Postmodern Conservative.

Jung and Stupid

FYI, nothing I can think of is less conservative than the junkyard of faux-sacred ready-mades for the bored Transcendence-Seeking Set supplied by Jung. Freud looks like a reasonable, down-to-earth pragmatist in the face of Jung's crackpot crockpot, where whole religions and traditions and persons lose their non-negotiable specificity to become abstracted-out themes, symbols on the trophy shelf of civilization in its retirement-home Golden Years, or like the buffet line in that well-branded chain. If Freud's stubborn modern arrangements of irreconcilable conflict strike postmoderns as hopelessly uncreative and conservatives as intolerably remissive, Jung should be filed by both camps, especially where they overlap, as leaps and bounds more horrible: an Ass Menagerie of golden calves for people always on the outside and looking in to fondle and indulge in more or less seriously is both a cheapskate version of postmodern creativity and an outrage to any conservative's situatedness in his or her particulars.

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.

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.

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.

Yale Mafia Update

The Reactionary Epicurean is one of the few 'working' bloggers who can toss out philosophically evocative nuggets of math accessible to your average political theorist. Case in point: when you spiral prime numbers and plot them on a graph, I have learned, you get these weird beautiful patterns. You know --

Sieve of Eratosthenes-style.

In other news, it's Karras vs. Rittelmeyer on embracing gender roles from which many have recently refrained from embracing. T.R.E. brings up the important nitpick that traditions which have at least in part failed can only be renovated from a social and cultural standpoint which recognizes that they have at least in part failed. But there's a big difference between renovating stay-at-home motherhood and renovating the polis. I could go on, but I've got a plane to catch. With ads on the tray tables.

Fight Through the Kitsch; Prize at End

I am toying with the idea of doing blog posts hereon out according to some kind of general daily theme. Last week, for instance, one day was a Posts About Whores, today it's Posts About New York, etc. Like most principles of organization, this one is stupid if followed faithfully and useful mainly as a heuristic to bring an ounce of focus to the goings-on here. At any rate check this out: someone actually wrote this:

Just a few years ago the prevailing style statement in Williamsburg featured metrosexually groomed urbanites wearing trucker hats and pristine Carhartt jackets and quaffing Pabst beer. Now some are choosing the real life behind the pose. [...] The Billyburg scene has changed, said Annaliese Griffin, who contributes to a blog called Grocery Guy. “Having a cool cheese in your fridge has taken the place of knowing what the cool band is, or even of playing in that band,” she said. “Our rock stars are ricotta makers.” -- NYT

The prize at the end of this instakitsch is...being a farmer! Yes, Wendell Berry's name appears in this article, though strangely only as an inspiration to young agricool kids from the 1970s. Whole books can and have been written trying to determine exactly what is going on here, and whether it's good, and I for one enjoy both PBR and clean country air, and, uh, cool cheeses as well. I'll try to restrict myself to point that maybe hasn't been made before: that this back-to-the-farm thing is natural in two ways. One, it's a market niche that makes perfect sense given how recently there were basically no alternatives to mass-produced artificial foods; it's something that reasonable people would and did think up given the homogeneity and undesirability of much of the food that's available today. In that fashion it's also a luxury. But luxuries, contrary to some opinions, are also natural, and it's natural then to think about what kind of luxuries one wants and pursues and enjoys. If you want to be less afraid of Nietzsche you can think about 'revaluing values' in this soft quasi-economic sense. What's your will to luxury look like? You may be less deserving of respect if it looks like a pristine Carhartt jacket than if it looks like cheese produced by a finely honed craft attuned to the productive quality of the natural world.

But organic cool is natural in another way, too: the luxury of religion -- as in, a long, deep tradition of religion closely enjoyed among family and friends across generations -- is foreclosed to many of the same people who willed the luxury of returning their orientation to the goods of natural life. This is to say nothing of the way that 'Billyburg' residents feel about Christianity in general. The return of organic is natural because when people are casting about for lives of 'integral' meaning they typically turn either to the soul or the soil. Wendell Berry himself was fairly clear I think that the Land, not the Lord, shall provide. Of course there's no inherent contradiction between living an organic Christian farm life. But the narrowing of horizons imposed by casting your gaze down to dirt and hearth does stand in a certain tension with the broadening of horizons imposed by casting your gaze up to God or out toward your fellow man. And returning to the recognition of this tension -- that abandoning one or the other isn't easy or right -- seems to me also both natural and a luxury.

Crossposted at The American Scene.

MacIntyre vs. Rorty!

[...] the vocabulary in which I make intelligible and justify or fail to justify my actions, beliefs, and life within a network of relationships of giving and receiving is never merely mine. It is always ours [...]. Ironic detachment involves a withdrawal from our common language and our shared judgments and thereby from the social relationships which presuppose the use of that language in those judgments. [In irony,] I am to find a vantage point quite outside those relationships and commitments that have made me what I now am. But what might this be?

