By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ Artem’s recent discourse on ‘Traditional Values’ is annoyingly accurate in many ways. So why ‘annoyingly’? I think it is because – although Artem throws a few alms in the direction of ‘tradition’ toward the end, the article, faithful to the author’s proclivity, remains top heavy in the direction of the political and perhaps just a tad neglectful in its allowances for the psychological side of it.
I have reread the article several times, and I think trying to refute it is difficult since Artem correctly identifies the elaborate falsehoods behind a lot of these appeals to tradition. But there are two passages from “The Curious Case of Traditional Values” that I want to call attention to which illustrate his line of thinking:
For many, nostalgia centers around an idealized mid-20th-century period, a seemingly tranquil era lovingly scrubbed clean of inconvenient truths—racism, gender inequality, war, oppression—presented instead as a lost paradise of simplicity and stability.
In this, you can almost hear the words “White Men” straining to crawl out of the text. That’s because white men are now the scapegoat for everything wrong with human history. True in part, it isn’t necessarily true in essence, because no 21st century value system can unravel the complexity of thought and emotion of another era. Besides, a lot of those people: white, male, Christian or otherwise, had good hearts, sharp minds, and, yes, a sense of justice – of fair play and decency.
The second part I’ll quote is this:
Preserving culture can at times resemble taxidermy—beautiful yet undeniably lifeless. Like animals posed in permanent stillness, carefully curated traditional values are attractive, reassuring, yet static and disconnected from reality.
It is beautifully worded but, in a way, as lifeless in terms of understanding human psychology as it accuses traditionalists of being. So in this article, I elect to avoid the political aspects, and concentrate on the reasons why Tradition and ‘Traditional Values’ are appealing to so many people.
I live in Europe now but my reference points will always be America and, to a lesser extent, England and Russia. Maybe you haven’t been to any of them. But if you have ever driven down a street in America where small ‘family’ diners stand at the side of the road, you’ll often see signs that proclaim, “Homemade Apple Pie –Just Like Your Grandma Used to Make” – and similar venerations of the ‘homemade’ past. Anything that ‘Old-fashioned’ can be attached to is another sure draw.
And if you analyze it, the logic just isn’t there. Who is to say that something ‘homemade’ is any better than what you’ll get in a restaurant down at the mall? Even frozen dinners can be tasty and appealingly well-prepared these days. And how can we be sure that “Grandma” ever baked a pie in her life when maybe all she did was sit out on the front porch swatting flies and wishing that someone would hurry up and invent the vibrator?
Nevertheless, most of us will experience a fleeting yearning for something indefinable – not just the pie ‘grandma’ baked or didn’t bake – but something both more elusive and more profound – and whether we pull over in search of a plateful of that scrumptious slab of encrusted apples or cherries (always on the menu) which nostalgia rests its case on, it is likely that some sort of warm, sweet emotion will appear in our minds like an angel on a pin.
Now there are valid disclaimers to be made here. For one thing, a teenager who sees such a billboard is not going to react in the same way an older person probably will. For another, his grandmother is likely still around and hasn’t produced a pie in years. Also, any moderately astute observer will detect the marketing manipulation involved.
But still the feeling persists, just as Larkin proves in his great poem “Church Going”, where the monologue is spoken by a guy who is touring the area on a bicycle and stops to enter a nondescript church. He expects to be disappointed and indeed he is. The musty, rather gelid place, is just like any other of its kind, and he asks himself why he bothered to stop here. This is how Larkin’s speaker answers his own question:
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Then Larkin concludes:
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspoilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
I could end my essay here and consider it a sufficient response to Artem’s justifiably cautionary, invariably political, and intellectually refined position. But, in my customary rambling way, I’ll continue.
If you have ever gone to a wedding or a funeral (again I am sticking to what I know; they do it differently in different cultures), you will notice two things: weddings begin with hope and optimism for lasting happiness; funerals eulogize the end of life with kind words and promised memories. It doesn’t usually matter if the bride and bridegroom are dubious characters or if the deceased was a bore and a rascal, does it? Most of us are willing to give these human beings their special moment, one a form of Hello and the other a distinct Goodbye. For a little while the better sides of ourselves take over and we become well-wishers or forgivers.
