The radical failure of imagination

traditions against Tradition

In my last few essays, I’ve covered what I believe to be some of the core problems with the urban woke ideology. There are more, certainly, but to focus too much on this new dogma misses a much larger problem with the “traditional” left itself.

While certainly there are significant pushes by a rising urban elite to remake society in a way that fuses the concerns of capital with a kind of mass ressentiment, this hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Or, rather say, it did happen in one, one created by several significant failures of leftist thought, theorists, and organizations.

One of those failures was of imagination. While the left is often accused of wanting to radically remake society along utopian lines, of engaging in the same sort of disruption that the bourgeoisie enact with their embrace of capital, the left often ends up being even more restricted by “conservative” (or rather say, de facto) social arrangements than the right ever is.

One of those places we can see this best is in the matter of “tradition.”

Tradition can mean many things, but our purposes I’ll define it as the series of customs and beliefs passed through generations. Not necessarily “the way it has always been done,” but rather “the way my grandmother taught me to do this” or “the stories my great grandpa told me, which he got from his grandpa.”

Another way of putting this would be to speak of traditions, rather than Tradition, because cultural knowledge and customs are neither monolithic nor static. Small-t traditions change, grow, and are constantly added to, forming not so much a center to society but a thread people weave through their own lives. Big-T Tradition, on the other hand, is a center around which an entire society is built and which must be enforced through social pressure, religious conformity, and constant policing of heresy.

Big-T Tradition is the American Flag, or the story of the Founding Fathers, or the narrative that the French Revolution was all about universal liberty. Tradition is race, and gender, identity, and sexuality, and also concepts such as Western Civilization and Democracy, human rights, the triumph of Reason and the regime of private property.

For the left confronting Tradition, the typical response has been to destroy anything traditional, or to harness and reform each Tradition into a new static center which serves utopian, radical goals. But in doing so, it often cannot distinguish between Tradition and traditions, seeing the latter as regressive “reactionary” demons to be exorcised (by education or by force) from private lives, or to be re-channeled into a new order of Tradition which will govern all.

For instance, consider the way the left approached gender and sexuality. Early anarchists and Marxists both approached homosexuality as a “bourgeois” and “decadent” practice which could not fit in a re-established order of Tradition. Later, probably because enough homosexuals also happened to be leftists, the move came instead to defend homosexuality along naturalistic grounds, the “born this way” idea by which homosexuals cannot help themselves and therefore should not be criminialized.

The shadow of Tradition which hung over all of this was not sexuality per se, but rather the Tradition of the state having juridical and political power over the sexuality of individuals. This Tradition extends far back into the pre-capitalist past, with feudal lords claiming the right over the reproductive powers of their serfs in order to ensure they had a steady supply of future labor. It also appears unsurprisingly in the institution of slavery, with owners of human chattel particularly concerned with the fertility of their female slaves, granting them often time off to raise their children since that offpring was guaranteed labor a decade later.

Rather than abolish that Tradition itself, the left’s argument for the protection of homosexuals hinged on arguing that there was nothing that could be done otherwise. Gay people were going to be gay no matter what the state did, so the state should legally recognize homosexual marriages just at it did for heterosexual ones.

The more radical imagination, on the other hand, would have proposed not the legal recognition of homosexuality but rather the full de-politicizing of all human sexuality. The state does not perpetuate heterosexuality by recognizing it, nor would it endanger heterosexuals by not recognizing them. They wouldn’t suddenly become all gay, any more than homosexuals would become heterosexual just because the state didn’t recognize them.

Another such issue is that of gender non-conforming people. Tradition says there are genders, and those map precisely onto sex, and there are only two ways of being and those ways are strictly defined. For a person who wishes to be something other than what is defined for them by Tradition, there are then only two options, be the x that society allows or change category to be the y that society allows.

