The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, Sohrab Ahmari

getting your answers questioned

One of the most quietly provocative books I’ve read in a long time, I picked up The Unbroken Thread because I thought it would speak to themes that matter to me: namely, that the traditions and authorities of the past are worth honoring. The fact that it did speak to those themes, but in a way that alternately discomfited and surprised me, makes me want to recommend this book to everyone. The Unbroken Thread is the best kind of idea book, one that challenges even those who agree with its premise, and I loved it for making me wince or feel weird or wonder at my own beliefs and whether I was hewing to them too much, or not enough. There’s no shame in reading books that reaffirm your beliefs, but it would be a salt-less meal if we never faced a challenge, and what better than a challenge from someone sympathetic to you?

It’s also a deceptively easy read. The book is separated into two halves, one with questions relating to God, and one with questions relating to humankind: things like ‘how do you justify your life’ and ‘should you think for yourself’ (!) and ‘can you be spiritual without being religious’ and ‘what is freedom for.’ Each question gets its own chapter, and that chapter tells its story using someone from history (Saint Augustine, Andrea Dworkin, C.S. Lewis, Seneca, etc). Ahmari suggests the answers to the questions with those stories, but never goes so far as to enshrine a right answer… it’s your job to sit with each story and struggle with the resulting ideas.

I love how the use of historical figures lifts contexts into relief that we might overlook, like this one about the Sabbath:

It is difficult to imagine just how revolutionary the Sabbath vision must have appeared in the ancient world, where the vast multitudes of people were slaves and nearly all derived their identities from the servile work they did: a world where who you were was inseparable from whom you served and what you did for that master. Into such a world, there appeared a religion that told slaves they had an identity separate from their labor, that their non-work was sacred.

The brain explosions were many. On questions like the nature of freedom:

Are we too free? Solzhenitsyn would say that insofar as our disordered concept of freedom hamstrings moral excellence and promotes its opposite, insofar as it encourages us to be base and Fetyukov-like—then we aren’t free enough. And we certainly aren’t free merely because we are unconstrained and unrestricted.

Or about thinking for yourself:

That liberal vision of absolute free thought and “conscience,” Newman argued, would never be realized anyway. It was a mirage. Some orthodoxy or other will inevitably lord over our societies, and likewise, some authority or other will inevitably demand our obeisance.

And, in between the really big ideas, the text is strewn with little, striking observations that linger:

Barbarism, in this sense, isn’t the mere opposite of civilization, but simply the refusal to communicate where communion is possible.

If you’ve grown up in the modern West there are assumptions you take for granted that Ahmari wants you to re-examine, because the overwhelming picture he paints is that we are lingering in an emotional adolescence in a society that encourages us to idolize the rebellious stages of youth. You know, the ones where we assume we know better than our parents’ and want to prove it, and usually end up learning their lessons the hard way. It’s difficult reading, because you don’t realize how much of that you’ve internalized just by existing in a society like ours. “Do what you want, as long as it works for you (and I guess as long as it doesn’t harm others)” is, in the end, a very lonely, atomizing philosophy, one that says the individual is everything and society nothing. But we’re not built that way, are we? It’s just easier to come down hard on one side of the scale than it is to embark on the balancing act between surrender and will, between the very individual journey we all take on being born… and the fact that our individual journeys have been traveled by millions of people before us. Maybe we should listen to them, Ahmari says. Maybe we should recognize that reducing every choice to ‘is it legal’ doesn’t lead us anywhere healthy.

I am reminded of John Adams’s famous quote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The Unbroken Thread is a reminder—a warning almost—that if we do not live moral lives, we are unequal to the freedoms that we have enshrined in law.

Did I agree with everything in this book? I don’t think so (see how interesting it is that I’m not sure!). But I’m so glad I read it, and as a book that I feel will challenge everyone, no matter their belief system, I’d hand it to anyone willing to examine their own ideas.

The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, by Sohrab Ahmari. Get it.