Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 5 – Many governments
around the world are promoting what they call a return to traditional values,
but few of them recognize the most important fact about such efforts: Unless traditions
are integrated into modernity, the Open Expanse telegram channel says, they
will prove a disaster as has already happened in Cambodia, Afghanistan, China
and Iran.
In places where people feel that
change has come to quickly, they often look back to the past and to traditional
values as a refuge, the telegram channel says. And governments often make use
of this especially if they are ideologically conservative in the first place (t.me/openexpanse/26608 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=6932D20E55019).
What many of the peoples and
governments forget is that “the traditional world is not an idyllic space of ‘eternal
truths’ but a specific social formation: patriarchal families, harsh
hierarchies, low mobility, an agrarian economy, dependence on natural cycles
and an enormous amount of labor by hand.”
In that past, Open Expanse says, “the
family was large not because of these values but because children provided free
labor and helped the family to survive. Morality then was strict because the
survival of the community depended on it. And life then was not hurried because
speed was impossible.”
“But now, humanity lives in a world
which is maintained by intensive energy flows, global logistical chains, mass
education, the most complex professional specialization and cities where a
large part of the population and the economy is concentrated.” Returning to a
traditional social structure while preserving the current level of life is “impossible.”
Nonetheless, in radical ways or less
radical ones, those who have tried to do just that have demonstrated that such
a course was and is “not simply a utopia. It became [and will become again] a
catastrophe,” as Cambodia, China, Afghanistan, Iran and other countries who
have adopted radical methods in the pursuit of that goal have shown.
Meanwhile, “attempts at social
traditionalism in Europe and the US, where conservative forces are trying to
return ‘the old order,’ by limiting immigration or restoring the ideals of the
classical family, look a little less dramatic. But even here the same logic
holds: rhetoric returns the symbols but doesn’t change the structures.”
According to Open Expanse,
“the main mistake of forced traditionalism is that it attempts to replace
modernization processes with moral prescriptions. But morality is a consequence
of the material order, not its cause. The family changes because the cost of
raising children and the role of women have changed.”
“Society becomes individualistic
because the infrastructure allows individuals to live independently. Culture
becomes flexible because instant communication exists in the world. It is
impossible to restore the old order without destroying the new structures. And
the destruction of new structures is always a path to crisis”
The telegram channel continues: “A
return to traditions becomes an instrument of power in places where power is
afraid of or ceases to see the future. Under the guise of tradition, censorship
is strengthened, dissent is suppressed, freedoms are restricted, and competence
is replaced by ideology.”
And Open
Expanse concludes that “tradition, transformed into a tool of political
control, ceases to be tradition. It turns into a ritual, a decoration, a
gesture, a dogma. And a society that tries to live within such a dogma
gradually (and over time, with increasing speed) loses its ability to develop.”
In sum, “preserving
traditions is possible – but only as an internal source of energy, and not as a
social regulation. Traditions can inspire, but they cannot govern an industrial
society. They can be an integral part of identity but not a substitute for
modernization mechanisms. They can support values, but not dictate their rules
to the economy or demography.”
