I’ve enjoyed exploring the nooks and crannies of James’s sprawling post , but there’s one thread of it I’d like to pick up—the one having to do with loyalty ( unsurprisingly ). It may strain my vernacular blogging style to take up such an unabashedly theoretical argument, but I’ll do my best.
Loyalty is immoral—I won’t bother trying to deny it. Morality is universal and objective; loyalties are particular and arbitrary, mere accidents of birth. (James talks about Christian uneasiness over Christ’s identity as a Jew; same concept— particularity is somehow morally wrong —in different terms.) This tension has pushed postmodern people towards two extremes: at one end there’s ecumenism-on-steroids, which insists that all cultures and religions are simply different lamps for the same light, so one’s only real loyalties are to humanity, truth, and goodness; at the other end there’s radical multiculturalism, which says that I can never hope to understand your radically different culture, neither can you hope to understand mine, so no one can pass judgment on the morality or wisdom of anyone else’s tradition.
As James points out, this anxious realization that there are lots and lots of eminently respectable traditions that completely contradict each other, while familiar to most people as the sneaking suspicion lurking behind various macro-level cultural clashes, also plays out on the smaller stage of the individual mind. For instance, I belong to a lot of traditions: I’m a Southerner, but also an Ivy League intellectual (like Burke, I’m a usurper!); I’m a woman and a Catholic and a conservative. My identities contradict each other all the time, and so do yours. The solution to this dilemma is the holy grail of postmodern conservatism, and I’m not sure I have one. I do have one (or the beginnings of one) for the macro version, though, so I’ll leave it to others to see if it has broader (narrower?) applications.
Even within a single tradition, there are many contradictory pictures of virtue: the virtues of a patriarch versus those of an innocent child, an obedient soldier versus a bohemian innovator, a father versus a child. Things like honesty, humility, and mercy are good across the board, but it would be a problem if a patriarch were to emulate the innocence of a child, or if a father tried to behave with the virtues of a son towards his own child—or, just as bad, tried to be a mother to him. (Occasional exceptions like St. Francis or Jude the Obscure ‘s Father Time are acceptable, but they’re weird and should be labeled so.) Still, none of this changes the fact that both sides of contradictory dichotomies like innocence/canniness, justice/mercy, masculine/feminine, and meekness/bravery are virtues . The task of a conscientious man, then, is to figure out where his own identity puts him on these scales, and then act accordingly. "Are there two (2) or more individuals for whom you bear moral and material responsibility? If so, proceed to question five . . . "
But wait, there’s more! In the case of age-vs.-innocence and male-vs.-female, it isn’t just that the two sides act in contradictory ways; it’s that they can’t even understand each other . This gets us closer to the situation between, say, an American Catholic and a Korean Confucian, who are embedded in such radically different traditions that the chances of my understanding the other guy’s point of view well enough to judge it are pretty slim. In the case of Christian virtue pairs, the solution is appallingly simple: come up with rituals of interaction that allow the two sides to deal helpfully with each other even in the absence of mutual understanding . Women don’t understand men, nor men women; that’s why we have courtship rituals. The law says "honor thy father and mother" and commands us to regard our elders with special humility and obedience; it doesn’t say anything about comprehending them.
There are lots of people in the world whose cultures I’ll never understand. That doesn’t mean that I have to avoid them, or that I have to ignore our differences when I interact with them. Failing any kind of moral or cultural common ground, I have the option of turning to scripts; in this case, rituals of hospitality. ( "The Stranger" in Judeo-Christian Theology ; has this paper been written?) It’s the same thing I do when I’m faced with men being inscrutably masculine, or when my parents (literal or spiritual) are being inscrutably old. Rituals are the "third way" of postmodern conservatism. Way more fun than Rorty’s flashes of cross-cultural insight, which is the other "third way" going around pomo circles. [Questions for a future post: Are there "rituals of pluralism?" If not, can we make some?]
