Anti-Climacus

LINK: Every time I vow I will not address the postmodern conservative question again, they pull me back in. Helen, on identity and postmodernism:

As James points out, this anxious realization that there are lots and lots of eminently respectable traditions that completely contradict each other, while familiar to most people as the sneaking suspicion lurking behind various macro-level cultural clashes, also plays out on the smaller stage of the individual mind. For instance, I belong to a lot of traditions: I’m a Southerner, but also an Ivy League intellectual (like Burke, I’m a usurper!); I’m a woman and a Catholic and a conservative. My identities contradict each other all the time, and so do yours. The solution to this dilemma is the holy grail of postmodern conservatism, and I’m not sure I have one.

As I stressed to my students when we read Hobbes on civil law, there's an enormous difference between a tension and a contradiction. To contradict would be to have it be the case that one of those identities was not merely a difficult fit, but actually on some level a logical impossibility, to try and hold A and ~A at the same time. The only one on the list of Helen's identities that gives me a prima facie reason to think there might be a possibility of contradiction is 'Ivy League intellectual,' though I suppose I should point out William F. Buckley managed to navigate those waters. Tension, by contrast, is everywhere, but that's a regular feature of identity, and doesn't (necessarily) imply anything about their incompatibility.

The solution to the dilemma Helen poses is to recognize that a person is not reducible to any one of their identities, or even perhaps the summation of them all. 'Southerner' is a description of part of what it means to be Helen, it does its work at the important moments, and recedes when something else needs to take a central place. I think there's a recognizable precedent for this: there's hardly a more thrilling moment in Christian writing than the part of Thomas' Commentary on 1st Corinthians 15 where he says "my soul is not me." It's thrilling because it's a confirmation of the bodily resurrection, an assurance that somehow, the body has a purpose and a part of us, as does the soul, and we are reducible to neither. Helen is a woman and a Catholic and a conservative, where the conjunction does real work: she is all three together. Postmodernism, to the extent it wants to separate and examine these identities on their own, leads us astray, since you're looking for something (Helen-the-Catholic and nothing else) that doesn't exist.