society answers to unchosen obligations and should be set up a way that allows us to meet unchosen obligations. to the family, the king and become a nation, the people around us. he that we could not escape the past and we should want to because the past is the only reason why we don't live in savagery. the inheritance we get, the cultural and social and intellectual inheritance is the reason why we can make progress. so burke is a certain kind of conservative. he's a traditionalist but a forward-looking traditionalist. he believes the present is better than the past, not worse. a lot of traditionalists think the past with some perfect state and one way or another, or in the past we had access to some perfect truth and we don't anymore. we can only reach it by living with our fathers did. burke thinks things have improved over time and that the future can be better still but only if we sustain the means by which the president has become better than the past. traditionalism is a way forward. paine again because he believes fundamentally in the human being as a rational chooser, and because he b