PITTSBURGH (TNS) — He was not a philosopher MAGA would read, but he was also not a philosopher mainstream liberals would read. And not just because that would mean admitting they didn’t know as much as they thought and needed help in thinking more deeply — a fact about ourselves, to be fair, most of us don’t want to accept — but because he wouldn’t come down with a reassuring affirmation of the political binary by which American politics operates.
Alasdair MacIntyre was not a man who said “Go team!” He was a man who said, more than a little critically, “This is the wrong game.”
One of the world’s eminent philosophers, he grew up in Scotland and was educated and began teaching in England. He eventually moved to the United States, where he taught at many of our major universities, including Yale, Princeton, Brandeis, Duke and Notre Dame, where he wound up at the end of his career.
He had a great deal to say about a lot of subjects, and wrote a lot of substantial books, and I’ll leave to the experts — he was a thinker who attracted lots of disciples and critics — to summarize his thinking. I’ll deal with just one aspect, one helping explain our political life.
In 1981, he published a book titled “After Virtue.” The question he wanted to answer was why people today, in the pluralistic world of what scholars call “modernity,” can’t talk to each about important matters without misunderstanding that too often turns into argument — sometimes the kind of infuriating argument you can have with someone who just won’t get the completely freaking obvious.
You’re convinced there must be something wrong with him. He thinks the same about you. It’s impossible to get anywhere. Even if you like each other and want to agree, you can’t. And if you don’t like each other and don’t want to agree, which seems to be the condition of most political argument, you’ll just start yelling. Or sending bizarrely abusive “truths.”
It’s the reason why, before Thanksgiving every year, newspapers publish articles with titles beginning “How to talk to your relatives about.” It’s not just that some of your relatives are ridiculous. It’s that you don’t see the world the same way.
WHY WE CAN’T AGREE
Think, for example, about current debates about foreign aid, which may start as arguments about the details, about whether USAID does the good it claims to do (it does) or whether it’s the horrible corrupt mess Donald Trump claims it is. If the people keep arguing and keep their temper, they will eventually start arguing the more fundamental question, about what responsibility we have for human beings in other countries, about what we should do with what we have and to whom we owe what.
And that turns into an argument about the even deeper matter of what responsibility we have for other human beings, period.
The answer to that question depends on beliefs we can’t argue for. How could Jesus saying give up your life for others and Ayn Rand saying screw the others come to any agreement? Their fundamental commitments can’t possibly be reconciled. As MacIntyre says, “At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.”
Most of “After Virtue’s” 300-some pages are taken up with explaining what we do with that fact. He argues (this is a very inadequate summary) that we live in traditions which express definite beliefs about the deepest matters, that we are formed by ways of living and thinking in which we learn how to live a good life, a virtuous life. We can’t win a public argument for our way of life over others, because we can’t prove in a way the people who see the world differently will recognize, that ours is better. They can’t convince us either.
Unless, that is, the other way is so awful nearly everyone agrees ours is better. Our society still agrees on some things: 97% of Americans (I hope) see neo-Nazism as evil, and not just evil, but gross and disgusting. But agreeing in hating neo-Nazism isn’t much of an agreement to bind Americans together.
I may be too pessimistic, because I read so much political discussion and may have a pessimistic turn of mind. Americans do come together sometimes, unfortunately most reliably when we’re bombing another country and people can chant “USA!” In the way we can act, in so much volunteering, for example, we show we hold, and hold together, better beliefs than we may in arguing about politics.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE CAN’T AGREE
But still, that doesn’t get us far in national politics. What our extensive differences in fundamental beliefs mean, MacIntyre writes, is that “modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.” We don’t have the rough broad agreement that lets us talk to each other with some understanding and even sympathy, and get important things done. Things will get done, of course, because someone always wins in politics. But that’s not the same thing as a healthy government.
The government does not “represent the moral community of the citizens,” because we don’t have much of one. It “is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society.” It’s a kindergarten teacher running a class for very badly behaved 4-year-olds. Not ideal, but at least they’re not killing each other.
That means that politics becomes primarily a matter of power, of who can get his way. We see the effects in Washington.
(David Mills is deputy editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
