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(Parts one, two, three, and four of my interview with James Poulos.)
Q. You've written for a long time at a blog called Postmodern
Conservative, a project that I've always thought of as part politics,
part philosophy. Recently, however, the blog got picked up by First
Things, the "journal of religion, culture and public life." What is a
Postmodern conservative, anyway? And what do they -- or at least, what
do you -- have to say about religion in America?
People have asked "what's a pomocon" almost as long as I've been blogging at Postmodern Conservative.
And the truth is, my wife bought me the URL for my birthday when we
first moved to DC. In seriousness, all the intuitions that led me to
blog as a self-styled pomocon also led me firmly away from the kind of Ideas For Dummies
approach that seems to me one of the lamer things we mean to criticize
when we criticize 'modernity'. We want to know how to be or do anything
in only ten easy steps; my whole approach to philosophical reflection
and political engagement resists this. But I was the kid who thought
that instruction manuals were for those too mentally flat-footed or
underinspired to figure out how to do it themselves as they went. Dive
in first, impose order later. Chances are there's already a latent
order present which reveals itself only upon unrehearsed and
unquantifiable reflection. So at Postmodern Conservative I've
appreciated the varying interpretations of pomocon brought to the table
by our various bloggers.
That said, I think there are some noteworthy overlaps.
There's some
agreement that criticizing 'modernity' as such is an activity which
forces the critic to read him or herself back into 'modernity' itself
-- an experience which is not only dizzying and tiring but one which
distances us unhealthily from reality-based inquiry into the human
condition and contemporary life. Some of us are more apt than others to
use the language of modernity in discussing our present predicament,
but I think many (if not all) of us want to zero in on how to rescue a
certain integral, practical, and concrete kind of personhood from the
acid bath of 'secularization' and 'globalization' and 'scientific
rationalism' and all the bogeymen we label 'modernity'. Now, I myself
have come to the conclusion that what this conversation is mostly about
is the character of the individual in contemporary life. And I aim to
help defend the individual as a real noun -- what Philip Rieff, my
favorite sociologist, calls the "irreducible I"
-- against the disembodied and dangerously make-believe ideal adjective
of individuality. I think that in a democratic age like ours the
individual can only hold together as a real thing if we make a
sustained effort to show ourselves and one another why 'individuality'
doesn't really exist, why it's a fantasy that will lead us astray if we
try to imitate or channel it. Put another way, I take 'individuality',
at best, to be a shorthand we sloppily use to honor a real individual.
John Stuart Mill, among many others, helped get us in the habit of
thinking of 'Individual' as an honorific we grant to people enjoying a
fullness of this magical 'individuality' stuff.
People subscribing to this kind of magical thinking indulge just as
much in metaphysics as our oft-ridiculed religious faithful. And here
we are having to determine in what respect 'individuality' is a
superstition but God is not. One easy way to dispense with this
challenge is to write off both individuality and God as comforting
illusions, but as we know from daily experience that's not the way
things work. Self-satisfied atheists long ago caved on the question of
'oceanic feelings', and in the sorry tradition of Wilhelm Reich
our contemporary 'neurobuddhists' -- a moniker that gives Buddhists and
neurons a bad name -- are all re-enchanted over the possibility of a
purely natural 'transcendence', inseparable in reality from
19th-century talk about inner energies and forces and incorporeal
qualities. A bit further onto religious turf we find 'moralistic therapeutic deism', which Damon Linker has lately praised
as a better basis for a public theology in America than the mix of
Thomistic evangelicalism that many commentators appreciate. Well, I'm a
fan of moralism and soft on deism, but like any student of Rieff I'm
rather hard on therapy. The triumph of the therapeutic
is a story for another time, but Linker, like others, really seems to
miss out on the way lots of our practical American deists retain a
basically pagan understanding of virtue -- manliness for men,
womanliness for women, and the ideal family as one of both communal
love and clear hierarchy. Religious thinkers on the right who are
uncomfortable with deism of any kind probably need to recognize that
the reality-based pagan virtue of our non-dogmatic theists will be
essential to the survival of a Judeo-Christian social order in America.
Right now I think it's extraordinarily difficult to have this kind
of conversation in a serious and sustained manner anywhere other than First Things.
In several respects, understanding 'religion and politics' is more
significant than ever to contemporary life, here and around the world.
The mini-era in which religion was a ghetto for the political right is
definitely over, for good and for ill, and people who stay out of this
conversation are apt to be left behind.
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