Freddie dissects me and comes up short:
…I was sure I had missed something: where was the resolution to Karras’s existential crisis? Where was the moment where she found her access to the truth that frees her from the spiritual emptiness that pure intellect had left her with? I couldn’t find it, and can’t. I find instead her (very understandable) sense of loss at the dissolution of real authority and real certainty, and the choice to embrace foundationalism and its political child, conservatism.
He couldn’t identify the moment where I found “access to the truth” because I didn’t. That is, in a way, the whole point. The problem with that rationalism was the human inability to grasp truth by itself. I spent my time looking for something that I could be sure was true, and I couldn’t find it. I still haven’t. I’m not certain. My realization was not of the truth of anything in particular, but in the fact that I could have meaning without the certainty of truth.
So yes, of course my “ethic is an ethic of necessity, not of truth.” Truth would be lovely. Truth would, I imagine, give me some objective meaning. But meaning also comes from the search.
This is a willed belief in tradition, a knowing choice of old institutions, the inherently meta rejection of the meta. “I had been drowning, and looking back I saw how easy it would have been to latch on to something murderous to save myself.” Not, “the life raft was the reality of Christ/community/tradition/etc”. Instead, the pure pragmatism at grasping at whatever piece of driftwood happened to float by. This is postmodern premodernism, and it has become kind of popular.
I may not have been clear, and in retrospect the whole drowning thing is a dubious analogy. Let me try to explain myself again: when we regard foundationalism as the best way to understand the world, we are desperate for some foundational principle. We will grasp at whatever driftwood floats by. When I thank my lucky stars, it isn’t for the fact that I happened to grab a particularly benign piece of driftwood but that I realized I didn’t have to grab one at all.
How does that work? It segues nicely into Freddie’s questions about tradition and postmodernity:
How can traditionalism survive, when you know that mere human subjectivity is the source of tradition? Conservatism has tradtionally been suspicious, even hateful, of postmodern skepticism towards meta-narratives. I think many of the pomocons believe that they can have the destabilizing nature of postmodernism and yet still knowingly choose the stability of classical forms, traditional mores. But the old school conservatives abhor the postmodern for a reason. They know the limits of willed obediance to the past, they recognize the fragility of any conservatism of choice.
I’m not one of the arbiters of Pomoconservatism, but I’ll give this a shot. My emphasis on tradition is not, God knows, because I discovered that tradition is objectively correct. It’s not even because I’ve decided to think that tradition is objectively correct. (The former is impossible; the latter is lame.) Rather, it’s because tradition does form us, because tradition does give us meaning. We have to examine it and search for truth within it, because if truth is the sort of thing that can be found, that’s the only place we’ll find it.
Freddie is right: you cannot choose to be premodern. Those who have eaten from the tree of knowledge cannot forget. There is something pathetic about the conservatives who try to pretend they missed the Enlightenment. But if a postmodern conservatism does not stick its fingers in its ears (”la la la la, William of Ockham, I can’t heeeeeear you…”), it also does not insist that I have chosen my choice and that’s that.
Postmodern conservatism is a reflection of the fact that the veils have already been stripped off; tradition has already lost its reflexive hold on us. It still shapes us, but we recognize that it is to some degree arbitrary. The values we want to see in the world are informed by our tradition, but because we know that, any attempt at change must be a reflective, self-conscious process.
So what is the project of postmodern conservatism? Is it, as I think Freddie understands it, to justify conservatism in the language of postmodernity? Or is it the first steps towards overcoming?
Oh, the work that “does” does….
Nicola,
You may find Fr. Von Balthasar’s three volumes, Theo-Logic, useful.
I’m reading Vol. 1, The Truth of the World, after reading Vol. 2, The Truth of God. Don’t ask me about the order!
I don’t mean to be intrusive.
Best,
Bob Cheeks
(X-posted from Freddie’s, but updated, because it really belongs here:)
I’ve been mulling this over for awhile, how the pomocon seems to basically be “a conservative who should know better.”
But, look: maybe the solution is to read a little less from the gloomy-Gus traditionalists and a little more from philosophers of action, cultural sociologists, and queer theorists. Choosing meaning, choosing to proceed as if it exists, just is what agency’s all about, and luckily, homo sapiens does it naturally. Just because we can’t give an answer to why there’s something rather than nothing doesn’t give us reason to ignore the something there is. So, sure: MTV consumerism isn’t such a great milieu for meaning-making. But if you want to see meaningful communities, it’s not just the religious sects and the farmers, it’s the SF/NYC queers and artists and radicals, too.
