"Never break a tradition or start a new one" is a classic Irish saying, and well represents a traditional culture. Many around the world would agree to it.
However, there are two basic types of people, I think, and they generate two types of cultures: the
Progressive and the
Traditionalist. Everyone falls into their own niche on a line running from Super-Hyper-Wow-Wow Prog to Absolutely Rock-Solid Never-Budging Trad. The result is a nearly endless variety of opinions on the competing morals of the two extreme-end positions.
I
The word "Progressive" can mean many things, of course, such as developments in science, technology, and economic and cultural history, including a moniker for the whole period of the Industrial era of the early 20th century in the U.S. That particular use was eventually abandoned for "liberal" once "Progressive" became associated with failed economic and social policies. Then, starting in the early 21st century, "liberal" began to be abandoned for "progressive" in its trun, as if renaming a disaster could wipe it out from memory, making it a "non-event". (Actually, for a lot of people, this works quite well. Ignorance
is bliss. But for the Unexamined Life Not Worth Living crowd, well, not so much.) In any event, I use the word for the philosophical and moral idea that change (i.e., change forward, "progress", not backward) is not only
ALWAYS good, but
ALWAYS necessary. This in turn is based on the theological and anthropological idea that human beings are basically good, always and ever, except when they're unhappy because they've been "held back" by Traditionalists.
N.B. I simplify this a bit because, for example, James Madison ("If men were angels, no government would be necessary) and Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of Independence, etc.) were the Progressives of their day, but by our standards, not so much.)
II
The true Progressives I refer to, though, tend to be unsatisfied with life. They've got an itch. They want change, innovation, "evolution" and, of course, "progress." Many, if not most, are happy with
some degree of feeling they've progressed
some, and things are "looking up". They expect others to think the same way. Others want to feel a bit of progress "has been made" with whatever it is that's in question before 'em, their pet peeves, their axes to grind. And then there's always the more extreme types, who simply demand change for change's sake. They're the ones that really animate the whole of the others, ultimately.
III
"Trads" just don't operate that way. The Eternal Verities, that's their scéal. And that's because they have the idea that human nature is not malleable. We are what we are. Period. Each succeeding generation has the same issues to deal with, albeit in somewhat different angles. We're the same folks as God made in the beginning (i.e., after the Fall, that is) or, to use non-Biblical imagery, we're the same folks who hunted Wholly Mammoths and were chased by Saber-toothed Cats. Therefore, if religious folks (Christian or Jewish) think that God made us the way we are, then our job is to conform our wills to God's. If not religious, they think that what worked before will continue to do so, and what doesn't work (say, Socialism, which, as Maggie Thatcher once observed, works until it runs out of other people's money) should be discarded. Progressives seem to have a universal tendency to think that if a thing they like (say, Socialism, again) hasn't worked, it's merely because it hasn't been tried correctly, or with enough fervor. In short: admission of failure isn't a Progressive strong point.
Naturally, Charlie Darwin and his Evolution idea is a far, far better fit with "Progs" than Trads. So, Progs tend to embrace it and Trads tend to be against it (either strongly or mildly, depending on who they are, what religion they belong to, their level of education, and so on). In the same vein, Progs tend to be either utopians ("Gee! Communism means from each according to his ability to each according to his needs! How simple! Why didn't we think of that before?") or they're desperate Doomsters to whom the sky is
always falling (can anyone say AGW?). So great is the desire for change among many Progs that they'll manufacture a problem in order to solve it. AGW has been accused of just this, for example. There have been many such. A few decades ago, it was Global Cooling and then a pressing problem was identified and lamented – until totally forgotten: the trash disposal crisis. (Forgotten that? Landfills were going to smother us. There was also a "hole in the Ozone" crisis, now equally vanished down the memory hole.
Trads operate by the mantra, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Maybe they're just emotionally less excitable. Maybe it has to do with the imagination, or perhaps having a sanguine or phlegmatic character means you are more likely to be one or the other. Or maybe it is a mix of these things. Whatever the reason, you can image that each side thinks the other silly (if they're mild sorts) or insane (if they're eaten alive by their worries).
IV
An interesting point to make about Progs vs Trads is a survey I remember reading about. I don't think it was very "scientific" if such ever are. It was more like a journalist calling up well-known Progs (politicians, mostly) and asking them when they would be satisfied they had reached the Finish Line, when would they
ever think they got
all they wanted, when will they (to use modern parlance about the day when computers achieve consciousness) achieve "singularity".
