Postmodern Conservative.

The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Oakeshott

I've got to thank Andrew for anecdotally raising the authority of my attack on Austin Bramwell's Weberian conservatism [DTO] by ten Oakeshott points:

at a National Review confab where Oakeshott was unfortunate enough to speak, his address received utter bewilderment from the muckety-mucks and Buckley proteges in the crowd. In the end, one of them mustered a question: "Excuse me, Mr Professor. But what does any of this have to do with the power of the president of the United States?" "Oh," Oakeshott reportedly replied. "The president of the United States has no power. He has authority."

This is misleading if cosmically accurate -- the office of the President of the United States is very obviously vested with certain powers which it takes a President to exercise. But the distinction Oakeshott and I and Andrew are drawing reminds me again of one complexity I couldn't quite treat fully was the difference between, say, Philip Rieff's theory of authority and Oakeshott's -- specifically as far as religion, faith, prophecy, revelation, guilt, and repentence are concerned. One more plate to keep spinning...

Pomoconniving

Another intimation of MacIntyro-Nietzschean fusionism, courtesy of Nicola Karras:

The only answer we have yet found to the argument—perhaps the only answer there can ever be—is in the value of the argument itself. Our telos can be found, if nowhere else, in continuing our search for it. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill the heart of a man. One must imagine the Humanities student happy.

The 'must' is doing most of the work here, followed by 'one', with 'happy' bringing up the rear. The ancient discovery that our telos is only ever recognizable as our search for it was replaced in modern times by the radically different idea that our telos is only recognizable as the history of our search. The postmodern task, if you'll permit me, is to heal this divide. We cannot and should not forget history. If we are stuck with virtue, we are also stuck with the world as the expressly historical world. But we must also recognize -- in a way to which religion, I think, is of great importance -- that fate and history are not identical, that fate is how the ancients lived in the present and history how moderns lived so awkwardly in the future.

The Christian bridge between these positions involved living wholly in the present in whole, constant anticipation of the future: a powerful premonition of the later credo (somehow both dumbed-down and tarted-up) "Become who you are." The key to striking what seems like this mystical balance between passivity and agency is the obsession of the late moderns; left postmoderns typically want it to emit from the immanent self, whereas, I reckon, right postmoderns want to note that the mystically immanent self actually has much less self there than their left opposite numbers desire; that occupying that space, not terribly mystically, are the external authorities of particular narratives, particular others, and -- are you with me? -- a particular God.

Abstract Liberalism vs. Abstract Libertarianism

I'm just a little late here, but if you like Rawls-and-Nozick talk, Prof. D.L. Schaefer's reconsideration of the two at the, uh, New York Sun sports page is worth a read:

Like Rawls, Nozick sought to impose an abstract vision of justice on political life, relegating considerations of feasibility (i.e., of conformity with the likely demands of actual human beings) to be resolved by others, in the spirit of Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “let justice triumph, even if the world perishes by it.”

Either you love this sort of thing or you hate it. To loop back to an earlier conversation, the big problem with abstract justice from, I suspect, any 'perspective' is that it problematizes raising children -- because it can't explain good childrearing in terms of justice. Even Locke had to go in for natural emancipation at age 16. Rawls and Nozick both become crippled by an autism of justice when it comes to children, who represent not only individual human agents that should be able to leave their families as thriving members of their polity but individual human agents that should be able to leave their polities as thriving members of the cosmos.

Since Hobbes, a string of political theorists have well understood that the beauty of geometric truth is its correspondence between the abstract and particular -- any particular right angle will always also be a right angle in the abstract. What theorists have sometimes missed is that philosophy can't mirror nature in this perfectly-corresponding way because geometry, unlike, say, physics, is a relational science, the science of relations. It's not a science of bodies in motion. A philosophy that, in order to master human order, makes itself materialist can mirror geometry, but it can't tell us which geometry should be mirrored. So Badiou's attempt to express justice by set theory, disproving absolutist Hobbesian justice, is an interesting metaphor that, to many smart people today, better expresses what it means to be human. But that only underscores how even our most rarified abstractions really only gain purchase to the extent that they recapitulate and generalize cumulative particular narratives about our own interconnected lives.

