Authority? What? I don't need that!

"At bottom he stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of reason'. His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his 'reason'; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his 'reason (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action." - Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics

Try as I might, I can't figure out how Rittelmeyer's latest post in the ongoing war is meaningfully distinguishable from the worst sort of cultural libertarianism. The idea that we have the sovereign authority requisite to judge and then pick a tradition to follow, at which point of course we ought to break our identities so as to conform to it in a flurry of masochistic fun, leads rather rapidly to the idea that we don't need a tradition at all. After all, if our powers of judgment are so invincible that we can unmoor ourselves from the world and pick a tradition to follow, why have a tradition at all (aside from the cool holidays and ceremonies, that is)? There's a reason I find church-shopping distasteful.

More fundamentally, Rittelmeyer still hasn't answered the question of what end she is striving towards with all this tradition-shopping. Not that that's a problem necessarily -- shopping can be fun. Still, if we're shooting for something beyond intellectual vanity and cheap thrills, there needs to be a coherent answer to this question.

As it happens, my anarcho-mystic friend Theophanes (whom it appears Poulos has now picked up) gave me an intriguing lead on how to approach the question. He once defined postmodern conservatism for me as arising from "The self-conscious blending of means and ends." For those too lazy to unpack that aphorism unaided, here's a hint: It's about Burke.

In conclusion: Rittelmeyer rightly points out that "Tradition as innocence doesn't always work", but I never made the claim that it does. What she forgets is that there are compelling, non-braindead arguments for defending tradition qua tradition. While using such arguments requires some smarts and some education, it doesn't require abandoning our heritage or setting ourselves up as the supreme arbiters of whether a tradition is (useful/non-useful)/(good/bad).

Please see the attached technical diagram and explanation for an elaboration of my point.


The stick-figure in the "Meta-tradition battleground" is saying: "Bang!"

The stick-figure in the tradition bubble is saying: "Here I am, existing self-consciously but contentedly in the Democracy of the Dead, secure in the knowledge that my alter-ego can ascend to the Meta-tradition battleground without forsaking his heritage. In fact, he can only do so because he has a heritage!"

The stick-figure lost in the Po-Mo Vortex is saying: "Woe is me! I thought that my powers of rational inquiry made me able to pick a better tradition than the one I had inherited. Alack! I no longer have standards of judgment! I should have realized that all traditions partake in the good, and that direct-revelation/drug-ceremonies could have made my tradition better!"