[Note to readers: Some of you are misreading the comments boxes under the New, Improved (Ahem) Beliefnet. Your comments should go in the large box, not the middle one. I hate to see you losing your words. I'm so sorry for the problems, which are out of my control.]
Freddie de Boer is an atheist with whom I'd rather spend an evening drinking and talking than with many of my co-religionists. Here's his lengthy, meandering, thoroughly rewarding post on the difficulty of finding a locus for binding authority in postmodernity. If you think this is going to be an example of Maximum Heaviosity, think again. Freddie puts his finger on the critical problem of our time, one that only theocons have a truly plausible answer to, I think (and he seems to think, and this makes him sad).
He starts with Nicola Karras' long philosophical explanation of why she became a conservative. She went from realizing the emptiness of rationalist individualism, to a flirtation with nihilism, and eventually to this point (because blockquoting is not working now, I'll start and end quoted passages in an obvious way):
[begin]
From Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, from René Girard, from history, I had taken an important lesson about the darkness at the heart of Man. The human race is not, at its core, nice. For every worthy urge, there are a dozen unworthy ones: violence, lust, anger, greed, ressentiment... Society's job is then to teach us to be better. Plato thought that once we knew the Good, we would have no choice but to follow it, but he was wrong.
We need a set of values that makes us feel guilty about wanting to do the things we should not do; we need a culture that sanctifies those urges and channels them into something beautiful. (There could be no glory without violence, no romance without lust, no justice without revenge.) For some time, I toyed with the idea of the state: couldn't it be structured to encourage virtue? Could fascism, as a kind of community through the state, ever be divorced from its abhorrent results? What sorts of policies would foster communities?
[end]
From that point, she discovered conservatism, with its insight that no healthy political community can exist without a sense of binding and shared authority to limit and channel man's self-destructive impulses. Conservatism, in other words, is necessary.
Freddie sees the problem with this clearly: that Karras' choice was made out of utility, not out of a conversion to the Truth. As Freddie puts it, "How can you have the foundational without the foundation? Where can the bedrock come from, if you acknowledge that you've chosen your preference for it? How can traditionalism survive, when you know that mere human subjectivity is the source of tradition?"
It's all well and good to say that individualism is an insufficient basis for political community, and that we all need to organize our life around a higher collective purpose. But when the time of testing comes, nobody sticks by a certain philosophy because it's useful; they stick by it because they believe it's true.
Freddie goes on to discuss approvingly my Culture11 piece on "Mad Men" and '50s nostalgia, with its conclusion that conservatives watch the show knowing it's a tragedy, because what comes after the collapse of oppressive Fifties certainties is a wasteland of spiritual and philosophical dislocation. He writes:
[begin]
This is absolutely true, and if I leave you with nothing else, I want you to know that I understand it, and that my politics, my philosophy, is a product of my agreement with this. Yet I can't understand how Dreher can say this and maintain his conservative identity. Dreher seems to describe a choice, in this piece, and-- like Karras-- chooses the more comforting, valorizing and humanizing side. No one can blame them. I can't, I won't. But I'm afraid there's a creeping incomprehensibility to it all: You cannot choose to be premodern. As Walter Truett Anderson said, the act of choosing means you are postmodern. If you are aware that you've made a choice to embrace the traditional, you can't possibly accept the traditional in the same way that those heady champions of "the '50s" simulacra did. For them there were not choices of identity, there was the way the world was. A person in those days would be baffled at the notion of "exploring the traditional." Explore what? There's no need for exploration if what you've lived is really what is.
[end]
Vigen Guroian once made a similar point to me in a discussion of Orthodox religion. He said that you can't choose tradition, you can only have it handed down to you. Once you are in the position of being conscious that you have chosen, you are living in false consciousness.
I don't think this is always true. If it were, there could be no such thing as valid religious conversions. To answer Freddie's point, I maintain my conservatism because it's based in a religious foundation. Freddie, in his honesty, grasps that a belief in God is the only way out of the postmodern trap:
[begin]
So who can restore faith? Who can rescue Nicola Karras from her existential crisis? Who can tell conservatives if they should go back or go slow, and reassure them that asking that question doesn't undermine their project.
Sadly, only God.
