APOCALYPSE NOW?

...But as Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote, there is something a bit "cavalier" about MacIntyre's proposal...

...But what about those conservatives who believe in the continuing possibilities of liberal democracy and the fruits of Enlightenment culture...

...and the Scottish moral tradition, which combined elements of Calvinist Augustinianism and Renaissance Aristotelianism...

...What he recommends is a politics of small local communities that keep their distance from the state and the market economy...

...In abolishing such tests, the liberal university thought that it was making way for rational debate...

...How this happened is a very complicated tale, but it is fair to say that in MacIntyre's view the cause of our moral decay rests squarely on the scrawny shoulders of the liberal Enlightenment, which made several valiant, but failed, attempts to set morality on a universal rational basis...

...Born in Scotland in 1929, he grew up in a small farming and fishing community...

...thus, the handicapped should not be seen as the "Other," but as enduring a condition that, if only in our aging, we shall all come to know intimately...

...Bentham and his utilitarian followers tried to do it by deriving morality from human psychology...

...The book was called After Virtue, and it might have faded away unnoticed: yet another unremarkable tome in the long line of conservative laments for lost worlds and yet another conservative demand that we flee to the distant mountains and escape the decadent last days of a collapsing culture...

...As for MacIntyre's larger political vision, it is not one that has any chance of realization in America (a fact he readily admits...

...People might invoke key scientific terms, but they have utterly lost sight of the presuppositions, the social and intellectual context, that gave meaning to them...

...Just as one cannot, in an emotivist culture, appeal to some transcendent standard to settle the debate between life and choice, one cannot provide convincing reasons to oneself...

...A renowned teacher, MacIntyre is celebrated by his students and influential far beyond his own discipline...

...But he also claims that the tradition of liberalism is not readily understood, that, in fact, the history of the liberal tradition hasn't been written yet...

...Even more surprising, Newsweek took it up, explaining to its popular magazine audience that the complex work was a "stunning new study of ethics...

...Nonetheless, MacIntyre still finds it possible to reject all of liberalism...

...She later retracted the intended compliment when she discovered that MacIntyre was no longer a politically correct author...

...Where MacIntyre parts company with the left, however, is on the question of whether our only choice is liberal rationalism or Nietzschean self-creation...

...In his view, "the moral attitude" of the Stalinist-turned-liberal was hardly different from that of the unrepentant Stalinist...

...Or you can violently agree with him, as many do, particularly on the Catholic right...

...When he wrote the sequel to After Virtue, the New York Review of Books and the New Republic called upon their heaviest hitters to knock it down...

...Thomas's reconciliation of Christianity with Aristotle...

...But "the rationality of traditions," at least according to MacIntyre, does not end, as the liberal Enlightenment did, in an unresolvable clash of values...

...The turn to traditions would not, at least at first, seem an answer to value pluralism and relativism, for as MacIntyre makes clear, there are a diversity of traditions, each with its own table of values and conception of rationality...

...MacIntyre boldly asserts, pace Thomas Jefferson and our Declaration of Independence, "there are no self-evident truths...

...Moore, R.M...

...by unearthing "an alternative mode of understanding," which he calls "the rationality of traditions...

...He is also right to note that the emotivist human type is to some extent characteristic of our modern condition...

...In his view, a Third Way is open: returning to the ancients, in particular Aristotle...

...One of the most frightening aspects of MacIntyre's book is its claim that Nietzsche was right about modern liberal regimes...

...There are conservatives, of course, who still mourn the loss of the old world and still urge us to flee an America that has become indistinguishable from Gomorrah...

...Thomas Aquinas (not to mention MacIntyre's conversion to Catholicism...

...INSTEAD, IT LED TO MORAL CONFLICT, RELATIVISM, AND EVENTUALLY NIHILISM...

...The result is a culture in which moral debate never ends because there is no rational way of securing consensus...

...such attempts failed, argues MacIntyre, with the unhappy result that a third moral theory prevailed in the West: emotivism...

...To call him interdisciplinary—^which he certainly is, with a background in sociology, the classics, and philosophy—does him a disservice...

...Indeed, in the author's view, morality as such had nearly vanished, and the collapse of intelligible moral discourse marked a serious "degeneration" and "cultural loss...

...The first has to do with his conception of tradition, which leads him to call the conservative hero Edmund Burke "an agent of positive harm," for divorcing tradition from reflection...

...To teach a course that begins with Plato and ends with Nietzsche, or to write a Book of Virtues, is to fall into the old liberal trap of universalism and cosmopolitanism...

