This is Not a Post

I'm sorry to say that my inaugural post is about philosophy. Quick, David. Write up a new post and bury mine. (You know what would be really useful? One of those cut tag things that both LJ and typepad have. I think wordpress has it too. Fuck you, Blogger.)

I'm linking to a post on postmodern conservatism, which I got to via a link from the #1 female blogger I secretly want to make out with. (Unsettlingly pathetic fantasies of liplocking aside, I do want to make a note that I am in fact not a huge fucking libertarian, and do not agree with Megan McArdle to as much of an extent as many suppose.)

Freddie of L'Hôte writes on the contradiction of postmodern conservatism, namely that it doesn't seem like one can make a choice to be traditional in an existential sense, since embracing conservative "traditional" values involves a very selective memory of the "old days". As the Daily Show put it:

The Republican Party is the party of nostalgia. It seeks to return America to a simpler, more innocent and moral past that never actually existed.

I won't claim to have any knowledge on the subject of existentialism just because I stumbled through a couple of brain-wrenching classes on Heidegger (often referred to as "Gaydegger," "Heidegay," and "Ugh" by my friends, who are all very sick of hearing about him), but it interests me to read that

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.

"Are you sure?" I say doubtfully. All I can think of is having to write my second paper for that class on Being and Time's Division II. Especially this weird and awful passage in Chapter 5:

Resoluteness implies handing oneself down by anticipation to the "there" of the moment of vision; and this handing down we call "fate". This is also the ground for destiny, by which we understand Dasein's historizing in Being-with Others. In repetition, fateful destiny can be disclosed explicitly as bound up with the heritage which has come down to us.

Weird for self-evident reasons. Awful in its historical context. I argued (rather unsuccessfully, to tell you the truth) in my paper that the idea of destiny (a collective authentic historizing) contradicts the rest of Being and Time, and hence we don't have to worry too much about the chilling words of creepy!Heidegger. (On the other hand, destiny is what it's all about in The Origin of the Work of Art. So much for trying to save Heidegger from himself.) (I say this very flippantly while demonstrating a flagrant disregard for serious Heidegger scholarship.)

Basically I want to ask:

What exactly is terribly contradictory about "repeating" the past-- not recreating it blindly, but making Heidegger's reciprocal rejoinder, a "response to that which in the 'today', is working itself out as the 'past'." We can all agree on this incredible quote from Alan Ehrenhalt, via this link which was linked in the pomocon post which was linked in the McArdle post, etc:

"What we want is to edit [the 50s]. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk and cookies, while blotting out the political bosses, the tyrannical headmasters, the inflexible rules, and the lectures on 100 percent Americanism. But there is no easy way to have an orderly world without somebody making the rules by which order is preserved. Every dream we have about re-creating community in the absence of authority will turn out to be a pipe dream in the end. This is a lesson that people who call themselves conservatives seem determined not to learn."

No, we don't want the real 50s back. But perhaps what postmodern conservatives see in the moment of vision is a 50s simultaneously curbed and liberated by the circumstances of today. We can't and won't have the political bosses and the Lucky Strikes and the oppressive chauvinism-- it doesn't make sense in the here and the now. (We can't have Marilyn Monroe either, no matter how hard Lindsay tries.) I can see a (specifically Heideggerian) way of being a conservative existentialist, but on the other hand, I doubt that many can squeeze through Scylla and Charybdis to get there.

Freddie also says:

Because this, to me, is a simple fact: the chaos of meaning kills conservatism.

... How can traditionalism survive, when you know that mere human subjectivity is the source of tradition?

This strikes me as particularly apt, though I don't think that the problem is that the pomocon has made an intellectual choice to be a conservative. The problem here is that conservatism tends to depend horribly upon there being an observer-nonrelative basis to their views. (It's usually God, but there's also natural law). I think an existentialist shouldn't, by definition, subscribe to the belief that there are brute facts that necessitate their social beliefs. I don't want to pick at whether it is actually necessary to have an observer-nonrelative basis to conservative views. I don't see any such necessity prima facie, but honestly I don't give enough of a shit to engage in deep thought over it. The thought of anyone believing in natural law is enough to make me gag and reach for dramamine.

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What I really want to point out is that the question of retreading history is not unique to conservatives. I've already heard David express a vague wish to see a new Depression era. (And it sounded just as bad as it looks in type. You're a dick, David.) I've seen a newspaper article describe a speech Obama made on the Wall Street situation as "channeling FDR."

But we're not the Depression Era. We can't be, even if we wanted to-- which we definitely don't. There are plenty of reasons, even without the whole Depression part of the Depression Era, not to want to be in the Depression Era (yeah, David, THAT'S FUCKING RIGHT!). If/when we retread history, we must do it on our own terms. Face it, there's just no goddamn way we're going to launch World War III and power up our economy that way.

If anything, the lesson of the moment is not a chant of, "We know it all, we've seen it all before; we know it all, we've read it all before." The lesson is that we don't know. We can't know. The things we don't see coming are the really big, really important things. This moment in history is not completely different from what's come before, but it's still a unique moment.

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I think I should end all my posts with oddly relevant lyrics from the 80s, one of the most retarded modern decades. That should be my thing.

More than this
You know there's nothing
More than this
No, there's nothing

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addendum / fake edit:

An attack on postmodernism along predictable lines. I've read more or less the same thing from Sokal and Dawkins (Sokal was funnier, IMO), I've also heard it also articulated awkwardly by one of my more infuriating boyfriends. Guess who. A reply. A counter-reply in the comments of that reply. I'm linking these because I realized I'm going to get some wtfs. I'm sorry, I'm really bad at explanations. I don't have the gift of explaining without the fallacious reductions. Maybe I should just not post this, but fuck you guys, I spent way too much time writing this. Seriously, fuck you.