NOW -- I go through all this because family is an inextricable part of our interconnected lives. It isn't everything, but even the extent to which it isn't is mostly resonant as the negative space around family. Family is a 'problem' with or without abstract political philosophy, in the same way that 'life itself' is, should be, and must be a problem, but abstract political philosophy exacerbates the general problem. Interestingly, I think there's a push lately away from trying to solve the special anxiety that family causes as an ineradicable remainder in abstract political philosophy. Theorists want, I think, to follow Martha Nussbaum's lead in recognizing that this problem is better coped with therapeutically than solved scientifically. This makes sense if you read the obsession of the abstract philosophers as not actually justice but suffering; and if it turns out that even a complete system of justice leaves remainders of suffering, it looks like theorists dedicated to such political systemization can tolerate a certain kind of suffering, too -- less the remainders they can't eliminate than the anxiety of coping with those remainders.

And to the extent that they succeed, the original remainders -- the 'injustices' of family -- get translated socially into the anxiety of coping with our unmoored reactions to those injustices -- 'counter-injustices' like one day leaving your wife, committing adultery, lying to your parents, in short, breaking the bonds of family on an ad hoc, pragmatic basis. 'Practical morality' of a Rortyan sort sneaks into abstract political regimes through the seams and comes, I suspect, to dominate the whole. But while Rorty would reject any attempt to mirror even geometry, if not physics, I'd suggest that practical morality can learn how to cope with, and even flourish within, political societies whose institutional architecture is significantly the outgrowth of abstract philosophy. The question is for how long -- and probably 19th-century France is one good place to look for an answer.

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.

Liberal Faith, Liberal Feelings

A few points to add to Daniel's latest, lovely excoriation of Kagan. The latter has said that

[o]nly the liberal creed grants the right–the belief that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights that must not be abridged by governments; that governments derive their power and legitimacy only from the consent of the governed and have a duty to protect their citizens’ right to life, liberty, and property. To those who share this liberal faith, foreign policies and even wars that defend these principles, as in Kosovo, can be right even if established international law says they are wrong.

I'm not really interested in endorsing Daniel's remark that "Russia and China are in the position the U.S. and western Europe were in during the late 1940s with the beginning of containment, while the U.S. and Europe have adopted the revolutionary posture of the USSR and China." (Neither I suppose are a goodly number of Europeans.) But I do really dig Daniel's characterization of Kagan's 'liberal creed' as

an ideologically-driven mania that says sovereignty and international law can be compromised whenever certain powers feel (and feel is the right verb here) it necessary to protect “rights" [...].

Contrast against this Kagan's own self-appellation, "liberal faith." Perhaps the central failure of liberalism has been its inability to sustain its intellectual convictions without relying fundamentally on feelings. One could argue that a Burkean conservatism is frank about the indispensability of feelings in this regard, and a MacIntyrean whatever-you-want-to-call-it is equally strict about the indispensability of rational argument through but above them.

Our own Dr. Deneen has already put the question to 'democratic faith'; this matter of liberal faith deserves similar attention. Probably the best I can do here is to underscore why "feel is the right verb." Take, as Daniel does in the full post, Kagan's last sentence:

To those who share this liberal faith, foreign policies and even wars that defend these principles, as in Kosovo, can be right even if established international law says they are wrong.

