Zombie Traditionalism I

Liberation fever is not new; it's at the heart of Modernity. It started with the Reformation, progressed through the Enlightenment, and ultimately manifested in the liberation movements of our own era. The modern spirit from its earliest manifestation has always been a movement to shuck off the constraints of the traditional premodern social system. The black liberation movement, the women's liberation movement, and now the Gay liberation movement are all perfectly consistent within the logic of modernity.

They are all assaults on traditional constraints. And resistance to the demands of blacks, women, or gays has always been rooted in arguments to preserve traditional social forms and traditional morality. And these arguments were also always accompanied by predictions of social chaos if these groups were given what they asked for. But in the modern era traditional logic always loses to modern logic sooner or later. The custom ("the way we have always done things around here") argument always loses to the rights argument when basic fairness is at stake. And it is right that fairness should defeat custom in responding to the demands of all three of these liberation movements.

But here's where it gets tricky, because many people on the right think that the culture's surrendering to the demands of blacks, women, and gays is directly responsible for the destruction of the traditional American way of life. On the surface there might seem to be some merit to this argument, but traditional America was already dead by the time any of these movements got any traction, and the liberationist left didn't kill it. Consumer Capitalism did.

Consumer capitalism is the end result of another kind of liberation movement whose origins lie in the sixteenth century and is linked the emergence of the Protestant bourgeoisie as a driving force in science, politics, and commerce. The new class wanted to be free of the stultifying constraints of state-centered mercantilism and pushed for the laissez-faire approach to economic matters which sought policies that would let the market dictate the direction of the economy rather than the King. They gradually won that fight, and the result was the unleashing in the late 1700s of the enormous economic energies that produced the industrial revolution. And during the 1800s we saw the enormous growth of industrial capitalism and with it a ravaging of traditional social arrangements as the economic center of gravity shifted from the manor to the factory.

The American Civil War was from this angle a battle between the new modern forces of industrial capitalism pitted against the forces of tradition-centered agricultural society. The forces of tradition always lose to the forces or modernity, but that doesn't mean that the traditionalists  go down without a good fight. The Southern Confederacy showed a gallantry then that was ultimately futile. The recent Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai explores this same theme of a soulful traditionalism losing to the relentless, machine-powered forces of the new industrial state in the 1870s. The same dynamic is working now in the Middle East.

But even as late as the 1890s about 90% of Americans still derived their livelihood from farming and agriculture-related businesses. And traditional American culture still thrived in a genuine way where family farms and rural communities maintained a living continuity with the past. And the greatest counterbalance to the soul-deadening encroachments of industrial capitalism came from rural America where Populism arose in the 1890s.

The rest of the culture benefited from the continuity of American traditionalism in the rural heartland. Whatever else maybe going on in the cities or the factories, the heartland was there as a kind of ballast. But living American traditionalism was destroyed by first the ravages of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the mechanization of agriculture in the 1950s, which led to the capital-intensive agriculture that gradually killed off the family farm as a basic institution preserving the genuine living American traditionalism of which I speak.

Traditions need thriving, living institutions and a way of life through which the tradition is passed from generation to generation. The death of the family farm meant the death of a living American traditionalism. Sure people talk about traditional values, but the point I'm trying to make is that these are zombie traditional values. They no longer inhere in a living tradition. They are twitching, wraithe-like forms that have no life and provide no real nourishment.

Click links for Zombie Traditionalism II and III.  See also "Dying Traditions and The South Gets the Last Laugh."