Postmodern Conservatism and Religion, Part II
By Ivan KenneallyIn reponse to excellent questions and insights regarding my previous post, I’ve decided to offer a sequel. While Jim is certainly right that the whole of the Enlightenment can’t be reduced to its anti-religious premises, and there are surely important thinkers who don’t fit the bill, the essence of the modern Enlightenment is the liberation of the individual from the two traditional restraints on him, nature and God. First and foremost, what links early modernity and late modernity is the philosophical theme of the abstract, disconnected individual—there’s a geneological line that runs from Locke’s rational being with rights and interests to the lonely existentialist who suffers deeply from nihilistic angst. In these two very different versions, nature is either transcended by its abstract mathematization and reduction to fodder for labor or its abstract poetiziation and reduction to fodder for deconstructivist hermeneutics. In postmodernity as it is typically understood, we find the Rorty inspired intersection of these two currents–an acceptance of the metaphysical collapse of the individual coupled with the project of weaving gossamer tales of his rights and responsibilities, whether ultimately defensible or not. In postmodernity properly understood, one can discern both the extraordinary technological progess science has achieved and its utter failure to capture the full and true nature of man. Likewise, it can understand that what typically passes for a postmodern response to modernity is only its unwitting continuation, hyperbolically tracing its impoverished account of both reason and nature to often comic conclusions. Maybe more than anything else, a postmodern conservatism is a principled return to an experiential realism, that take seriously an account of human eros and consciousness unvarnished by gratuitous, theory-laden abstraction.
Tags: Enlightenment, nature, Postmodernity, Religion
October 7th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
A nagging question: how is “postmodern” conservatism all that different from pre-modern conservatism? Yes, it’s one thing to say that we learned something from the failure of the modernist project, but any discussion of the “full and true nature of man” sounds far more at home in the Middle Ages than the 21st century.
Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. I’m just curious to know what, if anything, makes this project not simply a rehabilitated medieval conservatism? It sounds to me that like a good conservative, you’re more attempting to recover something which was lost than to find something new.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Am I far wrong in saying that, unlike a medieval conservatism, a postmodern conservatism has more to conserve: namely, whatever is good in modernity?
October 7th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
The assumption at work here is that there is a necessary connection between the various “waves” of modernity. If there was not, you could be defending Locke (or some other early modern figure) as a middle ground between being thoroughly “bound” by nature and God (who interprets what either of those terms mean?) and suffering as a lonely existentialist. By not defending such a position, you seem to imply that it would not be tenable. I would like to know why this is so.
The nice part about being a postmodern conservative is that you can have all the nice things modernity gave us — clean water and abundant food, wives that probably won’t die during childbirth, children that will live to adulthood, effective medicine, etc, etc — while throwing around empty slogans like “return to an experimental realism.”
Why not say, simply, that modernity is a complex thing, not definable by one simple “genealogy” (note the very modern reductionism at work here!), but that its great temptation is to be prone to excess, to be “too consistent” in Reinhold Niebuhr’s phrase? Or, slightly differently, that modernity is bound up not just with the Enlightenment, but the Renaissance and Reformation, and thus contains within itself a number of resources that might correct its excesses. Or even more differently, why not simply allow (again) that modernity’s temptation is excess, and argue for its chastening from within — why the elaborate intellectual edifice of finding our faults lurking in the pages of an Englishman who toiled away his last years writing about Christianity?
October 7th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
i agree with much of what matt says. my main assertion would be that ivan conflates the *margins* (or extreme tails of the distribution) for the *mass* (central tendency of the distribution). the french enlightenment and the scottish enlightenment are very different. additionally, even among the french d’holbach was an extremist. yes, *some* of the descendants of the enlightenment were characterized by hardcore anti-religious sentiments as you describe, but *some* were not. to a great extent american conservatism in its classical liberal tendencies is also a child of the enlightenment.
