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This is the problem that I have with Postmodern Conservatives. https://twitter.com/MarcusC31391111/status/1376899673227722753">https://twitter.com/MarcusC31...
Their goal isn’t to reestablish an authentic connection to God or to bring back some idyllic past before the advent of post modernity. They will happily ignore basic Christian principles, in order to advance their agenda.
The postmodern con believes that by eliminating dissident, they can restore the national religious community to its former glory. This nostalgia is at the heart of what Fredric Jameson criticizes about postmodernity in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Rather than rediscovering Christianity, or engaging in a Nietzschean project of establishing new identities and transcendent values through acts of individual greatness, postmodern cons look to assemble a pastiche-like parody of religious identity from the relics of the past.
The postmod con must is always compelled to eliminate features of the world which threaten to reproblematize their faith. This is why not only must foreign religious elements be banned or ostracized.
But even right-wing Athiests must get on board with the program in order to, in Hazony’s words, “make [themselves] a more conservative person.” That this constitutes a very serious form of religious inauthenticity is a problem to which we should be quite attentive.
In The Present Age, Kierkegaard wrote that with the emergence of the press and new communications technologies, it became possible to establish a mass man. An individual whose opinions and beliefs would be shaped for him, and disseminated through a vast apparatus of new media.
Kierkegaard was aware of the impact this might have on religious belief. He emphasized that having true faith was the only way to live an existentially meaningful life, Kierkegaard didn’t believe that the major threat to Christianity came from unbelief.
Rather it was the mass man of Christendom (Christianity’s socio pol dimension) who represented the end of authentic faith. This would be the conservative gentleman who abided by the culturally Christian mores of his society, in order to preserve order and make a minor profit.
He would go to Church, say his prayers but never in his life would faith actually challenge him.The divine would never reach into the mass man’s heart and demand that he give up everything and follow in the footsteps of Christ.
This dystopian version of Christendom would be a place where everyone would parrot the words of the Bible, but no one would be authentically Christian. They would believe it due convenience when the cost of conviction is 0, but this wouldn’t be what Christianity calls for.
In A Secular Age When discussing the impulse to demand that people simply profess faith, even if they don’t believe, in order to hold things together, Taylor remarks that the price is a religious community where individuals parrot idolatries while feeling next to nothing within.
For Taylor, a philosophical Roman Catholic, this is far too great a price to pay and may well only contribute to deepening secularization in the long run.
Today’s postmod con are e.g Their faith is not oriented around the individual’s relationship to God or her duties towards others, but stems from a desire for order and the stability of collective nat id. The needs of the nat assimilate the desire for faith.
In the long run, this can only have a corrosive impact on our efforts to overcome the limits of postmodernity. Rather than a return to inauthentic religious nationalism, we would be better off looking for new ways to establish meaning in the world.
This will mean avoiding the temptation to look into the museum of the past, and instead face up to the need to establish new sources of meaning for our future.
