Basis for Tradition

[Anonymous No.18777266]

Is there any room in the contemporary advanced liberal nations for a conservative tradition? As the synthesis of liberalism and technology reaches its apotheosis, it appears more inevitable than ever that liberalism will destroy any and all rituals, traditions, and customs that previously allowed the citizens of a nation to find common ground, make compromises, and in general have at least a vague direction to govern their own country towards.

The end goal of liberalism thus seems to place us in the very state of nature that earlier philosophers thought reason enough to leave (as Patrick Deneen notes), though this particular state of nature is decidedly not that of Hobbes or Locke or Rousseau. Instead it entails each and every individual living in benign alienation from each other, their necessities either provided for by the black-box bureaucratic-monolithic sugar-daddy state (conveniently scalable to cover at least the planet, and perhaps that is even the goal considering the vitriol towards nationalism and decidedly cosmopolitan outlook of most intellectuals of the tradition throughout the 18th-19th centuries) or earned through hard individual work in a world where even hard work may no longer provide those necessities. Any compromise between these two camps necessarily exists on a spectrum somewhere between those two poles (of which the sugar-daddy variant will inevitably win due to the nature of the universal expansion of the market and the ascendancy of multinational corporations), and unfortunately brings with it all the axioms that unite the two in the liberal tradition: rampant individualism, violence towards tradition or custom, "scientific" management of human beings, and what ultimately amounts to the same goal of allowing each individual to "eat, drink, marry, bear children, and go to their grave in a state that is at best hilarious anesthesia, and at its worst is anxiety, fear, and envy, for lack of the necessary means to achieve the fashionable minimum of sensation," as Christopher Lasch summarizes Lewis Mumford.

But then even if we recognize the problem, what basis exists for tradition, ritual, and custom? The simple (if eloquent) defense that Burke provides amounts in contemporary society to what would be succinctly and in the last analysis to be a prejudicial institution or structure allowed to exist without scrutiny. This does not seem like a realistic foundation unless hollowed out of all its importance, ie contemporary holidays (many of which are under attack today). This also raises the question of such a divided and alienated citizenry could possibly willingly (as it must be willingly, ritual without authenticity is mere charade) walk into and be truly united by such a custom. War seems like one such option.

Thanks for reading my word soup

[Anonymous No.18777493]

>>18777266
didn't read. traditionalism is a gay newly painted paper tiger that prays on feminine stubborn scaredycats.

[Anonymous No.18777504]

>>18777266
what does this have to ro with deus ex?

[Anonymous No.18777511]

>>18777504
>ro
*do

[Anonymous No.18777763]

The progressive degenerative effects of "hyperdemocracy" (Gasset), which is really pseudodemocracy of masses manipulated by people who know exactly what they're doing, becomes even more frightening when you realise that those people are perfectly capable of accelerating the degeneration as a long term plan. They aren't just opportunistically worsening things in aggregate, they are actively conspiring to dissolve all nations into this nationless goo of subhumans who can be rearranged, broken down and built back up, or simply culled at their convenience.

Things have accelerated even more now that the old cold warrior elite, whose main thrust was anti-Sovietism at any cost, has mostly died off and given way to a truly cynical international technocrat class, what Peter Dale Scott calls the "deep state," functionally identical to what Quigley called the Anglo-American elite, whether the latter literally exists or not. The old cold warriors at least had some residual idealism, which was exactly how they were manipulated into being allies of convenience by the truly cynical ones, who knew that the forces they were unleashing would dissolve everything down to a homogeneous soup in the end.

Obviously contemporary "conservatism" has no answers. Merely reactionary conservatism is little better if it does nothing but say "boy how I wish everybody could go back to being nice comfy Catholics again!" when institutions like the Catholic church have long rotted away from the inside out (and again, there is very good evidence that this was intentionally steered by the technocrats).

