Early on in the post-liberal discourse, a good friend warned me about what he assured me the trajectory of that conversation would be. "This isn't going to go the way you think it will," was the gist of his concern, though he expressed it more tartly and made liberal use of this GIF any time I made confident declamations against "liberalism":
Finally, I was feeling a bit frustrated by it all and asked him something to the effect of, "OK, if you're so smart, what should I be reading instead?" He had a list ready for me. It started with Eric Gregory. But, really, he told me, you need to read Jeff Stout's Democracy and Tradition. So I did. And I'll be forever grateful to him. And I think you should read them too.
I'll have more on these themes soon—the combination of Gregory and Stout have been disruptive to my mind in the best possible ways and I'll be thinking with them for a very long time indeed—but for now I wanted to share this excerpt from the conclusion to Stout's Democracy and Tradition.
If you are a person frustrated with the power-obsessed reductionism of the contemporary left but also unhappy with the neo-traditionalism of the Hauerwasians and their much less admirable cousins the Integralists and the Christian Nationalists then you should read Stout.
Here he is:
Eminent writers have recently been inviting us to choose sides on the modern age, as if they knew the essence of modernity and whether, on the whole, it has been a good or a bad thing. The ones who say that modernity has mainly been a good thing tend to think of democracy as its essence. The ones who imply, at least in their tone and their selection of examples, that modernity has mainly been a bad thing to tend to see talk of democracy as a sort of smoke screen, designed to draw attention away from modern evils. Both sides tend to describe modernity as an essential underlying structure. They differ over what that structure is and how democracy relates to it. The temptation seems strong to find something in particular that stands for modernity itself, some set of necessary and sufficient conditions the absence of which would make a form of life pre- or postmodern, some basic trait or structural feature in terms of which modernity can be judged.
Beginning in this way tends to block the path of moral inquiry and social criticism. It does so by narrowing one's focus too quickly, reducing one's ability to recognize complexity and ambiguity or to experience moral ambivalence. Disbelieving in essences gives no certain protection against this habit of thought. If you doubt this, consider the antiessentialist who commits himself to the doctrine that modern thought, the history of philosophy from Plato to Hegel, or perhaps even "the Western project" itself, is (in essence) the history of essentialism or the metaphysics of presence. In one breath he tells us there are no essences; in the next he describes an entire age or epoch as if it had one. And from what point of view does the postmodern oracle speak? At times he claims tos peak from the perspective of the emerging future, the character of which he cannot specify; at others he seems to hover in midair above the epoch he describes. He is prepared to think through any position but his own. When pressed he merely repeats the the hard sayings of his postmodernist masters. Delineating an alternative to the system of the now-vanishing present, he says, is mere complicity in that system, so he must excuse himself from defending a 'position.' Yet his descriptions of the age are obviously saturated with moral outrage.
His opposite number typically responds, first, by pointing out the implicit contradiction, and second, by defending everything his postmodernist opponent wishes to destroy or deconstruct. He claims to understand and represent what makes Western culture or the modern period worth caring about, and that, for him, is the whole story. On what basis can he defend the achievements of an entire age or culture? It would be viciously circular, he thinks, to appeal to parochial values in defending his conclusions. So he goes transcendental. He feels he must rise above the age and look down upon us, judging us from afar. Like his opponent, he has trouble explaining the point of view he claims to occupy.
He continues:
Postmodernism is apocalyptic in tone. It prepares the way for something radically new--something, utterly beyond modernity, which has heretofore appeared, if at all, only in the margins or in the fissures of official Western culture. Traditionalism, on the contrary, tends toward nostalgia. It is trying to find its way back to premodern traditions in the hope of reconstructing and defending them anew. The difference between the two is often summed up in a question like the one MacIntyre poses halfway through After Virtue: "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" It is as if our troubled journey beyond modernity had finally brought us all, after much strife and destruction, to the same crossroad, where we must either turn right or left, certain only that modernity itself lies in ruin behind us.
But there is something wrong with this picture, and not merely with its stark and misleading disjunction. There can be little doubt that many influential modern thinkers have attempted to escape history and tradition. Elsewhere I have tried to contribute to the historiography of their effort and to the diagnosis of their failures. Yet I see no good reason to suppose that modernity, even as we know it in the West, is the expression of a single project, the career of a single ambition. There is more to modernity than that. There is a life, a complicated network of practices and institutions and goods and evils to be taken in.
Declaring modern democratic aspiration a good thing need not lessen our capacity to recognize modern evils: alienation, racism, anti-Semitism, the horrors of mass death, the prospect of nuclear war, the suffering of the poor, the subjugation of women, the banality of political discourse, and so on. It does, however, make the now-familiar reductive slogans of our social criticisms seem irresponsibly one-sided: that modernity is simply the Enlightenment project in collapse; an enterprise of logocentric self-deception, the death of authentic political action, the triumph of instrumental reason; or 'nothing more than discipline concealed.' There is truth in each of these slogan.s They are not, however, the whole truth, and if they were nothing but the truth, we would all be too far gone to know it. Yet in making this point one can easily appear to be implying that we should disregard our misgivings about modern evils.
George Orwell, in a commentary on the 'twilight-of-the-gods' mentality expressed in 'Sweeney Agonistes,' remarked sardonically that T. S. Eliot had achieved 'the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is.' By now our critics have practiced Eliot's difficult feat so many times and with such zeal that they have made it look easy. Any graduate student can perform it at a moment's notice. More demanding and more worthy of respect is the kind of ambivalence Orwell worked into the crack about Eliot. It can be found throughout much of his best social criticism--sometimes directed toward features of his own society, at others toward features of British socialism. Few writers can hold together contempt for and appreciation of different aspects of a single object so successfully. I think especially of his various commentaries on mass culture. Orwell can sound like Adorno when he talks about tinned food or the decadence of a life dominated by machines, but he can also makes us see an ordinary bourgeois paperweight or a cup of properly brewed tea as a fitting object of love. How many writers could work all of this, and much more, into a picture of our culture without seeming insincere or hopelessly incoherent?
There is much more where that came from.
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