Human Diversity and Individual Instruction

From Mises.org (Sept. 5, 2020):

One of the most important facts about human nature is the great diversity among individuals. Of course, there are certain broad characteristics, physical and mental, which are common to all human beings.1 But more than any other species, individual men are distinct and separate individuals. Not only is each fingerprint unique, each personality is unique as well. Each person is unique in his tastes, interests, abilities, and chosen activities. Animal activities, routine and guided by instinct, tend to be uniform and alike. But human individuals, despite similarities in ends and values, despite mutual influences, tend to express the unique imprint of the individual’s own personality. The development of individual variety tends to be both the cause and the effect of the progress of civilization. As civilization progresses, there is more opportunity for the development of a person’s reasoning and tastes in a growing variety of fields. And from such opportunities come the advancement of knowledge and progress which in turn add to the society’s civilization. Furthermore, it is the variety of individual interests and talents that permits the growth of specialization and division of labor, on which civilized economies depend. As the Reverend George Harris expressed it:

Savagery is uniformity. The principal distinctions are sex, age, size, and strength. Savages…think alike or not at all, and converse therefore in monosyllables. There is scarcely any variety, only a horde of men, women, and children. The next higher stage, which is called barbarism, is marked by increased variety of functions. There is some division of labor, some interchange of thought, better leadership, more intellectual and aesthetic cultivation. The highest stage, which is called civilization, shows the greatest degree of specialization. Distinct functions become more numerous. Mechanical,—commercial, educational, scientific, political, and artistic occupations multiply. The rudimentary societies are characterized by the likeness of equality; the developed societies are marked by the unlikeness of inequality or variety. As we go down, monotony; as we go up, variety. As we go down, persons are more alike; as we go up, persons are more unlike, it certainly seems…as though [the] approach to equality is decline towards the conditions of savagery, and as though variety is an advance towards higher civilization….

Certainly, then, if progress is to be made by added satisfactions, there must be even more variety of functions, new and finer differentiations of training and pursuits. Every step of progress means the addition of a human factor that is in some way unlike all existing factors. The progress of civilization, then…must be an increasing diversification of the individuals that compose society….There must be articulation of each new invention and art, of fresh knowledge, and of broader application of moral principles.2

With the development of civilization and individual diversity, there is less and less area of identical uniformity, and therefore less “equality.” Only robots on the assembly line or blades of grass can be considered as completely equal, as being identical with respect to all of their attributes. The fewer attributes that two organisms have in common, the less they are “equal” and the more they are unequal. Civilized human beings, therefore, are unequal in most of their personalities. This fact of inequality, in tastes, and in ability and character, is not necessarily an invidious distinction. It simply reflects the scope of human diversity.

It is evident that the common enthusiasm for equality is, in the fundamental sense, anti-human. It tends to repress the flowering of individual personality and diversity, and civilization itself; it is a drive toward savage uniformity. Since abilities and interests are naturally diverse, a drive toward making people equal in all or most respects is necessarily a leveling downward. It is a drive against development of talent, genius, variety, and reasoning power. Since it negates the very principles of human life and human growth, the creed of equality and uniformity is a creed of death and destruction.

There is a sense, however, in which equality among men is sensible and beneficial. Each individual should have the freest possible scope for the development of his faculties and his personality. In order to have this scope, he must have freedom from violence against himself. Violence can only repress and destroy human growth and endeavor, and neither can reason and creativity function under an atmosphere of coercion. If each person has equal defense against violence, this “equality before the law” will permit him to maximize his potentialities.

Since each person is a unique individual, it is clear that the best type of formal instruction is that type which is suited to his own particular individuality. Each child has different intelligence, aptitudes, and interests. Therefore, the best choice of pace, timing, variety, and manner, and of the courses of instruction will differ widely from one child to another. One child is best suited, in interests and ability, for an intensive course in arithmetic three times a week, followed six months later by a similar course in reading; another may require a brief period of several courses; a third may need a lengthy period of instruction in reading, etc. Given the formal, systematic courses of instruction, there is an infinite variety of pace and combination which may be most suitable for each particular child.