Bracket for a minute the opening relativist gambit ("To me..."). That's not the problem. First, instead, notice how an aggressive war stops being aggressive because it is really only defending principles. Query how it is we're supposed to determine whether or not a certain principle needs defending. As hard as it is to remember, everyone must patiently acknowledge that a neoconservative point of view is compatible with prudence, as in sometimes the principles of the liberal creed may 'need defending' more than others. That what seemed blatantly obvious even during the Cold War now seems incomprehensible is a sign of just how far thinking discourse has degenerated on the matter. Even if one feels like one should be everywhere at once, even if in at the level of wildest dreams it would be ideal to be winning every battle one felt like starting, it simply doesn't follow that one should or even can be everywhere at once, or waging particular possible battles.

It's very sad and dangerous that the foes of neoconservatism and its loudest exponents  alike are persuading us that neoconservatism is incompatible with practical reason. If neoconservatism fails in this way as liberalism itself has failed, the fault seems to me not to reside in the structural characteristics of 'the liberal creed' as such but in the personal character of particular liberals and conservatives who fall prey to the temptation to embrace not only ideology but a conflation of faith and feeling.

Kagan's last quoted sentence is a textbook case. It is quite possible to reason as follows: (a), this Kosovo business (1999) is an affront to the basic principles of the liberal creed; (b), bombing the perpetrators of that affront, by contrast, would do more good than harm to the creed; but (c), international law prohibits us simply waking up one morning and bombing away; unfortunately, (d), violating international law (in this case, at least) does more harm than good to the liberal creed, and (e), on balance, as much as the creed would invite us to bomb, the creed rightly understood militates against simply serving as the henchman of the passions; therefore, (f), we will not bomb and yet we will remain good liberals.

Can this be done in practice? I think so. But it is more uncomfortable than simply swooning into your own arms. It requires the toleration of a certain kind of liberal suffering -- knowing that something which revolts and offends you and your most basic principles is happening, and that, with those principles in mind, you must counsel yourself well to let it happen. It transpires that a significant number of people often cannot stand the anxiety or agony which this last trap of liberals inspires in them, and that, in the end, they would rather know that they 'care more about people' than that they 'care only about principles.' Liberalism is always in fear of losing its humanity; this is its constant modern crisis of faith. The specter of being insufficiently feeling, and therefore insufficiently active, in the face of real suffering is what tortures the liberal soul -- tortures it so much that it pulls liberals away from the liberal creed itself. Sadly, not a few liberals -- and, to be explicit, not a few neoconservatives -- are willing to damage their faith to gratify their feelings. And as for conservatives --

Crossposted at The American Scene.

A Paradox

The best part of the day -- the warm, sunny hours between two and four-thirty p.m. -- is therefore the part of day worst to sleep through. But being the best part of the day, it is also the part of day best to fall asleep in.

Metadeconstructionism

At TAS, Matt Feeney delivers what might be the funniest and most well-conceived blog post of the year. Absolutely hopeless trying to pull a quote. Read it all. Big surprise: it's rife with implications for long conversations about prospects for postmodern conservatives. The main question is whether deconstruction has political implications, and whereas Stanley Fish says no, and Derrida goes so far as to say it's "justice" (this from the guy who also said Nietzsche's corpus might always only mean "I forgot my umbrella), Feeney sensibly enough says yes.

Briefly, all too briefly, I would contend that Matt's generally right and that's where the fun starts. Because Fish's claim that deconstruction does not (as opposed to should not) have political implications is a claim to what I call interobjectivity -- that is, to a shared and sharable conviction of the authoritatively true existence of a metaphysical item. (I continue to refine this definition.) It's not quite the whole story to say that Fish is just baldly masking a subjective preference with a truth claim. And it's not quite right either to say that Fish, as a bourgeois postmodern liberal, can, by the standards of authority internal to his own political philosophy, proclaim deconstruction as neutral with regard to 'political implications' and stop there. The phrase 'political implications' itself, in what it does and does not say, is positively rife with political implications. At its worst, as Matt hints, it can license "a trace of rapt passivity;" at its best, it can invite us to deconstruct what's going on when someone (contentedly or otherwise) settles for hovering over the surface of the world with the careful abstraction 'political implications' instead of saying more forthrightly that MY political philosophy can neither be attacked nor defended by recourse to any of the principles or conclusions of deconstruction.

