Another fine lesson from Scruton’s A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY:
Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes Burke from the French Revolutionaries is not his attachment to things past, but his desire to live fully in the present, to understand it in all its imperfections, and to accept it as the only reality offered to us….Burke…recognized the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world.
Insofar as to be modern is to live abstractly or anywhere but in present reality, we postmodern conservatives add that a realistic accessment of the greatness and misery of the modern world is actually postmodernism rightly understood. That means there is a sense in which postmodern conservatism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. It is all about living well in the modern world, our world.
September 24th, 2009 | 11:50 am
“It is all about living well in the modern world, our world.”
Well, I like that! But, that doesn’t mean we aren’t required to critique “the modern world.” Or does it?
And, if we critique the modern world, assuming the critique has some technological content, are we not porchers?
September 24th, 2009 | 3:41 pm
Thanks – helpful. R.S. should be widely noted as an Anglo-American treasure for conservatives.
September 24th, 2009 | 3:58 pm
To what degree is “our world” connected with a past world? Doesn’t living well in any world require some continuity, some understood, felt, or culturally encoded relationship between our world and the beliefs, circumstances, choices, and habits of generations who “generated” our world?
I very much like the quotation from Scruton and I think that understanding Burke in this fashion is helpful for our time, but in your comments that followed, Peter, you don’t include a historical sense–one that might be necessary to understand and one that might serve as a means of critiquing the modern world. I don’t think that one can live well in the modern world without critiquing it, though it is obvious that critiquing the modern world is insufficient to living well. So much depends on knowing how to love one’s home well: including one’s physical place, one’s family, one’s history, and the social and cultural context one did not and could not choose.
I recall you quoting Manent about loving democracy well….one must love it moderately. I do believe that there is an art to loving well and that this art requires a delicate balance that needs constant calibration. Perhaps here Chesterton is a better guide than Burke.
September 24th, 2009 | 8:55 pm
I don’t know if I am agreeing with the french revolutionaries however, they did not believe that this was the only reality offered to us and that if we believed we could make it better than we should. SO I don’t know if I completely agree that in order to accept life we must “understand it in all its imperfections, and to accept it as the only reality offered to us” … Maybe I am missing the point? Perhaps my assertion goes too far in the other direction and negates “genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world.”
September 25th, 2009 | 9:36 am
Bob, I don’t think critiqueing the technological dimension of modernity requires one to be a porcher–we do it here all the time. I think Ted is, of course, righ that to live in the present necessarily means also living in that part of it that is an inheritance of of the past–to live in some snapshot moment disconnected from its temporal juxtaposition is a myth (this seems to be how Rousseau would describe the consciousness of the natural savage, or what Buddhists seem to hanker for). I think the point that Scruton is making (I haven’t read the book yet but it arrived last night) is that that the realist priority of experience that must be central to modern conservatism requires that we acknowledge where we actually are, the extent to which our condition is only so susceptible to revision, and the resistance of our nature to being wholly revised by those same circumstances. In other words, modern conservatism doesnt oppose a new radicalism, hankering for a dramatic and sweeping change of our modern world, to the radicalism of modernity itself.
September 26th, 2009 | 6:30 pm
I’ve got a question about this “front porch” mentality that people should stay where they are born rather than move to places to pursue greater possibilities.
Was not the U.S. founded by pioneers who left their hometowns in Europe to seek brighter possibilities and create new lives for themselves in the new land of America? Is not the kid who leaves a small town in Illinois to seek opportunity in, say, Dallas or Phoenix, the modern-day equivalent of the pioneers that built up the U.S. to begin with?
What is the difference here? You seem to suggest that the frontier seeking philosophies that make up the foundation of our country is somehow fundamentally wrong. What does this say about the origins of the U.S.?
