Since my name is now on the masthead, perhaps an introduction is in order. My name is Patrick Deneen, and – like a few other people who write here – I am by trade a political theorist. I teach at Georgetown University where I hold a chair in Hellenic studies and nearly three years ago founded a program – The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy - devoted to the fostering among today’s students a deeper understanding of the American and western traditions.
Two years ago I launched a small outpost in the blogiverse that I entitled "What I Saw in America." In addition to posting a number of my quasi-academic writings – for instance, essays on G.K. Chesterton (for whose book recounting his travels in America the blog was named), Mark Twain, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, Allan Bloom, Peter Lawler, Kurt Vonnegut, and my teacher, Wilson Carey McWilliams, as well as musings on American democracy – I also commented frequently on the state of American and modern life with special emphasis on the a-moral or immoral dimensions of the modern economic order. Believing we were poised at once for a trying time of declines in non-renewable energy sources that undergird every aspect of modern life, combined with an unsustainable way of life that highlighted consumption, debt and short-term thinking, I posted a good many essays in which I asked my readers to consider a better way. Connected to these concerns were regular critiques of the modern educational system – particularly higher education, the domain I know best – which is deeply implicated in perpetuating and feeding a modern consumptive economic system and forming a modern corps of deracinated cosmopolites who were encouraged to be citizens of nowhere and everywhere with devotions to everyone and no one.
I expect I will continue commenting in these areas, but think, too, that this new venue will lend itself to thinking and writing in some different directions. I am honored to be joining a site that features the thought of several colleagues whose work I have read with great profit – Peter Lawler, James Ceaser and Ralph Hancock in particular. For those who only know these gentlemen as occasional bloggers, I recommend their prolific corpus of published writings if you seek a deeper understanding of the philosophy that underlies our civilization. We are privileged to have them as commentators on this medium that infrequently features thinkers of such depth.
As for the title of this blog – Postmodern Conservative – it is a label that I can accept only under protest. It is a phrase that is inspired by Peter Lawler’s efforts to recommend a "postmodernism rightly understood" – a period that may or might arrive after the passing of the modern order. Thus, it is not to be confused with the trendy (or, really, tired) postmodernism of modern academia inspired by such thinkers as Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard. It is instead a rejection of modernity in the name of the insights of premodernity – Thomistic and Aristotelian "realism" in particular. That said, it is a postmodernity that also wishes to retain a good number of the boons of modernity – Starbucks, McDonalds, suburbs and exurbs, the interstate highway system, orthodontic dentistry, etc….) – while rejecting its excessive materialism, individualism, liberalism, atheism, etc. I can sign onto the "postmodern" critique but have more difficulty accepting that we can easily retain all the good stuff (so called) while jettisoning the bad. My deepest suspicions are that it’s a package deal, and so I’m not sure I can fully accept the label "postmodern conservative" and might rather consider myself to be a premodern radical. With that understanding, I expect we will have some interesting conversations here, and I’m happy, pleased and honored to be here. I will be posting a short essay here weekly – beginning, and continuing on Tuesdays – and look forward to what lies ahead.
January 2nd, 2009 | 11:39 am
Dr. Deneen, a sincere pleasure to have you posting here and looking forward to you insights. “Premodern radical” works, perhaps a Kauffmanesque “front porch radical?”
Please do something on Mr. Berry, it will alarm the sentinals and calm my anxiety.
January 2nd, 2009 | 11:39 am
Welcome to Pat! I hope my many trendy critics will notice that I’m both more modern and more liberal than he is. That’s because the genuine premodern insights lead to grateful acceptance of what’s good about the modern world–like modern denistry, much of modern technology (although only ambiguously and partially the blog), and certainly Trader Joe’s and probably Wal-mart (easy, reasonable, one-stop shopping for the large family). It’s cheezy Hegelian but true enough to say the genuine postmodernism involves a premodern criticism of modernity (which has two moments–classical/Aristotelian and Biblical Christian) and a modern criticism of premodernity (which also has a Christian moment–on behalf of “personal reality”).