Ironically I think one of the more pomocon things to do is to recognize that deconstruction does not equally threaten all political philosophies. But again this raises more questions than it answers. When it all boils down, Rorty and Fish (for instance) may paradoxically be able to rely on the United States Armed Forces to perpetuate and protect a system without any of their interests at the fore which nonetheless guarantees their best chance of survival and even flourishing. Postmodern bourgeois liberalism is parasitic on a global political system that's largely inimical to it. Yes, this is something of a dig, but then again Plato long ago recognized that this relationship also basically describes that between philosophy and democracy, at least until some philosopher or group of philosophers encounters the unthinkable (the people nominate them to rule or one day a ruler turns out to have been a philosopher). Whether or not a postmodern bourgeois liberal can cop to this relationship requires them to take a certain stance on politics, one which deconstructs Rorty's claim that we should/do call truth whatever wins in an 'open encounter'.

So what political philosophies are not as threatened by deconstruction as postmodern bourgeois liberalism? Well, postmodern conservatism, for one. Why? Fewer inherent contradictions and (perhaps because of) a more circumscribed commitment to social justice, I suspect. Postmodern conservatives, I think I'd like to suggest, recognize that truth is actually thrown into a constant state of extremity and crisis, or at least can't flourish, when all encounters are truly 'open'. This is different than the kind of cabalism that Straussians are accused of. It's more Aristotelian, insofar as it credits practical reason as a sharable resource for the maintenance and recovery of interobjectivity. But it's also Platonist insofar as it recognizes that the quest for a society of truly open encounters is a deconstructive project that never ends, and deconstructs some of the most noble and enjoyable things available to creative yet faithful human beings. The quest for the truly open encounter is a project of cumulative abstraction masquerading as a celebration of particularity. In that sense, it's like the charge leveled by Tocquevillian conservatives against modern liberals -- you think you're reveling in real diversity but it's really just a superficial compensation for the ubiquitous homogenization of equality.

In Nietzsche's terms, the point is more ominous: the only true diversity is a diversity of nobles. Postmodern bourgeois liberalism works overtime to avoid this conclusion, and to do so it requires of its nobles an endless set of shrugs when presented with the question of whether they are their own society's nobles. Pretty chintzy -- whereas postmodern conservatism -- even of a bourgeois variety -- would be more inclined to credit its own nobles with their nobility, even as it recognizes the virtues in permitting all manner of shades and subtext and subtlety when it comes to talking about and acting out nobility. Rah-rah sessions: generally to be avoided, and to be undertaken with the utmost care when necessary. That, too, has political implications, but my own claim is that, properly understood, deconstruction is like fire: it deserves respect and a little fear but, handled well, will not burn down the political philosophy of a well-informed postmodern conservative. But this in turn requires that the house of that philosophy is built with an eye toward the dangers of fire. And I suppose the bottom line is that a postmodern conservative thinks a postmodern bourgeois liberal is playing with fire but pretending not to be, whereas he or she the postmodern conservative is either not playing with fire or isn't pretending. And indeed, to make Aristotle suffer through a dance with Nietzsche, that not everyone can play well with fire.

That's where the 'political implications' come back in, in their honest guise as political morality, concerning the question of what nonpolitical standards should come into play in judging better and worse regimes. For this reason, America is a special treat for postmodern conservatives, because here is a place that doesn't always do as you'd like but which will probably always be okay in the end if its citizens aren't seduced away from their providential combination of small-bore innovation and wide-lens fidelity.

Happy Warriors

Thru Patrick at the Dish, I see the Economist is at it again:

extremists of both sides are happier than moderates. Some 35% of those who call themselves “extremely liberal” say they are very happy, against only 22% of ordinary liberals. For conservatives, the gap is smaller: 48% to 43%. Extremists are happy, Mr Brooks reckons, because they are certain they are right. Alas, this often leads them to conclude that the other side is not merely wrong, but evil. Some two-thirds of America's far left and half of the far right say they dislike not only the other side's ideas, but also the people who hold them.

