I should start off by confessing that this post isn’t at all topical, except insofar as Freddie has challenged the Pomocon stable to explain why postmodern conservative doesn’t just mean "a conservative who should know better" ( TM ). So, with that half-hearted protestation—"No, Brer Fox, don’t throw me in the theory patch!"—and with the clarification that I’m a conservative for whom God doesn’t do a lot of philosophical heavy lifting, here’s the short (-er, by my standards) version of what a nice girl like me is doing in an ideology like this.
Unlike Nicola , who kicked off this thread, I never really had an existential crisis, which is probably why I’ve never taken to the argument that tradition is important because it gives our lives meaning. (It’s probably just as well. Isn’t that like saying God exists because I really, really want Him to?) My conservative turn had a conversion moment, but it was much less dramatic—I heard my grandfather, a former high school English teacher, recite this verse by Alexander Pope:
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,He dragged out the last line exactly like a wounded snake dragging its slow length along, and I realized in a flash that this moment of aesthetic bliss was brought to you by Formal Structure and Tradition. Traditional constraints like rhyme might not make meaning possible—it’s totally possible to find meaning without them, in poetry as in life—but they do make layers of meaning possible. Pope’s "needless Alexandrine" has no free verse equivalent.
That like a wounded snake, drags it slow length along.
If the point about layers of meaning is still unclear, consider the quick analogy of everyday conversation. Sometimes I mean exactly what I say and nothing more, but sometimes the message I want to send is more subtle, in which case it helps to be able to rely on traditional scripts ("I expected Helen to say one thing, but she said something different; in deciphering her meaning, I need to consider both what she said and the gap between what she said and what both of knew I was expecting her to say"), or genre (what is flirtation if not a way of indicating that, while the content of your conversation hasn’t changed, it has switched genres, and what is genre if not a tradition?). If you don’t have these implicit expectations, contexts, and scripts to play around with, your conversations can’t work on multiple levels; you’re stuck at the level of literal meaning. My hunch is that these scripts don’t work in "communities" as small as half a dozen people nor in communities as big as humanity, which is why I think individualism and humanism won’t get me where I want to go but traditionalism will.
When I wound up editing my high school’s lit mag, I was notorious for pushing students’ poems back across my desk with the clipped suggestion "Make it rhyme." I was indifferent to counterargument that the rules of a sonnet are arbitrary, or that free verse poetry is a more accurate representation of the poet’s inner thoughts. Yes, forms are arbitrary, but still objectively better (that, in case you missed it, was a non-theological conclusion doing some heavy lifting). Yes, they’re less authentic, but I don’t care. "Always be who you are, unless you suck," right?
The other thing I learned by observing teenage poets in their natural habitat, and my last point before getting to postmodernism, is that following the rules of a sonnet or a villanelle doesn’t just make better poetry; it makes more individual poetry. Ask a hundred high school students to write a free verse poem; then ask them each to write a sonnet. Generally speaking, the hundred sonnets will reveal more of the individual poet’s personality; the free verse poems will all sound the same. Eve has more on the relationship between individuality and authenticity here :
Submission to authority always involves a degree of awe; thus it approaches the sublime. And an encounter with the sublime will necessarily draw people out of our usual submission to culture and to whim; it will change us and, under certain circumstances . . . it will make us more our own than we could ever have been without that awe.Bottom line of my pre-postmodern conservatism: submission to authority seemed to be responsible for everything in the world I liked, including formalist poetry, moral virtue, and interesting individuality (as opposed to the tedious kind, which is more common), and I didn’t know why everyone around me seemed to bristle at the idea of submitting to authority instead of seeing it as a challenge and a duty.
Enter postmodernism. What does it mean to submit to authority in a world where the legitimacy of that authority has been undermined? Doesn’t leave us with the two options of either playing the God card ("Uno!") or admitting that, at the end of the day, we just playin’? I don’t like invoking the Almighty in situations like this, and for a long time I ran on the assumption that traditionalism is a kind of play-acting, but such satisfying play-acting that its underlying relativism doesn’t really matter. Then I came across this paragraph in Raymond Guess’s introduction to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy :
One has failed to experience the tragedy if one sees only one’s friend and fellow actor up there on the stage parading around in an odd mask. One has also failed if one thinks that it really is Oedipus up there, that the blood dripping down from his eyes is real blood, etc.A good play can change not just a man’s life but his identity , but only if he "believes" it in a very particular way. He can’t really believe it—if he does, he’ll rush onstage to try and stop Oedipus from blinding himself!—but neither can he keep in the front of his mind that it’s just his friend Jeff in an Oedipus mask. That’s the kind of belief I have in my traditions, especially those that can’t be traced back to divine revelation. More on why traditionalism isn’t relativism here . I’d excerpt, but this post is long enough already; let it suffice to say that Oscar Wilde was my kind of conservative.
So that’s my deal. I didn’t use the words "foundationalism" or "religion," but I hope I’ve answered at least some of Freddie’s questions , especially his quip that one cannot choose to be premodern, since the act of choosing is postmodern and essentially unconservative. (Incidentally, my Normblog profile , published this morning, has more on my philosophical autobiography and autobiographical philosophy. I thank Norman Geras very much for the opportunity, made that much sweeter by the fact that Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind has been an important book to me. Curious about which philosophical thesis I consider it most important to combat, and which I find it most important to disseminate? My favorite proverb? Political hero? Click through! )
