You may ask, ‘How did this tradition get started?’ I’ll tell you. . . . I don’t know.
—Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof
I notice an internal contradiction in what is said by MAGA white nationalists. MAGA white nationalists shriek that nonwhites are ruining the West by immigrating to it, and therefore they should be barred from it. In reply, free-enterprisers point out that the MAGA white nationalists are contradicting the Declaration of Independence and the very philosophy upon which the American republic was founded. Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, has turned out to be surprisingly articulate in explaining this position. He began as a conventional leftist blaming capitalism for the world’s problems. But, as he says in a speech to Georgetown University, he came to realize that political-economic liberalization is actually the strongest remedy for the Third World’s poverty. And in holding up the liberalizing philosophy of the USA’s founding as his case study, Bono praises the republic as an idea. To quote his own words,
...America is an idea, isn’t it? I mean Ireland’s a great country but it’s not an idea. Great Britain’s a great country but it’s not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world: as one of the greatest ideas in human history, right up there with the Renaissance... right up there with crop rotation… the Beatles’ White Album... ...that idea, the America idea, it’s an idea, the idea is that you and me are created equal...
The idea that life is not meant to be endured, but enjoyed. The idea that if we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us, we can do the rest. ...
This country was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper. And God love you for it, because these aren’t just American ideas anymore. ... You’ve brought them into the world. . . . I know Americans say they have a bit of the world in them, and you do. The family tree has a lot of branches. But the thing is… the world has a bit of America in it, too. These truths — your truths — they are self-evident in us.
In 1989, Leonard Peikoff as well has pointed this out. The USA, he ascertained, “at root is an ideology. . . . The founding fathers explicitly championed a certain philosophy, which they made the basis of America’s distinctive political institutions and national character, and that philosophy to some extent survives among the citizens to this day.” And we free-enterprisers have repeatedly pointed out that this philosophy refutes everything spewed by the MAGA white nationalists.
Hence, the MAGA white nationalists have a rejoinder to us free-enterprisers. MAGA white nationalists stamp their feet and cry out that the USA “is not a collection of ideas.” That’s how failed comedian turned white supremacist Sam Hyde phrases it. In his viral Twitter video with over 21 million views, over 33 thousand tweets, and over 37 thousand retweets, he moans, “There is this disturbing idea...that America is just a collection of ideas.” No, “You have to fight for not...the notion of ‘America as this collection of ideas.’ That’s not what it is.” He dismisses the Declaration and other founding documents as an empty set of words. “You’re not fighting for a paragraph” (emphasis his). Rather, MAGA white nationalists maintain it’s all about blood and soil. But when they don’t want to admit it’s all about race, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists say the USA is not about “ideas” but traditions (translation: only the traditions associated with their own ethnic group). As a case study in tradition, Hyde pontificates, “Nothing significant that gets built, gets built on an individualistic scale. The greatest things that get built: cathedrals — and, if you disagree with this, you’re just wrong . . . — cathedrals are built over hundreds of years. They’re built not just by the army of stone masons who build them but by the towns who pay for it.” And he continues, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. . . . It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”
And in showing a complete lack of understanding of what culture entails, Sam Hyde adds, “This is not learned stuff.”
There is an internal contradiction in proclaiming that rather than “ideas,” America is about “culture” and traditions (“culture” and traditions of white people, apparently). It is that culture and traditions are, by definition, learned. More to the point: culture and traditions are expressions of ideas, and therefore traditions ultimately come down to ideas.
All Traditions Are Customs, But a Tradition Has a Symbolic Meaning That Goes Beyond the Custom Itself
To understand that, we can do something that Sam Hyde has neglected to do: we can bother to consider what is the definition of tradition. Traditions are customs practiced in particular types of settings and on particular occasions, and these customs have become long-established in their respective societies. So far, Sam Hyde and the other MAGA white nationalists would agree. But there is a second part of the definition that they omit. What else makes an action a tradition is that is a gesture symbolically representing some institution that is valued in that society. Culture does not consist of actions merely. Culture consists of actions considered important not only in and of themselves but also as symbolic representations of something else important to that society. And all symbolic gestures exist in the realm of ideas.