It is obvious, therefore, that the best type of instruction is individual instruction. A course where one teacher instructs one pupil is clearly by far the best type of course. It is only under such conditions that human potentialities can develop to their greatest degree. It is clear that the formal school, characterized by classes in which one teacher instructs many children, is an immensely inferior system. Since each child differs from the other in interest and ability, and the teacher can only teach one thing at a time, it is evident that every school class must cast all the instruction into one uniform mold. Regardless how the teacher instructs, at what pace, timing, or variety, he is doing violence to each and every one of the children. Any schooling involves misfitting each child into a Procrustean bed of unsuitable uniformity.

What then shall we say of laws imposing compulsory schooling on every child? These laws are endemic in the Western world. In those places where private schools are allowed, they must all meet standards of instruction imposed by the government. Yet the injustice of imposing any standards of instruction should be clear. Some children are duller and should be instructed at a slower pace; the bright children require a rapid pace to develop their faculties. Furthermore, many children are very apt in one subject and very dull in another. They should certainly be permitted to develop themselves in their best subjects and to drop the poor ones. Whatever the standards that the government imposes for instruction, injustice is done to all—to the dullards who cannot absorb any instruction, to those with different sets of aptitudes in different subjects, to the bright children whose minds would like to be off and winging in more advanced courses but who must wait until the dullards are hounded once again. Similarly, any pace that the teacher sets in class wreaks an injustice on almost all; on the dull who cannot keep up, and on the bright who lose interest and precious chances to develop their great potential.

Obviously, the worst injustice is the prevention of parental teaching of their own children. Parental instruction conforms to the ideal arrangement. It is, first of all, individualized instruction, the teacher dealing directly with the unique child, and addressing himself to his capabilities and interests. Second, what people can know the aptitudes and personality of the child better than his own parents? The parents’ daily familiarity with, and love for, their children, renders them uniquely qualified to give the child the formal instruction necessary. Here the child receives individual attention for his own personality. No one is as qualified as the parent to know how much or at what pace he should teach the child, what the child’s requirements are for freedom or guidance, etc. [read more]

Carl Sagan’s Final Warning on the Importance of Scientific Skepticism

From FEE.org (Sept. 18, 2023):

Shortly before he died, the astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) offered a two-part warning in an interview with Charlie Rose.

The first part of Sagan’s warning touched on humanity’s growing ignorance of science, which Sagan attributed largely to the failure of modern schools. Sagan saw this as a clear danger to humanity, especially in a society built on science and technology.

“We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces,” he told Rose. “I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?”

Shortly before he died, the astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) offered a two-part warning in an interview with Charlie Rose.

The first part of Sagan’s warning touched on humanity’s growing ignorance of science, which Sagan attributed largely to the failure of modern schools. Sagan saw this as a clear danger to humanity, especially in a society built on science and technology.

“We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces,” he told Rose. “I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?”

The second part of Sagan’s warning was even more profound. The University of Chicago-trained astrophysicist pointed out that science is not simply “a body of knowledge, it’s a way of thinking,” one based on skepticism and questioning. It was imperative, he said, not just that people be educated in the sciences and grounded in healthy skepticism, but that people be allowed to question and challenge those in authority.

“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell us something is true to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along.

…It’s a thing that Jefferson lay great stress on. It wasn’t enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in the Constitution and the Bill or Rights, the people had to be educated and they have to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise, we don’t run the government, the government runs us.”

Covid and the Corruption of Science

Sagan’s warning was eerily prophetic. For the last three-plus years, we’ve witnessed a troubling rise of authoritarianism masquerading as science, which has resulted in a collapse in trust of public health.

This collapse has been part of a broader and more partisan shift in Americans who say they have “a high degree of confidence in the scientific community.” Democrats, who had long had less confidence in the scientific community, are now far less skeptical. Republicans, who historically had much higher levels of trust in the scientific community, have experienced a collapse in trust in the scientific community.

John Burn-Murdoch, a data reporter at The Financial Times who shared the data in question on Twitter, said Republicans are now “essentially the anti-science party.”

