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

by Sohrab Ahmari

We've pursued and achieved the modern dream of defining ourselves--but at what cost? The New York Post op-ed editor makes a compelling case for seeking the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning.

As a young father and a self-proclaimed “radically assimilated immigrant,” opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari realized that when it comes to shaping his young son's moral fiber, today's America comes up short. For millennia, the world's great ethical and religious traditions taught that true happiness lies in pursuing virtue and accepting limits. But now, unbound from these stubborn traditions, we are free to choose whichever way of life we think is most optimal — or, more often than not, merely the easiest. All that remains are the fickle desires that a wealthy, technologically advanced society is equipped to fulfill.

The result is a society riven by deep conflict and individual lives that, for all their apparent freedom, are marked by alienation and stark unhappiness.

In response to this crisis, Ahmari offers twelve questions for us to grapple with — twelve timeless, fundamental queries that challenge our modern certainties. Among Is God reasonable? What is freedom for? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, one another? Exploring each question through the life and ideas of great thinkers, from Saint Augustine to Howard Thurman and from Abraham Joshua Heschel to Andrea Dworkin, Ahmari invites us to examine the hidden assumptions that drive our behavior and, in so doing, to live more humanely in a world that has lost its way.

Editorial Reviews

“[The Unbroken Thread] merits attention . . . because Ahmari is a notable combatant in the fight on the American right for the future of conservatism.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Ahmari’s elegantly written book matters because it seeks to give moral voice to what so far has mainly been a populist scream against the values of elite liberalism.”
—Bret Stephens, The New York Times

“A scholarly rebuke to the fashionable currents of our rootless age. . . . Salted with an intellectual breadth and curiosity, expressed with exceptional clarity.”
—The Times (London)

“A formidable combination of storytelling and philosophy that might change your life.”
—The Times (London), Audiobook of the Week

“A vital and provocative read. . . . Designed to satisfy the curiosity of those wondering whether there is more to life than rootless independence, The Unbroken Thread is an easy read, while still meaty enough to reward those already sympathetic to tradition’s insights. . . . Studded with little gems of historical and philosophical intrigue.”
—The Telegraph (London)

“[Ahmari] is a master storyteller. . . . Readers of Sohrab Ahmari’s new book will be grateful to him for reminding us of how serious the loss [of our traditions] could turn out to be.”
—First Things

“Even those who reject Ahmari’s categories and conclusions will still admire and be edified by the stories he has to tell.”
—National Review

“A triumph of intellectual hagiography that leads the reader confidently into deep waters.”
—Commentary

“Ahmari proposes a path out of the chaos in our culture today, discerning the reasons of the heart and promoting moral excellence. He frames the questions we all need to ponder and identifies many topics that families and religious leaders need to address — the sooner, the better.”
—The New Criterion

“Sohrab Ahmari’s latest book presents compelling critiques of the modern understanding of human freedom.”
—The American Conservative

“An extended, carefully worded invitation to share in the treasures of Western civilization.”
—Claremont Review of Books

“Ahmari’s prose is always clear, and he manages to articulate sophisticated arguments without ever sounding academic or getting lost in minutia.”
—Washington Examiner

“The Unbroken Thread will be of great service to Americans who have been deprived of their moral and philosophical inheritance by a shallow educational establishment. . . . Ahmari introduces a generation (and more) to the spiritual patrimony of which they have been robbed. And he does it in the gentlest way possible, knowing its riches may dazzle eyes that have too long alighted on only the rusted scrap of utilitarian liberalism.”
—Spectator USA

“The urgent need for this work cannot be doubted. For as Ahmari concludes his reflections, the social trends that fill parents like him with unease also come into sharper focus.”
—National Catholic Register

“The quality that makes [Ahmari] a valuable thinker for our current moment is the same one that made him write this book in the way that he his willingness to take risks.”
—City Journal

“...

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Religion, Politics, History, Theology, Cultural

298 pages, Hardcover

First published May 11, 2021

About the author

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact: A Radical American Journal. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at News Corp., as op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London.

In addition to those publications, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, The Spectator, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, and The American Conservative, for which he is a contributing editor.

Born in Tehran, Iran, he lives with his wife and two children in Manhattan.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fiddler on the Roof

Religious converts are almost always radically conservative. Their psychological condition is not dissimilar to that of the common soldier who has been promoted to officer rank. He or she depends upon the stability of the culture to which they have committed their identity. The convert is attracted by a tradition and wants to protect it as he or she first found it. The ‘mustang’ officer is particularly keen to ensure good order and discipline among his former colleagues, and heaven help them if he is a member of their court martial. Proving oneself worthy of one’s heritage is a dominant motivation in both cases - a sort of Whiggish spirituality.

Sohrab Ahmari is just such a convert to Christianity. He has been gripped by some aesthetic compulsion to embrace the Christian myths. Now in order to confirm his aesthetic to himself and to prove his bona fides to his fellow-believers, he wants the rest of us to understand their importance. He also, in the manner of a newly received member of the officer class, wants the rest of us to accept these traditions as the key to our own psychological and sociological well-being. Discipline and right-thinking should be restored. Tradition must be revived.

Central to Ahmari’s tradition is the idea of freedom. But for him freedom is not the absence of constraint, rather it is “freedom rooted in self-surrender, sustained by the authority of tradition and religion… ” This is an ancient Catholic idea formulated first by St. Augustine in the late 4th century CE and promoted forcefully by the Puritans and Calvinists who dominated early American society. According to Augustine freedom is not the capacity to exercise choice because we are bound to choose badly. Left to our own powers we will sin which is “the will to keep or pursue something unjustly.” According to Augustine, we live in a permanent state of “akrasia,” that is weakness of the will. This condition enslaves us. For him it made no sense to talk of free will without the power of grace from God to keep it on the right track. And only through total submission to the will of God could this grace be obtained.

