I recently posted some thoughts on liberalism and conservatism as they seem to appear in the history of modernity. Here is Zizek’s way of thinking about modernity in his book, The Puppet and the Dwarf:
One possible definition of modernity is: the social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive as the same religion in different cultures. This extraction enables religion to globalize itself (there are Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists everywhere today); on the one hand, the price to be paid is that religion is reduced to a secondary epiphenomenon with regard to the secular functioning of the social totality. In this new global order, religion has two possible roles: therapeutic or critical.
Zizek goes on to argue for the critical role of religion in the secular world. This opens up the second feature of the conservatism I am trying to articulate: a Leftist (or critical) conservatism. And it seems that, in order to be properly on the left-hand side of things, one must be forced to see that liberalism is wholly of the right in this day and age. Front and center in this dilemma is the religious question that forces us to question the very merit of the form of life we have become accustom to. A way of living where we do not need to believe.
More to come, I think…
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