First, this is a sloppy inference from a journalist. Burn-Murdoch’s poll isn’t asking respondents if they trust science. It’s asking if they trust the scientific community. There’s an enormous difference between the two, and the fact that a journalist doesn’t understand the difference between “confidence in science” and “confidence in the scientific community” is a little frightening.

Second, as Dr. Vinay Prasad pointed out, no party has a monopoly on science; but it’s clear that many of the policies the “pro science” party were advocating the last three years were not rooted in science.

“The ‘pro science’ party was pro school closure, masking a 26 month old child with a cloth mask, and mandating an mrna booster in a healthy college man who had COVID already,” tweeted Prasad, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco.

Today we can admit such policies were flawed, non-sensical or both, as were so many of the mitigations that were taken and mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But many forget that during the pandemic it was verboten to even question such policies.

People were banned, suspended, and censored by social media platforms at the behest of federal agencies. “The Science” had become a set of dogmas that could not be questioned. No less an authority than Dr. Fauci said that criticizing his policies was akin to “criticizing science, because I represent science.”

This could not be more wrong. Science can help us understand the natural world, but there are no “oughts” in science, the economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, echoing the argument of philosopher David Hume.

“Science is competent to establish what is,” Mises wrote. “[Science] can never dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at.”

Even more importantly, however, to shut down discussion and censor political opponents is the antithesis of the spirit of science, which has experienced major breakthroughs only by challenging and tearing down previously accepted scientific assumptions and orthodoxies.

Carl Sagan understood this, which is why he said it was so important to “ask skeptical questions” and “to be skeptical of those in authority.”

If we fail to do this, or if we are not allowed to do this, Sagan warned what will happen: we will no longer be running the government; the government will be running us. [source]

Speak truth to science? Scientists are people too. They can make mistakes and even falsify results. Good points to heed.

Cracking the Zodiac Killer’s Cipher – How Mathematicians Finally Solved the Z340 Mystery

From Discover Magazine.com (2020):

Few cases have captured the public's imagination and baffled investigators quite like the Zodiac Killer. For decades, this unidentified serial murderer taunted law enforcement and the public alike with cryptic messages and ciphers, leaving a trail of terror in his wake.

One of the most infamous aspects of the Zodiac's sinister saga was the series of letters he sent to local newspapers, in which he claimed responsibility for his gruesome crimes and taunted authorities with cryptograms. Among these letters, one stood out as a tantalizing puzzle that would endure for years – the Zodiac Killer letter that finally got decoded.

Wonder no more, true-crime aficionados.

Who Was the Mysterious Zodiac Killer?

In the late 1960s, a serial killer self-identifying as “the Zodiac” killed at least five people in Northern California and claimed to have murdered more, according to Biography. In November 1969, the Zodiac Killer sent a card to the San Francisco Chronicle containing a 340-character secret message, also known as the Z340, that for more than 50 years went unsolved by detectives, cryptography experts, amateur sleuths, and curious others, according to a study in Arxiv.

After months of crunching code, three researchers on three different continents announced that they’d finally decoded the Z340 message. Further bolstering the claim, experts at the FBI verified the solution (and even tweeted about it).

……….

Who Cracked the Z340 Zodiac Killer Code?

Although the codebreakers involved had each been working on the cipher for years, the successful joint effort began in 2018 when Oranchak delivered a talk about the cipher at the annual meeting of the American Cryptogram Association in Asheville, North Carolina. He posted the talk on YouTube where, predictably, it elicited hundreds of comments, many of which came from people who (erroneously) claimed they’d already solved it.

But one person stood out: Blake. He responded to Oranchak’s talk with mathematical ideas about how to approach a code that includes both homophonic substitution — in which one letter might be swapped for more than one symbol — and transposition — in which letters are reordered in a systematic way. Oranchak and Blake began corresponding and eventually generated hundreds of thousands of possible ways to read the code.

To make sense of those, Oranchak brought in Jarl van Eycke, a Belgian warehouse worker and codebreaker who’d written AZdecrypt, software used for decoding homophonic substitutions. Van Eycke used an updated version of his software to churn through the possibilities. “Jarl just smashed it out of the park,” Blake says. In late November and early December 2020, the trio reprocessed their previous results, this time looking for words and phrasing characteristic of other writings by Zodiac.

