By: Josh Gilman
What makes me chuckle about progressivism, and more specifically “wokeness”, is that when you think tomorrow is always going to be morally superior to today, you must logically assume that our children’s children will surely loathe us.
If the world is so horrible and we are realizing our many sins so quickly, it only stands to reason that the same way that we look back at previous generations with disdain is exactly how future generations will look at us.
The pride many people have today in how much better they are than their so-called terrible ancestors will surely proceed to a just as embarrassing fall.
This wasn’t always a popular understanding of history.
Growing up I believe it was a fairly standard worldview that society was always a mix of improving and deteriorating.
Less racism was good. Ruder teenagers were bad. Although there was no correlation.
Cars were inherently safer than 40 years ago, but neighbourhoods weren’t. Probably with no correlation.
Online encyclopedias greatly improved access to education, but online pornography was bad. There was probably some correlation but we weren’t sure what it was yet.
Despite this constant dichotomy of societal improvement and deterioration, many of us often yearned for an earlier time. As a young boy, my thoughts often turned to wondering what it would be like to be born generations ago.
“Oh to be a Cowboy”
“I could have been an explorer”
“I would have been a fearsome pirate.”
There is a reason that Star Wars and so many other movies and shows that have futuristic technology place their societies in more of an old-western culture than modernity.
Picture the latest Obi-Wan Kenobi series where instead of yearning for freedom and adventure, young Princess Leia sits in the corner taking selfies and texting.
There is not just a romance to the days of the past but we recognize that progress is a double-edged sword that constantly brings new challenges for every problem we solve.
But despite the complexity of understanding history and the problems we face today, young men growing up in modern society are told that all men who came before them were toxic misogynists, and there is nothing to learn from them.
Young women are told that societies and values of yesteryear were all designed to oppress them and even women who accomplished great things in the past aren’t worth celebrating because they supported a misogynistic society.
And yet when Queen Elizabeth II passed away so many people outwardly mourned for a day gone by. The solemnity, dignity, and even the pomp and circumstance harkened back to a more serious time before we got our news from Twitter, our dances from TikTok, and our political insights from Instagram.
Stories were told about her bravery, her graciousness, and kindness, and the sad part was that it was all told in a wistful way as if we’ll never see such behavior again.
But I would make the case that as conservatives we should be constantly looking to the past for lessons and I would suggest even behaviours that should be applied today. We shouldn’t be looking to import the past directly, but we should be inspired by the good.
Healing fevers with leeches is a bad idea, but the idea of being a knight, fighting for honour, defending young maidens, staring fear in the face, and having the courage to slay it, this is good.
Essentially, pointing out that young men used to speak to older women with more respect in previous generations doesn't mean you want to return to the days when women didn't have the right to vote.
In order to be true conservatives we must believe that we are conserving something other than lower taxes and better budgets, but the very values from which we pull the moral concepts of responsibility, and accountability.
It is the problems of the past that carry such lessons for us today and not simply to be better than our sinful ancestors. Because I would say that it is the very shadows of history that illuminate the good and the brave.
Conservatives often get accused of wanting to take things backward. That’s simply not true. We simply know that looking backward is often the only way to learn the lessons we need to in order to keep moving forward.