Of course, computers, no matter how advanced and no matter how amazingly programmed, will
never achieve consciousness because consciousness involves soul, spirit, the animating, non-material reality that is "life". (You remember, the very thing Western Metaphysical Materialists deny the existence of.) Currently, we don't even know how the human brain generates, say, the color blue. So how can we make inanimate objects "live"? See:
That's a great article, BTW, and I highly recommend it, but not it doesn't bring God into it, either. It focuses on the empirical science of the whole question, and at length.
Cibe ar bith, re: the survey: no one the writer contacted could tell him when they'd be satisfied. That's the Progressives' foundational problem. There's simply
no end to any of it. 50 years ago, for example, if you tried to argue that homosexuals were NOT mentally ill (something Church Fathers would have agreed with: sinful, sure; demented, well, maybe some here or there might end up that way, but the idea of madness/mental illness underlying homosexuality came in the later 19th century; you know, the Age of Progress!), but if you tried to argue 50 years ago that "the homosexual lifestyle" was just an alternative to the non-homosexual one, you'd (shall we say) have been
not taken seriously. That's to put it politely. And ten years ago, if you argued for "gay marriage" you'd have met the same fate. And so on. And notice with those crises again the curious
manufactured aspect to them. There have always been homosexuals, but only 50 years ago was it a crisis to them (and to Progressive elites in general) for society to accept them, and then the crisis that they had to be married. Such is called "the Bum's Rush").
V
Ultimately, just as a Trad culture might be in its own corner of the world strong, colorful, profound, but not exactly "catching the world on fire", there's just no knowing when Progressivism (the moral imperative for perpetual change) will collapse under its own extremes. Examples from just one narrow slice of modern life:
- Look at Feminism, and I mean the old-line type. How can they NOT be outraged at the idea that a man (Bruce Jenner, say) can make himself into a woman; that growing up a girl, living all that life to womanhood, then trying to survive in the rush-rush competitive modern world as a woman, experiencing all that entails, can be suddenly be the equal cosmetic surgery and hormonal alchemy?
- Or how can they remotely tolerate men wanting to use women's facilities just because the man in question claims to be a "woman trapped in a man's body"? (100 years ago, it was a major feminist fought-for achievement to get women's restrooms in the first place!)
- Or take the example of Progressives at American universities. It's obvious, from many examples, that "free speech" is seen as "micro-aggression" and it is shutting down in the very heart of American intelligentsia and critical thinking.
- Or that the rise of the "victim culture" won't shut down critical thinking altogether. (Update: See http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/08/google-senior-engineer-fired-for-diversity-memo/ )
- That sort of thing is intellectual suicide, and Progressives are rushing like lemmings to embrace it as they go over the cliff.
Whereas Traditionalism is a lot like an ancient family farm: sure, familiar, and uneventful in terms of modern life's attractions, Progressivism is a lot like the Titanic: big, powerful, progressing across the world to
big places to
do big things, and of course luxurious (for some, a very comforting luxury indeed, as it is their whole world-view). Yet it's about to pay the price of entering an ever thicker ice field at reckless speed.
VI
Trads don't have any of that sort of problem. Traditionalism is utterly different, and much simpler (although of course individual people might well exhibit elements of both positions as they confront the various pressing issues one has to confront today).
Traditionalists are motivated by:
- Eternal verities...
- Absolute right to private property that exists for everyone, high or low, and...
- Property and people are protected by law decided by elected bodies (or however), but always ...
- Founded solidly on the Traditional morality as it came down to Christians via the Jews and their Desert God, because we are MADE IN THE IMAGE OF THAT GOD, and so forth.
Simple.
Too simple for some.
So we'll see who will "win". Progressivism can provide excitement and highly useful developments in science and technology, that much is clear, as well as providing us nuclear war, genetically engineered humans, and white plagues (accidentally manufactured bio disasters). I'm thinking this civilization is about to collapse, myself, for the contradictions it contains. Maybe I'm too phlegmatic? But having studied the collapse of Irish civilization (there was such a thing) and Ancient Rome and Greece, and China too (Li Po is my favorite all-time poet) and Baghdad in its high glory years before its conquest by the Asherites, the Hanbalis and anti-intellectualism in general, I can say the signs are strong (glaring, really) that our civilization is about to meet the cré na cille*, face first.
Or maybe not. But that ice-berg sure looks big.
*Church yards, i.e., cemeteries in Ireland; the Irish-language writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain's most successful work of literature was the novel
Cré na Cille.)
An Préachán
(I told you this blog would be melancholy. Remember Edgar Allen and his corvine on the bust of Pallas. :)