...Indeed, the bulk of Whose Justice...

...Instead, there are particular traditions each with its own conceptions of justice and rationality...

...The liberal Enlightenment subverted tradition and authority—^which once provided an-swers—in the hope that naked reason would provide the necessary alternative...

...In the interim, he became first a Marxist and then a Trot-skyist, writing penetrating essays on Marx, Freud, and Marcuse, and in the field of analytical philosophy...

...Mac-Intyre did take a stab at confronting the liberal tradition in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, but rather than taking up liberalism's best arguments, he settled for arguing against the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which dates back to 1880, hardly liberalism's most persuasive spokesman...

...Unlike another famous former Trotskyist, Irving Kristol, MacIntyre was not exactly "mugged by reality...

...He insists that one must imaginatively enter into a tradition in order to understand, let alone criticize, it, which should hold true for his own look at the tradition of liberalism...

...Stephen Holmes, in the New Republic, accused MacIntyre of "deceptive sobriety," "sonorous preaching," "baffling inconsistency," "moral polygamy," and much else besides...

...Additional problems arise with Mac-Intyre's more practical proposals...

...MacIntyre's After Virtue seemed to many at the time—with its apocalyptic, almost postmodern tone—one such alternative...

...When Kristol abandoned Marxism, he also abandoned his hostility to liberal capitalism, even giving it, famously, "two cheers...

...But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality...

...The New Republic declared it a "surprising and important new book," even "spellbinding...

...The New York Review of Books called it "a striking work" and praised it for its "passion...

...MacIntyre began the book by asking readers to imagine that several environmental catastrophes have convulsed and ravaged the world...

...Meanwhile, many conservatives defend MacIntyre, the former Marxist, as one of their own...

...But what no doubt really soured the left on MacIntyre was his turn, after the publication of After Virtue, to St...

...Thus MacIntyre denounces Bennett, and other "self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives," who "turn out in fact to be one more stage in modernity's cultural deformation of our relationship to the past...

...You can violently disagree with MacIntyre, as many do, particularly on the socialist left...

...What most makes MacIntyre a man to be reckoned with, however, is his intransigent rejection of liberalism...

...Mac-Intyre declared himself a partisan of the Thomistic tradition, and in his subsequent book, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, he attempts to show how the Thomistic tradition can defeat its two main rivals: the liberal Enlightenment and postmodernism...

...MacIntyre opposes capitalism and has little to say in defense of civil society, insofar as the latter is a creation of liberal modernity...

...According to MacIntyre, the Great Books can only be understood within the tradition they belong to and the language they were written in...

...In reality, MacIntyre says, only "a fictitious objectivity" was created, one that favored liberalism and shut out alternative traditions of rational inquiry, such as Thomism...

...His understanding of liberalism seems to be most informed by what passes for liberalism in academia— in other words, the arid and amoral and soul-deadening philosophies of Rawls, Dworkin, Ackerman, and the like...

...If one agrees with MacIntyre that ours is an emotivist culture, then the Nietzschean logic does seem to follow...

...For both conservatives and liberals, it was After Virtue that put MacIntyre on the map—though, curiously, the book was initially greeted with greater warmth on the left than on the right...

...As Princeton professor Robert George points out, the generally friendly reception of After Virtue derived from the book's publication at an opportune moment...

...All the Enlightenment efforts to ground morality, either in natural right, or the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the categorical imperative, or the moral sentiments, turn out to be fictions...

...There is no such thing, MacIntyre holds, as "Western values" or "the Judeo-Chris-tian tradition...

...We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions...

...Since 1981, Aft^^ Vir^-ue Adam Wolfson is executive editor of the Public Interest...

...MacIntyre has put liberalism to the test, and his adversaries know it...

...All THE ENLIGHTENMENT SUBVERTED TRADITION IN THE HOPE THAT REASON WOULD PROVIDE AN ALTERNATIVE...

...The emotivist culture reduces the pro-life position to one more instance of irrational decisionism, of blind preference, even if it contains rational arguments...

...MacIntyre clearly wants no part of the liberal Enlightenment, comparing the belief in natural rights to "belief in witches and in unicorns...

...But before fully agreeing with MacIntyre, we inhabitants of modern liberal regimes might consider, as MacIntyre has not, the moral resources within our own liberal tradition, including its greatest founders, statesmen, and poets...

...For Mac-Intyre, a tradition is "an argument extended through time" among its internal and external critics...

