If denial of God is the key to liberalism, then the key to traditionalism is …

In the previous entry I quoted Alan Roebuck saying that liberals do not believe in the God of the Bible—something that is undoubtedly true when you think about it, but I had never heard it put in such categorical language before.

By coincidence, just after reading Mr. Roebuck’s article (which I need to re-read much more carefully), I read a long e-mail from Kristor, who also makes the denial of God (or, more specifically, the modern split between reason and theism) central to liberalism, and therefore the rediscovery of God central to the recovery from liberalism. He then lays out a long list of traditional values and virtues that would seem, at least, very difficult to attain without belief in God.

Kristor writes:

… And such a widespread conversion, such a latter day Great Awakening, is I think a crucial desideratum for the traditionalist project; a sine qua non. I cannot resist the feeling that if we as a culture—i.e., as a congeries of individual thinkers who are not technical philosophers but who must perforce take ideas seriously in order to live—could get past the putative tension between science and religion, the fundamental intellectual bases of a traditionalist renascence could be laid. I don’t think traditionalism has a real cultural shot unless most people become seriously convinced that God is real, real as a hammer, and that they owe everything to him. That conviction entails the traditions of the West. For example, it entails the virtue of a proper humility—as opposed to the self-“esteem” movement (as if one could convince oneself of a known falsehood via a mere act of the will), the “me” society, the racial spoils arguments, the divorce tsunami, all of which are cut of the same self-regarding cloth. It entails also the virtue of a proper courage, moral, spiritual, and physical—in, e.g., war, criminal justice, marriage, the mission field, in discourse about differences among people, and especially in accepting the moral burden of noblesse oblige that follows upon recognition of such differences. Finally, it entails traditional sexual morality. Therein above all lies the nub, and the rub, of the modern crisis as it plays out in the conduct of lives—for the flagrant sexual public display, the promiscuity, illegitimacy, homosexuality, abortion, destruction of marriage, and so forth, all so endemic in the modern era, proceed all from unbridled lust.

Absent such a popular religious conviction, traditionalism will indeed be an exercise in nostalgia, a kind of tourism, such as is enjoyed by Civil War re-enactors and early music enthusiasts; it can be serious, and high minded, and indeed even sublime, but it cannot found a way of life for a whole culture. If traditionalism is to be more than an avocation of a few eccentrics, it must be carried into our popular quotidian habits, must be expressed in most of the concrete decisions most people make. It cannot be something we merely find interesting and attractive, but must be who we are, must govern us interiorly, must guide and limit us. Only thus can individual Western men and women find again their way in the world, only thus can Western traditions ever regain their former health, only thus can they become again the Way of the West. And only thus can the West perdure, and prevail; for a culture just is the daily practice of its individual members.

I may post more of Kristor’s essay later.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 27, 2008 01:49 AM | Send