Evolutionary Traditionalism

Rene Guenon defined Western thought in Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines as a subset of Eastern thought, a branch diverging from the trunk. As he describes it, “It is almost as if the Greeks, at a moment when they were about to disappear from history, wished to avenge themselves for their own incomprehension by imposing on a whole section of mankind the limitation of their own mental horizon.” In his narrative, Hellenic Greece and the Renaissance were periods in which Tradition declined in the West, culminating in the our final rejection of Tradition in the French Revolution.

While most Radical Traditionalists are content to vilify America in favor of Europe, Guenon went a step farther, vilifying the Occidental in favor of the Oriental on the same grounds. To summarize, he envisions the East as wise, esoteric, and harmonious as opposed to a West that’s relatively more knowledgeable, exoteric, and Faustian. He chose a side, considering the East superior to the West. He considered Eastern meditation superior to Western research. In fact, this Frenchman was so impressed with the East that he turned his back on his own people, converted to Islam, moved to Egypt, and became a Sufi mystic.

His dichotomy between knowledge and wisdom pervades both the Modern and Traditional worldviews. But what if both our scientific research and our sacred texts are separate paths to a convergent truth? Given how incomplete and corrupted both our body of knowledge and our preserved Traditions are, it’s no wonder they superficially appear irreconcilable.

In the abstract, this suggests that the optimal path forward is one of reconciliation and synthesis: viewing research and technology through the prism of Tradition and viewing Tradition through the prism of research and technology. To the secular Western man with the evolutionary worldview, this is a heretical muddling of the quest for knowledge with mystical bullshit. To the man with a variation of the Traditional worldview, this is a heretical muddling of the sacred with the profane. I call it evolutionary traditionalism.

Traditions can be understood on one level as evolved collections of memes, memeplexes that have been adapted through millions of iterations and hundreds of generations to integrate truths and practices transcending what the individual adherents could comprehend. As an example, ritualizing and restricting sexuality is a hallmark of the more ancient Traditions. None of them, to my knowledge, explicitly state that these practices are necessary adaptations to the crowded and sedentary habitats in which they emerged.

The aforementioned example is a relatively obvious one that was made plain by the abortive Sexual Revolution, culminating in the disastrous AIDS epidemic. But just as previous generations were incapable of comprehending that, we must concede that there are emergent systems and processes in Tradition that transcend our own powers of comprehension. It’s doubtful that any one sentient mind could ever truly fathom the emergent effect of millions of sentient minds throughout the centuries operating as one.

However, I could potentially use my sentience, including tools for arriving at knowledge like formal logic and the scientific method, to leave Tradition a bit less incomplete and corrupt than I found it. Tradition in the West is on a death spiral, and the West itself will die with it. I believe it’s critically important that we take on the challenge of reviving it not as architects of a new ideology, but as surgeons, carefully and patiently working to repair systems we can’t hope to fully comprehend.