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The
Importance of Order
Q.
Your writings always emphasize the importance of justice. You rarely
speak of order. In fact, you criticize American foreign policy
because it seems to aim exclusively at order in the world. What are
the roles of order, justice, and freedom in your vision of the
world?
A.
My thinking and writing reflect the wisdom accumulated among the
giants of traditionalist thought. Perhaps the greatest of the
contemporary traditionalists is Russell Kirk, who has written an
entire bookshelf of volumes addressing your question. In his epochal
work, The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk writes, "The
good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and
freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for order cannot be
enforced until a tolerable civil order is attained, nor can freedom
be anything better than violence until order gives us laws."
Kirk also emphasizes that, "it is not possible to live in peace
with one another, unless we recognize some principle of order by
which to do justice."(10)
"The higher kind of order, sheltering freedom and justice,
declares the dignity of man. It affirms what G. K. Chesterton called
'the democracy of the dead' - that is, it recognizes the judgments
of men and women who have preceded us in time. … "(11)
In
these few words, Russell Kirk defines the exoteric or external
meaning of "traditionalism." This respect for the wisdom
of the past is central to all of the world's major religions and to
the religious spirit that gave rise to the American republic. The
basic thesis of my current book is that the most similar of all
religious paths is the traditionalism common to both classical
America and classical Islam, even though, at least until recently,
such traditionalism has been dying in America for well over a
century and in the Muslim world for more than half a millennium.(12)
Their classical understanding of order, justice, and freedom are
identical. Therefore, in combination, they are suited to promote a
minimum world public order of justice and freedom for the third
millennium.
The
basic paradigm of traditionalist thought as developed by the
founders of the American republic is that order, justice, and
freedom are interdependent. When freedom is construed to be
independent of justice, there can be no justice and the result can
only be libertarian anarchy. When order is thought to be possible
without justice, there can be no order, because injustice is the
principal cause of disorder. When justice is thought to be possible
without order and freedom, then the pursuit of order, justice, and
freedom are snares of the ignorant.
Every
person has three choices when faced with the injustices that are
inevitable in every society. The first is to rebel as an outsider,
which automatically renders this person irrelevant to any process of
constructive change. The second is to assimilate and become part of
the problem. The third is to transform the society in which one
lives by first transforming oneself.
This
path of transformation consists of two parts, order in the soul and
order in society. A much-quoted verse of the Qur'an reads:
"Verily, Allah does not change a people's condition until they
change what is in their inner selves." In other words,
political and social panaceas are ideological delusions, because
true transformation of the world is possible only on an individual
basis. Social engineers may construct and build better institutions,
such as new means of producing credit in order to broaden
opportunities for capital ownership, but structural innovations
merely make it easier for individuals to act justly both toward
themselves and others.(13)
Such innovations can never be the source of order, justice, and
freedom.
The
essential cause of disorder, injustice, and oppression is the
failure to understand the proper nature of order. In human society
at every level from the nuclear family to the commonwealth of
humankind, order is the first need. Order is the path that people
follow by consensus and by which they live with purpose and meaning.
As the Book of Job puts it in the Bible, "If we lack order in
the soul and in society, we dwell 'in a land of darkness'."
Without a consensus on the proper nature of order, and of justice
and freedom as its component parts, rather than as independent
pursuits, no civilization can continue to exist. The twin roles of
religion in all of its many traditionalist manifestations,
especially in the monotheistic, revealed religions, are the
spiritual well being or happiness of every person and the
maintenance of consensus on the responsibilities and corresponding
rights necessary to live in an ordered society.
The
appearance of order can be obtained by superficially trying to
maintain the status quo. But the substance and reality of order can
be achieved only by a strategy of managing the inevitable changes
that occur in persons and societies. Changes promote order only if
they promote justice. Justice can have no meaning except as an
expression of the law of God, because secular and subjective
concepts of justice always end up in the denial of human dignity and
freedom.
The
balance worked out in the American system of government between
order and liberty required many centuries of preparation, and it has
survived despite two centuries of challenges from extremists.
Totalitarian democrats have favored centralized government to serve
the majoritarian mob. Libertarian anarchists have sought in practice
to fight all government as an enemy of the individual.
These
extremists have failed because the American system of government was
created by the consensus and practice of the American colonists long
before the adoption of the American constitution in 1789, and
because the mores or customs of Americans, rather than the
ideologies of utopian theorists, have controlled the political
process. Americans traditionally have excelled in long-range vision
and purpose, because they are deeply religious and feel that their
Creator has endowed them with a manifest destiny. They are properly
suspicious of what Irving Babbitt called "idyllic
imagination," often based on egocentric ambition, as opposed to
"moral imagination," which operates modestly in the realm
of the possible. Americans distrust ideologues, because the very
concept and word "ideology" came from the horrors of the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic aftermath. Americans have
preferred the path of patience, practicality, and compromise,
perhaps precisely because traditionally they have relied on God more
than on themselves in the pursuit of their national purpose.
a. Positivism: The Root of Chaos
b. Traditionalism: The Root of Cosmos
c. Culture War
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