As those who have been reading this blog for some time know, for me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. And the essential thing that distinguishes the one from the other lies in that in premodern cultures people live for the most part in a 'given' world and in modern cultures people live in a chosen world--or at least in a world where choices are available in a way they are not in a classic premodern society. The zombie traditionalist who haunts modern societies is in effect a premodern wannabe. Such a one longs to live in a time when the world would once again be delivered to him as a given with
a universally accepted order, accepted without question across the entire culture. No choices, no confusion, no fuss, no muss. There is only what is right and wrong according to what it culturally defined as normative.
I believe the objection of the zombie traditionalist, for instance, to homosexual marriage/civil unions is not primarily a religious or spiritual issue. It has more to do with how he sees yet another element of what remains of the world given to him by tradition being attacked. In other words, what frightens him is not that these "sodomites" are all going to hell, but that they are the latest agents of modernity’s campaign to destroy what remains of the world given to him by traditional authorities. They fear that the whole society is being dragged into hell, and for them hell equals normless social chaos--"relativism."
Zombie traditionalists don't really care about the tradition; they care about social order--an order with as little real freedom in it as possible. For without a strictly normed social order, they don’t know who they are or how they should act. All of that has to be given or prescribed for them. As a type, they have very little interior sense of a moral compass. They are all superego,with a minimal awareness of what it means to have a conscience.
In a pluralistic socieity, which is by definition relativistic, they don't know who they are, and they feel like cornered animals whose territory in that corner is shrinking. They see themselves as an endangered species, and now they are lashing back, fighting for their survival. And they have taken the mainstream culture by surprise, because the mainstream never took them and their worldview seriously. They've been a laughing stock since the Scopes trial, and they burn with resentment toward those like the cosmopolitan "Darrows" who have been laughing at them all these years. This is the source of their hatred of liberals; it's born of resenting their condescension. And this burning resentment is the driving force behind the backlash mounted by the cultural right in the last thirty or forty years, a resentment that has been enflamed by GOP elites whose political rhetoric to galvanize support for their agenda to destroy the restraints but on them since the New Deal.
Is there just cause on the part of the traditionalists for their resentment? Let's put it into historical context. There is a basic dynamic working in history for the past five hundred years that promotes the individual, his freedom and rights over against the society and its traditional norms, rituals, and obligations. It was the archetypal dynamic that characterized the conflict between Catholics and Protestants 500 years ago, and it now the same dynamic that characterizes the conflict between Islamist radicals and the West. And on another level it's a dynamic at work in yet another way in the conflict between traditionalist red-state mentality and the cosmopolitan blue-state mentality. The first mindset in each of these pairings in relation to the second is more group-, authority-, and ritual-oriented. The second mindset is, relative to the first, more individual and choice oriented.
The modern cosompolitans see themselves as heroic individualists fighting the repressive, irrational constrictions of the the ancien regime, and they see the first as frightened, naive bumpkins. Those in the traditionalist group, if they are not among the zombie traditionalists, have historically seen the moderns as the American Indians saw the European settlers--as people who have no understanding, people who have lost their soul because they have lost their connection to everything worth being connected to because they have become so alienated and selfishly individualistic. Those in the premodern traditionalist group see themselves as people who understand the deeper interrelatedness of things, an interrelatedness that is celebrated in the rituals that the second group judges to be irrational and meaningless. The traditionalist group sees the moderns as having shriveled souls and as such rendered incapable of responding to the mystery in things that is to them self-evident.
So there's a part of me that connects with the traditionalism of the first group, but I would make a distinction between a living traditionalism and a zombie traditionalism. A living traditionalism is supple, adaptive, sacramental; a zombie traditionalism is brittle, rigid, non-adaptive, a mere going through the motions. The second is for the most part more characteristic of the extreme cultural right in this country right now, because the traditional forms they celebrate really don’t convey life in the way they do in a living traditionalism.
Zombie traditionalists, for the reasons given above, are like confused, frightened children, and as such deserve our understanding and compassion. They are like the kind of people who are attracted to cults. Or like the kind of woman that is attracted to a physically abusive man. Alone such people are usually harmless, but when organized they are the necessary base required for the development of an authoritarian society. For authoritarian elites depend on this kind of fearful, confused, personality type as the base for their ascension to power. Their fear and confusion is manipulated by authoritarian demagogues into a frothing resentment at people who resist being sucked into their dysfunctional system and who judge them negatively. Authoritarian elites need a confused, slavish sector of the population who in turn need an authoritarian elites to tell them what to think and what to do. Like women in abusive relationships, they are more likely to resent sane people who try to intervene than the people who abuse or manipulate them.
