Why We Need Tradition

The West has forgotten the problems that our traditions were created to solve

Donald Kingsbury said “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.”

I heard this quoted recently and it struck a chord. Having not long returned from a two-week holiday, I had just resumed my usual exercise routine and, as is often the case after a period of prolonged inactivity, overexerted my body and injured myself.

I usually run at least 20km, and walk up to 40km a week, which is a fair amount of activity for a fellow whose twenties are long behind him. All this impact necessitates daily stretching and mobility exercises which keep me flexible enough maintain my regimen without seizing up and developing a range of maladies that can include heel, calf and hip pain, lower back tension, and general inflammation.

For some years I had endured this pain – both too lazy to dedicate the time and effort required to mitigate it, and of the mind that it was simply the price to pay for looking and feeling well. But eventually I had enough and explored some solutions.

Over a few months’ trial and error, I discovered that I could offset the worst of my pain by doing a yoga and stretching routine daily, as well as an intensive five-minute hip-mobility practice. The maintenance of this regime over time has allowed me to improve my fitness, run longer distances, lose more weight, and generally feel better. Put simply, it has made me tougher and stronger.

When you first discover such a solution to a problem that has been plaguing you, you pursue it doggedly, and with a grim passion. But over time, as the memory of that daily pain fades, and the longer distances and slimmer waistline become the norm, the solution becomes just another daily chore which, most days, you could really do without.

But having returned from two weeks of light activity – with nothing more strenuous than a stroll around the park – and jumping back into my normal exercise routine, I was swiftly reminded of the problem for which I had developed the solution in the first place. As a desk bound worker, the limited range of movement I go through from day to day, let alone while on holiday, does not keep me limber, and while on holiday my muscles and tendons had tightened up again – so when I laced up my running shoes and did my first post-vacation run, I strained myself. And my aches and pains returned.

I had thrown away the solution and gotten the problem back, as strong as it ever was.

The mysterious symmetry between our human physiology and the collective energy of the societies we build is well demonstrated in this analogy. We have moved into an epoch where the problems of the past have been forgotten, partly through a dereliction of our educational institutions, and also the general apathy and hubris that results from times of plenty such as the second half of the Twentieth Century. An oft quoted aphorism by conservatives is ‘Hard times make strong men; strong men make good times; good times make weak men; weak men make hard times.’

No cliche could be more demonstrably true. The hard times of the early Twentieth Century with its great wars and depressions created strong, tough men – The Greatest Generation, of which my grandfathers were members – these men returned from World War 2 and built the world we know today, and they gave us the good times. But the generations who followed, insulated by the great wealth and plenty these folk had created, grew weak. The Boomers with their steadfast credulity, Generation X with their naive idealism, the Millennials with their woke progressivism, and now Gens Z and Alpha with a whole new suite of problems, mostly relating to smart device and social media addiction, have all created hard times.

And here we are now – war, civil strife, rampant inflation, authoritarianism, and general social decay. We as a society in the West have spent the last few decades throwing away our traditions because we cannot remember the problems that they were created to solve and, much like my daily stretching routine, they present now merely as tiresome chores which we’d rather not have to complete. And much like my recent holiday, we as a society have been relaxing and enjoying the freedom from our little routines and traditions.

But the holiday is over, and we are now getting the problems back, and they are indeed as strong as they ever were – and in many cases, stronger.

We forgot that the point of God was so that no man might elevate himself to the status of a deity, so we threw God in the trash, and in his place we got Dr Fauci and Bill Gates. We forgot that the point of borders was to preserve our cultural values, so we threw the borders in the trash and in their place we got rape gangs and backpack bombs. We forgot that the point of gender norms was to preserve the family unit, so we threw gender norms in the trash and in their place we got Drag Queen Story Hour, and puberty blockers. We forgot that the point of femininity was to propagate our offspring, so we threw femininity in the trash and in its place we got legions of childless career women. We forgot that the point of masculinity was to raise strong men who could create more good times, so we threw masculinity in the trash and in its place we got plummeting testosterone rates and a generation of sad, angry young men who’d rather play Call of Duty and jerk off to Only Fans than go on a date.

All of the above has served literally to neuter our society, decimating our birth rates to the point that we are no longer replacing ourselves, while at the same time importing millions of mostly young men from incompatible foreign cultures.

And as we continue to flush our traditions away, smugly decrying their stuffy outdatedness, those flooding into places like Europe, the UK, and the US cling fervently to their own traditions – because they, for all the faults I could level at them, come from hard places and hard times, and have not forgotten the myriad problems for which their particular traditions were created. Their problems are not different from ours, but their solutions in many cases have been applied much more fundamentally than we in the West would consider ‘civilised’.  Yet these men arriving in the West from the Third and Developing Worlds know who they are, and what they believe, and what type of world they wish to build. Like it or not, they are strong. And these are the strong men who will in part shape the next epoch.

Whether or not the coming epoch will be seen as ‘good times’ is a subjective matter. But I am sure that for the hegemon, it will indeed be so.

We in the West would do well, in the few years we have left to recall the ancient set of solutions for the pain we are now beginning to feel again, and to retrieve these traditions from the trashcan of time, dust them off and resurrect them.

If we do not, the pain will get worse. And much like the runner who keeps pushing on through the pain and the tightness, the body will eventually seize up and become immobile. To push on past this point will then lead to permanent injury and disability.

And once disabled, what then is left to do but sit around waiting to die.