Consider a traditional Western wedding ceremony. Absent of any formal marriage ceremony, people can form pair bonds. They can form a unit where people live together, pool their assets, and have sex. These can be considered common-law marriages, and the marriage ceremony is not needed for that. Rather, the nuptials are a formalized ritual to codify the pair bond that already exists. The wedding ceremony, like all traditional ceremonies, is a ritual in which people express their appreciation for a set of actions — the pair-bond and all it entails — and is not the actual set of actions being celebrated. The wedding ceremony is not the pair bond but a symbol expressing appreciation for lifelong commitment to the pair bond in question. That is, the wedding ceremony is not the marriage but a supplemental performance of the idea of the marriage.
Within this larger symbol are smaller symbols. The bride wears white as a gesture to represent her relative chastity prior to the marriage. The throwing of the bouquet is a ritual symbolizing the idea that other wedding attendants, too, will soon be able to enjoy what the bride and groom get to have.
Eating particular types of food has practical value, and need not have tradition attached to it. But sometimes eating a particular food on a particular occasions is said to have cultural value and be a tradition. When that happens, that particular dish is no longer valued only for the directly practical values of nourishment, nutrition, and the pleasure of taste. Indeed, the dish becomes a symbol of something — something of value in that society — other than the dish itself. And ideas are involved there as well.
The is seen with the tradition of eating turkey on Thanksgiving. Many Americans could prepare a turkey feast almost any other day of the year. But eating turkey on Thanksgiving is a ritual for family members to represent their gratitude for what everything good in their lives, including each other. Hence, the feast itself is not about the turkey as much as it is about the values the ritual represents — that is, specific ideas.
Eating any particular cuisine at least in part due to its ethnic history is about ideas. The Japanese diet originally formed because of geographic isolation. Japan is an archipelago surrounded by sea animals, and therefore Japanese cuisine puts a lot of emphasis on seafood. Historically, it was easier to be a fisherman than to try to be like the Steppes peoples and raise livestock. Originally, then, Japanese people ate seafood only for practical reasons.
But with global trade, a rich person in Japan now can theoretically go for long periods of time eating food not caught from the ocean. Often, people eat traditional Japanese food not only for the taste. Those of Japanese descent want to experience something that their ancestors did, such as eat the same food. When non-Japanese people try Japanese cuisine, it has a lot to do with wanting to experience other cultures — the idea is to be exploratory. Eating food from other cultures is an expression of one’s openness to new experiences and new kinds of people. Accordingly, in the modern world the tradition of eating “ethnic food” has a lot to do with ideas.
(As Murray Rothbard-influenced, patent-hating anarcho-“capitalists” often make common cause with white nationalists, some might interject here. In trying to stigmatize intellectual property rights as some form of protectionism and monopolism, this is the point where I have heard them say in their usual churlishness, But a patent or copyright claims you own an idea. If a tradition is an idea, you want a corporation to patent your ethnic traditions? That is a false conflation on their part. Customs and traditions are generalized ideas, as are entire product categories. By contrast, patents and copyrights recognize your ownership over a very specific presentation of your own origination. I have written of that difference here and here and here.)
An apologist from the Intellectual Dark Web might chime in, “Yes, ideas are important. But what we object to, is people talking only about ideas that are pie-in-the-sky and not focusing on the actual actions taken to help the American people.” As Sam Hyde says in his viewed-21-million-times tirade, “ . . . America’s not a collection of ideas; America is a people [a race]: Americans.” But for the Intellectual Dark Web to say that its criticism of America-as-an-idea is not about practicability is for the Intellectual Dark Web to whack at a straw man. No free-enterpriser who stresses the importance of ideas does so at the expense of concrete action. The point of ideas is to implement them. A plan — a complex set of ideas — to buy a home is made for the purpose of buying the home. A schematic explaining an invention is drafted to produce units of that invention. In turn, the Founders drafted the Declaration not to muse idly in a parlor, but to put such ideas into practice. Hence, they produced a social system freer than what it had existed before. And to the extent that such a social system was successful, it was not due to, but in spite of, political collectivists such as Sam Hyde.
