Alasdair MacIntyre and the Lost Tradition of the Virtues

Note: If you don’t have time to read, you can listen instead: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n5i0cBzsEcGyxvJ27OxsWzlhsZCVBUyv/view?usp=sharing

If I had to pick the top ten books that are most worth reading, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue would be on the list. Its fame precedes it, at least in certain circles. I get the impression that a lot of people know that it’s important, but haven’t read it, or have tried but not gotten far. It’s an erudite and difficult book, and the arc of the argument is ambitious and subtle. And so the chief purpose of this post is to channel it, to capture the heart of After Virtue in a shorter and more accessible form. But it has my own stamp, and I’ve women in commentaries and agendas of my own.

Everyone can benefit from understanding MacIntyre, but I’m particular eager to get his message about the pursuit of virtue to what some are calling the “manosphere,” the milieu of somewhat frustrated, alienated, and/or purposeless young men who seem to have formed their own strands of opinion and outlook in recent years. See David French and Benjamin James on the topic, among others. But I may have more sympathy than either of them, in my own way. I think modern society, under the influence of feminism, deliberately fails to celebrate masculine virtue, and leaves men without esteem or role models. One reason I want to evoke MacIntyre is to try to fill that gap. Young men, lose the angst and pursue virtue! MacIntyre can help you understand what that means.

But one more reason for publishing this: I’m haunted by a poll last year that showed rapidly changing American values. The chart below shows people’s answers to questions about what’s “very important” to them. From 1998 to 2019, fewer people thought religion and having children were very important, and slightly fewer people though patriotism was very important, while more people thought money and community involvement were important. But the changes over twenty-one years were not huge. Then, between 2019 and 2023, there was a drastic discontinuity. Patriotism’s importance plunged. Religion’s decline was milder but still seems to have accelerated relative to trend. Having children fell in importance, and community involvement went into reverse and plunged most of all, after having been rising. Only money rose, slightly.

The cause, doubtless, is the pandemic, which disrupted everything and made it seem fragile and transient. At first glance, the trend looks disturbing. And yet, in a way, I agree: many of these things aren’t very important in the grand scheme of things. What matters is God. But are these disillusioned people finding other things that are important to them in place of patriotism, community involvement, and having children? 

MacIntyre’s starting point is a kind of nihilistic confusion of which the chart above, in which the value of everything is falling, is vaguely reminiscent. He refines that message ruthlessly for half the book, then takes a new turn, and starts rebuilding a tradition of the virtues on ancient foundations. It’s a message very suited to the current times of confusion and anomie.

MacIntyre’s Demolition of Modern Ethics

In 1978, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a very deep diagnosis of what has gone wrong with modern ethics, and why there's so much confusion and interminable disagreement about right and wrong, called After Virtue. He began with a disquieting suggestion. Suppose, he said, a pogrom broke out against science. Libraries and laboratories were destroyed, scientists were killed, schools shut down, books burned. Later, people regret the destruction of science, and try to revive it. But all they have left are fragments. They do their best to piece these together, and soon everyone is talking about science. That is, they are talking in words borrowed from the fragments of science that happened to survive the ruin. But they don't know what they're talking about. They don't know what the words mean, and they don't know that they don't know what the words mean. They don't know that all sorts of facts and concepts necessary to make scientific theories coherent and complete have been lost. And so endless disagreements ensue, and there is a kind of frantic futility about the whole affair. Such, MacIntyre suggests, is the state of ethics today. 

We felt it, perhaps, more intensely in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. Should we obey orders to stay home? Should we close churches? Should we be shutting down so much of the economy at the expense of so many jobs? Should we all be wearing masks? These were ethical questions which it was hard even to begin to answer because there was so little agreement about ethical fundamentals. We still had online free speech, but how could we conduct an effective and disciplined conversation along the citizenry leading to truth, without any shared premises or sources of authority? Soon the routines came back, and complacency became possible again. But the memory of that fragility and helpless confusion remains. It’s hard to take modern life as seriously, after you’ve once seen it collapse like a house of cards. MacIntyre intuited that fragility and saw that confusion long before.