More specifically: you (and plenty of others) are simply wrong to say that tradition is the only place meaning is to be found, if it’s to be found at all, unless you’re using an unhelpfully expansive definition of “tradition”.
If what you mean is, “intersubjectively accessible inferential frameworks for interpreting the world and engaging in practical reasoning,” fine, I’ll agree with that, but there’s nothing conservative about it. Because, again, any engagement with the social science of such things shows that, while we’re always constituted and constrained by the webs of meaning that came before, humans often find *radical* reconstructions of cultural fragments *more* meaningful than conservative ones.
This shouldn’t be surprising: religious fundamentalisms of all kind are radical, not conservative. Heck, think of your own experience: the PoR may be ‘conservative,’ but its success at recruitment and conversion depend on precisely this attraction of the radical.
Perhaps I’m belaboring the point here; maybe I’ve already beaten it to death in my arguments with Helen. If conservative traditions bring meaning to your life, if they keep you from existential despair, that’s fine–or would be, if it were just a matter of idiosyncratic private ritual. But this isn’t about rooting for your favorite sports team, this is about dropping bombs and putting people in cages: the forms and limits of power (yes, including power over cultural production). So it’s not just false to say that only (conservative) tradition can provide meaning, it’s positively dangerous.
Much ado about nothing.
“Postmodern conservatism is a reflection of the fact that the veils have already been stripped off; tradition has already lost its reflexive hold on us. It still shapes us, but we recognize that it is to some degree arbitrary. The values we want to see in the world are informed by our tradition, but because we know that, any attempt at change must be a reflective, self-conscious process.
So what is the project of postmodern conservatism?”
Let me make this simple for you niccola.
Postmodern conservatism is a series of apoligia for the political abomination that grafted James Dobson’s head onto Thomas Jefferson’s shoulder. Now this hideous two-headed monster lurches around in agony, until one of the heads supurates and falls off in profound organ rejection.
I can only hope that Jefferson’s immune system is strong enough to cause Dobson’s head to be the one to fall.
One must consider that Palin is an attempt to graft a fresh and more superficially attractive head onto Jefferson’s other shoulder.
Sad isn’t it?
Beyond sad. Absolutely frustrating, given that Richard Hofstadter previewed all these outcomes in his work on Anti-Intellectualism. We are in Farcical Repetition now. Which leads me to write:
Arrrrgghhh! Will you self-proclaimed newbie conservos stop counting the dancing angels and grow-up, please.
THE American Ideology is pragmatism (small or capital P, I don’t care), c.f. Peirce & William James. Their writing explores the consequences of the Madison-Hamilton System which harnesses for a power source the Jeffersonian Ideal (life, l & p of h), and so extends its validity because it contains it, minimizing its tendency to fizz into vacuousness. This proclamation is a “real thing” best summarized by A. Lincoln as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”, government being understood in the widest range of sense (from self- to global-, because if Abe did not understand it to be global, why describe it as “the last best hope earth”?).
Burke is dead. His prescriptions do not work.
Madison-Hamilton lives. Because they pragmatically actualized the social scientific analysis of history they & others had conducted on the matter at hand, which is government of by & for.
Long live the Englightenment! (Scottish Division, certainly.)
I wouldn’t declare Burke dead. Certainly parts of him live on. The original has long since failed as a single organic entity but bits and pieces have survived repeated transplantation.
His liver, with it’s bile, lingers in the privileged bodies of your modern nobility; those who’s youthful suffering extended to falls from one-eyed hack horses on ‘learn to ride’ Saturdays, appalling sunburn from a day windsurfing off Antigua, or the trauma of a clandestine visit to the local Planned Parenthood after the kegger got out of hand. His cornea was shared with Adam Smith and then passed on to John Maynard Keynes. You’ll find the odd skin graft here and there.
Building a set of social principles around the axiom - “Because I decided it’s objectively correct.” is fascism. Build it around “Because that’s what I like.” is lawlessness.
Give me evidence. Give me reason. Explain yourself.