>We extol tradition for practical, down to earth reasons, not some goofy, esoteric ones. We stress actual civic involvement and making a difference, not cyclical fatalism.
The empiricists are the very ones who have fulfilled the technophilia of the Enlightenment. They've built social organization on the dampened soil left behind by the platitudes of moral and economic philosophers who've achieved nothing but plowed the way for social rationalization and mythical utilitarianism. Paredo was right that the aristocratic class doesn't disappear, it just continuously reinterprets itself to fit the ends of a new system. The entire modern edifice is built on the premise that one can divine human action in a discursive, organized manner; their authority is self-justified by their efficiency, a mythical conjuration, appropriate for decadent priests.
The individual is non-existent, it is virtual; but the platitudes of empirical philosophers have done nothing but reduce their personalities, which is the mask that gives them any being whatsoever, into a reified object, defined by, on the one hand, their social and sentimental affinities, on the other, their suitable application in a carefully woven fabric of securing mechanical domination. Such narrow-minded worldview abolishes anything outside the narrow, conjured scope of social utility and abstract formula, always at the service of the former.
So you can see, the "conservatives" and "traditionalists" were defenders of values that were total caricatures of their proper function: property. They were entirely incapable of disposing of their narrow, modern outlook, and so failed to understand that the property of ancient aristocracy depended entirely on religious worship, the mediating demons of ancestors. Once property was reduced to an abstract, theoretical principle, it could not withstand the banal moral criticisms of liberal philosophers and hence has been reduced to a mere epithet of an individual, identified with various educational and mechanical properties, which is now the only thing that defines them. Property in the original sense has been reduced to mere geography.
The conservatives are now merely the buttress of a lifeless, cold, mechanical system that provides no existential meaning and serves to defend social property that is entirely mythical and false. Some have even explicitly supported the idea of a "noble myth," if this doesn't spell out the true intentions of the conservatives there and done.
