"Conservatism is my sexual preference."
--the FC, around 5 a.m. Sunday morning

SHE LOOKS LIKE AN ANGEL... BUT I GOT WISE/SHE'S THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE!: Some exceptionally scattered thoughts on tradition and conservatism. These are propositions for discussion, not settled beliefs of mine. [I'll add links to older posts later, and remove this parenthesis.]

1. There's a difference in kind between a stereotype and a role. Actually, this one I'm fairly sure of; I'm just not sure how to cash out what that difference in kind really looks like. I've been using gender stereotypes vs. gender roles as a possible way into this question.

One possibility is that stereotypes are abstractions, character descriptions, whereas roles are characters. The Hysterical Woman is a cruel and insipid caricature; Eddie Monsoon is a wonderful monster. (Similarly for The Prude vs. Saffy Monsoon.)

I'm not sure that's quite accurate. I do think a preexisting personal representation of the role being somehow approached by our actions is part of the difference. That's what the saints are for. They break the conventions in keeping the Commandments, in Chesterton's very nice phrase, and thereby expand the possibilities for the rest of us. They show us new roles. Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, these aren't stereotypes.

This of course doesn't help you when you can't find precedent for what you perceive as your vocation. And since I believe very strongly that vocation isn't a choice, I am still searching for other, more illuminating ways to cash out the difference between stereotype and role.

2. One way to tell that something is a tradition is if it can't be defended by reason alone. I've already written that tradition's primary purpose is to create a persona--to simultaneously give a place or institution an ethos, and give it a personality, making it a possible object of love. (Specifically, at least in the contexts where I've encountered traditional institutions, the institution becomes a fictive woman. It would be shockingly cheap [and cheaply shocking] to wonder if Germany's problem wasn't the idea of the Fatherland--but is there anything to be salvaged from this idea that fictive womanhood is better for us than fictive manhood?)

Anyway, putting gender questions aside, this definition of tradition should immediately show you the many points on which it is vulnerable.

a) Fictive womanhood is fictive. (Long cat is loooooooong!) There is no actual, individual, percept-rich "America" or "Marianne" or "Israel" or "Church." Reason-alone will always sever the cords of language and longing which held together shadow and substance... making it impossible for us to argue that the imperceptible (the persona) should be considered the substance, not the shadow.

b) Fictive womanhood is a fantastic alibi! This is why Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is simultaneously so central to my understanding of tradition's role, and so troubling. If we agree that tradition makes France an ethos and a beloved, must we agree that Marie Antoinette is the personification of that persona? Or to bring this down to the twentieth century: If tradition, then figurehead--whether monarch or dictator?

This is the darker side (the back!) of my post about how tradition gives grace to our necessary subordinations and submissions: Tradition, of course, can give graceful cover to our unnecessary subordinations as well.

c) Cultures lack an architecture. There is no science--and precious little art!--by which we can tell which elements of tradition are load-bearing. In any particular case, I can argue rationally that this element can be removed without destroying the iconic resonance, the persona, of our tradition. And in fact, I can always point to many, many cases in which prior rejections of traditional elements did not fatally damage what we now consider to be the nature of that tradition. This is both a strength of tradition--its ability to adapt, to recreate a cultural persona as adeptly as you and I recreate our own public faces when we undergo severe personal change, remaining recognizable to our friends despite the massive internal damage and recovery--and, in a rationalist age, a weakness. No individual fort can be defended, even though the attackers insist they're on our side.

d) Finally... how can you prove that your beloved should be loved? This is one of the very few questions where I can't think of a medieval Christian philosopher who has really provided a hard-and-fast, cash-value answer... which is a point in favor of medieval Christian philosophers. Never use an argument when a stained-glass window would suffice.

(In every cycle there is a candidate reporters and liberals fall in love with whom they do not call liberal but call instead fresh or new or independent or a laughter-loving Aphrodite.)
--Richard Brookhiser, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement. I like Rick a lot personally--too much to feel like I can review this memoir--and I'm enjoying his latest book immensely, as I've also loved his books on Washington and Hamilton.

A NEW HAVEN AND A NEW EARTH. So in a conversation about how 1) how it's a total cop-out to praise loyalties only insofar as they're chosen and unzippable, and 2) "vocation" complicates the concept of "choice" anyway--you don't choose what you hear even when you choose how you answer, I mangled Ingmar Bergman to get what I think is my new right-wing bumper sticker:

WE MAKE AN IDOL OF OUR FEAR AND CALL IT CHOICE.

