Thread: Rather than view society and the state as a “social contract”, view it as a trusteeship. Or as Burke said - “a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn”. An unbroken traditional civilisation, such as ours, has continuity over time and diversity over space. (1/n)
Rather than view the past as a “burden” to be cast off, view it as a foundation. We are legatees of a great civilisation. We are trustees, and as trustees we (and the custodian- the state) have a duty to preserve, improve and pass on that civilisation we have inherited (2/n)
That approach has intellectual and moral humility. It means you look upon the collective wisdom of your ancestors as something to learn from and take forward, as opposed to something to cast off. We aren’t the first moral and intellectual generation of history (3/n)
It is an act of arrogance to think that everyone who preceded us were intellectual and moral cretins. And that we have the answers to everything. And before someone strawmans it - that doesn’t mean zero change (4/n)
What it means is the humility to see our inheritance as a learnable. To understand and then build on it (or “reform” in the true sense- to RE- formulate the original true insight adapted to our times). In Hindu terms - Srishti that is in line with Rta leading to Stithi (5/n)
To look at “modernity” as a full break from the past is also inefficient, even if you don’t think of tradition in sacred terms. Let’s say you think of it in terms of just the heuristics for a good life arrived at through trial and error. Why would you discard that …(6/n)
…collective wisdom arrived at and passed on through that process of trial and error? Inductive, empirical knowledge is also knowledge. The past is the foundation, but also contains the seeds for future design (7/n)
This urge to “museumise” our past should be resisted. It comes from a place of deep arrogance of social engineering, from ideologies which have proved to be embarrassingly bad anyway. Hence the arrogance is unearned too (8/8)
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