A Postmodern Conservatism? Part I
If postmodernism and Burkean-based 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, what might be generalized of the cultural effects and communicative language that would allow for comparisons? Swimming in the seas of both of these large terms is an earnest epistemology – a critique and response to certain themes of modernity – and also an arch cultural schtick, something less philosophically serious and more culturally aesthetic. It is in the second trend (rootless, circulating fictions) that there may an interjection of imaginative language aimed toward more permanent things.
Because there is so much reality that will remain hidden, there is much that language cannot adequately capture. Examples include uncertainty, suffering, frustration, the sense of the story from another point of view – all will be conveyed only with loss or distortion. The task is to find a way to talk about these experiences in the language of the profession. This requires thinking about the language itself: what it can do, what it can be made to do, and its limitations. All of this, in other words, is involvement by some means of invention to reimagining the world and not to the routine application of rules or principles. Literature at its best is always about the language in which it is written, its ways of imagining the experience of others, its response to the conventions of authority with which it works, and so on. To seriously engage the language of a text is to commit to an imagination of a world where certain declarations of significance are possible and others impossible. The use of language is an inherently ethical and political activity, as we define ourselves and those we speak about in what we say. A principal purpose of studying literature is to give us all a common culture, ethical and intellectual, so that a people may share a general heritage and be united through the works of the mind. The invitation to share in his beliefs and conclusions resonates for conservatives. The language of reverence and mystery is a calling to a higher purpose, a challenge to look beyond the temporary and toward an order which holds things in place. The postmodern conservative can formulate a community of invitation to discuss truth, goodness, beauty, and all of the transcendent things that give life meaning.
To convey the notion to innovate is not to reform, and to consider how a conservative critique of human nature and affairs might impact discussion about the role of government, it is necessary to directly consider the underlying realities of human experiences, even as they remain rather elusive. The spiritual voids addressed by the fleeting pursuits of pleasure should instead be met not by the variations of technical pursuit but by the discipline of the mind, the instillation of prudence, the presentation of a coherent body of ordered knowledge across subjects, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake – in short, rising generations should be helped to make their way toward wisdom and virtue. In drawing out these ethics, and by making their necessity explicit, there is a way to talk and live. To step back from the constant motion of seeking status and power, of always being “plugged in,” and of religious dogmatism in a political context, allows room to express the past and initiate a variety of imaginations: historical, poetic, prophetic, civic, moral. As liberalism exhausts itself, it is good to appeal to the emotional and imaginative resources humans can invest in place and personal history as essential components of individual and social self-identity. This gives flesh to sentiments and anxieties, new and renewed, perhaps too inchoate to define.
This can be accomplished through a literary narrative, which is a sharp contrast to most conservative commentators and controversialists who tend to be focused on electoral victory or the political issue of the moment. A postmodern conservative possesses concern for the imagery a society creates of what it admires and condemns, as people can participate in and change history. The constituted community of its language demands that the mysteries of free will, divine guidance, human agency and choice, and the creations of custom be respected as cornerstones of a temperament in but not of the confusions of modern society. Thus the limits, and not only importance, of government and political power can come to be understood. This is a community in favor of the ingenuity of civil society. Its narrative form, as opposed to the more strictly historical, is conducive to providing lessons and examples of valuable meaning drawn from a human consciousness that transcends history. History, after all, is itself contained within the immanence of a mysterious nature. It is the ideologue and their planners who seek totality, not the seeker of inexpressible permanent things.
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