Life is full of questions that we never really answer to our satisfaction, but to which we give fuller answers as we move along life’s path. Perhaps the most fundamental questions are those of identity: Who am I? Where do I come from? What is my purpose? The answers to these questions used to emerge in and through the culture in which one grew to maturity, by learning from the traditions received through participation in the common life. As Timothy Stanley lays out in his wonderful book, while traditions used to play this role, for us Westerners in late modernity this is no longer the case. We are left wondering: what happened to tradition? Moreover, what is it?
Defending tradition in an anti-traditional world such as ours requires both belief and boldness. Stanley manifests both, combining wry humour and a sense of peace with the world unseen in many political polemics. It was a pleasure to read a right-wing writer who is not trapped in resentful despair at the undoubted degradation that so many suffer today. It also helps that Stanley writes in a clear, even journalistic, style. The ideas and worldview he discusses are made easier to understand by the clarity of his prose.
Stanley defines ‘tradition’ in three ways:
First, it ties the individual to the collective… Second, traditions impose an order on the way we behave by teaching us ‘social knowledge,’ the invisible architecture of human behaviour, the customs and rituals that have been ham- mered out down the centuries to determine how we live … Third, traditions affect how a human being experiences the phenomenon of time.
Traditions form a communal and cultural sense of continuity that give us a sense of identity and purpose, providing an authoritative guide for how to live. As the philosopher Claes G. Ryn writes, in connecting us to the universal, tradition is a “living past.” According to Ryn, tradition joins yesterday and today in “a new, direct apprehension of universality.” From this awareness of an enduring good, the value of our lives as persons, and our common project as a community, can be judged over time.
Stanley proceeds to build on this tripartite definition over the rest of his book, which is divided into two parts. Part One considers how invention, innovation, and evolution are all integral to a healthy living tradition, preventing it from ossifying into a creaking system to which people adhere for no apparent good cause but just because it’s there. Part One then moves onto our “war on tradition,” that is, our proclivity for forgetting and repudiating, a certain cultural amnesia in regard to lessons from the past. The chapter on nostalgia is especially wonderful, arguing a case for the importance of looking to the past in order to learn lessons which we might apply to our own time, thereby viewing history as a great treasure house from which we can constantly draw for our benefit.
Part One might be called “Tradition in Principle,” and Part Two “Tradition in Practice.” Stanley moves from the abstract to the concrete, successfully managing to balance the universal and the particular in his survey of tradition down the ages and across the world, in different cultures and places. His defence of male infant circumcision within the Jewish community in his chapter “Tradition and Identity” is a brave one, given the fraught subject matter. One doesn’t have to agree with the practice, or with other comparable practices, to see that this is one of the strongest expressions of belonging. The through-line is that many of our attributes and characteristics are unchosen and cannot be sloughed off on a whim.
This argument for givenness runs through Stanley’s celebration of the old, as a way of feeling connected to both past and future. The past, because the ‘old’ is where we came from, both biologically and culturally. The future, because we will all age and become old ourselves, no matter our solipsistic, infantile denial of mortality and existential frailty. Tradition can act as a lamp along the path of life. Our lack of such a lit pathway in the modern age plays out in lost souls warehoused in care-homes and hospitals, as we increasingly invest in “bare life” as the highest good.
The givenness of our condition is set at the most fundamental level in our sex and gender. Again, this is a subject freighted with angst, and in his chapter defending the traditional conception of the sexes and sexual relations, Stanley manages to stake out his own Catholic-inspired approach with sensitivity. He also demonstrates that this does not mean ‘women in the kitchen, not in the world,’ and in turn he engages in a brief foray into the Catholic Enlightenment, among whom are included figures like the Spanish monk Benito Feijóo, author of Defence of Women (1726); Giambattista Vico; Nicholas Malebranche; Catholic priest, scientist, philosopher and friend of Voltaire, Francois Jacquier; Madame Leprince, author of Beauty and the Beast; and the Catholic priest founders of the exiled rival to the Royal Society, The Society of St. Edmund. According to Stanley, these people embodied a tradition grappling with a changing world driven by new science, technology, and economic development.
As Stanley lays out his case, the promise of emancipation that the modern liberal order offered us is shown to have led to the opposite effect: we are less free, subject to gross financial and social inequality, and creating worldly ‘faiths’ to replace the loss of the transcendent. The problem is that many of us in late modernity no longer have any sense of real connection to traditions which would orient us to a vision of the good. As Stanley writes, modern culture encourages us to despise our past, advancing what Patrick Deneen has recently called “a purposefully amnesic society,” that is, a society at odds with conservatism’s fundamental purpose of remembrance.
