‘The Unbroken Thread’: An Eloquent Defence of Tradition
A review of ‘The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos’, by Sohrab Ahmari; Hodder & Stoughton, 2022.
Sohrab Ahmari, founding editor of COMPACT, is hard to place politically. This is typically a good thing: it suggests he thinks for himself. One might call him ‘post-liberal’; and indeed, his co-founder at COMPACT, Patrick Deneen, is the author of what is the key text on the movement, Why Liberalism Failed. But post-liberalism is a broad church whose only shared view is that liberalism has failed or is failing or will fail and that something else must replace it. It is, as James Orr has suggested, incoherent. What we can say of Ahmari is that he is an eloquent defender of tradition. The Unbroken Thread is proof of that. He charts a course across the choppy waters of several centuries of Western development, aiming to show that tradition is not, as Gustav Mahler put it, ‘the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.’
Ahmari centres his book on twelve big moral questions, such as ‘Can you be free without limits?’, ‘How do you justify your life?’ and ‘What is freedom for?’ He answers each by drawing on a range of thinkers, from Aquinas to Confucius, all the while reflecting on his own volte-face: from urban, freewheeling, secularist to a man whose life is grounded in faith. He attempts to show that the best answers to the questions he asks — questions he asked himself when he had a son and reflected on the kind of man he wished him to be — are to be found in tradition. This is a distinctively conservative idea: that tradition contains the means for its perpetuation and renewable. But it also implies another deeply conservative view: that — to quote Orr — limits are liberating.
Ahmari centres his book on twelve big moral questions, such as ‘Can you be free without limits?’
In case it were not obvious from the title, modernity, for Ahmari, has unmoored itself not only from the past, but from what is most meaningful: rootedness, community, family, faith. By casting these aside, he suggests, we also cast ourselves out to sea, where we are bound to be lost in a turbulent sea of choice and consequence free-living. The paradox of liberalism, Ahmari said, and here he echoes Deneen, is that out of the raw material of boundless negative freedom we have built ourselves prisons of worry and pointlessness. Loosed from the bonds of family and community — bonds that imply both rights and duties — we find we have little in common with our neighbour, few certainties to guide us and nothing to do but, per Roger Scruton, ‘get and spend’. Which is not ideal.
Naturally, any call to restraint makes us wary, for it smacks not of of authoritarianism. But Ahmari sidesteps this elegantly by making his story personal, relating simply how his own search for meaning caused him to accept and then embrace limitation. He argues more for self-imposed limits than the establishment of a centralising power that will tell us what to do. As to whether he is moralising — another very untrendy thing to do — you can be the judge, dear reader; although my view is that such a word has only gathered up negative connotations because our ruling culture has replaced good and bad with free (narrowly defined) and unfree. Frankly, I would like my brother or my wife or a friend to tell me to my face if I did something wrong. And since I do that all the time, I know that they will.
Stylistically, Ahmari brings intellectual rigour with an autobiographical style that stops the book from getting too dry or academic. He has a tendency to bounce around a bit from one idea to the next (a sign of a creative person, by the way) rather than proceed smoothly and logically. We can more or less read each chapter without reference to the one before or after it, and though there is something to that, it does mean that the narrative flow of the thing suffers a bit.
Stylistically, Ahmari brings intellectual rigour with an autobiographical style that stops the book from getting too dry.
What makes his take so valuable is that he is, in some ways, an outsider. He calls himself a ‘radically assimilated immigrant’ and converted to Catholicism as an adult. I have written before about how our best cultural critics, poets and satirists have the outlook of one who has one foot inside and one outside the mainstream culture. Swift, Goldsmith and Wilde — all Irishmen living in England — were among the most trenchant critics of the English. Gore Vidal, a gay left-libertarian born to the establishment, was a mordant commentator on American power. Orwell was an Old Etonian and former imperial cop who attacked what Engels called the ‘social murderers’ of the working poor. (He was also a left-wing intellectual who attacked the Stalinist left.) Ahmari, I think, has this quality; but he is someone who does not attack but affirms. He sees the good in the Western tradition in a way that many of us manage not to.
In the end, The Unbroken Thread is a call to rediscover the wisdom of the past. Whether you leave convinced by Ahmari’s arguments or not, his skill in weaving together faith, philosophy, and personal history makes the book a good read. It calls into question not only what we have gained but what we may have lost in our rush to throw out the past — and does so in a way that makes us stop, if only for a second, to wonder if we might, just might, have been a bit too hasty in cutting the thread.
