So I started to use an article by Rod Dreher to support my view that nonrelational personalism rather than progressivism is our distinctive issue these days. But I said too much silly stuff about the American and crunchy conservatives to get to it.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012, 9:26 AM
December 4th, 2012 | 9:56 am
Your article really needs to write “American Conservatives” instead of “American conservatives” in order to improve clarity.
As far as I can tell the major factor driving AmCon is a fierce loathing of the GOP (see their embrace of Obama rather than any of the last two GOP nominees), which is a strange thing to build a “conservative” brand around, in the absence of any positive agenda along the lines of what you’ll find at places like Front Porch Republic or The Imaginative Conservative.
December 4th, 2012 | 10:47 am
[...] personalism rather than progressivism is our distinctive issue these days. But I said Source: Postmodern Conservative Category: Blogs and [...]
December 4th, 2012 | 10:56 am
Brin, I will make that change. Formerly I would have used the all-caps method. Of course I agree with you, and say as much more more indirectly in the post.
December 4th, 2012 | 10:32 pm
There were some pretty nasty insinuations in your essay against Mr. Dreher which I think are remarkably unpursuasive. For instance, your bit about his changing religions frequently – as far as I know, he converted to Catholicism in college, and then later in his late-30s he became increasingly skeptical of the authority of the CC and converted to Orthodoxy. Hardly an example of extensive church-hopping. And your cheap shot about his desire to share details of his personal life – well, so what? That’s his choice, and from the comments on his blog it would appear that most of his readers enjoy his stories.
By the way, proofread your writings for errors before you submit them – you are a professor, no?
December 5th, 2012 | 10:29 am
Jason, I didn’t mean anything to be nasty and everything to be appreciatively descriptive. I believe I too said he was always enjoyable. I was trying to capture Rod’s style in a lighthearted way. Dropped the words “fairly often” in case those are the ones that offended you.
December 5th, 2012 | 10:33 am
Jason, whatever Dr. Lawler’s faults may be, he isn’t ‘nasty,’ mean, or vindictive. With that said, stop whining like a little girl. It’s unbecoming.
December 5th, 2012 | 10:38 am
Bob, Thanks for standing up for me. But now I fear I’m stuck with a duel.
December 5th, 2012 | 12:53 pm
“Duels” tend to get the blood flowing and at our age, that’s a good thing. I just got off the phone after two hours, with my A-A, liberal-Christian, pal who, first, wanted to know who Mr. Norquist was?
It’s all good.
December 5th, 2012 | 1:20 pm
Good ironic use of the two meanings of “blood flowing”
December 5th, 2012 | 5:09 pm
Robert,
Would have loved to have listened in on that conversation.
But speaking of Mr. Norquist (and “blood flowing”), are there any Girardians here on Pomocon’s blogroll? Because a very juicy Girardian analysis of the prominent use of the scapegoat mechanism in contemporary American politics is definintely in the offing for anyone familiar with Rene’ Girard’s work.
December 5th, 2012 | 6:09 pm
Jason, I’d always taken Peter’s general lack of proofreading as a signal that everything appearing on this blog was still…bloggy. Occasional thoughts loosely strung together but by no means laid down in a final or polished form. We know that Peter has gone on the record pointing to the Pensees of Pascal as worthy of serious attention these days. It might mean something when an academic who knows how to spell and write with good grammar chooses not to do so. You can be sure that his published work is conscientiously edited.
That said, I also found the comment about changing religions frequently somewhat inconsistent with Peter’s sometime praise of the religious seeker. It seems plausible that the seeking could lead away from Catholicism to the Orthodox church, especially when your roots are in evangelical Christianity. But it could be that there’s something to Peter’s implied connection between the occasionally self-indulgent prose of Dreher and his apparent theological restlessness.
And of course few speak more openly or effectively today than Peter about the American’s seeker’s experience of being at once homeless and at home.
December 5th, 2012 | 6:33 pm
PP,
My pal and I go back some years when he got me to demostrate at a haz waste facility which resulted in three days in the county facilities. And, yes I was, or rather my wife and I were arch conservatives at the time.
