The scandal of particularity: threat or menace?

It would be easy to snark at Jonah Goldberg's recent column about postmodernism, but there's a kernel of truth in it that speaks to postmodern conservatism:

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness. We've all seen how adept the PC brigades are celebrating free speech, when it's for speech they like.

This can be (and often is) interpreted as simple intellectual dishonesty on the part of pomolibs, but the real take-away lesson here is that, having acknowledged the extent to which various truths are culturally conditioned, there are places we can go from there. We can still make positive claims about what's true, and not necessarily from the solid ground of things that are universal.

Consider: the Jews are the chosen people, but their chosenness has universal significance. Vatican II threw a lot of liturgical particulars open to cultural determination, but that only made it more obvious that the thing at the center of a Mass is something more than an expression of community. William Shakespeare is part of my tradition but still poses a mountain of challenges when I want to identify with any of his characters; Zoroastrianism is far outside my own tradition but is far more familiar than I might expect; in neither case is the correct response for me to plug my finger in my ears and tell Bill and Kerdir to "speak to my experience." Embracing political correctness as a capitulation to inalienable differences is one way to respond to postmodernism, but so is going to Mass.

Also, as I have said before, "an obsession with theory, a keen interest in power relationships, [and] a yen for the transgressive" is Yalien conservatism in a nutshell.

UPDATE: Read this sentence:

Something about the nature of Christianity makes it possible to bridge this divide [between us today and Augustine centuries ago], to pick up the threads of history and make sense of them, in a way that transcends the particular, and may do so systematically, rather than in fits and starts.

Then read the whole post.