AT VDARE.COM, Steve Sailer writes:

The point of thinking about the past is not to decide whether or not we’d rather live there. Since we don’t actually have time machines, we aren’t confronted with an all or nothing choice between living in the past and living in the present. Uninventing advances in coffee-making machines or lawnmowers isn’t on the table. The point is to understand the past to help us make decisions in the present to make the future better.

Exactly. The purpose of thinking about the past is not to reject the present, but to live more fully in it and to prepare for the future.

                                                             — Comments —

John P. writes:

The purpose of thinking about the past is not to reject the present…

Quite so. It is not to reject the present but it isto critique it. One of the aims of cultural Marxism is to cause people to become unmoored from their past and to discredit the past so that there can be no framework for criticism of current directions. In my view, Tradition serves as a sort of distributed, public resource; philosophy for the common man. As such, it is not above rational criticism of particular manifestations, but neither can it nor should it be reduced to rational principles. This would be to accord too much power to intellectuals over other human types. The wisdom of tradition and the past is too subtle and rich for any such scientistic reduction. To think and interpret, even to criticise, is an inescapable necessity of the human condition. To repudiate or reduce tradition is a fundamental error.

Laura writes:

To be conscious of tradition, T.S. Eliot said, is to be “conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” 

Jesse Powell writes:

To me understanding and learning about the past is fundamental; after all, the past is the only thing I have any knowledge about at all, the future is yet to happen. There are two types of knowledge about the past; the first is what I have personally experienced and the second is what has been told to me through the media or through books or by any other means. The personal experiences of my own life are limited in time and location but the knowledge one can learn through research is vast, much greater than one can know through observation. 

The past is a big issue because the claim by the feminists is that women were oppressed in the past, that you can’t go back to the past even if you wanted to, that all of the social changes of today are a result of “progress” as if things can only get better as time moves forward; this way of defining the past is very much central to the claim that feminism is good. 

This way of characterizing the past is deliberate; it serves the purpose of glorifying the status quo. In reality however, when one looks at the past, in terms of cultural issues and relations between men and women, one finds that the past was much more healthy and functional than the present. All of the statistics related to problems within the family were much lower in the past than they are today. 

One of the claims that is asserted or implied is that family breakdown and material luxury necessarily go together. People might point to the hardships experienced by those who lived 100 years ago and think to themselves, “See, things are much better now, I wouldn’t want to live like they lived in the past,” and then use that as a blanket justification for claiming that all aspects of life today are better than they were “in the past.” The problem with this line of thinking is that it is still possible to have a healthy culture even in a society that is rich; people chose the cultural values that they live by regardless of their material circumstances. 

The value of tradition is that it helps us glimpse into the past, when family life worked much better than it does today, and thereby provides us with a guide on how to recreate the culture so that future generations will be able to experience the same healthy culture that those in the distant past took for granted.

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