Augustine is careful to avoid the Gnostic implications of an evil creation, a potential residue from his Manichaean past. But he nevertheless claims that humanity as it exists is corrupt and therefore hopelessly lost in sin and disorder. Ahmari’s argument is straight out of the Augustinian playbook. He points to the vulgar banality of present-day America with the same superior disdain Augustine held for the declining Roman Empire. And like Augustine, Ahmari blames his philosophical forbears for the mess - Ahmari the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Augustine the Platonists and Stoics who also did not respect the Christian God.

According to Ahmari, channeling the Jewish theologian Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, “The message of tradition runs counter to the fundamental credo of a utilitarian society.” Whether this is true or not, is not this utilitarian society also the product of a tradition? In fact the very Christian tradition which Ahmari adheres to? This is a tradition, fundamentally unlike that of Soloveitchik, which begins with a presumption of individual rather than communal salvation. Is not the postulate of a personal inviolate soul the foundation for the philosophy of individualism in Mills and all subsequent economists who dominate the national discourse? In this context, Ahmari’s use of Soloveitchik is obscene. Christianity itself is the origin of the problem not its solution.

Ahmari’s abuse of Soloveitchik reminds me of an apt observation by another great Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem: “Authentic tradition remains hidden; only the decaying [verfallende] tradition chances upon [verfällt auf] a subject and only in decay does its greatness become visible.” Indeed, in its time the Christian tradition has demonstrated greatness. This is probably what attracted Ahmari to it in the first place. But to suggest that it is a tradition that should be revived is the equivalent of the recent claims by old Marxists that Communism failed only because it wasn’t implemented with enough vigour. Christianity brought us to where we are today. Max Weber documented that over a century ago. What Ahmari is saying therefore is that Christianity itself has gone astray. It is his brand of Christian tradition that should replace it.

In short, Ahmari is a typical fundamentalist. Not only does he consider his interpretation of the truth definitive but he also claims the authority to promulgate that truth to the rest of us (not as a church minister, or philosopher, or theologian, but as a journalist; the irony is precious I think). But he is also, paradoxically, a sort of pan-fundamentalist who calls upon those of other traditions to adopt his point of view to form a sort of Coalition of Traditionalists. Within this coalition, the factual will be reduced to the dogmata of faith. All other reports are suspect, and, even more importantly, irrelevant.

What Ahmari really wants to promote through his coalition is apparently the idea invented by St. Paul, faith. “Faith in God,” he proclaims with Pauline certainty, “assures us that there is ultimate meaning in creation, even if we can’t always discern it.” This explains his cavalier attitude toward the contents of faith in other religions. It is faith itself which he wants accepted as the criterion of truth. Like Augustine with the Manichaeans, Ahmari doesn’t recognise the roots of his view in the Iranian Islamic faith from which he and his family fled.

It’s fairly clear that Ahmari expects that once faith is established as the criterion of truth that the Christian truth will prevail. His intellectual hope is in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas who is the poster boy for Christianity as the supreme religion. His only remaining rival, he believes (and he is probably correct), is that of modern Gnosticism. He spends a great deal of effort connecting the work of Hans Jonas and Rudolf Bultmann about Gnosticism with modern American society.

Perhaps Ahmari is viscerally aware that Harold Bloom’s assessment is accurate, namely that “Gnosticism is the American religion.” In fact it is hard to distinguish from Christianity just as Augustine had found. And Ahmari faces his greatest difficulty here in that even more than in Christianity, Gnosticism knows “the wisdom of submitting to limits.” But it does so by appreciating reality as it is not as somehow redeemed. This grates annoyingly on Ahmari. But the only thing he can do, once again, is meekly submit to what he considers divine revelation. He wants us “To relate to the Blessed Virgin Mary as an uneducated peasant might.” Ah the joys of tradition.

Postscript: I have received several emails (hate mail really) claiming that I have overstated my case regarding the Christian, particularly the Catholic, views expressed by Ahmari. I therefore think it’s necessary to supply some supplemental evidence regarding his claims about tradition.

Indeed the Catholic Church is nothing if not tradition-minded. Many pronouncements by the Church express this tradition admirably. These include the following modern encyclicals:

Mirari vos (1832) which explains that liberal democratic politics are evil. Rejection of this proposition would become known as the American heresy and was promulgated well into the 20th century.

Singulari nos (1834): went further than its predecessor and proposed that even attempts to justify liberal politics are evil, thus stifling any debate about the matter.

Quanta cura (1864): states definitively that there are no inherent civil rights, neither freedom of speech, nor freedom of conscience, nor other democratic freedoms are valid.

Aeterni patris (1879): scholastic philosophy, that is the thought of Thomas Aquinas, is the only correct mode of thinking.

Libertas praestantissimum (1888): Error has no right of freedom at all, a restatement of a doctrinal statement of the 13th century which also insists that all but baptised Catholics are doomed to Hell.

Testem benevolentiae nostrae (1899): directed explicitly at Americans, it insists that Catholics must not assimilate to the national political culture, namely that of democracy.

Pascendi dominici gregis (1907): Religious truth is a matter of authority. Only the Church may determine what constitutes the truth.

Notre charge apostolique (1910): Religious truth/power is strictly hierarchical.


According to explicit doctrine, these pronouncements are infallible and therefore cannot be altered by any subsequent pope. This is what tradition means in the Catholic Church. In addition to these official statements, numerous less formal indications of the traditions that Ahmari alludes to may be cited including:
 
”If there is a totalitarian regime, totalitarian by fact and by right, it is the regime of the Church, because Man belongs totally to the Church.” - Pius XI in a September 1939 address to a group of French Union members, essentially justifying the existence of German fascism.

“Jews are Christ killers.” - Numerous editions of the Pope’s own L'OSSERVATORE ROMANO newspaper from the loss of the Papal States in the 1870’s until well into the Holocaust in 1942. Historically, this has been the rallying cry for two thousand years of anti-Semitic persecution that really doesn’t require further documentation.

