The Twelve Foundations of
the Ancestral Folkway.

“You either have heritage, or you are nothing.”

Heidegger's term for the unchosen conditions into which you are born: ancestors, tongue, customs, land. Heritage is the bedrock of identity.

“Law from another.”

Obligations flow from without: from kin, community, and the commands of the ancestors. Morality, if it is to bind at all, must come from outside the moral agent.

“The basic stuff of morality is the command.”

Moral language is command language. Commands are apt or inapt depending on who issues them and to whom. Ethics is agent-relative and irreducibly particular.

“Something is always already in place before reasoning begins.”

Reason depends on brute facts, axioms, and concepts handed down by tradition. Metaphysics is downstream of tradition.

“Authority is authorship. Obligation arises from origin.”

A command binds because it issues from that which made, founded, or transmitted the form of life within which one stands. When commands conflict, priority goes to the more ancestral.

“To be is to be other than.”

Difference is the precondition of there being things at all. Unity is real, but it is an achievement, not a beginning.

“I against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the world.”

A graded structure of obligation that radiates outward in concentric circles. Loyalty is ranked; the nearer has priority over the further.

“Group feeling is the cohesive force of the folk.”

Ibn Khaldun's term for the bloodbound solidarity that makes a people warlike and communitarian. Civilizations rise and fall with it.

“Society is a body, and the whole comes before the part.”

The individual is a limb grown inside a living order: posterior, derivative, and defined fundamentally by his role.

“Sovereignty is conserved. The buck always stops somewhere.”

If a sovereign can be restrained, then whatever restrains him is the real sovereign. Liberalism cannot abolish sovereignty; it merely conceals it.

“The sacred is in the world, not behind or beyond it.”

Field, hearth, threshold, river, ancestor mound, boundary stone: these are sites of power. Religion gravitates toward cult and orthopraxy, not doctrine and orthodoxy.

“The love of the familiar: home, hearth, kin, custom.”

Sir Roger Scruton's term for the emotional precondition of any sane and durable order. You will not preserve what you do not love.