This is a great post and exciting news! I read your book, The Common Mind, several years ago and learned much from it. Some of the writers you mentioned (Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, etc.) I was not aware of, so now I have much more reading ahead.
The connection you make between agrarian themes grounding us in reality is one I've tried to make in my own writing and conversation. Thank you for your careful thought and for the work you put into this post.
Thank you for your kind thoughts, and I'm so glad you found The Common Mind helpful. There are so many great American writers who also address themes I look at in my forthcoming book: Rachel Carson (in Silent Spring), and of course the great Wendell Berry. I look forward to getting to know the Southern Agrarians better at some point. It does seem to be that alienation from nature is inextricably linked with alienation from human nature, and thus from the divine.
Great post. I don't know whether the world will ever be weaned of modernism, but it is at least more systematic than postmodernism. To collect all lines of thought that correspond with the latter movement would be tedious. On the other hand however, I think it is proper to use postmodernism against modernism. I don't know, but it is perhaps true that there's so much that needs to be deconstructed in modernism. Tolkien isn't modernist by any standards, is he? Great writer. I don't claim to entirely know how postmodernism can be used as a positive force, but I will fall on Chesterton's line that in times of crisis it is not just vice that is unleashed but virtue that is put to wrong use, and thus wasted. In education, I tend to notice that the theme of 'de-colonisation' is common. But isn't postmodernism also a Trojan horse in some ways?
Tolkien, I would say, provides one of the most powerful twentieth-century critiques of modernity through the deployment of a modern version of pre-modern thinking, in (largely, but not exclusively) pre-modern literary models.
Postmodernism, as I understand it, provides a critique of Enlightenment ‘pure reason’, which could, theoretically, be doing a service to those of us who doubt the trustworthiness of the intellectual foundations of modernity. In this regard, I once read a book of essays called ‘Balthasar at the End of Modernity’, (Kerr, Gardner, Moss, Quash, Ward, Williams, published by T and T Clark, Edinburgh, 1999) which was partly an exploration of whether postmodernism creates an opportunity for Christian thinkers today. I think Rowan Williams entertained the idea positively, so far as I could follow his thinking; I think he’s often wrong, but what a mind!
Personally, and as no expert at all, I incline towards Roger Scruton’s view in ‘An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture’ that postmodernism is the work of the Devil: that is, it is one thing to believe that Reason alone cannot guide us to all truth, but an attack on Reason itself is an attack on the Logos, and all meaning, order and cosmos. This is the work of the Father of Lies, whose constant work is to undo that which is created.
We would then be falling to the same temptation as previous generations who thought they could save the face of modernism, were we to employ postmodernist lines of criticism. I don't know, but I seem to think the movement of postmodernism hasn't been fully grasped and that's probably why John Paul II didn't condemn it outrightly in the encyclical letter Fides et Ratio. But then again...
This is a great post and exciting news! I read your book, The Common Mind, several years ago and learned much from it. Some of the writers you mentioned (Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, etc.) I was not aware of, so now I have much more reading ahead.
The connection you make between agrarian themes grounding us in reality is one I've tried to make in my own writing and conversation. Thank you for your careful thought and for the work you put into this post.
Thank you for your kind thoughts, and I'm so glad you found The Common Mind helpful. There are so many great American writers who also address themes I look at in my forthcoming book: Rachel Carson (in Silent Spring), and of course the great Wendell Berry. I look forward to getting to know the Southern Agrarians better at some point. It does seem to be that alienation from nature is inextricably linked with alienation from human nature, and thus from the divine.
May God bless your work.
Great post. I don't know whether the world will ever be weaned of modernism, but it is at least more systematic than postmodernism. To collect all lines of thought that correspond with the latter movement would be tedious. On the other hand however, I think it is proper to use postmodernism against modernism. I don't know, but it is perhaps true that there's so much that needs to be deconstructed in modernism. Tolkien isn't modernist by any standards, is he? Great writer. I don't claim to entirely know how postmodernism can be used as a positive force, but I will fall on Chesterton's line that in times of crisis it is not just vice that is unleashed but virtue that is put to wrong use, and thus wasted. In education, I tend to notice that the theme of 'de-colonisation' is common. But isn't postmodernism also a Trojan horse in some ways?
Thank you for your kind thoughts.
Tolkien, I would say, provides one of the most powerful twentieth-century critiques of modernity through the deployment of a modern version of pre-modern thinking, in (largely, but not exclusively) pre-modern literary models.
Postmodernism, as I understand it, provides a critique of Enlightenment ‘pure reason’, which could, theoretically, be doing a service to those of us who doubt the trustworthiness of the intellectual foundations of modernity. In this regard, I once read a book of essays called ‘Balthasar at the End of Modernity’, (Kerr, Gardner, Moss, Quash, Ward, Williams, published by T and T Clark, Edinburgh, 1999) which was partly an exploration of whether postmodernism creates an opportunity for Christian thinkers today. I think Rowan Williams entertained the idea positively, so far as I could follow his thinking; I think he’s often wrong, but what a mind!
Personally, and as no expert at all, I incline towards Roger Scruton’s view in ‘An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture’ that postmodernism is the work of the Devil: that is, it is one thing to believe that Reason alone cannot guide us to all truth, but an attack on Reason itself is an attack on the Logos, and all meaning, order and cosmos. This is the work of the Father of Lies, whose constant work is to undo that which is created.
We would then be falling to the same temptation as previous generations who thought they could save the face of modernism, were we to employ postmodernist lines of criticism. I don't know, but I seem to think the movement of postmodernism hasn't been fully grasped and that's probably why John Paul II didn't condemn it outrightly in the encyclical letter Fides et Ratio. But then again...