To be clear, these are precisely the traditions Ahmari is referring to. There are many more that are equally repugnant but I think the point is made. The tradition of faith in which Ahmari has immersed himself is one of ideological totalitarianism and official hatred (at least as intense as that practised in his native Iran) of those to whom he reaches out to for support. His is an expedient ploy for furthering his narrow political ends.

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eloquent primer to the enduring importance of traditional values like belief in God, observance of the Sabbath, and norms to govern sexual life, using the lives of a number thinkers whom Ahmari finds inspiring to illustrate each point. The chapters about Solzhenitsyn, Seneca the Younger, Andrea Dworking, and Rabbi Joshua Heschel were particularly poignant. Ahmari is a surprisingly eloquent writer, I was quite taken aback by how good his prose was. This book is almost like a letter to his past self, a socially liberal neoconservative whose family immigrated from a traditional society to the United States. I found that his arguments tread on terrain with which I was already familiar, though I enjoyed hearing his take on it. As a popular book about traditionalism this is as good an introductory text as any.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alright, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. Tradition is an elusive concept, so defending it in the abstract seemed like a tall order—especially for an op-ed writer. When the first chapter turned out to be about C.S. Lewis, I worried that the whole book would retread familiar ground. But not so; each chapter is an engaging, brisk, and quaffable moral biography aimed at answering a simple but foundational question (Does God need politics? What do we owe our parents?) and thereby illuminating some element of “traditional” thinking that has been either neglected or self-consciously rejected in the modern age.

Many of the biographical subjects are familiar characters—Lewis, Augustine, Aquinas, Heschel, Kolbe, Confucius, Newman, Solzhenitsyn, Seneca—some are less so, at least to me—Howard Thurman, Victor and Edith Turner, Hans Jonas—but each morality tale is pleasant to read, and, at times, surprisingly insightful.






[Insert obligatory David French comment here]

[Julie Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy moly, what a great book!

Sohrab Ahmari wrote this book for his 2-year-old son, Max, after he began worrying about what sort of man Max would become when formed by our modern culture. Max is named for Maximilian Kolbe, a great saint of the 20th century. Ahmari thought about the gap between our cultural expectations and the culture that led Kolbe to to lay down his life for a man he didn't know. He wanted to bridge the gap between those two different cultures using the "unbroken thread" of tradition — both Tradition as Catholics would know it and tradition from other cultures such as from someone like Confucius.

He begins with the premise that the great traditions offer answers to questions that liberal modernity doesn't even begin to ask. Therefore, Ahmari asks twelve questions, each of which he explores through the life of different great thinkers from across the political and ideological spectrum. The style is kept very readable as it encompasses both story telling and intellectual thinking.

For example, his first question is "how do you justify your life?" What is at the bottom of that question is modern scientism which says that everything must be measurable through cold, hard facts. The great thinker he uses to help examine this concept is C.S. Lewis. First we are given a mini-biography so that the context of Lewis's thinking is clear. The place that Ahmari finds Lewis's thinking on science is in the first book of his science fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet.

Some of the thinkers were those I'd heard a lot about, such as St. Thomas Aquinas. However, Ahmari also included people I'd never heard of like anthropologists Edith and Victor Turner. And there were plenty of in-betweens where the most I knew was a vague sense of their contributions, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It got to the point where I was excited to begin a new chapter to see what thinker was going to be highlighted.

I felt lucky to begin the book on a fairly open weekend so I finished it in two days. It was exciting and satisfying to read. And I was surprised to find myself moved in one spot where a teacher asked a former student, "May I hope that's the second volume of your Gnosticism book?" You'll have to read it yourself to see why that matters.

I really appreciated that Ahmari included people who are not 100% in lockstep with traditional Catholic teachings. It was enough that their basic premises showed logical thinking and that "unbroken thread" from past to present. That in itself is an important lesson to the modern reader in how to discern when someone has the big idea but may go astray on smaller details. He's not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The others in my household are eagerly waiting their turn before this goes back to the library. Needless to say, I will be buying my own copy for rereading. Highly recommended.

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brisk book, confident of where it is going and not presuming on its reader. He writes like a reporter: he does what he needs to to make his point and that is all. I have more than passing acquaintance with many of the thinkers sketched in these chapters, and if Ahmari got anything important wrong--with one debatable exception--it was not obvious to me. So it is brisk and sure-footed.

It is also an interesting book. Each chapter centers on a question that is illuminated by a subject. For example, the last chapter is centered on whether death is a good, and it is illuminated by Seneca. I had my reservations about ending the book with Seneca, whose death was notoriously horrible. I feared Seneca would be traduced. And yet Ahmari has an insight, a surprise. Seneca's embrace of death is contrasted with the transhumanist follies of modern technologists; the result is something new to me. All the questions posed are good ones, and the approach of reporting on persons and situations brings out new and necessary emphases.

The last thing I'll say is that it ranges wide: C.S. Lewis, Confucius, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (I think Ahmari's misread A Day in the Life), Victor Turner, and Hans Jonas, among others. And so you get a book that is a brisk walk, with interesting views and lots of variety. The book does not intend great profundity, but it does mean to suggest that there are questions leading into profound considerations, and shows the beginning of trails explaining why these questions are profound, and demonstrates how dealing with them shapes people.

Our civilization is being agonized over my many. We lament the loss of institutions and what they provide. Institutions do a lot, but still, the greatest capital we have are the people our civilization produces. I think that's one of the themes not only in the chapters of Ahmari's book, but in the fact that it was written when and as it was.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is outstanding. A grateful immigrant's fears for the culture of his new country and how it will chisel the character or soul of his little son. He draws brilliantly on the lives and worldviews of his representative characters, drawn from across the political and ideological spectrum, to define his worries about the spiritual poverty of the kind of materialistic, affluent but empty world he sees as a likely future for his son. In face of the difficulties of the task today, Ahmari will do his best to equip the boy with the spiritual resources he will need to flourish. A commenter below says she "was expecting this book being more on a personal point of view in Ahmari showing his son that he can accomplish anything no matter what is happening around him...." In the spirit of Solzhenitsyn (see ch. 9 on Solzhenitsyn and the question of what freedom is for) who defeated that very expectation in his famous Harvard commencement address, this book is fundamentally about how that is precisely the wrong thing to tell your son. His life is not all about him and his supposed freedom to do anything he wants. That is the vision of the modern autonomous unencumbered and spiritually empty self that Ahmari seeks to contest by helping his son - and his readers - discover the wisdom of tradition.

