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even aesthetics and concentrates instead on the ways that texts advance the agendas
of various groups, usually defined in terms of race, class, or gender. I shall contrast it
here not with Modernism but with something far older that I will call "The Tradition."
Not every scholar who has looked at race or gender issues in literature will be
fairly represented by the following characterizations. But neither do I mean only the
hard-core Derrideans and Fishites; rather, they and the host of scholars (and their
students, including Christian students) who have adopted their methods without
necessarily thinking through their epistemological and ethical implications, but whose
analyses are nonetheless affected by them.
Neither by "Traditionalist" do I mean every redneck or robber-baron capitalist
who ever gave the phrase "ugly American" its meaning. But there is a Tradition that
holds together thinkers as diverse as Socrates, Erasmus, Aquinas and the great
Protestant Reformers, Edmund Burke and Dr. Johnson, Thomas Jefferson and Russell
Kirk, C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers and Flannery O'Connor, which
makes them all, in spite of their differences, part of a single conversation taking place in
the same universe of discourse. Some of these people found themselves on different
sides of some fences (some were outside the Church), but they were still able to
cooperate in examining and repairing them, to each the boulders that had fallen to each.
They differ from the type of Post-Modernist thinker I am describing by believing that,
while the usefulness or proper location of any given fence might be an open question,
there is a difference between one field and another rather than an endlessly open play of
French-accented differance; and, hence, in not wanting to tear all the fences they
inherited from their ancestors down so they can start over again from scratch.
Questioning, to both groups, is an intellectual good. By it the mixture of truth
and error, gold and dross, that constitutes our thoughts is refined. But for the
Traditionalist, questioning is not an end in itself. It has value in so far as purer gold is
desirable. But if we question whether gold is really more precious than lead, the
process of refinement grinds to a halt and our intellectual currency becomes debased.
When questioning becomes an end in itself, no longer limited either by First Principles
(which the Post-Modernist thinks are just arbitrary social conventions) or Facts (which