I GRABBED YOU BY THE GILDED BEAMS--OH, THAT'S WHAT TRADITION MEANS!: Very scattered notes on a dust-up.

Once upon a time, an undergraduate posted her "political autobiography," under the title, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy."

...And then they exploded.

So far, the comments-boxing has punched blithely away at foundationalism, antifoundationalism, traditions, traditionalism, communities, communitarianism, communities unless they're full of hippies, Tom Eliot's translations, Godel, things that aren't Godel, James Dobson for some reason, and things that look like Godel when seen from a long way off.

And now I will take my turn, commenting or maybe just riffing on various things said by various combatants. (I promise not to mention Godel anymore though.) What follows are my thoughts on conservatism as love story, conservatism as complicity, and... you know... other stuff. And while I'm both postmodern and conservative, I'm pretty sure I'm cattercorners to whatever "postmodern conservative" is supposed to mean at their blog, so, you know, forewarned.

It's such a weird post, you know? (And do read it first if you're interested, or else I don't think this post will make any sense.) Nicola Karras gives these two really big, intricate apparati, and says that her post is the story of how they're hinged together, and yet we never get to see the hinge! Now, I'm honestly not sure that a blog post of any length can really draw a hinge (an epiphany) in ways that make sense to strangers. I would rather write a novel. But if a blog post is what you're gonna do, I'm gonna need some sketches or cartoons or Silly Putty impressions of a hinge.

AT THE DARK END OF THE STREET: Here, let me re-post the thing I posted in Nicola's comments, way back in the halcyon days of Thursday:

To the extent that this is a love story in which the beloved(s) remain intentionally unnamed, I can understand your interlocutors’ frustration! WHOM one loves (whether a person, a Person, or a persona e.g. a tradition) makes an enormous difference....

I can guess at a few possible beloveds; and you say yourself that this is a story of the shape of your thoughts rather than their content, but obviously it’s really difficult to separate shape from content, and I wonder if your decision to attempt the separation wasn’t a mistake.

I'm hoping that this reading of Nicola's post is reasonably accurate. Because there are several different ways to read it, and a love story with a beloved (or beloveds) she can actually name would be the best one. A love story in which the identity of the mystery date hasn't been revealed, but she thinks it might, and she's going on a detective search--that's also good. I hope it doesn't end up like this existentialist detective story!

There are at least two other possible genres for her autobiography, and I think some of her interlocutors may have assumed too quickly that her post falls into one of these two categories. Now, after reading her second post, I'm not totally sure their criticisms are unfounded ("My realization was not of the truth of anything in particular, but in the fact that I could have meaning without the certainty of truth. ...But meaning also comes from the search"), but it's possible she is just expressing herself in a way I'm misreading; we'll see!

(I'll say right now that if Will Wilson is citing my post on the "birthday cake of existence" in defense of that particular line, he's misunderstanding it. My post is about how you seek. It assumes that you will keep searching. It's an affirmation that your ethics sometimes should affect your search for a metaphysics--not a rejection of the need for a metaphysics, nor a rejection of the need for that metaphysics to affect your ethics in turn! I mean, sure, meaning also comes from the search, but that meaning is either a) epistemic conditions which imply metaphysical ones, come on! or b) fluffy feelings. In a beautiful and functional Socratic-traditional community, it's often hard to tell a) and b) apart, and I'm hoping that's why Nicola hasn't yet begun to reflexively distinguish them.)

(Oh, and! Read this, because it's awesome; and because it delineates points of agreement and dissent within a group often wrongly believed to be monolithic; and because I think it's really, really smart and provocative; and because it reminds me of my best friend; and because it answers so very many objections so quickly; and because it's awesome!)

When the ship runs out of ocean and the vessel runs aground,
Land's where you know the boat is found.
And there's nothing unexpected about the water running out;
"Land!" is not a word we have to shout.
--They Might Be Giants, "Women and Men"

The first story Nicola's challengers think she's telling boils down to, "You had an existential crisis and then discovered that: language. 'Descartes knew only that he existed, and that he spoke French.' And because this revelation was so startling to someone raised in a vat of rationalist cliche, you immediately assumed that this very thin 'tradition' meant you had to be a 'traditionalist,' thus a conservative. You fell until you hit the floor, and the floor was made of words instead of the rationally-accessible Platonic forms you were expecting, and so since language is a tradition you started hating the government."

