This — that critiques of progress only come from obscurantist priests of hidebound tradition — on the other hand, is simply the voice of one seeking to silence the questioner and squelch threatening lines of inquiry. Voegelin diagnosed this tendency in the Gnostic mind and labeled it an “intellectual swindle.”

In actually fact, contra Nick’s statement, most conservative critics of progress also developed a sophisticated understanding of social change and development. Voegelin, for example, made an incisive and thoroughgoing critique of calcified traditionalism.

The question is not tradition versus progress, it is what is the truth about God, man, his condition, and the right ordering of things? (For those who would (mis)hear the coming theocracy in those words and beat a swift retreat to the barricades of tolerance and personal choice, please note that I am speaking the language of Plato, not the language of John Winthrop).

As for “resonance,” who knows? The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism, progressivism, and materialism may lead to a renewal of thought that goes beyond the reductive and instrumentalist level of the empiricists. At one time, this was a primary conservative impulse. It ought to be again.