Grateful, not Burdened, by What Has Been

Ideas, Cultures, and Adopting a Posture

Should we be unburdened or grateful for what has been?

Those are two very different attitudes towards the world and are very deep ideas. It may sound like a trite, throw away comment but it digs much deeper than we think. Most things do. It’s the difference between seeing responsibility as an opportunity or something to avoid.

Modern humans are so far down the road from their foundations that today it can be difficult to see that.

It could be said that adopting one or the other is the pivotal difference between progressivism and conservatism. Some have even pointed to the fact that “being unburdened” is at the basis of communist thought, which it absolutely is. But most people who adopt these ideas have no idea, for good or for ill, where they came from. People with communist ideas don’t know their ideas are communist any more than atheists know that they have Christian ideas.

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” — Karl Marx

What’s important here is to understand the two postures and what results from them.

One is a posture adopted towards history and tradition that sees it as a burden — something to be discarded as to not become a yoke that keeps us from progressing. The other is a posture towards history and tradition that believes our ancestors walked a path to get us where we are today and many of those steps are foundational - we would not be here if not for those steps.

We’re already way more abstract than anyone generally cares to be. But ideas have consequences and are important to understand. Ideas are a type of interest and not everyone is interested. Maybe a practical example can help illustrate the importance of ideas and how they manifest.

Foundations Matter

On the world stage, we have a variety of cultures in a variety of countries with a variety of results. Without pointing out better or worse for now, I think we can all agree to that.

The United States and her overall culture is very different from the Middle East. Yes there are several countries in what we consider the Middle East, and they have their own variations, but as a group, nobody would disagree that their cultures are more similar to each other than they are the U.S. or even Western Europe, for now.

Why is that? Why is there a difference? It’s not geography as evidenced by the existence of Israel. Israel is in the Middle East but culturally more like the United States than its Middle Eastern neighbors, even though it is populated by Middle Eastern people.

Israel has a Declaration of Independence, a constitution, and in June, it has several massive gay pride celebrations. Sound familiar?

Forging Ideas

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say something a lot of people will balk at, not because it isn’t obvious: The religions (foundational ideas) of people who start a nation will characterize that nation’s culture. Crazy, right?

Secular people in nations that grow ever more secular don’t generally like that idea. In America it’s fashionable to challenge the concept that the Founding Fathers were religious and to what extent they used religious ideas to shape our founding documents. They also forget that the Founding Fathers don’t necessarily characterize the entire nation, the people do.

Just imagine a group of people got on a boat, while holding Bibles, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in order to settle a land in part to practice a religion for which they are persecuted or at least maligned. They do so at risk to their very lives and many died on the way. Once they land in this new place, the first organizational process they undergo is the creation of a church with a written covenant outlining the society they want to create.

These churches grow into towns and cities and states, populated by the children of people who were deeply religious. And when it came time to declare independence from their soon to be former king, they base their rights to independence on the equality of man based on the dignity granted them from their “creator”. This all happens within about 150 years, and those first covenants they wrote look remarkably similar to the preamble of their resulting Constitution.

Those religious ideas held by the first settlers did not simply disappear once they wanted to form a nation independent from Great Britain. I can’t think of anything more ridiculous.

Now this is speculation of motivation, but I’ll do it anyways because I can’t help myself and I think it’s incredibly interesting and important.

Anyone who admits that any of the cultural norms of their nation are tied to foundational ideas that are religious, by default admits that some of the ways they see the world and act in it are religious in nature. And that is like kryptonite to secular people.

Modern people like to think that every idea in their heads was produced by some rational and reasoned process they undertook to form those ideas on their own. But in reality, it’s the exact opposite. Our reason and logic is used to rationalize the ideas we absorb from our culture.

It’s like falling in love. It happens, and when someone asks you why that particular person, you can come up with reasons based on that person’s personality and looks, but that’s not truly why. You may never know exactly why. What you’re doing is rationalizing after the fact of the emotional reaction to that person’s nature.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It gives us the chance to challenge those ideas by using reason and logic to understand and reassess the veracity, practicality and morality of those ideas. But those ideas were not our sole or even collective creations. They were given to us.

Grateful for What Has Been

That’s what it means to me to be grateful for what has been. I view the sacrifices, ideas, and pathway to the incredibly privileged life I lead as a consequence of the path that lies behind me. Behind us. Even if some of those ideas came from old religions that are no longer popular. The path behind us doesn’t change with modern sentiments towards it. Losing sight of that will make it impossible to get back here, where we are, if we should ever lose our way.

And in turn, I feel a responsibility to point in the same direction. I want my children to benefit from that path which was laid. And to keep moving in the same direction they have to be able to understand the path which led us here.

That path is not a burden. It’s our North Star.