I get the conservative part–”the accumulated wisdom of generations” that show forth in various communities, but I’m not sure about the modifier postmodern. Mr. Jones offers Kirk and Lawler as atypical moderns or postmoderns who offer alternative responses to modernity.

Neither (for all their fundamental differences) embraces–or would embrace–an alternative to Lyotard, for instance–with Habermas’s communicative rationality. So neither seeks a Habermasian “completion” of modernity.

Nonetheless, Kirk and Lawler offer crucial differences. Kirk offers useful warnings against “earthly totality.” But as such, he leaves nothing but an idea of what one is against. Kirk becomes practically stale as time wears on (even though there is much wisdom in his writings).

Lawler (more positively) speaks of a return to “realism,” and he charms the reader with multiple descriptions of life in ordinary suburbia. (Though not as charming as one of my own and Lawler’s “heroes”–Walker Percy). This is a life that remains uncertain, must still deal with human finitude, and that still offers an opportunity for choice–even if it is all too ordinary. It still offers choice because as Tocqueville notes–human desire for knowledge of the good will become manifest regardless of how much modern democracy transmogrifies it. It is never boring because we are still “stuck with virtue.” In a life faced with all kinds of technocratic challenges calling for us to give up and adapt to the modern, scientific, technocratic, and (strangely) expert trends, Lawler provides a more compelling defense than Kirk. He argues against the “theorist-consumer” relationship that Percy so aptly named.

Nonetheless, I think that Lawler may become another Kirk in thirty some odd years. New front will have been opened, and new lines of defense will be drawn.

Hence, this doesn’t seem postmodern, but simply conservative as laudable as it may be.