Most marriages don’t appear to be especially happy, and the dead are quickly forgotten in the rush hours of life. But the aging widow or widower may sometimes, on a wintry night, maybe in the Christmas season spent alone, pull out an old photograph album and relive the wedding day when good things seemed possible – or they will visit the cemetery on special mornings or listless afternoons and speak to the dead and leave flowers that the skeleton in the box below will never see.
Why do they do this? And why, in general, do people, when they come together at family reunions, tend to discuss – with much tenderness, laughter, and yes, nostalgia – those ‘good old days’ even if the good old days were hard? I think it’s because they were young then and probably, even if they screwed up a lot, they recall the energy, the fire, and the sense that life hadn’t caged them in. Yet.
I myself remember times like that, and I am well and truly punctured (in the aorta) when I reminisce about women I made love to or were in love with (sometimes the same thing, sometimes not), and, after considerable reverie, I stop and think that most of them, if alive at all, would be unrecognisable old women now. Old dears that young people indulge or cast aside or ignore or are irritated by. Yet I remember them when they were goddesses. Must I always ‘put this in perspective’ or brush them away as the meditations of an old piece of furniture strangely breathing?
I even remember, with a masochistic fondness, my life in England when I was supposedly a university student: the hangovers, the lonely walks on rainy days, the Sunday mornings in Bath when I was shaking from the night before and waiting for the pub to finally open at noon. Those damp Sundays in Hampstead when I would get drunk and walk on the Heath, hoping to meet the ghost of John Keats. I was young then, you see, and I was living in my Golden Age even though, God knows, it wasn’t golden at all most of the time, not at all. But I was young.
The human race, if dissected historically, as I in my role as history teacher have done, is mostly a diabolically horrible chronicle of human misery inflected by other humans. If put on trial, the human race would be lucky to get life imprisonment and even that would take a plea bargain. You think I am being rough in my judgment? Open the books. Forget the nonsense about the good old days. They weren’t.
And yet these same human minds of ours, which are also capable of love, keep insisting that those times were, if not good and golden, at least worth living. It is because we so desperately need to feel that way, to feel as if we haven’t completely wasted our lives. We need something to tell us that we were here, and that it wasn’t all bad.
Above all, we crave simplicity. We want there to have been good reasons behind it all. It’s why a lot of people like to wear uniforms that define them as a member or employee of this or that ‘organization’; it’s why some people dive into the Bible, into yoga, into the biker gang, into the Society of This and That; it’s why we have conspiracy theories. Anything to help it all make sense. And, in many ways, it’s easy to do that with the past, isn’t it? We can tinker with it, revise it, falsify it and then teach ourselves to believe the falsifications. In this way, we are all revisionist historians. The past might not have been perfect, we say, but at least it made sense.
Or so we imagine.
And what if we are wrong? – and we most certainly are. What of it? Should we go back to our hometown and burn all the houses in our old neighborhood? Understand, I am not trying to justify these misrepresentations of the true histories of our individual and collective lives, I am trying to explain where these silly feelings come from, and to do so in a way that gives them the status of something actually serious and dignified after all, which they deserve.
The past is full of our distant mirrors. They often reflect us in ways that confer a special privilege, a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card that exonerates us and serves as a badge of simple explanation in a world where all the mirrors seem cloudy and distorted, and where there are no explanations to take refuge in. A world of screaming and shouting, whereas that old place of real neighborhoods and chapels – even if we didn’t like the neighbors and never went to church – now represent a kind of coherence and decency – that goes begging today.
Finally, it is true – or sure seems true to me – that during my childhood, kids were taught manners and discipline – not, at least not in most cases, of an arbitrary, brutal nature – but something to harness our immaturity. Tools. Maps. We trusted authority. The mayor, the school teacher, the policeman, the doctor, the fireman – they were good guys. Why wouldn’t they be? My grandfather often left the car keys in the car so he wouldn’t have to look for them. Our front door was never locked. Was it because everyone was ‘good’ and would never think of stealing?
