I GOT MYSELF A GUN/AND I CAN SHOOT DOWN EVERYONE/THINKING I JUST INVENTED SOME RELIGION:

Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence.

more (via A&LDaily)

I WOULD NEVER SAY "I TOLD YOU SO," OH, BUT TONY... I TOLD YOU SO: Some aphorisms of Don Colacho, as I discover a blog. (...For the theological ones, I feel duty-bound to note that Christianity complicates everybody's aphoristic wisdom a.k.a. self-image, so if you want to argue with an aphorism it might be better to sit and let it steep in you and figure out the ways in which it might be true. Or to put it another way, I don't think "Don Colacho's" point is actually that he's right about Jesus.)

#2,966: Superficial, like the sociological explanation of any behavior.

#2,964: A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.

#2,956: The modern clergy believe they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity.

Thus forgetting that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.

#2,953: Historical events stop being interesting the more accustomed their participants become to judging everything in purely secular categories.

Without the intervention of gods everything becomes boring.

#2,952: If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, its history is a colorless narrative.

#2,949: Where the law is not customary law, it is easily turned into a mere political weapon.

#2,942: The secret longing of every civilized society is not to abolish inequality, but to educate it.

#2,938: Baroque, preciosity, modernism, are noble failings, but failings in the end.

#2,937: An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.

#2,936: The modern clergy, in order to save the institution, try to rid themselves of the message.

#2,932: After having been, in the last century, the instrument of political radicalism, universal suffrage is becoming, as Tocqueville foresaw, a conservative mechanism.

#2,931: Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes.

[I'm stopping after one page, but this is fantastic stuff. Even the punchlines with which I actively disagree are fierce.]

CATO BOUND. My essay on traditionalism is up now.

THE CREATION OF A PRIVATE LANGUAGE is also, of course, an important way in which tradition functions to make an institution more like a person, and an individual's acceptance of an abstracted, often difficult or subordinate, role more like a specific relationship of love between two people.

Uyeda says that his approach to cocktail-making is grounded in the Japanese tea ceremony. It is an "adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order."
--"Tokyo, Cocktail Capital of the World," Hugh Garvey, in Best Food Writing 2009

COMMAND PERFORMANCE: Once I've actually finished Second Skins I'll do a chapter-by-chapter. Like many academic works (e.g. Etienne Gilson's deeply-felt Heloise and Abelard) this book opens with its toughest and most jargon-riddled chapter. I hesitate even to comment on the Judith Butler critique since I am a) unschooled and b) desperately anti-sympathetic to Butler's project. I basically felt like Prosser was defending... you know... common sense--which isn't really accurate, and certainly isn't an especially useful interpretive lens, even though I agree with and appreciate Prosser's writing.

But I was struck by how Prosser's work sidled up to what I know or believe without ever engaging directly! I genuinely think Second Skins would be better if John Paul II's "theology of the body" were engaged: He offers a theology of sexual difference, rather than solely a cultural history of sexual difference, and he does so while clearly separating sexual identity from gender expression. JPII lets Augustine cry. And so he challenges us to view sex as a real symbol, an enfleshed reality whose expression is deeply culturally-contingent. He takes the body seriously, and still proclaims iconic womanhood. In these two respects he is basically the opposite of (Prosser's representation of) Butler, and I wish Prosser had gone mano-a-mano with him.

Moreover, I think the excision of conservatism from academic thought--or the conservative recoil from academia, I'm thinking it's both--badly limited the metaphors available for Prosser. His basic project in the early chapters (it sort of changes later on, so hold on for my chapter-by-chapter review) is to reclaim the body against the Gnostic, moralizing, dissolvingly analytic tendency of queer theory. That's totally right-on and well taken! But Prosser kind of can't analyze gender in itself, because he lacks metaphors which allow for cultural constructions to be better or worse.

