Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Emile Perreau-Saussine. Translated by Nathan Pinkoski. University of Notre Dame Press, 197 pages, $40.
What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics by Richard Rorty. Edited by W.P. Malecki and Chris Voparil. Princeton University Press, 227 pages, $24.95.
By George Scialabba
Fifty years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. vowed not to read another book about liberalism until his mother wrote one. Liberalism was riding high then, and Buckley was presumably annoyed by its champions' triumphalist tone. He would feel differently now. You can hardly walk around the block today without tripping over a critique of liberalism. There are critiques by wild-eyed Randians, free-market libertarians, neoclassical economists, neo-Burkean conservatives, and Catholic integralists; and from the left, by critical race theorists, postmodernists, and of course, Marxists.
Two books stand out from the anti-liberal flood. Christopher Lasch's The True and Only Heaven (1991) takes on the dark side of the Enlightenment legacy, searching out the philosophical roots of consumerism and technocracy and unearthing a counter-tradition in a great many well-known and lesser-known places. Whatever one thinks of Lasch's central argument, it is a remarkable synthesis. The other book is Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), undoubtedly the best (the only?) Aristotelian critique of liberalism. Though difficult, like all MacIntyre's works, it has been extraordinarily influential. Otherwise fractious conservatives are unanimous in their reverence, while even most liberals and leftists - at least those who pay any attention to philosophy - accord it a wary respect.
MacIntyre, now 91,
has had an unusual trajectory. Born in
Scotland to a working-class family, he grew up and attended university in
northern England. In the late 1950s he joined E.P. Thompson's legendary journal
The New Reasoner, which eventually became the New Left Review. In
the 1960s, after a decade of intellectual engagement with Marxism, much of it
gathered in his 1971 collection Against the Self-Images of the Age, he
drifted away - not from Marxism but from the left. The contemporary left, he
argued, saw only two possibilities: Stalinism or social democratic reformism.
As a Trotskyist, MacIntyre could accept neither.
Marxism continued to fascinate him, as an ethics and a philosophy of history. One of the attractive features of his thought is his scorn for the superficial notion that Stalinism discredited Marxism. As he later put it: "The barbarous despotism of the collective Czardom which now reigns in Moscow is as irrelevant to the question of Marxism's moral substance as the life of a Borgia pope was to Christianity's moral substance." He eventually took his distance from Marxism, both because of the "impotence of Marx's economic theory" (presumably value theory - a valid complaint) and the failure of Marx's predictions (not a valid complaint). But concluding his intriguing little volume, Marxism and Christianity (1968), he insisted that it was by no means superannuated:
Both liberals and Christians are too apt to forget that Marxism is the only systematic doctrine in the modern world that has been able to translate to any important degree the hopes men once expressed, and could not but express in religious terms, into the secular project of understanding societies and expressions of human possibility and history as a means of liberating the present from the burdens of the past, and so constructing the future. Liberalism by contrast simply abandons the virtue of hope. For liberals the future has become the present enlarged.
In the long course of his subsequent development, MacIntyre would maintain a distant regard for Marxism, while directing his philosophical heavy artillery at liberalism.
Liberalism is notoriously hard to define. For MacIntyre the political radical, liberals are those who, while professing concern for the less advantaged, have no intention of allowing them significantly greater social power. Judging from scattered hints in his later works - he has written hardly anything about politics for the last forty years - he still feels that way. For MacIntyre the cultural conservative, liberalism embraces rationalism, secularism, individualism, and materialism, the latter as both a philosophical doctrine and a sociological phenomenon.
For MacIntyre the moral philosopher, the decline of the modern world is seen at its starkest and most ominous in the evolution of moral reasoning. The background and scaffolding of the classical tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas was a shared conception of cosmic or social order, derived from Aristotle's metaphysics and Aquinas' theology. The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries undermined Aristotle's metaphysics, and the Protestant Reformation introduced several competing theologies. In response, moral philosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries, including Hume, Smith, Diderot, Kant, Bentham, and Mill, tried to provide a rational but non-metaphysical justification for morality. All of them, MacIntyre argues, failed.
Instead, in the 20th century morality was severed from rationality. The dominant form of moral theory is now emotivism, which holds that evaluative statements are nothing more than expressions of preference. "X is good" simply means "I like X," but disguised as a factual statement in order to manipulate the hearer. There is a less pejorative way of understanding emotivism: "I like X" could mean "I like X. This is why, and why you might like X too." For MacIntyre, however, emotivism makes honest communication impossible. We can only inveigle one another.
