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September 19, 2007

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Boni

MacIntyre's dismissal of Nietzsche is what renders After Virtue ineffectual for conservatives. By doing this, he also avoids Heidegger and Gadamer, who are as traditional as they are postmodern. If "traditionalism" has a prayer of making a comeback, it has to battle with the poststructuralists, using their weapons, on their home turf; otherwise, the Commies aren't leaving the academy any time soon. Every time they undermine a tradition, a new tradition is installed. I imagine many postmodern conservatives have figured this out, but can't find a way, nor do they have the numbers, to gain entry. Until they start to use the tactics of the Left, traditionalism is doomed to failure. It will either take a relentless assault or a trojan horse to weaken their stranglehold on values.

scriblerus

Thanks very much for such a detailed response. I didn't want to say that your overall project was exactly the same as Macintyre's, just that like him you have highlighted quite nicely how managerial nihilism goes hand in hand with a therapeutic mindset, in fact that the therapeutic is the way of getting along in a world without ultimate goods and final ends.

I think you are a little hard on Macintyre's version of tradition. In various places, he suggests that tradition is similar to an ongoing argument about various human goods. As the argument ebbs and flows, certain options (e.g., slavery) are rejected and the tradition grows and changes. So, the Borges comparison doesn't quite work, since not all aspects of a subject can be discussed at the same time.

That said, Macintyre certainly does seem to stress individual consciousness of tradition to such a degree that I really wonder who could ever put his ideas into practice. I think that his recent book on Edith Stein is an attempt to show how somebody who isn't a Thomist (at least to start with) could carry out the sort of inquiry he is proposing.

Macintyre is ultimately correct, however, I think to underscore the intentional aspect of tradition and the virtues. After all, as Aristotle said, virtues are habits oriented to right reason, so for a person to have virtues and be part of a tradition seems to require some sort of choice.

Along these lines, I'd say as a sort of response to your further thoughts about Tocqueville that Macintyre's emphasis on the rationality of tradition indicates the limits of a political/ institutional approach to living well. Politics can push people in certain directions and make it easier to form certain habits, but when people are vicious or morally weak, institutions can't force them to do as they ought. I'm reminded of the first two books of Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Once people had let their greed and intellectual weakness (superstition) get the better of them, it was incredibly difficult to hold the fabric of the Roman Empire together and protect it from tyrants, usurpers and generally corrupt individuals.

scriblerus

Boni,

If you think that Macintyre doesn't effectively engage Nietzsche and postmodernism, do read "Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry" and his lecture, "First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Debate" (in Knight, ed., "The Macintyre Reader"), or if you have read them, share your thoughts.

Boni Jakubik

Scriblerus-

Unfortunately, I only have Whose Justice?, A Short History of Ethics, and After Virtue by Macintyre. I am no expert on his philosophy. I do generally like him, though, and see similarities in our ideological biographies, including yours. I am a recovering Marxist, but was raised a Catholic first. Virtue ethics, I think, is something that should be promoted by intellectuals to the "ordinary" man. I don't mean that it should be used as some sort of manipulative social control, just that intellectuals tend to be hyper-rational, to the point of devouring their own feet, and should remember what happened to Plato's Republic in Sicily. They never learn (remember) that theory and praxis resist each other.

I have no problem with the deracinated intellectual in theory or in class -- though many of them should learn to be tolerant in practice -- but once they start playing surgeon, they end up being the disease, often reinforcing the problems they were trying to prevent. (Irony is for teenagers:])

Even Eagleton saw this problem and promoted virtue ethics in After Theory. (However, I've never been able to take Eagleton's Marxism seriously because I don't think he does.) I think we as "postmodern conservative intellectuals" -- a growing breed, I hope -- because we act humanely and decently in practice, as do most left-wing Cultural Theorists, have a responsibilty to point out the limits and dangers of philosophy. For example, the Right, in America, has always throughly marginalized the cruder materialist racists and other rigid Nationalists. However, the Left always protects, at times promotes, their most fanatical and violent Communists. They should be called on this behavior.

That being said, I tend to take Ayn Rand's quip about philosophy seriously, "A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war." Without slipping into eschatology and the Kali Yuga, but into worthy cliche, I think we are fighting, ideologically speaking, over man's soul. We should guard against our authoritarian impulses and the dangers associated with our various modes of being and thinking, but have to stop the excesses of mindless libertinism and the laughable militancy against Das Kapital. In many ways our American mythology has enlightened the world despite being largely based on historically ignorant and idealistic values. However, I think, because of our material comfort, it is time to enrich our Tradition with some of the nobler and more virtuous mythologies of the past.