And they struck gold. Van Eycke’s software spit out two phrases: trying to catch me and gas chamber. They fixed those phrases in the software, ran it again, and more words like paradice [sic] and slaves began to appear. Finally, in early December, they had the message in total. Notably, the message included “that wasn’t me on the TV show,” referencing a call-in news show that had aired just days before the Chronicle received the cipher in 1969. [read more]

Nice. Too bad the Zodiac Killer was never found.

The Winning Message for the GOP: Order Is Compassion

From Glenn Beck.com (Jan. 23):

There is a lie quietly poisoning this country. It says that if Republicans win, someone else must lose. That prosperity is a zero-sum game. That order requires oppression. That freedom is chaos.

That lie is why we are divided. And it is wrong.

America has won before—not by redistributing what existed, but by creating more than anyone believed possible.

When America creates, the middle class grows, the poor rise, and the future opens. Not because government hands it out—but because it gets out of the way where it should, and stands firm where it must.

If Republicans want to win—and if America is going to survive this moment—then the path forward is not rage, not revenge, not tribalism. It is competence, courage, and clarity.

Start here: People don’t feel poor because they’re lazy. They feel poor because life has become artificially expensive. Housing costs more because we stopped building. Energy costs more because we strangled supply. Healthcare costs more because we allow closed systems and cartel behavior. Education costs more because we replaced skill with bureaucracy and debt. So the winning message isn’t “tax cuts for the rich” or “government handouts for the rest.”

The winning message is this: We are going to make America affordable again.

That is not redistribution; that is liberation from scarcity engineered by bad policy.

Republicans win when they say: We will build homes again. We will permit energy again. We will let trades matter again. We will reward work, saving, and risk again. And we will do it openly, legally, and fast.

Because real wage growth doesn’t come from mandates—it comes from abundance.

Now let’s talk about order, because without order, nothing else matters.

Order is not authoritarian, cruel, or oppressive. It is the first civil right.

Republicans must say it plainly: You cannot have freedom where violent criminals rule the streets, where drug cartels run open markets, where law-abiding citizens are treated as suspects and criminals are treated as victims.

This is not about race. This is not about class. This is not about politics. This is about right and wrong.

Republicans win when they draw a bright line: Peaceful protest is protected. Speech—even ugly speech—is protected. But violence, arson, trafficking, intimidation, and sabotage will be punished—every time.

Not selectively. Not politically. Not performatively. Law applied evenly is not tyranny. It is the foundation of a republic.

Now immigration—because this is where fear is used against truth.

Republicans do not win by demonizing the desperate. They win by isolating and removing the dangerous, swiftly, lawfully, and visibly. Violent criminals, gang members, traffickers, and repeat offenders, all arrested with warrants, processed with due process, and deported or imprisoned under the law.

No raids for headlines. No profiling. No chaos. Just boring, relentless enforcement—the kind that restores trust because it respects the Constitution while protecting the innocent. That is how Republicans win without becoming what they oppose.

Now, the future, because a party that only talks about the past will lose it.

Artificial intelligence will define the next century. Republicans must refuse two equal and opposite failures: Blind acceleration without safeguards or fear-driven paralysis that hands the future to China.

The winning position is this: America will lead AI—but with brakes, audits, and accountability at the highest levels.

Not government ownership or innovation-killing bureaucracy, but secure development, clear thresholds, protection against weaponization, surveillance abuse, and catastrophic misuse. And at the same time, AI education, worker training, productivity tools that lift every American.

Republicans win when they say: The future will not be owned by a few companies or a distant bureaucracy—it will be built by a free people with guardrails, not chains.

Energy. This is the quiet pay raise.

Republicans must say it without apology: Cheap, reliable energy is pro-worker, pro-family, pro-environment, and pro-national security.

Oil and gas now. Nuclear now and next. Grid modernization. Domestic minerals. Long-term innovation.

Not because we reject the future—but because you don’t reach it by kneecapping the present.

And finally—this is the most important part—how do Republicans get Americans to believe again?

