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The Unbroken Thread, Ahmari, an editor at the
New York Post, defends traditional ways of thinking by asking pointed questions that reveal the deficiencies of our modern worldview. But the state of tradition is surely not “unbroken” — it could be more accurately characterized as “hanging on by a thread.” The tenuous state of tradition makes it important to drag out the buried thesis of Ahmari’s book: We need a counterelite.
The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, by Sohrab Ahmari. Convergent, 320 pp., $27.
The Unbroken Thread reminds us that everything worth conserving must be constantly reaffirmed. It begins with Ahmari’s admission of his wariness of what the West has become. “I have come to believe that the very modes of life and thinking that strike most people in the West as antiquated or limiting can liberate us, while the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison.” Ahmari makes this abstract concern both concrete and urgent by tying it to the fate of his son, who is named after the Catholic St. Maximilian Kolbe. When young Max grows up, will he be able to understand why his namesake sacrificed his life for a stranger at Auschwitz?