October 8th, 2008 at 12:26 am
Good discussion. But I remain a fan of the “wave of modernity” analysis: the radicality is there at the outset, in Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes — bound to erupt one way or another; there is a certain necessity to the waves of radicalization. Of course there are more moderate voices and more moderate strands (Scottish, American) along the way, which it is fitting to honor. But they succumbed, or are succumbing, I propose, for no accidental reasons, but because of a fundamental theoretical deficiency, or an unthought complicity in the radicality of their more obviously extreme cousins. This is why an alternative to modern theory is needed - not exactly another “theory” supposed to provide a fully transparent blueprint for practice, but precisely a highly self-aware articulation of the role of reason in practice — the rule of reason — and its limits. This is what I began to attempt, or attempted to begin, in my Manifesto Part I. (The demand, I am told, for Part II is reaching a fever pitch, and I hope soon to comply.) It is here — in the task of articulating the task of reason in relation to goods prior to and beyond reason — that I believe the work of Leo Strauss remains singularly indispensable; he frames the question of modernity with unique clarity in terms of the orientation of the “philosopher” with respect to common hopes and fears. But the limits of Strauss’s project in the implausible idea of the pure and aloof serenity of premodern (and pre-Christian) philosophy also provide us the task of postmodern conservatism: a responsible thinking that neither simply transcends these hopes and fears nor simply promises to serve them (technologically). The responsible management of transcendence, both vertical and horizontal (to be explained, someday), the healing of the love-hate relationship between “intellectuals” and the public, to be made possible by the greatest possible self-knowledge, that is, the keenest possible awareness of the relation of theory to practice.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I’m still wondering why Matt’s discussion doesn’t make us simply “technologically-advanced medievals.”
Still, I agree that the Reformation is essentially modern, as opposed to medieval Roman Catholicism. Being modern/postmodern and being Protestant seem to go hand in hand. A question for the room then: is it possible to be a modern/postmodern, Catholic? Or is that faith tradition inherently mired in pre-modern thinking? I’m not going to argue that there are not people who claim to be both Catholic and modern, but I wonder if being one doesn’t compromise the other.
October 8th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Im still with Ralph on this (and I suppose Strauss too) that the whole modernity is hard to characterize univocally since there are different tributaries running in multiple directions but it’s also not a themeless pastiche of currents either…the really astute question, as I see it, is Ryan’s when he asks what makes a postmodern conservatism postmodern versus some medieval iteration. The simple answer is the fact of modernity itself—any political approach has to accomodate its own circumstances—that’s alomost a definition of prudence–and modernity produces both its own unique advantages and disadvantages for any conservative posture. One could not simply draw proximate guidance from the medievals—surely they have much to say that is helpful but its a very different world….
October 8th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Of course there’s no question we want to keep some (many) benefits of technology. So that is in no way in question. Now, I’m not a Catholic, though I find much to admire in much Catholic thought (including medieval), so there’s not question for me of “going back” to medieval Catholicism. Obviously I’m trying to cast a wider net, on purely philosophical grounds (though obviously respectful of faith), in attempting to help come up with a working definition of postmodern conservatism. And I would say there’s no going back, not only because we want the technology, but because there’s truth in the Christian critique of classical philosophy (see, for example, Augustine’s profound critique of the pride implicit in Platonism and, still more deeply, the incoherence of the classical ideal of timeless “circular” happiness); and also, even, because there’s truth in the modern critique of the premodern tradition (which critique is finally heavily dependent on the Christian critique). I guess this leads me to say, if I dare, that there’s truth in the Reformation critique of the classical-Medieval synthesis, and in the Calvinist radicalization of transcendence. But it’s not the whole truth. So the result might be called eclectic on a practical level, but grounded in a coherent mapping of the philosophic options, each with its partial truth. OK, this is quite formal and vague, but there is my outline.
October 8th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
“A question for the room then: is it possible to be a modern/postmodern, Catholic? Or is that faith tradition inherently mired in pre-modern thinking? I’m not going to argue that there are not people who claim to be both Catholic and modern, but I wonder if being one doesn’t compromise the other.”
I’m no authority in the matter, but Catholic thought has representatives hailing from traditions other than Thomism or Augustinism, for instance those of the phenomenological tradition (e.g., Jean-Luc Marion); heck, I’d go so far as to say that many Catholic thinkers work in the shadow of Karl Barth and Heidegger, irony of ironies so to speak. Others like Robert George and Maritain before him (both politcal & moral philosophers) are expressly inheritors of the natural law tradition.