But does jettisoning the concept of evil make you happiest of all? Evil must be feared, even respected; looking down on your comprehensively-wrong enemies with the contempt reserved for those too deluded even to accomplish evilness may produce new heights of joy. And yet...what is joy without the rejection of evil? Is 'happiness' itself only a pale, impoverished version of joy? A postmodern conservative, especially a religious one, might have an initially depressing but eventually joyful time of deconstructing 'happiness' as a stand-in in Western thought for joy. Perhaps even 'ideal' happiness already articulated a typically (small-l) liberal lowering of expectations.

At this juncture, Will Wilkinson is ready to say, no doubt, that greater happiness for a greater number is a far better public good than more intense joy for a smaller number. And when pressed, I will concede this point. But only because it's tied to a definition of 'public good' which I think works pretty well for America, though not necessarily other places. And at any rate the turn toward the 'American Idol' model of social entertainment suggests some bizarre and atavistic need to amp up the joy of a select number of individuals. Our strategy has been to attach the greater happiness to the vicarious enjoyment of the joy of super-talented special people...which is a hell of a thing for a bunch of (small-d) democrats to do. What's extra-strange about this phenomenon is its relation to democratic politics, made most striking in the form of Barackstar Obama. The ambivalence we feel about Obama's star power arises from just this funny feeling of aristocracy coming in through the back door -- or, better, a sense of aristocracy indulged in as such, the better to gain its emotional benefits without risking the costs of its actual reinstantiation.

Who Do You Love?

There is a mondo-importanto conversation going on about patriotism and nationalism featuring many of my favorite commentators. My backblog (that's a backlog of things to blog about) is already a groaning monstrosity, but this meme has added itself to the pile without complaint on my part. The main reason why is because the predicaments of patriotism and nationalism are very different in America and in Europe, and since most of the rest of the world has inherited the European, not American, model of statehood, no small bit of ugliness has to be sorted out with due attention paid to the weight and persistence and detail of the specific models. So stay tuned, and consult the whole meme meanwhile.

Integrity, Mystique, Charisma

Patrick Jackson, one of my favorite nonfoundationalists, has a longish and very interesting "Wittgensteinian /  pragmatist" rumination on 'integrity', that favorite of American abstractions designed to fill in for particular facts about a person the character of which only come into focus as the result of long social narratives among intimately interrelated persons. So you can see that here Wittgenstein and MacIntyre have something to say to one another. But I want to zero in on this:

The more profound problem here is that we misread "X is a person of great personal integrity" if we regard it as an empirical proposition. If we did try to read it that way, then we'd be saying something like "X's words and actions have corresponded in the past," and the proposition could only be evaluated if no more words or actions were forthcoming, i.e. if the person were dead or otherwise completely incapacitated. But that's not how the statement functions, because it's a practical-moral claim rather than an empirical one. "Practical-moral" is a term I borrow from John Shotter; it highlights the extent to which such claims do important social and cultural work in a given context, since they arise from and participate in a whole complex ecology of commonplace notions on which people draw to make sense of things. The truth-value of a practical-moral claim is irrelevant, or undecidable, or nonsensical. Saying "X has personal integrity" is like saying "we are a just society" or "we are a compassionate and environmentally-friendly organization." On one hand, it means nothing in particular, and on the other hand, it can exercise a profound shaping effect on future action -- which is what practical-moral claims are supposed to do in the first place.

There are at least two possible problems that might result from this line of thinking. One is that irrelevance, undecidability, and nonsensicality might be conflated. But another, more important problem is that people might come to think that rhetoric is nothing more than the art of getting results from the public pairing of nonsense words that everyone puts a positive value on with outcomes that you desire. It is sadly obvious that rhetoric can and does work this way, which is why debate in the US tends to resolve into a 'National League' vs 'American League' dynamic, the Party of Goodness vs. the Party of Rightness. What's more concerning is that people come to think that this is so because there is no alternative, that because 'practical-moral claims' cannot be ascribed a 'truth-value' we had all better pick our favorite cultural symbols to evoke, line them up with our desires and preferences, and start evoking.

