The history of mankind is rife with evil. Every culture from the beginning of civilization to now has chunks of its history that your schoolbooks will characterize as mostly full of vice, injustice, exploitation, and abusive power dynamics. However, when mankind triumphs over its base nature, something unique has been revealed about the human narrative, which we are otherwise disposed to view nihilistically, progressively, or misanthropically as the greater part of life.
Why does it matter if we imagine the history of our nation and culture as one of great triumph or one of great sin? As we think about the greatness of particular men or peoples, which is not a particularly popular thing in our modern ethic, we gain a vision of what it means to rise above the baser nature of human depravity and the tragedy of man’s desire or nature. Even though the right wing in America tends to beatify the founding fathers of the United States to a largely hyperbolic degree, the instinct and gratitude there possesses value which promotes more good than evil.
In regards to the pseudo-sainthood of the founding fathers of the United States, it does not greatly profit a nation or culture to blindly love itself. However, filial piety, often first introduced to young students by the ideas of Confucianism (though, by far, extends beyond it), informs our love and respect towards tradition, ancestors, and family. In the same way we honor our parents while knowing their faults, honoring and respecting the sacrifices, accomplishments, and legacies of our forebears embellishes and cultivates a wisdom of historical thought.
What a student of history and culture aims to do through honoring the past is not to ignore its sinful epochs, tragedies, or injustices. Rather, he seeks to find, in humility, the essence of a people and culture that makes it worth love rather than hate or, worse than that, apathy. As humility solidifies the cornerstone of wisdom, humility also informs the most powerful tool of approaching a culture’s traditional morals, ethics, and values. If we modern men presume that the past has nothing to offer us except for evil, then we are to be the most pitiable and wretched of creatures.
If the past is simply a series of wicked and depraved peoples willfully enacting whatever violence, prurient desire, or greed they wished, then we should expect we possess no more capacity for virtue than the rest of mankind has had, (unless we have found some magic pill, which I’ve failed to see evidence of thus far). This reasoning has avoided becoming believable except perhaps amongst the most ardent and extreme of moral nihilists. Even if the modern day’s view of great men of the past is largely negative, we seem to think that we somehow have risen above their moral faculties.
This same group of people that promote this vision, you may notice, are ever quick to remind you that you are a product of society, its sins, and its prejudices; because of this, you are never guilt free from the past or your hypothetical skin ancestors. They are partly correct and there are lessons to be learned from that view, though not in the same vector or degree. The past plays a part in who you are today.
Traditions inform and mold us into the people we become. Similarly, our genetics, childhood experiences, and friends also affect our everyday lives through their historical impact on our souls. These things accomplish this through their impact in informing the morals, ethics, aesthetics, and preferences of generations before us and before them. Tradition, however, is not something that should just be viewed as some kind of throw away “things that we did in the past” kind of foolishness or luddite temptation. The fact that traditions and customs persist from generation to generation suggests that even for any faults you may find in them, many people before you, some of whom were likely much more intelligent, found them worth keeping around.
Our old friend G.K. Chesterton has some useful words of wisdom on the subject:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." —G.K. Chesterton
Likewise, the traditions that have been erected amongst multitudinous cultures and societies may not all be worth keeping. However, if one does not ask the question of its usefulness or not, how can we wisely say whether or not it is worth keeping? Tradition is the distilled wisdom of the past that has been judged time and time again, if you see a fault in its remaining, the task and duty of tearing it down comes with great moral and intellectual weight. It is a duty that has been undertaken many times with great success, however we should not always assume that just because a tradition has lapsed, it was worth leaving it behind.
Many traditions that have been eroded in the last century have not been replaced or built up with a greater Good. The American mythos of the nuclear family as the lost tradition is itself a 2nd order derivative loss. Even as the atomized individual has slowly come to become the norm, the “nuclear family” of parents and children as the main kind of familial structure replaced a much more networked family in which uncles, cousins, grandparents, parents, and all of their children were in much closer community than the nuclear family offered. Do not mistake this for some kind of “found family” nonsense wherein whoever you make friends with becomes “family.” Rather, there was once an even greater view of the family than the 50’s nostalgia-ists have presumed was the American ideal.
On the other hand, we can point to both old and new traditions or norms that we can be glad of their extinction. Slavery, though still an unfortunate reality but out of sight of the Western mind, following biblical morality had great reason for its abolition. Likewise abortion, considered by some to be on the level of a natural right, has clear moral underpinnings that are worthwhile being eroded and eradicated at the institutional level. In the same vein but less extreme, we should consider tempering our radical acceptance of social media and technology’s effects on the soul, psychology, economic life, and social norms.
As we move forward in this brave new world of ours, gratitude for the gifts of the past may blind us if we profit from them without considering their moral and historical weight. Yet, if we desire to overturn every rock and crash through every fence that has been established with a self righteous vengeance, we may destroy everything we hold dear. It is for this reason that humility and a moral center that transcends time must be the very thing that we judge anything with.
It is good and normal to give honor, gratitude and love to one’s country and history; it is what made you who you are today. This tendency should remain more potent than our desire to upturn the whole system even though we may find ourselves unhappy, uncomfortable, disappointed, or even enraged with the failures of the present and past. Hatred pleases nobody more than the devil himself so it has been said. When we wield a moral view of the world that values the flourishing of man alongside respecting his natural duties to a moral universe with order and meaningfulness, then we arm ourselves with the means to make sense of the past and present. It may even allow men to learn from both in order to craft a future worth loving with more pride than either.