Traditionalism is Cope

To live historically is to embrace the inherited world and to abide by the customs, language, and traditions of the culture you are born into. Historical living does not simply mean an appreciation for these things. It means recognizing that you share a destiny with your community, which includes your ancestors and will include your descendants. To live historically, you must consciously take up your role in this destiny and act upon it.

If you’re the kind of person who pretends to have read Heidegger, you may recognize this as a Heideggerian attitude. Despite the problems with Heideggerian thought (incomprehensible, never finished his book, Hannah Arendt, name that sounds like a slur, completely made-up words), Heidegger’s sketch of what it means to live historically resonates. He also sketches the antipode: the rootless cosmopolitan who lacks this connection to a shared communal heritage, and he argues that such a person would be unable to live authentically.

So what happens when the world transforms to the point where everyone becomes a rootless cosmopolitan?

In this essay, I will argue that traditionalism, as a political and cultural program, has become completely meaningless and is an obstacle to the pursuit of a positive right-wing cultural and political program.

Turn your cynicism up to 11 for a moment, and think about what a tradition is. A tradition is a social technology that allows important and complex rules and information to be passed down across generations without having to memorize them all. It also protects the next generations from having to relearn the same rules. Groups adhering to traditions that readily pass on effective survival rules will outcompete groups with poor mechanisms for transmitting traditions or poor rules encoded by those traditions. Selection pressure refines tradition, and the greater the difficulty and danger, the more important the traditions become.

Material abundance removed tremendous difficulty and danger from the world. As a result, groups faced less pressure to retain their traditional ways of life and pass them on. When violations of the tradition go without negative consequence, it is easy to let them go. This has the unfortunate byproduct of also discarding the aspects of the tradition that helped the person find meaning in life and long-term spiritual/psychological security. Traditional ways of life may also be discarded if they fail to prevent tragedy.

The 20th century saw the disintegration of tradition through both means. Industrialization granted material comfort, relieving the pressure on tradition as a survival tool. At the same time, tradition failed to prevent the horror of the trenches

Now turn your cynicism back down. Not healthy to keep it that high.

The 1950s marked the onset of American consumer culture, during which technological marvels began to reduce the need for manual labor at an unprecedented rate. This was followed by the 60s, the decade in which progressivism likewise accelerated. Burning Man, counterculture, LSD, Civil Rights Act, feminism. Washing machines now exist, so why would we listen to those constricting old traditions? Fair question, worth a shot. Now we know. Endless progress without a determined, realizable future, and nothing higher to attain, nothing in the past to reinforce your ways.

Many traditions had mythic/religious stories that accompanied them. These stories contained a vision of a final state, the apocalypse, the unveiling, and the final accounting of all reality. There was something to look forward to, a future, however far off, to live in accordance with. The loss of tradition, of course, meant the loss of these futures. Progress has no end state; it is an ever-present flux, a continuous striving for the next contrived social group’s liberation. This obvious has a political impact. And this works, somewhat. Even though there is no final accounting, there is at least the next thing, the next group to liberate. Re-evaluate and cannibalize the movement again afterward.

Shoehorning traditionalist beliefs and aesthetics into this modern political context does not make an effective political program. This applies to traditions across the board, whether Protestant or Catholic, Evolian chivalric-racism traditions, Norse pagan (obesity) traditions, etc. It should be noted that Christian traditionalism is quite important and effective within its context, but appeals to the 1500s Catechism do not have a place at the RNC. You may think they should for perfectly good and moral reasons, but it will also be totally ineffective.

And ultimately, the outward display of traditionalism as a political project is cope. It is a cover for responsibility. It is using history as an escape hatch and as a banal display of internet social clout. It is history against action. Nietzsche argues that man becomes himself by using the past in life, but when he uses history for more than that, he becomes petrified. He ceases to be the man he could have been, and would have been better off ignoring history.

A vision of the future is also meant to inspire action. The hollowed traditions peddled for attention on the internet do not actually posit a vision for the future. They actually say nothing, being thin shells of what they were once used for, for some ulterior aim.

Traditions are historically evolved solutions to problems in specific conditions. They are easy-to-communicate formulas for getting from point A (bad) to point B (a future good state). Once the conditions that select for the traditions disappear, the traditions themselves cease to be useful for short-horizon survival. Attempting to restore tradition wholesale by simply restoring and enforcing its outer appearances is not conservatism. It is maladaptation. Yet this is what the champion of traditionalism wants.

Many traditions are Darwinian truths. They provide an adaptive advantage. Traditionalists conflate the truth of the mythic structure surrounding the tradition with the tradition's fitness. Traditions encode accumulated solutions to the environments that produced them, so applying the tradition to a new environment is counterproductive.

The concern is not with religious traditionalism. Even under this cynical framework, the Traditional Latin Mass makes sense, because it is adapted for participation in timeless truth. The concern is with what the political traditionalist thinks needs to be applied on a political and civilizational scale to align them with the religious tradition. A Latin Mass enjoyer may also argue for Catholic-monarchical absolutism as a political solution or Distributism as an economic solution. In both cases, these are closer to what is needed than the current entropy of democratic managerialism, but they still miss the mark because they believe the traditionalist dressing on these alternatives is the important part, when it actually is not. What is important is digging into what these organizational methods encode and recognizing whether and how they are applicable to the present.

However, decoding undermines the very reason the techniques became traditions in the first place: they were difficult to transmit otherwise. Therefore, if a rule should be re-adapted, it needs to be re-encoded. What this looks like is the acceptance of the development of new attitudes, vibes, and aesthetics within the right, so long as they remain on the right. It is even better to let these evolve to suit the needs of politics and civilization rather than undergo deconstruction and reconstruction.

The obsession with history and the embrace of tradition become hostile to life, activity, and victory when reverence for inherited forms prevents adaptation. This is the danger of what Nietzsche describes as the antiquarian use of history, relating to the past solely through mere preservation of and loyalty to inheritance, absent any movement.

This does not mean that the right should embrace modernity, but it should not fully reject it either. History does not run in reverse, so the right must adapt. Technology, in particular, has irreversibly changed the environment, so our task is to discover and craft the forms of civilization that can flourish under these new conditions. To reject the conditions entirely cedes the moral interpretations of technological society to the left and leaves conservatives where they find themselves in so many other circumstances: with easy access to the tools and a principled refusal to use them.

The right should embrace technology and embrace the future. There are many domains where the left fails horribly at this, and gives the right the opportunity to become the progressive force, the force that will lead to prosperity and abundance. The right should adopt a pro-nuclear, AI, biotech, space, industry, and science stance, all under the banner of nationalism and authority. The great Faustian achievements available in these domains are simply impossible in organizations wrought with DEI.

The left operates under the assumption that the future, progress, belongs solely to it. When traditionalists argue for a retvrn to absolutely anything as a non-negotiable political project, they implicitly agree and cede the future to the left, content to forever occupy themselves with the proverbial action figures of history.