[Stetson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ahmari's Unbroken Thread is intended as an accessible tour through received traditional wisdom, typically from religious traditions while also drawing eclectically from other traditions like feminism. It touches on some interesting and important ideas, but often lacks depth or a clear demonstration of why traditional wisdom is not only individually or communally beneficial but also broadly beneficial to a nation or society at large. The work also wanders in a somewhat haphazard and flippant critique of Western liberalism and Enlightenment thought (an alternative, younger tradition of knowledge that now ostensibly exerts significant influences on most advanced states, especially America). This latter aspect of the book is its undoing. The tangential benefits of Enlightenment thought (humanism, liberalism, individualism, rationalism) and its institutional outgrowths (capitalism, science, representative democracy, common law) are too well in evidence for traditionalists of any stripe (myself loosely included) to reject. This isn't to say that Enlightenment thought or its institutional and social effects can't be improved upon, but its place as foundational to advanced societies isn't going away as it is likely a pre-condition for this advancement and maintenance of it.

Ahmari organizes his book with 12 questions:
1) How do you justify your life?
2) Is God reasonable?
3) Why would God want you to take a day off?
4) Can you be spiritual without being religious?
5) Does God respect you?
6) Does God need politics?
7) How must you serve your parents?
8) Should you think for yourself?
9) What is freedom for?
10) Is sex a private matter?
11) What do you owe your body?
12) What's good about death?

However, it is unclear to me why some of these are supposedly profound questions to all Americans or even necessarily in conversation with the actual received wisdom of various traditions. Ahmari has a particular understanding of the ideas he'd like to organize his life and community around, but fails to see these things can't be imposed or broadly adopted across the country he lives in. The beauty of the American system is that Ahmari can live the way he wishes if he founds or joins a traditional Catholic community and withdraws from broader engagement with American culture and mass media. He can also work to persuade more people to voluntarily live the way he does. However, for whatever unspecified reason, this isn't enough for Ahmari. He thinks reorganizing America away from much of its Enlightenment foundation would somehow improve it as a whole. This is decidedly wrong-headed and based on the lack on profundity, depth, and rigor in The Unbroken Thread , it is clear Ahmari has not thought deeply or clearly enough about these issues and ideas.

[John Larrabee · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an age of turmoil and division fueled by a self-centered American culture determined to erase its past, it took an Iranian-born "radically assimilated immigrant" to boldly remind us of the importance of faith and tradition.

Drawing on the works of some of humankind's most well-known philosophers and religious leaders, Ahmari takes the reader on a two-part spiritual and personal journey by devoting a chapter to each of the following 12 questions:

Part I: The Things of God
Question 1: How Do You Justify Your Life?
Question 2: Is God Reasonable?
Question 3: Why Would God Want You to Take a Day Off?
Question 4: Can You Be Spiritual without Being Religious?
Question 5: Does God Respect You?
Question 6: Does God Need Politics?

Part II: The Things of Humankind
Question 7: How Must You Serve Your Parents?
Question 8: Should You Think For Yourself?
Question 9: What Is Freedom For?
Question 10: Is Sex a Private Matter?
Question 11: What Do You Owe Your Body?
Question 12: What's Good About Death?

Highly recommended for those who wish to take a break from the daily madness of the "modern" world and quietly reflect on what's really important in life.

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ahmari is concerned that our modern culture often seems to drive us away from the things that makes life most meaningful—pushing us to constantly seek out what we believe will make us happy, while perhaps neglecting what will make us good. As a corrective, he offers this exploration of the deeper questions about living the good life.

Each chapter addresses a different question and focuses on a particular person to provide wisdom and illumination. For instance, he reviews the life and works of Rabbi Heschel to learn about the soul-enriching effects of observing the sabbath rest day.

The chapter headings may give one the impression this is a religious book, but it really has more of a secular feel. And if you are going to contemplate what is most important in life, it’s important to consider what both philosophy and theology have to say.

These are the chapter titles and the people he uses as guides, so to speak:

How do you justify your life? CS Lewis
Is God reasonable? Thomas Aquinas
Why would God want us to take a day off? Abraham Heschel
Can you be spiritual without being religious? Vic & Edith Turner
Does God respect you? Howard Thurman
Does God need politics? Augustine
How must you serve your parents? Confucius
Should you think for yourself? William Gladstone & John Henry Newman
What is freedom for? Solzhenitsyn
Is sex a private matter? Andrea Dworkin
What do you owe your body? Hans Jonas
What’s good about death? Seneca

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

RTF

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rich book asking 12 questions about God and life in light of ancient tradition, but reading like a conversation with a friend about literature, history and religious ideas and how they relate to our lives today, and how the thread of tradition answers many of the questions faced by people today, and others that we don't even know to ask The questions are: 1) How do you justify your life? 2) Is God reasonable? 3) Why would God want you to take a day off? 4) Can you be spiritual without being religious? 5) Does God respect you? 6) Does God need politics? 7) How must you serve your parents? 8) Should you think for yourself? 9) What is freedom for? 10) Is sex a private matter? 11) What do you owe your body? and 12) What is good about death?

Obviously the answers Ahmari proposes in each of these chapters do not jibe with our modern ideas, but those answers are very well grounded in history, tradition, and reason.

I've actually put this back in my stack to read again in the future.

[Jim Keating · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author did his research. He dug deep and I appreciated that. In order to tackle twelve of life's most meaningful questions (e.g. How do you justify your life?, What is freedom for?, What do you owe your body?, What's good about death?) intelligently, it's best to do your homework. He grabbed philosophies from ancients such as Confucious, C.S. Lewis, Augustine, Aquinas to add flavor to his opinions about the topics. The reader may be surprised at the answers and conclusions.
His depth lost me a couple of times but I still recommend. It's not an easy read and maybe not one for the beach this summer. You need to be able to focus.

