The Flame of Living Tradition

Deneen reports on The Future of Conservatism conference at Yale where he was a presenter. He was particularly impressed with Anthony Esolen, whose presentation he briefly summarizes as follows:

I can hardly summarize what he said, and am told that a recording will be available on the I.S.I. website before too long, but a basic insight was how deeply ignorant we have become concerning the absence of an actual culture in our time - understood as a vast, almost intuitively known and usable storehouse of collected wisdom, myth, story, poetry, song, worship, memory, and knowledge from the past. We are likely to know such things as the ending of this unforgettable line - "Rice-a-Roni, the..." What we lack is a vibrantly alive connection to that storehouse that was once available to even the "uneducated" in what we often dismiss as ignorant and backward societies. Still, weaving the tales of our own cultural inheritance, recalling to us the tales of Homer, plays of Ben Jonson, the words of Shakespeare, the epic lines of Milton, the verses of the Bible, Esolen began to reconnect all of us with a culture that is rightfully ours and invited us to become fully capable of a true form of leisure - from which culture derives, and which in turn makes possible true leisure - drawing on the wisdom of Josef Pieper. It was a moving and inspiring performance, and the audience was visibly roused and cheered.

Maybe I don't fully understand what Deneen wants to say, and I look forward to hearing Prof. Esolen's talk when it becomes available, but is his point that consumer culture is inferior to what it destroyed? Of course it is. We are swimming in a  culture whose values have been almost completely subordinated to the requirements of consumer capitalism, and the result is the "deep" mud  to which I referred in yesterday's post.  We're so spiritually impoverished we mostly don't have the imagination to know what we've lost--how one-dimensional is the culture we live in and how flat-souled we've all become adpating to it. We're wallowing in the mud, and in doing so think ourselves superior to all the rich, vibrant cultures that preceded us.

Nothing is given anymore in the way it was. If to live in a living tradition means to have passed to oneself the living flame of the culture's wisdom from the previous generation, there is no longer a flame to pass. It has been extinguished in the mud. We can lament it and long for the good old days, or we can accept it as reality and try to find a way forward.

Artifacts have been left by spirited men and women who preceded us, but that's all they are, clues that point to something they knew that we don't. So I'm not so interested in the artifacts except as a tool to understand better what our ancestors understood and that we need to understand once again, but with second naivete. So there are resources upon which we can draw, but they are not something we are born into or live into as a normal part of acculturation. We have to dig into them and into ourselves to find where the nexus point lies.  That nexus point is the flame that animates living, vibrant cultures, but it's gone underground. We have to work to recover that flame by other means and if we succeed find disciplins appropriate for our time and situation that protect it from being snuffed out. That requires effort and faith, and if enough people keep the faith and make the effort, then maybe there'll be a tipping point into renaissance.