Tradition (definition)

New Culture, New Right : Tradition

Michael O'MEARA

Utdrag från New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, s.104-106.

New Right identitarians believe a people is a living organism. As such, it can die. To guard against this, a people needs a common heritage to define itself and maintain its will to live together. In this sense, tradition serves as the scaffolding around which a people constitutes itself. If there is no heritage -- no transmission (traditio) from one generation to another -- a people has nothing to live for and no reason to remain together. [67] It is, then, as the horizon against which a people's existence is worked out that tradition imparts purpose to its common endeavors. As Gehlen writes, "without it one can keep restlessly active . . . and yet lack any inner sense that all this busyness carries any moral significance." [68] This is why identitarians believe Europe's pagan, mythic traditions are key to its renaissance.

The revival of these traditions, however, faces an awesome array of countervailing forces, for the modern order is premised not only on the belief that reflexive reason frees man from tradition and hence from the need to root his identity in it, but that the rapidly accelerating rate of change and innovation characteristic of modernity, especially late modernity, deprives traditional meanings and practices of their former relevance. [69] Against this dismissive rationalism, New Rightists hold that tradition is the basis of, not an obstacle, to all that man can achieve in the present. This was true 30,000 years ago; it is, they claim, still true today. Like the larger culture, of which they are an intregal part, traditions embody the habits and beliefs of the people who uphold them. They are thus part of a living presence -- and not simply vestiges of the past. And because they arise organically, as experience, habit, and value unconsciously shape what are culturally acceptable and individually satisfying modes of behavior, no amount of reason or theoretical modelling can substitute for them. As such, traditions arise and are sustained by a vitality distinct to those who uphold them; a people no more chooses its traditions than "it chooses the color of its hair or eyes" (Gustave Le Bon). On this count, Benoist describes tradition as that historically formed structure reflecting the perennial in a people's culture. [70] This situates it beyond time, representing the imperishable in a people's orientation to the world. Tradition in this sense serves to encode those defining principles that maintain a people in its timelessness, establishing the frame of its collective consciousness and the order of its collective being. At the same time, it conditions a people's view of its world, giving permanence to its abiding values and shaping the growth of its identity, as it is subject to the forces of time and change. Its loss can thus never be a step forward, but only backwards, toward devitalization and decline.

The existential centrality of tradition is especially evident in the fact that many, especially the most important, European traditions share a common origin, reaching back to the crucible of Indo-European civilization (subject of the next chapter). While varying in detail among the different European families, many of these traditions express a common relationship to the larger world, linking the continent's different national families through rituals, customs, and norms which speak to kindred sensibilities and common origins. As the greatest of its identitarian historians, Dominique Venner, writes: "To live according to tradition is to conform to the ideal it incarnates, to cultivate excellence according to its standard, to rediscover its roots, to transmit its heritage, to be in solidarity with the people who uphold it." [71] Without tradition's persistence, there would, in truth, be no Europe, for the historical, cultural, and genetic bonds Europeans share with their ancestors would otherwise be impossible to sustain.

Tradition in this sense has little to do with "traditionalism" -- which freezes "eternal" truths in sterile, lifeless forms. Nor is it necessarily the same as traditions. "Tradure," its Latin root, means to "translate" and in this sense tradition is the means by which innovation is rendered into an idiom conversant with the larger heritage. [72] Russell Kirk aptly describes it as the vital force that influences the future in filtering out all that is mistaken in innovation and doing so in a way which reaffirms whatever is viable in the past. [73] This makes tradition compatible with modern reflectivity, in that thought and action are constantly refracted back upon one another. But more than its reflective function, tradition creates that sense of continuity which permits the discontinuity of events to appear as aspects of a single meaningful experience. As such, it denotes not the past, but that which stands outside of and beyond time. All healthy societies tend thus to balance tradition and innovation, for without the latter, a society would ossify, losing its capacity to adapt to altering conditions; with only innovation, it risks anarchy, with nothing allowed to settle or take effect. The opposite of tradition, Venner notes, is not modernity, but nihilism. [74] (The primitive, disoriented behaviors characteristic of contemporary society, identitarians contend, are one obvious consequence of its loss). The meanings and identities forged in the past and perpetuated in tradition need, however, to be reaffirmed in every generation. For tradition exists only in the living and remains vital only in its renewal. [75]

