Principled conservatives (as contrasted with the power conservatives that control the GOP) have legitimate concerns about the nihilism that pervades our popular culture. I share them. We part company, however, when such conservatives think that a remedy lies in the political sphere. Solutions to problems in the cultural sphere need to be developed in the cultural sphere. It's a soul problem, not a political problem. The political sphere needs to be culturally neutral--or secular. That doesn't mean that the culture ought primarily to be secular, although certainly secularists must always feel secure and respected, as anyone must regardless his beliefs or worldview.
As I said in my last post, pluralism must be embraced as a necessity in a rapidly globalizing world, and that requires that the political sphere be as neutral as possible when it comes to cultural values. The one essential element that defines our common ground as citizens lies in the secular rights traditions developed during the high tide of Enlightenment modernity. That is the one, great bequest that cultural era has made to the world and to future generations, and it is a legacy that must be preserved.
Although pluralism is a necessity if sanity is to reign in a world where so many cultures, philosophies, and worldviews are rubbing up against one another, there are still many people who remain resistant to it. They resist mainly because they want to preserve the integrity of various traditional cultural forms from external encroachment.
Multiculturalists are like those environmentalists who want to preserve biodiversity. They fear the homogenizing effects of modernity and market capitalism, and I understand and sympathize with their concerns. But the future does not lie in preservation of existing cultural forms, but rather in the interaction between cultures and in the various 'fusions' that will result from their cross-fertilization. America, in my opinion, is at the cutting edge of the development for such a fusioning culture, and its success or failure will have a significant impact on the success or failure of other cultures in making the transition into the globalizing postmodern world.
The other group that find pluralism hard to embrace is the monculturalists. It's hard for a lot of people when their worldview is challenged by another's whose basic presuppositions about what is real and unreal, true and false, important and trivial are very different. It's hard for a lot of people to just shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, that's just their opinion." And if they do, it's hard for them not to drift into the opposite kind of problem, which is a kind of ironic, quasi-nihilistic cynicism that might be described as Seinfeld-Costanza Syndrome. People affected by SCS find that it is pointless to believe in or care about anything larger than their own appetites, amusements, or occasional obsessions. This is one kind of loss of Self. It's the particular malady of the cultural left.
The other is typical of people who feel competing worldviews as a threat that must be defeated. In this we are entering into a strange room within the human psyche where issues revolving around power and identity fester. People who have a relatively weak sense of individual self have a stronger need to rely on group identity. These are people who feel relatively powerless as individuals, and it is hard for them to separate themselves from the group in any way, and as a result any threat to the group--its worldview and values--is a threat they feel intimately as if it were a personal threat. They suffer from an inflammation of the soul I call "Cultitis". It's the particular malady of the cultural right.
The people in the latter group see the people in the first group as decadents, and they are right, but they are suffering from the same modern malady, which is a diminution of Selfhood. Selfhood is what healthy cultures produce in their citizens--it comprises a quality of independent thought and moral volition, i.e., conscience. And I think that it is self-evident that a healthy conscience leads one to understand that the flourishing of the human soul is nourished by his interdependence with others, by a deep moral imperative that recognizes that we are all in this together, and that we must all pull our own weight in contributing to the larger common good. In other words, Selfhood is neither the shallow appetitive "freedom" and self-absorption of typical of SCS, nor is it Cultitis, the dependent loss of Self in the group, whether it be conventional middle class mores or the code of the gang.
We are living in an in-between time, neither here nor there. Neither moderns or whatever comes next. I think of our era as similar to that of the century between 1350 and 1450, a period during which the medieval era was breaking apart and the modern era had not yet taken shape. It was for most people of that era a miserable time to be alive, but as bad as things got, it gave way to the European Renaissance, and a remarkably fertile period during which the West emerged. But all good things must come to an end, and that era has died, and we are living now in the decaying ruins of the cultural forms created during that time.
These forms, including democracy and the rights tradition associated with it, are weak because the cultural vitality that gave them shape is so diminished, and now we live with these forms as we live with old habits. But my fear is that they are habits that will be easily abandoned if we are told they are no longer workable because of the terrorist threat or because some other necessity requires their abandonment. How many people are truly, deeply committed to an abstraction like the rule of law and the constitution? How many people are suffering from SCS or group cultitis, and will have the independence of spirit to resist those who seek to undermine the rule of law and the constitution in the name of the expedience and national security? I honestly don't know. Have you seen the Spanish film "Butterfly"? Watch it and ask yourself if you response would have been different than that of Moncho's family. We are all anti-fascists until we get really scared.
I have frequently adverted to Jacques Barzun's definition of decadence as an era during which a society has lost any sense of future possibility. The culture shaped by Enlightenment modernity has lost this sense of future possibility, and there's no making believe that we can get it back. Neither is it possible to get back the Christendom that preceded the modern age, as Pope Benedict seems to think would cure the West's problems. There is only going forward, and in going forward we must travel lightly, but that does not mean that we leave behind everything from the past. We carry forward only that which we need to live.
In other words I see the emerging postmodern/postsecular era as integrating what's best in Enlightenment values while at the same time retrieving what the Enlightenment rejected--namely, religious consciousness. The critical consciousness developed during the Enlightenment prevents anyone from accepting naively the traditional "given-ness" of any values and worldview, which is typical of Cultitis. But pure critical consciousness leads to radical skepticism and to nihilism, which on a popular level translates into Seinfeld-Costanza Syndrome. I worry all the time that my son will have to battle the tendency of his generation to fall into SCS. But what is the antidote?
The culture of the future has to learn to believe again, but not naively, not with a sense that belief means accepting anything uncritically as a given, complete and absolute truth. It's impossible to think that way anymore and not to fall into pathology. But it is not impossible to recognize all the signs of grace that abound in our experience and to believe that they point to possibilities that transcend what the rational mind can deliver with certainty. And in that spirit it is not impossible to go back with an open mind to the faiths of our fathers and retrieve what is most valuable in their bequeathal to us. For truly there is much there, and much of it forgotten, that we need now to live.