Our culture is characterised by repudiation, and it has become an anti-culture, which destroys the memory of who we were and what we are. We live in a world of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity,” when all the solid structures—social, cultural, spiritual, economic—are being dissolved in the acid of licence, driven by capital and technology. It is mastered by the elites, whom Michael Lind calls the “Overclass,” and communicated by their scribes and skalds, whom Joel Kotkin calls the “Clerisy.” The ‘woke’ have a substantive vision, as Stanley correctly argues. The problem is not that they have a substantive, faith-based vision, but that it is wrong and inimical to living a good life in common with others.
Liberalism is the liquifying ideology under which we have lived since at least as far back as 1789, not the end of the Cold War or the Second World War. Stanley is right to point out that liberalism, based on the promise of ever more freedom, can be “surprisingly oppressive.” What good is the freedom to engage in hedonic play if it comes at the expense of the freedom to pray? The liberal individual is purportedly born in perfect freedom and equality, with life’s goal defined as pursuing life, liberty, and property in a world of contractual transactions. Our relational ties of mutual loyalty are wiped clear, leaving us adrift and drowning in a sea of liberty. As Stanley writes, “You are an individual, said the new philosophers. You should be free to work out who you are and what you believe through rational inquiry, and your life should be governed by the supreme quality of reason.”
Stanley echoes Shadi Hamid’s critique of liberalism’s supposedly liberatory ideal and its socially and politically enforced conformist reality when he writes, “Liberalism says, ‘you can think whatever you want to think, within the boundaries of what is reasonable,’ which sounds generous, but it is constantly moving and shrinking those boundaries to exclude any serious alternative to a status quo that elites love because it’s what makes them elites.” We see this freedom-as-serfdom played out on social media, which Gladden Pappin describes as, “‘Be free to express yourself,’ urge the social media platforms, when what they mean is, ‘Perform yourself online so that we can harvest your data and corral your thoughts into ever more limited domains of acceptable opinion.'”
Stanley is right to ask, “who gets to define what ‘reason’ is and who defines the ‘objective standards’ by which we are judged?” Liberalism’s view of man and of ‘reason’ serves elites well who can manage the churn, change, and chaos it unleashes. These claims deny the traditional Western view of the human condition, one of struggle between one’s higher and lower potential, a struggle engaged with moral effort, conditioned by family, community, and the traditions they pass on. This moral struggle towards virtue is what the health of society and politics rely on for continuance. Stanley echoes Benjamin Disraeli, who said, “Liberal opinions are very convenient opinions for the rich and powerful. They ensure enjoyment and are opposed to self-sacrifice.”
Liberal rationalism, and its denigration of faith and custom, history, and legacy, is mirrored on the Right by those who argue, in the vein of Leo Strauss, that tradition itself is neither morally self- justifying nor self-correcting. Indeed, as I’ve written elsewhere, Strauss argued in Natural Right and History that cleaving to tradition risks historicism, the belief that “all human thought is historical and hence unable to grasp anything eternal.” As a result, historicism destroys “the only solid basis of all efforts to transcend the actual,” as the “unbiased historian had to confess his inability to derive any norms from history: no objective norms remained … thus all standards suggested by history as such proved fundamentally ambiguous and therefore unfit to be considered standards.” Any remaining standards are “of a purely subjective character, standards that had no support other than the free choice of the individual. No objective criterion henceforth allowed the distinction between good and bad choices.” Strauss blasted Edmund Burke for this reason, erroneously lambasting the founder of modern conservatism for advancing a relativist historicism that ended in nihilism.
Stanley is aware of the risks involved when addressing evils like slavery, especially from those outside the traditional perspective he favours, whose innate scepticism against any form of tradition could make his recounting of the use of Catholicism’s bounded reason to interrogate the sinful nature of slavery seem like special pleading. This is always a risk in a cynical time when sincerity is often scorned. Stanley reinforces tradition’s viability in modern eyes through his argument that traditions are Darwinian: the fittest survive, the weakest die off. But he might have gone further in defending the moral justification for tradition from its rationalist critics. Stanley’s argument is reinforced when paired with Ryn, whose work on the relationship between universality and particularity is helpful for supplementing Stanley’s account of tradition over Lockean, Enlightenment rationalism.
