Talking of “traditionalism” Frithjof Schuon writes:
there is certainly nothing pejorative about the word itself, and indeed it is a far broader term and even less open to argument than “esoterism”; as a matter of fact, however, it has come to be associated—arbitrarily and reprehensibly so—with an image that inevitably devalues its meaning, namely, “nostalgia for the past”; it is difficult to believe that such an idiotic and dishonest circumlocution would be freely employed as an argument against strictly doctrinal positions, or even purely logical ones. Those who look back longingly at some past age because it embodied certain vital values are criticized for adhering to these values because they are found in the past or because the critic would like to place them there “irreversibly”; one might as well say that the acceptance of an arithmetical proof is not the sign of an unimpaired functioning of the intelligence but of a morbid obsession with numbers. If to recognize what is true and just is “nostalgia for the past”, it is clearly a crime or disgrace not to feel this nostalgia.
— Schuon, Frithjof, Logic and Transcendence, (World Wisdom, 2009) 5