Not with slogans or insults. Not with “owning” anyone. They win by governing like adults in a burning house. By telling the truth in full sentences. By applying the law equally—even to allies. By admitting trade-offs. By fixing things people can feel in their daily lives—lower bills, safer streets, more opportunity, and less chaos.

When people feel their lives improving, unity stops being a fantasy. Because unity is not agreement; unity is shared benefit.

So here is the message Republicans must carry—not as politicians, but as stewards of a republic: We are not here to punish half the country. We are not here to redistribute decline. We are here to make America affordable, safe, productive, and free again—under the Constitution, under the law, and for everyone willing to work, build, and live in peace.

That is how Republicans win.

And that—quietly, stubbornly, lawfully—is how America wins too. [source]

Good advice.  Make sense too. Safety is one of mankind's basic needs. Without it you cannot have other higher needs. Got to have stability. GOP needs to heed Beck’s advice.

American Wins!

• US Murder Rate Headed for Record 1-Year Drop
• Border Patrol completes full year with no catch and release of migrants
• BREAKING: President Trump Announces Massive Oil Deal with Venezuela – “BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!”
• Trump: US Will Refill Strategic Petroleum Reserve Using Venezuelan Oil
• EPA: Biden-Era Emissions Rules for Coal and Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants Repealed
• Americans Are Wealthier Than 30 Years Ago. Here's the Data To Prove It.
  
• ADP: Private Sector Added 90,000 Jobs In September, Much More Than Expected
  
• GDP Revised Up To Show Stronger Growth In First Half of Year
  

And the GOP says there is no issues to run on. Really?

The Art of Virtue and the Virtue of Art

From Margarita Mooney Clayton on The Public Discourse.com (Sept. 18, 2023):

The idea that art is related to moral virtue will strike many as odd. Art, understood as self-expression or enjoyment, is a spontaneous realm apart from the calculating, choosing, and sacrificing of virtue. Art as self-expression or enjoyment must therefore allow for total freedom to explore one’s desires. By contrast, the hard-won perfection of moral virtue requires restraint and discipline. Moral virtue, in contrast to pure subjective expression, is a means of human perfection. Moral virtue is doing good; it requires effort, perhaps sacrificing something short-term for a greater material or spiritual benefit. But how does this relate to art?

Modern Romantic notions of art have emphasized the subjectivity of human creativity, purportedly to free human instincts in order to reach their fulfillment. But by separating art from reason, Romanticism opened the way for what we see today: much of the art produced today is kitsch (excessively sentimental) or transgressive (seeking to shock or produce outrage).

But in his book The Shape of the Artistic Mind, Father Brad Elliott provides a crucial philosophical grounding that will connect art to moral virtue. Rethinking the relationship between art and virtue leads to very different answers to the questions: What is art for? and What is moral virtue for?

Through a thorough review of Thomistic principles, Elliott moves from considerations about art as an imitation of God’s creation to art as a virtuous participation in God’s governance. For Elliott, both art and moral virtue are ways that humans imitate God; by imitating God, we therefore participate in his governance, as he draws all things back to himself. To some finite degree, all creation, from small living organisms like molecules to inanimate things like stones, participates in God’s being. But Elliott emphasizes that only the rational human person participates in God’s governance through the activity of acting and making.

By bringing new things into being, humans co-create with God. Yet apart from virtue, the power to bring new creations into being will be disordered. As Elliott writes, “art and morality are merely two aspects of man’s participation in the reason and creativity of God.” Hence, art seen as a practical virtue extends God’s governance over creation. Humans move toward their proper ends and contribute to their own governance through co-creation with God.

Elliott contrasts this view with that of Plato, for whom human creativity could only ever represent a shadow of the ultimate reality. For Plato, no human advancement in knowledge or art could ever get us out of the cave—we are forever seeing only shadows of reality. Elliott, on the other hand, contends that our rationality is not purely speculative or abstract. Rather, the human person has the unique capacity to take an idea and impress it upon the external world, making what we create something that shares in the spark of God’s reason. As he explains, building on St. Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson, and other Catholic thinkers, “by learning to imitate nature and her laws through skill or craft, the human intellect is also learning to imitate the Divine creator. . . . Simply put; God, nature, human intellect, and art all relate by a mysterious pattern of imitation spanning the whole range of the cosmos.”

