How is history made?

When I write a post describing a positive political strategy or some political work that is happening on the ground I often get comments that assert grandly that some factor beyond our control renders all activity useless.

It's a bleak attitude, one that denies the effect on the world of our own creative spirit. It is this creative spirit that is mostly responsible for making history (though factors such as the economic organisation of a society or technological changes can influence things as well.)

For all their materialism, liberals are very much attuned to exercising their creative spirit on the world. This might even be one reason for their success over past centuries.

Liberalism might even be seen as an impatience with any "limiting" factors on an individual's creative spirit. Liberals want to be able to express this spirit in a wholly "unencumbered" way, as an abstracted "uncreated" individual inhabiting an "uncreated" environment.

Traditionalists don't go to this extreme. We gladly accept our position as created beings, as it is through our identity and our particular relationships that we find our deeper loves and fulfilments. So it is within a definite context that we express our creative spirit.

The contest ought not to be between "creative spirit liberals" and bleak spirited traditionalists. If it is, then of course we deserve to lose.

We will make a real contest of things when we prove ourselves to be stronger as creative spirits, stronger because we begin as meaningfully embedded human personalities rather than as abstracted individuals.