As Ryn argues, rationalists denigrate the moral character of tradition and of history itself as teacher and cultivator of virtue and right action, allowing the realisation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Straussians ground their philosophy of natural right and of equality in an abstract view of the universal, the true meaning of existence that lies beyond our historical world. Particularity, especially the role of historical experience, cannot itself be a guide to the universal. Because there is a fundamental animosity between timeless universality and fluctuating particularity, it is inimical to the good of individuals to revere their particular traditions. Benedetto Croce put it well when he wrote that anti-tradition rationalists are “anxious to put morality outside the pale of history, and think to exalt it, so that it can agreeably be reverenced from afar and neglected from near at hand.”
However, traditions are not simply manifestations of personal or cultural preferences, adhered to and valued simply for their existence and age. They are practised and continued because they reveal the deeper, substantive goods that underlie them. As Ryn writes, “certain attitudes and forms of life found in different parts of the globe bespeak the existence of a more than subjective and time-bound apprehension of the self and the world. Discernible amidst the diversity of human tastes and preferences is a fundamental confluence of moral and aesthetical sensibility. This confluence is visible not only in mankind’s strictly religious traditions but in the moral and cultural life more generally.”
The reach for the higher things in the ethical life is a human universal, revealed in the particularity of national, local, and religious cultures around the world, informed and influenced by the histories of these peoples. Our quest for true universality is an everlasting process of judging history’s harvest, “guided by fresh intuition of universal values.” This involves constant discernment of examples from the past to see “which can help inspire, articulate, and enrich [our] intuition.” None of this can be undertaken from a perspective outside time and history with perfect clarity gained from pure rationality. Our attempt to understand our lives can only be made from the best source of evidence available to us: our own experience, entwined with the past that formed it. Rather than devolving into a nihilistic relativism, or a postmodern confusion, it is “a mark of an authentic and living tradition that it points us beyond itself.”
Stanley illustrates this with a concrete example from Ralph Vaughan Williams, who argued that the music of J.S. Bach simultaneously expresses the universality of musical beauty and is only possible because is benefits from and expresses the work of “generations of smaller composers, specimens of the despised class of ‘local musicians’ who had no other ambition than to provide worthily and with dignity the music required of them: craftsmen, perhaps rather than conscious artists.” For Vaughan Williams, the universality of music is “the expression of the soul of a nation, and by a nation … I mean any community of people who are spiritually bound together by language, environment, history, and common ideals and, above all, a continuity with the past.”
Rationalists—many secular Straussians among them—attempt to ground objective morality in a universal philosophy that lacks the bedrock of Christian or Jewish universalism. If traditions are just irrational preferences passed down through history, then pure reason reaching for abstract ‘timeless truths’ is just as unconvincing, especially when Straussians attempt to ground ethical universalism and equality in the thought of the ancient Greeks, who as both Larry Siedentop and Tom Holland have written, did not believe in a true ethical universalism, equal to the idea that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” a view rooted in the equality of the Imago Dei. As Siedentop writes, the ancients viewed rationality and humanity itself as rising through gradations as one ascended the social and therefore spiritual hierarchy.
This demonstrates John Selden’s observation that deductive reason can run wild, changing and landing on answers at complete odds with those of others similarly gained through reason. Universality gained through particularity, filtered through inductive reasoning, accords far more with our creaturely nature. Burke, so wronged by Strauss, himself declared in the opening speech of the Warren Hastings impeachment, “We are all … in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law … by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir.”
Ryn is right that both experience and intuition, guided by a will formed through appropriate education, enables the individual to mediate the tradition passed down to him from his ancestors, shape it to suit the needs of his time and circumstances, and pass it on to those who come after. In this sense, tradition is both morally and philosophically justifiable, being “a oneness that is always changing,” as Irving Babbitt put it. The role of education is indispensable, as Phillip Blond writes, because
in a sense, [students] do ‘recall’ something when they learn something, if they are to ‘see it for themselves.’ But this is not to recall something simply innate. Instead, it is to have a dim inkling of the entire truth with which human beings are—despite it all—still kin, even though they can never altogether understand it.
One might say that Tim Stanley’s book joins the ongoing attempt to become better acquainted with this truth. Stanley has written a fine book, one that displays a peculiarly English love for the local over the global, the universal reached through the particular. His defence of tradition in the face of the solvent of liquid late modernity is needed now more than ever, not because it gives an excuse to berate those who fall in a fallen world, but because it provides lights along the path through the darkness of a broken one. His good humour reminds us that attempting to live a life of virtue is not simply an excuse for moral self-gratification, but the means to feel at peace with one’s place in the world, no longer so alone in an atomised society, given meaning and purpose through the threads of our lives joining us to the weave of the past and future. It’s a message we would do well to listen to.