Take this moment to decide
If we meant it, if we tried
Or felt around for far too much
For things that accidentally touched...
Know the things we need to say
We'd said already anyways
Parallelograms collide
On walls that we repainted white
--The Weakerthans, "Sun in an Empty Room"

The second story is more like, "By the power of Greyskull, I have MEANING!"--a Nietzschean willed denial of the crisis, in which conservatism is asserted because why not?, and then you deny that you ever asserted it rather than discovering it, because if it was all just will to power then you're still falling in empty space.

In both of these stories-I-hope-Nicola's-not-telling, she then stops, once the immediate crisis is over and she has found some form of tradition (and thus community) to cling to. And this is why I think she needed to be more explicit about the nature of the beloved, if there is or might be one; because it's this beloved who could make demands of her, who could ask her to sacrifice, rather than allowing her to rest in the complacence of a preexisting tradition.

I think Nicola is trying to describe--to use my terms rather than hers--how she came to conjoin sublimity and morality, the same weirdness of the Jews which Clive Lewis describes in the introduction to The Problem of Pain. But Yahweh is shaped exactly like a hinge, and Nicola hasn't given us any hinge-alternative.

So that's my meta-comment. Now for some very slightly less meta comments.

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE OXYMORONIC; ALL MY FRIENDS WAKE UP ALONE. (Or, "Resolved: A coherent conservatism is both necessary and impossible." Or, as Andrei Navrozov once said, "The Party of the Right is a group of people who prefer a bad paradox to a good cliche." Or, "The question mark was part of the title.")

Conservatism is inherently in conflict, inherently deconstructive. If the basic move of deconstructionism is to heighten both sides of a paradox, not in order to let one side triumph but in order to strengthen or deepen or make more sublime the paradox itself, then conservatism--the self-conscious defense of givenness, the rejection of the tide of history in the name of tradition, the Socrates who praises Aristophanes, the attempt to defend love in the arena of rationalism and constraint in the arena of license--is the ultimate deconstructionist practice.

And so when anyone reflective says, "I am a conservative," what she means (or what I mean, anyway!) is, "I see the unresolved conflicts of the conservative worldview as more important and more compelling than either the conflicts or the resolutions of liberalism and leftism." I would rather talk about the individual as a paradox, not a hero. I know that love and marriage are in conflict, and I don't want either of them to win. I know that the market works against liberty and against community--but I also know that government solutions are usually just a matter of switching around the victims and the victimizers, thus turning people who once merely suffered into people who, far worse, oppress. I am pretty sure that all societies are structures of sin, and that if you tell me we can get to a society that isn't, it's because you want me to sign on to a society whose sins are even worse than the horrors of the current age.

Conservatism is complicity. But conscious complicity is far, far more open to right action, self-sacrifice, and even positive change, than complicity denied. If you say complicity is eternal this side of Heaven, you can't do the standard champagne-socialist thing of forestalling any sacrifices on your own part until the revolution comes. There won't be a revolution, or if there is, it won't help, and so you need to make yourself a gift now.

You'll notice that I'm using fairly Christian language here. There's a reason for that. If the Left's great temptation is complicity denied or payment deferred, the Right's great temptation is complacency: complicity affirmed as a good, rather than accepted as an evil.

And so not only must a conservative understand herself to be (in her conservatism) essentially conflicted. In order to be halfway decent, she must also have something outside conservatism with which her already-conflicted conservatism is further challenged and in several places defeated.

Obviously I think Christ, the radical, is the best opponent of conservatism (and, you know, of everyone!). That's one reason, of many, why I'm so incredibly sympathetic to L'Hote/Freddie's position, especially as expressed here. But I do think there are many, many other possible opponents, which is one reason why--since Nicola is not yet a Christian!--I want her to name her beloveds if she can do so without violating a confidence. She mentions duty--to whom?--and compassion--requiring what?

I HEARD IT FROM STEVEN SMITH, AND STEVEN SMITH HEARD IT FROM ALLAN BLOOM, AND ALLAN BLOOM HEARD IT FROM LEO STRAUSS, AND LEO STRAUSS HEARD IT FROM MOSES! But of all the things that have been said in these threads, this thing, from the very provocative and interesting blog L'Hote, is by far the weirdest to me:

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.

