Darwinian & Postmodern Conservatism

At Culture11 Ivan Kenneally asks, Is Darwinian Conservatism Postmodern?:

Larry Arnhart is surely the best proponent of Darwinian Conservatism, and not just because he has a blog with the same name. In his view, an evolutionary biological account of nature properly captures our intellectual and moral capacities, the emergence of consciousness itself, and grounds a political and cultural conservatism by demonstrating our natural limits as political and social beings. Does this count as a species of postmodern conservatism? It might fail as appropriately conservative since nature is made all too dynamic–if our current human condition is nothing other than the latest stage in a train of evolutionary developments then on what basis can we privilage this one as the final one? Does Darwinian conservatism require an End of History, some kind of final eschatology? Also, does evolutionary biology do justice to the real human person as we experience ourselves or is there something about our characteristic resistance to nature and eros for transcendence that eludes Darwinian categories of explanation? If the heart of postmodern conservatism is an experiential realism that rescues the real human person from modern abstraction, Darwinian conservatism might fail by identifying human nature too closely with our bodily selves, with nature as such. So is Darwinian Conservatism insufficiently postmodern and insufficiently conservative?

Nature is dynamic, but very fast evolution works on the order of tens of generations. I perceive political orders as the possibilities of the present. What is conservative in one age varies from what is conservative in another age. Why demand of Darwinian Conservatism what one does not demand of conservatism writ large? Darwinian Conservatism does not do justice to the human individual, but it is much more serviceable in addressing human populations, what we might term societies. The true interlocutor which Ivan is looking for is “Psychological” or “Cognitive” Conservatism, which might focus on individuals as natural phenomenon which develop over a lifetime.

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6 Responses to Darwinian & Postmodern Conservatism

  1. matoko_chan says:

    Darwinian Postmodern Conservatism is an oxymoron of such profound and awful dissonance that Ivan’s post has likely opened a rift in the very fabric of spacetime wide enough to swallow wideboyz Rick Warren, Karl Rove AND Rush Limbaugh simultaneously.
    If I may respectfully point out, all Science is Modern, not Postmodern.

  2. matoko_chan
    :

    If I may respectfully point out, all Science is Modern, not Postmodern.

    Agreed. I think a better case can be made that religious conservatism is postmodern. At least, they happily grasp at the tools of postmodernism to deconstruct science and reality. Because if reality is a social construction, then why not their reality? “Truth”, then, is decided by whatever group has the most power to spread or impose their worldview. Marxism and young earth creationism are equally the offspring of Platonism.

  3. A-Bax says:

    I’m a bit confused as to how Arnhart might be considered post-modern.

    Then again, I have no confidence in the “post-modern” take on anything. From where I’m sitting, Steven Pinker essentially put post-modernism in its place vis a vis the arts, child-rearing, gender-relations and what not in his masterpiece, “The Blank Slate”. If we can assume that Arnhart’s account is grounded in the view of human nature that is evident in Pinker’s work, I would think that Darwinian-Conservatism is anything BUT post-modern.

    PS – Did anyone else notice that Austin Bramwell listed Pinker as among the most significant contributors (perhaps unwittingly and unwillingly) to conservatism in the past generation or so?

    http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/nov/03/00024/

    All I’m saying is…Pinker rules. 🙂

  4. mtraven says:

    Pinker is great when he writes about stuff he knows (cognitive science); when he tries to be an art critic (in the section of the Blank Slate on modernism and postmodernism in the arts) he is laughably philistine.

    Here’s a pretty good review by Louis Menand. Here’s an excerpt:

    So it is with most of the things we care about—food, friends, recreation, art. Biology reverts to the mean; civilization does not. The mind is a fabulator. It is designed (by natural selection, if you like) to dream up ideas and experiences away from the mean. Its overriding instinct is to be counter-instinctual; otherwise, we could put consciousness to sleep at an early age. The mind has no steady state; it is (as Wallace Stevens said) never satisfied. And it induces the organism to go to fantastic lengths to develop capacities that have no biological necessity. The more defiant something is of the instinctive, the typical, and the sufficient, the more highly it is prized. This is why we have the “Guinness Book of World Records,” the Gautama Buddha, and the Museum of Modern Art. They represent the repudiation of the norm.

    I don’t quite understand what a “postmodern conservative” is, except that modernism is generally associated with the Enlightenment and rationality, both of which are rejected by conservatism, hence they may feel som affinity with postmodernists who also aim a critique at modernism, although usually for vastly different reasons.

  5. matoko_chan says:

    I don’t quite understand what a “postmodern conservative” is

    One may observe them in their natural habitat, however, IMHO, a pomocon is a rare high-IQ christianist rather desperately cloaking their traditional supernatural belief system in thick, clumsy verbal gymnastics and pretentious philosophical references to Old Dead Guys.

  6. Polichinello says:

    The more defiant something is of the instinctive, the typical, and the sufficient, the more highly it is prized. This is why we have the “Guinness Book of World Records,” the Gautama Buddha, and the Museum of Modern Art. They represent the repudiation of the norm.

    Menand seems to have missed Pinker’s point in this quote. Pinker was saying that standing out is instinctive in and of itself. It’s like the peacock’s tail, which serves no utilitarian purpose beyond a display of health. Displays of “repudiation of the norm” serve a similar purpose by allowing an individual (almost always male) to show off some capacity.

    Menand somewhat acknowledges this in the next paragraph but decides not to pursue it, deciding, instead, to go after a misquote and Pinker’s aesthetic sense. On these terms, Menand may be right, but his claim that biology reverts to the mean misses the forest for the trees.

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