So you're saying I can be postmodern and love Kirk?

Friday, cigarette #2

Dan McCarthy's review of The Postmodern Mind of Russell Kirk has hit the cyber-shelves to well-deserved acclaim. I join the resounding chorus, with two reservations.

Yet Kirk admitted to a few areas of agreement with antistatists: “they do not believe that the United States should station garrisons throughout the world; no more do I,” he wrote in the same essay, and he found libertarian resistance to collectivism and centralization laudable. Russello looks only briefly at Kirk’s relationship to libertarianism. That’s a pity, since the question of why Kirk felt such animosity toward a group with which he had a good deal in common (in practice, if not in theory) is an interesting one, and his attitude could be fruitfully compared with the disdain many postmodernists feel for capitalism and classical liberalism.

Opposition to hair-trigger interventionism doesn't make for the most inviting common ground, being as broad as it is. It certainly doesn't make Kirk a closeted libertarian (which, to be fair, is not what McCarthy is trying to imply), or even a closeted libertarian-sympathizer (which might be).

Edmund Burke condemned the profession of mining as "servile, degrading, unseemly, and unmanly" because, in David Bromwich's words, "the work itself and its final fruit are so remote from each other in time and space." This is certainly a more subtle objection to capitalism than the agrarian one ("The only good market is a farmer's market!") or the Luddite/traditionalist one ("Insofar as capitalism necessarily embraces technology that alienates people from each other and from themselves, it's bad!"). In any case, it's clear that the man Adam Smith called "the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do" had some qualms about the market, so it shouldn't be surprising that Kirk would, too.

Also, while McCarthy is right that Kirk understands the narrative of history in terms of truth and the postmodernists understand it in terms of power, I wish he had dedicated a couple of sentences to how power fits into postmodern conservatism, not just because I'm interested in the question but because I feel like power is one of the biggest differences between the pomo Left and the pomo Right: they think power relationships have to be neutralized, we think they only have to be sanctified (i.e. love is a power relationship, but that's fine because introducing love into a power relationship makes it okay, etc.)

On the other hand, McCarthy scores a definite win with "an obsession with theory, a keen interest in power relationships, a yen for the transgressive." Could there be a better description of Yale's right-wing scene?