Bret Stevens on the Meaning of Tradition By Chris Knight

      Bret Stevens has “pipe meditations,” where, as smoking is now beyond the pale, he gets some good tobacco, and lights up his pipe, sitting by the fire in his philosopher’s chair, with his smoking jacket on, and tells us like it is. Here are some pipe meditations on the meaning of tradition from a pro-northern European perspective:

  http://www.amerika.org/politics/pipe-meditations-july-6-2019/

“Pipe tobacco blends represent a different idea. They seek an order which transcends the ages, much as conservatives seek order generally where the Left seeks equality (individualism). You want to be able to smoke what your great-grandfather smoked, and pass it down to your grandson, because we know people and how we like our intoxicants, but in true time-honored form, have chosen the gentlest versions of these and made them excellent, like Royal Yacht.

This shows us the nature of tradition. Step one is ego-death; you realize that you are simply a point in time along a long line, and that ultimately none of our concerns here matter that much. This helps, since you stop worrying about whether you got the right car or if your house is the best on the block. The big thing is to be part of something big.

After that, you start to see the wisdom in order beyond the individual. You benefit most from a society that is stable and part of a thriving civilization, so that it carries on the things you enjoy and anything good that you do. If you make a stone river bridge in your hometown, it should be there for centuries or longer, as people fix and maintain it, keeping it alive just like the population around it, even as individual stones and humans drop out over time.

Finally, you see the wisdom in the unchanging. You want to live in basically the same society as your great-grandfather. The rules are known, as are the conditions of success, this way, and you can rely on things being familiar and comforting instead of constantly being forced into the role of re-interpreting and re-adapting to an outside world that is both not that interesting and not in need of new solutions.

For all of our technology, humans peaked with the hot water shower. At that point, we had the rudiments of medicine, so that the injured could survive and the healthy would do fine; we erred when we let medicine save the genetically and biologically doomed, as now they have reproduced and, big surprise, we have more sickly people among us than ever before (this has been exacerbated by ethnic mixture among Europeans; an Irish-German has less genetic continuity than a German or English-German). We had working cities, but not too large. We had good and fulfilling lives.

Since that time, we have done nothing but add more complexity to lives that need none of it. We do not need immigration or diversity; we do not need thousands of movies; we do not need endless insurance, bureaucracy, red tape, and regulations. These things merely make life ugly using the pretext of defending the helpless against themselves, but really simply empowering a class of professional parasites to live off of us as lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, and media talking heads. These people add nothing to life, and take away a good bit of our time.

Perhaps the essence of tradition consists of looking inward and finding your place in the universe. Modernity loves to pitch us the snake oil salesman yarn about how we can be anything just for wishing it, or how the future is ours, as if we might win some vast lottery. In reality, each of us has a place that makes sense for our abilities and inclinations, and will be happiest there, as masters of a small domain instead of yet another face in the crowd screaming for a chance to rule the world, as people seem to, these days.

Tradition means love of the unchanging, for it is strong where we are weak, and desire for a strong social order so that the assorted parasites, sociopaths, neurotics, international investors, merchants, religious fanatics, schizoids, and blockhead nerds do not tear it down. Humans will destroy anything in their desire to be significant, but the humans that actually do great things get over their desire to be powerful, and focus on what might be done to improve our human role in things. We can always refine our scholarship, improve our literature, write great symphonies, develop new science and technology, create more wealth, and clean up and order our communities so that they resemble an outgrowth of nature instead of an alien, self-conscious human thing. There are only a few great mountains to climb, however, and they have already been climbed.”

     This puts things in perspective. Really much of life is utterly pointless unless we can leave a legacy, which is all about preserving a heritage. Mere accumulation of goodies means little when death suddenly comes.

     I recall a friend telling me that his son was ashamed of his house, and by implication, him, because it did not have all of the mod-cons as the father actually worked in the environmental movement as a lawyer, in one of the few agencies that helped people with day to day problems. The son was at university and got free everything, but was still feeling resentful. Consequently, the father, doing his bit for the community, he did not get the peak salary that lawyers taking people down get. He son had a girlfriend (now long gone) whose parents were in the real estate  sector, selling off Australia to wealthy overseas buyers. I hold my friend that as painful as it was, he should unload on his son, as such a woman would eventually lead to him working like a slave, and she would no doubt do the usual hypergamy thing, and find someone else once his vital essence was drunk. My goodness, there is even a wiki page on this:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

     Further, kick the parasite son out into the real world, where he can work and study, and see if his spooner girlfriend still loves him, as he learns the real lessons of the world. As it turned out, the girlfriend found a rich guy, dumped the lad, and she went up the food chain. It is sad that this sort of family treason exists, but expected in peak degeneracy.