In Guenon's work, he sharply dichotomizes occidental knowledge and oriental wisdom, excoriating the west for choosing the wrong path and praising sufis, hindus, and such for ways of thinking and modes of life more aligned with the perennial. I reject that dichotomy and believe in a synthesis, which puts me in a school of my own I call "Scientific Traditionalism," or SciTrad.

It is my belief that knowledge and wisdom can't ever be in conflict, and that the appearance of such conflict is proof that either one's knowledge or wisdom or both are lacking. As if by way of a cosmic double-entry bookkeeping, facts and truths must be accounted for and reconcile. As such, we ought to take a traditionalist approach to science and a scientific approach to tradition.

In the Orthodox Christian tradition, ethnos is comprehensively accounted for. All traditions are in a state of degeneration, and some fail to account at all for ethnicity and identity. Even Orthodox Christian institutions in 21st century America are bending to the neocolonial pressures with the emergence of a new "sin" of "racism" if (and only if) the perpetrator is white. Orthodox Christianity isn't the only exoteric institution that gets it right, but the foremost in mind for me.

The sharp corner we have to take is that the Accidental Identities of world history are giving way as the extended isolation and unique circumstances of their creation and maintenance slip away in the modern world. Mass society will not be a permanent state, and new endogamous castes--Intentional Identities--are already beginning to emerge.

Ireland is no longer a remote isle in the North Atlantic, and it's safer and easier to travel to Ireland now for anybody in the world than it quite recently was to travel from one end of Ireland to the other. The unique circumstances that made the Irish Irish are gone, though an intentional Irish identity can be constructed with an explicitly defined biological basis and a defined set of first principles.

The optimal level of loyalty should be a smooth, logarithmic curve, with more loyalty to the nuclear family than to the clan, more loyalty to the clan than to the nation, more loyalty to the nation than to the race, and similarly with political structures that ideally approximate those relatedness structures. This is necessary to minimize alienation and maximize eusocial behavior.

Scandinavian countries have been more inclined to invest in the commons, in social welfare, and in local charities because they're nations that share a common sense of heritage, identity, future, and stake. Their loosening of those policies in recent years is a direct function of immigration and diversification. As Putnam explains in Bowling Alone, people instinctively and reflexively pull back when they don't identify with or care about the kids in the parks and public schools.

As such, we see the sociological facts that dovetail with the perennial truths manifested by the Orthodox "ethnarchs" in Ottoman Greece, the Irish partisans, and the organic communities and naturally emergent community leaders that humans reliably and universally develop. Humans exist in these "tribes" as surely as fish exist in schools and birds exist in flocks.

The Traditionalist worldview doesn't place any absolute value on the tribe, just as it doesn't place any absolute value on being married or having children. The Christian Bible exhorts us to "be fruitful and multiply" and, as Yoram Hazony has thoroughly shown, it comprehensively supports the existence of nations. But Tradition is truly universal, and is just as true for all tribes and those without a tribe as it is for patriarchs and old maids alike.