Traditionalists can’t get no respect

The traditionalist blogger Bonald at Throne and Altar is in despair because of the untrue and denigrating way liberals and mainstream conservatives keep characterizing traditionalism—as a mindless adherence to the past. As he points out, the truth is just the opposite. The most important traditionalists, from Bonald’s namesake Louis de Bonald onward (see my article on Bonald’s On Divorce), have been intellectuals who come up with original critiques of liberalism and defenses of social order; furthermore, these intellectual works are not passed down, tradition-wise, but are disregarded and forgotten and have to be discovered anew by lonely seekers of truth in each generation. Yet the traditionalists keep being derided as people who mindlessly follow a mindless tradition.

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Timothy A. writes:

It was good to see Louis de Bonald mentioned in VFR, as well as your article, which I had not previously seen. In case you or your readers missed it, a book with a collection of selections from Bonald’s writings was published somewhat recently (I believe the translations were new ones) and is still available. I recommend it.

James R. writes:

Serendipitously I was musing this morning on how conservatives must be autodidacts because the educational-informational establishment won’t present their views fairly and engage in exactly the sort of exclusionary behavior Bonald describes (this before I read your post and followed the link to his). In schools and everywhere people are presented with the best of liberal-progressive theory, such as it is, and told conservatives just follow tradition; if they’re presented with any traditionalist arguments, they are weak and out of context. To learn what traditionalist views and reasons actually are, you have to be an autodidact, and since Sturgeon’s Law applies (“90 percent of everything is crud”), most people get a misrepresented sample (they learn the “best” progressive thought in schools, presented with varying degrees of dogmatism. Thus even when they encounter the shoddier reasons outside of school, they were informed of better ones. But they have to sift through everything to find the best traditional/conservative arguments on their own, and thus get the impression that on the whole liberals are more thoughtful than conservatives).

I think Bonald’s key observation is precisely the ironic one: that those who deny the validity of tradition are currently the only ones with any kind of intellectual tradition, while conservatives have to re-invent their position anew every generation since the institutions through which they would pass and build on their thought have been progressively (literally) demolished. (This is one area where, whatever your other disagreements with Moldbug might be, he has been quite good at analyzing the plight conservatives find themselves in, and why, as a result, they are in continual retreat regardless of the fact that their views are really no less reasoned than that of progressives, and progressives are no less dogmatic and, ultimately, unreasoned than they charge conservatives with being). The irony is that those who denied there is a (Western) “canon” are the only ones who really have a canon anymore, at least in the sense that matters (passed down through established intellectual institutions. As you’ve pointed out, even the churches are no longer reliable on this, and the less said about universities, the better).

I feel sometimes like we’re in Tigger’s position where everything is a key priority that must be fixed, but this one really is. To that end Moldbug, again, offers worthy suggestions: using technology we can now access old books that our progressive “friends” in the educational establishment have no interest in letting anyone know even exist (and which most of them, having passed through a progressive education establishment themselves, aren’t even aware exist). Major work should be done on creating a conservative/traditionalist intellectual repository, and finding a way to publicize its existence broadly so that people become aware of it, and thus can use it as a resource. Something along the lines of what has already been done for K-12ers for Homeschoolers (itself rather imperfect), but for advanced education.

We know we won’t get any help or sympathy from the establishment in doing this, even the supposed “conservative” establishment. Perhaps think upon it as a new Monastic movement for a new Dark Age.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 07, 2011 06:45 AM | Send