AT The Orthosphere, in an essay titled “Why You Need Traditionalism,” Alan Roebuck poses the question, “How can you escape the nightmare of the contemporary world?”

His response in part:

Know first that you cannot save yourself. You are too small. You need to discover, believe and participate in something larger than yourself, something that connects you with the realities that the contemporary world denies: God, true religion, family, nation, and so on. You need the traditionalism of your people.

Traditionalism is not just adherence to a tradition, for there must be a reason why we adhere to it. More basically, traditionalism is knowing and living in accord with what many thinkers call the order of being. Contemporary thought holds that the world is only a physical realm in which any meaning or order that transcends the physical is arbitrarily projected by man. And since this order is arbitrary, man can change it whenever he wants. But contemporary thought is mistaken. The world contains a God-given order that pre-exists man, and that he knows primarily through intuition, his faculty of knowing basic truths without a process of formal reasoning.

What are the elements of this order of being? It contains, among other things,

• The physical world, with its scientific laws of matter and energy.
• The biological world, with plants and animals (including man in his animal dimensions), with laws of life and death, birth and growth, male and female.
• The social world, with its moral, psychological, political and economic laws, with individuals, families, clans, associations, nations, rulers and governments.
• The spiritual world with God, angels and demons, Heaven and Hell, creation and miracles, and spiritual laws.
• The religious world, with priests and pastors, Scripture and creeds, religious acts, and laws of sin and repentance, salvation and damnation.
• The intellectual world, with metaphysical and epistemological principles, schools of thought, disputation and proof.
• The esthetic world, with beauty in all its varied manifestations.

The reader will note that some of these elements appear to be man-made. Man creates social, religious and intellectual orders. Each nation creates its own unique orders. But there are proper ways to create them, within limits established by God. Man is not free to redefine what is proper without the disastrous consequences we see all around us.

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