You may be interested in our conversation. I posed a question, to wit: How can a ‘Christian’ be a card-carrying member of the Democrat Party given their pro-abortion plank in the Party’s Platform? Sadly, as it always has, at least so far, the conversation devolved into his accusing me of ‘trying to impose’ my worldview on others?
I shall continue to inquire among the Left.
December 5th, 2012 | 8:02 pm
Thanks for your responses, professor and copy editor – I think they help provide a more understandable context for what was written in the big think essay. I’m glad to know that no real malice was involved on Professor Lawler’s part when he wrote about Mr. Dreher, other than perhaps some gentle ribbing.
My apologies for the grammar remark – that was uncalled for.
December 5th, 2012 | 10:19 pm
Jason, Being a threader means never having to say you’re sorry. You might even be right and the post has the wrong tone. As I explained, it began as a quick intro to an unfamiliar audience on the AC in general. I was going to talk about RD’s take on the birth dearth, which I take quite seriously. But I blathered enough that I ran out of time and space. A number of years ago I wrote a review of RD’s CRUNCHY CON book that involved gentle ribbing, I thought. Apparently many more traditional conservatives thought I was launching a dramatic neocon counterattack against this heretical form of conservatism. But of course that wasn’t true.
December 5th, 2012 | 10:47 pm
It’s nice to see a noble humility in recognizing the limits of one’s own case (Jason), as well as a generous magnanimity that recognizes that one’s own forum to speak freely might on occasion lead to dubious exaggeration (Peter).
As one who speaks out of sorts and even with venom at times, I want to speak against such niceness. But in this case I can’t. Good job to both!
I still want to read Peter’s thoughts about the content of Dreher’s post that he originally began writing about. I suspect they will be as insightful as usual.
December 6th, 2012 | 10:10 am
So here’s another idea for your APSA panel on pop culture, or at least a paper on that panel: American Zombies: nonrelational personalism in the Walking Dead (or World War Z).
I’ve never paid much attention to zombie movies, but there’s evidence that a lot of us do, and that we could even begin to speak of high-minded zombie shows and films. What is it about the relationship between a small band of friends and family trying to survive in the midst of a hostile community of mindless and violent “living dead” zombies that many find compelling? Perhaps the genre gives voice to the experience of living in a regime grounded in Hobbes’ account of the state of nature. Zombie movies are phantasmagoric expressions of the horror Tocqueville describes as individualism devoid of his salutary doctrine of self-interest rightly understood. Or something like that. Anyway, I wonder if there are any experts on the Walking Dead or World War Z out there who have more to say along these lines…
December 6th, 2012 | 12:45 pm
(David) Ramsey, Jason Joseph had a post here a while back on zombie matters, which I remember as being worthwhile. The thesis was something along the lines that zombiism is appetite unfettered and undisciplined; hence, the genre has a moral pedagogical purpose. Might look it up.
December 6th, 2012 | 1:14 pm
A propos of Ramsey’s analysis. This coming to theatres near you in 2013:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/warm_bodies/trailers/11174156/
Ramsey just may have a very relevant point!
So does this make blue-staters Zombies?
December 6th, 2012 | 1:29 pm
My problem, which I shared with David and various students last weekend, is that I just don’t find Zombies credible.
December 6th, 2012 | 3:54 pm
PP, I had the warm bodies trailer in mind when I posted. But it was actually a talk I had with someone about the World War Z book that got me interested. I’m not sure that I have enough of an interest in moving into zombie studies to pursue the topic, but I’ll definitely look up Jason Josephs’ zombie post, Paul. It could be that even if most readers of pomocon don’t find zombies credible, either, someone out there could take the time to say something sensible about why some people do. (And why they should look elsewhere in the culture for more edifying narratives)
December 6th, 2012 | 6:07 pm
Just a thought Ramsey,
Based on the preview of Warm Bodies, Zombies are saved by love. So it seems to me there are two aspects of modern estrangement at work here, the reality of the modern experience of estrangement from one another, represented in terms of Zombie-ness. And the naively romantic notion that somehow estrangement will be overcome by romantic love.
