Among the common terminologies beyond the fluid meanings of modernism and modernity are the variants of “postmodernism.” Catholicism demands an emptying of self, through the Sacraments and the prompts of holy images among other means, but what of the many (including those who claim apostolic faith) with a diabolic imagination – those who search for identity through the images that surround them? Modern images tend to be driven by what “sells” and led by a debased sensuality. Within an aggressively secular public sphere, then, what also exists in our state of fallen nature when there is too much reliance on a straitened form of rationalism and the false science of materialism to address fleeting feelings of emptiness – essentially, a spiritual deficiency?
The conservative might view all political problems, at their foundation, as moral problems. And the postmodern might view all political problems as unsolvable, as we exist in the confusions of rootless, circulating fictions. (I think both would agree with T.S. Eliot that there is no such thing as a lost cause because there is no such thing as a gained cause.) If rights-based liberalism, with a mechanistic view of the human imagination, fetish for rational solutions, and love of power-wielding experts finds its political expression in modernity, a postmodern conservative might view the liberal (that is, Enlightenment) order as failing to meet the necessity of human sentiment (that is, spirituality). This is to say that what comes next need not be a hyper-modernism of relativism, amorality, devotion to unending progress and innovation, and derision of tradition.
Two good attempts to work this out may be read here and also here. In these descriptions are a resistance to descriptive frameworks, a sentiment against utopia, ideology, and dogma. According to the postmodern papist, for example, an incredulity toward metanarratives is directed toward the subjective and mediated understandings of salvation history (truth) presented as salvation history itself (Truth), or reducing “The Way, The Truth, and the Light” – which refers to a Person – to totalizing series of propositions. As conservatives continue their debates, I begin my small contributions by suggesting that postmodernism and (Burkean) conservatism possess important commonalities in a rejection of the autonomous self and in an acceptance of the social construction of life by tradition and custom, developing and perpetuating meaning through learned practices and the symbolisms of expression.
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