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ahmari sets out to show that what he terms traditional views are superior to modernity and particularly to enlightenment values. Instead, he repeatedly conflates enlightenment values with unambiguous evils like selfishness or purposelessness, preaches against those evils, and pretends that the enlightenment has been defeated.

This confusion is well-illustrated in the story Ahmari uses to frame the book. Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who gave his life in a Nazi prison camp so that a man who had a family depending on him could live. Ahmari pretends that this action can be viewed only as senseless through the lens of enlightenment values. Of course to sacrifice oneself for the greater good of the many (the man and his family) could not be more rational and supported by enlightenment values. It is only radical selfishness that has been defeated here, and that's not much of a victory.

While the book does fail on its own terms, it is far from worthless; it's sermons against the many ills of the modern day are both entertaining and effective. Of course the danger with any book like this is that some will read it casually and assume that the stated case has been made, nevertheless, when read actively and skeptically it is a worthwhile read and a good thought-prompter.

[Brandon Olson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Unbroken Thread was a highly anticipated book for me. I preordered the book before its release eager to read it. I was not disappointed. In this book, Ahmari applies his storytelling skills to connect important questions to the wisdom found in traditions. He did not rely on only one culture's traditions but applied traditions from all over the world in answering these important questions.

One of the strengths of this text is that the author does not simply answer the questions but provides thought-provoking historical examples to help illustrate the problems. This approach allows the reader to understand the reason for the answer rather than just the answer to these questions.

My copy of the text is now full of notes that I will go back to. This is one book I plan to read again.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm an Ahmari fanboy, but really, what purpose does this book serve? It is competently executed, poignant at times, and certainly imparts a reasonable amount of wisdom. Yet there are many other books that do impart wisdom better, and delve deeper. And introspection about wisdom isn't what we need; it's curb-stomping our enemies we need. After that's done and we've cleaned up, we can sit around again talking about the importance of tradition. Until then, Ahmari should stay focused on flogging David French and leading a post-liberal revolution.

[Wolfpau · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I have ever read on a topic of vital importance to our future: tradition. I love his use of history, biographies, and philosophy to make his point. So well done!

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A satisfying series of questions and answers addressing an eternal question - what ought man value in life?

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

An accessible tour of pre-modern thought positioned as a counterpoint to (and, in fact, superior to) liberal modernity. Will you come away fully convinced that Ahmari's recommended orientation around largely Judeo-Christian ethics and religious mores and beliefs is the answer to our modern social and political woes? Perhaps, perhaps not (I didn't), but at a minimum Ahmari's polemic provides good material for considering an alternative world view and contains none of the mudslinging and name-calling that popular political broadsides engage in. This is the kind of book that expresses a conservative worldview with grace, detail, and fluidity. Overall it is the kind of book more liberal folks should read to at least train the ability to hold different perspectives in one's head simultaneously. Not because both are equally valid, but because context illuminates the relative vale of competing viewpoints.

[Chris Fellows · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kind of wish Mr Ahmari had written the book he first pitched to write, about the specific phenomenon of young hipstery people in big cities taking up Orthodox Judaism or Traditional Catholicism. I think that would have been a more interesting way to make the same points that would have fit better with Mr Ahmari's background as a journalist. I guess he might still get around to writing that book, I will live in hope!

There was one weird dissonance in this book that I couldn't shake - maybe it already has been mentioned in other reviews, but I will finish writing this first before going to check. Mr Ahmari has about a dozen essays about various big questions that the wisdom of tradition offers answers to, each built around the life of a historical figure such as Confucius or C.S. Lewis, but none of these essays relates to a historical figure who was part of the tradition into which Mr Ahmari himself was born. I know he had and has a very negative impression of the Islamic Republic of Iran where he lived as a child, but he says nice things about his Muslim grandmother (as we all should say nice things about our grandmothers) and her stories, so it seemed to me to be an odd omission that he didn't have at least one token essay grounded in the Muslim world. And sort of sabotages his own argument about the importance of tradition, by giving the impression of complete estrangement from the tradition of his own ancestors.

[Zak Schmoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that I am going to need to revisit again. In fact, this is a book that everyone should visit once and then revisit.

Ahmari asks twelve questions. They range from how do we justify our lives to what freedom is for to the Sabbath to the purpose of death. In each chapter, he answers one question by appealing to stories from across the world and across the centuries. His point is that tradition can provide the answers to some of the deepest questions humanity still asks. There is nothing new under the sun, and we can benefit from learning from people who have taken this journey before. We can stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us. We can learn from Confucius, CS Lewis, Seneca, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Howard Thurman, John Henry Newman, and more. Learning from tradition helps us avoid chaos; ignoring tradition creates it.

This is easily one of the best books I have read this year. You need to buy this book.

[Buck Wilde · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one changed the way I thought about a lot of things, but especially religion.

For much of my life, I viewed it as a mechanism for the powerful to exert control over the easily influenced and those without much of a penchant for critical thinking, and on some levels I think that still holds true. What has changed is my understanding of what these powerful were attempting to control the unwashed masses into doing.

Ahmari explores an idea that I've been privately chewing on for a while, that we live in a world absent of codes. We're lost in the dark, especially if we happen to be boys or young men. There's an elaborate and ever-growing system of arbitrary restrictions about what we can't and shouldn't do, say, or be, but very little in the way of what we should do, short of feel-goody abstractions, often presented with an accompanying vehement outrage that these obvious non-instructions hadn't already occurred to us, somehow.

Ahmari suggests that we have abandoned the arbitrary doctrines of religion for secular scientism and equally arbitrary discipline for a more libertine approach, to the massive detriment of our collective cultural fiber. We live longer and we live freer, we live richer and safer and more comfortably, and for all that we live worse. It's never been a better time to be a human being and human beings have never been more depressed and anxious.