By emphasizing the intellect as a commonality between art and moral virtue, Elliott does not disregard human enjoyment or self-expression. The problem is that not all things that humans create, think, or do are good. If we are fallen and wounded creatures, why would we expect all art to be morally good? And why do so many people seem to think that there is no objectivity in what we enjoy or how we express ourselves?

Elliott’s Christian anthropology underlies his argument. Human beings are a unity of body and soul; we have the capacity to make things and to contemplate. Elliott brilliantly describes how humans imitate God in a finite manner by bringing the outside world into the mind through contemplation and then turning outward through art. As he writes:

This bringing the outside world into the inside world terminating in the perfection of the inside, the intellect’s perfection of knowing, is the intrinsic operation of which St. Thomas speaks. By this action, the created intellect imitates God-as-artist in an unprecedented way, by imitating, in a finite manner, the oneness and unity of its creator. . . . Art or craft is the mode by which the perfection of the inside world (the act of knowledge) impresses its likeness on the outside world; perfective action moving from the inside out.

If moral virtue is imitating God’s goodness, and artistic creation is imitating God’s creation, then co-creating through art is one of the ways we participate in God’s governance. Art understood as a practical virtue makes visible the invisible inner world of the human person and the goodness of God. By participating in God’s governance, art understood as a practical virtue contributes to the right ordering of creation.

In spite of our woundedness as evidenced by laziness, idle curiosity, and self-centeredness, we can grow in virtue through art. Elliott provocatively states that “it is the virtue of art that emerges as the supreme master coordinator between man’s internal and external worlds.” The very act of writing this short essay is an expression of art as a practical virtue: I’ve fought many distractions as I read and pondered Elliott’s words and crafted my own thoughts into words to share with readers.

Art is not moral; it is not a command about how to act. Rather, art can “indirectly influence morals by providing an ‘aptness’ to act well.” Like books and articles that encapsulate ideas into form, music, paintings, and other forms of human creation invite us to contemplate God’s goodness, form our inner lives, and grow in moral virtue. By co-creating with God, we imitate his goodness, participate in his governance, and bring more of creation into the divine unity. [source]

Amen. The Good, the True, the Beautiful. Art should show the Beautiful.

Why the State Seeks to Abolish Both Tradition and History

From Mises.org (Sept. 1, 2020):

In the opening monologue of the much-beloved musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the milkman compares life for the Jewish inhabitants of the village Anatevka to the balancing act required of a fiddler scratching out a tune on a rooftop. According to Tevya’s famous allegory, the people of Anatevka are able to keep their balance thanks to their traditions. Yet as the story progresses, we see that even with tradition in place, keeping that balance is no easy task—especially when faced with rapid and unprecedented change.

Over the past century, tradition’s imperfections have led to its fade from our collective consciousness. It’s no longer viewed as a useful tool to help keep one’s balance on the roof of life, but rather is seen as a roadblock that must be removed from the path to progress. Thanks to a highly rationalist strain of Enlightenment thought beginning with thinkers such as Hobbes and Descartes, who held that all knowledge should be discovered by conscious reasoning, and culminating with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution, the importance of tradition has been greatly undermined. Thomas Paine summed up the antitraditionalist creed quite nicely when he declared that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Guided by the power of reason, and liberated from the chains of the past, these Enlightenment rationalists promised progress and increased human happiness.

Yet, discarding tradition has not led us to the realm of happiness, as promised by the prophets of progress. Between 1999 and 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, the suicide rate in the US increased 24 percent. In 2017 the US saw the highest suicide rate in fifty years. Such tragic numbers are the exact opposite of what progressives, radical feminists, and neoconservatives, all the latter-day children of the Enlightenment rationalists, led us to believe would happen if only we cast off the binds of backwards tradition and were made free to pursue our individual self-actualization. By its very nature, tradition is extremely difficult to fully erase in practice, but there is no doubt that its decline has coincided with a decline in the conceptual understanding of tradition in favor of a belief in “progress.” It is no coincidence that the weakening of the mediating institutions of civil society, the transformation of the family, an acceptance of divorce and promiscuity, all have come about during a period in which tradition and custom have come to be viewed as useless chains from the past. Understanding the role of tradition in human life may help to explain why its decline has led to so much human alienation and suffering.