Wow, that was an obscure and abstracted paragraph! But the conclusion is really simple: Gender is like a lot of things. If Prosser were able to say that gender is like manners, or gender is like art, or gender is like tradition... he'd be able to, I think, maintain and even strengthen his anthropology while accepting that some gender is better than others. Manners are culturally-contingent, yet not optional! They imply a moral stance. Art is notoriously difficult to delimit, yet I can actually name some forms of self-expression as beautiful and others as ugly, or distinguish between sublime and banal. Tradition is precisely the kind of repetition Prosser loves (and I love it too!), repetition as redescription... repetition in a new context as a simultaneous acknowledgment of, response to, and reshaping of that context. This is pretty much the second-most awesome thing about tradition. An aesthetic conservative vocabulary would, therefore, seriously help Prosser both explain his gender theory and give examples. ...I think.

And on a related note (I almost typed, "an elated note"!), I think Prosser is mounting an oblique and perhaps-unintentional challenge to the basic queer-theory stance where every constraint is abhorrent. Prosser actually echoes Maggie Gallagher's Enemies of Eros in his hints that the flesh truly does constrain us. Maggie goes on to say that we fear the fleshly constraints of sex because we fear the ultimate fleshly constraint of death. Whether or not she's right about that, she's at least able to articulate an anthropology--and, crucially, an understanding of womanhood--in which the flesh constrains our choices and that's good.

Every now and then I toy with the phrase, "I am a conservative because...." My favorite Mad Libs endings right now are, "...I believe suffering is a complex good, not a necessary evil," and "...submission is the best form of leadership."

Who sails the ships out of Blogwatch,
Laden with Bibles and rum?

Megan McArdle: You should be reading Megan anyway, because she gets both the problems with the current US health-care system and the problems with the proposed fixes; but I found this post especially interesting for its discussion of what the euro can and can't do.

Sean Collins:

Digression: In writing about film for this blog I've noticed that I don't talk about form the way I do with comics. Like I said, I've lost a lot of that vocabulary, which in turn limits my ability to think that way, and that's really sad. When I first started regularly reviewing comics--probably for The Comics Journal--it took a shot by Milo George at the state of comics criticism to make me realize that I was doing the usual formula: Three or four paragraphs about the writing, one paragraph about the art, a "to be sure" paragraph, and a conclusion. Figuring out that comics are a visual medium ain't rocket science, so to confer upon myself a rocket-science degree if you will, I tried to fix this the easiest way I could: I began forcing myself to start reviews by talking about the visual aspects of the comics.

more--I'll be pushing myself this way as well

The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings. I wouldn't care really, but now that I really like Deadpool... I mean really, the pouches and the buttocks and the... the hands that don't do what they should and the FEET the FEET the BARBIE FEET I just can't... well yeah, basically Liefeld is genuinely as bad as you've heard. And this takedown is mostly funny!

The Richard Hofstedter Drinking Game.

"The next conservative thinkers." Surprisingly not-awful.

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

REFUSIONISM: So at a wedding over the weekend, I ended up in the perennial right-wing debate: Is fusionism a tactic, a political philosophy, or a scam?

What I say in this post is my interpretation of my experience; other people may have had other experiences, or interpreted them differently, and I'd really like to hear about that. But from my perspective, "trads" aka conservatives seem to interact with libertarians and their arguments in a very different way from the way libertarians interact with trads and trad arguments.

From my perspective, I see trads accepting libertarians as allies on criminal-justice/Fourth Amendment/"Leave Us Alone Coalition"/big govt vs. the "little platoons" issues, whereas libertarians tend to view trads as dinosaurs who don't believe in dinosaurs. (Keep in mind that I'm only talking about people in both camps who think a lot about their positions and have some degree of philosophical depth. Because I persist in my evidence-free belief that these people's conversations matter.) Trads seem to me more open to libertarian arguments on police power as state expansion than libertarians are to trad arguments on family and charity as the foundations of a free society. Trads seem to me able to grok libertarian arguments which invoke justice much more than libertarians can grok trad arguments which invoke beauty.

