A Postmodern Conservatism? Part III

Conservatism – the negation of ideology, the political secularization of the doctrine of original sin, the cautious sentiment tempered by prudence, the product of organic, local human organization observing and reforming its customs, the distaste for a priori principle disassociated from historical experience – partakes of the mysteries of free will, divine guidance, and human agency by existing in but not of the confusions of modern society, as it offers no framework of action, no tenet, no theory, no article of faith. Nature will not be possessed, nor overcome: happiness (forever elusive when the individual or the “will of the people” as organized by the state is the base unit of society and the chief agent of freedom, as opposed to the family and the Communion the family reflects) absent virtue is temporary and fleeting. It must be consonant with the purpose and limitation of nature. How, then, might a postmodern sentiment work toward the good in the seeking of more permanent things?

Much of the problem of modern morality is evidenced by the unstable status of the good. It is very difficult to choose what will make us happy, for how can happiness be found? The world is full of noise and confusion, quite a lot of it glittering yet in the end false. Christ calls us to wisdom and to Himself through the Greatest Commandment, which is to love the Lord God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. The pursuit of wisdom, goodness, and permanence outside of this call is a source of restlessness and artificial happiness – a diversion to nothingness. The drive to conquer nature should be associated with the inability to live well, as the impulse swells into the vacuum of status-seeking, inevitable in its failure due to sin….and only to be met with inescapable death.

Christians must affirm that humans do possess the ability to live well. Postmodernism, in its acceptance of the sentimental imagination as a conduit of appreciation for the inexpressible, laments that the altar of rationality and ideological construction too often works to separate humanity from historical existence. The modernist push (rooted in Enlightenment liberalism) against mediating structures so as to better support abstract rights cannot easily tolerate smaller groups from which individuals come together to create and share meaning: nature instead exists in itself as an extension of human personality, and cultures develop from such norms. The root of its danger is a rationalist reordering of the undesirable. Yet the postmodernist and the conservative recognize that ordered societal explanations of totality is to be avoided not only because we cannot access them, but because it is not wise to human nature to try – the totalitarian temptation is far too well established.

Postmodernism need not abandon all attempts to find foundational meaning or truth. There is simply recognition that philosophy has limits, and a recognition that rationalism – perhaps the most consistent underpinning of modernist projects – can never eradicate the inherent mysteries of existence. Any totalizing theorist, therefore, especially those partaking in the universalist and abstract, rejects the mystery that is a synonym for the human creation (avowed and self-identified postmodernists thinkers included). The intersection of Christianity, conservatism, and postmodernism is the understanding and acceptance of the unknowable, internalized so as to scorn promises to unlock the mysteries that have and will always endure.