Postmodern Conservative.

Our Most Glorious Triumph Yet

Kim Jong-Il, perhaps, should start a blog. Instead of presiding over famine, low productivity, and international isolation, and culminating his rule by blowing up minor but no doubt painful extensions of his ego, he could (somewhat) lower his expectations and...sooner or later...report, as I do now, four years months of glorious, exceptional growth, with June's Most Gloriously Highest Page Views Statistic topping it all off. By the time we march forward in unbreakable union across the gleaming threshold of July, this number is unquestionable and certainly guaranteed of ensupering 13,000 individual units.

Above all, however, we must thank the Crew of Worthies, whose infinite suns of infinite brilliance should truly shine forever in the Great Firmament. Most joyfully, we may take final proof from the great performance of the Worthies that Kim must open his society and democratize his nation to reap the full bounty of permanent productivity and growth!

Back

(1) Over the next few days, I'll be getting back into the swing of things here as the Crew of Worthies eases out of the hipness and brilliance that has been their hallmark. Large public thanks to Helen, John, Shawn, and Will. I've loved having them around and I'm sure you have too.

(2) This month a few pieces of note have appeared here and there. In case you've missed the links over at Doublethink, here they are:

A blueprint for the McCain candidacy [The Guardian]

The technology of memory [The New Atlantis]

(3) Hopefully in short order the sidebar situation will be magically repaired as well.

Blogging Madness

Before turning the helm over to the Pomocon Crew of Worthies! for an unprecedented fortnight or so away from the 'puter, it seems fitting to take a step back and say, Don Rumsfeld-style, my goodness. 2,078 posts, over 113,000 vists...it's been a busy few years. A fresh debt of thanks is owed to you, the readers: May has been Postmodern Conservative's second biggest month ever -- despite the stiff competition which has debuted this year at The American Scene and Doublethink Online. You make the insanity worthwhile.

It's probably not an exaggeration to remark that bloggers, especially on the right, are needed now more than ever. Courtesy of the past eight years, the Republican Party has wound up in fairly dire straits and even the basic meaning of conservatism has been thrown into question. It's a relief and a privilege to be part of the blogversation that's started to take place among the young right, but everyone recognizes that much work is left to be done and things will get worse before they get any better. Of course this is exactly the sort of sweeping but nonlethal catastrophe that every rising political intellectual wants to wind up in; so let's make the most of it, for the sake of Western civilization if not our own selves.

In that spirit, I'm trying to be a little more systematic, frank, and concentrated about rolling out my own political theory. If Fear and Loathing in Georgetown is any indication, I've been just a bit too coy about what I imagine postmodern conservatism specifically to be. Don't expect any manifestos anytime soon, but do expect a continued series of ruminations along the lines of this defense of elitism, improvisation, and the meaning of conservatism. Also expect a deepening of the lines of attack you've come to know and love against people like Michael Gerson and Austin Bramwell.

Sixteen Days of Glory

You know you've really made it as a blogger if you can abandon your laptop for two weeks without coming back to see that your blog has in turn been abandoned by what you'd coaxed yourself into thinking of so recently and so fondly as your readership. But this is really only possible if you've befriended some helpy heroes who also happen to like blogging. I am fortunate to enjoy several such friends and colleagues -- who will transform into Pomocon Guest Star Bloggers! beginning on June 1st.

Starting on that date, for approximately sixteen days, all the Olympian summer excitement you've come to expect will be dealt out in spades by Shawn Macomber, Helen Rittelmeyer, John Schwenkler, and Will Wilson. They are all incredibly credible writers and brilliant mental talents, and I owe them much gin and grapefruit. As for you, dear readership, roll out the red carpet!

Pantheism and Catholicism: The Fateful Encounter

One of the few things Alexis de Tocqueville most underrated was the affinity in contemporary times between Catholicism and pantheism. I know this may be a revolting and outrageous idea, or allegation, to a fair number of friends and/or readers. But I have thought it over and have decided to move forward with it. For now I can only point you to The Immanent Frame, specifically to William Connolly's brief for pantheism (though he doesn't call it this), one of the plainest, frankest, and 'best' (yes, because it's Nietzschean) that I've seen in a while.