The initial chapters of After Virtue, which set out the imagined consequences of this philosophical impasse, are probably what MacIntyre is best known for. The absence of a cosmic order, with its associated telos or purpose, condemns modern society to widespread anomie, superficiality, and narcissism (in the clinical, not the colloquial, sense). Modern culture has evolved several representative character types, notably the bureaucrat, the therapist, and the aesthete. The first two deploy fictitious expertise to achieve externally imposed goals; the third treats others as interesting sensations to be consumed. Modern moral life is a series of interminable quarrels and subtle conflicts of will which, for lack of a recognized moral authority, can never be resolved.
What then is this telos, which alone can redeem us? Telos, like "Being" and "dialectic," is one of the most important and mischievous terms in the history of philosophy. It means, roughly, "essential nature," "ultimate end," "purpose," "goal," "fulfillment." According to MacIntyre moral philosophy is futile unless it starts from our telos. Only with a grasp of our true end can we judge what our duties are and what virtues will enable us to fulfill them. The human telos, MacIntyre asserts, following Aristotle, is rational happiness.
Well, rational happiness is a plausible contender, surely. But questions crowd in at this point. Who gets to decide what the human telos is? Why is reason more essential to humans than, say, love or beauty? More universal than suffering? Nobler than sympathy or courage? And what is an essential nature, anyway? Is it something every member of the species has? But every human has eyes and a stomach, arguably as important to its well-being as reason. It's true that if someone is deprived of eyes or stomach, we still count her as human, but the same is true if someone is temporarily or permanently deprived of reason.
There is an ambiguity in the meaning of telos that even MacIntyre, for all his philosophical acuity, does not resolve. It can mean "nature," that is, what we are; or it can mean "purpose," that is, what we are for. Anyone is entitled to an opinion about my nature - my own opinion is not privileged. But I alone am entitled to decide on my purpose - I am for whatever I decide to be for. So that to refer, as MacIntyre repeatedly does, to the end or goal or purpose of human life as something objectively discoverable or deducible is to ignore the fact that ends, goals, and purposes are chosen with the whole of a person's experience and imagination - perhaps making use of Aristotelian moral philosophy, and perhaps not.
Why is MacIntyre so alarmed by our apparent lack of moral consensus? After all, the supposedly interminable and irresolvable disagreements he laments may be described very differently, as conversations: age-long, society-wide conversations, sometimes (e.g., slavery), but by no means always, issuing in violence. Our national conversations about Jim Crow and interracial marriage ended in the 1960s. Our conversation about the full humanity of women seemed to have ended in the 1980s and 90s. Republicans and evangelicals are bent on re-opening it, but that too will end eventually, when (to adapt a venerable 18th-century phrase) the last originalist Justice is hanged in the entrails of the last fundamentalist preacher. Our conversation about homosexuality ended happily; our conversation about legalizing marijuana - maybe also psychedelic drugs - looks promising. Our conversation about economic inequality and reviving the New Deal is unfortunately going nowhere - but there was a New Deal, which is perhaps grounds for hope. Our conversation about global warming has, alas, barely begun. But despite the persistence of conflict, MacIntyre's insistence that modern pluralism makes moral and political progress impossible seems at odds with our history. And in secular, social-democratic Europe, where they're even more alienated from Aristotelian metaphysics and supernatural religion than we are in America, their moral/political conversations generally go even better.
MacIntyre is one of the most celebrated moral philosophers alive. But he seems to me just wrong about the nature of moral argument. What it ought to provide, he writes, and did provide in those blessed days now lost, are "genuine objective and impersonal standards" capable of "rational justification." At least, that's what premodern philosophers claimed. But for three hundred years, most philosophers have rejected that claim. Of course one should be "rational" and "objective" - that is, fair-minded and scrupulous in argument - whatever one's moral philosophy. But that doesn't mean one should - or can - appeal only to standards and values that will compel universal assent, or whatever "rational justification" is supposed to mean. The distinctions on which MacIntyre leans so heavily - "meaning" and "use"; "emotive" and "rational"; even "means" and "ends" - are practical and provisional, not absolute.