To understand that, we can do something that Sam Hyde has neglected to do: we can bother to consider what is the definition of tradition. Traditions are customs practiced in particular types of settings and on particular occasions, and these customs have become long-established in their respective societies. So far, Sam Hyde and the other MAGA white nationalists would agree. But there is a second part of the definition that they omit. What else makes an action a tradition is that is a gesture symbolically representing some institution that is valued in that society. Culture does not consist of actions merely. Culture consists of actions considered important not only in and of themselves but also as symbolic representations of something else important to that society. And all symbolic gestures exist in the realm of ideas.
The Choice Is Not Traditions Versus Ideas, But Respectively of Passive Conformity to Some Ideas Versus Active Engagement With All Ideas
And, of course, even the MAGA white nationalists’ use of the term “tradition” is a red herring. They don’t value “traditions” in general. They disparage Islamic traditions. Even MAGA white nationalists who are Catholic are unfriendly toward the Catholic traditions of Latinos. The white nationalists only like “traditions” that they associate with their own skin color. And their skin color is just something unchosen that they just have. We can see this in Sam Hyde’s conflation of skin color with “culture.” To revisit the quotation from earlier, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. This is not learned stuff. It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”
Notice Sam Hyde’s equation of “culture” with “genetic memory” and that which is innate, “hardwired.” Culture and traditions consist of sets of actions that people enact voluntarily. By definition, they are not “hardwired.” But in the warped interpretation of Sam Hyde and his many white-nationalist fans, such human actions are as innate and involuntary as skin color. Hence Sam Hyde says nonsensically, “This is not learned stuff.”
To test Sam Hyde’s assertion, you can look at differences in traditions among people who are of the same genetic background but who live in different parts of the globe. Persons of Korean descent in the USA often behave with different customs — different ideas on what is, or is not, socially appropriate — than do people in North Korea. In the USA, rap music is considered “Black culture.” But rap music was not associated with Black people in the 1940s or 1970s, prior to rap music being invented. Rap music is not as popular among Black people in West Africa as it is in the USA. That is because culture is indeed something that is not hardwired. Culture consists of customs. Every custom had to be invented by some individual. Afterward, other people adopted that custom — that is, they learned it.
Every tradition that exists, began as an untraditional innovation and was therefore adopted for reasons other than “It’s a tradition.” As white nationalists love to invoke the fall of Rome in misleading ways, an observation from ancient Rome is instructive here. MAGA white nationalists love to say that the Roman Empire fell from being to open to outsiders — (white-skinned) Germanic barbarians — and the modern West will destroy itself through similar openness. And in an actual ancient Roman debate about openness to foreigners, the emperor Claudius made this important observation about traditions which these same MAGA white nationalists prefer to evade. Tacitus quotes the emperor as saying, “Everything, Senators, which we now hold to be of the highest antiquity [tradition], was once new. . . .This [new] practice [with regard to openness to outsiders] too will establish itself, and what we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.”
This, and every other tradition, was something learned. A tradition might have begun as a practice done squarely for practical value. That was the case of Japanese people mostly eating seafood. But the custom might have begun, from the start, as a symbolic gesture. In either case, what is now called a tradition, is called a tradition — rather than only a custom or practice — because it is a gesture representing some value other than itself. Traditions are ideas.
But there are two different approaches we can take to traditions and all other ideas that have ingrained themselves into the culture. We can take a passive-and-uncritical approach to them. Conversely, we can engage with traditions and other long-cherished ideas, which means being critical and selective about them, which requires actual thought.
