Peter probably has the right idea—it’s worth some effort kicking off the new blog by trying to hash out what postmodern conservatism means. I’ve been re-reading a lot of Christopher Lasch lately, especially the work following The Cutlure of Narcissism (1979) . Lasch argued for a true populism that rejected any and all projects aimed at the "widespread redemption of mankind" through technocratic efforts to rationally control nature, especially that part of nature that is man.
By time he got to his much later work, in particular The Revolt of the Elites (1995) , Lasch saw that the modern project of rational mastery was a rejection of the pemanent human experience of alienation, or of the permanent need for human beings to experience some measure of melancholy and pain in a an environs we only find partially hospitable to our being. At least in its early formulation, early Enlightenment philosophers like Locke had also discerned this kind of alienation, but dismissed the possibility that it was in many ways necessary for us to be able to also experience the range of human goods available to us, and also evidence of what Tocqueville calls an "invincible inclination" towards the divine.
Postmodern conservatism, at least in part, or "properly understood" as Peter would say, is an attempt to revivify a moral realism that accepts our alienation as an indelible stamp of our humantity, recognizes the eros for transcendence that underlies our experience of alienation, and recommends moderation and a sense of human limitation in the face of all endeavors to master and possess nature. In short, it’s an effort to rehabiliate the truncated Augustinianism that drives modernity with a fuller account that appreciates the necessary interplay in our experience between longing and contentment, transcendence and immanence, joy and melancholy.
