Traditionalism: Just a fancy name for oppression
By: Christopher Laine
Tags: Politics, Freedom, History, Society, Philosophy

In the 80s, a growing conservative Christian movement out of the US embraced and espoused traditionalism in religion. The Traditional Values Coalition emerged as a far-right reaction to what it saw as society turned permissive and debased.

Founded by Rev. Louis P. Sheldon to oppose LGBTQ rights, the Traditional Values Coalition was a loosely-affiliated group of Christian religious groups keen on seeing the “Old Time Religion” return to full primacy across the US and the Western world.

America and most Western societies, they stated, were based on Christian religion and ‘values’. These, they claimed, were being toppled in favour of a multicultural, progressive society which was the source of all our ills.

As such, since its founding, the Coalition fought tooth and nail to see their traditionalist Christian vision return. What does that look like? While never 100% explicit in terms of what that idealised Christian nation would look like, the Coalition did have some ideas. From Wikipedia, the Great and Powerful

Right to life (against abortion and euthanasia but in favor of capital punishment) Sexual fidelity in marriage and abstinence before marriage Opposition to homosexuality and “other deviant sexual behaviors” Opposition to pornography Patriotism (supporting national boundaries, the armed forces, political participation, free enterprise, limited government, low taxes, and personal responsibility) Opposition to “liberal” immigration reform without first securing the U.S.-Mexico border Freedom of Christians’ attempt to convert non-Christians Cleanness from addictive behaviors (with opposition to gambling, the legalization of addictive drugs, alcohol, and smoking)

You get the idea. Let’s get back to the ‘good times’ of Judeo-Christian morality and mores.

These are just a few tastes of traditionalism. Have a look around. The would-be new Caliphate, known as ISIS, was an offshoot of such traditionalist thought in Islam. Russia and other Eastern European nations have used traditionalist reasoning in recent years to make homosexuality a crime. Judaism’s far-right sects are fraught in oppressive policies and beliefs, much of them driven by traditionalist thinking. Find a dictator, a religious demagogue, an oppressor, and traditionalism isn’t far away.

Why Traditionalism is a Crock

Let’s break this down as quickly and cleanly as possible. All traditionalism is ultimately a critique of modernity / progress. It claims that things were better ‘back in the day’, and that we need to get back to that. Our society is overrun in debauchery and decay, and that’s why we’re miserable.

So let’s examine this a moment, shall we?

A Golden Age for whom?

Let’s start with the fundamental premise of a “Golden Age”, where everyone was happy and fulfilled and knew their place, where the physical and the metaphysical merged into a societal Nirvana.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Look first at the life of peasants, those making up the lion’s share of society (approx 85% of the population).

“It is the custom in England, as with other countries, for the nobility to have great power over the common people, who are serfs. This means that they are bound by law and custom to plough the field of their masters, harvest the corn, gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain; they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood, and perform all manner of tasks of this kind.”

— written 1395

Peasants owed allegiance and complete docility to the nobility, religious leaders and their hired goons. Unquestioning fealty and obedience were strictly enforced. Any dissent immediately led to their imprisonment or execution, irrespective of the circumstances.

Peasants were expected not only be servile and do all the work, but to also pay tax / tribute to their liege lords and the church. Peasants had to pay rent for use of the land to their lord as well as pay a tax to the church called a tithe. This was a tax on all of the farm produce they had produced in that year. A tithe was 10% of the value of what was farmed.

Peasants were expected to work for free on Church land, growing crops for the clergy free of charge, time which they could have used growing their own crops.

All peasants worked six days, seven if it was deemed ‘right and just’ by either their lord or by the clergy. There were no weekends, very few festival days, and work went on from before the sun came up to after it went down.

Due to harsh working conditions, mistreatment, malnutrition, and the broad effects of poverty, few if any peasants lived to see their 40th year of life.

Religion had a veritable death grip on society. All castes were ultimately beholden to the church, royalty included. The Church ruled everything and everyone. No ruler could be said to be legitimate unless ‘anointed by God’, which of course was doled out from the clergy as they saw fit.

Any belief systems which were in any way variant from those of the Church were considered heresy, apostasy, or witchcraft, and were punished ruthlessly. Any and all ‘deviance’ sexually, or any women seen as getting out of their station were ruthlessly punished, publicly flogged, burned at the stake, or imprisoned for life.

Public education and individual liberty were, of course, non-existent. Justice did not exist for peasants when it came to any dispute with nobility or the church. One was superior and the other was not. God and religion were wielded as a club against any thought of freedom or self-determination.

Irrespective of where in the world you look, traditional societies were hardly paradise for the masses. One need only peruse the history of civilisation to find traditional societies of the past as invariably cruel, brutish and short for the majority of humanity. A sliver of powerful few ruled over the top, keeping any and all power and spoils for themselves. From Feudal Japan to the Islamic Empire to Western Europe’s medieval age, we see suffering and privation, a repressive and tyrannical society meant only for the rich, the landed, and the powerful. If you can imagine all of us living in North Korea under the Glorious Leader, you start to get some semblance of what traditionalists believe is a Golden Age.