The modern situation suffers from a double wammy, one is the reality of our interpersonal estrangement, the other that we have become so separated from any memory of how the interpersonal was once fulfilled by a matrix of once thriving communities, ie family, neighborhood, church, Putnam’s bowling leagues etc, that the modern romantic imagination puts the entire burden of those needs on a notion of romantic love that has no plausible basis in interrelational reality.
Working in De Rougemont’s critique of Western Romanticism, Love in the Western World,
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Western-World-Denis-Rougemont/dp/0691013934/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354835037&sr=1-1&keywords=love+in+the+western+world
would allow for a way to analyze the implausibility of the very popular modern solution to estrangement which is a vague notion of the beloved having little to do with any plausible solution to the modern predicament.
Anyway, not that it’s worth much, but I would support such an examination.
December 6th, 2012 | 8:57 pm
Do you not believe in Lawyers?
No one really finds zombies to be credible…at least in the modern world. You die and that is it. No comming back from the grave. Of course one would think academics of a certain sort in particular would believe in zombies since they make such frequent use of them. To ascribe an idea to Keynes or to Pascal or to Locke even… In a sense this is being a zombie, since it is eating the brains of the “Great” dead. None of these figures ever comes back from the dead to defend themselves, or point out that they were really talking about a different set of circumstances and don’t really endorse or condone the policies of the zombies who eat their brains. Your students could be zombies. When I walk into a library I am a zombie… I am there to devour the dead who only passed themselves on in the form of some book no one else has bothered to read or think about in years. I don’t know what non-relational personalism is, but that seems apt. Non-relational personalism in this sense seems related to progressivism. In a library each author believed that he was furthering the progress of science and the useful arts, saying something true about some topic, that someone somewhere, sometime might come along and read. The congressional record is no different… Each book also competing for shelf-space and clout and being more progressive than the next. Don’t eat this brain…eat this brain…That…that is ‘mere” Copyright…this, this is Trademark and reputable…or this is actual mechanics, patent even…useful, relevant, hell its good law, the court said so!
Well in that case… namely Lambs Chapel v. Center of Moriches union free school district, Scalia fixed zombies and a good chunk of politics in my mind as the repeated attempts of justices to drive pencils into the heart of a beast…a late night ghoul even that stalks our Establishment clause jurisprudence. It seems that if you give a liberal lemon he makes lemonade, but this is certainly also a smart ass cliche. The case itself and the establishement clause in part deals with the question of community perception, whether or not the perception is a sufficient reality, or if the perception even exists. The Lemon test itself or my perception of it being at the same time sufficiently broad to encompass zombies, seems in many ways to draw the immagination towards the entwined issue of state action, in otherwords will folks think there is sufficient endorsement on the part of a state actor? This really is an issue impossible to kill with pencils, in fact pencils make it worse, because they draw lines connecting the dots, not to mention the fact that they are often drawn by lawyers who are in many ways brain-eating progressive library dwellers who are victims of dead hand control. Lawyers eat the most dead brains, see things no one else would see, and indeed don’t even see the things but imagine them for clients that often times don’t see them. It can even sometimes become difficult to know what a “gaffe” is, or what non-zombie sun dwelling, god fearing folk actually think. I can’t even tell you if the constitution is living or dead, but I suppose it is dicta, copyright, hyperbole, or an abused imagination fixed in a tangible medium of expression to be devoured by other zombies either way.
So there is some recognition of abject futility that drives the analytical Scalia to flights of fancy about zombies and like PP suggests some dude named Girardian suggested about the scapegoat mechanism…so too Scalia suggested that “The secret of the Lemon test’s survival, I think, is that it is so easy to kill. It is there to scare us (and our audience) when we wish it to do so, but we can command it to return to the tomb at will.” A zombie can with some discipline also command any book to return to its shelf.
There is without a doubt a Zombie spirit, there is also an animal spirit. Keynes is not quite clear on which is strongest: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
@John Presnal, Your Animal Spirit is calmed by your Zombie Spirit.
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