The Pomo Mind

Was the conservative intellectual Russell Kirk a postmodernist?

Daniel McCarthy from the March 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

There is indeed common ground here between Kirkian traditionalists and postmodernists. Both camps try to conscript the uncertainty principle, mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Einstein’s relativity into attacks on objectivity in other fields. The Kirkians and postmodernists share a fallacy, and ironically it is a species of scientism: They wrongly apply the ideas of advanced physics and mathematics to history. It turns out that when “science” casts doubt on objectivity, the otherwise science-skeptical Kirkians and postmodernists are all for it.

Missing from the chapter on knowledge and history, however, is any sustained discussion of the two very different elements that postmodernists and traditionalists find at the heart of historical interpretation. For the postmodernists, that element is power. For traditionalists, it is truth. Kirk was a realist: Objectivity may be elusive, he believed, but the truth is out there, whether we can grasp it fully or not. Postmodern theorists have tended to see the matter differently. Foucault, for example, was more interested in how knowledge, including historical knowledge, could be an instrument of power—not just state power but cultural hegemony. Russello cannot be faulted too much for not getting into this, since Kirk himself did not look very deeply at the nature of power and the ties between convention and the state, in part because that would have been a more theoretical discussion than Kirk, who abjured most abstraction as the sin of “ideology,” would have wanted to undertake. Kirk was not a painstaking, analytic historian; he was more of a chronicler, a literary writer with an interest in political history and philosophy.

The chapters on Kirk’s political thought and jurisprudence are on firmer ground than the chapter on history. Russello brings his talents as a legal thinker to bear in discussing Kirk’s views on natural law, common law, and positive law. He clarifies a contentious issue among Kirkians: whether, and to what extent, Kirk was a natural-law thinker. Russello argues convincingly that for Kirk, the common law—built up over centuries upon the ad hoc decisions of judges and juries—should be preferred over consciously constructed legislative law or abstract natural law. He feared the revolutionary potential in natural law and disliked its absolute and rational qualities; he wanted it tamed and codified by common law or, failing that, legislation. There is a plausible pomo dimension to Kirk’s thought here. The bottom-up and participatory common law does have qualities congruent with postmodernism—certainly relative to the rationalistic, top-down approach of legal positivism and the universalism of natural law.

In his final chapter, Russello deals most explicitly with the relationship of conservatism to postmodernism, particularly to Lyotard’s “crisis of narratives”—the splintering of metanarratives into discrete, incommensurable stories. It is here that Russello insists that Kirkian conservatism and postmodernism do not simply have the same enemies but have common interests as well. Cultural decentralization and localism are two of the overlapping concerns Russello finds, and he notes parallel themes in several traditionalist and postmodern thinkers. In 1926 Bernard Iddings Bell, an Episcopal clergyman and friend of Kirk’s, was “among the first ever to use the term postmodernism as a description of an age emerging from the collapse of Enlightenment rationality,” Russello notes. Meanwhile, the postmodern theorist Hans Georg Gadamer came to a rather Kirkian understanding of, and respect for, tradition, arguing that it could not be understood by an objective, outside observer. “To stand within a tradition,” Gadamer wrote, “does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible.”

Yet even this final chapter leaves too much merely summarized and too much left unsaid. Gadamer, the postmodern figure whose approach to tradition seems most sympathetic to Kirk’s worldview, is discussed only fleetingly, and the book never rigorously compares Kirk with any postmodernist intellectuals. At a little over 200 pages, The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk only skims the surface of what might link Kirk to a figure such as Gadamer. As a prologue to a future, wider study of conservatism and postmodernism, it’s valuable; there might be inspiration for a half-dozen doctoral dissertations within its pages. And as a book showing Kirk to be a more eccentric, unorthodox figure than most conservatives imagine him to be, the book is delightful. But for all the connections Russello finds between Kirk and postmodernism, the strongest impression it leaves is that Kirk and the pomos are at best allies of convenience against liberalism. And that may be the least attractive element in either camp’s thought.

Daniel McCarthy is a contributing editor to The American Conservative.

Comments

|2.29.08 @ 11:06AM|#

Am I the only one who saw the title as the Porno mind?

|2.29.08 @ 11:38AM|#

Could someone explain to me post-modernism in a nut-shell for me? It's a concept that I can't really wrap my mind around...all I can figure out is that it has something to do with how reality is a social construct.

And it's concepts makes great tv-shows.
And shitty everything else.

|2.29.08 @ 12:20PM|#

Elsewhere in the same chapter, Russello relates the dubious idea that Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum physics, which Russello says "struck a terminal blow to the idea of scientific objectivity," tells us something about historical knowledge. What does our inability to observe simultaneously the velocity and position of a subatomic particle have to do with our ability-or lack thereof-to understand what happened at, say, the Battle of Hastings? Even if there is uncertainty about both kinds of events, we are not talking about the same kind of uncertainty. We may not know whether King Harold was really killed by an arrow to the eye, but if he was, we can say with certainty that both the position and velocity of the arrow could have been observed simultaneously, if anyone had been in a position to do so.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle proves that it is impossible to say with certainty the position and velocity of anything--an arrow, a planet or a galaxy. For a large object, like an arrow, the uncertainty is trivial, but exists nonetheless.

The related dichotomy as to whether a photon or electron is a particle or a wave is trivial when applied to an arrow, but it still exists--even the arrow is both a solid and a wave.

|2.29.08 @ 1:46PM|#

It says a lot about the conservative "mind" that a wet fart like Kirk is considered any kind of thinker at all. As for "pomo," I say it's spinach, and I say to hell with it.

economist|2.29.08 @ 9:08PM|#

Yeah, Kirk was kind of a douche.

|3.1.08 @ 7:04AM|#

High Respectable! http://www.spymac.com/details/?2348684

Someone Who Doesn\'t Want to L|3.1.08 @ 11:18AM|#

Ana Luisa Stella,
That doll singing video "INTERESTING DUCKLING SONG 2008" was terrifying.

Andrew Murphy|3.2.08 @ 9:23PM|#

Russell Kirk was really a British Tory in America. He did a great job as a scholar of Burke and the 19th century British poets and writers but he over played his abuse of Liberalism. He thought all Liberals and libertarians were Benthemites when in fact Gladstone and Lord Acton were not only anti-Bentham but devout Christians. Likwise, Austrian economist libertarians like Ropke and Rustow were devout Catholics and had nothing to do with the utilitarianism.

ChiTown|3.9.08 @ 4:25AM|#

Mr. McCarthy, You may already be familiar with it, but I might suggest considering Clinton Brand's essay in the Modern Age "50th Anniversary of the Conservative Mind" where he specifically encounters Kirk's thinking with an eye toward Gadamer. I'll have to pick up Russello's book, but it seems like you're correct that a wider discussion of Kirk vis-a-vis the libertarians needs to be written, though perhaps it already has. Quarrels with Frank Meyer, no?