The modern liberal rejection of tradition

What? This man is not on our list of Modern Wise Men? What is wrong with the Induction Committee? Oh, wait. That's me. Well we won't be too critical then.

Here is Jim Kalb, author of the seminal The Tyranny of Liberalism, on the modern liberal rejection of tradition:

The problems among us today are unusually radical. People aren't dissatisfied with this tradition or that, or at a loss how to achieve old goals in new settings. Instead, they want to reject the authority of tradition as such, along with the goods it proposes. They adopt views like liberalism that claim to possess a universal rationality that trumps all tradition, and insist that the only acceptable standard for social life is giving people what they want, as much and as equally as possible. Hence the California Proposition 8 decision that declared legal recognition of marriage unconstitutional.

The current situation results from an ever-greater insistence on a clear but extremely limited understanding of rationality that tells us that knowledge and conduct must be modeled on modern natural science and technology. That understanding works well if you're putting a man on the moon, not so well if you're figuring out how to live and relate to other people. It can't deal with identities, essences, or ultimate ends, so it has no way to make sense of our lives and those of others. The result is that belief and conduct lose their ability to order human life in a satisfying and non-arbitrary way.

That means the current state of affairs isn't going to last, and we'll have to go on to something else. Some would describe the current situation as the collapse of the Western tradition. I think it's better to describe it as the distortion and suppression of that tradition as a whole by part of it that has become too dominant. The scientistic outlook has to be ditched in any event, since it's at odds with the needs of human life. Once that's done the obvious way to proceed is to stick with the remainder--actually by far the greater part--of the tradition of the West, and try to bring it into a workable form. We can't get by without a tradition, the tradition of the West is our tradition, and there's no superior one to adhere to. So isn't the way forward obvious?

Read the rest on his blog here.