No, of course not, but there were certain taboos in the culture, certain things you just didn’t do – at least not where I came from. Halloween was a fun night for us kids before the perverts started poisoning the candy and some of the juvenile delinquents started spray painting cars and houses instead of rubbing soap on the windows. Thanksgiving dinners were congenial family celebrations without guilt trips about the ‘Indians’ and what our ancestors did to them half a millennium ago. Christmas was a Christian holiday even if for me it had more to do with presents than Christ. We had real Christmas trees of pinewood and pine needles. We heard Christmas carols, beautiful songs like “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, “Away in a Manger” and “Silent Night” that you never hear today because the Woke are afraid of offending non-Christians. Love songs were about falling in love, not “Fuck the bitch and make her blow/then Kill the hoe, go on and throw/ her dead ass out the window.”
It wasn’t that we didn’t know that bad things had been done in the past; it’s that we wanted a break from it. We wanted a chance to cherish the good in our lives without having some social justice warrior up our ass every minute of the day, telling us that we were the enslavers of anyone and everyone not just like us. We didn’t – shame on us – think globally. We looked up and down our street, and that was about it. Rotten bastards, weren’t we?
And now, not surprisingly, we return in our minds to those days where we imagine that we were better, fuller, happier. And I will say the decisive word again: Young. That’s what we were all right, and then, as today, Youth remains the best selling point ever invented. It is in the nature of things that such moments of fresh existence seem worth preserving, when we were all in a precancerous state of body and mind. It was never to deny other people their rightful stake in the world. We didn’t think that deeply. Looking back with nostalgia – maybe it was a means of creating a Happy Ending in a weird, reverse action sort of way. Can you understand that? A Happy Ending in advance, like a down payment on the prolongation of Innocence?.
But our Happy Endings were all back then. I think people are to be forgiven such indulgences; otherwise, we’d go mad. Most of us secretly ‘have issues’ with ourselves enough as it is. Therapists everywhere welcome us with open arms.
This need for the absolution which the past, falsely but firmly, offers, is a wonderful placebo against reality. Only a true curmudgeon – or maybe the most punitive instincts of a merciless god – would send everybody hellbound without a single good memory to take with them.
Tradition, therefore, is not simply a way of keeping the ‘darkies’ down on the plantation while sittin’ back and ‘whistlin Dixie’ on the front porch; not so, not on a deeper level; nor is it trying to rouse the disgruntled citizenry into taking the Nazi Oath. At it’s finest, it means a reenactment of life at its ceremonial best, whether it’s looking at a Breugel painting and mentally joining a merry medieval celebration after the harvest, or treating yourself to a vision of pagan women dancing around the maypole in hopes that their swains will come soon to sweep them away.
It’s easier to follow if you think of the past as another country. I further believe that this holds true whether you come from that country or not. Most of the people there wouldn’t understand you. Maybe you can forgive them then. Those people with whom I now number myself.
And the older I get, the more I see – maybe because I want to – life (and death) as part of a circle rather than just a straight line, a Ring of Seasons containing all manner of repetitions of man and beast, fish and flock, around and around and around – not like some kind of bullet train or javelin whose destination or target is just the final stopping point.
And maybe because I have a leftover taste in my spirit’s mouth of some beautiful order of a long long time ago – purely imaginary, you understand – that instead of pushing forward into a shrinking future, I gaze back at an ever expanding past. People seem friendlier there, whether they really were or not. Perhaps it’s because time has made them harmless and defenseless and it is now possible to remember them with tenderness. They too – the worst bullies and the most beautiful, inaccessible girls – have all been changed radically, as have I. Anyway, they’d look different, wouldn’t they?
So I imagine my great grandfather’s special applesauce gathered from the treefall of his austere backyard that dipped away and out of sight like the end of the world. Those apples were not full of medicine to make them bigger and redder nor did they come from supermarkets. They fell to the ground in various disorderly patterns, and they were no prettier to look at than the ‘imperfect’ girls at school.
They were part of a decorum as old as time, and there was fecundity in all. I remember them not as the golden apples of the sun nor as ‘sea girls wreathed in seaweed red and brown’, but as mere breath-producing emblems, stuff one finds in the souvenir shops of the heart and the cobwebs of the brain – the people of the old lanes that led to other old lanes and other people still, all gone, all gone, like clean sheets dried by the wind and pulled down from the clothes lines. Whatever they might tell you if they could, most of them were loaded down with what we now term ‘traditional values.’