Really, though, I only have a problem with this insofar as it reflects a failure to understand or even to consider the genealogy of practical-moral terms. It's no surprise that such a shortcoming should emerge from German philosophy, where one's great purpose in life, all too often, is to generate abstract universal terms and  to impose the categorizations appurtenant to them upon the world in which everyone lives. Linguistic pragmatism is helpful in getting us out of that bad habit, but the lesson comes, all too often, at the cost of denying practical reason:

Consider "we are a just society." If "justice" exists as a commonplace among both speakers and the audience for such a statement, then the practical-moral claim functions not to describe the society, but to guide and shape subsequent discussions about possible courses of action: from here on in they have to make reference to "justice," and various participants in those contentious conversations can deploy "justice" as a way of impressing their positions on others. The same is true of "X has personal integrity," which I submit ought not to be thought of as a description but instead as a contribution to the shaping of an ongoing flow of action -- after the practical-moral claim is made and accepted, debates and discussions about options have to take "integrity" into account. This does not mean that any particular action is excluded as much as it means that the whole terrain on which actions are considered has shifted; that's the kind of effect that a successful practical-moral claim has.

Patrick is rightly careful not to rule out the idea that 'justice' has a genealogy decisive to the way in which it can be deployed in contentious conversations, so I'm not critiquing his own position so much as one that seems to take his presentation and run with it. Indeed, I suspect only in a culture where such a thing has already happened can we be having this kind of conversation. It's important to underscore that when a society abandons, naively or otherwise, the genealogies of its practical-moral terms, its rhetoric is severely perverted. And a self-conscious understanding that terms like 'justice' or 'virtue' or 'constancy' or 'prudence' or even 'integrity' actually have no assignable truth value or empirical content seems pretty clearly to deepen that perversity. This is the charge Machiavelli always comes in for. But he wrote for highly disciplined princes in small republics, not very lazy citizens in large democracies. The way our concept of 'integrity' has decayed into the mystical cipher of Truthiness reflects a decay of our faculties to both reason and will virtues into being and sustain them. I would submit that this in turn results from a loss of vitality when it comes to the discipline of maintaining close personal interrelationships with the characters in our everyday lives.

This is the classic bourgeois disease -- a latticework of highly public terms of opprobrium which are all systematically violated privately. On the one hand, that kind of arrangement reflects a superhealthy culture, but on the other it augurs an imminent collapse into superdecadence. Testing the integrity of your interdicts is a dangerous business. But anyway: since the number of personalities and characters that figure into our everyday lives continues to grow relative to the number of persons whom we hold to account in virtue of our detailed interrelationships with them, the terms by which we hold persons, personalities, and characters to account lose their content specificity. Rather than being the products of a slow, continual accretion of detailed and interlinked examples and episodes of proper conduct, our moral terms become abstract, empty terms -- either of praise ("Dude's got integrity, man") or condemnation ("Dude's racist against trees, man"). The notion that a culture's moral terminology grows like a rare plant out of centuries of intersubjective experiences and lessons drops out of the picture completely -- and with it, precisely that moral terminology. And we head toward praising people for the most mystical and abstract and contentless of reasons -- charisma.

Don't get me wrong, charisma is something we all seem to recognize when we see it, but attempting to define charisma is something not even Weber could really pull off without some glaring caveats. This is because the modern conception of charisma is basically just the mystical power of attraction and command. Funny how the scientific approach to morals leaves you with a residuum of things which are no longer morals but are still scientifically indescribable. And funny how if you set out to abstract the labels we use to ascribe virtues you wind up with abstract people.