January 2nd, 2009 | 12:15 pm
Another way of putting Peter’s point is that he is less conservative then me…
To Mr. Cheeks – many thanks, and you can be sure I’ll write some about Mr. Berry of Kentucky here. I’m quite amenable to being associated with Bill Kaufmann and front porches in general… On that note, I would also refer interested readers to my famous critique of George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which takes to task many of the modern forms of restless consumption praised by Peter and defends the pre-modern devotion to the front porch and all it implies…. http://patrickdeneen.blogspot.com/2007/12/its-destructive-life.html
January 2nd, 2009 | 12:30 pm
That’s an interesting point. I agree that “postmodern conservative” is a problematic label. A conservative is to me someone that accepts the foundational propositions of liberalism but just wants revolution slower, “liberals in slow motion”. The two exist in a dialectical relationship. The terms “liberal” and “conservative” really have no meaning in isolation but a conservative is conservative in comparison to liberals and a liberal is liberal in comparison to conservatives. At this point in Western civilization I see very little I would like to “conserve”. Standing athwart history and yelling “stop”, at this point would seem to be a poor choice.
My interest in postmodernism comes through my reading of radical orthodoxy and I think your description coincides reasonably well with the approach of Milbank and others, ” It is instead a rejection of modernity in the name of the insights of premodernity – Thomistic and Aristotelian “realism” in particular.”
I think their approach and our approach are compatible insofar that modernity needs to be deconstructed and exposed as the idolatrous and pagan edifice that it is.
January 2nd, 2009 | 12:40 pm
We in the conservative South today are, in fact, somewhat ambivalent about all that the front porch implies. When it “authentically” flourished, for one thing, it implied the absence of air conditioning, and so it implied that inside of the house was pretty literally hell for several months of the year. We southerners know that what made our region the most “livable” part of the country–in addition to some traditional virtues–was air conditioning and integration. I’m liberal enough to embrace them both. Today the front porch has made a “lifestyle” comeback on the pricier of the southern McMansions. But that’s because we live in a time of very effective (thanks to our great inventors!) insect repellants, and because we know that air conditioning is always just a few steps away.
January 2nd, 2009 | 12:47 pm
Patrick, I hope your new blog home is conducive to thought and writing.
Regarding the Pomo conservative label: I too have a bit of an allergic reaction to it. This is based precisely on your sense that modernity and all the consumer goodies and the enlightenment worldview that sees humans as above the natural world are all part and parcel of a general spiritual, mental and economic ecosystem that does not allow individual features to be disentangled.
For this reason, I use the term “premodern hybrid” to describe myself. I accept the practical findings of, say, modern medicine, even though I think that the overall intellectual underpinnings that make them possible are either false, or at least false if pushed beyond the status of “pragmatic tools”to the status of a metaphysical claim, which then becomes scientism rather than science.
I wonder, though: is there any “going back,” or is the fall into modernity one that, like Adam’s fall into self consciousness (I saw I was naked and covered myself) cannot be undone, and can be only partly mitigated?
January 2nd, 2009 | 1:15 pm
Dr. Deneen, it’s “Bob,” and now I’m REALLY, REALLY looking forward to your postings. It seems that you’ve inadvertantly driven Dr. Lawler to the cusp of high dudgeon, and now all we need is a brilliant and witty comment from an unreconstructed Rebel! With that my day shall be complete; now off to the front porch, cigar and a tumbler of a decent southern burbon in hand, and my favorite rendition of “Bonnie Blue Flag” playing on the Victrola!
January 2nd, 2009 | 1:21 pm
Welcome to the blog, Pat—really good to have you on board. I think you’re at least partially right—the good and bad of modernity, in many respects, is a package deal. Part of the difficulty of taking a radical premodern position is that there are simply parts of the package we’re stuck with and insisting too stubbornly for a revival of things lost can become a kind of romanticized nostalgia. The good news might be that there are parts of premodern thought that are recoverable, a certain view of virtue or of the human person, precisely because they have natural supports that modernity itself could conceal but not decisively erase.
