Belief in God would change everything — Freddie
In response to my due distance postscript, he writes:
James is right, of course, that this doesn’t have to be a moment of despair, but merely a moment of opportunity. There are small graces in this kind of world, if we look for them. James is a conservative, and thus it is inevitable that his project will be foundational, postmodern or no. That’s not a luxury I have. We share, however, the important distinction (which we also share with David Foster Wallace and everyone else) that we really can’t go back again. Every conscious attempt to moves our target farther from our fingertips. Unless we can come up with some sort of brain-washing syndrome or hypnosis, we’re stuck here. Or, perhaps, we could get a group of like-minded people together and buy some island together in the South Pacific, and raise a group of children, free from Rorty and Heidegger, never hearing of Nietzche, no such movies as The Last Action Hero or Bolt, no The Real Inspector Hound, no Tristam Shandy, no Fake Steve Jobs, no Don Delillo or David Ives, no Stephen Colbert, and you’re god damn right, there’s a Santa Claus. Would it be worth it? Could you do that to your child, live that kind of lie, even when you were sure it would leave them in a happier and more fulfilling world? I might have to, I’m not going to lie. No kids, so I don’t know.
Freddie points to the post- 300 Spartan vogue among some pop conservatives as an image of how ridiculous it is to fantasize about ‘going back again.’ My Greek blood permits me to bracket questions of the contemporary silliness or seriousness of Spartan manliness while going on to say that Alasdair MacIntyre has been around a lot longer than 300 and even he cannot show us how to choose to be premodern again. Then again, MacIntyre does help us understand in what way reasons, plural — different rationalities — are built up socially, which puts him at least on that count in the same camp as Freddie. So the issue isn’t so much whether we can turn our back on time and memory as whether we can repent of what it is we do in time and what it is we remember that we have done. And that’s why belief in God would change everything. There is no secular substitute for repentence. (Arendt’s attempt is just Foucault for nice people.) Deciding to kill our televisions, on the other hand, would only change some, albeit important, things.
The more serious point is that my ‘project’, such as it is, is to disambiguate foundational culture from nonfoundational politics, which seems odd to characterize as foundational, unless the only alternative is anti-foundational; and though that project may be ‘conservative’ in a derivative or consequential way, I’m not sure it’s at all restricted to people who ‘are conservatives.’ Right?
UPDATE: Frum , 12/06/09:
In the end, political conservatism’s core insights will cease to belong to any one political party, and be integrated into the shared history of the American people, part of the historical background from which new politics and new coalitions will arise.
Perhaps it already has! And not to its detriment! (Thru Ross .)