What they mean by a Golden Age is really a Golden Age for them, for it clear any such society set up would put them in a vaunted station. It is highly unlikely any traditionalist would relegate themselves to the station of the unwashed, oppressed and battered masses.

Modernity was a natural reaction to Tradition

With the lives of the majority of humanity in medieval Church/State-imposed hell on earth, it is not surprising that something else would eventually rise up to overthrow the old order. A society thus structured as were traditional ones were unjust and repressive. With the passage of time and the advance of knowledge, so came the desire for individual freedom from the masters. Slow but inexorable, voices and revolts for change began to show themselves across traditional societies.

The basic nature of the old-world ways was one of blatant inequality and oppression. All the pretty words of traditionalists like Evola cannot unwrite historical fact. As the centuries and millenia rolled on, peasant revolts grew in size and frequency, all of it leading up to the advent of the modern age.

Peruse this list of peasant revolts. In and around the mid 14th century, we see a massive increase in the peasantry fighting back.

Why? The fall of traditional social orders had many factors, but a clear driver was that the majority of people were fed up with their treatment by their ‘betters’. Peasants revolted, or moved to towns where they could secure a better life for themselves. The scientific revolution beginning in the Renaissance led to the Age of Reason, a time when logic and science openly questioned such notions as the divine right of nobility, the unquestioned status of the Church.

As species evolve, so do societies. With the advancements of the human race in science and technology, so came societal changes with them.

Modernity is the natural order of progression from traditional societies, not an aberration of them. As knowledge, science, and reason spread, so did the understanding that the traditional societies were made for kings and popes, lords and priests, never for the beaten millions who were the real source of power.

Religious Traditionalism: That Old Time Religion was no Heaven on Earth

Let’s fast-forward past medieval times into modernity. Anyone selling the idea that traditional religion was the binding glue which made a moral and healthy society tick is either deluding themselves or trying to sell you something (likely both).

Fundamentalism, the traditionalist branch of religion, has been defined as ‘ideological intransigence’, in essence a complete unwillingness to accept anything which differs or contradicts religious texts or leaders. The words of the Bible / Koran / The Upanishads are TRUE. They are FACT. Any questioning of the Divine inspiration of their words from the Golden Past is heresy.

Fundamentalist religion has been the reactionary force against any number of scientific discoveries and social advancements, in particular those which grant women, minorities, and LGBTQ people any semblance of equality with the society’s majority population of men.

Fundamentalism in religion has been linked to oppression and violence against women and LGBTQ, repression of reproductive rights, and any number of hard pushes to deny basic human rights to anyone they deem ‘immoral’ or ‘degenerate’.

In the sciences, fundamentalism has been a driving force against the teaching of evolution, the accuracy of the scientific age of the earth, stem cell research, just to name a few. Instead, such religious adherents would have us revert to an intellectual dark age, in which the earth is a mere 6,000 years old, humans are the product of divine construction, and any/all science which would usurp the ‘Will of God’ are actively suppressed at every turn.

The Flat Earth movement, that fringe rabble of tin foil hats who claim science is a lie, the Earth is flat and gravity doesn’t exist (“Things just fall” is their answer), has its roots in traditionalist religion, believing that the round earth ‘hoax’ was set up to turn people away from God.

Religious traditionalists want nothing more than to undo any progress or scientific discoveries which run counter to their beliefs. From the Catholic Church and its heresy trial against Galileo, to the Salem witch trials, all the way down to the near-countless attempts by these groups in modern times to stop any and all advances of women’s and LGBTQ rights, one must look askance at any attempt to paint traditionalist religion in any light other than repressive.

Traditionalism: A philosophy based in fear, meant only for the few

In the final equation, when one looks at traditionalist movements, one sees a fear-based reaction to change. Rather than tackle the complexities of our modern society and civilisation, traditionalists recoil from the task, seeking to force our species back to the worst humanity has to offer. “Back to the past” is a slogan with its roots in a terror of the inevitable chaos of the present. The past always feels more secure, for everyone thinks better of that which is dead and gone.

Fear drives traditionalists to seek simple, hard-and-fast rules to the woes of life. Far easier is the path of enforcing draconian rule over the masses than to truly deal with the varying ebb and flow of post-modern human interactions. While anyone would agree that we face a wide swathe of social ills which are the byproduct of modern society, traditionalist thinking imagines that those social ills can be cured with a toxic brew made of subjugation, superstition, and unquestioning obedience to those in power.

Which brings us to the most important point of all: Traditionalism is, like so many despotic philosophies, simply a pretense for the rule of the very few over the very many.

No more equality, no more social justice for all, no more progress. Those who try to push traditionalism on us are corrupt seekers of power. It is they who believe themselves to be our betters, and would seek to create once more the kind of barbaric and undemocratic societies most of us look upon with revulsion and dread.