Sohrab Ahmari’s new book on tradition is important because its title is inaccurate. In The Unbroken Thread, Ahmari, an editor at the New York Post, defends traditional ways of thinking by asking pointed questions that reveal the deficiencies of our modern worldview. But the state of tradition is surely not “unbroken” — it could be more accurately characterized as “hanging on by a thread.” The tenuous state of tradition makes it important to drag out the buried thesis of Ahmari’s book: We need a counterelite.
The Unbroken Thread reminds us that everything worth conserving must be constantly reaffirmed. It begins with Ahmari’s admission of his wariness of what the West has become. “I have come to believe that the very modes of life and thinking that strike most people in the West as antiquated or limiting can liberate us, while the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison.” Ahmari makes this abstract concern both concrete and urgent by tying it to the fate of his son, who is named after the Catholic St. Maximilian Kolbe. When young Max grows up, will he be able to understand why his namesake sacrificed his life for a stranger at Auschwitz?
Ahmari holds up successful 20-something yuppies as the dark archetypes of our society. Credentialed at elite universities, they know nothing. They’re simultaneously hedonists and corporate bores. They’re consumed by ambition, but it’s aimed at ephemeral and pathetic goals. Each chapter of the book is organized around a philosophical question and contrasts the yuppie’s answer with that of a great thinker.
These questions pull out the faulty assumptions that lurk beneath status quo views. For example, the chapter “How do you justify your life?” explores the life and work of C.S. Lewis to discuss the limits of scientific rationalism. The questions in the first half of the book all relate to God, while those in the second half explore the relationship between freedom and duties. Intellectual giants such as Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and Confucius appear, but the most interesting sections discuss lesser known figures. One chapter explores the emptiness of those who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” with the story of anthropologists Victor and Edith Davis, who studied the religious rites of African tribes. The inspiring life of black pastor Howard Thurman, a theologian who mentored Martin Luther King Jr., is used to argue that life’s indignities do not undermine belief in God.
Ahmari’s prose is always clear, and he manages to articulate sophisticated arguments without ever sounding academic or getting lost in minutia. The chapter on Augustine’s City of God, for instance, never gets bogged down even though it weaves together history, philosophy, and theology to challenge fundamental precepts of modern politics. He does an excellent job of synthesizing different lines of thought.
The chapter “Why would God want you to take a day off?” is a standout. It discusses the work of Abraham Heschel, a rabbi who wrote about the philosophy of the Sabbath, and the importance of blue laws. For most of our history, the United States was filled with various blue laws that closed or limited business on Sundays (especially the sale of alcohol). They were abolished in the name of “liberty,” but this led people to be less free. For example, North Dakota used to close all businesses on Sunday mornings, and people had freedom over that time. “Political freedom isn’t enough,” writes Ahmari. “For Heschel a civilization might be politically free, as America indeed was, and its citizens could still remain unfree in their souls.”
It’s become common for conservative pundits to criticize rhetoric extolling “freedom” in order to differentiate themselves from “zombie Reaganism,” but Ahmari makes an important point that’s often lost. People may talk a lot about “freedom,” but we no longer live like a free people. Freedom is self-rule. Blue laws may have limited consumer choice, at least on Sundays, but they were passed by elected local governments; when they were abolished, it was because of lobbying by big corporations. That’s not self-rule. And even those running the corporations aren’t particularly free. They often live like serfs, chained by “non-stop barrages of emails to be answered and sleepless nights spent by the ghostly blue of the smartphone.”
Ahmari’s critique of modern “freedom” is essential for understanding why we’re no longer interested in self-rule. People who lack self-mastery, who chase after their every desire, aren’t free. This truth is obvious at the personal level. You’re “free” to choose to lose those 5 pounds, so why don’t you ever actually do it? And when freedom is defined as merely the ability to choose, then the expansion of choices becomes associated with the expansion of freedom. But this logic is self-undermining because choosing one thing often limits future choices. “Freedom” then becomes paralysis, and its endpoint is spending three hours choosing among 12,000 Netflix movies but never actually watching anything.
Ahmari’s points are so obviously true that an implicit question goes unasked. Why does he have to defend “tradition”? Meaning, anyone with an ounce of humility understands that lots of smart people lived before them, and anyone with half a brain understands that the dead offer the living important lessons. Soren Kierkegaard likened those who think society has outgrown its traditions to a dancer who thinks that just because dance is old that he doesn’t have to learn the basics personally. Tradition is the frame of reference needed to continue conversations between generations. Why then does the word “tradition” elicit childish reactions and brain-dead conversations?
Anti-tradition is itself a tradition. Liberals often operate on unquestioned assumptions they inherited from prior generations and defend their worldview more with prejudice than argument. Marquis de Sade was born in 1740, and Wilhelm Reich coined the term “sexual revolution” in 1936. Our “modern” views on sex are ancient. Our “freedom” is life as a serf. And attacks on “tradition” come from those who have the intellectual horizon of lost Amazonian tribes.
The “decline of the West” has become a cliche, and Ahmari can be forgiven for not wanting to engage in hackneyed melodrama, but his book becomes more important when we acknowledge that we were all born into the ruins of a prior civilization. We live in a new dark age. This sounds dramatic in light of new advancements such as the COVID-19 vaccine. But in 1969, “technology” meant mankind walking on the moon. Today, it means apps that use slave wage workers to deliver pad thai. The thread connecting us to the old civilization broke before ‘69, and no one today has known anything other than the long death rattle of the West.
The first half of the 20th century featured a series of cataclysms that sundered almost all confidence in the civilization’s prior values: World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, which should be viewed as different episodes of a single crisis. This becomes obvious once you look at how society changed afterwards. To take just one example, the Catholic Church had an unbroken liturgical tradition that stretched back to ancient Rome. In 1962, with the Second Vatican Council, it was snapped. Regardless of the merits or demerits of Vatican II, everyone should recognize that it signaled a radical change in society’s relationship to the past.
Since the “thread” has been broken, it’s important to note the undercurrent of Ahmari’s work. While the book is framed as a letter to his son, this feels like a device to organize the various essays. It adds a nice personal touch, but it leaves something unsaid. The true climax of the book is found in the acknowledgements, where Ahmari admits that the book was born out of a desire to write about young professionals who had embraced traditional Catholicism. The book’s stated purpose is simply to change minds, but it seems also to be calling for more members of the elite to defect. When a tradition fails, it is the failure of the ruling class. Elites are always the stewards of their society’s traditions, and abdicating that responsibility is akin to renouncing their right to rule.
A better ending for Ahmari’s book would have been a more explicit call for a counterelite. Studying the ancients doesn’t just connect us to the distant past; it connects us to the far-off future. It took a long time for the thread to break, and it will take just as long to repair it. We need a cadre of counterelites who are willing to pursue a vision for what life ought to look like in 100 years.
Ahmari works in the great conservative tradition of reminding us that there are no lost causes because every generation finds themselves asking the same questions. Tradition is not a static item that never changes but the repeated asking and answering of questions, and its maintenance requires people of courage and talent. The Unbroken Thread is a fantastic tale of the most important things our society has forgotten.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
