I suppose I should just say it.

Just in case anyone wanders over here from my comments on the Great PoMoCo Throwdown of October 2008:

I don't really have many policy opinions, and the ones I have, I hold loosely.

I'm conservative and Christian (Presbyterian, to be specific) because I was raised that way, and I still think I can make it work, although I often have to warp the former to fit the latter.

I'm trying to bootstrap my way to some understanding of the world I live in.

My imagined audience here is “people who see the world as I do.”

At the same time, I try to refrain from saying things that would seem stupid to, say, atheists or liberals or leftists, though it certainly happens. This reticence is a bad strategy for blogging, because saying (bold) stupid things generates large numbers of comments, and hopefully some readership (e.g. the one time I got quoted anywhere else was for something I can't actually defend).

So does saying smart things. But I'm pretty sure I always land somewhere in the middle (although my “middle” may be someone else's “stupid”).

I like these Postmodern Conservatives very much, but I'm not exactly one of them. I take their project to be something like this:

“Unreflective traditionalism is no longer possible because of modernity. How, then, can we conceive of a new, more fluid traditionalism that carries the good things of the past forward, past modernity, without necessarily founding it on an absolute?”

In my reading of post-structuralism (and I haven't read much, so I could be completely wrong about everything that follows), it seemed apparent that the significance of the event of structuralism was taken for granted. Or, rather, the major thinkers had evaluated the significance of structuralism, and their acolytes took it for granted.

The temptation with postmodern conservatism, for me, is to take the evaluation of political modernity for granted. (I mean, have you read MacIntyre?) The PoMoCons have their reasons. But, suffice it to say, liberalism as a political theory may still have a few things to recommend itself to me. I'll find out when I get around to Jeffrey Stout.

And so I'll keep reading them and supporting them, but as long as the failure of the Enlightenment is an open question for me, I can't be one of them.

And though I wish I could offer settled opinions, as long as I have all these live hypotheses playing in my head, I'm going to keep jumping around.