The West feels lost. Brexit, Trump, the coronavirus: we hurtle from one
crisis to another, lacking definition, terrified that our best days are
behind us. The central argument of this book is that we can only face
the future with hope if we have a proper sense of tradition - political,
social and religious. We ignore our past at our peril. The problem,
argues Tim Stanley, is that the Western tradition is anti-tradition,
that we have a habit of discarding old ways and old knowledge, leaving
us uncertain how to act or, even, of who we really are.
In this wide-ranging book, we see how tradition can be both beautiful
and useful, from the deserts of Australia to the court of
nineteenth-century Japan. Some of the concepts defended here are highly
controversial in the modern West: authority, nostalgia, rejection of
self and the hunt for spiritual transcendence. We'll even meet a tribe
who dress up their dead relatives and invite them to tea.
Stanley illustrates how apparently eccentric yet universal principles
can nurture the individual from birth to death, plugging them into the
wider community, and creating a bond between generations. He also
demonstrates that tradition, far from being pretentious or rigid,
survives through clever adaptation, that it can be surprisingly
egalitarian.
The good news, he argues, is that it can also be rebuilt. It's been done
before. The process is fraught with danger, but the ultimate prize of
rediscovering tradition is self-knowledge and freedom.