(link)

I... but... he... *deep breath* Yes. There are some defenses of tradition which defend it for its unthinking, unreflective nature, its inability to change, its obviousness, its inability to introspect.

Those defenses are wrong.

Your Honor, I'd like to introduce into the evidence: Saint Justin Martyr. And, you know, all Catholic philosophy ever. And midrash. If even traditions backed up by God Almighty can introspect and challenge themselves and wrestle angels and change--change with fidelity to the covenant!--why would not mere human traditions have the same ability? To deny the ability of tradition to understand itself as a choice ("I set before you life and death; choose life therefore, that you and your descendants might live"--and life is the covenant) is to assume what must be proven, that all choices are assertions of self rather than submission to the beloved. Moreover, it's to assume another thing that must be proven, that reflection is corrosive--that analysis can only exist without synthesis, when I'd argue that it can only exist with synthesis.

I wrote a while ago about how the Catholic Magisterium has acted as a spur to intellect throughout the ages--giving us understandings of justice, mercy, rationality, coherence, compassion on which even atheists still rely--but I can't find that right now, so, you know, just read Cur Deus Homo.

[and here I excised a really long riff about conservatism-as-fanfiction, which I swear I will post somewhere sometime soon because I kind of love it, but it's a distraction right now.]

It's possible that this is obvious to me and, I think, to Nicola, precisely because we're both members of the Party of the Right--the most paradoxical, introspective, Socratic-traditional undergraduate organization north, south, east aaaaaaaaaand west of the Pecos! My first experience of a self-proclaimed tradition (with the partial exception of the Jewish services and day camp I attended sporadically as a child) was an experience of a tradition both rigorous in its self-questioning and beautiful enough to withstand even the sharpest questions. The Party seduced when she couldn't reply rationally (or rationalistically) to a challenge; and when you smelled her perfume suddenly your challenge became a lot less important than just keeping her in your arms a little longer.

So, you know, I'm used to that.

(possibly my posts on tradition as persona would be helpful here--everything on January 31 should give you what you're looking for)

WHY DO FOOLS FALL IN LOVE?: One thing I really like about Nicola's posts is that she is very very clear about what or whom she doesn't love. Seriously. I think a lot of people are misunderstanding her as saying she loved faut de mieux. I think a lot of people misunderstand me as saying that, when I talk about my conversion, especially when I get all "my love of women prepared me for love of Christ!"

The experience of falling and the experience of falling in love are related but separate things. For me... I keep falling and then falling in love and then the former and then the latter and then everything at once, possibly because I'm scatterbrained! But I'd like to say, as someone whose situation is really quite different from Nicola's, that just because you say, "I have no idea who I'd be or what I'd do if I didn't believe in God," that doesn't mean, "I have to love somebody, so I guess it'll just be God, because that's so convenient for my rationality!"

I'm not really sure how to convince someone of that fact. Again, you can't reason your way to an epiphany. The novel I'm working on right now is about that experience of falling in love with God--how that love both responds to and challenges all our former questions--and I think that will be more convincing than I can be right now. I'll just say that if someone says, "Through love I became a [X]," where X is any philosophical stance, you are probably wrong if you assume she ended up where she is faut de mieux or, to coin a phrase, even though she should know better.

THANK YOU FOR THE FLOWERS AND THE BOOK BY DERRIDA/BUT I MUST BE GETTING BACK TO DEAR ANTARCTICA: I'll approach the finish line with this:

So what is the project of postmodern conservatism? Is it, as I think Freddie understands it, to justify conservatism in the language of postmodernity? Or is it the first steps towards overcoming?

from Nicola, because I like it a lot, and I'm not sure whether my love of it makes it more or less attractive to her!

HONEY FOR THE BEARS: And finally, I hate myself for even writing this post, when I should be attempting to starve the beast of undergraduate blogging. I can resist anything except etc etc.

RESURRECTED WORDS BATTLE ZOMBIE WORDS: So of course someone put his finger squarely on the weakness of my Parmenides/Huckabee post: What now?

Well, I want to say a few things. I'm going to do my thing first, because this is my blog, and then if I think it will help to respond to my interlocutor I'll do so; otherwise I'll yield the floor.

First: Does BDFAR actually disagree with my premise? That is, does he actually think that "reason" or "nature" or "happiness" or "pleasure" are either a) a basically uncontested category in American politics, or b) a good-enough basis for politics? I'm going to say that the first three are radically contested, and the fourth is a frankly gross basis for politics. Does he disagree?