From these perhaps-wrong observations I move to a more general observation, behind which I'll stand all the way: American political and cultural discourse is devastated by our inability to speak politically about beauty. We let anything trump beauty--even choice. Even equality, for pity's sake! Thus we're desperately stupid about sex, about urban policy, about technology, about hierarchy and tradition. (Yes, I promise to cash out some of that list soon, but don't let that stop you from emailing me!)

And now back to a much more tentative question: We hear a lot about psych studies which purport to show that self-identified conservatives have a much stronger sense of "disgust" than soi-disant liberals. I wonder to what extent that is really true (who is more disgusted by images of physical pain, the devastation of war, torture, or--for one example in which I side with the right-wingers--skinning a rabbit?), but certainly a huge amount of liberal rhetoric is directed toward exalting reason at the expense of disgust. I dislike both of these terms! "Reason" too often becomes a nickname for naivete (rational = what my culture and disposition allow me to understand), when it isn't a nickname for power-worship (let the clever rule the weak). And "disgust" has all the class-based problems of shame, in which we recoil from the weak because of their weakness, as well as all the problems of good-person talk.

But I still wonder... if liberalism diminishes disgust (which I'm not convinced it does--I suspect liberals simply call their disgust another name, like "compassion"), is that why it also diminishes our ability to stand up for beauty? And does that mean we can't speak politically about beauty without reviving disgust?

I hope not. But beauty has so often been deployed against weakness (see: Paglia, Camille) that people on my side of the argument need to reckon with the moral passions we seek to unleash.

SHE NEEDS YOU/MORE THAN SHE LOVES YOU: An email in response to my post about tradition and iconicity:

First, you suggest that tradition's primary purpose is to create a persona out of an impersonal thing (like a place or an institution) so that individual human beings might truly love it. But it seems to me that this position reduces love to an exclusively inter-personal phenomenon. I will accept that love cannot exist apart from the relationship between persons, but consider that (theologically) the act of God's creation is sometimes described as an overflowing of the Love within the Trinity. Thus, God loves rocks and trees though they are impersonal.

Might we not say that human love of institutions, places, etc. result from a similar overflowing. A Frenchman does not first love France, but rather his family, and then, later, his love overflows into the place that made his family possible, and the institutions that gave it shape. Under this scheme, tradition does not create a persona but rather forms a shifting network of channels into which love may overflow. Love allows us to see the beauty of the beloved even where it is concealed from plain sight. Just so, loving the beloved allows us to love what the beloved loves, and to love what brought the beloved into being, and to love a thousand other things as well. And as love overflows, so do we become privy to ever more beauty.

And tradition, by binding people together and to institutions, customs, foods, ways, stories, etc. etc. makes the flow of love from one thing to the next easier and more regular. But I think you miss something if you say a French person loves France more fully as personified rather than as experienced.

Secondly, I would like to make a distinction... you mention the Church as one of the "fictive women" alongside Marianne and Israel. The Church, however, must be distinguished because the Church is in some sense a real Being with an existence distinct (if not independent) from its constitutent parts. France is the people of France and their ways, land, and all the things to which the people of France are bound. The Church, however, is the Union between God and man, which is a Unity in the image of the Unity between the Persons of God. And just as the three Persons of God make up a single Being Who is not merely three Persons existing in a certain relationship to one another, so the Church is a single (eschatological) Being. Consider that Marianne (a fiction) is the symbol of France, but the symbol of the Church is Mary.

That being said, the Church is a Unity as well as being a truly human institution (that is the mystery of the Incarnation, right?) and thus is formed by tradition as any other human institution. I think this actually lends support to my "overflow" model of tradition, since the idea that tradition builds up the Church into a persona would set up two parallel and conflicting symbologies -- one of Marianne and one of Mary.

so yeah, that's awesome.