I don't know if I'm fully ready to drink the kool-aid, but from an empirical standpoint, there's no denying the efficacy of hormesis for both physical resilience and psychological grit, and there's a couple of reliable factors for subjective well-being.

Maybe we did lose something when we killed God. Probably not for me to say. Probably not for anyone to say, now that we've erased objectivity as a concept. But if you have a child, or one on the way, you have no choice but to take a good hard look at the world we currently live in and wonder what values you want them to carry into the future, because the situation as it stands? Progress? That's going to keep marching on.

[Christian Jenkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to this, although I personally felt it fell down on a number of points.

1) His questions didn't really make sense as to 'the big questions' the world should be asking. Are these really questions which society is/should be asking.
2)I feel this book would be useful to read alongside 'The Benedict Option' by Dreher as they had similar styles and I have the feeling they were both aiming in the same direction, but this one rather missed the mark.
3) Rather than choosing 1 person as a case study to answer his question from a variety of different 'life approaches' I feel it would have been clearer and more beneficial to approach all the questions from one 'life approach' - at least then there would have been commonality amongst the answers.
4) By having all these people mashed together, you have people who wouldn't agree on basic things trying to find commonality, an admirable sentiment, but ultimately naïve.

What I did get from the book was ideas to read from different people (e.g. Solzhenitsin) as then they can further explain their ideas about these topics, rather than, ironically as laid out in some chapters, trying to come to a world view by mixing all these ideas together.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Unbroken Thread by Sohrab Ahmari

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I listened to this as an audible book. The effect was like having a conversation with a smart and deep friend. I enjoyed it tremendously.

The basic frame of the book is that Ahmari wants his infant son to have something better than the intellectual wasteland it looks like will be his lot in the future. Ahmari's answer is to ask the classic questions about life and consider what the traditional answers have been. Ahmari introduces each chapter with a person who illustrates the issue in question, such as C.S. Lewis or St. Thomas Aquinas. These introductions are empathetic, inspirational, and insightful. I learned things about Aquinas that I had not known before. His skill is put to the ultimate test when he uses Andrea Dworkin as the springboard for a discussion about modesty and pornography, where he makes the point that fat, lesbian, loud Dworkin's concern about the kultursmog of porn was something to be concerned about.

I enjoyed the whole book and recommend it highly.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the premise of this book is good and necessary, at the same time it was poorly executed and edited. I’ve seen interviews with Sohrab and he genuinely seems humble, intelligent and delightful, but sadly the writing style of this book falls short of all of those characteristics. The writing felt heavy, dense and disconnected from the initial questions it was meant to answer at the beginning of each chapter, and I found myself completely forgetting what the chapter was actually about.

I sadly cannot say I enjoyed this book that much, even though I wholeheartedly agree with the authors premise of finding wisdom in tradition.

[ryj · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sohrab has a truly unique and almost unheard of talent— he finds a way to make transcendental ideas of immense beauty and magnitude as boring as a bowl of grape nuts cereal made with unsweetened almond milk.

[Nich Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book’s chapters (if somewhat dated by COVID references) offer helpful stand alone biographies containing ancient wisdom, but ultimately fail in the stated objective of making a cohesive, comprehensive critique of Western modernity.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each chapter contained an interesting biography of an influential western thinker. Well researched and thought provoking…

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top shelf book!

[Kevin W]

Audiobook

[David Selsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Q. How did you get to the point of reading Sohrab Ahmari, a Catholic, who’s previously published work, at least until the last several years, could fairly be labeled neoconservative or neocon adjacent?

That’s a great question, and in the most general terms it speaks to the still present beauty of the internet as a device through which one follows his intellectual muse--this tweet leads to that tweet, which leads to that journal, which leads to that Substack, which leads to a reference to that book. More than that, though, one sees the same authors or the same books and if they’re (the authors and books) consonant with a political commitment developing in you, the searcher, pretty soon you have laid the bricks in a foundation of new political commitments.

In this case, the chain of events that brought me to Ahmari began with a reference, I can’t even remember where, that led me to The Bellows (an online journal) where I saw a reference to Aimee Terese who at the time I might have already heard of, but I’m not sure. Long story short, Aimee Terese used to host her podcast “What’s Left?” with a writer named Benjamin Studebaker. Covid began, and I’d go on long walks during the spring and summer of 2020, and I listened to almost all the episodes they had recorded (I think they began the pod in early 2019). It was a revelation. Together they produced a fantastic critique from the left of the Democratic Party (Jacobin, DSA, Bernie, and the Dirtbag Left had been doing that since at least 2015) but they doubled down and demystified the ways in which those mentioned above smuggled in a lot of the priors of mainstream libs (identity politics mostly but also a visceral disdain for actually working-class people [deplorables in Hillary-speak, “chuds” in Dirtbag Left-speak]). Listening to Aimee and Benjamin’s critique and hearing them elucidate their project was a very generative experience for me: alternately fascinating, infuriating, and revelatory. The dialectic of growth--you dislike something, you can’t connect the dots, you’re convinced what you’re hearing is short-sighted in some way, and then months later (maybe years) it makes perfect sense.

Q. That’s interesting, but you just gave four stars to a book written by someone who was never a Democrat and who was a full-on neocon 5 years ago; he’s also a devout Catholic who believes that natural law as expressed through the one universal church of the savior Jesus Christ should govern normative behavior in the United States?

