Progress Within Tradition
Tradition and Progress
How often are “progress” and “tradition” treated as opposite terms? It is not only Jacobins that do this, painting, as they do, tradition as “an impediment to progress”, but a large portion of people who would self-identify as “on the right”, also agree on the mutual exclusivity of these terms. With the popularization of Ted Kaczynski, whose MK Ultra background does not seem to bother people, the phrase “return to tradition” being plastered everywhere, and the conceptualization of reaction as the desire of reinstating feudal monarchy, the right has done as much damage to the idea of tradition as the left.
Although I rarely use the terms anymore, not because I reject them, but because I fear fandom, I am a traditionalist and a reactionary, and it is because I am so that I believe tradition and progress are complimentary terms, and, in fact, you cannot have tradition without progress, nor progress without tradition. For this reason, I do not deny myself the label “progressive.” Labels are just that, labels, and put you into a preset “fandom” with a preset core of “influencers” that follow a preset “canon”, and deviating from the aesthetic, canon, or fundamentally disagreeing with the influential hierarchy gets you booted out of the fandom, which means you now carry around signifiers that interpolate you as a member of a very specific community, a community that others do not accept, and want no part of, yet a community that you have been exiled from. This is why fandoms produce so few pieces of new wisdom. Anything genuinely new, be it a new interpretation of a text, aesthetic, or mode of praxis, threatens a fandom, and thus must be expelled. Without making this a post about fandoms, you can begin to see why The Tavistock Institute, an enemy organization if there ever was one, is so interested in their proliferation.
What is tradition? This is already framing the question wrong. There are many traditions that, while sharing a common structure, are nevertheless different things. To speak of tradition as if it is a thing, is to obfuscate what it is, and once it has been obfuscated, then, and only then, can it become the opposite of progress. We must ask, what is a tradition? A tradition, to quote Alasdair MacIntyre, is an argument over time.1 What argument? The answer to that will determine what tradition is being talked about. Christianity is a tradition whose argument is over “who is Jesus Christ?” “Who is an American, and what is he owed?” is the fundamental argument in the American tradition. Science too, is a tradition in these terms. Biology’s argument is “what is life, and how did it originate?”
These arguments are over time, meaning that there is an ongoing investigation into the thesis and its defense against opposing traditions and dissent from within its own walls. Christianity has had to argue its answer to “who is Jesus Christ”, against Jews, pagans and Gnostics at first, then the major heresies the ecumenical councils were convened in response to, against Islam, and now against various atheistic challenges to the Faith. In Christianity’s historical argument, which is to say in the Christian tradition, the essentials of the Faith had to be reformulated to answer specific challenges. Against Arius, Greek philosophical language, particularly “homoousios”, was employed. Using a technical Greek philosophical term did not alter the Christian Faith, as it expressed the truth in the gospels that Christ is of the same essence of the Father, but it allowed the Church to add a degree of specificity to its previously held teaching, a degree of specificity that Arians could not wiggle out of. In the American tradition, each time a judge decides a case, he, or she, is answering the question, “who is an American, and what is he owed?” Marbury v. Madison and Dobbs v. Jackson, while 219 years apart, and dealing with very different questions, the question behind the questions of judicial review and abortion are, nevertheless, constitutional questions, and constitutional questions are those questions which ask, “what is owed to Americans?”, and implicit in the answer to this is a conception of “who is an American?”
Our examples of Christianity and the American tradition show two types of conflict, those of inter-traditional conflict and extra-traditional conflict. With American judicial decisions, the question “who is an American and what is he owed?” is being asked from within the American tradition, it is a quest of self-understanding. In the case of Christianity, we looked at extra-traditional conflicts, conflicts between the Christian tradition and those opposing it. There are examples of extra-traditional conflict for the American tradition, such as America’s conflict with the Soviet Union, and inter-traditional conflict for Christianity, such as the Great Schism between East and West. In both extra and inter conflicts, a tradition has to ask its basic question, reformulate its thesis during a historical argument, and, if it succeeds, that is if the tradition does not either a) collapse or, which might chronologically follow, b) its adherents convert to a rival tradition, then solidifies itself and becomes stronger. Progress in a tradition, then, is when a tradition becomes stronger, more defined, more articulate, as it continues in historical argument.