...But for conservatives, here and now, who love their great big extended republic and their Constitution, MacIntyre's politics are at present more than they bargained for...

...Hare, and C.L...

...Only a new St...

...Which Rationality...

...In 1970, he moved to America, marking the start of his philosophical conversion from Trotskyist to Aristotelian to Thomist...

...Here one can see why After Virtue appealed to today's Nietzscheanized left...

...What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived...

...The emotivist culture makes nihilists of us all...

...MacIntyre argues that the great philosophers were not engaged in "a single debate with a relatively unvarying subject-matter," and he is critical of those who would divorce Kant from the history of Prussia or Hume from his Scottish ancestry...

...But instead, the Enlightenment yielded numerous standards, leading to interminable moral conflict, then relativism, and eventually nihilism...

...One person, appealing to some tradition of natural right or law, declares: "There's a right to life...

...But if traditions are the stuff of rational reflection, it's not hard to see why some commentators have claimed that MacIntyre skates near the edge of relativism...

...And, in an odd little concluding chapter in which he pointed out a curious parallel in the thought of St...

...The publication of the new MacIntyre Reader—a fascinating anthology of his work from his Marxist beginnings to his Thomistic conclusions— provides an interesting opportunity for reconsidering the man's thought...

...It is his sweeping contention "that the political, economic, and moral structures of advanced modernity in this country, as elsewhere, exclude the possibility of realizing any of the worthwhile types of political community which at various times in the past have been achieved...

...Blaming scientists for the trouble, people destroy laboratories, burn scientific books, and lynch physicists...

...And over twenty years later, when he came to write After Virtue, he still held that Marxism was not an alternative to liberalism but one of its offshoots...

...A greater lack of empathy for liberalism would be hard to find...

...And it is all the more surprising given two of Macln-tyre's fundamental claims...

...MacIntyre, in contrast, has neither reconciled himself to liberal modernity nor abandoned the Marxist critique of liberalism...

...One is the ability of a person working within the standpoint of his own tradition to enter into the perspective of his antagonist...

...He also shows that it has become embedded in certain social types and now defines our culture...

...is devoted to describing three such traditions: the Aristotelian, which developed out of the life of the Greek city-states and ran from Homer through Plato to Aristotle...

...has been the most widely discussed book of philosophy in English—not just among philosophers, but among general readers across America...

...Arguing that a "new dark ages" had fallen upon us, he claimed we are under the governance of "barbarians...

...For alongside his analyses of Aristotle or Hume on the virtues, one finds literary criticism, interpretations of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Weber, asides on funerary inscriptions and Icelandic sagas, anthropological insights, even discussions of what dolphins and humans have in common...

...The matter of MacIntyre's purported relativism aside, a more telling problem is his root-and-branch antagonism towards the liberal tradition, which dates back to his Marxist past, runs through After Virtue, and is present to this day...

...He was one of the first to demonstrate that while liberalism sells itself today as a doctrine of neutrality, it in fact imposes its values of radical autonomy and individualism on nearly everything it touches...

...But discontent with Rawls's pat welfare-state philosophy—prompted by such alternative visions as communitarianism, postmodernism, and gender feminism—had begun to emerge...

...To view them otherwise is to have, in a sense, liberalized and distorted them...

...Perhaps in some post-apocalyptic world that has been devastated by the sort of science-fiction fantasy laid out in After Virtue, MacIntyre's political vision will become feasible...

...eventually a Know-Nothing party comes to power and bans all teaching of the sciences...

...His claim that there is not one type of rationality, but many historical types, earned him the tag of "honorary woman" from one gender feminist...

...Reinstalling a regime of religious tests, MacIntyre implies, would encourage genuine encounters among the different traditions, each one represented by a university, rather than the pseudo-encounters that he claims occur on the campuses of most universities today...

...This insight is most apparent at the edges of life, in birth and death, where liberalism promotes a regime of abortion and euthanasia...

...Benedict—or a new Trotsky—can possibly save us...

...That seems unfair, and his own solutions somewhat quixotic...

...This requires, according to MacIntyre, the "rare gift of empathy," best exemplified by St...

...This theory holds that all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, and MacIntyre carefully traces its development in the thought of such moral philosophers as G.E...

...When traditions come in conflict, at least the best of them have ways of settling differences...

...Benedict and Leon Trotsky, he suggested that the only solution is quarantine, a breaking up of the world into small local communities in which civility might be preserved...