In such a situation, there is not only no room for variance from those Tradition-defined gender norms (which are based on labor categories, not human traditions), but also no room to be a third or fourth thing altogether. The left here failed yet again at its supposed core feature, that of the “radical imagination,” by insisting that the switching of categories be legally recognized without ever questioning the limited nature of those categories. That is, it is merely Tradition again. You can still be only one or the other gender category, or perhaps on a spectrum defined by the two.

Here, the left could have instead looked to traditions rather than Tradition. There have always been countless traditions of man and woman, myriad ways of being man and being woman. But even more radical, which is to say even more small-t traditional, countless cultures, indigenous tribes, and entire civilizations have, when the binary system didn’t work, created new categories.

My favorite of these traditions is that of the Bugis, an indigenous group in Indonesia. The Bugis have five “genders,” with each gender serving a specific function within the community. Two of those genders are the same as for Western Tradition, mapping to man and woman as they are Traditionally understood. A third gender, the calabai, are male-born people who take on “feminine” roles in a particular fashion. Many of those roles map somewhat to what we think of as “feminine” gay male roles, for instance planning weddings or doing make-up. A fourth category, the calalai, are female-born people who take on “masculine” roles, and hold a particular position as being the ones who make the tools that the “binary” category of men use. This group maps loosely on on our stereotype of the “butch dyke,” the lesbian doing “Traditionally male” jobs.

The Bugis have yet a fifth category, the bissu. The bissu embody all the other four categories as well as their own, and are seen simultaneously as multi-gendered and also agendered (androgynes). Their role in society is that of the priest or shaman, the bridge between the otherworld and this-world, as well as creating harmony between the other four categories.

Many other groups have had their own such configurations, but the Western Tradition, constructed as it is wholly from Empire and Monotheism, only allows two. Rather than challenging that Tradition itself and imagining a multiplicity of categories, the left merely pushed gender-variant people to try to fit into one or the other by whatever means possible.

Here we can now talk about traditions again. I think here on my beloved and recently deceased great-aunt, a “redneck” and a “hick” from Appalachia for whom both the urban elite and the left made no sense. Yet when I told her I preferred having sex with other men rather than with women, her response was that of the traditions which formed her, and much more radical than the legal regime of Tradition.

She said, “That jus’ happens. Sometimes God just makes men want to sleep with men. Ain’t my business to question it.”

The left has come to see the traditions of the poor as the enemy of the Good, and thus both fears them and seeks to bring them under the rule of their own Tradition. Families arrange themselves among the poor based on desire, necessity, and cultural formations, not from some obedience to a normative center. Sometimes those are many generations living under the same room, sometimes those are cousins who marry, sometimes those are “spinster” friends closer than sisters. Sometimes those families include people born as males but living as women, or people born as females but living as men. Much more often, it is a husband and wife and kids, that dreaded “nuclear family” which techno-futurist fantasists like Sophie Lewis wish to abolish and replace with a more utopian Tradition of their own making.

These are all traditions, constantly resisting the politicization of human life into Tradition. The radical imagination that the left lacks has always existed in the traditions of the poor, of the indigenous, and even in the traditions of the pre-capitalist European past the left has decided we’d all best forget.

In the face of the left’s failure to imagine even what already exists, it is no wonder that the rigidity of identitarianism has arisen in its place. “Woke” anti-racism merely reproduces Tradition, insisting race is the only thing imaginable rather than the world before race existed and a world during which race no longer exists. Gender is only a recent construct, and yet this new identitarianism still tries to force everyone into it, rather than looking to the millions of ways humans already express themselves without categorization and the myriad ways other societies have created space for difference. And people have always desired whom they desire, without the need for science or politics to tell them what that desire means.

The only way to break this madness is to abandon Tradition altogether, to look instead to traditions, to admit that it is neither possible or desirable to create society from the top down or to enforce cultural norms through education and discipline. People will do what people do regardless of what any political program tries to foist upon them, and the only thing politics can ever succeed at is eradicating difference in the name of a “better” society and the protection of the Tradition of the powerful.