I wonder if it (complaining about the modern world) is a theme though with some traditionalists? Seeing this while perusing:
Not so much a theme as a recognition of a metaphysical principle at play.
Modernism is under the glamour of its own surface, if you like, we're bedazzled by our achievements, and that deludes us into thinking we are in every respect superior beings with regard to those who went before, when actually, we're not that much different, and take away all our tech, and we'd devolve pretty rapidly ... we are 'hothouse' flowers, in that regard.
By modernism they mean the refutation of the religious and the spiritual – it's hard to see, but if you've been raised in a religion, and then taken the trouble to look into and interrogate your own beliefs, you come to see that so much of what passes for 'common sense' with regard to comments on religion are not the product of any real thought at all, and are largely spun out of thin air, prejudice and ignorance...
After all the modern world does challenge tradition in many ways. So I suppose traditionalists would be living up to their name.
The meaning of tradition is 'that which is handed down'.
What 'tradition' is not, is the more contemporary reading of the term to imply a "nostalgia for the past”, in the words of Schuon, 'a particularly reprehensible arbitrariness' which utterly devalues its proper meaning. His reasoning for arguing the 'idiotic' and 'dishonest circumlocution' being that the same can be applied to well-founded logical processes – mathematics is a tradition; that mathematical theorems exist today is not the result of such a 'nostalgia' but rather the recognition of their versimilitude.
With regard to religion, modernity tends to reproach these ideas simply because they are found in the past, or because one would like to situate them there “irreversibly”, so as to remove from them any contemporary value. They become trivialised and are reduced to novelties.
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The Enlightenment introduced the opinion that we are other-than nature, something we are somehow apart from and superior to. Famously nature was portrayed as a wanton woman who needed to be tamed by (male) science – it was not so much enlightened as patrician privilege and entitlement bolstering itself on its own interpretation of scientific principles.
As the Native American commentator might have said, "If you're so enlightened, how come you shit in your own tent?"
So for all its benefits, and they are many, there is an underlying downside which we do not see and refuse to acknowledge – it's taken us to approach the brink of catastrophe, an extinction event, to recognise that we cannot control nature, and it's a dangerous game thinking that way. Better is working in harmony with, but that is not the 'male' way ...
If there was any more example sought for the idea of the decline spoken of by the perennialists, I'd point to our current batch of political leaders.
I guess I'm not really getting my head around what it is that makes perennialism equivalent(?) to traditionalism, or why traditionalism is another name for it, when I would more likely have associated it with modern pluralism.
The distinction between 'traditionalism' and 'pluralism' can be seen in the case of comparative religion.
The Traditionalist, that is the follower of the Sophia Perennis, holds that all truth is one, and works from a set of top-down principles, to highlight the essential sameness and the formal differences between religious traditions, and thus offers a means of reconciliation for those for whom the differences become an impediment.
The pluralist, on the other hand, tends to work on bottom-up principles, and often such are founded on egalitarian ideas, which too often is an egalitarian idealism, founded on sentimentality and romance, rather than actual metaphysical principles.
All religions are
not the same. This is a confusion of metaphysical principle. Each is unique and in its own way quite distinct from its neighbour. Its source and origin is One, and that One-ness exists above the level of forms. If you treat each religiuon at its exoteric and formal level, then Christianity, for example, refutes every other religion, or at best situates it beneath itself – "Jesus saith to him: I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me" (John 14:6) – that's pretty dogmatic.
You can't be a Zen Christian – or rather, you can identify as such, as long as you're not fully conversant with either Zen Buddhism, Christianity, or both. The 'way' of those paths contradict each other at the formal level.
You can delight in the correspondence between traditions that points to a common essence, that is what the Perennial Tradition is all about – but what the Traditionalists assert, is that to know a religion you have to do it – there are plenty of those who comment on or about religion from outside. You can't ride two horses, you can't serve two masters, and at some point you're gonna have to get off the fence.
