Friday, June 10, 2005
(10:47 AM) | Brad:
If You've Never Stood in Front of Strangers and Told Them Your "Testimony" This Post Will Make No Sense
I was recently contacted, via email, by a seminary student studying at my alma mater (which will remain nameless -- if you're really that curious, it's not that hard to discover). The student was given my contact information by a professor there who recognized, among other things, that he was not 'normal' -- that is, insofar as he was more prone to quote Heidegger than Lucado, not like his conservative Christian kin. Since then, he has regaled me with questions regarding my work, my reading, etc.; and I have responded by inquiring about his educational and professional aims, and suggesting, just to see if he would, that he read Spinoza's Ethics. The effect has been, in his words, profound. Spinoza, it would, seem has hit him hard, and in a place that resonates with the questions he'd been asking for a couple of years.The effect of this exchange on me has been two-fold. First, on a very self-centered level, I realize that, should my alma mater ever hire me to teach art and/or philosophy -- which they likely would never do. of course -- I would be a fucking academic superstar to students such as this one. Second, and more interestingly, I began thinking about how so many of us here at The Weblog, united in a spirit of enquiry and hope for something truly, for lack of a better word, 'different than what is', if not necessarily united in the specifics that define what that difference is and/or how it is achieved, have emerged from a variety of conservative contexts. It is almost as if the most radical position can only be staked out if one has 'passed through' that which it now resists. I'm not necessarily suggesting a dialectical relationship, notwithstanding my comments to JD earlier this week; indeed, for example, I realize one like Doug Johnson (Old) has not so much renounced some of his earlier positions, or moved to its dialectical Other, as he has pulled them to a truly radical extreme. (I don't mean that pejoratively.)
The question is -- yes, I know this has undoubtedly been discussed here before, but I'm not inclined at the moment to search through the archives to make sure this is the case -- why is this so? Is it that former conservatives -- again, I realize both of those words, let alone their combination, 'former' and 'conservative', are nebulous at best -- have a vantage point, an embattled perspective not built on caricature and misinformation, that many forever-diehard Leftist secularists lack? Is it, then, a 'gift' to have embarassing memories (not to mention photographs) of ourselves, for instance, at, sweet Jesus say it isn't true, Carmen concerts whilst sporting t-shirts that scream in a multi-colored font: 'Whenever the Devil reminds you of your past, remind HIM of his FUTURE!!!!' Is it, I wonder, that we reject our past with fingers crossed, and thus try to play the tragic hero, with all the pathos that requires?
