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Saturday, November 16, 2019

Where the Right is not wrong, part 5: Tradition

Conservatism reminds us progressives of an important thing that we often lose sight of: the value of tradition.
Progressives tend to focus on the injustices involved in traditions. When we look at the tradition of marriage - a flash point in the culture wars - we see subordination of women to men in terms of careers and family decision-making. In race relations we see the shadow of the long history of slavery. In religious traditions we see suppression of other religions and frequent holy violence. In our own nation’s past we see blood, the conquests and slaughters of other peoples. The progressive impulse is critical of these subordinations, exclusions, and conquests. It  seeks to move towards more complete inclusion and more equal involvement of all. 
If we are honest with ourselves, however, we have to admit our own attachment to traditions. We feel the heart-warmth of affirming who we are, of bringing together people who share our sense of things. Those are the safe spaces that provide stability in a world that sometimes seem overwhelming. They give us foundations to work from, reinforcing beliefs that we don’t have to question every minute. We want, at least some of the time, to be around people who are like us, who have the same kind of background, so we don’t have to explain everything or fight over the value of everything. We want, in other words, people who share our traditions.
We progressives also fall easily into into the negatives we criticize in others. We strengthen the comforting bonds of friendship  and family by sharing in-jokes and making fun of outsiders. We put up barriers to entry because certain people – certain types of people – would destroy the warmth and the easy camaraderie of the group. We tend to exclude and make fun of Republicans, for example. If a conservative entered the group it would make everyone uncomfortable; conversations would be strained and self-censored. We exclude people of lower educational levels – not deliberately, but in practice – and those from backgrounds so different that they wouldn’t get our jokes and references. We don’t like to recognize how often liberal and progressive communities fall into the “not in my backyard” attitude – whether it’s fighting proposals for nearby low-income housing or mental-health centers, or protesting a fancy new house seen as out of keeping with the neighborhood.
Traditions are not just abstract values or rituals: they are ways of life, backed by shared beliefs about right and wrong. They work because everyone knows them and knows how they are supposed to fit in. Traditions create comfortable relations. When they break down – (there’s a lot of research about this) it causes intense personal anxiety and social disorder. No  one knows how they’re supposed to behave. People interpret the same event differently. There are constant misunderstandings of meaning and motive. Conflict escalates. And that, to a large extent, describes our current state of polarization.
Conservatives see the restoration of shared tradition as the main solution to our current dysfunction. They want to affirm the importance of being American, of our founding values. They don’t necessarily agree among themselves on what the core traditions are: some emphasize Christianity, others not; some are more Hamiltonian, others more Jeffersonian; some, but not all, focus on “Western culture”. But despite these differences, the essential conservative way of healing our body politic is to find traditions we can agree on and take pride in.
The progressives’ emphasis is on changing traditions to remedy their injustices. But conservatives are right that abandoning tradition leads to personal and societal chaos. We need traditions – a way we do things, backed by what we believe – and we also need a way to improve them. So far the primary way humans have resolved that tension is through extremely disruptive cycles of revolution, and reaction. To  get to a better society we need to bring together respect for tradition with dialogue about how to change it.