The Wisdom of Our Ancestors

Let us also not detain ourselves - conservatism is the defense of the ancestral tradition. The concept of tradition comes from the Latin verb trado, tradere which expresses the idea of “transmitting” or “handing over”. Conservatism defends what has been “handed over” from one's ancestors. It understands this as an inheritance held in trust to be jealously guarded and preserved intact so that it may in turn be passed on to heirs. In this most general sense conservatism may be said to be the default posture of most historic human cultures since ancient times.
To be clear, the conservative argument is not that any practice is legitimate simply because it is an inherited tradition. This is not conservatism but cultural relativism. Obviously, a Western conservative informed for example by Christian conviction about human dignity will not approve of practices like forced marriages, human sacrifice, cannibalism, abortion/infanticide, euthanasia, ritual suicide, or widow burning simply because in certain times and places these practices have been inherited traditions. Actions that offend human dignity can be rejected on substantive grounds even where they are time honored customs. Conservatism is not an excuse for blind, unreflective compliance to past praxis. A conservative however, will not lightly succumb to the pride and folly of rejecting the resources of tradition on the premise that his own generation is better and wiser than all that came before. The conservative's default attitude is one of reverence for the past on the assumption that there is a collective and accumulated wisdom in history. Just as the memory of past personal experiences provides wisdom for individual life, so the collective memory of the past provides wisdom for social existence. As Cicero put it “Not to know what occurred before one was born, is to remain forever a child. For what is the age of a man, unless it be woven with the memory of ancient things from the age of our ancestors? (Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur?) This disposition is seen for instance in the pious deference of the Romans to the mos maiorum (“customs of the ancestors”). Cicero in his speech De Imperio admonishes the Romans to “let indeed no novelty be done contrary to the example and instruction of our ancestors” (At enim ne quid novi fiat contra exempla atque instituta maiorum.) This well expresses a classical conservative's first instinct of reverence for ancestral traditions and ancestral figures. In China, where the veneration of ancestral ways was particularly developed, its greatest sage Confucius self-consciously disclaimed any novelty in his teaching. As he put it: “I am a transmitter, rather than an original thinker. I trust and enjoy the teachings of the ancients”. The classical conservatism of modern Europe is associated among other figures with Edmund Burke. He opposed the modernist critiques of tradition during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to the superior example and wisdom of the ancestral: Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. The continuity of culture itself depends upon treasuring its tradition as a sacred patrimony from the ancestral past. As Burke said, society is: “…a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”