I’ve gotten a few random emails about POSTMODERN CONSERVATISM either being an oxymoron or some bad joke. Well, it can be that, I guess. No doubt some believe that postmodern conservatism is conservatism gone stylish, contemporary, young, beautiful, metrosexual, pop cultural, and Obamacon. But that understanding doesn’t really make much sense. Even the word “postmodern” obviously isn’t cool anymore. It sticks around only because post-postmodern is too dumb to come into its own.
I wrote a book called POSTMODERNISM RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD about a decade go. “Rightly” obviously means both correctly and conservatively in context. Postmodern must mean what we can know after experiencing the modern world. So postmodern must mean being free of modern illusions and appreciative of modern success.
That means that true POSTMODERNISM is not all about endless self-creation and the fantasy that everything human is socially constructed. From the RIGHT postmodern view, what’s generally called postmodern is actually hypermodern, or the modern run amok. True postmodernism is a return to REALISM, to the fact that we’re STUCK WITH VIRTUE, that the needs of the SOUL can be distorted but not deconstructed or destroyed. But true postmodernism also has a properly limited appreciation of modern revelations. Technological success is real and a generally beneficial revelation of some of the truth about human freedom. Not only that, the modern affirmation of the free individual is a distortion–but not a destruction–of the true Christian revelation that the human PERSON has an identity as a whole being–or is not merely a PART of nature or his or her country. One huge modern failure is not to see that the person is also necessarily RELATIONAL, that the free being with LOGOS also is shaped by personal EROS. So the modern effort was less to discover our responsibilities as beings who love and die than to extinguish those allegedly alienating experiences.
April 25th, 2009 | 3:18 pm
True, well-said, and worth saying. After the dream of reason has produced monsters, we may as well give up the modernist project and start pursuing what you call the “true postmodernism.”
I’ve liked this blog through all its incarnations. But my problem with its name is that “postmodernism,” rather than referring simply to things occurring after the demise of the modern, tends to suggest a cultural stance in which the forms of the past are nothing but grist for the postmodernist’s playful and ironical mill.
Just as a postmodern architect may use forms that parodize the classical orders, or a postmodern artist may reinterpret artistic tradition for purposes odious to that tradition, it seems to me that the postmodern conservative likewise tends to snatch up a few phrases from Burke or from some other author and recombine them to produce whatever they want.
I remember reading at Culture11 a critique of so-called Euclidean conservatives, who by the free recombination of supposed “conservative principles” could go on to defend any innovation that appealed to them.
What makes me uncomfortable about “postmodern conservatism” is that I can never tell which word governs. Is it conservatism stepping in after the death of the modern? or is it postmodernists, dedicated to the free play of the mind over every traditional border, who for whatever reason happen to lean to the right?
In the former case–which I know is your interpretation, Prof. Lawler–postmodern conservatism appears as a great tonic for the ills of our age. In the latter case, however, it seems to be little more than a “stylish, contemporary, young, beautiful, metrosexual, pop cultural, and Obamacon” movement that atavistically votes Republican despite itself.
April 25th, 2009 | 3:58 pm
Well, right. First off I need to make my plug that even stylish, contemporary, young, beautiful people can be virtuous too, especially if we really are STUCK WITH VIRTUE. Even metrosexual people can rightly understand lots of things despite wearing tight jeans and flatironing their hair. Probably they can’t rightly understand as many things as a philosopher whose vocation it is to attempt to rightly understand as many things as possible, but then again this is true of yeoman farmers and factory workers and Walmart greeters too. Too many people have been too horrified into thinking that anyone who enjoys being fashionable and at least occasionally ‘current’ in their personal aesthetic has got to be fundamentally deluded about the important things in real life. It’s obvious why this has happened, but as the good Dr. Lawler has hinted it’s a modern illusion that our affectations need to stand in some kind of demonstrably comprehensive relation to us, our selves, and our souls. Rorty is right that we ought to simply laugh off the idea that our trivial preferences have to be proven either to accord or not accord with the truth about our souls, but he is wrong that we can then proceed to laugh off the idea that the truth about our souls amounts to nothing more than the question of how we want ourselves to use one another, and that we should therefore laugh off the idea that there IS a truth about our souls.
