Grateful, not Burdened, by What Has Been
Ideas, Cultures, and Adopting a Posture
Should we be unburdened or grateful for what has been?
Those are two very different attitudes towards the world and are very deep ideas. It may sound like a trite, throw away comment but it digs much deeper than we think. Most things do. It’s the difference between seeing responsibility as an opportunity or something to avoid.
Modern humans are so far down the road from their foundations that today it can be difficult to see that.
It could be said that adopting one or the other is the pivotal difference between progressivism and conservatism. Some have even pointed to the fact that “being unburdened” is at the basis of communist thought, which it absolutely is. But most people who adopt these ideas have no idea, for good or for ill, where they came from. People with communist ideas don’t know their ideas are communist any more than atheists know that they have Christian ideas.
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” — Karl Marx
What’s important here is to understand the two postures and what results from them.
One is a posture adopted towards history and tradition that sees it as a burden — something to be…