The passive-and-uncritical approach is to accept a tradition unthinkingly. The insinuation is that the tradition was good enough for my family, and so I should practice it, and there is no more to consider. That is the approach taken by those who say, “You should follow a tradition because it’s our tradition, and that’s that.” A variant that is only slightly more thoughtful, and which was popular among twentieth-century European political conservatives, is one that goes, “The fact that the tradition has lasted so long, into our own day, is already proof that the tradition is time-tested and has served us well. So the fact that the custom has earned the status of ‘tradition,’ means the custom is worthy. In that respect, I am justified in saying ‘That a custom is a traditional is justification enough to practice it.’ ”
And, of course, that unthinking approach is lazy. For millennia, slavery was traditional. Slavery was a tradition not merely because of its ostensive practical benefits for the slave masters, but because it represented particular ideas that were convenient for the politically-influential in general. It embodied their larger assumption that those in power have every rightful authority to domineer over others by force. In some Mesoamerican Empires, such as that of the Aztecs, ritual human sacrifice was considered an indispensable tradition. The traditional sermons delivered in the very cathedrals that Sam Hyde extols are all about ideas. And, contrary to Sam Hyde, the ideas in such sermons are due for critical reexamining. That a custom is a tradition, is indeed not justification enough. That brings us to the second approach to traditions.
The second and contrasting approach is to recognize that traditions themselves must be subject to judgment and scrutiny other than “It’s a tradition.” It means embracing the realization that some traditions are good and worth preserving, whereas others are inadequate and due for abandonment, replacement, or at least modification. And that is a major role of Enlightenment philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy calls upon us to examine our traditions and select the good from the bad. Since the founding of the republic, reading Enlightenment philosophy has itself become a tradition. But Enlightenment philosophy and Founders such as Thomas Jefferson would tell us that this is not a basis sound enough to embrace the Enlightenment philosophy of the founding: once again, these must be justified by some other, more-objective standard rather than appealing to “tradition.”
And, of course, even the MAGA white nationalists’ use of the term “tradition” is a red herring. They don’t value “traditions” in general. They disparage Islamic traditions. Even MAGA white nationalists who are Catholic are unfriendly toward the Catholic traditions of Latinos. The white nationalists only like “traditions” that they associate with their own skin color. And their skin color is just something unchosen that they just have. We can see this in Sam Hyde’s conflation of skin color with “culture.” To revisit the quotation from earlier, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. This is not learned stuff. It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”
Conclusion: The Nation of the Enlightenment
Ayn Rand has observed the exceptionalism here of the USA’s founding. Sam Hyde’s fellow white nationalists wail that white people have no ethno-state of their own. The reality is that almost all white-majority countries are ethno-states founded by a single tribe. It’s called England because it was founded by the tribe after which it was named, the Angles. Yet another well-known nation is called France because it was founded by the Franks. Insofar as these tribes founded a country to maintain their traditions, the founding was based on ideas. But insofar as it was about “tradition” per se, it was from an uncritical acceptance of those ideas — of accepting them from one’s elders without question.
What makes America exceptional was not only that it was founded by ideas, but by very conscious examination of, and grappling with, such ideas. Upon separation from England, Americans could have set up a new monarchy because that was the tradition of the people from whom they descended. But upon examining that form of government and comparing it against others, the Founders decided to go with institutions previously tried by the ancient Athenians and the Romans but, with the aid of the newest philosophic ideas, to make these institutions more liberal than what their Mediterranean forebears had conceived. Ayn Rand notes that whereas these other Western societies, including those of the Greeks and Romans, were a result of “historical accident,” the American republic was from “philosophical design.”
Leonard Peikoff, too, observes, “America is the only country in history created not by meaningless warfare” nor some “geographical accident” in which some tribe like the Angles found itself, “but deliberately, on the basis of certain fundamental ideas.”