As for the compromising positions, I’m inclined to think that given such a long tradition to deal with and explicitely or implicitely accept, there is alot to reconcile. To the point that the reflexion on reconciling innovations in thought and practice with the tradition goes a long way in defining what Catholic thought is.
October 8th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
I think the Catholic tradition, in many ways, can be part of what I mean by postmodern conservatism…one, if part of the problem of modernity is the sundering of faith and reason, the reduction of eros to its bodily incarnation, atomistic individualism, a misinterpretation of transcendence, and soft moral relativism then Catholicism is a helpful corrective..also, if Christianity turns out to be an integral part of the American tradition, it becomes even more instructive for a postmodern American conservatism
October 8th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
I hear what you’re saying about not simply wanting to turn back the clock. That isn’t possible even if it were desirable, and the decrease in physical human misery–at least in the West, but arguably globally–suggests that it isn’t. As far as that goes, I’m a huge fan of modernity.
But in a real sense I think those technological advances are inextricably linked to the breakdown of Catholic authority culminating in the Reformation. Note that it was Protestants who were responsible for most of those advances. World population stagnated or grew very slowly from ancient times until around 1500, and then immediately skyrocketed with no end in sight. Correlation/causation, yes, I know, but either way suggests that the medieval Catholic worldview is incompatible with that kind of population growth, because whether the Reformation caused or was caused by population growth, either is more likely than there being no relationship. Also note that it was not until the middle of the 20th century that the Vatican became at all friendly towards representative government; it was supporting authoritarian regimes up until World War II. Given its radically authoritarian epistemology, this makes sense, at least to me.
In any event, I think my ultimate objection is that you may not be able to do quite the picking-and-choosing of artifact from ideology that you seem to think you can get away with. Ideas, culture, and technology are inextricably related, and if you want a “principled return to experiential realism,” let alone a proper interpretation of transcendence, you’re going to have to find some way of recognizing that. Simply resuscitating medieval Catholicism is, contrary to what all of the wannabe-Chestertonians I know believe, not really an option, because it doesn’t get you everything you want. Yet it sounds a lot like what you’re trying to do.
In essence, I guess I’m asking “What are your first principles?”
October 9th, 2008 at 10:08 am
I thought I went out of my way to define pomocon as something other than a simple resucitation of medieval Christianity…although in many respects, I find that option more palatable than the ancient perspective Strauss at least seemed committed to revivifying…what’s useful about medieval Christianity in this regard is, as Brague points out, that in many ways it forms the heart of modernity even though modernity sees itself as a rupture from it….but I’m arguing for a postmodern conservative view which has to be a reflection on our modern circumstances–that can’t simply be medievalism by another name
October 9th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Okay, if it isn’t simply “medievalism by another name,”–and I agree with you that a viable 21st century worldview simply can’t be that–I ask again, “What are your first principles?” I may disagree with Descartes about his argument that one starts from one’s own existence and builds a world from there, but he wasn’t wrong in that one does need to start somewhere. Modernism started from the atomized, morally liberated individual. That doesn’t work. Where does “postmodern conservatism” start from?
October 9th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Well if what you want is a manifesto style account of first principles then you can’t do any better than what our own Ralph provides right here:
http://culture11.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2008/09/26/rethinking-the-rule-of-reason-or-a-draft-manifesto-of-postmodern-conservatism-part-i/
Nevertheless, the demand for such a foundational ground, while understandable, already seems to be too Cartesian for what I’m aiming at as if postmodern conservatism is another theoretical prism that can be reduced to its propositional components…not that Ralph intended his manifesto in that way—much of his account is devoted to a critique of pure reason untethered from practice. One might say that the first principle of postmodern conservatism is a profound wariness of apriori first principles that don’t take seriously enough a proper beginning in lived political experience….
October 9th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
“I think the Catholic tradition, in many ways, can be part of what I mean by postmodern conservatism…one, if part of the problem of modernity is the sundering of faith and reason, the reduction of eros to its bodily incarnation, atomistic individualism, a misinterpretation of transcendence,…”
I understand what you’re saying very well. I think it was Levinas who labelled the whole Western tradition of philosophy (except for theocentric Christian & Jewish thought), as one continuous endeavor of trying to erase the transcendant posed by Plato from the horizon of thought. And that the pull of immanence was such that it made thought collapse upon itself like a black hole.
