What do we mean by “Deep Social Traditions?”

One of the greater challenges faced by contemporary Americans is that our entire culture and society has been created during and after the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, all living and working arrangements have been conceived with the expectation of engines and factories. This is compounded by the fact that in practice, the word “tradition” means not just “the life my grandparent’s lived.” But more pointedly, “the way life was back when I was a very young child.”

Of course so many people want live to go back to the way it was when they were small, when every need was provided for, and we were unaware of the evils of the world. This is naturally understandable. However, it is not at all what we mean.

A study of history and anthropology beyond the levels of high-school history-class propaganda shows a past radically different than we have been taught to assume.

A serious look at everyday life prior to steam engines and factories shows that the very concept of work as something separate from home-life really didn’t exist. Yes, there were a few trades that took people away from their homes – professional soldiers, merchants, messengers – but these were the rare exception, not standard. After all, Royalty and the nobility were the most mobile, but most people were neither. And even in those cases, many times, families moved with the soldier (camp followers), the merchants, and nobility. Messengers might move from town to town, but they always strove to return home.

Overall, home life and “work” life were the same. Men and women both engaged in trades, children were apprenticed. The carpenter’s workspace was part of the house, likewise the blacksmith, the weaver, the tailor and seamstress. There was no commute.

More importantly, for our purposes, the division of labor by sex was not as strict as we assume, nor as consistent. For much of the past two thousand years, at least in the western civilizations, there has been a push-pull between the Imperial Roman Traditions, and the tribal traditions of the Germanic, Celtic, Frankish, and Gothoi peoples.

A very reader-friendly introduction comes to us from renowned French historian Régine Pernoud’s 1977 work Pour en finir avec le Moyen Age, translated into English in Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths.

In chapter six of this book, she writes the following (emphasis mine):

“It is as always in the history of law that we must seek the facts and their meaning, in other words, the reason for this decline, which became, in the nineteenth century, the total disappearance of the role of women… Her influence diminished in direct proportion to the rise of Roman law in juridical studies, then in institutions, and finally in customs. It was a progressive obliteration, whose principal stages, in France at least, one can follow very easily.

“Curiously enough, the first provision that excluded women from the succession to the throne was made by Philip the Fair.* The fact is that this king was under the influence of the southern French jurists, who had literally invaded the court of France at the beginning of the fourteenth century and who…were very much into trading, rediscovered Roman law with a veritable intellectual avidity. This law, which had been conceived for the military, functionaries, and merchants, conferred on the property owner the jus utendi et abutendi, the right of use and abuse, in complete contradiction to the customary law of that time but eminently favorable to those who held personal wealth…. Roman law…was the great temptation of the medieval period; it was studied with enthusiasm not only by the urban bourgeoisie but also by all those who saw in it an instrument of centralization and authority. It showed in large part the effects of its imperialist and, let us say the word, colonialist origins. It was the law par excellence of those who wanted to affirm a central state authority. So it was claimed, adopted, extended by the powers seeking centralization at that time: by the emperor, first of all, then by the papacy. In the middle of the thirteenth century, Emperor Frederick II… made it the common law of the German countries.

“…

“It was by relying on Roman law that jurists like Dumoulin… contributed both to extending the power of the centralized state and also – what interests us here—to restricting the freedom of women and their capacity for action, particularly in marriage…”

[*Philip the Fair is perhaps best known to us as the King who prosecuted the Templars.]

Having started by contrasting the introduction of Roman law in contrast to established customs, she then goes on to discuss women in the church, concluding: “It suffices to say that the status of women in the Church is exactly the same as their status in civil society and that gradually, after the Middle Ages, everything conferred on them autonomy, and independence, any instruction, was taken away from them.”

