The past is an abusive spouse that cultural conservatives have to divorce and then befriend for the sake of the children. Let me explain.
A couple of weeks ago I posted Dying Traditions II which argued that Southerners who are trying to maintain their Southern Heritage are fundamentally mistaken, and then in a short post entitled "Dying Traditions III" I refuted that argument as I would expect a lover of the Southern heritage to do:
We're from somewhere, and you aren't. We have roots. We have memories. We have a cultural heritage and identity that you have no idea about. You cannot even begin to understand what we feel because it's not something you have ever felt. Who are you to tell us that our traditions are dead? Who are you to tell us to get over it and move on? Move on to what? To an empty cosmopolitanism that doesn't care about or feel deeply about anything? What do you have to offer us that is better than what we have and cherish? Your pious abstractions don't cut it. So STFU.
First let me say that I make no attempt to argue that the North is morally superior to the South. That's stupid, and there's no question that Southerners have good reason to resent Yankee or Liberal smugness when Yankees have nothing to be smug about. My argument is that Yankee cosmopolitanism is healthier because more flexible and adaptive in a rapidly changing globalizing world.
I'm fine with any subculture that wants to resist assimilation into this globalizing fusion culture, and I'd even say that I'm sympathetic--parts of it should be resisted, particularly in the economic sphere. But insofar as a culture is animated by resentment and by a nostalgia for something that really doesn't exist anymore and can't exist, I'd argue that it's a trap, a whited sepulcher, and the longer one is stuck in it, the more curdled and decayed becomes his soul.
I'd argue by extension that the cultural right has a form of cultural co-dependency. It's like the wife who won't leave her abusive husband because she's afraid to be alone and doesn't know how she'll be able to support herself. Whatever wholesomeness the cultural right thinks it's preserving is in fact a parody of wholesomeness, and it's driven by a need to feel safe and to preserve a sense of order even when the life preserved by that order is unhealthful.
Am I saying that everything cultural conservatives value is unhealthful? Of course, not. The values important for conservatives--loyalty, respect, reverence for the sacred--should be culture-wide values. It's just that the right applies these values dysfunctionally--i.e., their loyalty, respect, and reverence are misplaced or misdirected. They are loyal to that which does not deserve their loyalty and are dying nobly in ignoble wars. They respect authorities that are morally bankrupt frauds, and they revere idols, not the living God who will not be contained in stone-rigid formulas.
If there is anything decent and healthful in the lives of those on the cultural right, it is despite their cultural allegiances not because of them. The many who are decent are so because they are innately decent, just as those on the cultural left are. Whatever the differences might be in their thinking, people, in general, are decent. This basic decency is where the common ground lies, and this is what needs to be recognized, and this is the key to broaching the fissures that divide us.
So apart from what there is in cultural conservatism that is worthy of our respect, too much of it is animated by resentments about abuses, real or imagined, that won't be let go of, and the whole Neo-confederacy phenomenon takes that unwholesome dysfunction to a new level. Too much of cultural conservatism is not as much about what it stands for as much as what it stands against. It's about "We're not that" more than it's about "We are this" because when you examine it, there really isn't much of a 'this' there. It's more of a wish that it were there. There is the rotting corpse of the Real, but the soul of the Real departed long, long ago.
This is not a North/South thing anymore. It's more about what's happening to the entire globe, and finding the attitudes and mentality that will move us forward out of this transitional phase to something that is more culturally healthful. I see cultural conservatives as propping up the corpse of the dead king for fear of the chaos that will engulf society if they don't. But this is an exercise they are doing in their own little bubble because the world is functioning just fine without them and their king, and it is moving on with out them. Let me put it in Christian terms by quoting a the last several paragraphs of a 2008 piece I wrote entitled "Cultural Identity I":
We are entering a critical time in human evolution during which our understanding about what it means to be human will be dramatically re-imagined. Our current understanding about what it means is terribly muddled. Most people's thinking about it is an incoherent mixture of premodern ideas that embrace soul and spirit and modern/postmodern notions that humans are nothing more than talking animals or wetware machines.
The the animal/machine idea is abhorrent, but the soul and spirit ideas are linked to tribal and cultural supports that are no longer sustainable and which now clutter things up to make the re-imagination task more difficult. The trend toward one form or another of cyborgism wins by default unless we find a way that retrieves elements of the premodern and represents them as a robust postmodern alternative that does not depend on the older tribal loyalties and other cultural accouterments of the past. Christians, rather than looking at the loss of their cultural identities as an evil to be resisted, should embrace it as the necessary movement from embeddedness to disembeddeness which has been at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian impulse since the time when our father Abraham was called to leave Ur to go into the desert.
The Judaeo-Christian impulse throughout history has been fundamentally about moving out of the past and into the future, and that has meant out of embeddeness into increasing levels of disembeddedness. Those who have lived from this impulse have given up the comforts of the past to believe in seemingly impossible promises. They have trusted, like Job, that even when everything is stripped away, that their essential identity, their 'I am' created in the image and likeness remains, and that if the great saints are to be believed, it's only when everything else is stripped away that we are revealed to ourselves and see no longer through a glass darkly but face to face. It is not possible to willfully strip everything away, but we should not resist the historical forces that gradually peel off the layers that hide and too often suffocate the unconsuming fire that burns within.
This might seem abstract, but I think that the stripping away is something we don't have a choice about, and so it's a matter of finding the best attitude to make the adjustment, and Christians, if they really understand their religion, have the resources to make the necessary adjustments. In fact they should lead the way, but the most public forms of Christianity are past-obsessed rather than focused on the future.
It's too bad. When the message of the gospels is most needed by the world, the credibility and legitimacy of the churches are mostly invested in preserving cultural forms and traditionalist attitudes that no longer have anything genuinely life giving in them. The credibility and legitimacy of the churches is therefore at an historically low ebb when the message of the gospels genuinely helpful if it were communicated in a way that addressed the real problem, which is not about who we were but who we humans are becoming.
I'll tell you one thing that gives me hope. I have a nineteen-year-old son who just finished his first year in college. His friends from high school and college embody this cosmopolitanism that southerners feel will destroy their heritage. But they embody it in a way that I see as profoundly healthy. They are a lively, smart, thoughtful group almost completely unencumbered by the past or with any real knowledge of it, and it's OK. They will retrieve from it what they need as they move into the future. The important thing is that they are genuinely open to everything--including religious answers to life's most persistent questions--and have excellent b.s. detectors and have no tolerance for the politically correct nonsense of the left or the moribund pieties of the right.
My son is not churchy. He comes with me to mass from time to time, but I have never insisted on it. But he has a nose for the "real" or what he calls "down to earth." And so do his friends. That nose for the "real" is what will lead him and them into the future, and I don't know how representative they are of their generation, but that American liberal, cosmopolitan, bi-coastal culture was able to produce kids like these gives me genuine hope. And whether involvement with the Church is a part of their future depends to a large extent on whether the stench of what is rotting in it overpowers the subtler scent of the Real that is also to be found in the parts of it that are still alive, and always will be.
See also Cultural Identity II.