Dear readers, as the name of my Substack suggests, in this Substack I will cover topics about both civilisation and tradition. This post is the first one to related to the second word of the title of my Substack.

This article is in some ways a summary of ideas from the booklet ¿QUE ES EL CARLISMO? in which Francisco Elías de Tejada y Spinola, Rafael Gambra Ciudad and Francisco Puy Muñoz wrote down the basic principles of this school of thought. Though I did not have Spanish at school, my knowledge of French and English was sufficient enough to understand the work, with only a handful of passages requiring me to use a translator. This is a testimony, above all, to the clarity and intelligibility of the text and the eloquency and articulateness of its authors

Don Quixote a Sancho Panza (oil on canvas), José Moreno Carbonero

Tradition is the accumulated history that results from the ecology that defined it. As Enrique Gil Robles said, tradition is the continuity of the same life . When we are born, we are not born naked and abstract, but with the qualities passed on to us by our parents, based on culture and tradition. As Juan Donoso Cortés observes, nations without tradition are called savages.

Tradition is not the entire work of our ancestors, which is passed on intact to our descendants. On the contrary, it requires discernment: what of that work will be included in the selection that we pass on to our descendants, and which works will perish along with their creators. As Víctor Pradera writes: Tradition is not the entire past: it is the past that satisfies the basic principles of human life in relation, in abstract reasoning. In other words, it is a past that will survive and have the privilege of becoming the future.

Tradition, is living history, to which each generation adds some improvement, something new. What our ancestors passed on to us will not be the same to the letter as what we will pass on to our descendants, but we will add to it a selection of the best fruits of our generation's activity, and so we all have the opportunity to leave our mark on the rich tradition that we will pass on to our descendants.

Traditionalism is based on a deep recognition of historical reality and a Christian understanding of man - a man who is born into an earthly world, but whose ultimate goal is heavenly salvation. He is not here for the consumption of food or the rigors of evolutionary competition, but to participate in God's creative work.

Traditionalism contrasts sharply with both liberalism and totalitarianism.

For liberalism, man is an abstract individual in his own right, the bearer of abstract freedom, a number in the census and a voter. From this perspective, society is merely an aggregate of individuals, ignoring social reality. It is based on an optimistic view of man, the logical outcome of which will be anarchy. It rejects human history and reshapes it on the basis of measurable natural sciences

For totalitarianism sees man as a component in a great whole, emphasizing the state and the bureaucratic apparatus, suspecting man of abusing every semblance of freedom. It abolishes freedom in order to establish equality. This approach also denies social reality and creates an enslaved mass in the face of an all-powerful state. It is based on a pessimistic view of man whose end state is tyranny. It destroys human history by degrading the free individual who makes it into an interchangeable member of a hive or termite mound.

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Traditionalism recognizes man as a social being (zoon politikon) who is embedded in a concrete reality. It protects concrete freedoms (fueros) and social pluralism. It recognizes both the ontological equality of human beings and their ethical inequality as an incentive to grow towards virtue. From the perspective of traditionalism, we are faced with a concrete human being in flesh and blood: father, husband, worker, householder, inhabitant of a county or city... It recognizes society as a reality. His view of man is realistic - he sees man as good with a propensity to sin. Traditionalism recognizes history in the fullness of its results.