After these reflections, she then moves on to discuss the “Women who were neither great ladies nor abbesses nor even nuns: peasants and townswomen, mothers of families and women practicing a trade.” When examining the vast number of royal inquiries, town statues, and other legal documents, she writes (my emphasis):

“[these documents] show us men and women through the small facts of life: here the complaint of a woman hairdresser, there of a woman salt merchant (trading in salt), of a woman miller, of the widow of a farmer, of a chatelaine, of a woman Crusader, and so on…

“…one sees, for example, women voting like men in urban assemblies or those of rural parishes…

“…In notarial acts, it is very common to see a married woman act by herself, in opening, for example, a shop or a trade, and she did so without being obliged to produce her husband’s authorization. Finally, the tax rolls… show a host of women plying trades: schoolmistress, doctor, apothecary, plasterer, dyer, copyist, miniaturist, binder, as so on.

“It was only at the end of the sixteenth century, through a parliamentary decree dated 1593, that women would be explicitly excluded from all state functions.

This post is not intended to be a full review of the on-going back and forth regarding who does what in society. The point to this is to show that what modern, “Red-Pill” or “Trad!fam” individuals think of as “tradition” is in fact, not.

First, we see what remains of the tribal customs being swept away by the imposition of Roman law by authoritarian tyrants. This progression gets a boost when factories arise, moving “work” out of the “home.” This then truly separated the spheres of living and working, and thus also childcare, children’s education, and the “adult world.” Married women were then consigned to the children’s sphere since somebody had to watch the children and, by this time, the Romanization of society was so thorough that the idea of men educating and raising their own children was no longer imaginable. One should note that unmarried women were often engaged in trades and factory work (as shown so vividly is Les Misérables) until they were expected to set it aside when they married, forcing them into economic dependence and further impoverishing the already poor, and making it harder for families to grow or increase their resources. No doubt the already wealthy and powerful, who could afford for women to be taken out of the economic equation, found this much to their liking.

But even as this was happening, suffragettes and “first wave feminists” were hard at work trying to reclaim the legal ground that women had progressively lost over the previous 600 years.

World War II, however, called the women back into the factories, and women overall enjoyed betting back to “work,” outside of the home. The end of the war saw the firing of most all of the women who had been so instrumental in building the planes, ships, and logistical necessities of the war effort. This, paired with the rise of the suburb, isolated women in ways they had never been previously. The Leave-it-to-Beaver image of the 1950’s and 60’s hides the fact that many housewives were doped on “mother’s little helper,” – alcohol, valium, or any number of regularly prescribed barbiturates. For this reason, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was so welcomed by so many women.

Having thus shown that the assumptions regarding gendered roles in society is not as clear cut as most “traditionalists” claim, we must come back to the question of “What do we mean by ‘Deep Social Traditions?’”

Here is what we mean:

• Suburban layouts and living are inimical to human psychological, spiritual, emotional, and physical health, and therefore are to be avoided as social poison.
• Village layouts are far more healthy and robust, and are to be preferred.
• “Work” and “Vocation” are not to be seen as separate from “home life,” but rather, entirely in service to it. Every adult’s primary concern is to their family, then the village, with “work” coming in only as much as it supports one or either.
• The concept of family as “Nuclear Family” is inherently broken. Functional families require grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. Every home should be multi-generational, and the modern ideal of kicking children out on their own when they reach legal adulthood is to be abhorred as psychologically abusive, and financial lunacy.
• The recognition of differences between male and female humans is important and it is essential for these differences to be recognized for the sake of social harmony. However, when it comes to roles in public and economic life, such differences are to be recognized more as descriptive than prescriptive.
• With recognition to the physical strength differences between the sexes, the roles any individual takes in the life of the village should be determined first by their ability and their interest. This will lead to natural statistical differences in what sex generally does what job, but there should be no social or familial pressure for any individual person to pursue one path or another based on their sex, nor to avoid any particular role given their sex, with certain exceptions, namely; professionals in the area of women’s health, or any other profession where one sex is naturally put into extreme vulnerability with a professional of the opposite sex.

            As much as we can, we are harkening back to the pre-Romanized social traditions of the Western Peoples. I hope to have some time to write further explorations of these ideas in the future, but let this post serve at least as an initial explanation of the term used in our mission statement.

-Christine Chase