January 2nd, 2009 | 1:39 pm
Well, I had to look “dudgeon” up, which is so easy to do on the computer. But it goes without saying I’m not really angry or resentful at all, but just trying to jump start this thing with what are really stock arguments from other venues. Nobody who actually has a job has spoken more positively than I have about southern stoics such as William Alexander Percy. And anyone who’s read Walker Percy can see the irony in my front porch post. But the old South really was an aristocracy, and so, while it had lots of strengths when it comes to brilliance, imagination, the soul, manners and morals, and, yes, even guns and God, it was weak on the human goods that are justice and technology.
January 2nd, 2009 | 1:53 pm
Well, I was toying with what to write for my first post, but – since this is a fruitful and interesting discussion – I think I’ll write a piece on “Conserving Liberalism – project or oxymoron?”, or something like that.
For those who love air conditioning so much – you have to accept that not only did it make the abominations of greater Atlanta and Houston possible, but it made Washington DC comfortable enough for bureaucrats, lobbyists and even Congressmen to want to stay here year ’round. That, more than Supreme Court jurisprudence, is likely the cause of the growth of a permanent centralized government. So – yes – I maintain it’s a package deal. My yankee advice: try turning off the air conditioning, sip some sweet tea and pretend that there are neighbors who walk on non-existent sidewalks by your home….
January 2nd, 2009 | 1:58 pm
I do apologize for using such a strong adjective, perhaps “pique” would have sufficed. Your comments on the Southern aristocracy are brilliantly rendered, though I might add the caveat that the South, prior to the “unpleasantness,” offered the best opportunity to re-engage the principles of the Revolution whose destruction began with the election of Abraham Lincoln.
January 2nd, 2009 | 2:15 pm
A large public welcome to the good Dr. D!
I’ve always presumed that if pomocon is a buffet line or dining hall then at least it’s somewhat a la carte. Though I view the psychology of Starbucks — captured in its relentless marketing campaigns selling 21st-century bon bons as boutique rewards for hyperrestless working women — with mostly unbridled contempt, I’ve never had a bad drink at Starbucks; by contrast, I have abandoned McDonald’s completely for a number of reasons, and I see nothing forcing the average pomocon to write off present-day Atlanta as something we therapeutically might as well feel positively about since we’re stuck with it empirically. Surely a good regionalist pomocon can see HVAC as more commonsensical in some places than others without concluding that the golf courses of Phoenix are beyond criticism…and hopefully our premodern radicals can flourish without having to derail justice, technology, or anything else for EVERYBODY. A main question for premodern radicals is how political — or apolitical — they should be. The Benedict Option and The Bryant Option sure look increasingly different.
January 2nd, 2009 | 2:27 pm
I think most philosophers would agree that “ought implies can” is a basic principle of ethics. The major distinction between what could roughly be called the conservative and progressive positions is whether human capacities are regarded as currently exercised near their limit, or subject to enlargement by technology.
There is a lot of evidence for the latter view. But one of the things we have not figured out how to do (and probably never will) is to erase the imprint of history–in this case a history marked for centuries by the fruits of progressivism. At this point, we are moderns because we can’t be otherwise. Even the idea of a choice for a pre-modern standpoint is essentially modern, because it substitutes affirmation by will for the evident truth of its first principles.
If that’s the case, arguments for a radical overcoming of modernity don’t make a lot of sense. All we can hope for is to manage perhaps a little better its many and real contradictions. Orthodonture and air-conditioning and even capitalism aren’t going away. The issue, in my view, is not whether they’re good or bad in themselves, but how *we* can best live with them.
January 2nd, 2009 | 2:37 pm
“At this point, we are moderns because we can’t be otherwise. Even the idea of a choice for a pre-modern standpoint is essentially modern, because it substitutes affirmation by will for the evident truth of its first principles.”
That’s an excellent point. I had a discussion with someone on a message board where I posed that problem too, in that case with regard to the traditionalist movement within the Catholic Church, of which I would consider myself a member. It would seem that Humpty-Dumpty has fallen off the wall, the tradition of the West is shattered so that even an attempt to return to it carries the mark of liberalism – choice.
I don’t have a good answer for this problem, it requires the attention of someone wiser than I.
