Aug
3
We Must Not Disrespect the Past
“So often in the age of presentism, we in our narcissism and arrogance confuse our technical and material successes with automatic moral progress.” — Victor Davis Hanson
I know, I know. I just had a post not long ago in which I quoted the author/commentator Victor Davis Hanson, a respected classicist and military historian. Normally, I wouldn’t have another post quoting Hanson so soon. But, I just read the most recent Imprimis newsletter from Hillsdale College, which adapts Hanson’s 2025 commencement address to the latest batch of Hillsdale graduates.
The focus of the speech is a trio of “American virtues” — honor, tradition, and optimism. I thought the section on tradition in particular was so perfectly quotable that I decided to excerpt it for you below. It’s a bit shorter than some of the past excerpts I’ve shared, which I’m sure you will appreciate. Continuing from the quote at the top of this post…
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[Thinkers of the past] worried that material progress and greater wealth would result in moral regress, given the greater opportunities to gratify the appetites with perceived fewer consequences and to use sophistry to excuse the sin.
Likewise, without traditional reverence for the past, an ungrateful nation not only suffers a loss of knowledge but is plagued by hubris — so often the twin of ignorance — believing that it alone has discovered ideas and behaviors unique to itself and its own era, when they are in fact ancient. This closed mindset seeks a kind of perfection, a heaven on earth, instead of the good — and it ends up obtaining neither.
Are we not instead the sum total of all those who came before us, who for the most part here in America left us a constitutional system and infrastructure that allowed us to start our lives both materially and civically, in terms of freedom, far ahead of those in the past and those elsewhere today?
Key to the endangered idea of reverence for the past is a recognition that it is neither fair nor just to dismiss easily those of earlier generations based solely on the standards of the present. Instead, we must remember the different circumstances faced by previous generations — circumstances like incurable illnesses, short life expectancy, and work entailing existential danger and physical drudgery. Yet our ancestors were able to endure suffering and challenges that we now can scarcely imagine.
The Hillsdale reverence for the Western tradition and the American past is a reminder that we should not easily condemn and erase the dead, lest we and our times be judged capriciously by future generations and found wanting — whether for the medievalism of our dangerous cities, the electronic cruelty of the Internet, or the fragmentation of the family.
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Wise words on the familiar topic of chronological hubris. Here is the full article.