And what Rorty is right about works, therefore, in both directions: just as it’s silly to insist that a male virtue ethicist with eyeliner and a nonprescription monocle must not take the idea of virtue very seriously, so is it silly to insist that a philosopher who spends his time frequenting leather bars is doing something that stands in no necessary relation to his moral philosophy. Some things are aesthetic affectations and some aren’t, and although it creates something that seems like ‘extra work’ to sort out which is which, because we suspect that we’re ‘drawing arbitrary lines’ and so forth, it’s essential to maintain confidence in the reality of authority that allows us to exercise any kind of judgment at all about what’s ‘just a choice’ and what isn’t. Surely there is no escape from the fact that at least some of the ‘forms of the past’ are indeed subject to fun-poking and even parody; but the idea that one can only ‘really’ be postmodern if one ascribes to an ideological commitment to treat ALL forms of the past as subject to parody is the height of modernism, no?
The postmodernist who does this, after all, only really embarks on his monomaniacal quest to parody everything as an anxious and guilt-stricken insurance policy against the possibility that he might leave some commanding authority intact. Rorty is also right to praise Wittgenstein for saying “the important thing is to be able to stop doing philosophy when one wants to,” but this means that the philosopher, and especially a postmodern one, must give up the effort to repress the sympathy of his soul to the acknowledgment of the eternal authority that presides over it. The self-help book dominating the Soul Therapy aisle of the philosopher’s megachain book store is titled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love God, but the subtitle is Living Well Despite–I Mean, Because of–Sacred Fear. The contents of this book seem to me at least entirely consistent with, if always demanding of, a good pomocon, for whom neither PostmodernISM nor ConservatISM can be properly said to be the sovereign, governing thing.
April 25th, 2009 | 4:16 pm
The discussion about the symbol “postmodern” is important because we have to ask the question, is modernity finished? I’m really not sure about that. Dr. L posits that technology is generally a good thing and I’m not sure of that either, in the sense that I wonder if society has defined the “limits” of technos (I think not) or whether our society is driven by an out-of-control technos (and I’m not talking about air conditioning vs. front porches). I agree with him on the immutability of the nature of man but I’m less inclined to embrace his “realism” than to acknowledge his beautiful logic re: the “needs of the soul,” which modernity gleefully hypostatized into a corrupt and perverse immanence and of which technology provides no succor.
April 25th, 2009 | 6:55 pm
Of course people who are metrosexual or homosexual or tatooed or dress like Jim Ceaser can be conservatives–and should be. By “postmodern conservative” doesn’t refer to conservatives who are trendy or exotic or whatever in certain ways. To say that technology is intrinsically evil or even degrading, in my opinion, is to fall into a Heideggerian or even Wendall Berryian/Marxian trap of believing either that “technology” is describes the whole human world in our time or that people are wholly determined by prevailing mode of division of labor. Without this cool blogification technology I never would have been able to virtually hang out with Bob Cheeks. As Tocqueville would say if he were blogging with us, these are the best and worst of times, and the good old days were too. Selective nostalgia is great if you never forget it’s selective and so somewhat self-indulgent.
April 25th, 2009 | 7:10 pm
Professor Lawler I have been reading that book closely, and thank you for writing it. It is very helpful for my project on rhetoric and Russell Kirk, as is Russello’s Postmodern Imagination. From your chapter The Return to Realism, if you have anything to add about how postmodernism properly understood can help to recapture and reconnect human beings to communion with each other and most especially with language, I’d be interested in it…
April 25th, 2009 | 7:19 pm
James: “for whom neither PostmodernISM nor ConservatISM can be properly said to be the sovereign, governing thing.”
Yes, this can’t be said enough. I like to think of P.C. as a sentiment, a temperament, a rejection of ideological positioning (remembering Kirk’s popularization of the “negation of ideology”), and a bias in favor of the local and familial above all else. In other words – to make a definition is half-futile!
April 26th, 2009 | 11:53 am
If what you describe is true postmodernism, then should we stop calling the projects of Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault examples of postmodernism?