January 2nd, 2009 | 3:24 pm
As forceful as Sam’s point is, though, an Arendtian judgment as to the irrecoverable brokenness of “the Western tradition” seems better suited to Europe than America. On the other hand, America is in fact the fruit of a pretty sizable — indeed, perhaps Providential — break with that tradition. Or, one might say, America shows in what respects the Western tradition is and isn’t a “package deal”. Americans have never self-destructed as the Europeans did. Even the first modern war, the Civil War, wound up uniting more than dividing. And if Europe’s self-destruction led toward a kind of unity, too, Europe still struggles without a throughline reaching from the precious earnest of its best vision of the good life to the banal politics of the present-day EU. As I suggest in my predictions at the main page, only France has the resources necessary to reconcile Europe with its history and redeem both in a flourishing way.
January 2nd, 2009 | 3:29 pm
It strikes me that any project seeking to establish a “postmodern” worldview is required to return to the Greek foundation; that was Voegelin’s position.
Plato, Socrates via Plato, and Aristotle referred to the Good (Agathon) as a form that was (sometimes) above all others, a form that they could only address in allegory and metaphor. In their inquiry these rather brilliant fellows (including the pre-Socratics) were engaging “philosophy” from the perspective of “open existence.” It seems to me that where some are being derailed is in insisting on a “closed existence” inquiry. That there is no “agathon.”
In order to philosophize one must have some hint of the transcendent where the act of the “periagoge”-the souls turning around toward the agathon-illuminates (appercieves) within the psyche its order of being within a cosmos that it had no hand in creating!
In establishing the transcendent as a pole in our existence and the realization that man is “constituted…through his relationship with the divine” are we not properly situated to address the questions of liminality, communitas, the polis, and even technos.
Without this grounding technos will surely be (and has been) utilized for the most horrific of human actions.
January 2nd, 2009 | 6:58 pm
Welcome to the new location, Patrick; I’m looking forward to what you may add to the site. In the meantime…
For those who love air conditioning so much–you have to accept that not only did it make the abominations of greater Atlanta and Houston possible, but it made Washington DC comfortable enough for bureaucrats, lobbyists and even Congressmen to want to stay here year ’round. That, more than Supreme Court jurisprudence, is likely the cause of the growth of a permanent centralized government.
Wasn’t it Gore Vidal who first made this point? In which case, good show! Vidal and a premodern Aristotelian reactionary; that’s the kind of postmodern ideological synergy we’re looking for here.
…The Bryant Option
Is this some reference to Anita, James, or did you mean “The [William Jennings] Bryan Option”? Because I’m all in favor of the latter.
January 2nd, 2009 | 8:07 pm
RAF – the latter, whoops. Alien finger syndrome.
January 3rd, 2009 | 11:02 am
Thank God or globalization that sweet tea is on the run with the abomination the meat-and-three restaurant (where it’s impossible to tell the difference between the meat and the semi-gray overcooked vegetables). Even most barbeque ain’t much. Rome, GA now has three Japanese restaurants! Although sweet tea is horrible–a heaping glass of sugar, I would like to say something good about the authentic taste of a real Coca-Cola (Floyd County, GA is the highest per capita consumer of this product in the world), which is under withering assault by Crunchies, Greens, and low carbers liberal and conservative. I refuse to think of Texas as part of the real South or even fit for human habitation (Florida even more so). But our country was surely improved when the center of commerce and culture moves in direction of Richmond and Nashville and Greenville and Jackson and Savannah and Charleston and Charlottesville, VA and Athens, GA and Chapel Hill/Raleigh, and even Atlanta (although a sprawled out mess is still a city of real chruches). That would not have been possible without the techno-liberalizing influences of air conditioning, integration, and even air travel. It’s surely northern paternalism to tell southerners to sit on their porches with Atticus Finch and the kids and be photo ops for the rest of the country. And even the stoic Atticus knew that his way of life was fatally flawed and its remaining days were few.
January 3rd, 2009 | 11:33 am
Well, them damn Yankees burnt down Atlanta (calling Dr. Swenckler!!)
I’ll take the “front porch,”a good book, family conversation, and the air and give you air conditioning, T.V., computer, ipod, Sony PSP, and the beloved cell phone, then we’ll discuss whose “way of life fatally flawed.”
I’m putting “Bonnie Blue Flag” back on the Victrola!