Thomas Paine understood how the founding of America was more about innovation than unthinking adherence to tradition. In Common Sense, the very pamphlet instrumental to inspiring the American Revolution, he reminded readers, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And that is what the Founders did.
Ayn Rand has observed the exceptionalism here of the USA’s founding. Sam Hyde’s fellow white nationalists wail that white people have no ethno-state of their own. The reality is that almost all white-majority countries are ethno-states founded by a single tribe. It’s called England because it was founded by the tribe after which it was named, the Angles. Yet another well-known nation is called France because it was founded by the Franks. Insofar as these tribes founded a country to maintain their traditions, the founding was based on ideas. But insofar as it was about “tradition” per se, it was from an uncritical acceptance of those ideas — of accepting them from one’s elders without question.
Bono is right about America. The fact that America is an idea is the source of what has made it so important and so powerful for over two centuries, prior to MAGA finally being able to threaten it.
Both approaches to tradition — passive-and-uncritical versus engaged-and-selective — involve ideas. But note that the latter involves much more thinking and, hence, ideas play a much more active role. As Ayn Rand noted, the USA was founded not only upon ideas, but upon very conscious engagement with them. And that is why this latter approach to tradition is anathema to Sam Hyde and other white nationalists screeching about a “Great Replacement.”
Were Sam Hyde’s fellow white nationalist, Richard Spencer, to establish a new explicitly white-separatist “ethnostate,” such an ethnostate would also be founded upon ideas. But those would be putrid ideas that have already shown themselves to have the worst consequences, and which Sam Hyde and Richard Spencer haven’t faced objectively. By contrast, the American republic is founded on ideas that have proven themselves to be good — ideas such as freedom of peaceful action for the individual of any “race,” especially those from India whom Sam Hyde demands be expelled from our labor market. The fundamental choice is not between “tradition” and “ideas.” Nay, it is, respectively, whether we passively go with the sloppy half-baked racist ideas that Sam Hyde favors, or go enthusiastically with the ideas of individual rights and, yes, “racial” diversity, which withstand rational scrutiny and which Sam Hyde thus rejects arbitrarily.
The verbiage of Sam Hyde and other white nationalists does not consist of actual arguments but instead of a litany of slogans. “Demography is destiny.” “Don’t be a soyboy.” “Go Woke, go broke.” “You can have a welfare state or you can have open borders. You can’t have both.” “Cuck.” “I was red-pilled.” “It’s White Genocide.” “It’s the Great Replacement.” These amount to thought-stopping clichés. A thought-stopping cliché is a tactic of a dangerous mind-control cult. When they notice underlings beginning to question the cult leader’s arbitrary dictates, the underling’s supervisors recite pithy slogans to them to quell them and preempt them from weighing pros and cons of what they are presented with. The sloganeering is the “cliché” part and the preemption is the “thought-stopping.” Technically, thought-stopping clichés are themselves ideas, but they are the sort of ideas intended to precluded further thought and further inquiry, as rationalizations do. They are stale, simple ideas crafted to discourage people from philosophizing more sophisticated, more advanced ideas into their heads.
Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists, of course, would have us embrace their racism unthinkingly, going as far as conflating customs and traditions and culture as being as inherent as skin color — “This is not learned stuff.” Bothering to examine the facts about culture, tradition, and the learned-versus-unlearned is what immunizes someone against Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists. In that respect, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists are correct to hate the fact that America was founded upon “ideas.” The fact that some people still bother to think is a fact that prevents Sam Hyde and other white nationalists from winning over the rest of the population, white-skinned and otherwise. And, on at least some implicit level, Same Hyde and the other white nationalists notice this.
Both approaches to tradition — passive-and-uncritical versus engaged-and-selective — involve ideas. But note that the latter involves much more thinking and, hence, ideas play a much more active role. As Ayn Rand noted, the USA was founded not only upon ideas, but upon very conscious engagement with them. And that is why this latter approach to tradition is anathema to Sam Hyde and other white nationalists screeching about a “Great Replacement.”
