In Defense of Alasdair MacIntyre
… against Andrew Sullivan, who writes:
Yes, there was perhaps a real value in a world where everything reflected the same widely accepted Truth, and all questions had answers, and all answers were a function of religious obedience, and a brilliant Catholic interpretation of Aristotle. But Rod, like all other mature Westerners, must know that that world is over. You either deal with it or you follow Alasdair Macintyre’s advice and disappear into a monastery.
But as I pointed out the other day, that just ain’t MacIntyre:
… a tradition, as opposed to a mere ideology, is never something that is static, [but] is always something that is ready to modify and adapt itself to the new sets of problems – philosophical, scientific, cultural, political, or whatever – that arise during the course of its existence. (I take it that this is, at least roughly, what MacIntyre is not a Burkean.) A tradition that fails to do this is a dead tradition, which is really to say that it is no tradition at all; hence a tradition, unlike perhaps a constitution, cannot be the sort of thing it needs to be unless it is a living thing, which is to say a growing and changing and always at work at problem-solving thing. But when self-conscious attunement to one’s inescapable place in a tradition becomes, as it does in Rod’s language, a simple commitment to “traditionalism”, to preserving those “ancient structures” that are the only things standing between us and those who wish “radically [to] undermine the foundation of our moral order”, it seems to me to fail in this crucial task.
Note that none of this is to say that MacIntyre is anything but a skeptic of modernity, nor is it to make any claims about his views on same-sex marriage. (Any of you Domers out there want to get the scoop on that front?) But the notion that the author of, say, Dependent Rational Animals is concerned to shuttle us off to monasteries and have us pretend that the Enlightenment never happened is more than a bit ridiculous, and I suspect that Andrew knows it.
Filed under: marriage, philosophy
So I’ve given up trying to persuade you that Sullivan isn’t worth your time, but this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me think that – however good his PhD thesis may have been – he’s no intellectual. Yet another sophisticated view is mangled in order to force it in to the preferred ideological narrative.
Dependent Rational Animals is great but you don’t have to have read any of MacIntyre’s less-well-known works to see that this is bunk both as a description of MacIntyre’s account of the pre-modern world (we were all Thomists and everyone agreed on everything!) and as a description of his recommended response to modernity (get thee to a monastery!). You just have to read After Virtue with an interest in discovering what MacIntyre actually thinks.
Unless I’m remembering it wrong, wasn’t MacIntyre just using an analogy about how the monks kept an older tradition alive even during the “dark ages”?
I’m thinking this has more to do with the MacIntyre quotes that Rod Dreher tends to use, and the way that the “Benedict Option” gets credited to MacIntyre. Dreher’s not giving his readers the section in WJWR about Hutcheson and Hume, that’s for sure.
Yes, that’s right – which of course means that Josh has the content right, too. I agree that Sullivan’s criticism has much less to do with MacIntyre than with Rod’s peculiar take on him; all the more reason, though to make that distinction quite clearly.
Yeah, “After Virtue” is one of those books that really, really suffers from summary; people usually just grab the little thought experiment at the start and the bit about the barbarians among us at the end. Whenever Rod uses that phrase, “Benedict Option,” it’s like nails on a chalkboard. He really needs to think about why the last chapter has the title, “Trotsky and St. Benedict.” Where’s the “Trotsky Option”?
Okay, so that’s the comment of the week.