Taking tradition ends our identity
Recently I was crossexamined about my loyalties “to the unenlightened people and policies that make up conservatism.” As we’ve finally come past “Anything But Canada” day, our annual Jour de la White Guilt, and that month long plagiarism of the Almighty’s multicoloured promise to never flood the earth again, focusing on the family, civil society, and tradition appears to be a welcome reprieve. What follows are reflections on the malaise surrounding these issues.
The irreducible human unit is the family, not the individual, as we cannot perpetuate and improve mankind without parents and children. This fundamental truth was a source of strength for the old left, particularly when agitating for better wages to lift people out of abject poverty.
But the family has been abandoned by radicals, who dismiss the imperatives of monogamy and procreation, while advocating that all familial duties become state issues.
Thus sapped of its strength and purpose, the family has fractured for the marginalized thanks to incentivizing single parenthood, or become disadvantageous to the middle and upper classes thanks to liberalized divorce laws. Fatherlessness and broken homes are the leading causes of every physical and psychological malady in their respective offspring, yet the silence from progressives on this issue precluding addiction, literacy, prison reform,
etc. is deafening.
Families once made up civil society with church and secular groups on all sides of the social, cultural, religious and political spectrum. Such organizations supported everything from schools to hospitals, poverty relief to work placements, as well as the arts and all levels of sport.
In British Columbia, gambling was legalized on the condition that all profits would benefit civil society groups – even churches once hosted gaming events for fundraisers. Now, gambling is entirely outsourced to private businesses. There are still gaming grants for nonprofits, but nearly two thirds of taxation on gambling goes into “consolidated revenue,” in order to help the government fund services that used to be conducted exclusively by charitable organizations.
This costs more and renders worse results. But be grateful, as now we have big state agencies with members working tirelessly to expand their empire of mediocrity with your taxes.
Attitudes towards tradition offer another stark contrast. In our supposedly pragmatic age, the great irony is nothing more practical than tradition exists. The tried and true, by definition, are those methods that work given man and nature’s limitations. Yet these are constantly denigrated by progressives who assert the old ways must be discarded and brave new worlds created at breakneck speed with malice aforethought, regardless of the carnage wrought on “peoplekind.”
All of this comes down to a question of potential: radicals proclaim that each of us can be giants, the stars easily within reach if only we follow a particular program; the traditionalist warns that the true giants are the glorious dead – we stand on their shoulders and owe them everything.
The proof is in the educational pudding. Since the 1980s, curricula have changed more than in the previous two millennia, replacing classics with hyphenated studies and rote learning in math, logic and science with discoverybased systems. The radicalism on campus speaks to the former as the ever dwindling test scores of all but the brightest attest to the latter. Luckily, those in charge are removing all standardized rubrics – soon there will be no goal posts to miss.
These are just a few of the bleak realities obvious to “conservatives.” It bears repeating that historically, the family, civil society and tradition were bipartisan issues with strong voices of support on the tight and left. The reestablishment of this consensus is crucial to preserving a humane existence. Otherwise, a cruel world of corporate or statist oligarchy is all but inevitable.