Two Cheers for Postmodernism

Love is the most desirable end for human beings, just as death is the most inevitable. That’s why, in the admirably ambitious Postmodernism Rightly Understood, Peter Augustine Lawler’s most important ambition is to show how modern life and postmodern thought combine to make it hard for us to address questions of love and death.

But Lawler is a gadfly — of that distinctively southern sort, with an enviable combination of intelligence, learning, and wit — and in Postmodernism Rightly Understood he has another ambition as well: to usurp the title of “postmodern” for conservatives, to show how the central insights of postmodernism can be understood in a manner congenial to the Right.

Of course, the notions we typically think of as postmodern have borne more than a casual relation to the most pernicious of politics, Right as well as Left. Lawler therefore attempts to show how postmodernism “rightly understood” would somehow preclude this characteristic immoderation. His answer — with a gadfly’s typically ingenious twist — is to invoke the great hero of conservative political theorists, Alexis de Tocqueville. According to Lawler, Tocqueville was a postmodern thinker avant la lettre whose observations on the restiveness of American society anticipated the leading postmodernists’ most familiar complaints about excessive individualism, anxiety amidst prosperity, and the insidious tyranny of the everyday.

Lawler finds the most compelling spokesman for contemporary postmodernism in the Catholic novelist Walker Percy, to whom he devotes half his book’s pages. Indeed, Percy is clearly Lawler’s hero, the thinker for our time. But Lawler prepares his case for Percy by way of two teachings that have had a certain vogue in recent years: Francis Fukuyama’s claim that we have reached the end of history and Richard Rorty’s democratic pragmatism.

By Fukuyama’s account, the end of history is marked by the triumph of liberal democracy. Man has been pacified by commerce, and all his essential needs have been “satisfied.” Through a “spirited” affirmation of his humanity, Fukuyama’s post-historical man can still lead a meaningful human life, albeit within the constraints mandated by history’s coronation of liberal democracy.

Lawler finds Fukuyama’s account objectionable in its disregard for our awareness of our own mortality. Fukuyama wants man to be historically “wise,” to recognize that nothing exists outside the realm of history. Yet how, Lawler asks, can a “spirited” man possibly be “satisfied” with the idea of his own radical contingency? The certain prospect of eternal nothingness does not make for a good night’s sleep.

Lawler turns from Fukuyama to Richard Rorty, an intellectual who self-consciously places his intelligence in the service of superficiality. Lawler shows that Rorty’s doctrine is an attempt, wildly unsuccessful, to combine Martin Heidegger’s teaching on death with John Dewey’s faith in progress and democracy. According to Heidegger, the fundamental human experience is anxiety in the face of one’s own mortality. Nature and the universe are indifferent: Every man is entirely alone. The best a human being can do is resolutely to confront radical contingency. An “authentic” life is an anxious one.

And yet, though Rorty is not oblivious to the problem of death, he would like to be. As long as man is troubled by death — as long as he is human — he will act in troubling, passionate ways. He will not always be nice. He will even occasionally be cruel. And cruelty is to be avoided at all costs. So Rorty preaches ignorant indifference to our true situation. He sets forth a doctrine of unseriousness that he hopes will be taken seriously: Passionless vulgarity will be the salvation of mankind. The Rortyan pragmatist, Lawler concludes, “cannot face without flinching what he really knows about his own existence.”

Lawler’s devastating critique of Rorty is coupled with a short analysis of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind that is Lawler’s least satisfactory section. Though Lawler variously describes Bloom as, among other things, a disciple of Rousseau, an “atheistic Socratic,” and an “ambiguous modern,” his Bloom is at his core a twentieth-century man, influenced above all by History and Heidegger. Lawler fails to do justice to Bloom as a student of Tocqueville, and he ignores Bloom’s obvious purpose in The Closing of the American Mind: to counteract, in the name of genuine liberal education, the harmful influence of the very ideas Lawler attributes to him.

And yet, in describing Bloom as an “atheistic” Socratic rather than simply a Socratic, Lawler does suggest that modern life and ideas necessarily color even those who seek to return to earlier points of view. Modernity, Lawler contends, is at the same time inescapable and unacceptable. As such, we have no choice but to be postmoderns. And since we cannot reject postmodernism, we must seek to understand it “rightly” and “realistically.” For Lawler, postmodernism is realism, albeit of a sort not frequently encountered. Postmodern “realism” has its roots in Pascal, not Machiavelli; it is Christian and haunted. Having faith in the good sense of common people, it is democratic as well. And as a guide for this genuine postmodernism — a sort of Christian existentialism leavened by democratic sensibility — Lawler nominates Walker Percy.