On this Rorty might well comment: that which he praised is an ironic attitude towards one's own final vocabulary, but not an ironic attitude towards those commitments, those solidarities, which are the basis for the trust that others may repose in us. And Rorty's trenchant and admirable expression of his own social democratic commitments and solidarities does not seem to be in the least ironic. So over what then do we disagree? Presumably over whether it is or is not in the end possible to separate one's attitude towards the vocabulary through which one's commitments and solidarities are articulated from one's attitude towards those commitments and solidarities. Attempts to answer this question have a long history. [...] -- Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (152-3)

I mention this because something illustrative of MacIntyre's idea of postmodernity and something else illustrative of Rorty's have both hit the news at the same time, or at least hit this weird little world of mine in which both these things count as striking and useful bits of nourishment.

In the first case, certain evangelical Protestants are turning to monasticism, of a very new but also very old kind, a creative and forward-looking improvisation. In MacIntyre's words -- words written in 1981 at the close of After Virtue --

What they set themselves to achieve [...] -- often not recognizing fully what they were doing -- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. [...] We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict.

In the second case, Rorty's favorite author Nabokov has this David-Lynch sounding last unfinished novel kicking about in a steel Swiss shoebox called The Original of Laura. And Nabokov's son has received spectral permission to sell it (as opposed to indulging in that theatrical Nabokovian habit of burning the damn thing). The link here to the monasticism business -- aside from the eerie possibilities issuing from a contemplation of a man whose most profound social connection involved shutting himself in a room and pounding out his bent genius into a form that more than once almost went straight into the bin -- involves what hints can be gleaned from this firsthand-ish report on Laura as to the issues Nabokov grappled with therein concerning the relationship between the destruction of the individual self and the construction of the social self. Which in many respects is the last modern, and first postmodern, question.

Having types this out in alone in a room, I must now leave it to you to finish making all the profound little connections.

Deep Thoughts

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

Livin' the Dream

There's that pesky Kantian enlightenment, still trying to spread o'er the world. But will the dream live us? Camille Paglia presents another smooth and graceful brief for the limitations of practical reason as the lodestar of our lives:

Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture.

The whole piece is putatively about the way art and religion have intertangled in Christendom and post-Christendom (and everywhere, everywhen), but the subtextual contemplation of the pathologies of Catholicism is even more intriguing. And then of course you get classic lines like these:

And I would question whether Mapplethorpe's cool, elegant torture and mutilation scenarios were an ideal advertisement for gay male life.

Yet the Paglia Protocol, for all it's worth, runs us headlong toward the eclectic pseudotheism of Jungian psychology -- a therapeutic use of faith entirely in accord, as Rorty never wanted to admit, with pragmatic reason. Alex Wendt, that amateur philosopher and IR genius, understood the therapeutic uses of science itself:

The emergence of an international public sphere signals the emergence of joint awareness, however embryonic at this stage, of how their own ideas and behavior make the logic of anarchy a self-fulfilling prophecy. With that joint awareness comes a potential for self-intervention designed to change the logic and bring international society under a measure of rational control. In individuals we might call this 'therapy' or 'character planning'; in social systems like international society it would be called 'constitutional design', 'engineering', or 'steering' (Social Theory of International Politics 376).

But in privileging of a scientific understanding of friendship and truth, Wendt missed the way therapeutic logics keep bringing other understandings back into culture. For now I'll have to leave that first claim unelaborated. (Maybe this is a relief to you.) But as far as the second, other concepts of friendship and other understandings of verity -- like those you get from philosophy, politics, or religion -- are placed under great pressure, and almost squeezed out entirely, under the logic of Wendt's academically popular brand of secular practical reason. This makes it radically incomplete, as Paglia, Jung, Obama, Huckabee, and others reveal to us all the time. The inability of secular scientists to fully model therapeutic logics blinds them to the way especially religious or metaphysical conceptions of verity may be integrated into frameworks of therapy that end up challenging the status of empirical truth itself. Perhaps more painfully, acolytes of secular practical reason must lower their expectations as encounters with devotees of political, philosophical, and religious conceptions of truth and friendship fail to result in transformative social progress -- or turn (back) into anxious neoconservatives and neoliberals.

Why Huckabee and Obama Work

It's all in Twain's weird, strange conjoined twin named America. Leigh Eric Schmidt explains at the Immanent Frame. Religious faith and the therapeutic, in America, have almost since their respective get-gos both been pragmatic anti-doctrines grounded in shared experiences which unite the immanent and the transcendent in the social. How quickly we broke the Puritan -- and Hebraic -- mold. It keeps recurring -- these habits go deeper than consciousness and are very hard to eradicate -- but right now it looks like the therapeutic is quite capable of assimilating faith into its master order of contingency unless and until excessively felt pain.

The Europeans understood this -- Freud's disciples, especially -- but mystical therapeutics was made to look stupid in America as techno-industrialism and social statistics rose to unquestionable prominence. When the '60s arrived all that went out the window; but what replaced it is now becoming clearly a re-mystical therapeutics, in which particular faiths are all just another set of tools to get us through life as broken, co-dependent animals with the strange power to have overleaping experiences together -- heartsongs, you might call them. As negative as therapy is -- saying no to all Nos -- the positive that it needs to endorse everything with equal small-c catholicity is love. The argument of the era is over the ontology of real love. The terms of the argument are only in part over the God question.