“One might say that the first principle of postmodern conservatism is a profound wariness of apriori first principles that don’t take seriously enough a proper beginning in lived political experience….”
After reading this, would I be correct to identify pomocon as being rooted in Platonism and not just Strauss’ Plato, I mean Plato himself. Perhaps I’m wrong here, but Strauss’ interpretation brushed over the significance of myth in Plato’s writings. Though he did insist on Plato’s stance according to which we are born into a specific context of cultural & religious references which influence our common notions of things and indeed prejudices.
Mythic language for Plato was more than just prejudices to be liberated from - it was a language of analogy which allowed for contemplating that which was beyond the horizon of immanence.
October 9th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I don’t want to be Cartesian any more than you do, but I do believe that everyone ultimately operates on the basis of a set of unquestioned assumptions. Without those assumptions, nothing works, because “questioning must come to an end.”
I read Ralph’s piece before, and I read it again when you linked it here, but I’m not really any closer to understanding what your fundamental assumptions are, and I haven’t the foggiest what Ralph’s are. I don’t think you can even get to “lived political experience” without a set of assumptions with which to frame it. I’m just trying to get at those.
October 9th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
1. “First principles.” Pomocon’s first principles are our first practices. There are very few irruptions into practice that are not, more importantly, disruptions of memory. Our first principles are cognizable (and re-cognizable) through the shared, lived memorializations — memorizations, known “by heart” — of the first practices we remember truly. So the main meta-principle is that there is true and false memory. Nietzsche and Freud knew of the relation between memory and guilt. They pushed us toward an understanding of our all-too-clever training in the practical knack of accrediting our own false memories as stipulative possibilities for instrumental therapies of ordinary and extraordinary action. But they recoiled from what Freud called the “3rd Unconscious.” Pomocon doesn’t.
2. “Catholic pomocons?” Absolutely. But only American ones. Discuss.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Well, James, maybe I’m just not postmodern (or literate) enough, but I found that to be entirely opaque. I followed you through the first two sentences and then just lost it. I haven’t studied philosophy since I was an undergrad some years ago, but I don’t think I ever studied enough for that to make any kind of sense. That’s my problem, not yours.
Your problem would be explaining what you mean to interested laypeople like me.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Fair enough. Some fundamental assumptions or, better, convictions:
(1) There is no ‘view from nowhere.’ Nobody can jump out of their tradition, their self, their society, or their historical situation to get a really objective perspective from which rational, empirical study can be used to generate absolutely true and predictive laws.
(2) Nonetheless sometimes it’s easier than others to develop knowledge about predictable things. We just need to bear in mind that persons are not enough like atoms or molecules to treat them, scientifically, in the same way. Sciences that study non-human things present different problems for politics than sciences that study human things. Although the former can create more shocking challenges to stable political order (nukes, robots, etc.), the latter can more powerfully and fundamentally shape — or distort — the way we understand our condition, our relationships, our selves, and our lives.
(3) Indeed, being too scientific about ourselves has the same effect as being too artistic — we put ourselves at a critical distance that begs the question of why we can’t put that critically distant self at a critical distance of its own! We alienate ourselves from our actually indivisible selves. Yes, we change over time, and that’s necessary and proper. But being different from who you were ten years ago doesn’t mean that you weren’t you ten years ago. Both science and art, when in denial about both the inescapability of the contexts we’ve grown up in and the inescapability of our single, whole self, can dangerously obsess us with all the possibilities for change within us. They can lead us to radically doubt that any controlling authority commands us to be honest about who we really are. Of course, we can’t all be fully honest about ourselves all the time; that seems not to be in our nature, and anyway even if it’s possible it would take a utopia-sized amount of work on everyone’s part. So we shuffle restlessly in a complex milieu of commandments and the valid excuses we have for not fully obeying them even though we must. (This is an echo of what I think Ralph is getting at with horizontals and verticals. Rieff also puts this at the heart of his social theory.)