April 26th, 2009 | 2:10 pm
Kyle: Right, the right name for those guys is HYPERMODERN. Even Heidegger, finally, came up with no alternative to TECHNOLOGY but what amounts to a more radical HISTORICISM–as opposed to a REALISM which decisvely rejected all forms of the modern distinction between nature and history. One postmodern book that needs to be written: WHAT WAS HISTORICISM?
April 26th, 2009 | 3:34 pm
Thank you for the response.
Assuming the term “hypermodern” more accurately describes those projects, how far do you think one should go in insisting that that term be used in place of postmodernism? How far can one even expect to go on a practical level? I can’t imagine that one would have much success at changing philosophy course titles or the titles of books about postmodernism.
I can understand your defending a particular idea of postmodernism as being true, but I don’t really see the point of insisting that that particular idea should be the only one we call postmodern. The term has been used in reference to a variety of projects developed after and as a response to modernity. It covers a lot of ground and different terrain. So do the names existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. I find, for example, Gabriel Marcel’s philosophy truer than the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, but I’m not sure I’d call Marcel’s philosophy “existentialism rightly understood.”
April 26th, 2009 | 4:57 pm
I’m ok with existentialism rightly understood, actually. Walker Percy said that the postmodern challenge is to put back together Anglo-American empiricism and European existentialism. That means they both contain a lot of truth. Darwinian conservative Larry Arnhart calls me a Gnostic Heideggerian existentialist for saying that some alienation is a condition of being human, the being who wonders necessarily (to some extent wanders). Larry thinks that anyone who doesn’t think Darwin explains it all is an existentialist–that would, if you think about it, include Lockeans and most modern thinkers. What’s true about existentialism points to what’s distinctively true about Christianity, and Marcel can’t be beat on that. The existentialist-empricism antagonism disappears in a true or Thomistic understanding of nature.
April 26th, 2009 | 7:55 pm
So, er, “postmodern conservatism” is a return to realism? (Presumably you mean something like moral and metaphysical realism…not ‘realism’ as opposed to idealism.) Ergo not really postmodern at all… This is probably just a confusion about the meaning of ‘postmodern’. Like ‘modern,’ it’s ambiguous as between a name and a description. Properly, it’s a name. It *names* a mish-mash of intellectually disreputable positions (e.g. social constructionism, social doxastic determinism, skepticism, cultural moral relativism) largely on the intellectual left. One might take ‘postmodern’ to be descriptive and mean something like “after the modern” or “contemporary” or something…in which case “the postmodern” is pretty much whatever people are talking about now. I’m afraid you’re using the term in the latter, less accurate, descriptive sense.
Seriously man–postmodernism and conservatism…not exactly the two most intellectually respectable positions in the constellation of theoretical possibilities, are they?
April 26th, 2009 | 8:32 pm
Winston…Dude….The quills are being sharpened as I write!
I’m truly looking forward to this exchange.
April 26th, 2009 | 9:27 pm
Sure, right, moral and metaphysical realism. Postmodern is not just after the modern but based on genuine reflection on the significance of modern theory and practice etc.
April 27th, 2009 | 2:35 am
So “postmodern conservatism” is a politically-oriented neo-Scholasticism with an appreciation for style, technology, and over-hyphenation?
April 27th, 2009 | 5:30 pm
Ryan, Although I don’t necessarily feel the love and respect in your comment, you’re close. More neo-Thomism or 21th century Thomism–the Thomism of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor–than neoscholasticism. And overhyphenation is completely optional. Politically oriented in cmparison to some cultural conservatives, but not compared to the Straussians who take the cave dwelling stuff too seriously. And how could anyone except Bob Cheeks not appreciate technology?
April 28th, 2009 | 12:18 pm
Peter, Dr., philosopher, famed author, dude: Should I attend one of
your classes, I would be assigned, no doubt, to the back, to perch upon a stool and to wear a pointy hat! Albeit, no doubt, enjoying the lecture while asking inane questions!
April 28th, 2009 | 1:30 pm
Bob, That would be great. I’ll give you a special discount rate. I could be all Socratic and say “inane question” is an oxymoron, but sadly enough it’s too often a redundancy in college these days. Anyway, let me know when you’re coming.
May 20th, 2009 | 1:50 pm
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
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