The True Conservative Response to the Postmodern Cultural Revolution: Rationality
There is nothing more Postmodern than contemporary ‘conservatism’. That is the ‘conservatism’ of the vaunted Republican ‘base’, fans of President Trump.
It is Postmodern because of its disdain for rationality, including rationally based knowledge. It is the triumph of pure, unadulterated subjectivity — beliefs and feelings.
It is true that the thought leaders of that form of ‘conservatism’ consistently rail against Postmodernism. The “post-Modern condition” (from Jean-François Lyotard) is nothing, though, if it is not a font of irony.
Contemporary ‘conservatism’ is anything but true conservatism. True conservatism calls for careful consideration of any change. To cast away in its entirety the foundation of Modern culture with nothing to put in its place is anything but truly conservative.
Fundamentally, modernity has given the world two things: science and ideology. Both have been seen by both moderns and post-moderns as exemplars of ‘the rational’.
In the case of science that’s correct. In the case of ideology it is wrong.
There is nothing rational about any ideology. All ideologies are based on beliefs. Beliefs are inherently, intrinsically, unavoidably non-rational.
One can reason logically from a belief. The letters of Paul in the New Testament attest to that; he was one of the great logicians of all time. Contemporarily, Ravi Zacharias, who self-identifies as a “Christian apologist,” is as impressive as a logician as anybody. Yet, having a belief as a starting point makes any chain of reasoning following from it ultimately non-rational.
The cultural core of modernity is (was?) a transitive relationship among universality, objectivity, and knowledge: true knowledge would be universal; universality required objectivity; objectivity would therefore yield universally valid knowledge. Postmodernism, led by Jacques Derrida, attacked that relationship through an attack on objectivity.
He was right. Objectivity, as a state of mind in which no extraneous subjective influences are operative, is a human impossibility. Postmodernism’s famous process of ‘deconstruction’ is a process of revealing the presence of such influences.
Postmodernism became a cultural revolution. Its goal became the ‘emancipation’ of humanity from the ‘hegemony’ of ‘the rational’. The crushing defeat of “objectivity” was understood to take with it the possibility of any universally valid knowledge. Knowledge became indistinguishable from beliefs.
In the event science was forced to adjust its process. Ideology was destroyed (though most people haven’t fully realized it). [To be fair, science was forced to acknowledge the contingency of scientific knowledge, which it was supposed to be doing anyway, according to its own, self-imposed process.]
Ideology’s failures are not only theoretical, but also practical. No ideology has solved one single social problem within the context of anything anyone would call a just society. Indeed, both Fascism and Marxism have rejected any notion of ‘bourgeois justice’ i.e. justice involving liberty and equality — the justice of Liberalism.
Liberal societies, on the other hand, have not overcome the basic problems of unemployment and poverty. Now global warming, and environmental degradation generally, are becoming serious problems that, unlike unemployment and poverty, are existential in nature (existential for civilization with the rule of law, on which liberty and the security of private property depend, if not human life itself).
Conservatism as an ideology has suffered the same fate that all other ideologies have suffered. That is why contemporary ‘conservatism’ has retained only the name, ditching the ideology. True conservatives must also let ideology go.
True conservatism is more than a political ideology. It is an approach to life. It accepts change as inevitable, but insists on discerning what is worth keeping and what can be safely, even productively discarded.
So, what is a true conservative to do? Turn to rationality!
Ideologies were invented to replace theology for governing governance. True conservatives must realize that rationality is the only place where the means to govern governance justly and efficaciously can be found.
I have trod that intellectual path. At the end of it lies a society with maximum liberty and a reinforced democratic political process (which is necessary for liberty and the rule of law to exist), where the existing economy would be self-regulating, with no unemployment (at no cost to anyone), no poverty (without redistributing anything), no taxes (of any kind) and no public debt (at any level of government), but increased sustainability (even without additional regulations). True to the conservative way politically, none of those outcomes requires any imposition of changes in behavior.
Further reading (in Medium):
“For American Conservatives: Time to Put-up or Shut-up on the Economy”
“Re-thinking Individualism to Avert the Worst Tragedy in the History of Civilization”
“Real Justice (summarized for a ‘5 min read’)”