Jonathan Jones continues his series on the meaning of conservatism.
I see an intriguing similarity between the conservative's distrust of ideologies and the postmodernist's incredulity towards meta-narratives -- particularly the totalizing narratives of the Enlightenment and of Marxism. Granted, many postmodernists would look upon the conservative's "permanent things" and "eternal truths" as meta-narratives, and Burke's "moral imagination" as incapable of moving beyond the messiness and chaos of experience. Still, there is a shared concern: people becoming trapped in ideologies, meta-narratives, and other constructs and failing to see what is going on beyond them. This is a concern especially when people build grand institutions or other structures, such as governments, on abstract ideological constructions with little rootedness in history and humanity.
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