A reader whose name I’m withholding to protect his privacy writes:

I wrote to you about six months to a year ago about deconverting from radical Leftism to some species of conservatism. I had an experience recently which exactly reflected the issue of emotivism and moral incommensurability that you talked about in this post– can we call episodes like this “MacIntyre Moments?”–  and I wanted to share it with you.

I try to avoid Facebook arguments but I let myself indulge in one recently. The topic was the recent desecration of the grave of Junipero Serra . A friend who is still involved in radical activism posted a story about the incident, in which Fr. Serra’s grave and the graves of other people of European descent were desecrated. Due to the racial aspect of the vandalism, the police were investigating it as a hate crime.

My friend thought that this was perfectly reasonable. The desecration, I mean, not the hate crime investigation– that, she thought, was just ridiculous.

One of the things that infuriated me most during my time on the radical left was the complete lack of respect for the dead. I couldn’t have put into words why, then, and I’m not sure I can now. In the part of the– maybe we can call it the Deep Left– I inhabited, it was very common for a dozen or more young activists to live together in a house, which was seen as a kind of collective or commune. We can talk about what this says about young peoples’ need for real community another time. The first such house I lived in was a trailer. The city is an expensive one on the West Coast, so a two-bedroom trailer was a luxury. We had gotten into it because the previous resident had died and his neighbor had helped us rent the trailer from his brother, who was managing the estate.

The previous owner’s name was Chester. He was in his 90s when he died. The trailer was his– you could feel it, and you could tell by the personal things he had left behind what kind of person he was. There were model ships and sailors, a memoir entitled “Double Whammy,” an piano with the sheet music to “Old Cotton Fields Back Home” on the stand. (I still can’t hear that song without crying.) We did our usual Leftist thing with Chester’s home, packing upwards of a dozen young radicals into it and filling it with stolen goods and dumpstered food.

Any time any of our comrades brought up Chester– this obviously very sweet old man, whose death had provided us with a place to live– it was to mock him. “Chester the Molester” was the nickname that one friend gave to him– the very same friend that posted the article on Facebook. At other times they read from his memoir, laughing and sneering.

That was wrong, and it was wrong to desecrate Junipero Serra’s grave. I said as much. I avoided the issue of whether Fr. Serra should have been canonized, because it’s irrelevant. “Regardless of what you think about Junipero Serra, you don’t have the right to desecrate his grave just because you’re angry, and you don’t have the right to single out members of a specific racial group for victimization.”

I said this over and over again. The trouble was, there was no way that I could make my case. To say “you don’t have the right to desecrate someone’s grave because you’re angry” assumes a common frame of reference, one in which all people have the same set of rights and responsibilities, derived from a common source, and are equal in the eyes of the law.

To my young friend and the others that came to her defense in the argument, this simply didn’t make sense. One responded that “we know” that Fr. Serra was “a racist and an as*hole,” and so that made it okay. I reiterated my point that I wasn’t going to address the issue of whether Fr. Serra was a good guy or not, because it wasn’t relevant– you still don’t have the right to desecrate someone’s grave because you’re angry with them, and that the Catholic Church has the right to practice its religion in the way it sees fit, even if it makes you angry.

Their response? “Yes, and we have the right to desecrate someone’s grave, even if it makes you angry.”

After that I stopped talking because I knew there was no way to move forward. We had reached EXACTLY the impasse that Alasdair MacIntyre talks about. We had no common language on which to discuss the issue. For them, being angry and feeling oppressed justifies basically any act. For me, the idea of universal rights and the rule of law, however imperfectly it may work out in the real world, is what saves us from the arbitrary rule of power. But there was no way for me to explain that to them. “We know” that Junipero Serra was “a racist as*hole,” and since “we know” that, there is nothing that can stop us from doing anything we like to express our anger at him.

I see things like this happen– regularly. And I see Trump banging the drums on the other side. The Trumpists and the SJWs have legitimate grievances… but that doesn’t matter. Lacking a common frame of reference, we no longer have any way of hearing one another in this country. Which I’m afraid means that, going forward, the only way we will be able to settle our disputes will be through the exercise of unrestrained will and violence.

The reader subsequently wrote to say that the friend who posted with approval the article about the desecration of Fr. Serra’s grave is, in real life, an “extremely sweet and kind-hearted person,” but one who participates in an evil movement, and “has no sense of or interest in the larger issues involved.”

Think about it. Think about it hard.