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.

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.)

“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.

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.

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