January 3rd, 2009 | 2:01 pm
Excuse the sundry typos on my previous post. I really can’t proof the screen. Isn’t even the Victrola decadent? Don’t you have to pull out the fiddle and make the kids dance jigs or something? Another liberal opinion f mine is that, on balance, it’s much better than the North won the Civil War, although I can’t help in some perverse Percy fashion but root for the South when I see battles on the big screen. I also think the South could have won the war had its leaders been more prudent and less romantic. (And listened to Stonewall Jackson and attacked northern cities.) Insurgents usually win, but most insurgencies aren’t led by slaveholders. But I’m, of course, being picquish to stimulate conversation, which Robert is right to talk up.
January 3rd, 2009 | 5:55 pm
Peter, are you having a slow weekend, anxious to get back to the classroom?
I may be a Luddite, but my Luddism has its limits.
I pull out the guitar and sing Dylan songs; “Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift…” Except globalization has pushed those dayshift jobs to China.
You root for the South during movies depicting the War for Southern Independence because deep in your heart you know the South merely wished to engage its right to withdraw from a voluntary pact made eighty years earlier. The eastern monied interests wished to keep the South in the Union strictly for economic issues and Father Abraham sided with them when he realized how much the South paid toward the punitive tarrifs imposed by Washington City.
Jackson was brilliant, at Chancellorsville his assault on Hooker’s left, just a-hangin’ in the air, was one of the most significant military maneuvers in history; “You may go forward, General Rhodes!” Jackson said.
BTW, I do disagree that “..it’s better that the North won the CW,” for the simple reason that if the South would have been allowed to estabish its own republic, we’d have someplace to flee to…just across the Ohio River.
I don’t think insurgents have to win at all…one merely has to have the desire and will to destroy them..I think Neitzsche-sp-said that.
January 5th, 2009 | 6:38 am
Oh, here we go…the Southern apologists ride again! Sort of, sort of…
And if we’re a true McWilliams-ite, like Patrick, we can go one better, and become Anti-Federalist apologists. Alas, for the 71 Rhode-Island size republics that might have been!
Well, no thanks…while this California Yankee has been enjoying the South just fine, and he’s even been reading up on the likes of Russell Kirk praising the likes of John Randolph of Virginia, but he still thinks the Federalists were right. True republics of the Anti-Federalist sort were/are unsustainable, and the conspiracy-minded (bound-to-later-produce-secessionism) republicanism of Jefferson, Randolph, and alas, Madison, was delusive and incoherent. It sought to charge Hamilton and co. as monarchists while simultaneously enthroning Virginia…er, ahem…the States. In its confusion it led, contrary to the initial wishes of all three of these republicans, to a die-hard defense of slavery and to a corrosive/essentially anarchic doctrine of nullification, even to the societal triumph of Declaration-denying racialism a la Alexander Stephens. I think a comparison of Jefferson and Randolph in particular reveals incoherence. Both came to lament the changes that occurred in Virginia caused by their own championship of republican values, especially against primogeniture and entail. TJ sought to strengthen the local community, desiring more of the NE township example, and both TJ and Randoph surely championed the idea of natural aristocracy, exercising a beneficent hierarchical role especially at the local level, although they surely thought the natural aristocrats emerged more-often-than-not from the same prominent families, along the classical models.
Washington, Hamilton, Marshall and Lincoln were right, and they were not for unbridled Lockean capitalism or unbridled centralism. They were less confused about the limits of “natural aristocracy” and intuitive Burkeanism in a necessarily democratic/commercial American future than were the likes of Jefferson and Randolph.
January 5th, 2009 | 12:24 pm
I agree with Carl that the Federalists, on balance, were more right than the Anti-Federalists, although we need Tocqueville to appreciate properly some of the human cost of the modern choice. To appreciate the virtues of the South (and how they can benefit us today), I wouldn’t go to Jefferson or Randolph, but to the Percys, Faulkner, and O’Connor–and to some extent Tocqueville. I certainly agree that the Christian Epicurean Jefferson as a hugely incoherent and somewhat self-indulgent writer. Washington–a really, really noble guy–was more with Hamilton than Jefferson precisely because he was a genuine–or always trying to be effective–antislavery man.
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