Why, for a Postmodern Conservative, Communism and Libertarianism Are Virtually Identical
By Peter LawlerUnder communism, Marx explained, people live liberated or completely unconstrained or completely unalienated lives. "Do you own thing" becomes the only remaining rule. So communism–which is communal only in the sense that the remaining necessary work is done by the community as opposed to any particular individual–is radical democracy or radical anarchism or radical liberation. It is not at all compatible with the love- and death-obsessed civilizations of the past, the cultural achievement of which, Marx thought, had already been commodified into insignificance by capitalism. Freedom is freedom from all the obsessions that plagued the repressed, scarcity-driven, stressed-out past. Freedom means that there’s NOTHING you really feel you HAVE to do. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. And so to Carl (who had a great post on the thread below on Tocqueville) I say that I agree that Plato and Marx and Tocqueville all agree that the democratic dream of freedom from necessity is (as David Brooks says) the "paradise drive" that animates specifically democratic restlessness. We postmodern conservatives say that the natural limitations and direction we’ve been given are not only ineradicable by but actually quite good for us. We postmodern conservatives dissent from all forms of radical liberationism in being grateful for what we’ve been given and for, as a result, being stuck with virtue.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Yes, the postmodern conservative response to the deep democratic inclination a la Walt Whitman to become free of all limitations and boundaries and thereby to “contain multitudes,” is that Hell is not Other People, but that Hell is a Never-Arriving Exploration of All Possibilities in which you become Every Type of Person. To be an everyoneman, is to be a real no-one man. Morrissey of the Smiths, for example, had a bit of Whitman in him, but with greater awareness: “I Am the Sun, and the Earth, of…Nothing in Particular.” You’ll have to trust me that backed by Johnny Marr’s guitar it sounds profound and poignant. The pomocon is aware of the desire to explore and encompass the MULTITUDE, and feels it waiting in him/her/?-self. The Shakers sang ” ’tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free…” Well, that is a gift indeed in our day, one the pomocon cannot expect…but the gift of limitation, and the hard practice of self-limitation, can be expected and can be earned, and it is more than enough to be grateful for given the little hells of indeterminacy that otherwise bloom in modern democratic souls. As Jonathan Richman once sang, if one can learn to love things like the “USA” and even “Route 128 when its cold outside,” then one might be able to live in a way in which “the modern world is not so bad, not like the students say.”
October 5th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Sorry to mess up your quoting of Morrissey, whose lyrics I love, but in “How Soon is Now” he actually says ‘I am the son and the heir/of nothing in particular”…
October 6th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Oh that’s right, thanks Mortimer…I vaguely remember that this is one of those mistakes I figured out several years ago, and then apparently forgot.
October 6th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
[…] The postmodern conservative. “We postmodern conservatives say that the natural limitations and direction we’ve been given are not only ineradicable by but actually quite good for us. We postmodern conservatives dissent from all forms of radical liberationism in being grateful for what we’ve been given and for, as a result, being stuck with virtue.” […]
October 6th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I really and truly mean thanks for the link to a page on Mormon Metaphysics. Fascinating stuff.