I still have to back up a tad. I think identity politics, idpol for short, is the fulcrum upon which all millennial politics rests--“Millennial politics” because the political commitments of the millennials due to the enormity of that generational cohort and the technology brought to bear on those politics is hegemonic. How you orient your political commitments in relation to idpol is kind of the beginning and end of your politics. Because of that, and the dialectical process, if you will, of how one gets to a place of feeling at worst idpol is race hustling and/or make-work for over-credentialed, downwardly mobile, metropolitan petty bourgeoisie and at best a good-faith attempt to ameliorate American society’s inherited inequities those who end up rejecting idpol find themselves sidled up to strange bedfellows. Like many on the “left,” or coming from the “Left” (like Edwin Aponte, for example), I found my way to reject idpol through a materialist (read Marxist) critique of the way society reproduces. In other words, a materialist, class analysis should be privileged to understand the dialectical process of societal formation. This field, or course, is shot through with many Black authors: Adolph Reed Jr. being pre-eminent among them, but also Barbara Fields, Susan Fields, Walter Benn Michaels, Touré Reed, Cedric Johnson among others.

Q. Not all of those are Black authors? And is this spot you arrived in where you sidled up to “strange bedfellows” like Sohrab Ahmari?

Right, Walter Been Michael isn’t black, and there are other white writers like Matt Karp and Dustin Gaustella who used to, or maybe still do, orbit around Jacobin and various branches of the DSA, and who have a more robust class analysis (Marx leading). For me personally, however, it was revelatory to read most of all Adolph Reed Jr. As late as 2019 or so I was teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates and was as “woke” and “progressive” as the next Nation reader. What was revelatory about Reed and the cohort I mentioned is the way they demystify the class forces operative in the identity politics/make-work/NGO complex. You can have fun and go on and on hyphenating this blob to which I refer pejoratively, but the point is, and the reason you can keeping tacking on, is the entire beast is a type of class politics--it’s a petty bourgeois politics for the upwardly mobile (or downwardly depending on the one’s credentials, location, and meritocratic markers) and college educated (bachelor’s or advanced degree). It’s not a working-class political project. Its political commitments are not working-class political commitments. I mean, this all was my revelation in the summer of 2020. That’s ancient history at this point. The rot at the core of the liberal/”socialist”/progressive/Democratic Party (where they all end up voting anyway) is now clear as day for everyone not willfully blind to see it. The shameless virtue signaling, the condescension, the imperiousness, the censoriousness--all of that and more are going to lead to a red wave in November the likes of which we haven’t seen in a generation. As someone joked on Twitter a few days ago, everytime a Dem pol says “Latinx,” a 100 more Latinos change their voter registration. So I’m at the same place as Sohrab Ahmari. Sort of.

Q. Voting Republican? Why “sort of”?

Well, probably voting Republican or not voting at all. But absolutely not voting Democratic. “Sort of” because, well, first of all I have no idea how he will vote. But I’m also not a devout Catholic, and I assume I’m still more sympathetic to the history of social-democracy in this country starting from at least the Debs Era and through the passage of the Wagner Act and the solidification of business unionism as the dominant paradigm in the American labor movement in the early ‘50s than he is. Or maybe not. As a side note, I’m also less sympathetic to the New Left than I was when I was younger. In a way, they were the precursor to the “woke” PMC driving the engine of the Democratic Party today. They all settled down in brownstones by the mid to late seventies and took their sinecures in academe, government, and/or the NGO world, just as this latest crop of millennial PMC will take theirs. It’s all transparent and coherent as a political project once it’s demystified. Occasionally, you’ll get lucky an Elizabeth Warren will say, “I’m capitalist to my bones,” or Hillary will call the fly-over rabble “deplorables,” but usually elite liberal rhetoric obscures more than it reveals.


Q. In one of Ahmari’s tweets, or it might have been an essay he wrote for Compact, he mentioned the socially conservative/economically liberal quadrant of that chart you sometimes see where social orientation and economical orientation are presented on an x/y axis?

Yeah, those graphs are interesting and they have a certain amount of explanatory power. One of the interesting characteristics of this populist/socially conservative coterie that publishes on the excellent Compact--Patrick Deneen, Malcolm Kyeyune, among others, is I suspect many of them believe in small government, which isn’t what you usually think of when you think of a Marxist wanting the people to take over the means of production and redistribute the wealth created by the populace in an equitable fashion. Unrepentant “Tankies,” for which I have more than a little sympathy, see a State as something that is seized by the people and then operationalized for the people, or destroyed first (the State), and then rebuilt in the name of the people. Whatever. The point is that in classical Marxist/Leninist logic, there is a large bureaucratic State functioning at the behest of the people in order that the fruit of the people’s labor is equitably distributed. The trials and tribulations, the failings and evils of a highly administrative, highly bureaucratized State is the story of Stalinism. That being said, like the Tankies, I’m more than a little sympathetic of the former Soviet State insofar as the depredations, and let’s be honest, horrors, US foreign policy rained down on peoples from one end of the globe to the other since, I don’t know, about 1899 can’t simply be waved away.

My point is that the amalgamation of people who might be in a pot called “the New Right,” or “populism” with socially-conservative tendencies consists of people with heterodox views on the role of the State and the scope of the State. They also have different views, obviously, on discrete cultural issues and what the normative commitments and profile of American society should be. And that brings us finally to some of the writers whose Catholicism is a part of their project--Ahmari, Deneen, Matthew Schmitz, Adrian Vermeule. Their lines of inquiry and critique are new to me, very interesting, and edifying. One must read Patrick Deneen’s magisterial “Why Liberalism Failed.” The basic argument is that liberalism, and the Western World whose logic coheres around liberalism, has been massively successful but its comprehensive success has brought about a landscape of ruin for the inhabitants of the liberal West--ruin psychologically, familially, economically, emotionally, politically. Liberalism failed? A landscape of ruin? But what about free speech? Free flows of capital? Incredible wealth generation? Civil liberties? Freedom of faith? All dead letters except for an increasingly small sliver of global elites congregated in the most populated metropolises hoovering up all the rewards of the liberal order. Brexit, Trump, Poland, Hungary, gilets jaunes--all symptoms of the failures of the liberal order. What comes next? Who knows? And the answer will be different depending on the specific local conditions in different countries. Compact is charting the contours of what might come next and why.

Q. And I take it you feel Ahmari’s “The Unbroken Thread” takes up the challenge of answering what might fill the void for people insofar as how they live their lives in the wake of our continuing failing liberal order?