(4) The quality of that shuffling is such that, over time, we have gotten better and better at making excuses for why we shouldn’t have to be controlled by our commandments, or the guilt we feel for breaking them or excusing ourselves from them. Whereas pomo leftists think this is what happens when God dies and we recognize how all our relationships — including those with ourselves — are power games, religious pomo cons [I’d say] think that God doesn’t die, He just fades away: we can shove the sacred, holy, and divine out of our lives, but only our narcissism and egotism (and ultimately, fear and shame) permit us to think that by doing this we can actually ‘kill’ God. Pomocons generally expect that our therapeutic virtuosity — living well by acting ‘as if’ we’re not guilty of living poorly — can work indefinitely but is very costly and exhausting. And, ultimately, it puts us face to face with the extent of our human powers in a way that makes us disgusted, horrified, disoriented, ill.
(5) At the same time, pomocons recognize that we can’t go back in time to a supposedly ‘more virtuous era’ or ‘lifestyle’, because that would just be pretend. And it would be bad pretend, because — as MacIntyre criticizes Burke — we would know that our ability to act ‘as if’ we had become as virtuous as we supposedly were was contingent upon a deliberate self-delusion. Nonetheless, pomocons recognize that the truth about metaphysics is that knowledge can persist even if we’re not acting it out. We can recover it in a form so identical to the way it used to be that our best account of that knowledge requires us to describe it as ‘enduring’ or ‘permanent’ truth. The challenge of differentiating these two cases calls for a powerful degree of honesty about our guilt and our pride. It calls for us to both recognize how dependent we are on our idiosyncratic masks and our cultural baggage AND how independent we can be. But we avoid being crippled, therapeutic herd animals, and we avoid spinning off into what Hegel called bad infinity, by recognizing that we are, as Peter Lawler puts it, ’stuck with virtue.’ You can run from the strange truth about our lives, but you can’t hide.
One of the reasons why I was a little circumspect (or opaque) above is I’m hesitant to chisel the Pomocon Commandments in stone. At the same time I don’t want to be too ecumenical. So hopefully this helps matters?
October 10th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
James: That was far more understandable. Thanks.
From that, I’d say where you and I start to differ is in point 4, and that makes point 5 completely different. I wouldn’t claim either that God is dead or that he fades away, but I would claim that the modern project has taught us that rationalistic ways of thinking about God are dead. In a sense, the medieval project was too easy. God was spoon-fed to individuals through a hierarchical church which claimed to proceed on the basis of strict and abstract rationality. Mystery, while recognized, was confined to well-defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. Faith was only really necessary at step one of the process: accept what the church tells you and the rest just follows from there. I think the moderns did a pretty good job of eviscerating that edifice, in no small part due to the fact that God will never submit to be bound by human reason. This is not to say that knowledge of God is impossible, only that complete knowledge of God is inherently beyond our capacity.
Letting God act as if He were a Person makes a difference. I argue that here. In short, I think that the lefties are right when they say that it’s all just power games, but they’re wrong if they think that God isn’t playing too. Playing a power game with an omnipotent being is still a power game, it’s just that the outcome is a foregone conclusion: God gets what He wants. From there, a kind of stability emerges, one based not upon an abstracted rationality but upon a personal expression of will. God’s will.
October 11th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Well that — in part — is why I am one of them ‘nondenominational protestants’ we hear about from time to time, rather than a Catholic, even an American one. But at this point I am pretty doubtful that the Catholic/Protestant split does more harm than good to sorting out postmodern conservative political philosophy. Your gloss on God’s power seems right enough, but calls up the difference between human power and divine authority: i.e. our wrestling with God and his Angels eventually manifests in a tradition — meaning a (completely) memorized or (incompletely) remembered narrative — that results in out not needing to suffer God’s power all the time in order to recognize and accede to His authority.
But, gosh, I avoided being a theologian for a reason…!
October 12th, 2008 at 8:37 am
2. “Catholic pomocons?” Absolutely. But only American ones. Discuss.
This seems to have the same oxymoronic ring to it as Anglo-Catholics: they want their particularism-cake and eat itn too (and this despite the universal/catholic injunctions against).