What Would Enlightenment Traditionalism Have Looked Like?

As with every successful vision, if the Liberal Traditionalist idea is to take off, and eventually inspire positive social change, we need to at least have a rough idea of what it looks like. After all, we need to be able to imagine what something would look like, if we are to work towards some version of it. So what would a Liberal Traditionalist society look like? I guess a good first step would be to go back into history, to imagine what an 'Enlightenment Traditionalism' society would look like, if history had indeed taken that path.

Inspired by the egalitarian values of the 'historical Left' of the Enlightenment, I imagine that an 'Enlightenment Traditionalism' society would uphold equal rights, equal dignity and equal opportunity for every citizen. However, the classical values from earlier times, especially those that inspired members of the nobility to greatness, would continue to be upheld. Thus, there would also be a lot of emphasis on values like honour, honesty, charity, bravery, loyalty, purity, and the like. The shared culture would emphasize these values so they would form the cornerstone to everyday problem solving and conflict resolution. I imagine that social relations would be much healthier than it is now, as a result.

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The debate of how to best achieve and apply the aforementioned values to life would be a major part of intellectual culture. The dominance of these very concrete values would also mean they form the basis of a shared meaning for life, which would probably prevent the rise of the set of postmodern wishy-washy concepts dominant in certain intellectual circles today, which are much less conducive to community building. At the very least, this would prevent the rise of public intellectuals who speak or write in a deliberately difficult to understand manner, who are for some reason celebrated for their supposed 'profoundness'. In other words, intellectuals would be immersed in clear and constructive conversation that actually benefits people, rather than being drowned in pointless 'profoundness'.

At the heart of an 'Enlightenment Traditionalism' society would also be the importance of family life, and the importance of relationships that uphold family structures. Instead of the landscape of broken families we actually have today, I imagine that an 'Egalitarian Traditionalism' society would have strong and enduring structures of extended families. The big, multi-generational Household of feudal times might even have survived, and the Household might have been at the centre of much of life's important events, just like it was for the nobility of feudal times. Families would also be much more able to pool their resources to look after family members in need, so the 'vulnerable and needy' population in society would be much smaller. With a lesser

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need for institutions to look after people, there would also be more of a 'human touch' to everyday life.

Strong families of course mean strong private spheres, so people would be much less affected by peer pressure and the need to conform to the 'fashion of the day' in terms of interests, ideas and values. There would be much more diversity of thought as a result. Moreover, different families would develop their own divergent traditions over time, as well as their own interpretations of the core values, through the practice of those values in accordance with their own needs and circumstances. In turn, intellectuals would be nurtured by the culture of their own extended family. With a diversity of views and practices among different extended families (or clusters of extended families), intellectuals from different families would have come up from different traditions, and therefore naturally having very different views on things. This would make cultural conformity simply impossible, and lively debate in the marketplace of ideas something that is as natural as the sun rising in the East.

In conclusion, we see that an 'Enlightenment Traditionalism' society would be more family-based, healthier, more diverse in thought (and thus freer), less conforming, more moral, and probably happier than the one we live in now. Therefore, it is still something to inspire us, even if history ended up taking a different, less ideal, path. As Liberal Traditionalists in the real world, I guess we may have to accept that we can't totally rebuild the society 'Enlightenment Traditionalism' would

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have been. For example, given our cultural habits and our economic structure that have developed over time, it is probably inevitable that people would be living in nuclear families for the foreseeable future, and the medieval-style big Household won't be coming back any time soon. (However, technologies around virtual meeting spaces hold a lot of promise to link up nuclear families virtually and provide regular extended family bonding time, so perhaps all is not loss.) Despite the limitations, however, there's still a lot we can do to 'recover' the 'lost ground of history', simply by promoting the right values in society. In the following chapters, I will discuss how upholding the Moral Libertarian principle of Equal Moral Agency for every individual can lead to a revival of family life (which would be central to any Liberal Traditionalist vision), and why more family autonomy is ultimately good as long as the Moral Libertarian principle is observed throughout society. Finally, I will outline what a Liberal Traditionalist agenda could look like in the 21st century.

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