The dictionary definition of tradition is “the transmission of custom or belief from generation to generation.” Many thinkers are reaching for the old and traditional as a way to move forward in a collapsing world. One of the first to look at what has been lost in modernity and science was ecofeminism Carolyn Merchant who argued that the scientific revolution made nature into an object, killing it. I think much of the revival of traditional thinking is the search for eternal values, to say something about life that is more than a vulgar materialist experiment with life as a machine.
I do think that on a certain level, life is a machine, but it is so much more. Having a child has taught me that much of life is totally unknowable and that even my cat and dog have something about them bigger than the workings of their internal organs. There is something about life and living that is beyond any kind of human knowledge, the spirit or pneuma, can’t be known, but we can know it exists.
This is why life must be protected and fostered; it must be fostered because there is something special about the pneuma that we can never understand. It must be fostered and protected for the sole reason that we don’t understand it, like the love of a child or pet, it is beyond explanation and that is why it is special, maybe in it’s purest form the essence of life in the universe, the pneuma.
These traditions are practical, if flawed, steps rooted in generations of experience to protect and foster life. Sometimes these steps are absolutely wrong, such as the focus on specific types of family as the correct way to foster life. Cross-culturally many types of family exist on the globe, but the universal except within late modernity, is that the family exists universially.
I agree with a return to tradition, but I also think we need to recognize that there are many traditions globally that foster and protect life and that there is not one way. People go to war over the idea that there is one way, but there are many ways. We must recognize those ways in other traditions and learn from them, not destroy them.
I offer here the ways of the redneck, our values, rooted in generations of lived experience:
Toughness
Resilience
Honesty
Friendship
Freedom
Let’s not have a discussion about which tradition is correct, but how we can learn from each others traditions.
Just found your work, and it speaks to me so deeply right now! I'm also a southerner who has spent the last few years rethinking my leftist values. Don't get me wrong. I'm still very much a leftist, probably an anarchist, even, but there are some traditionally conservative values, on which I'm now wondering why right wingers get to have the monopoly. Anyway, looking forward to reading more of your work.