more of the cognitive elite are Asians.

Vanishing American replies that blogging, even if we’re not instantly changing the world, at least helps keep us spiritually and mentally alive.

It’s late, and at the moment I have no answer for Hermes beyond something I’ve said before. The indispensable core of traditionalism is loyalty to truth, to our civilization, and to what Western man has been; and the inward refusal to accept the victory of liberalism, no matter how convincing that victory may seem at times. If we have that, we can never be defeated, and we have a base from which greater things—things that perhaps we can’t even imagine now—will become possible.

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Mark J. writes:

I like your point that the core of traditionalism is loyalty to truth, to our civilization, and to what our people have been, and the refusal to accept the victory of liberalism.

I would explain my optimism about our people’s future in a similar way: my optimism is built on my conviction that in the end, Quality always triumphs. Quality, meaning that which works best to make a good life. Traditionalist conservativism has higher Quality than liberalism. It is truer. It works better in the real world to actually make our lives better. It better takes into account the way people actually are and what people actually want than liberalism does. It provides better practical guidance for how to live a satisfying life.

Human beings are struggling upward through the generations, reaching in a halting and frequently mistaken way towards ever more manifest and realized Quality. Liberalism is one of those mistakes. But the reaching for Quality never stops and the truth does win out because it is only truth, Quality, which can bring real happiness. So in a sense, since I am convinced through logic and my inner Quality compass that we are closer to Quality than the liberals are, the eventual victory of Quality, and something more like traditionalist conservativism than liberalism, is assured. All that is left to us is to pursue its path with patience, excellence, and the joy that comes from knowing we’re on the right track.

LA replies:

That’s beautiful.

Terry M. writes:

I agree with both you and Mark J. And, yes, I tend to be more positive than negative about the future prospects of traditionalism in this country.

As I said recently to one of my friends, I believe firmly that the majority of Americans will eventually realize, by necessity, that liberalism is an untenable political doctrine because it is founded on untruth. If I am correct about this, then the job of traditionalists is not to complain about how difficult it is to be one in today’s liberal climate, nor is it to recount the innumerable reasons for the impossibility of a return to traditionalism at this very moment in time. The job of traditionalists is to put forth the reasons for which traditionalism is superior to liberalism now, so that when liberalism begins to fail people, individually and collectively, they will have an alternative to which they can turn, and in which they can put their faith because of the work of traditionalists in long-since exposing the insanity of liberalism which they (liberals) will have finally coming to realize themselves.

It all takes time, and time, or long-term recovery requires patience. And not to thump the Bible at anyone, but we have biblical examples of this kind of thing recounted therein. It was the children of Israel, recently released from Egyptian bondage, who complained that self-government was too hard and that they were better off as slaves than as freedmen. And while we may not be allowed entry into the promised land, it is nonetheless the destiny of our progeny. I have to believe that.

Kristor L. writes:

Truth is immensely strong, falsehood and error weak. Whitehead says, “The instability of evil is the morality of the universe.” In the limit, truth cannot help but prevail over falsehood, because falsehood is mistaken about the world, is thus a poor guide to action, and therefore tends to the detriment of its host. Error is inherently self-destructive. It is a weakening, or a deficit, of the truth.

This is not to say that those who have avoided a particularly pernicious error will surely avoid destruction at the hands of those who have not. It is only to say that the final victory of truth is assured, however messy, chaotic and painful may be the struggle with error; and that, in the meantime, the truthful are less likely to destroy themselves.

The Christian identification of the Truth with the content of the knowledge of the Perfectly Good entails what Origen called the apokatastasis: the unavoidable eventual state of affairs for this or any universe, wherein God is all in all, every creature is in a state of obedience to the Truth, and the whole shebang is, without exception or limit, increasing in joy, knowledge, power, wisdom, and virtue. Origen thought even Satan would eventually be saved, because there is no limit to God’s resources in the contest with evil, whereas every creature is ipso facto limited. Others of the Fathers disagreed, arguing that Satan is competent to effect his own permanent damnation; if this were not the case, how could he be construed as truly free? Their doctrine has prevailed; but Origen must be correct that all possible futures eventually involve the salvation of all creatures that have not so damned themselves as no longer to exist—not existing being the only possible way to be wholly alienated from the Necessary One.

Traditionalism is indeed difficult in a liberal milieu, as most conservatives so amply demonstrate. But I would argue that a truth attained represents a permanent increase in intellectual efficiency. To draw an analogy, walking is hard to learn, but it is a lot more efficient and powerful than crawling, and confers permanent advantages upon its practitioners, vis-a-vis their competitors. So the struggle to figure things out is a form of capital investment.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 25, 2007 01:26 AM | Send