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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: October 10, 2008 at 8:04 pm by Eve Tushnet

2008-10-10T20:04:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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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.

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