There will be no return to tradition

There is no going back, only forward.

‘In my mind and in my car, we can’t remind, we’ve gone too far, pictures came and broke your heart’

-         Video Killed the Radio Star

The title of this article shouldn’t be taken so literally as to mean that the morals, etiquette, and customs of the world in which we live in will never transform into something better. Entire empires and civilisations have grown to dominance through their virtue, sophistication, and intelligence to then, over the ensuing centuries, embrace vice, sin, and short-term expedience, ultimately leading to their decay and destruction. The dust of their carcasses litters our history books and parts of their souls are imbued into the societal edifice we call home.

Babylon has fallen many times, and when these dark days exist only in memory, a new order will have arisen which embody the core human values that we have sown onto the sinews of our hearts. Virtue will not die. Virtue, kindness, valour, the triumph of good over evil - these are the necessary ingredients poured rigorously into the story of life. But, as with all things, worlds do die.

The world that we know will one day perish, and the past that we wish to rip back into the present, as if carefully slicing up a vintage movie reel and stamping the good parts onto our own timeline, will remain forever out of reach, much to the dismay of a very vocal, aesthetically-tuned corner of the internet.

Those who self-describe themselves as traditionalists will be forever disappointed, and rather ironically, only the most advanced, Kardashev Type V civilisation will have the frightening power to make their dreams come true, if such a power does indeed manage to snap the laws of physics as if it were a twig.

One fundamental law of science is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but within the realm of human endeavour, where minds and limbs try to manipulate, control, and transform the domain around the physical body, there is a similar iron law which governs us, mocking any traditionalist who dares violate it: once invented, it can’t be un-invented.

In the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, when the jealous witch Maleficent places a curse on the baby Princess Aurora, she declares that her finger will one day be pricked by a spinning wheel. In response, the King orders that all spinning wheels be torched and destroyed; this mere act by a mortal Monarch however, was no match against the powers of a cunning sorceress.

We are stuck in a similar conundrum. We can’t smash up every smart phone in existence, destroy all heavy machinery, nor melt down every skyscraper. If we reverse modern agricultural techniques, we risk starving billions to death. Such a top down system would necessitate the most totalitarian state the world will ever see, because such a plan is utopian, and utopias require brute force (just ask the twentieth century).

This disentanglement of ourselves from what the nineteenth to the twenty-first century has injected into the very elements of the air we breathe and the ground under our feet would take several lifetimes, a number far higher than what it took to construct the Great Pyramids of Giza.

There is no going back, only forward. There will be no return to those rosy coloured cartoons of an American suburb, where a handsome 1950s husband returns from his stable, well-paid corporate job to his beautiful wife in bright red lipstick and a flower dress, complete with two or three children and a Labrador running around a house that would now cost close to a million.

Strong families will return, but life will inevitably evolve and adapt. Just as video killed the Radio Star, the ongoing wave of technological advancement, which began with humanity’s invention of the spear, will force us to rescind what we once knew. We can still live good lives, purposeful lives, and we must, for the sake of the future and our souls.

But we can’t rewind. We’ve gone too far.