Lawler finds in Percy a persuasive critic of both the reductionism of modern science and the irrationalism that arose in reaction to that science. According to Lawler’s Percy, the evidence in regard to the cosmos is murky and confusing. At least in the singularly insane modern world, the most powerful and evident news is bad news. Yet we do not have to give in to fashionable despair.

Certain experiences — love, in particular — suggest that human beings are not without support in the cosmos, and those experiences cannot be dismissed as some kind of self-forgetting of our true situation. Good news must be given its due. In short, according to Lawler and his Percy, honest — and therefore honorable — confusion with an openness to the Good, be it philosophical or religious, is the true postmodern solution.

Lawler’s account far surpasses the leading scholarship on Percy. He has something important to teach both of the reigning camps of the author’s interpreters — the postmodernists (wrongly understood) and the pious. To the former, he shows that Percy more than took morality seriously, that his fundamental motivations were at least as much moral as artistic. And to those Christian scholars who see nothing problematic in embracing Percy, Lawler brings out the very ambiguous character of their hero’s Christianity. Lawler’s Percy is ultimately a believer, but he is no simple believer. Percy’s chief targets were dogmatic atheists, but his thought stands in a certain tension with traditional piety.

Despite its brilliance, Lawler’s case for Percy is ultimately unpersuasive. He is far too uncritical, and he claims for Percy far too much. Lawler cannot help showing that Percy does not possess opinions that can be plausibly presented as a coherent whole. According to Lawler, Percy is somehow at the same time “a twentieth century Thomist,” “a Catholic Socratic,” the century’s foremost Tocquevillian and someone who “joins Pascal in emphasizing [man’s] strangeness and perversity, while remaining as devoted as Aristotle to the possibility of a science of human nature.” Lawler describes Percy’s “Thomistic science, his theory of evolution and of man as a languaged being by nature” as “a combination of Peirce’s semiotic empiricism and Heidegger’s existentialism.” If Percy were somehow able to cobble together a consistent Tocquevillian, Thomistic, Socratic, Pascalian, Heideggerian, Peircian, Aristotelian teaching, he would deserve all the respect Lawler accords him and more. It should come as no surprise that he cannot.

It’s with Tocqueville that Percy most fails to be what Lawler wants. Percy’s debt to Tocqueville consists almost exclusively of an endorsement of Tocqueville’s famous statement about Americans being Cartesians without having read Descartes. Percy enlarged upon that insight to construct a critique of the shallow “pop-Cartesianism” of those Americans whose boundless faith in technology leads them to embrace the solutions of “experts.”

Yet it takes more to be a Tocquevillian than to recognize the soul-deadening effects of modern technological society. Percy divorces Tocqueville’s statement from the general analysis of democratic society in which it appeared. Percy provides the singular spectacle of a Tocquevillian with nothing to say about democracy and equality. So too, Percy is a Thomist with nothing to say about natural law, a frequent mentioner of Heidegger with nothing to say about the connection of Heidegger’s thought to his being a Nazi. In short, Percy ignores the political.

Ignoring the political is not Lawler’s own failing. Political reasons both inform and animate his attempt to redefine postmodernism. He teaches us that how “we postmoderns” speak of ourselves plays no small part in how we act. And he wants us to act morally and democratically. He entreats us, almost at all costs, to reclaim control of our lives from the experts, bureaucrats, technocrats and gurus. “Elitism” is bad. “Populism” is good.

It’s easy to sympathize with Lawler’s attacks upon some of his targets, not least the mental health industry that seems on the verge of therapeutically dispensing with human experience altogether. Yet Lawler fails to distinguish between good elites and bad elites. Modern conservatism, by contrast, almost began with The Federalist Papers’ case for a government in which the learned professions predominate and Edmund Burke’s defense of a “true natural aristocracy.” Conservatives would do better to rehabilitate a healthy form of elitism and its accompanying respect for genuine excellence than to appropriate postmodernism. Considerable as Lawler’s accomplishment is, his advocacy of a conservative postmodernism does not fly. Let the postmodernists vote Democrat.

Steven J. Lenzner is a political theorist in Cambridge, Massachusetts.