I honestly don't know how you can look out your window and not think that virtues have become brain-eating zombie words. But if somebody wants to say, "Oh yes! We have all kinds of virtue beliefs in common, and those are the most important ones!", well shoot, I'd love to listen.

Second: Of course we do actually share an enormous amount in common. When I talk about marriage I can say "Song of Songs" and most people know what I mean. This is important for the next point, but it isn't really the same as having a cultural consensus on marriage, as--again--I think almost anyone would agree.

On the one hand, I want to beat up the leftist postmodernists with copies of Donald Davidson's "On the Very Notion of a Conceptual Scheme"--you really can't get away from Shakespeare, sweeties! (which is not at all what DD meant to say, because he's naive about language, but it's still kind of obviously true)--but on the other hand, of course, the Left arises out of the same tradition and the same facts about the world that produced Shakespeare, and is thereby almost as universal as he is. (Not quite as, because he's multivocal, while the Left by definition tends to flatten all voices into one voice. I'm sorry your philosophy arose after the Enlightenment screwed up philosophical practice. Desperately not my fault, though, y'all.)

[eta: Sorry!--that previous paragraph was not at all in direct response to BDFAR, and I wasn't assuming that he (?) is in any unusual or interesting way "on the left"; I don't know his political beliefs.]

Third, and most excitingly: All anyone can ever do is present descriptions of how persuasion happens. This meta-discussion is vastly less interesting (and likely less fruitful philosophically) than simply persuading; but every now and then maybe it has to happen.

So here's what Huckabee should do, a.k.a. what everyone should do.

Get on your hands and knees. Humbly feel around for shared premises. Listen, listen quickly!

Talk about why you believe what you believe, in terms which you think might be persuasive to people who don't already agree. This ridiculously basic step is the one Huckabee missed, of course. He was a Rortyan without a secular canon--Rorty writes as though of course we all draw the same lessons he drew from Western lit, and Huckabee shows the same naivete about the Bible. I'm not sure which of them comes across as more provincial: Rorty with his canon which can never get outside the boundaries set by some projected self-shadow he called Nabokov, or Huckabee with his Bible which can never get outside the boundaries set by the Washington Times. Neither one of them exemplifies self-overhearing, to be frank.

So yeah--feel around, on your hands and knees, for words. If you find a word that might work, pick it up and wave it around and see where it catches the light: sublimity, beauty, honor. Maybe people who are allergic to talk of good and bad, or wrong and right, can hear those words when the light glints off them just right.

Eventually I think you should look for the light source; but then, I would say that, and I don't think it's a desperately useful thing to say in this conversation. For the moment let's just go with feeling around on the floor, listening, feeling with your palms until some shard of something really hurts. Pick that thing up. Look at that thing. That's the thing your culture teaches you to avoid. That's something worth looking at.

Fourth: To resurrect a word, you need to be a leader. That's actually the definition of leadership: resurrecting a word for a community.

John Keegan's Mask of Command is the most profound study of leadership I've read; the only other option is Plato's Symposium. Philosophy cannot proceed--maybe ever, but certainly in our day--without leadership, and therefore it cannot proceed without authority.

Where do words take meaning? From our culture, from our wants? From our beloveds? Or perhaps from some other--some Other--who pushes somehow beyond self and culture and beloved?

Philosophy, as eros, is precisely the eros for this other option, this hidden god, this Other. Apollo yearns for Dionysos, always, always.

Thus every resurrected word will lead--if we follow her--back to her tomb and then to her Savior.

ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP: PARMENIDES AND HUCKABEE BATTLE THE BLOB!: This very good post by Ryan Anderson is an opportunity for me to finally explain what I meant by saying that all culture rests on religion, “and by religion I mean an understanding of the nature of love”; and culture can't be separated from politics.

It’s pretty easy to jump from that statement to Huckabee’s, “I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do--to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.”

I think it’s fairly boring to say, “I don’t want conversion by the sword.” It’s unjustifiable on Christian grounds (sorry, St. Augustine, for the most part I think you’re the squiggly neon shoelaces of the world and I love you to little sparkly bits, but that wasn’t your finest hour) and, really, after JPII and his insistence on the rights of conscience, do we still need to have this discussion? So I will bracket it, because this is my blog, and instead talk about the ways in which Huckabee is right, and Richard Rorty is right, and Alisdair MacIntyre is right--because these are three guys I would far prefer to use as scratching posts, so defending them will be an exercise in humility.