Before we truly may evaluate tradition, we must first rightly define it. To many, tradition is synonymous with backwardness or an inability to embrace change. This view is rooted in the heavy societal influence of French Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who held that society and its institutions perverted man’s natural goodness. Only through liberation from these institutions could man’s innate goodness be emancipated. Yet a proper understanding of tradition is quite different.

Tradition, rightly understood, isn’t an effort to freeze the world in place. Indeed, Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman and political thinker widely considered the father of Anglo conservatism, even said that “a state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation.” Similarly, Oxford philologist and traditionalist author J.R.R. Tolkien attacked this static view of the world in Lord of the Rings in the form of his character Denethor. When asked in the midst of a crisis what he wants, Denethor replies, “I would have things as they were in all the days of my life…as in the days of my longfathers before me….But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.” In the end, Denethor burns himself alive rather than accepting change—hardly a ringing endorsement of the static mentality so often ascribed to tradition. Professor Claes Ryn at the Catholic University of America continues the Burkean tradition, warning of the danger posed by stagnant, unchanging tradition that turns into “a kind of fetish, which has little relevance to a world that will not conform and will not stand still.” Rather, Ryn says, continuing tradition “cannot be the mere imitation or repetition of old patterns. It must be a fresh, vital force in the present.”

So if tradition is not merely a blind clinging to the past in an attempt to stop the future, what is it? A respect for tradition, properly understood, is simply an acknowledgment of the fact, as explained by conservative author Russell Kirk, “that modern people are dwarves on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time.” In other words, tradition recognizes that knowledge and wisdom are accumulated through time, and not—in contrast to popular belief—able to be purely rationally derived and developed by one person or generation in time. Society itself, in all its complexity, is the result of this historical process, not the result of a single generation constructing itself on a blank slate.

The best way to think about tradition is to view it like capital accumulation in economics. The contemporary world enjoys unprecedented wealth, because, in the past, our ancestors chose to accumulate capital—or goods used to produce other goods. As the capital stock has grown, so too has the productive capacity of our economy.

Similarly, knowledge and wisdom are accumulated through countless centuries of trial and error. Rejecting the wisdom of the past is just as foolish as each new generation seeking to start industrial society over again from scratch. This analogy is not original, but comes straight from Burke himself, who wrote that “we are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”

Friedrich Hayek argued that there are two views about the nature of society. There are the rationalist constructivists, who contend “that all the useful human institutions were, and ought to be, deliberate creations of conscious reason.” To them, tradition is irrelevant, since man is capable of structuring all of life without past experience and wisdom. Every generation, then, is capable of formulating and acting on all knowledge independently. In contrast, there are those nonconstructivist rationalists, whom Hayek identifies as “more modest and less ambitious.” This school, in the words of Professor Paul Cliteur at Leiden University, “assumes that, in all our thinking, we are guided by rules of which we are not aware, and that, therefore, our conscious reason can always take account of only some of the circumstances which determine our actions.” Because the power of human understanding is limited, it is impossible for us to account for all of the relevant knowledge when making a decision.

However, Hayek points out that we are not left to wallow completely in ignorance. Rather, our ancestors have passed down abstract rules and guides that “embody the experience of many more trials and errors than any individual mind could acquire.” Hayek, drawing upon Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, speaks of the benefit derived from a social order in which members obey abstract rules “even without understanding their significance.” This is in contrast to one in which such rules that represent the accumulated experience of the past are discarded in favor of seeking to base conduct on the information only immediately available to a single person or even a group.

It is quite easy to see that—for at least the past century—the rationalist constructivists, or the New Jacobins, as Claes Ryn calls them (after the original Jacobins in the French Revolution, who attempted to replace traditional institutions with their rationally planned society), have been culturally ascendant. The past, if it is considered at all, is often viewed as anachronistic and unenlightened, as something to be forgotten or even purged. But the negative consequences of this Jacobin mentality range from the merely inconvenient to the disastrous.