I said before that what Dreher said was true, that the collapse of the traditional social order is no cause for celebration. This is what the existentialists knew; this is why I'm an existentialist. As you know, I'm an atheist who can't stand conventional atheism. And it's for this reason: only God can rescue human life from meaninglessness, if not me, if not the ego and the I. Atheists love to say that most religious people actually think like atheists. I think most atheists think like the religious, because they have not yet begun to imagine the wasteland of meaning that the death of God has left us in. (I think of Bill Maher and his stupid sneering face, and I see a man who wields the truth the way a chimpanzee holds a gun.) Both Dreher and Karras imply that the cult of the individual has meant profound damage for the civic psychology. As Karras says, she was"troubled by the decay of the traditional institutions that gave us meaning. The results were just as Arendt had diagnosed: alienation, isolation, susceptibility to totalitarianism."
And fair enough. My intellectual parents created a philosophy of emptiness and lack of meaning. This is existential incompleteness, and it's why existentialism is not so much a philosophy as a critique of philosophy. Man giving meaning to man is no gift. It's nothing to celebrate. It's agony, the pain of being completely unmoored. It's harsh. It's also, I think, why Dreher can look at the consequences of knowing the origins of tradition and want to go back to not knowing. Karras may not like the cult of I, but if not the I, who gives life meaning? Only God.
But there is no God, part of me objects. I tell you from the bottom of my Martin Buber-loving agnotheist anticlericalist heart that I don't say that with glee, or derision. I am a little creeped out, to tell the truth, by Culture11's diaries and user groups; the overt religiosity disturbs me. But it also makes sense. If you want to be a conservative, a real conservative, it's hard to get there without God. Many of the people who claim to be atheist conservatives, I suspect, just haven't thought their way far enough down.
[end]
As an aside, I think Freddie de Boer is closer to God than many Christians I know. If God didn't exist, I don't think I'd be much of a conservative. I know conservatives who believe in conservatism as a useful philosophy of the market and of keeping social order, but who live by a separate moral standard in their personal lives -- especially regarding sexual behavior -- because they don't really believe that God exists. I can respect at a certain level the validity of their claim: traditional conservatism, as Karras avers, really is the best way to live a meaningful, ordered existence in community. But absent a shared and genuine commitment to God -- by which I mean to a source of objective and transcendent authority -- it is hard to see how a community holds it all together in a time of testing. This is MacIntyre's point, and to a certain extent Philip Rieff's.
And not just an abstract deity, but a particular god. You can grasp this well if you read Robert Kaplan's 1994 Atlantic piece "The Coming Anarchy," in which he compares traveling from west Africa to Egypt. Here's a money quote, from an unidentified minister of state in West Africa:
[begin]
"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued, "there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination. Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group against another."
[end]
Anyway, the political problem for conservatives like me is that we live in a pluralist democracy where there is and cannot be more than superficial agreement on moral values. How do we integrate ourselves into the pluralist framework? It has been fairly easy for as long as this country has existed, because Christian morals, broadly speaking, have held sway in the public square. But that's rapidly changing, and conservative/traditionalist Christians are now and going to be a diminishing minority in this country. John Schwenkler, I believe, has suggested that libertarianism is the best hope for traditionalists, insofar as it is compatible with the American framework, and allows trads of all sorts a relative amount of space in which to live out their convictions in community.
Bottom line, though: the Benedict Option is looking to be the only viable solution to a truly conservative/traditionalist social order. If that can only exist in America within a libertarian meta-order, then perhaps we should explore the possibilities of a new fusionism.
Anyway, I thank Freddie for his insights into political foundationalism, conservatism and God. I'll leave you with this: a Catholic priest friend reports his seminary class being asked by a professor what they would do if archaeologists found the bones of Jesus. One seminarian gave the most reasonable answer: "I'd go out and get laid." There's profundity in that.
UPDATE: James Poulos stands athwart this post yelling, "Stop! You're shortchanging the work of politics!"
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I'd like to expand on the "common ground" theme, using Derek Scruggs' post as a comparison point (well put, Derek, btw).
Derek points out that from his atheist POV that there does not need to be conflict between faith and secular, because history shows that the border is porous and permits access from both directions. His point that there has been movement from faith to science but not in the other direction is not a complete picture, because two-way movement is an invalid measurement.