My main concern is that Taylor, and Catholics like him, are inclined to cede vast amounts of territory to the main thrusts and attitudes of the pantheist creed -- most importantly, the holiness of all love, in all its physicality, as an immanent and transcendent experience of peaceful yet powerful becoming in time -- as long as the Church and the Nicene Creed are kept intact. For at least a handful of Protestants, this amounts to something resembling worst nightmare territory. For what it's worth.

Six Sexy Figures

Today Postmodern Conservative hit 100,000 visits, tolled from whenever I started taking this blog more or less seriously and learned how to embed SiteMeter script. A big thank you goes to everyone who has impacted editorial policy here by:

(a) weathering several months of mindbending and oracular Philip Rieff-related content;

(b) appreciating the quirk of pomo conservatism that involves writing from that perspective without definitively describing it in an easy-to-reference meta-post;

(c) enjoying the gradual rise to prominence of blogging on such gripping issues as Kate Moss's cocaine habit, a dancing sea lion, and naked Lindsay Lohan;

(d) joining the Yale Mafia;

(e) permitting within the Department a colossal amount of free speech for a grad student in politics (enough to hang oneself with!);

and most importantly

(e) linking and commenting with a maximum of enthusiasm and a minimum of crudeness -- especially when it comes to the critics.

The definitive piece on pomoconnery will come out eventually, but in the interim this Pomocon Pledge will have to do:

Pledge

As modernity hurls fresh novelties this way, expect the same old reaction: some will be rejected, some will be worked through like the problems they are, and some will be accepted as is. Despite general good cheer, celebrations will be infrequent and at arm's length. Eclecticism may sometimes be risked, but not on principle, and never at the risk of meta-eclecticism. Vaya con dios! 

Why I Love Wikipedia

My Scene colleague Alan Jacobs points us toward this gripping tale of (almost) summarily executed Wikipedia articles. Fortunately lines like this survive:

Symposium originally referred to a drinking party (the Greek verb sympotein means "to drink together") but has since come to refer to any academic conference, whether or not drinking takes place.

What Makes Sacred?

Apropos of my AFF panel comments on marriage, Helen Rittelmeyer:

James is right that the important and interesting thing about marriage is that it binds two people together by some kind of sacred authority, but he doesn't give a very clear picture of where this sacred authority comes from. I can't make something sacred just by saying it is — two roommates, for example, couldn't invest their living arrangement with the same kind of holiness that marriage has just by calling it a "sacred" commitment.

Maybe it's possible that, while one person doesn't have the authority to make something "sacred," a whole community acting together does, and so if your community or church decides that gay marriage is sacred then it is. As Eve pointed out in a question, though, it ain't necessarily so:

Do you all think there is a difference between a "contract with the community" and "entrance into a tradition?" Those two seem to have different resonances with me, to the point that when I hear "contract with the community" I think, "Oh God, Hillary Clinton wants to raise me like a baby," whereas when I hear "entrance into a tradition" I think, "Oh, that sounds cool and beautiful and somehow aesthetically pleasing."

If it's not what your community says but the tradition of marriage that makes it a sacred relationship, then we have considerably less freedom to decide which relationships count as marriage and which ones don't. If it turns out that the Western Canon from the Song of Songs on down talks about marriage in deeply gendered terms, then we can't crowbar gay marriage into "the sacred" and expect it to work.

Well, certainly Helen's on to something, and it's her distinction between the authority of collective compact and authority as such that has driven me in the not-so-distant past to try to coin a distinction between intersubjective and interobjective knowledge. But this is unfortunately just the start of the hunt. "Mine" or "Ours" are two answers to the question "By what authority?" that a strong concept of the sacred renders inadequate -- not necessarily unnecessary; merely, or certainly, insufficient. Indeed the authority of the sacred is at its strongest when the authority of the self and the authority of a sacred union and the authority of a community of the sacred are asserted -- as incarnations of divine authority.