Some quick responses: I really do believe love is "an exclusively interpersonal phenomenon." I'm not sure how to defend this belief--I've tried a couple of paragraphs and deleted all of them--but actually I don't think my interlocutor is really disagreeing here, he's just pointing out that tradition might be explained without rejecting that basic belief.

I'm still not sure he's right, though. If I love France as an overflowing of my love for my family, can I ever serve France when that would damage my family? Can I have some ideal of France with which my family members would disagree?

The Unabomber was turned in by his brother. I've been convinced of a vision of America which is very different from the vision of ditto embraced by my family. Can we really negotiate these conflicting and shifting loyalties without personifying nationhood--and even, sometimes, putting those personified nations above other forms of personal loyalty?

I very much agree with the distinction between the Church and "Marianne." In fact, I generally think that Christianity (like Judaism) cuts the Gordian knot of philosophy by presenting an object of love Who is simultaneously a moral arbiter.

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.

PUTTING THE "PALE" BACK IN PALEOCONS: Of course within 15 pages Trent's Last Case gives us a "raving crowd of Jews." I couldn't tell you why. (Oh, no, right--I remember! It's because the early twentieth century heralded a beautiful new era when Jews would reign over their Gentile oppressors! ...You know, because that's what happened!)

Oh paleoconservatism. How you won't be missed.

"'KISS'? WHAT IS 'KISS'?": So today, for the second time in a couple weeks, I came across that definition of postmodernism (Lyotard's?) where it's defined as the rejection of metanarratives. Here's why I think that's unhelpful. These thoughts are even more fragmentary than usual, which I suppose is appropriate....

I'm no more interested in a "definition" of postmodernism than I am in a definition of conservatism; both terms seem to imply more a tradition of discourse than an orthodoxy.

And within that tradition of discourse there are authors whose work relies heavily on certain highly-charged terms--words "surcharg'd with wine," as they say--and if you single out these words as especially important, that implies a metanarrative. This is still true even if the author doesn't attempt to discern or dictate much about the content of that metanarrative. The example I think of is Derrida's use of "the other" and "the avenir," both of which imply, I think, a sort of skeletal Jewish-or-maybe-Christian narrative. (And not, for example, a Platonist one, because of the emphasis on the avenir. Some narratives are excluded, which I'm pretty sure you can't do unless you do have a metanarrative, however parsimonious or covert.)

There are likely other elements of Derrida's thought which would conflict with the narrative implied by the other-avenir stuff; but it seems to me that you then end up either discerning conflict between narratives, or reconciling them somehow (either of which implies a metanarrative about what constitutes conflict and what constitutes reconciliation). Or, you know, just saying one thing and then saying something else, but at that point you're just giving up on the self, like when you put your nose right up to a pointillist painting and all the people turn out to be cacophonies of dots; that is certainly one way to do postmodernism, but not the only one within this tradition of discourse. And in fact, to my mind it's the least interesting response to conflicting implied narratives, because it's the only one where you don't ever have to change anything at all about yourself. You can just keep "holding Yes and No together in one hand," in Anne Carson's terrific phrase, which is the same thing as standing still. No choices are required and therefore no sacrifices and no personal transformation. What is the point of a life like that? I mean, I suppose you could be happy. If that's what you really want.

Back to Derrida and implied narratives, which in turn imply metanarratives. Now, I admit that I'm an extremist here: I think words like "vulture" and "sparrow" imply a metanarrative. But I don't think you have to go that far (although I wish you would! Didn't Wilde teach us that we must "go as far as possible"?) to accept the point that some words which were crucial to actual existing postmodernists do imply metanarratives.

In fact, I'd argue that the term "postmodernity" itself, while obviously insufficient and kind of hilariously woozy with indeterminacy, implies a fairly obvious narrative, in which modernity is a thing which it's important that we're post-. So by the time you're pretending to define it, you're already accepting and/or creating a metanarrative. (I'm guessing Lyotard, or whoever, knew this and addressed it somehow or decided not to care, so I'm really not addressing him but more his popularizers.)

