Tradition or progress: the right system of values for a modern society

In this Prishtina Talks conversation, Professor Vehap Kola from Tirana — of northern Albanian origin, a doctor of philosophy and an active participant in Albanian public debate — takes up in depth one of the great dilemmas of our time: tradition or progress, and which of them is the right system of values for a modern society.

Kola begins by defining the terms. “Tradition” is not “a moment frozen in time”, as the moderns often misunderstand it, but “the wise accumulation of the experience of human societies” — a continuous movement that carries into our own time the values, the lessons and the structures that have passed the test of centuries. “Progress”, on the other hand, is a newer idea, born the moment the West decided to break with its own tradition and to stop recognising it as a source of authority. That break, Kola argues, is what defines Western modernity, and it now extends across the world as the dominant model.

In the central part, Kola traces the origins of the distinction historically: from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, through the mixing of Greek philosophy with Christianity, to the Reformation — which in his view marks the critical moment when the West chose to throw off the authority of Catholic tradition and to build a new hierarchical order of society. Drawing on René Guénon — one of the deepest critics of modernity — Kola argues that Western modernity was built systematically by denying its own traditional source, and that this has deep consequences for societies today that try to embrace “modern values” without knowing what they are giving up.

The lecture closes by applying all of it to the Albanian context: how a modern society can be built without cutting itself off from its inheritance — from religion, from custom, from the structures of the family, from the moral values that have held the Albanian people together for centuries — and why “tradition or progress” is not really a dilemma at all, because a modernity without tradition is a truncated modernity, and in the end a self-destructive one.

Some of the points covered: 📌 Defining the terms: what tradition is, and what progress is 📌 Tradition as “the wise accumulation of experience” — not a frozen moment 📌 Modernity as the West breaking with its own inheritance 📌 René Guénon, and the criticism of modernity 📌 The fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the forming of Western tradition 📌 The Reformation as the critical moment of the break 📌 Greek philosophy, Catholic Christianity, and social hierarchies 📌 Applied to Albanian society: modernity without the break

📍 Prishtina Talks