But the history of Christianity has revealed how this, too, settles little: when it comes to Christian sacredness, for example, either the authority of the Magisterium 'has to count' or it doesn't. It should also be clear that Protestant Christianity (as I tried to suggest at the CPAC panel, incidentally) has historically both strengthened sacred authority and broadened it such that claims to the sacred filed in antagonism to intermediary/doctrinal authority, including unabashedly heretical claims, may be made under auspices declared (at least sometimes) persuasively to be in affinity with divine authority!

So I myself am short of strong arguments as to why gay unions should be understood as sacred, but I am full of strong arguments as to why I or anyone else is disentitled to make that argument on anything other than the internal terms of one or another sacred authority. And the thrust of Christianity, particularly outside of Eastern Orthodoxy, seems to me strongly predisposed toward not one but three separate but interlinked thrusts in favor of understanding gay unions as sacred: one is the rise of direct, unmediated experience with God as the organizing principle of evangelical Christianity; two is the rise of gay and theologically gay-friendly clergy within 'mainline' Protestant churches; and three is the rise of advocates of the gay sacred who use precisely the intellectual tradition of Catholicism to craft and present theologico-philosophical arguments as to a nature of the sacred which does not exclude homosexuality or homosexual love or gay union. In his recent Intercollegiate Review review of Roger Scruton's Arguments for Conservatism, Robert Kraynak has noticed that Scruton seems to think likewise [pdf]:

I wonder then why Scruton concludes pessimistically that 'it will not be possible to resist' the current trends toward accepting gay or civil unions. Has he not made a strong case showing that the nature and dignity of man includes an eros for the eternal and that present trends are merely temporary distortions of natural, and therefore permanent, longings?

Well I haven't read the book and I don't know, but my answer would be that the 'right answer' -- either from an intersubjective or an interobjective point of view -- is often widely considered wrong or unacceptable or too awkward to be defended or put up with in a confrontation. And the gay marriage situation is a confrontation: "who are you to deny love?" A tough question for therapeutically informed liberal optimists in a late-modern democracy. Love -- indiscriminate, totalizing, all-purpose, universal-adapter love -- is the ultimate in 'cool' and 'beautiful', the ultimate in 'aesthetic pleasure', the ultimate declaration of the reduction of all articles of faith to the optimism principle: 'somehow...!'. Somehow, we can make such-and-such feel sacred! Even if -- !

But in church, that question has at least a few potential answers, and so it's there that the confrontation should, and, indeed, must, be made. Benedict seems to understand this. But the bottom line is that Christianity as we have it today supplies people with an incredible resource for setting up fresh sects, schisms, heresies, and evolutions -- call it the individualization of revelation. One still has to make persuasive arguments about why one's particular form or practice of Christianity exists in authority, but persuasiveness within various Christian traditions becomes harder or easier (usually, it seems, the latter) as mores and faiths continue themselves to shift. And the capacity of Christians to tolerate schism -- cf. Mormonism -- remains very strong. So, we'll see.

Sanctus Januarius

January was a blockbuster month at this site, best ever. Page views, to pick one stat, hit five figures. Add to the Honor Roll this time around all the new readers, and double and triple thanks to the fine network of young smartypantses that actually does seem to constitute a true Internet Community (fortunately one not dedicated to, like, naked Goth pictures or multi-user domains). I bet you all know their names and read their own excellent blogs too. And, yes, for the record it does help matters that I do see a significant number of these people in person every couple of weeks or so. May we never finally download ourselves into the matrix. (Sorry, Reihan.)

With comps next month and early March I have no expectation of continuing to put up these kinds of awesome figures, but I thought that about this month too so who knows. After all...it's in your hands. Yabba dabba doo.

Deep Thoughts

on mass murderers and Christianity's therapeutic future, up now at the Scene.