"History is the memory of the race; and a man without memory is no longer a man.” ― Hilaire Belloc, Places
History and culture are the memory of a people. People who forget their history are no longer a people. Those who forget their culture no longer have a culture to contribute, but are being absorbed into the culture and history of another who still remembers what they are about.
"I do not wish to see this country a country of selfish prosperity where those who enjoy the material prosperity think only of the selfish gratification of their own desires, and are content to import from abroad not only their art, not only their literature, but even their babies." — Theodore Roosevelt, 1911
You cannot import your history. You can learn from it and celebrate and perpetuate it, but you cannot borrow it. And if you try, you end up with someone else's history.
"Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures." — Rousas John Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History
When you throw away your history because you think it reflects badly upon you, you throw away your future. Your people cannot survive a chronological genocide.
“People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.” — Thomas Babington Macaulay
If you fail to celebrate the honor of your ancestors you will fail to accomplish anything worth celebrating. The kind of people who break covenant with their fathers also orphan their descendants. They cut their children off from their forefathers. The only inheritance they pass along is the hatred of the family tree.
"Men who raise families that remain in fidelity to tradition will end up with descendants ruling the world.” — E.H. Looney (cf. Psalm 112:1-2)
Those who keep their covenant with God by honoring their ancestors and teaching their kids to do the same, however, they will rule the world.
Matthew 5:5
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
The earth belongs to those who want it enough to share it with their forefathers and enough to give it to their offspring.
"Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire." — Gustov Mahler
Remembering your people and celebrating their culture and history is not keeping a vial of their cremated remains around your neck, it is keeping the fire that they started going. It is burying your dead and putting up tombstones to honor them, not grinding them to powder and leaving them to the winds of change to blow away.
“Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.” — T. S. Eliot
The past is only dead to those who have refused to remember. It is a living thing to those who embrace it. It does not deaden life, it rounds it out. It does not forbid progress, it makes it possible. It provides a foundation on which to build. It is not against building, it is against trying to build on sand. Especially after it worked so hard to lay a firm foundation.
"Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.” — G.K. Chesterton
Our ancestors should have a say in what we do. We should too, of course, but not without considering the counsel of those who have gone before. We should not follow in lock step with them without thought, but we should hear them out and consider why they put the fences where they did.
"No one should ever be allowed to tear down any fence unless they could explain why it had been erected in the first place." — G.K. Chesterton
Every generation wants to establish itself by moving the fences. By so doing, they do not differentiate themselves at all, but merely join the hackneyed actions of countless upstarts who tried to make a classic their own. But if you do not know why things are the way they are, you should not have any say in how they should be and those who come after will certainly pay no attention to why you did what you did. Preservation, history, culture building requires the generations to get along or at the very least, to converse.
Proverbs 20:29
The glory of young men is their strength:
and the beauty of old men is the grey head.
Young men have all the drive to do and old men have all the experience of what works. When the two resent each other, wisdom is ignored, history is abandoned, tradition is trampled upon, and culture is lost. When they work together, history is retained, culture is expanded, tradition is honored, and wisdom wins.
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." — Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition
Young men who are beaten into submission cannot transmit tradition, they can only shuffle along in traditionalism. They cannot pass tradition along because they do not have the root of the matter in them. They have not embraced the history and culture of their fathers, they have only assented to it or assumed it.
When the first generation fails to teach or the second generation fails to listen, the second generation can only assume the traditions of their fathers and when the third generations asks the second why they are doing what they are doing, the second will not know how to answer. At that point, the third generation will abandon their history and their culture because, strictly speaking, it was not given to them.
“New England of the future will belong, and ought to belong, to the descendants of the immigrants of yesterday and today, because the descendants of the Puritans have lacked the courage to live.” — Theodore Roosevelt, 1914
When fathers and sons do not work together, someone else's sons will take over. Culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If you do not feed it good things, it will gobble up poison while being overrun by those eating the protein of their own people's history and culture.
"We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.” — Hilaire Belloc
Our ancestors, if they could see us dishonoring their legacy, would wear no kind expression. They would see us tolerating what they worked so hard to defeat. It would be like Moses watching Joshua's grandson marry a Canaanite. It would not produce warm fuzzies. But we, in our hardened callousness, do not care. We are not bothered by people who are not here and we imagine we would have some things to say to them if they were. We imagine ourselves the victims of their work instead of the beneficiaries of it.
"We are indignant at the thought that our fathers, long since gone from the scene, could possibly have any kind of authority over us. We want to think that the placement of individuals in history is nothing more than a random number sequence, with no authority given to those who came before. But the Lord of all history placed them there, with the command that they leave an inheritance to us. Our duty is to receive that inheritance, build upon it, and become in turn a blessing to our covenantal grandchildren." — Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth
A healthy history and culture will reproduce itself. It will want to. It will want to ensure its own survival and pass along its achievements for the next generation. It will not hoard them up or try to spend them. It will not have a "spending my children's inheritance" bumper sticker on the back of its RV. It also will not have a swath of malcontent ne'er-do-wells complaining about the tough breaks they've had to endure. In summary, a healthy culture must want more of itself. And that means more people. Healthy things grow and produce fruit. If they don't, they are sick or dying or both.
"If the average family contained but two children the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the point of extinction, so that the people who had acted on this base and selfish doctrine would be giving place to others with braver and more robust ideals. Nor would such a result be in any way regrettable; for a race that practised such doctrine—that is, a race that practised race suicide—would thereby conclusively show that it was unfit to exist, and that it had better give place to people who had not forgotten the primary laws of their being." — Theodore Roosevelt
Ignoring your history is race suicide. Abandoning your culture is race suicide. For those who come from pagan backgrounds, repenting and putting on the Lord Jesus may result in changing a good deal of what your ancestors have done. If you have a culture of eating your neighbors and sacrificing your children, those will have to come to an end, but you will not have to abandon everything your ancestors ever did. You can carry their contributions through the refining fire of Christ and watch what precious metals survive and how they are changed in the purification process. The desire to be fruitful may have manifested itself in child sacrifice to the crop gods, but the desire to see the land fruitful and the willingness to endure hard things in order to secure a blessing for others is something that can be transformed after it is informed by the Gospel of God.
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