The Importance of Preserving Tradition

 Some recent thinkers have argued that the only way to save modernity is to free it of militant modernism. A culture that cannot balance the modern and the traditional, one that is all for the modern and all against the traditional, will end up destroying itself. When the moral capital of Western civilization is finally exhausted, we will not have entered some brave new world. We will have compassed our own destruction. What the barbarian hordes of ancient and medieval times were unable to accomplish we will have done to ourselves.

- From "Civilization & Tradition" by Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins in Where Next?: Western Civilization at the Crossroads: Essays from The New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball