Pomocon: An Introduction

For those of you who are new to the blog, greetings. We’re much obliged for our warm welcome at First Things , and we’re pleased to welcome you in turn. Regular visits to Postmodern Conservative are the best means to a good feel for the site, but a little introduction might be in order. In the fall of last year, I realized that both I and my readers stood to benefit from the breadth and depth afforded by a group blog. With surpringly little cajoling, a top-notch cast of contributors came together from across the intellectual — and geographical — landscape. Some of us are graduate students, some of us are professors, and some of us are not yet graduate students; most of us write here or there in the public prints, and all of us have an interest in the interworkings of political life, public philosophy, and religious faith.

But beyond that, I think we all tend, by turns and to varying degrees, to share an interest in trying to grapple with two different but related predicaments: the human predicament and the modern predicament. In virtue of their being predicaments, both of these hearken us to the possibility of escaping, resolving, relieving, or at least coping with them. And as some thinkers and writers have attempted to emancipate us from modernity by catapulting into something called postmodernity, part of our human predicament now involves reckoning with the postmodern predicament. For, sure enough, postmodernity — as it’s most commonly been theorized — has tended merely to deepen the modern predicament, or at least the pathologies of rootlessness, alienation, self-deception, and anxiety that thinkers from Tocqueville to Nietzsche have regarded as definitive of modernity’s downside.

‘Postmodern Conservative’, then, doesn’t denote a brand, a style, or an ‘ism’, as our continuing conversation about what it does mean is likely to show. For the purposes of the broader conversation at this blog, I think of Pomocon as an invitational concept, or a heuristic proposition, around which a wide-ranging and reality-based investigation into its implications can be organized. But by no means is this to preclude the simple fact that Pomocon is a plain old blog, where bloggy remarks are made about bloggy things in bloggy ways. Though we’re likely to keep ranging widely from the highfalutin to the mundane, the aim is to steer clear of the pedantic and arcane, and may the rest speak for itself. For now, thanks for reading, thanks for your comments, and cheerio . . .