TRADITIONALISTS are often accused of seeking to resurrect the past. The implication is that they are in need of a psychological crutch, that they are not manly or courageous enough to face the uncertain future. There are many problems with this charge. For one, traditionalists don’t honor all things past. For instance, they rarely speak of resurrecting polygamy or slavery.

The constant references to the past traditionalists often make should not be confused with wholesale approval of everything foregone. The real aim is not the past itself, but truth and the good. It is the attainment of God’s kingdom on earth, a project which can never be fully achieved.

Nostalgia, in this sense, is reverence for what our predecessors got right. Everyone must look to the ideal. Everyone does look to the ideal. The difference between a traditionalist and a liberal is that the liberal looks to some ill-defined possibility that is a radical departure from everything that ever existed while the traditionalist adheres to what has already been done. The liberal is the escapist. He seeks emancipation from life itself. The traditionalist is the realist, provided he is always instilled with some degree of disillusionment with everything human, with everything in this world, and provided he keeps in mind what his predecessors got wrong and the necessity of change. This detachment is essential to judgment of the past.

As Donald Davidson wrote in his 1957 book Still Rebels, Still Yankees:

‘You cannot turn the clock back!’ is the commonest taunt of our day. It always emerges as the clinching argument that any modernist offers any traditionalist when the question is: ‘What shall we do now?’ But it is not really an argument. It is a taunt intended to discredit the traditionalist by stigmatizing him a traitor to an idea of progress that is assumed as utterly valid and generally accepted. The aim is, furthermore, to poison the traditionalist’s own mind and disturb his self-confidence by the insinuation that he is a laggard in the world’s great procession. His faith in an established good is made to seem nostalgic devotion to a mere phantom of the buried past. His opposition to the new—no matter how ill-advised, inartistic, destructive, or immoral that new may be—is defined as a quixotic defiance of the Inevitable. To use a term invented by Arnold J. Toynbee, he is an Archaist. By definition, he is therefore doomed.

                                         — Comments —

Lydia Sherman writes:

Actually, it is the liberals who are living in the past, insisting that things like socialism, which had its beginnings in the French Revolution of 1789; Communism, made famous in 1848; Dewey-ism which promoted the progressive and liberal movements in approximately 1894; Darwinism, commonly known as the evolution (1859);  cynicism, first articulated by the Greeks 500 years before Christ; and Freudianism (1880’s) really do work. Most of these philosophies were created before and during the Victorian era, which liberals hate so much. When these systems were tried, they brought misery to mankind. Liberals keep resurrecting them, insisting that they would “work” if they were only done the right way. So, who is living in the past?

Greg J. writes:

I was gratified to see you quoting Donald Davidson’s insight about turning back the clock. He is a neglected but important writer for conservatives, and Russell Kirk wrote about how Davidson’s critique of statism in “Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States” served as Kirk’s inspiration to study and promote the “permanent things” in his own writing.

Part of what causes even some traditionalists to question any allegiance to the past is their understandable commitment to acknowledging the full truth about history. They point out with complete reasonableness that every era of human history has had its share of communal sin, and I don’t disagree with them. But when those of us who admire certain bygone things about the past hold those things up and praise them, or lament their extinction, do such feelings prove that we are ignoring whatever vices may have been mixed into the way of life we describe? Not at all. A fair-minded student of history ought to have the courage not only to call a spade a spade, but to call a flower a flower. If I claim that families were stabler and children were healthier in 19th-century America than they are today (and they certainly were), that doesn’t marry me to the whole milieu such that I am condoning a revival of chattel slavery. But when either liberals or even traditionalists scold celebrations of the past as rose-tinted nostalgia, they are arguing unfairly and puritanically. They remind me of the Pharisees who scolded Jesus for deigning to visit publicans and known sinners, folks that the Pharisees had already consigned to hell. In the same way, the anti-Nostalgists have concluded that the bad old days of racism and patriarchy (which I will admit had their dark side) render the entire past unworthy either of discussion or reverence. But I still like to go and visit the American sinners and publicans of our past, for they remind me of myself, who I am, and where I come from. Contrary to those who insist on the superiority of whatever is to come, there are many ways to ‘turn back the clock’. As the novelist William Faulkner has observed drily, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”

The Rev. James Jackson writes:

I have the feeling that those who disparage tradition as mere nostalgia have a narrow idea of what the word means. They use it as a wistful, dreamy and unreal desire to return to a past that will never come back, and which hardly existed to begin with. But the word is from the ancient Greek and literally means homesickness, in the sense of longing for one’s home and one’s family. Homer uses it to describe Odysseus longing to return to Ithaca and especially to Penelope. It touches the heart of Western Civilization.

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