The New Right's effort to revive the forces of tradition and make Europeans conscious of their shared origins has taken several forms. Early on, Benoist and the GRECE's Commission des Traditions undertook a study of European first names, determining which were native to Europe and which were imports, what they signify, and what importance should be attached them. Because naming positions a child "as the referent in the story recounted by those around him," it is a cultural practice of considerable implication. Benoist and the historian Pierre Vial have also produced a book length study on the all-important but reluctantly discussed issue of death, examining the ways Europeans have thought of, mourned, and reconciled themselves with it. Other Grécistes have produced monographs on traditional rites (such as those associated with Christmas and the solstice), on legends and mythology, on totem figures (like horses and wolves), and on various holidays and customs. But the most important facet of the GRECE's effort in this field occurred between 1975 and 1983 in an irregular bulletin titled GRECE/Tradition and later published as a single massive volume, Les traditions d'Europe. These studies attempted a synoptic history of those popular traditions associated with the seasonal cycles that once governed the rhythms of European life. Although centuries, in some cases, millennia, old, these traditions are presently on the verge of disappearing, as the modern world renders the seasons, days, and hours homogeneous and interchangeable. [76]

In rescuing such traditions from oblivion, the GRECE, like other New Right organizations, pursues several goals. Many of the most important traditions tend to be trans-European. While varying from nation to nation and from one national region to another, their common elements indicate that, in addition to Europe's high culture, the continent's popular culture possesses a genuinely European dimension. Their study also reveals the larger significance, often of pagan or mythic origins, of the most fundamental facets of European life: of holidays and festivals, Christmas cards and Easter eggs, Christian rites, important religious heresies and literary movements, May Day and Mothers' Day, artistic styles, and innumerable other quotidian concerns. And because they frequently allude to a pre-Christian past, having grown out of the beliefs of the continent's Indo-European founders, Grécistes emphasize the degree to which they illuminate the depth of Europe's primordial culture. [77] In reviving these traditions, they seek therefore to reacquaint Europeans with the pre-modern sensibility still affecting current cultural practices. This is especially evident in the New Right's philosophy of history.

67. Friedrich Nietzsche: "Tradition arose without regard for good or evil or any immanent categorical imperative, but above all in order to preserve a community, a people." See Human, All Too Human, op. cit., §6. Also Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, tr. by J. Synder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 120-21, 132.

68. Arnold Gehlen, Man in the Age of Technology, tr. by P. Lipscomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 68.

69. Even while accepting that the "reflectivity" of modern social life entails on-going changes and that knowledge depends on new information and new perceptions, New Rightists emphasize that meaning and identity are only weakly tied to reflectivity. Modernity may, therefore, have freed man from the customs and traditions that once shaped his behavioral modes, but no amount of self-reflectivity can substitute for those non-rational facets of history and culture that define man's innermost identity, sustaining the meanings that infuse his life with significance. Only an abstract, decontextualized concept of man -- the self as a purely reflexive project -- renders tradition entirely superfluous.

70. Benoist, Les idées à l'endroit, op. cit., p. 115.

71. Venner, Histoire et tradition des européens, op. cit., p. 49. Also Dominique Venner, "La tradition, une idée d'avenir," in Relève politique 2 (Spring 2002).

72. Herte, "La question religieuse," op. cit.

73. Russell Kirk, "The Importance of Tradition" (1989), in Joseph Scotchie, ed., The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999), p. 61.

74. Venner, Histoire et tradition des européennes, op. cit., p. 17; Alain de Benoist, Vu de Droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines, 5th ed. (Paris: Copernic, 1979), p. 156.

75. Xavier Saint-Delphin and Luc Saint-Etienne, "La Droite et la religion," in A. Guyot-Jeannin, ed., Aux sources de la Droite: Pour en finir avec les clichés (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 2000),

76. Alain de Benoist, Les traditions d'Europe, 2nd ed. (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1996), G/T #13; Alain de Benoist, Le guide practique des prénons (Paris: Enfants Magazine, 1979); Alain de Benoist and Pierre Vial, Le Mort: Traditions populaires/Histoire et actualité (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1983); Alain de Benoist, Fêter Noël (Paris: Atlas-Edena, 1982); Jean Mabire and Pierre Vial, Les solstices. Histoire et actualité (Paris: GRECE, 1975); Jean Mabire, Les dieux maudits: Récits de mythologie nordique (Paris: Copernic, 1978). Most of the GRECE's work on tradition is to be found in Eléments and Nouvelle Ecole and is too numerous to cite.

77. Cf. Jérémie Benoit, Le paganisme indo-européen (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 2001).

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