September 27th, 2009 | 10:41 am
So Ted, I haven’t responded because I have had issues getting a sufficient wireless signal at home for several days. Need to get a bit more modern… Living well in the modern world begins, of course, with not being modern (personally). And that requires of course a criticism of modern thought using premodern resources. Insofar as the criticism is of livng abstractly or in imaginary disembodiment, it includes all that it’s implied in the fact that we are, among other things, historical beings. So in that sense it includes historical consciousness or our irreducible indebtedness to tradition, to what we’ve been given. It doesn’t imply porcherism, necessarily, because the critique of the downsides of our high tech lives doesn’t necessarily imply going back, somehow, to less techy times. Some distance from techno-dependence is, of course, indispensable personally, but that might or might not suggest literally going back to the porch or the family pig or whatever. Ted, while I have you here, let me apologize for not writing you on your fantastic Conkin post. I put it aside to say something profound on it, but that (as is sometimes the case) didn’t work for me. I agree, by the way, that Chesterton is better guide for Americans than Burke-ism, at least.
September 27th, 2009 | 8:08 pm
Peter, your comments here are wonderfully clear and I agree with them almost entirely. But, as my essay on Conkin might suggest, “Porcherism” does not require a return to the family pig, nor does it recommend going back in any technological sense. It might or might not include a call to some form of return, usually of s spiritual nature. Most of all, it is hard for me to believe that there can be anything called “porcherism” since those who write on the Porch tend to reject all isms.
I believe that you and I are thinking about the same thing when we favor Chesterton over Burke. I had in mind (forgive me as I wrench to the two ideas out of context and thereby distort them) Burke’s claim that for us to love our country that it should be lovely as compared to Chesterton’s claim that we love something and then make it lovely–loving comes first. In that sense I am with Chesterton.
September 27th, 2009 | 10:08 pm
Any philosophy of historical existence that expresses an acknowledgment of “our irreducible indebtedness to tradition” must surely include an awareness, not so much of a desire to return to “less techy times,” but of the experiential reality of “genuine mythic symbols” as the product of the human soul in relation with God seeking truth.
September 28th, 2009 | 10:10 am
Well, “porcherism” is sort of a joke. But I will add that plenty of porchers write positively about traditionalism and paleoconservatism and left conservatism (Caleb S) etc. And Dr. Pat Deneen in his Anti-Federalist manifestos etc. seems rather doctrinal, abd that’s not to mention the selective appropriation of Marxism. I’m not going say anything about Voegelinianism (with the strange lingo) and even Catholicism as isms. The porchers don’t seem too good for ideology to me, although it’s a diverse group and doubtless they’re exceptions. To me, for the record, the phrase “genuine mythic symbols” tries too hard to assimilate Christianity into a broader mythic environment against which it is (rightly) rebelling. And for most pochers, it seems to be, there’s a indispensable literal return to a less techy time or a less “advanced” stage in the dehumanizing division of labor–for Ted, though, “the return” might well be more purely spiritual.
September 29th, 2009 | 8:36 am
Dr. Lawler, this site may be of assistance re: Voegelin’s “strange lingo”, http://www.voegelinview.com/ev/eric_voegelin_table_of_contents.html
Somewhere, I think, there’s a link to a Voegelin dictionary.
Re: your excellent critique of “genuine mythic symbols” I would argue that I was merely trying to declare the truth of these ’symbols’ as an evocation (in a broad interpretation of the word), interpreted by the ’self’ that is referring to an ‘existential movement’…or the experience of the mysterious (spiritual).
In other words, I would question the phrase “broader mythic environment” in the sense that it is this ‘environment’, defined as the “depth of the unconscious soul”, from which all, including Christian symbols, originate, e.g. the symbols emerges from the unconscious depth of the soul by the “conscious articulation of experience.” And, here we might argue that the mythic symbols are “self-generating and self-interpretive,” with the qualifier that we are speaking of true symbols and not those that are the product of lies, deceit, or purposefully misrepresented.
I’m not familiar with Ted’s project but if it is predicated on the ’spiritual’, on the Divine ground, than he surely is on the mark.
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