As Mel Bradford says, to be a conservative now is to be a reactionary and even a revolutionary by definition, because the things worth conserving are no longer instantiated at all, they have reverted to being merely latent and potential. To "conserve" them would in practice mean clearing the ground so they can grow in a healthy way again. How can you "conserve" healthy gender roles when 80% of young people are some combination of involuntarily celibate or barren cat lady, transvestite self-mutilator and chemical castrator, emotionally destroyed serial slut who can never be a good mother, literal prostitute (onlyfans micro-economy, a real sign of things to come), mentally ill and retarded, infertile or voluntarily sterilized, perpetually sexually excited and porn-addicted, drug-addicted, and so on? What is left to "preserve" when you live in Babylon itself?

The thing about Babylon though is it naturally generates its own negation, by compressing healthy people who are more in touch with the normal (in the sense of archetypal) aspects of humanity until they become self-conscious of their role as standard-bearers of normalcy, while also connecting these people with many who are maybe less conscious and less capable of doing it for themselves, but who crave health and normalcy without even realizing it, and who will recognize it when living avatars of it start to present themselves.

[Anonymous No.18777773]

>>18777763
Ultimately that's the real solution and the real way of getting back in touch with our roots, simply the natural coming to the fore of the healthy and archetypal. But all the people just mentioned are still running on Babylonian software. They were raised in this rudderless nightmare world, so even when they want to escape it, they can't imagine a way out. They try to address the evil by inverting it, since it's all they've ever known and the only negation they can imagine still fundamentally posits the evil itself, and just negates it abstractly. We can't even imagine what "tradition" or "traditionalism" are like so we try to over-theorize it and summon it out of thin air like an abstract idea, the same way that the deluded liberal is trying to summon his abstract idea of final utopian hedonistic equity between all human beings.

You can't impose traditions or healthy nations on people, you can't summon them out of thin air, you can't theorize the ideal tradition abstractly and then set to work getting a community to LARP it until it becomes reality. That is the same fundamental misconception of the shallow progressive mind, the Rousseauist fantasy that by renaming the months of the year and putting a dressed-up whore on the altar in Notre Dame you can erase Frenchness and replace it with the ideal republic of atheistic humanistic reason. It's the same error, just turned inside out and applied to "tradition" instead.

The whole premise of tradition is that it precedes abstract reasoning and makes the latter possible in the first place. It's not irrational, it's superrational, above and preceding ordinary reason. If you are a traditionalist you must always already believe in certain immutable platonic ideals, some kind of "natural law," and believe they're worth defending. Of course there will be disagreements, even radical ones, but that is what politics and history are, the ongoing dialogue of different attempts at taking a stand on what reality is and what it means and what we ought to do about it. Sometimes those lead to conflict and sometimes those conflicts are unfortunately zero-sum games, but the alternative is the hellhole we currently live in. A traditionalist could reply to this cynical realpolitik view by saying that we are getting better and better with each attempt, possibly signifying a metaphysically real, that is immutable and ideal, goodness to humanity, and therefore a humanity that can be trusted to take its chances of future conflict. That kind of optimism used to be the essence of conservatism, now conservatives don't even realize it's a position, because it's "faith" and faith is not abstractly provable in some pissant college debate.

[Anonymous No.18777775]

>>18777266
>it appears more inevitable than ever that liberalism will destroy any and all rituals, traditions, and customs
Sounds good to me

[Anonymous No.18777783]

>>18777773
One of the main tricks of the current system is making you think that every choice of preference has to be decided rationally and abstractly, before you can even try to find it in reality, or more likely, have to create it in reality by breaking down existing, "merely pre-rational" societies and reforming them to suit your abstractions. This keeps you in a perpetual state of deliberation and distraction while your own traditions are rotted out from under you by the elites.

The key is simply to find and foster communities with shared fundamental values on fundamental metaphysical issues. Again the nice thing here is that Babylon is not giving you a choice, it is MAKING these issues existential. That is Carl Schmitt's point about decisionism. Not some simple cynicism about how all politics is amoral realpolitik, but the simple point that you don't know who your real friends and enemies are until something happens that you are unwilling or unable to "solve" by turning away. We have spent so long letting the degeneracy creep up on us that we forget that fundamental disputes like these are what politics and history used to look like. People actually won and lost battles before the "end of history." We're only just now starting to remember that irreducible aspect of what makes human beings political animals, now that things are getting so unbearably weird that even normies are waking up to it.