As Tevye wisely said in Fiddler on the Roof, tradition is a tool that helps people maintain their balance in life. By trying to rely solely on a constructivist form of reason, individuals have abandoned and weakened many traditional institutions, such as family, religion, and community that are an important ingredient to a stable and happy life. In his work The Quest for Community, sociologist Robert Nisbet chronicled the decline of community and the resulting alienation and decay of the social fabric. He directly attributes this loss to the rationalist constructivist perspective. In Nisbet’s words, “the modern release of the individual from traditional ties of class, religion, and kinship has made him free; but on the testimony of innumerable works in our age, this freedom is accompanied not by the sense of creative release but by the sense of disenchantment and alienation.”

The facts validate this claim. A Heritage Foundation report that compiled data from dozens of studies correlated religious practice with numerous positive outcomes. Religious practitioners experienced greater marital and familial stability, a lower risk of suicide, less likelihood of committing crimes, and longer life expectancy. Similarly, as Professor Lauren Hall at the Rochester Institute of Technology documents in her book Family and the Politics of Moderation, the family unit plays an important balancing role in society. It does this by restraining and moderating extreme collectivism and individualism, and by integrating the individual into a community. According to Hall, “a family consisting of a monogamous couple and two or more children” is best able to carry out the social functions of the family that promote both the well-being of the individual and the broader community. However, the Pew Research Center shockingly reports that “if current trends continue, 25 percent of young adults in the most recent cohort (ages 25 to 34 in 2010) will have never married by 2030. That would be the highest share in modern history.”

On a larger scale, a respect for tradition and the limits of human reason precludes attempts at “wiping the slate clean” and building the perfect planned society from scratch. One need only look at the horrifying results of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward to see what can happen when tradition and humble rationalism are abandoned.

Even if some libertarians are skeptical of the benefits of tradition on a personal level, they should be greatly concerned with its consequences on a societal level. When institutions that provide existential meaning are undermined, such as the family, atomized individuals often turn to the state and totalizing political movements for meaning. Similarly, the extermination of tradition is necessary for the triumph of totalitarian regimes. As Michael Federici of Middle Tennessee State University has argued concerning George Orwell’s 1984, “Oceania is a society governed by a totalitarian authority that aims to create complete obedience to the state. To accomplish this objective, it is necessary to destroy historical consciousness and old ways of life. Most everyone in Oceania has lost memory of historical life.” Winston Smith is able to recognize and resist the tyrannical regime, because he still maintains a shred of historical memory, and with that connection is able to see through the lies and propaganda. “He remembers a time when life was different, when social life was not controlled by the state.”

Today our society is wracked by germinal totalitarians eager to destroy history. Ostensibly this is in the name of justice, but this destruction and historical desecration are little more than a tactic for securing power for themselves. America is supposedly infected on the genetic level with unforgivable sins of racism and oppression and those seeking to destroy history conveniently have the solution: hand over power to them to facilitate our collective reeducation and penance. By failing to recognize the important role that tradition serves by preserving historical consciousness we aid and abet the rise of the forces currently seeking the complete overthrow of our society and the complete annihilation of our traditional rights and liberties.

Again, tradition is not mere stasis. The wisdom and knowledge it hands down to us is not fixed for all times and all places. Like all of society, it adapts and changes over time. According to Ryn, “tradition has to come alive in the here and now through the creativity of individuals who recognize both humanity’s dependence on the best of the past and the needs and opportunities offered by changed circumstances.”

Our task going forward is to both revitalize the decaying and forgotten stock of reason that has been passed down to us, and to forge ahead into the future. Tradition is by no means a perfect tool, and understanding and adapting it is no easy task, but properly understood, it is the best tool we have to face and weather the constantly changing circumstances of life and to preserve our hard-won liberties. [source]

Tradition is the anchor of society. Without it society drifts aimlessly. The collectivists want to replace tradition with their own, but the replacement is far, far worse because they don’t understand how to create another correctly.