Progress has to happen within the context of a tradition, because progress is always progress towards something. I cannot progress down a road unless I start from point A, and I move closer to point B. I cannot progress is synthesizing carbon unless I begin with the goal of synthesizing carbon. To be a progressive, and here I wade into the alchemical waters of fandomry, presumably means to desire that society progresses towards something. Maybe it is general happiness, equality, justice, or peace. It might be all four of these. Yet, all four of these words can mean different things depending on what tradition the progressive is from. To an Aristotelian, happiness means the acquisition of virtue, something that happens through habituating oneself to the virtues. For most utilitarians, happiness is simply bodily pleasure. Equality, which might seem more particular to the modern context than happiness, justice or peace, also is tradition specific. Equality with whom? Equality in what? Equality for what? All being subject to the law, all being subject to death, and all having equal claim on self-rule are very different things. Now, it might be the case that “progressivism” is its own tradition, and I would concede as much, but this does not mean that “progress” is synonymous with “progressivism” any more than liberality is synonymous with “liberalism.” All members of a tradition are part of a tradition that encourages progress, for if a tradition did not encourage progress, if it refused to meet the challenges made to it, then it would have either ceased to exist, or is beginning to cease to exist. When a challenge is made, it must be responded to. To do otherwise is to go gently into the night.
Diagnosing why tradition is so widely misunderstood would be tricky, since each answer would bring up another question. Presumably the right’s misunderstanding of tradition is linked with the left’s, and both their misunderstandings has something to do with education and so on. Acknowledging that the chain of causes goes back rather far, and that my best guess (I think it might be the X Club) is only a guess, let’s try and give an answer for the right’s misunderstanding. When I say “the right” I mean, and I only mean, that portion of people who get their politics from the internet, be it podcasts, blogs, or forums, and who have been shaped heavily by the rise and fall of the Alt-Right, and then of Donald Trump. Having been around the Alt-Right since 2015 (as an observer, mind you), I have been keeping track of the literature being promoted. Not all members of the right have read the canonical texts (Evola, Spengler, Junger, Benoist, Francis, Caryle, Moldbug/Yarvin, Hoppe, etc.), but all members, to one extent or the other, live out these texts. The familiar ear can trace back ideas on podcasts to these texts, as the familiar eye can do the same on forums. This is not to say no new ideas crop up, there are some notable exceptions (Blood Satellite is a great podcast I highly recommend) but is to say that a canon shapes its community. Looking at just the names I presented, the authors are either post-romantics who believed that traditional ways of living (already a suspect phrase…what, which tradition!?) are long gone (Junger, Caryle and Benoist), thought that tradition is something static and needed to be reinstated (note how tradition has been made into a thing), or the author is simply not interested in the question (Moldbug, Francis and Hoppe). The right has been predisposed to contrast tradition and progress because the cannon it has built itself around, at bests, reifies tradition, and, at worst, does not care about it. Perhaps if MacIntyre, or Gadamer, were part of the right’s canon, then progress and tradition would be seen as complementary terms.
Some Examples
It is probably not good enough to end the post here. There are almost certainly a handful of you that want examples of how tradition and progress can go together. Though I have done this with Christianity and the American tradition, I anticipate many of you are thinking about the contrast between the “trad” village and some futurist alternative. This is unhelpful, because it presupposes the very idea of tradition that I have tried to reject above. Tradition is not staying in the past, nor is it even looking to the past. Tradition is an argument over time, and is necessarily forward looking because all challenges to a tradition are either a) contemporary or b) in the near future. If the question is “can I embrace the use of technology while staying true to my tradition?”, then the answer depends on your tradition. You can have robots, flying cars and all sorts of fun stuff and have the 1950s, as The Jetsons showed. Idealizing the 1950s is not good, and is another symptom of an obfuscated idea of tradition, but I use this sloppy example to make a clean point. Technology shapes our world, yes, but we shape technology. Should you want a Christian civilization, and if this means something like people seeing the world as epiphany, then it makes no difference if robots are present or if we inhabit Mars. Mars might make a really great spot for a Cathedral. If you are within the American tradition, and if you think America is in an extra-traditional conflict with a rival tradition that seeks to replace the American people, then why not use decentralized software to coordinate activism? Why not play Uber to the opposition’s taxi cartel? If your tradition is particularly concerned about the environment, or about close communities, take a look at solar punk. Finally, if your tradition leads you to value family, even a large one, then the development of AI technologies will free up the mundane tasks keeping you from spending time with your children.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana. 2014. 12