A RANDOM THOUGHT ON 'POSTMODERN CONSERVATISM': As I long ago promised to say something at length about it and never did. In my word processor (Scrivener--I highly recommend it) I have a document entitled "modern conservatism." It's blank. I think that's the only attitude one can have, at the end: one can defend all sorts of things about modernity, but if you don't want to be convinced, you never will be.
Also, I tend to think one should distrust people who overuse adjectives and adverbs to make their points--those are emotional appeals, not argumentative ones.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
3 comments:
Even if there's nothing to say at length, I hope you'll keep posting random thoughts on postmodern conservatism as they come to you: I've found your take on it to be helpful in the past.
My only opinion on it is that I have no idea what it is. Everytime I ask for an explanation the answer is something like "ask X" or "it's complicated," both of which sound like covers for incoherent BS to me.
Forget "conservatism," please. It has, operationally, de facto, been Godless and thus irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God they are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson's Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
”[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It .is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth."
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
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