The point is that in the U.S., and I presume increasingly in the other developed countries, living traditionalism is increasingly rare because the social institutions that conveyed the life of their traditions have been destroyed. And people in those societies either adapt and become cosmopolitans or they become the zombie traditionalists who are so easily manipulated by authoritarian elites. That's our predicament now, and it's hard to see how it's going to get better any time soon. Living traditions, wherever they still thrive, have proven themselves incapable of adapting quickly enough to the onslaught of changes that have accompanied advancements in technology and the the disorienting effects of affluence with its dizzying array of choices that increase exponentially with each passing decade.
Sure, there are still lots of people with traditional values, but they are disembodied traditional values. They no longer have a lived context that makes them sustainable and life-giving. I consider myself to be a traditionalist, but when I am with zombie traditionalists, I feel suffocated and depressed. There's no life there. There's no wisdom, just this dead-wooden formalism. It's all cellulose and no sap.
I am amused when people talk about creating “new” traditions. I know what they mean, but probably the word ‘ritual’ would be more accurate. And I think that creating new rituals is really what needs to be done. We need rituals that will en-soul our life together again. But if a ritual is eventually to become a culture-wide tradition, it cannot be arbitrary. It has to resonate deeply. It has to have a kind of “authority,” or it’s just cast to the side as soon as people tire of it or some other behavior presents itself as more compelling.
In other words effective rituals arise in response to deeply felt needs, and they have to work. They have to satisfy the need, and they have to be more satisfying than the “unhealthy” behaviors people are inclined to embrace without them. So the question for me is whether the creation of such “new traditions” is even remotely possible in this fragmented social environment at this time in our history.
I don't know for sure, but for me the idea of retrieval/second naiveté offers a clue as to how it might happen. Both words come from Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher of religion that I read years ago as an undergraduate. I’m not sure I’m using these terms precisely in the way he does, but the idea is that in premodern societies where everything is a given, you have “first naiveté.” You simply accept uncritically the world as the ancestors have passed it on to you. With the coming of critical consciousness, you start questioning the assumptions on which naive consciousness is based, and inevitably you lose your naive faith that the way things are defined as “given” really has much to do with the way things are.
Socrates' teaching the youth of Athens to think critically in this way was the crime that got him executed. Traditionalists don't like their assumptions to be questioned. But what began with Socrates as a relatively small movement became a culture-wide trend among most the creative thinkers by the time of the Enlightenment in the West, and by the early twentieth century, this project had run its course as it became clear that there is no rational basis for any of our assumptions. The existentialist, the late Richard Rorty, and the French postmodern philosophers make that case pretty compellingly. And so the possibility of saying Yes is either impossible and one lives in a state of detached irony or it is the result of an irrational leap of faith if not into the arms of God into other possibilities, Communism and Fascism being popular choices in the last century.
For while critical consciousness is good at saying No—at debunking and irony—it’s not very good at saying Yes--it accomplishes nothing postive. And so in order for it to be possible to to say a deeply resounding Yes, one possibility lies in going back to revisit the world as it was presented to naive consciousness, but now with “second naiveté.” This does not mean 'going native', i.e., reverting to first naiveté, but opening up to or becoming vulnerable to the reality that was self-evident to the premodern consciousness with first-naivete--but without losing critical consciousness. So the challenge becomes one of rediscovering what has been lost, remembering or resurrecting what has been forgotten. My hunch is, and that’s all it is, a hunch—that if “new traditions” are to be created, they will not have enough ballast or resonance unless they are in one way or another the retrieval of older, previously rejected traditions and rituals, but now adapted to our very different circumstances.
(This post is based on an essay I posted as Zombie Traditionalism II. See also the post entitled "Retrieval" which also helps to build this them. I want to use these as a reference point to probe a little deeper into these cultural themes. Also note I've put up a related post entitled "From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen" in the Don't Miss list to the left. That's where I suggest some clues for how we can now at least as individuals, and perhaps in small communities as well, say Yes.)
Update: An exmple of Second Naivete:
On Angels by Czeslaw Milosz
All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.
There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.
Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.
They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.
The voice -- no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.
I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draw near
another one
do what you can.