...MacIntyre has written five outstanding works in moral philosophy, A Short History of Ethics in 1966, After Virtue in 1981, Whose Justice...

...We are not, according to MacIntyre, independent rational agents, as liberalism's leading expositors claim, but vulnerable and dependent beings...

...More conservative publications kept their distance, with the American Scholar, then under the editorship of Joseph Epstein, condemning the book and the Economist calling parts of it "rather far fetched...

...That poses, however, the question of the extent to which he is actually a conservative...

...Stevenson...

...How else can one explain the fact that the left responded to his subsequent works, which largely completed the project begun in After Virtue, with extreme vitriol...

...Similarly, the "Nietzschean stance" turns out to be "one more representative moment in [liberal individualism's] internal unfolding...

...That MacIntyre has been of great service to the conservative cause and to all those who fear for our future there can be no doubt, pointing out liberalism's defects and reviving interest in virtue...

...MacIn-tyre opposes the secular university, first promoted in this country by such enlighteners as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, with its absence of religious tests for professors...

...Although order is later restored, and a scientific revival takes place, it fails because nobody knows any longer what science really is...

...As he said in a 1991 interview, "The Marxist understanding of liberalism as ideological, as a deceiving and self-deceiving mask of social interests, remains compelling...

...MacIntyre calls Nietzsche "the moral philosopher of the present age" and one of the "genuine theoretical alternatives" available to modern men...

...MacIntyre attempts to solve this problem of the liberal Enlightenment in Whose Justice...

...It ignores, as Neuhaus pointed out, that it is the defenders of objectivity who are under assault today and conservative students and professors who are routinely harassed and excluded from the university by the postmodern thought police...

...in 1988, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry in 1990, and Dependent Rational Animals in 1999...

...Thus communism and fascism were not the great rivals of liberal democracy but mere variations on a common theme...

...Quite the contrary: He argues that liberalism itself has become the leading agent of anti-humanism in the modern world...

...He is surely right to conclude that these are bankrupt thinkers, who by means of their considerable influence on the courts and elites impose their false neutrality on law and social policy...

...Thomas's ability to enter into the Aristotelian tradition...

...even "rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history...

...These disparate elements are all carefully sifted through MacIn-tyre's highly tuned historical sense...

...As a young man, he prepared himself for the Presbyterian ministry, but he soon became estranged from religion, only to return to it much later in life via Catholicism...

...The two sides share no premises with each other...

...The point of Maclntyre's thought experiment—which as many readers have noted bears an uncanny resemblance to Walter M. Miller's science-fiction classic, A Canticle For Leibowitz— was to advance the hypothesis that In the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described...

...But to say that Maclntyre opposes liberal individualism is not to say that he is anti-humanist...

...the Augus-tinian, which extended from the Bible through Augustine and culminated in St...

...What, finally, are we who still want to applaud the American Founding to make of Alasdair MacIntyre...

...The starting point for the two main sequels to After Virtue is again the claim that contemporary societies are rent by moral and political disputes to which no solution can be found...

...In a remarkable piece written in the late 1950s, he criticized ex-Stalinists who had turned to liberalism for having "done no more than exchange one dominant pattern of thought for another...

...For nearly a decade, Rawls's A Theory of Justice had reigned over philosophy departments like a colossus...

...While another, perhaps appealing to some notion of human autonomy, shouts back: "There's a right to choice...

...Both sides appeal to some rational standard, but the starting point for both, according to MacIntyre, is irrational decisionism...

...His books in philosophy are, as one reviewer said, more like "volcanoes and whirlpools" than academic treatises...

...It might have faded away—except that its author was Alasdair MacIntyre, the man who is possibly the greatest moral philosopher of the last fifty years and certainly the most unyielding critic of liberalism writing today...

...He opposes the sort of liberal education in Great Books that began with Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago and that William Bennett and others defend today...

...Which Rationality...

...Kant and his followers in the school of analytic philosophy tried to do it by deriving morality from human rationality...

...While MacIntyre's turn to Thomism is to be welcomed, and his Thomistic engagement with postmodernism is nothing less than brilliant, there are some troubling aspects to his analysis...

...Rather, says MacIn-tyre, thought is conditioned by culture: "Doctrines, theses, and arguments all have to be understood in terms of historical context...

...The unmasking of morality as Will to Power leads to the conclusion that it is up to truly superior specimens, supermen, to move beyond good and evil, to become self-conscious creators of new "moralities...

...But you can't get away without knowing about him...

...In Whose Justice...