Traditions can be good or bad. Progress is typically called
good, but when it’s misapplied to what is actually regression, it’s bad.
Progressivism
needs some definition, because the word progress in it is misapplied. In short,
it’s the version of socialism adopted by Woodrow Wilson, both Roosevelts,
Hillary Clinton, and many of today’s socialists who know better than to use the
word socialism, which has provably
failed everywhere it has been implemented.
There’s a connection to Darwinism in progressivism; it
posits that culture always moves in a forward direction, ever closer to
perfection. This assumption ignores some rather huge examples to the contrary
like the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Or the disappearance of Mayan
culture. Or Detroit, Michigan.
Progress requires going in the right direction. And there’s
no way to know if a direction is right when everything being tried is supposed
to be new, untried, and ignorant of history.
The Imaginative
Conservative had a piece by Joseph Pearce that describes the type of
bigotry that is progressivism:
If, for example, we were to visit a village in a remote
corner of Africa and were to witness children playing with crudely crafted toys
and presumed from our observations that these Africans must be inferior to
Americans because American children have iPods and smart-phones we would
rightly be accused of racism. Yet this is exactly what “progressivists” do when
observing cultures separated by time instead of space. The past is deemed to be
inferior and can be treated with scorn or, which is perhaps worse, with
patronising condescension.
Pearce goes on to imagine what an experience Plato would
have visiting our time. He would take a couple of days to master some of the
technology and dress. And then it wouldn’t take long to notice some modern
failures:
 |
| Plato image from here |
The Philosopher would soon come to the inescapable conclusion
that this strange race of “progressives” were in fact barbarians who adorned
themselves with the baubles of technology but had no concept whatever of the
meaning of life or the nature of reality. Feeling his exile from civilization
intensely he would long for the profundities of the Lyceum.
In contrast, when we honor those who have gone before, and
stand upon what they have learned, then we have actual social progress. That’s
what we enjoy when we cover most of the math and science we get before college—and
much of what we study in college as well. We don’t have to start from scratch.
Pythagoras did some of the work. And Euclid. And Newton.
Pearce quotes the wise G. K. Chesterton on the value of
tradition:
Tradition may be defined as the extension of the franchise.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.
It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and
arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All
democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition
objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells
us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks
us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any
rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition.[i]
Traditions can be changed—when we learn something previously
unknown and provably true. But throwing out truth because it’s old is foolish
and ignorant.
This concept of tradition reminds me of the word conservative, which is another word that
can be either good or bad, depending on what you’re conserving. If we’re
conserving a dysfunctional status quo out of fear of change, then being
conservative may be a bad thing.
But when we conservatives talk about what we conserve, we’re
talking about preserving—or often in our day restoring—freedom, prosperity, and
civilization. (I wrote about what we conserve in October and February.)
In the political sphere, we need a representative government strictly limited to its proper
role of protecting our life, liberty, and property. Government doesn’t grant
our rights; those come from God. And good government protects and guarantees
our God-given rights. Among these are freedom of religion, freedom of speech,
freedom to assemble, the right to armed self-defense, freedom to work and
engage in commerce, freedom from illegal searches and seizures, and freedom to
see to the education and upbringing of our own children.
We have a US Constitution designed to protect our God-given
rights. If we conserve/restore our Constitution, we get more political freedom
than most of the world’s historic and present-day cultures have ever known.
In the economic sphere, we need a system that allows us to work and earn wealth, and then
decide for ourselves how to spend it. Government doesn’t make the economy work.
We need government to safeguard property (including intellectual property, such
as with patents and copyrights), protect against monopoly, standardize money
for ease of exchange, and otherwise get out of the way of the free market.
Government ought to have nothing to do with charity, since
government isn’t capable of emotional care and can only coerce, by forcibly taking
from some and giving to others—what we call theft, which the people empowering
the government have no power to grant.
Of course, since the poor are always with us, we do need a
way to care for the truly needy. But it must be voluntary. So people who are
prosperous enough must willingly give to those in need.
We have had the best economy in the world. If we
conserve/restore our free market, we return to prosperity.
In the social sphere,
we conserve some very old ideas, hearkening back at least to the Ten
Commandments. In summary, we need a critical mass of righteous people—people who
love and honor God, family, life, truth, and property.
We’re not going to “progress” to a better way to raise
children than under the care of their own married mother and father.
We’re not going to “progress” to a better way to distribute
wealth than the right to our earned property combined with an ethic of charitable
giving.
We’re not going to “progress” to a better way to decide when
life is worth preserving than gratefully valuing all human life and leaving God
to decide when death should come. Abortion—which kills more black babies than
are born, as designed by the eugenics movement—is savage. Killing the aged,
infirm, or burdensome is callous. Any time we decide some innocent lives are
inferior, we’ve fallen out of civilization into savagery.
Progressivism doesn’t lead to progress; the name itself is a
lie. Tradition, on the other hand, may be worth conserving. The default, when
we don’t know, ought to be keeping the tradition. When we have the
principles to measure whether traditions lead to freedom, prosperity, and
civilization, such as with our US Constitution, we can wisely choose to conserve.
No comments:
Post a Comment