In a way, yes, that’s a good way to put it. I don’t want to conflate the project in this book with what Deneen does in his, but yes, Ahmari explores how the traditions (read Judeo-Christian) that pre-date classical liberalism as an societal organizing logic, sometimes predating it by millenia, are worth taking a closer look at or remembering why they are traditions passed down across the centuries in the first place. Which is a very interesting way of framing the debate insofar as when we think of being biased with presentism, we think we are biased toward the current thing of this year or this decade, but what if we’re biased with presentism insofar as seeing the classic liberal order as the only way society can be organized. Which of course we are (biased). It’s been the dominant ideology in the West going on 300 years.

Q. You haven’t talked too much about the specifics of the book? Have you forgotten them?

Sort of. Thomas Aquinas. Augustine. C.S. Lewis. Rabbi Heschel. As Ahmari admits, the approach of the book is popular, meaning he tries to reach a broad audience--he gives a lot of background for the lay reader not versed in Christology or important religious thinkers of the last two millennia. Some of the anecdotes are more robust than others; I felt as the book went on the anecdotes and the analysis became more engaging. Ahamari does a fantastic job of showing how each of these thinkers and the texts they produced speak to the failures of the liberal order, or the “age of chaos” of the book’s subtitle: alienation, atomization, depression, ennui, off-shoring of jobs, vapid consumerism, lack of embeddedness in communities, family dissolution, skyrocketing divorce rates, porn, deindustrialization, and so on. The book is light on political economy, but that’s okay. While “socialists” and “Marxists” wait for the proletarian revolution or wait for an upswing in unionization and labor power that hasn’t been in the cards in the US for 80 years (I’m referring to militant labor organizing of the ‘30s and ‘40s not the de-fanged business unionism of the ‘50s and ‘60s), we’ve got to live our only sole lives and understand how best to live them. The halcyon days of social-democracy (1880s-1914 in Europe and into the 1940s domestically) aren’t coming back anytime soon. None of it. Capital is global. The proverbial barn door is open and the horse is gone. So in the absence of militant union organizing and universal class-consciousness (the process by which the working-class of the US, or any other country, understand itself as a class force that moves in solidarity to achieve political goals), we have to ask ourselves how humans should conduct themselves in a decayed liberal order.

Q. So in lieu of class-consciousness coming to the working-class, people should save themselves--their minds, their souls?--because achieving discrete political goals the name of the vast majority of Americans is off the table?

It’s not off the table, but it isn’t happening anytime soon. There are different registers in which we can analyze American society--ethics, political economy, the realpolitik of political coalitions. Ahmari is largely working in the register or morals and ethics and normative commitments that contribute to the common good. And I for one am open to hearing those ideas and engaging in that debate. Even if we woke up tomorrow and ten of millions of Americans had walked off the job and brought global Capital to its knees, we would still need normative guidelines about how to construct and propagate the new society borne of worker control and worker administration. In a piece I read by Deneen, he mentioned a book by Tom Holland, “Dominion.” Summarized quickly, it explores how the ethics of Judeo-Christianity are the background and silent, almost forgotten palimpsest on which all “progress” of Western Civilization has been written; I would argue even on which Marxist and a socialist projects have been written. Honor, integrity, honesty, compassion, mercy, kindness, charity, forgiveness, grace, humility. Don’t all these normative societal organizing principles find their most significant and longest-lasting instantiation in the doctrines of Judaism and Christianity? There are Marxist/Leninist out there, and to their credit of being internally coherent, espouse that the above ethics of existing vis-a vis oneself and in relation to others have no place in in a socialist logic--that all socialism or communism should concern itself with is the materialist critique of political economy and the balance of class forces that legitimate how wealth is created and distributed. Granted, most socialists of the non-Tankie persuasion would argue that Marx was a democrat through and through and there’s good reason that socialists of today throw a “democratic” modifier in front of socialist because the hope is once the people own the mean of production they will democratically decide--no matter who knotty, innervating, and tortured the process is--how the formation of a given society is constituted and propogated. Everyone will have an equal say in how things are done. Maximum participation, maximum enfranchisement, maximum freedom as understood as participation and volition in the ordering of things. But what ethical and moral normative commitments would guide the people as they work their way through democratically deciding how to order society? Well, I would say honesty, compassion, integrity, humility, grace, and on and on. In other words, Judeo-Christian values.

Q. That’s interesting. So you’re saying that the Judeo-Christain foundation of Western Civilization will come in handy if and when the people gain more control of the means of production and have the opportunity to democratically decide how to organize society?

Sure, if we’re willing to engage in hypotheticals. One of the words that runs through Ahmari’s writing, and even more so in Deneen’s is “common,” from the Latin communis, meaning common, general, of the community, for the community. One of the central arguments of Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” and “The Unbroken Thread” is that the liberal order no longer gives any critical thought to the common good. Other than legalistic, juridical guardrails, other than the fact you can buy whatever color butt-plug you’d like from anywhere in the world, is there critical, robust discussion about the commonweal? About what normative behavior is good for the community? But we have freedom! We can go wherever we want, buy whatever we want, date whomever we choose, identify however we’d like! Freedom! Ahmari and his coterie are pushing back against that mindset and doing so with the Ancients, the Fathers of the Catholic Church, and other revered Jewish thinkers. Your classic liberal, whether conservative or leftist (read “progressive,” “leftist,” “socialist”--I put socialist here because the way “leftists” and “progressives” throw the word around [socialist] it has less than zero explanatory power)--liberal, both of these projects believe a variation on the notion “ you (the government) can’t legislate morality” and are thus down with morality and ethics. But the way these liberals conceptualize morality is too narrow and part of the narrative (political commitments in the present) need to concern how ethics, or lack thereof, have brought us to our present--a rotted-out liberal order. The commonweal concerns more than just the hottest-button of culture war issues--abortion, transgendersim, CRT. It needs to be thought of in terms of political economy and all that implies--wages, jobs, healthcare, housing, wealth inequality, etc.