I enjoy your blog, but would rather continue discussion via email -- it's a little more private. If you have any interest, please email me and we can discuss our ideas in a more scholarly way. I don't know much about Rieff, except what I've read by his ex-wife, but maybe you could point me in a general direction. He seems to come into the parlor from a psychological, rather than philosophical, angle, though I realize that's an ignorant generalization.

Boni Jakubik

Scriblerus-

Unfortunately, I only have Whose Justice?, A Short History of Ethics, and After Virtue by Macintyre. I am no expert on his philosophy. I do generally like him, though, and see similarities in our ideological biographies, including yours. I am a recovering Marxist, but was raised a Catholic first. Virtue ethics, I think, is something that should be promoted by intellectuals to the "ordinary" man. I don't mean that it should be used as some sort of manipulative social control, just that intellectuals tend to be hyper-rational, to the point of devouring their own feet, and should remember what happened to Plato's Republic in Sicily. They never learn (remember) that theory and praxis resist each other.

I have no problem with the deracinated intellectual in theory or in class -- though many of them should learn to be tolerant in practice -- but once they start playing surgeon, they end up being the disease, often reinforcing the problems they were trying to prevent. (Irony is for teenagers:])

Even Eagleton saw this problem and promoted virtue ethics in After Theory. (However, I've never been able to take Eagleton's Marxism seriously because I don't think he does.) I think we as "postmodern conservative intellectuals" -- a growing breed, I hope -- because we act humanely and decently in practice, as do most left-wing Cultural Theorists, have a responsibilty to point out the limits and dangers of philosophy. For example, the Right, in America, has always throughly marginalized the cruder materialist racists and other rigid Nationalists. However, the Left always protects, at times promotes, their most fanatical and violent Communists. They should be called on this behavior.

That being said, I tend to take Ayn Rand's quip about philosophy seriously, "A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war." Without slipping into eschatology and the Kali Yuga, but into worthy cliche, I think we are fighting, ideologically speaking, over man's soul. We should guard against our authoritarian impulses and the dangers associated with our various modes of being and thinking, but have to stop the excesses of mindless libertinism and the laughable militancy against Das Kapital. In many ways our American mythology has enlightened the world despite being largely based on historically ignorant and idealistic values. However, I think, because of our material comfort, it is time to enrich our Tradition with some of the nobler and more virtuous mythologies of the past.


I enjoy your blog, but would rather continue discussion via email -- it's a little more private. If you have any interest, please email me and we can discuss our ideas in a more scholarly way. I don't know much about Rieff, except what I've read by his ex-wife, but maybe you could point me in a general direction. He seems to come into the parlor from a psychological, rather than philosophical, angle, though I realize that's an ignorant generalization.

Boni Jakubik

I have no problem with the deracinated intellectual in theory or in class -- though many of them should learn to be tolerant in practice --

I think we as "postmodern conservative intellectuals" -- a growing breed, I hope -- because we act humanely and decently in practice, as do most left-wing Cultural Theorists, have a responsibilty to point out the limits and dangers of philosophy.

These two sentences, accidentally, contradict each other. I meant to say that the left-wing ideologue, pedant, Sophist, cosmopolitan -- whatever marginalizing slur is least offensive, but most effective -- tends to view the "ordinary" man, especially provinicial white males, as a possible, but not an automatic, enemy: a person who can be won over to the "open" and "progressive" team, though they've been filled with "hateful" prejudices. They are, however, defenseless against a right-wing nihilist -- please understand nihilism is a sophisticated philosophy -- because "hatred" is a value judgment, and the tables can be turned to show their "hatred" of the new "other".

I am reminded of Rorty's temperamental outburst that reveals the "liberal" agenda so nicely:

It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.

-‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.


(I copied that from the current Wiki because I'm too lazy to cherry-pick Rorty's books right now, but it fits quite nicely into our conversation. It might be a little long for a blog comment.)

He admits to behaving like a Nazi; except, he plays for the "good" team.

I'm also reminded of Chesterton's quip against "progressives" -- There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

I think the left-wing performance, though it reached its peak in the 80's and early 90's, has done more damage to the outside world than the "ordinary" man recognizes, since the Marxist historians are right about at least one thing -- Cultural Amnesia. More often than not, though, their sweeping, myopic social causes are responsible for this memory-loss. This isn't a new battle like some conservatives like to think, blaming the rise of the New Left in the 60's for everything. It goes back, at least, to Socrates. Without historical depth, i.e. a Classical Education, and, simultaneously, the ability to speak in the latest fashion, I think right reason will always suffer from nostalgia. Its strength lies in its age and endurance, but it is "immuno-deficient" in the short-term against managerial nihilism, and will remain a nice, but antiquated, ideal like chivalry.

I apologize for the double post earlier. My browser reported an error, so I wasn't sure if it went through.


Avi player

I've read "Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry" and really enjoyed it. Macintyre involves Nietzsche more than effectively and never loses the track of common sense.

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