Movements aware of this already existed. Check out Pat Buchanan and specifically Francis' writings on him, like the article "From Household to Nation," and Francis' adoption of the Middle American Radicals thesis. Also look up the rapprochement between the European New Right and Paul Piccone's post-Marxist Telos group, trying to fuse the right's populism, regionalism, and anti-authoritarianism with leftist social ideas, while denuding the latter of totalitarian Rousseauism. The thing uniting all these thinkers was the spontaneity of such political groupings, premised on a real faith (distinctly irrational by champagne socialist standards) that such communities ALREADY exist and are ALREADY latently awaiting organization and representation. Again if you are a traditionalist then you already, at least incipiently, KNOW that the "scientific management of human beings" is a dead and final end for humanity. You don't need to prove that to anybody, you already know it's something you want to fight. There's at least the beginnings of your tradition. By exploring and articulating it, and by seeing who opposes it and what the risks are, you can find your threshold for what you're willing to accept in an ally and fellow member of the same (ipso facto) community against "the alternative." Francis wrote a whole book on this (Leviathan and its Enemies), taking up Burnham's thesis on the post-bourgeois managerial class and systematically canvassing for every possible means of resisting its universal encroachment and domination of humanity.

[Anonymous No.18777792]

>>18777783
Conservatives and traditionalists should be looking for things that are already growing in the wasteland, despite all the odds and the destruction of the environment, and then tending those and bringing them together. As things get worse, and zero-sum decisions start to come up more and more in the decaying husks of western countries, you'll start to find that your differences with the Mormon guy or your bickering over the filioque with the Orthodox guy start to matter less and less compared with the state-neutered apparatchik telling you to hand over your kid for "rehabilitation" because he told a joke in school. In situations like that, "shared tradition" can be as simple as saying "now that ain't right" and seeing "normal" people nod in agreement. Of course, to the transvestite, you're the abnormal one, and neither of you can abstractly reason the other into conceding, but that's exactly what makes it a zero-sum decision.

[Anonymous No.18779398]

Bump for a good thread that I didn't read

[Anonymous No.18780052]

A big part of Confucian thought is the notion that tradition -- a body of repeated patterns of ritual behavior -- is what holds a society together more than any system of law. That's true in every society including the U.S.; look at the presidential inauguration for example, it's rich with ritualized behavior. So, you could say the U.S. society is in some trouble when the far left and far right are tearing down statues or trampling on the inauguration. Not making a judgement on either side, just an observation. And while Confucius is thought of a conservative figure, he wasn't an authoritarian one, and in his day, he was responding to a collapse in his society and its descent into empty formalism where "we just do things this way because that's the way we've always done it" and so forth.

Our conservatives have also married individualism to their traditions, or it seems that way, which paradoxically undermines tradition, which is a social behavior. Working for one's personal individual gain has become like "working for the country" in a sense. I'm not saying everyone should be drones. But I think that ultra-individualism only works when people can imagine that their future will be better. If they think it's going to get worse no matter what they do, i.e. showing the futility of individual action against a horrible and self-sustaining (or self-decaying) system, then they'll start calling those traditions into question. Abstract "freedom" and "individualism" has turned around and become a kind of unfreedom that has enslaved people. It has turned into its opposite.

Or "the market knows best" or "capitalism" because that's the way "we've always done it" and it's automatically the best system "except for all the others" as Churchill said. It justifies itself tautologically. Now I've even found it difficult to watch the U.S. national team at the Olympics because NBC wants me to pay $65 for their shitty streaming service. The U.S. system is blocking it own people from rooting on their national team. So who owns the state and its traditions? I can start posting corporate logos if you want. So I think the conservatives are wrong in thinking the state is blocking their freedom, rather those companies have risen above that of the state, which cannot check their power.

[Anonymous No.18780054]

>>18777266
>Is there any room in the contemporary advanced liberal nations for a conservative tradition?
No.