All natural-law talk is virtue-talk at heart. Certainly in the realm of politics this is true. There are some things Reason can’t explain; for everything else, there’s natural law. If you believe anything remotely close to that, you are a virtue-talker.

MacIntyre is right on two counts: First, that virtue-talk is necessary to translate religion (“an understanding of the nature of love”) into politics and culture. Second, that virtue-talk has broken down in our culture, and is merely a threadbare proxy for much more fundamental clashes of worldviews.

These two things are both true because virtues are names. I don’t mean that virtues have names. I mean that virtues, in both the cultural and the political arena, are names. If I say that a certain behavior is “dishonorable,” of course everyone nowadays asks, “By what standard of honor?” So too with “chaste,” so too with “cruel,” so too with “courageous,” so too with everything. Marriage, fidelity, kindness, justice--no noun can stand on the solid ground of universally-acknowledged meaning nowadays.

And therefore our Constitution cannot stand on that ground either. If you think I’m wrong… define “cruel and unusual punishment.” Every word in that phrase except “and” is not merely contested as a matter of political practice, but contested as a matter of basic, irreconcilable philosophical and theological worldview.

In other words: If the Eighth Amendment has meaning, rather than being a fight club of not merely competing but mutually exclusive meanings, then it must have meaning in reference to some underlying Truth which infuses meaning into our words “cruel” and “unusual” and “punishment.”

If the One is not, then nothing is.

Plato’s Parmenides is right that all of Socrates’ vaunted Forms rested on some underlying conception of reality: the One. Without some kind of consensus--however limited--on the One, no Form made sense.

Huckabee is right that without some underlying cultural consensus on basic definitions of justice, mercy, rights, marriage, compassion, cruelty, and even reason itself, whose definition is anything but obvious, we cannot possibly have a coherent national politics. Politics is a conversation punctuated with gunfire. If we don’t even understand the words the other side is speaking, the gunfire will of necessity get more frequent, and the conversation less so.

Rorty is right that there’s a way out, and that way is aesthetic in nature. When the Good and the True have collapsed into a hundred muttering and squabbling goblins; when the One is a longed-for rag of memory no more puissant than Prester John; still the Beautiful and--one hopes even more so--the Sublime call to us.

This is why the ultimate political evil of our age isn't cruelty, and isn’t even selfishness. The ultimate political evil of our age is sentimentality, which leaches the meaning from meaningful things; or, to use its secret name, banality.

PEOPLE SHOULD GET BEAT UP FOR SKATIN' LIKE THE LEAFS. Never before have I had a dream involving:

* my mother asking me, in deeply troubled tones, why I had changed my beliefs, no longer believing in the maximization of utilitarian happiness for the average person (she had an example involving grocery shopping), at which point I explained that I now cared more about "various kinds of excellence" than about happiness;

* Canadians lion-racing (in fact, I suspect this is the first dream of mine in which the Canadian anthem has featured under any circumstance);

* a stand-up comic asking for definitions of tradition, which led to the Reactionary Epicurean using my tradition/addiction shtik... which in turn led to all of us getting heckled by a six-fingered man for "drinking from the keg of hatred every day."

WHITE LIES/BLOW AWAY: Traditionalism without religion is addiction.

BLOG/RELIEF: RIGHT TURN ON RED. JWB donated to disaster relief, and asked for five ways of completing the sentence, "I am a conservative because…". [lightly edited for clarity]

First, some caveats: 1) Yes, I could also do five ways of completing the sentence, "I am a liberal because…" and maybe at least three ways for, "I am on the Left because…". (Maybe.) Those would probably be more boring than the conservatism answers, for a number of reasons: I'm liberal in the way that Americans are inescapably liberal, and that's not exciting; I was raised on the Left, so my conservatism requires more introspection and gnawing-on than the other options; liberalism is a more clearly-delineated tradition, by which I mean that it makes more sense to call Aristophanes a conservative than to call Socrates a liberal (although you could make a case against the former and in favor of the latter, if you for some reason wanted to), and Leftism is even more clearly-delineated; and for reasons having much more to do with my personality than with the merits of any political philosophy, I'm more interested in working out the ways in which I'm conservative than the ways in which I'm liberal or leftist.

