"These Fragments... Shored Against... Ruins"

“These Fragments… Shored Against… Ruins”

Tradition is a collection of 1,420 quotations, ancient and modern, aptly chosen for our times by Robert Beum, who has taught in American and Canadian universities. These quotations, which may be savored little by little, are grouped under twenty-two rubrics, such as “Continuity,” “The Land,” “Work,” “The People,” and “Arts”; and the authors cited range from Sirach and Leonidas to Samuel Johnson and Eric Voegelin. Also cited are some who are no friends to tradition but who have “winningly phrased” something about modernity. In this essay I will ponder Tradition’s overarching theme—the mighty and centuries-long struggle between tradition and modernity.

While Tradition offers a time-tested, authoritative consensus about right and wrong, modernity offers no consensus at all except one that is “momentary, faddish, or merely political.” And while there is a grandeur about tradition, which, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, involves “a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal,” there is something parasitical about modernity, which saps life from tradition’s “residue” in institutions, language, and habits of mind and slowly kills its host. James McAuley rightly speaks of the “progressive debasement and disintegration of the wealth of tradition,” as modern culture moves constantly “downwards, towards negation and sterility.”

Modernity’s contempt for and erasure of the past is a betrayal of the public good. Thomas Traherne warns that “Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages,” and Edmund Burke laments that when “ancient opinions and rules of life” are discarded, “we have no compass to govern us.” The arts are damaged, too, since artists are praised only for originality, however crude their works. Theodore Dalrymple writes, “Who but a barbarian could fail to believe . . . that tradition is actually the precondition of creation, not its antithesis?”

The mad creed of “progress” is the underside of modernity’s disdain of the past. Nicolas Berdyaev sees in this creed “an entirely illegitimate deification of the future at the expense of the past and present,” while Eric Voegelin and William Butler Yeats warn that it leads to the “death of the spirit” and the “withering of the heart.” The belief in “progress” was the construct of secular intellectuals who boasted that “they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better,” but instead, Paul Johnson says, paved the way to catastrophic revolutions.

The conservative’s readiness to protect tradition is, in Beum’s phrase, “the necessary defensive side of the life-affirming spirit.” Love of tradition is love of reality, of life, and of being, while faith in “progress” amounts to the pursuit of a mirage, leading sooner or later to despair and nihilism. Joseph Conrad observes that utopias inspire “a disgust of reality,” and Spengler, that the “projects of world-improvers” are disconnected from the “actuality” of history. Voegelin sums it up perfectly: “The essence of modernity is Gnosticism. In the Gnostic dream world . . . non-recognition of reality is the first principle.” Therefore, actions recognized as “morally insane” in the real world are perceived as morally sane in this “dream world.”

In Tradition we learn that modernity brings in relativism first, and then nihilism. The word nihilism was coined by Turgenev in 1862 to mean “any ideology or action” tending to “an indiscriminate destructiveness.” The word is apt for modernity’s all-out assault on faith and morals in the past few centuries. We are now come to this pass, says Jacques Ellul, that whenever there is “even a tiny blossoming of value, the intellectuals rise up to reject it and jeer at it.” Academe has “surrendered to the madness in which negation becomes an end in itself.” Stanley Rosen also sees “in the ‘adopted’ nihilism of intellectuals a kind of erotic perversion which is similar to the worship of machines.”

Since modernity adheres to its Gnostic dream world, which means a hatred of being, it treats the human person as an abstraction. Dostoyevsky warns that we are trying to become “some sort of generalized man” and will soon manage “to be born somehow from an idea.” In fact, modernity seeks to make man merely instrumental to its projects. In Pius XII’s phrase, it has turned man into “a more perfect tool in industrial production and a perfected tool for mechanized warfare.” The result of this, as noted by Lewis Mumford, is that “never before have machines been so perfect, and never before have men sunk so low.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry grieves that the voice we hear is that of the “propaganda robot,” and Arnold Toynbee that we have become “a race of technician-morons.” Tradition frees us from serving the machine by restoring our sense of mystery and wonder. We find this freedom in Flannery O’Connor, who reflects that “mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind,” and in G. K. Chesterton, who says that the ordinary man is healthy so long as he has “mystery.” We also find it in Walter de la Mare, who calls life “a never-ending, unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery,” and in Sigrid Undset, who declares life to be “glorious—whether or not it holds happiness for you or for me.”

In Tradition much of the blame for the triumph of modernity is laid at the feet of democracy, or more specifically egalitarianism. Balzac laments that “government by the masses” is “the only irresponsible form of government, under which tyranny is unlimited, for it calls itself law,” and Klemens von Metternich lambastes democracy as “a principle of dissolution.” Beum complains about the “reverse elitism” democracy fosters, as when “the tribunes of The People” insist that all are “equal in virtues and talents,” meaning that all must be “equally praised and rewarded, no matter the performance.” As a result, respect for a hierarchy of values disappears, and relativism becomes “the tacit law of the land,” promising toleration but delivering nihilism. Benedict XVI points out that relativism recognizes “nothing as definitive” and “leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires.” Thus it causes “an eclipse of the sublime goals of life.” Nihilism and narcissism—these are to be found at the endpoint of modernity, which today produces “self-loving, self-exhibiting people by the millions.”

As an antidote to democracy’s leveling of culture to the lowest denominator, Beum offers “Aristocracy.” Henrik Ibsen calls for a revival of the “aristocratic element” long missing from modern political life—“an aristocracy of character, and mind, and will.” Likewise, Burke yearns for “the age of chivalry,” with its twofold spirit, that of the gentleman and that of religion. He longs to see again that “generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.” Sir Walter Scott, too, issues a summons for that heroic spirit that embraces “the duties of self-denial, and the sacrifice of passion to principle.” What is missing from this collection of passages, however, is any indication that the loss of that “aristocratic element” is due to the treason of some and the cowardice of many in the educated classes. It’s easy to blame the masses indoctrinated by the media, but the blame should fall instead on those who knew better but failed out of self-interest to take a stand.

For decades now, Dalrymple observes, civilized men “have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians. They have denied the distinction between higher and lower, to the invariable advantage of the latter.” This is why “the obvious truth—that it is necessary to repress, either by law or by custom, the permanent possibility in human nature of brutality and barbarism—never finds its way into the press or other media of mass communication.” This denial of original sin has been coupled with a denial of the objective reality of Faith. As Max Picard puts it: “Once Faith was the universal, and prior to the individual; there was an objective world of Faith, while the Flight was only accomplished subjectively, within the individual man. . . . [But] today it is no longer Faith which exists as an objective world, but rather the Flight.”

Pondering the quotations in Tradition, I am reminded of T. S. Eliot’s line at the end of The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Beum’s collection is indeed a solemn reminder that Western civilization lies in ruins all around us. I wish the section on “Arms” had been twice as long, though, for in it lies the summons to battle. We hear Virgil’s thrilling exhortation, “Do not give in to evils: fight back ever more boldly,” and Goethe’s warning, “There are many dangers in life, and safety is one of them.” Joseph Conrad utters a clarion call to arms by defining courage thus: “a blessed stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature, and the seductive corruption of men.”