[Anonymous No.18780058]

>>18780052
I think the liberals meanwhile fetishize the cult of the process. Norms and procedures. But the state's policymaking and implementation is inefficient and it's unable to resist blockages by interest groups. So the situation polarizes. If you ask liberals in America why Obama didn't solve the problems, they'd say it's because of the Republicans and vice-versa for Trump supporters. Political elites have been captured by chasing short-term gain and the narrow edge in the balance of power, and they cater to the fears and self-regard of the public, who vote for "lesser" evils in accordance to which (ultimately irrational) tribe they belong to: leftists' multiculturalism (cultural tribalism wearing a mask) and the right-wing's nationalism (racism etc.).

But if anyone takes a rational approach to the problems, they should realize that it will require a long-term solution that will take decades to process and require extraordinary patience from everyone. But that's not happening. Superficiality reigns at all levels and there's a serious lack of major philosophical ideas.

That and the fact that conservatives are questioning multiculturalism does represent the fall of the West, which is not necessarily a bad thing because that in a sense means that the failure of multiculturalism in the West is actually promoting multiculturalism in the globe. This is because the West proposes multiculturalism internally indeed, but it promotes universalism externally -- the liberal Western model that Francis Fukuyama saw as the End of History and which was promoted as the alternative to the USSR's own brand of universalism. And you will be a hypocrite for wanting assimilation in your own country if you are doing the opposite in other countries. Or if you want to maintain traditions at home while destroying them in the world.

[Anonymous No.18780063]

>>18780058
But as other countries rise up, namely China but also India (in the next few decades) they will have to grant their own legitimacy by acknowledging themselves and others for being different from the West. The strong always favor freedom/competition, the weak equality/protection. This is the only thing that is universal. So the West's internal preaching on multiculturalism, in fact, symbolizes and justifies its external universalism, meaning the Western values become the default while others are just cultural flavorsauce or a particular headdress. So that's where "democracy," "freedom," "human rights," "capitalism," the "free market" and all those strong ideological terms appear daily. Those are all "universal" and can only be defined in the Western way by the West. "The West is the best" and the only "civilization," and the only one defined by the West as "civilized."

But that is being challenged and thus calling into question the Western ideology. Then maybe one day, after a decline and a long process, the American nation can be reborn and then establish new traditions, while also selectively reviving some older traditions too that are good and compatible with the new world it finds itself in -- one in which it's no longer no. 1 anymore -- and freed from the formalism and dogma that had led to its decline in the past. And no longer holding back the country's development or posing as obstacles to solving problems because "we have to do it this way because this is how we've always done it," but now accelerating development.

https://youtu.be/ksZh_AP-ZSE?t=7010

[Anonymous No.18780084]

Tracer Tong'll blow up the neolibs and bring us back to the wholesome medieval chungus

[Anonymous No.18780378]

>>18777266

[Anonymous No.18780725]

>>18777266
Look at the Pope

[Anonymous No.18782122]

What about the pope? I have a job.

[Anonymous No.18782144]

>>18777266
Read Hobsbawm, most of your observed traditions are recent inventions. Read Sylvia Wynter to realize the alterity present in blackness. A synthesis of this material should make you less racist.

[Anonymous No.18782271]

>>18782144
I barely observe tradition. There are few left today with substance. The family is one, under attack both from the influence of capital and the influence of liberalism. It has already lost much of its power.

Your solution which I can only attempt to glean from your recommendation of a woman author on blackness and your accusation of racism presupposes all that needs to be questioned, and in that perhaps we see the only tradition that seems to be acceptable: the liberal one. But what is presupposed is acquisitive individualism, primacy of capital, and the "hilarious anesthesia" of consumption and "me" culture. You see in Academia and elsewhere with blacks and lgbtq and all the other oppressed minorities. They are encouraged and do wear their minority status as the prime element of their identity. That already presupposes the individualism that brought us to this mess. The end goal is ostensibly for these minority groups to be able to consume as hassle-free and copiously as white males. It's literally nonsensical, even in its own framework, and especially out of. Your solution is a symptom of the disease.

[Anonymous No.18782633]

>>18777266
Progressivism is a tradition, it just can’t acknowledge the fact that it is one because that would reveal the fact that it’s self-refutating. You should strive to only further traditions which do not refute themselves and are therefore at least possibly true, rather than verifiably false.