DEAR PRUDENCE: Unqualified Offerings wonders whether my long post about big splashy effects vs. small intricate moves toward justice is “simply demonstrating that all texts really do deconstruct themselves if you stare hard enough.”

Quite possibly! I wasn’t especially trying to do anything large (or splashy!). I don’t really think all texts deconstruct themselves etc., though, so can I offer an alternate phrasing of what I was getting at?

Basically I think that post was a defense of the necessity of prudence. Prudence always comes across as The Boring Virtue (it even has the word “prude” right in the name!), but actually, it’s perhaps the most literary/artistic of the virtues. Prudence requires complex negotiation between general and specific; the constant attention to any mismatch between one’s chosen symbol and the concept being symbolized; a multilayered way of thinking that acknowledges that we may be ignoring major problems in our attempts to fit events and situations into the narratives we tell ourselves.

Prudence is deconstructionist in a way, in that it calls our attention to the interstices, the things that don’t fit, and asks us to worry about whether those ill-fitting items should lead us to reshape our overarching narrative. That’s what I was trying to get at by talking about how the same events (the pro-life movement; war in Iraq; the American Civil War) can be viewed as part of a widescreen “splashy” narrative whose grave danger is utopianism, or part of a small inch-by-inch narrative whose grave danger is complacency and quietism.

But the whole point of prudence is that it goes beyond this deconstructionist attention to the lacunae and the misfits. Prudence is the art of choosing the right narrative–the art of taking a stand. Prudence presupposes that one of the several available narratives is the most accurate; the goal of prudence is to discern which one, so that wisdom can issue in action. That’s why I pointed out that I don’t think the preg ctr is utopian, even though I can see why others might–to me, it’s the proponents of sexual liberalism who are deadly, destructive utopians.

Prudence is, you could say, the art of authorship: You need to craft a realistic understanding of several possible narratives and world-understandings (the dialogue and, in cases where the narrator isn’t simply the author’s mouthpiece, the narration) and yet you also need to choose and delineate your own sense of how the world works and what’s realistic. Which brings us back to poetry, really, where this started.