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The traditional view would see the family as the main societal unit, and not the individual. The traditional view would see the community as the locus of popular polity and sovereignty, and not some remote, out-of-touch government. The traditional view would hold the Constitution as limiting government to allowing the people to choose what is good and evil, and not permitting the government to decide for the people.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
Peter1469 (01-04-2021)
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
IMPress Polly (01-03-2021)
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
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Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect. -- Woody Hayes
I don't agree about De Maistre or see any connection between his politics and totalitariaism. Moreover, I don't think he was a reactionary like Bonald who I know you have some knowledge of. De Maistre's musings on political legitimacy, sovereignty and the state have an almost post-modern character. You see many of the insights of modern sociology in early French conservativism.
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
OK, but I don't think the reviewer or Fawcett were trying to associate De Maistre with totalitarianism. Just, as compared to Burke, placing him on the hard right.
I thought the contract between hard right as part the conservative tradition, rather than the far-right departure from it.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
MMC (01-04-2021)
So what can be said in favor of the principle of tradition, of living with social practices as they are and working with them in the light of experience and tradition, in opposition to the modern practice of remodeling society on abstract standards of efficiency and equality? One answer is that markets and bureaucracies need tradition. To work at all well they require a whole complex of habits, attitudes and beliefs supported by things like family arrangements, religious commitments, and standards of respectable conduct. Such things do not themselves operate on market or bureaucratic principles. They grow up informally and in ways that can’t be planned or controlled, through the growth of settled habits and attitudes among people who live together and deal with each other for a long time. They are thus essentially traditional.
That answer suggests a kind of minimalist conservatism often found among chastened leftists and libertarians who have read Oakeshott or Hayek. Leftist or liberal goals won’t be achieved unless people have the understandings and habits—honesty, diligence, restraint, public spirit—that make it possible for bureaucracies, markets and institutions of self-government to work properly. Those understandings and habits can’t be counted on unless they are part of a stable and authoritative tradition by which people live. So grown-up leftists and libertarians must favor whatever is needed to have a generally-accepted tradition that fosters such things.
But what is it that’s needed? It is likely to be more than minimalist conservatives expect. An analogy to socialism and free markets may be helpful. When the socialists became convinced that markets were after all necessary they tried to invent a “social market” consistent with socialist ideals. It turned out to be impossible. If the principle of central control comes first, the market suffers severely. If the principle of contract sets the tone, socialism must be given up. While bureaucracy may be useful for particular goals, the failure of attempts to save socialism indicates that in a modern economy the market must take the overall lead. From an intellectual standpoint, at any rate, libertarianism has won its argument with the left.
A similar result seems certain in the case of an attempt to create a traditionalism that is a subordinate part of a fundamentally leftist or libertarian order. Leftism and libertarianism emphasize equality and satisfaction of individual goals within an orderly framework that facilitates such things. However, to accept tradition is to accept a great deal on trust, and so requires loyalty to something larger than the individual that can’t be fully rationalized. That loyalty is not likely to last when subordinated to equality and self-interest. Things like patriotism and love of family are not matters of calculation or personal advantage. If genuine self-sacrifice is needed, as in wartime, can the need for an orderly framework to advance self-interest and promote equality be enough to motivate it? Can that need be enough to motivate even the public honesty and stable family life indispensable for a tolerable society?
It seems not. Tradition—the habit of loyalty toward one’s society and its ways—is necessary to establish the overall order within which social institutions like markets and bureaucracies can function. It follows that it cannot be justified by reference to market or bureaucratic considerations, which are of necessity subordinate, but must be viewed as authoritative in its own right. Since society cannot be rationalized on clear simple principles, evolved social practices must be accepted to a large extent on their own terms.
But what personal reason do any of us have to treat tradition as authoritative? Is it only that we should do so as members of society because otherwise social order will be impossible? Or does tradition have internal qualities that make it reasonable to recognize its authority? And what about bad traditions? Surely loyalty shouldn’t be blind!
The answer is found in the nature of human life. To accept tradition is to accept life on the whole as we find it. The alternative is to construct some new form of life based on supposed superior knowledge. However, life is too complex, subtle and all-embracing to be reconstructed in more than marginal ways. One might be able to invent a better mousetrap starting from scratch, or program a VCR simply by reading what the expert who wrote the manual has to say. More complicated things that can’t be analyzed so clearly require acceptance of a particular culture and tradition. We learn such things by imitation, by doing, and by participation in the traditions that define them. Without tradition complex human activities could not exist at all. We can’t engage in human speech, for example, without accepting and doing those things that constitute a particular language and so obediently accepting a particular tradition.
In the case of very high-order activities, like politics, religion and the conduct of life generally, individual inventiveness and expertise that is not integrated with the practice of the activity itself become wholly subsidiary. The statesman and saint are not those who have studied religions and political systems and become experts or those who claim to have mastered those things so they can do with them what they want. They are those who live the life of religion and of politics as they exist in a particular tradition supremely well. How could it be otherwise, when such activities are so complex and subtle that no one could hope to state all their principles, and so all-embracing that an external perspective is impossible? The so-called innovations of great men only fulfill what was there already. Washington and Lincoln acted out of loyalty to their country and wanted to maintain something good it had long possessed. Christ based his teaching on the Law and Prophets and aimed only to fulfill them. How do such men compare with men like Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler who rejected and destroyed societies they considered rotten in the name of a radical new order of their own invention?
Life depends on loyalty. To live as a human being is to accept and follow tradition. Without participation in the traditions that constitute our social world of shared habits, attitudes, beliefs and so on we would be like children fostered by wolves—dumb animals with no conception of who we are, and no goals other than immediate gratification of crude instinct. It is only because we take part in that world that we know who we are and what we want. To reject the authority of tradition is to leave that world and so become less than human.
As for bad traditions, we know they are bad through other traditions. Ultimate standards of goodness, beauty and truth are too basic to isolate and study from outside. Since our relationship to them is part of what makes us what we are, they are beyond the reach of the ideals of neutrality and impartial expertise that have led moderns to try to base everything on economics, social science and formal abstractions like equality. Without involvement in forms of life that embody ultimate standards, we can’t know them......snip~
Understanding Conservatism and Tradition | Turnabout (antitechnocrat.net)
Last edited by MMC; 01-04-2021 at 08:32 AM.
History does not long Entrust the care of Freedom, to the Weak or Timid!!!!! Dwight D. Eisenhower ~
Chris (01-04-2021)