In lieu of debate spin (that post is still in the oven), I’d like to weigh in on the Postmodern Conservatism for Dummies thread, since Ms. Crum is right that we could stand to nail the concept down a little more. This stab won’t be nearly as comprehensive as Mr. Hancock’s, nor as academic, and, of the three things mentioned in the post’s title, I’ll only take up the third. Irrationality and socratic dialogue are just as important, but Christopher Lasch seems to be hot right now .
Looking over the first draft of my own Pomocon reading list , I realized that a good chunk of it—Richard Sennet’s Fall of Public Man , Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll , Dwight MacDonald’s Discriminations , and Christopher Lasch’s True and Only Heaven —was written by Marxists and former Marxists like Lasch, who said that in the sixties "Marxism seemed indispensable to me." (It’s right there in his Wikipedia entry .) Even MacIntyre calls Marxism "one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society." I know that, at a certain place and time, everyone was doing it, and furthermore that anti-communism is no longer the glue holding the conservative movement together, but, still, my reading list seems pretty far gone in the opposite direction. Unlike Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, none of these men had moments of dramatic renunciation; their journeys away from Communism were more of a slow drift. What kind of conservatives can Lasch and these other ex-socialists possibly be?
I can think of several reasons why so much Marxism should be interesting rather than troubling. First of all, it suggests that postmodern conservatism is an ideology that mixes the right’s fondness for elites with the left’s instinct to side with the weak over the powerful. As the culture war stands, the right is either contemptuous of elites, as in Sarah Palin’s convention speech, or contemptuous of common (in the full sense of the word) culture, as in Western Canon cheerleading and, on the economic side, trust in the market’s ability to reward merit with some kind of approximate accuracy. The Blue State left’s tendency to see the weak and powerless from an upper- or middle-class point of view (see this Linda Hirschman editorial, or any leftist who has ever romanticized the worker) isn’t much better.
The paleocon/ex-Marxist third way is sensitive to class conflict, but would rather recognize the arbitrariness of class than engage in a fruitless effort to make it less arbitrary or, worse, get rid of class distinctions altogether. Of course it’s ridiculous to say that elites are elite because they deserve to be, but elitehood will never be doled out fairly, much less disappear completely. That being accepted, we can go from there.
The second reason why so many former Marxists turn up on pomocon reading lists is that we share with radicals a distaste for bourgeois hedonism, or, as it is sometimes called, libertarianism. Postmodern conservatives tend to be skeptical of middle-class "happiness" talk, not only because making happiness your goal is the worst way to achieve it, but also because there are so many things we’d rather be than happy: virtuous , blessed , redeemed . For values like that, one has to go either to the upper classes (honor culture) or the lower (religion). Also, Marxists wish they could have come up with a definition of bourgeois man as insulting as Allan Bloom’s: "the man who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself, and on the other hand, in his understanding of himself, thinks only of others."
The bottom line with ex-Marxists like Lasch was summed up by a friend of mine this way:
. . . with Marx, you must run far far away from anything he actually concludes. But as the raw materials for your own thinking, so wonderful. Marx is like flour. You can’t eat it raw. That would taste bad and be very messy. On the other hand, you can make cupcakes with it.Anyone curious about what Karl has been up to lately should consult Norman Geras .
Also, this sometimes happens with Marx.
