The biggest difference is, in the society Tayana seems (admittedly from what little I'm reading of her/his? stuff) to endorse is that tradition was both adaptable and practical, yet also squarely rooted in a common norm.
that allowed leg room for people to be safely cavalier and dumb and promiscuous without ruinating society.
I won't say that it allowed people to be safely cavalier and dumb and promiscuous, but rather traditionalism recognises the inevitable fallen nature of humanity and tries to contain and direct it effectively rather than force it to not exist. You see, when I sniff at "bourgeoisie morality", I'm sniffing at democratic totalism--the ideology of being able to make everyone normal, of being able to make everyone fit the mean.
It is absurdity to think that all people are equal. They're not. Some people, you see, are simply better than others. More talented, more motivated, more honourable, sometimes it's physical and sometimes it's psychological. But modern society demands that we pretend this isn't the case, that structural failures cause these defects and if only we shovel more money at education, or free housing, or what have you, we can make them better. Instead, we inevitably make them worse, because what we're actually doing is discouraging the borderline people from applying their full effort at self-improvement. Then we wonder why we don't have equality yet, and spend more money to fix the problem. And worse, as we follow down this equality of outcomes we find ourselves dragging down more and more of the intelligent and motivated by insisting on a homogeneity of outcomes. We complain that Magnet Schools are "biased". Of course, it is true that everyone with a soul is equal before God, but the specific role in life they were meant to play is a work of Werdë, of Dharma, and it's not something that the imposition of standardised morality will actually change.
But what actually follows from this is that trying to force the elimination of specific classes of "immoral" people is driven by the same impulse, and just as likely to fail. Being homosexual or transsexual is a part of one's innate spiritual character, it's a role someone is fated to play out before they're born, and the same with many other vices of character, being intemperate and hot-blooded or being shy and retiring, it's all the same.
What we see is that the bourgeoisie notion of scientific totalitarianism--democratic totalitarianism--this monster of "we can adopt measures to force everyone to the mean" became prominent even in so-called conservatives. We can force everyone to be
moral. Indeed, the early social reformers tried exactly this in banning obscenity and in banning alcohol and in establishing standards for gin houses and in proclaiming that we could civilise the pit-wench and put her into the home and make a bourgeoisie mother out of her. We entertained the notion of a universality of
outcomes, leveling our very speech (the promotion in Britain of the affected lower-class accent which is now universal), adopting crass gutter-art as high art, etc. Gradually these high-minded ideals gave way to the present derangement. Refinement in taste, which provides the peak of civilisation and which forms a cultural vanguard which preserves our sense of identity as a people, was deranged and lost.
Since all people could not be beautiful, we even demanded an end to beauty, and declared that instead ugliness would be beauty. Our music lost centuries of refinement to become the insensate noise of bongo drums, not even related to the ethnic music of other people because the ethnic music of other people has taste and class, and can be fully appreciated in their cultural context; our own pop music is completely divorced from it. We finally reached the Eclipse--the cultural singularity of evil--in the 1960s when all distinctions were torn down, and the social expectation of an upper class--that it serves its nation--was completely lost, because we no longer believed there should be an upper class at all, we equalised everyone. In doing so we created the modern neoliberal order, because it meant that the upper class, which still existed (but which now everyone had to pretend didn't exist) was completely unrestrained by the mores and customs established for their aristocratic refinement, and thus could act with total unrestrained rapacity, because after all they're just like the rest of us, except more successful for reasons nobody really can control.
In short, the very poison of equality is in your heart and soul, and it's what it makes you want to crush and eliminate things like homosexuality and transsexuality entirely, because you're ultimately a bourgeoisie modern as well. But to a Traditionalist, the question was: How do we fit the inevitably fallen condition of humanity into the proper functioning of society? How do we keep society healthy when these natures and inclinations exist and we can't do anything about that? How do we keep ourselves moral and chivalrous when we know this cannot be helped?
And so for tens of thousands of years human civilisations have created rules around differences between people. There's rules for aristocrats, there's rules for the poor, there's rules for merchants, bankers, and rulers, there's rules for homosexuals to comport themselves without harming society, and places to put transsexuals without harming society. There is a social exchange where society gives people freedom to be themselves, and in reciprocity expects them to uphold their duties to society. Everything worked because
nobody pretended that everyone was equal, and instead, we created specific social rules which could adapt to and manage the infinite varieties of human nature. And so laws were organic, complicated, and subtle. Social reformers declared this an evil: There was no need for tolerance, we could fix it all and make everyone equal.
But what was the point of making everyone equal? The society they created resulted in worse standards of living during the industrial revolution, and currently is driving everyone mad like we're rats in a densely populated rat-paradise; we've created "Stand on Zanzibar" as our brave new future and only technology nominally covers up the deep psychological sickness we all exist in. And so, too, by not regulating these behaviours, they have become rampant. We have lost on every front, and it was the Gladstones of the world who put us here, in their ineffable arrogance, and you have not actually escaped thinking a great deal like they did.
