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Cultural continuity is important in three ways: one, if the pace of change is too rapid, people will become disoriented and fail to adjust well. Therefore, it is good for change to occur against a fairly reliable background; two, as a matter of fact, there is much in our cultural inheritance worthy of continuation, such as the the Scientific Method and the Rule of Law; and three, just as human life has no meaning if there is no memory, so there must be respect for history merely to affirm that human life is not evanescent and in vain. The last is actually the most important, as it represents the ethical foundation of conservatism, as distinct from libertarianism. Although the way we live inevitably changes with the advent of new industries and technologies, we should have a reverence for our heritage, and seek those underlying values which may bind us and provide a sense of historical identity with our ancestors. Either the past matters, or human life is but a sequence of moments, and the arc of our lives matters little..... |