Two people arguing about whether something is good may offer factual reasons, in case one thinks the other is misinformed, or may suggest that the other's reasoning is faulty. If that doesn't produce agreement, they may canvass principles and values relevant to the dispute, and if they share one and can agree on how it applies to their disagreement, then they've reached agreement. In the most difficult case, however, facts and logic will not suffice: the disputants will have to reveal to each other the whole scaffolding of beliefs, experiences, and hopes underlying their position, each one trying to see the issue with new eyes - or more precisely, with an enlarged moral imagination. Moral judgment incorporates both reason and emotion - Hume formulated that then-novel truth provocatively, saying that reason is always the servant of emotion, in an attempt to dislodge from readers' minds the traditional strict separation between the two. It's also what pragmatists like James and Dewey meant by identifying the imagination as our key moral faculty; and it's why Richard Rorty wrote that we should expect moral progress chiefly from the work of novelists, journalists, ethnographers, and other purveyors of thick descriptions rather than from philosophy.
But who can get through all that mutual moral excavation? Even lovers and spouses rarely dredge all the way to moral bedrock. Can Democrats and Republicans, democratic socialists and Tea Partiers, be expected to? Not individually, perhaps; to that extent, MacIntyre's pessimism is justified. Other, more homogeneous and solidaristic societies rely on widely shared origins or a sense of mutual responsibility in order to understand one another sufficiently for civic debate. But in chronically bamboozled, heavily armed, endemically precarious America, there is very little solidarity or good will. The civic debate is a brawl. And the institutions that should help mediate it - the schools, the media, local government - only add fuel to the flames. MacIntyre's diagnosis notwithstanding, however, the reasons for America's civic cacophony are political and historical, not philosophical - plutocracy, not emotivism.
It is not only dark side of modernity - the alleged manipulativeness, shallowness, aimlessness, and fragmentation - that MacIntyre deplores. Even modernity's loftiest achievements are hollow. Natural rights and human rights have no more reality than witches or unicorns, he scoffs, so the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights are "fictions," with no objectively rational justification. In fact, those great documents are not philosophical arguments, nor do they depend on philosophical arguments. The Bill of Rights means: "Where this document's writ runs, no one shall be prevented from voting or running for office or starting a newspaper or any other political activity merely because he is not a nobleman." It does not mean: "There are wraith-like entities called rights subsisting in a shadowy metaphysical realm, from which we must deduce how best to organize our polity." The fact that some or all of the document's signers may have believed the latter, metaphysical proposition does not change the fact that what they actually did, and what they were then and ever since understood to have done, is best expressed by the former, non-metaphysical one.
And how do we today, who don't believe in those wraith-like entities, rationally justify our affirmation of these truths? Our justification is: "We trust ordinary people, governed only by persuasion, with ultimate political power." We could explain further, but it wouldn't satisfy MacIntyre. For him, an "objectively rational justification" is a rigorous deduction from the telos, against which there is no appeal. The absence of an ultimate, unaccountable authority is a decisive defect in liberalism, MacIntyre warns. Liberalism is purely negative, a matter of setting limits on authority. Liberal principles "set before us no ends to pursue, no ideal or vision to confer significance upon our political action. They never tell us what to do."
It is true, of course, that to grow up in a society or polis where the ends of life are authoritatively defined by the society's traditions, which prescribe the duties and virtues needed in each walk of life, does make it easier, in a way, to become a hero. Becoming a hero takes a great deal of single-mindedness, and not to have to form one's own conscience and values relieves a prospective hero of a great deal of trouble and distraction. But even so, our confused and distracted society does occasionally produce our own sort of hero: Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Aaron Swartz, for example, who seem to me not spiritually inferior to Saint Benedict, MacIntyre's ideal.
Alasdair MacIntyre, by the eminent French philosopher Emile Perrault-Saussine, is not so much an intellectual biography as an essay on MacIntyrean themes. It's engaging and accessible, and it does sometimes clarify MacIntyre's arguments, which can be knotty. It would have been interesting, though, to learn something more about MacIntyre's life: for example, about his break with the British New Left (there were rumors of hard feelings with Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn) or his conversion to Roman Catholicism. A little gossip adds relish to a biography, even (especially?) of so austere and forbidding a figure as MacIntyre. It is also surprising that Perreau-Saussine barely mentions Simone Weil. With her intellectual passion and her anguished concern for the infirmities of the soul, she is perhaps the 20th century's closest approach to St. Augustine, who was a major influence on MacIntyre. I wish his biographer had asked him why he has never written about her.