And this brings me to John Paul II, whom I consider the greatest postmodernist of the past century, and whose wine-charged word was so often "nuptial" or "gift" or some similar insufficiently-hardcore way of saying "kiss." Not only in his writings on the "theology of the body" but also in his writings on faith and reason, and on philosophical practice, he tapped into and further explicated a narrative in which the primary metaphor for our lives is the kiss: both otherness and reconciliation, with neither term conquering the other. So much of his writing is pretty obviously a translation of basic Biblical rhetoric into the new language/slang/pidgin of postmodernity.

My bitter-little-lady thought for the day is to wonder whether existentialist postmodernism is simply Christianity reconceived as intellectual promiscuity: kissing everything in sight in an attempt at self-expression.

So... yeah, this was obviously much more of a blog post than a treatise! But then, I reject treatises utterly--if you must write philosophy, write dialogues. My main problem with JPII, on a philosophical level, is that he shoulda just kept writing plays.

RESOLVED: THE CONSERVATIVE CANNOT BE A PHILOSOPHER. So how many of the posts at Secular Right really boil down to rejections of philosophy as such?

Surely it is possible to be conservative, in love with Sophia, and--at least for a while!--atheist. I mean, lots of my friends are in that position, and I'm going to tentatively say that if something exists then that thing must be possible. So where are their allies?

...AND HANDED THEM OVER TO THE SECULAR ARM: The comments section to this post, specifically Elizabeth Crum's use of the term "natural," reminded me of something I've wanted to write about for a while now--the fact that there's no such thing as a fully secular political argument.

Political arguments are about what is just, what is good, what is honorable, what is natural, and what is sacred. (They sometimes pretend to be about what is efficient or what is safe, but in order to rank efficiency and safety highest you must already have made a judgment about the relative ranking of the just and the good.) Those terms might seem like they're arranged in order from least to most religious, but I think really they're only arranged in order from least to most obviously religious given current philosophical mores. Even the most-neutral term, justice, is claimed by groups ranging from the American Center for Law and Justice to Jews for Justice to the Institute for Justice--these seem like groups working from obviously divergent traditions of meaning, obviously divergent definitions of the word "justice." More.

(I am reminded of the Yale man who leapt onto a table in Commons, at the height of the Panther trials, and yelled, "Justice to the Black Panthers! Death to the Black Panthers!" If ever a word was double-edged....)

What gives our words meaning?* This is, at heart, a religious question; a question of aesthetics, of whom or Whom we love.

*Yes, this is that same link I always give you. If I could think of a better way to say it, I would.

If we discard philosophical naivete, then, we can only argue that we should use the arguments most likely to be understood across a broad range of religious/reaction-against-religion-ous (sorry!) traditions. I see three reasons to support this claim, in increasing order of importance: social comity, good manners, and rhetorical effectiveness.

One of the central features of the American project is its need to simultaneously acknowledge, give meaning to, and mitigate the tragedies inherent in our status as an immigrant nation. Casting a broad rhetorical net is part of how we bring people into the American story. It's part of how we try to assimilate in both directions--immigrants changing America, even as they're changed by America. So social comity is a big deal here.

Good manners, even more important. It's uncouth to exclude someone just because you can--just because your clique has the numbers in the Homecoming Queen vote.

But rhetorical effectiveness is the most important reason to seek seemingly-neutral political rhetoric. And therefore, when sectarian rhetoric can be made so sublime that its appeal breaks over the banks of its sect, and washes across people from many other and contrary traditions, do it--this is the basic, boring lesson of the Rev. King's religious rhetoric.

The upshot: 1) "It's the right thing to do" is not a neutral statement. All virtue-words are given content by a religious tradition, a philosophical tradition, or (this is almost always the case nowadays) both. And since philosophy at its best takes part in the same eros as religion, suggesting that only the "non-religious" philosophy is valid in the public square will only make our discourse banal.