2) The ideas below are not going to get you to a welfare policy, or many other specific policy positions. They're part of the general philosophy I consult when I need to work out what I think of an issue, but I do understand that you can get to different places from these premises. So, like, don't yell at me because you agree with the premise but think it leads to different conclusions--I'm laying out the platform from which we can begin a discussion of political philosophy, not the end-state.

3) These are ideas I'm chewing on at the moment. (And perhaps for that reason, this list is neither as interesting nor as coherent as I'd like!) It is entirely possible that what I hope is "the next conservatism" is actually "the conservatism I made up in my mind"… or maybe even "the next liberalism," although I doubt that sincerely, which is one major reason I call myself a conservative even while disagreeing radically with most Americans who use the term.

Uh, okay, enough disclaimers. Let's get out the candles, the whiskey, and the Crab Rangoon, and start talking!

…because power corrupts. First of all, get it out of your system: Insert snark about current administration here. I'll likely agree. But this is one basis of my remaining feathers of libertarianism. I see people on the Left correctly identifying various loci of power in the private sector, like corporations, and attempting to use the government to limit that power. First off, I hope we can all keep in mind that corporations give us butter and disco, and for this we should be grateful. But also, isn’t this strategy a bit like the old woman who swallowed the fly? It’s not great to have a fly inside you, but that doesn't mean swallowing a spider is the right response…. See my second post about Wendell Berry for more.

Look, I volunteer at a crisis pregnancy center. I see the grinding edge of capitalism (as well as, of course, the hard consequences of replacing daddy with the dole). That doesn't mean shifting yet more power to the people who brought you the DEA is the best response.

…because man is made in the image of God. This is something whose immediate application to politics I'm still struggling with. It obviously comes out in torture. I want to think hard about how it relates to the next item:

…because we are dependent rational creatures. Liberalism, and other processes of applying the acid of Reason to social forms, tends to work very well for competent, rational people with the wherewithal to display their competence and reasoning power. It has a much harder time understanding unchosen responsibility, unchosen debility, and other forms of dependence. Abortion and euthanasia are logical consequences of liberalism.

This is the primary, and best, critique of liberalism by the Left--and one of the Left's great failures in the contemporary era is that it has failed to apply its defense of the defenseless to the old, the sick, and especially the unborn. Understanding why the Left failed here, what it got importantly right and why it came to ignore its own best impulses, seems like a basic project for any "next conservatism" I'd approve.

(I wonder if this Orwell essay isn't a good place to start? Understanding dependence requires understanding our universal dependence on God....)

…because religion is the heart of culture. And by "religion," I mean an understanding of the nature of love.

And also, a related but separate thought: Culture includes, but surpasses, government, and can't be untangled from government. That was part of what knocked me out of my "conservative libertarian" phase--while obviously you need to give specific attention to specific issues, in a way that this post just isn't going to attempt, I basically no longer believe that you can sustain a good-enough society with a rights-shaped governing philosophy. (This is related to my suggestion here that it becomes hardest to separate Christianity from politics when citizens disagree on the nature of justice.)

…because traditions give meaning and beauty to necessary suffering. That's one of the very few interesting things I said in that AFF marriage roundtable. The pithier way to say it--which is probably closer to what I mean, anyway--is, "because I prefer the suffering of constraint to the suffering of alienation"… but I wanted to give you guys something original-ish, not just the Cigarette Smoking Blog's commonplace book! (And I can't find the link where that phrase is roughly from, so if she wants to send it, I'd be grateful.)

(I speculated half-jokingly at one point to the Rattus that left-wing novels were about how suffering is bad, and right-wing novels were about how suffering is good…. Dunno if that's true, and would love to hear examples, counterexamples, and theories….)

Tradition, like constraint, is based in relationship. So it should come as no surprise that ideologies of choice and reflexive suspicion of tradition dissolve the social forms that sustain relationships, and leave freedom, relief from the previous form of suffering, banality, and alienation in their place. This is pretty much the entire point of my senior essay, a.k.a. Nietzsche vs. Eros: This Time It's Personal.

It's also one of the really insightful points in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which is my current reading--I'm on chapter three. The guy's critique of modern alienation is about four hundred times better than his proposed fluffy, "Believe in whatever!" solution, but I still really appreciate that he understands that meaninglessness is worse than pain.