In the book's Foreword, the even more eminent French philosopher Pierre Manent approvingly notes MacIntyre's fifty-year-long "steady core of antiliberal anger" but then wryly observes, in Tocquevillian accents, that "the alternatives to liberalism have lost all credibility. Never has a principle organizing human association been more criticized while triumphant, or more triumphant while discredited." MacIntyre would probably agree, even if not in the same jaunty tone of voice. He too thinks liberalism will be around a long time, though not because it's resilient or the least bad alternative. Rather, liberalism is a blight, a toxic fog that has settled permanently on our cultural/political landscape. "What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the long dark ages which are already upon us." That's MacIntyre's political program.
Perreau-Saussine's book is a useful digest of MacIntyre's thought but rarely offers us anything original or profound. The exception is the book's final paragraph, which wisely tempers MacIntyre's radical antiliberalism and which contemporary American postliberals should take to heart:
MacIntyre remains faithful to his antiliberal premises even though he has no constitutional or political alternatives to counter liberal democracy. The tension between de facto political liberalism and philosophical, theological, or moral antiliberalism manifests a tension in the very substance of our lives. Liberalism presupposes a social order that it does not produce and that it even tends to destroy, By absolutizing individual consent, by reducing truth to mere opinion without granting importance to otherwise recognized authorities, liberalism nourishes a relativism that subverts the mores and habits it needs. The moral is that liberalism does not stand to win if its program is completely realized. Liberalism only lasts if we periodically counter it with our objections. Without this it collapses in on itself. The tension between liberalism and these criticisms, between freedom and truth, does not weaken the West. On the contrary, this tension constitutes one of the secrets of its vitality.
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Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was MacIntyre's polar opposite in all ways except one: both men liked and respected the other. Rorty was an anti-foundationalist, while MacIntyre grimly insists that philosophy without metaphysical foundations is the merest fiction. Rorty thought our paramount moral/political obligation was to reduce suffering and increase happiness. MacIntyre thinks it is to follow the path of virtue marked out by the traditions of our community, guided by that community's view of the telos or purpose of human life. Rorty thought the Enlightenment, and the spirit of criticism it bequeathed, inaugurated a new and fortunate period in history, an epoch in which personal and social liberation are at least possible. MacIntyre thinks we will be lucky to survive this liberation.
Rorty seems to have felt that his philosophical celebrity entailed an obligation
to comment on contemporary political issues, while MacIntyre seems to feel that his philosophical celebrity entails an obligation not to - Rorty was pretty much the model of a public intellectual, while MacIntyre may as well have been writing from inside a monastery. What Can We Hope For? rounds up a last (presumably) selection of topical pieces from Rorty's archive, following on last year's more strictly philosophical Pragmatism As Anti-Authoritarianism.
Rorty's parents were journalists, teachers, activists, and friends of John Dewey, from whom they learned that radical democratic egalitarianism was 100 percent Americanism. Their son was to offer many friendly reminders of this over the years to intemperate leftists who dismissed American history and culture as irredeemably benighted. This was the theme of Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998), which urged a rapprochement between the Old and the New Left. Rorty's other previous political book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), argued with grace and subtlety that for political purposes, philosophy is unimportant and imaginative identification with others is all-important.
The eighteen pieces in What Can We Hope For? give amateurism a good name. Each one discusses an essay-sized topic - economic inequality ("Making the Rich Richer," "Back to Class Politics"), globalization ("Can American Egalitarianism Survive in a Global Economy?"), cultural politics ("Demonizing the Academy"), international affairs ("The Unpredictable American Empire," "Half a Million Blue Helmets?") - humanely, incisively, and elegantly. Perhaps the most memorable is "Looking Backwards from the Year 2096," a review of the preceding (i.e., 21st) century by a nameless speaker. Increasing misery and resentment gave rise to increasingly uncontrollable civil strife, he or she tells us, resulting in a military dictatorship in mid-century. Eventually the Democratic Vistas Party restored civilian rule, but everyone was much chastened and American exceptionalism, for better and worse, much weakened. "Compared with the Americans of a hundred years ago [i.e., 1996], we are citizens of an isolationist, unambitious, middle-grade nation." The speaker concludes that "everything depends on keeping our fragile sense of American fraternity intact." The piece's allusions to Whitman's Democratic Vistas and Bellamy's Looking Backward underline this moral.
Rorty was fond of drawing a distinction between Enlightenment rationalism and Enlightenment liberalism. He agreed with MacIntyre that Enlightenment rationalism - the attempt to ground morality in reason - had failed. But he thought Enlightenment liberalism - egalitarianism, free speech, universal suffrage, the separation of Church and State - had succeeded gloriously and was humanity's best hope. Doubtless he and MacIntyre will spend eternity debating this.
[END]
George Scialabba's selected essays will be published next year by Verso.
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