2) "Civil religion" which changes no minds and touches no hearts = stupid and useless. It's tapioca. Spit it out therefore, and seek sublime religious rhetoric of the kind which can awaken undiscovered longings even in the breast of a hardcore secularist.

3) To combine both of the above points: Neutral is boring. Neutral is banal. Neutral is also impossible, since even if you and I agree on the most efficient means of securing physical satisfaction (good luck with that!) we disagree on when, how, and whether justice, liberty, mercy, loyalty (which loyalties?), family, or sublimity should trump efficient satisfaction of wants.

In short, "You need to use secular arguments!" is bad philosophy and we should stop saying it. Show me pictures so I understand what your words mean. Don't pretend we share compatible traditions of justice or freedom or equality or happiness. And I'd rather be accommodated than implicitly excluded... but I'd rather be wooed than accommodated.

AND A BAND CALLED "AMERICA" SINGS A SONG ABOUT THE DESERT, AND A HORSE WITH NO NAME: Inside Catholic did a symposium about how Catholics can move forward from what has been--let's be honest--a devastating eight years.

I'm on page three, I think. I guess my entry is kind of, "Oh hey, powerlessness! Double down!"

So take it for what you paid for it.

OTHER SPAGHETTI, DIFFERENT WALLS: In my NormBlog profile I mentioned that doing a blog is especially exciting now for those of us on the Right, as we try to renew and reexamine our beliefs, because on a blog you can throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. A newly-launched blog, Secular Right, is attempting to do just that for the unbelievers among us. Walter Olson is involved, which bodes well.

I will be especially interested to see how any lib/trad-type splits play out on this site. You all know that I believe all political and moral/ethical talk is either incoherent or based on some object(s) of love. That's one reason atheist conservatives (as vs. libertarians) are so fascinating to me: Whom do they love, and how do those loves resemble or differ from love of God? How do those loves shape and contradict their conservatism, as love of God might shape and contradict a believer's conservatism? (Obviously, there will be a lot of different answers to these questions!)

When I was an undergrad, we sometimes referred to the "Romantic Atheist Faction" of conservatism. I hope we'll see some of that on the blog.

IN THE DESERT, MAYBE YOU CAN REMEMBER YOUR NAME!: Seven silver linings for right-wingers.

#1: Your hangover will go away eventually. I suggest sports drinks if you can (I never can), Tylenol, and sleep. Tomato soup, esp. w/curry powder, might help. Cancel all your appointments except those with the Porcelain God and/or the confessional.

#2: A big-government candidate who thinks the First Amendment is really more of a suggestion lost!

...To another big-government candidate who etc etc. But hey,

#3: The Fairness Doctrine won't apply to blogs!

#4: No, for real though, the daughter of a slave voted for a black President. There aren't words to convey how amazing that is. God bless America, for real.

#5: The candidate who flip-flopped on torture (despite his amazing personal story and general staunchness on this issue) because the Republicans decided to go bats crazy lost.

#6: Just remember, we're the party that believes in the necessity and meaning of suffering--and especially humiliation. So really, we win again! Offer this $#@! up, y'all.

#7: Conservatism is inherently a tradition of complicity, satire, internal conflict, and cynicism. So with the Messiah as our next president, we're in like Patricia Quinn!

JUST MAKE ME SOMETHING SOMEBODY CAN USE: It occurred to me that my earlier post on crisis pregnancy counseling--specifically, the issue of complicity with the client vs. complicity with the "system"--might shed some light on what my admittedly over-abstract discussion of conservatism looks like in practice.

A NEEDLESS ALEXANDRINE: One of the many reasons I recommended that post from Helen about aesthetics and conservatism is that she not only describes but demonstrates how traditions can be performed well or poorly. There is a standard, which is outside of the tradition itself narrowly construed but might be understood as "the spirit of the tradition," which neither disrupts or disavows the tradition nor performs it by rote.

You can make the analogy to Vatican II yourself, I'm sure!