That's an awkward way to put it. I'm not sure there is a better way, though I'd like to see others' attempts. My point is that my agreement with Derek comes from the other side of the border: I am a spiritual believer (albeit outside the mainstream) who acknowledges the need for the scientific method. We find common ground in that shared perspective, even while holding oppositional views on matters of faith. I acknowledge the movement from belief to science, but I also have a personal, experiential view that when science fails, faith is sufficient to continue with until such time (if it comes) that data, technology and theory advance enough to provide the scientific explanations it lacks now. It bears repeating, as well: unless that explanation fulfills the strictures of the scientific method, it cannot replace faith as it did with thunder & lightning, comets appearing in the sky, disease and famine.
Anyway, the two-way street metaphor is flawed, IMO, and I'd prefer to use the balance-point approach. We use hindsight to scoff at the superstitions of the past, but it is the present in which we live, and the future is an open road with many branches.
His point that there has been movement from faith to science but not in the other direction is not a complete picture, because two-way movement is an invalid measurement.
The problem is that it is really an invalid comparison. There has not really been a movement from faith to science, the two are not asking questions at the same level. Science deals with immediate causes, faith with ultimate causes. Science and revealed faith are not in competition with one another, they complement one another. Science tells me about the Big Bang, faith tells me who "pulled the trigger", something science could never do. Science tells me how my physical body and brain came about, faith tells me why it came about. I'm not saying that there are not times when science and faith overlap, and others when they seem, to our finite minds, to conflict. Usually time and more study and thought will resolve the conflict, and it doesn't always move in science's direction, either. For instance in the 19th century the "scientific" view was that the universe was infinite in space and time, with which theists of all sorts took issue. Time has shown that the theists were the correct party.
Franklin,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate it and appreciate the suggestion that it was not too long. I'm personally and in practice floating somewhere between the Catholic and Orthodox church, but I grew up in a household filled with perennialist ideas of all major religions being vehicles of divine truth, with which I to some extent agree. That said, I'm not sure I believe in there being such a thing as "paganism" because the term's usually used as an insult by early Christians or people whose outlook is narrower, rightly or wrongly, than mine.
Derek Scruggs, science is not looking in the right places for such phenomena as consciousness, thought, intellection, or so I firmly believe. I'm not a materialist; and as long as science ultimately believes in matter and motion as the only true causes, I do think that such searches are in vain. If we're a continuum of mind and body (Google Anthony Bloom's "Body and Matter in Spiritual Life" and read it if interested--I think it's one of the best foundational statements I've read for a healthy Christianity), it means that feelings and even thoughts (you can't completely separate them from feelings, I'd guess) so on do involve changes in the body; Aristotle knew this from glorified common sense 2,500 years ago but not in a precise way (see On the Soul, or De Anima.) But if you are only looking for material causes, that's all you'll find. A paradigm that allows for nothing else can't find the "else."
Perhaps Franklin's idea is the best one possible. And perhaps the best we can hope for is a degree of thoughtfulness and civility in public life that might mitigate the profound philosophical differences, allowing for civility and fellow feeling even while not papering over the gulf of ideas and values.
Regards,
PDGM (I'm a he, by the way.)
PDGM, we seem to be kindred thinkers ("spirits" came to mind, but it requires assumptions neither of us is prepared to make). I know many modern pagans who would dearly love to find another term, but "paganism" is what we have, and like other movements to change the lexicon we'll just have to be patient. Google Isaac Bonewits' essay on his view of it being in three broad categories: paleo, meso and neo.
I agree with your view of the limitations of science, and that its being self-limiting is a worthy caution. I have just one addendum: science doesn't deny faith, it simply requires it to be outside of science. There have been and will continue to be many scientists who are also people of faith. I do not believe that the limitation will keep them from their faith, or from contributing to the faith-life of us all.
"science is not looking in the right places for such phenomena as consciousness, thought, intellection, or so I firmly believe."
You may well be right. The Greeks came awfully close to positing that earth was not the center of the universe, but just missed it. It was over a thousand years later that Galileo finally figured it out.
And it may be that we are incapable of understanding it. We didn't evolve to understand the meaning of the universe, we evolved to survive. Consciousness may be as impossible for humans to understand as for a dog to understand algebra. In the dog's case, that doesn't mean algebra is divine.
The difference between me and many believers is that I'm okay with that, whereas others feel the need to ascribe it to a deity. I'm okay with that too, but don't need anyone's pity or, worse (and as is so common) judgment that I really must have no moral center.
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