MacIntyre goes on to prove his point by demolishing all the major ethical theories of the past two or three hundred years. Working backwards, he begins with an ethical theory he calls “emotivism,” according to which ethical utterances such as “This is good” really mean “I approve of this; do so as well.” This ethics was typified, according to MacIntyre, by the elite Bloomsbury group in London in the 1920s, but its sway is much broader: it is close to the attitude to ethics which today is more commonly called “moral relativism,” and remains widespread. MacIntyre objects that this kind of ethics can't be distinguished from manipulation. Surely it is a corruption of ethics when I try to persuade you that a certain course of action is right, not because it really is right, but simply because it happens to be to my advantage if you do it. But emotivism permits no distinction between moral persuasion and manipulation.

MacIntyre does not think ethics can be done at the merely individual level. It must be writ large. Every morality implies a sociology. And so he asks what kind of characters emotivism can be expected to produce. MacIntyre takes characters, or social roles, seriously. He thinks that a crucial feature of societies is the set of characters or social roles that they recognize and promote. He describes two typically emotivist characters: the rich aesthete and the manager, each of whom is manipulative. MacIntyre describes a type of rich aesthete who manipulates people and situations for amusement, to escape from the boredom of monotonous luxury. Then he describes a type of manager who manipulates people and situations for the sake of power and profit. We would like to condemn these characters, but emotivism gives us no basis for doing so, since it leaves nothing for ethics to be except arbitrary desire and interested persuasion. We would like to stand up for the victims of manipulation, but for emotivism, there is no objective good that they have lost or that can be restored to them. There is nothing that the tools of the manager or the toys of the rich aesthete ought to have been but fail to be through being made the tools or toys of someone else. Emotivism has reduced them to blank modern selves, protean and insubstantial, suspended between instrumental rationality and arbitrary freedom.

For MacIntyre, each modern philosophy is a response to the failure of the last, and they fall down in his retrospective vision like a row of dominoes. Thus, before emotivism, there were Immanuel Kant and the utilitarians, who did at least have notions of objective good. Especially Kant. He was very insistent that moral rules must hold absolutely and not be mere means to some end. He claimed that moral maxims must be such as a person could, without inconsistency, will to be universal, and that they must treat people as ends, not means. He seems almost to have thought that the rules of traditional Christian morality, as he had learned them in his pious childhood, followed logically and inevitably from these abstract principles. But they don't. Almost any principles could logically be willed to be universal. Yet Kant was trying to avoid conclusions previously arrived at by Diderot and Hume, who argued that reason is the servant of the passions, and tried to derive moral principles from the goal of satisfying one's desires. Of course, this is a formula for conflict, since people's desires differ. 

The moral rules for which Diderot, Hume, and Kant were seeking to supply rational justifications were fairly traditional: honesty, marriage, property, promise keeping, obedience to the law. Former generations had generally not felt the need to justify or defend them. Why Diderot, Hume, and Kant, and many others down to the emotivists and beyond, did, is not quite clear in MacIntyre's account. A ready explanation, though, is that from the time when Rene Descartes, in the 17th century, launched his philosophy with a plunge into universal doubt, European thinkers felt the need to rationally justify everything. Anyway, MacIntyre suggests that the reason for the failure of Enlightenment thinkers to rationally justify morality was that the morality they wanted to justify was native to a teleological worldview that had been lost.

Telos is a kind of purpose or potentiality that inheres in things, defining their aim, their goal, their perfection. The concept was important to Aristotle, who learned to think in terms of telos from his study of biology. Thus, an acorn is not an oak tree, and most acorns never become oak trees, but an acorn is nonetheless, and most essentially, a potential oak tree. That is its purpose, its telos. Modern science concedes that after a fashion but doesn’t consider it fundamental. It would tell an evolutionary story about why acorns seem designed to become oak trees, but regard the acorn as really just a bunch of atoms and molecules in particular configurations, and the oak tree as something that may appear in future as a result of certain processes of which the acorn is a part. There is no telos, except what humans may choose to see, for practical or poetic reasons. But for Aristotle, telos was at least as real as matter. And he applied it to all sorts of things other than biology. It was the telos of the stars to move in their orbits, of stones to fall and of hot air to rise. For Aristotle and for many generations of philosophers thereafter down to the High Middle Ages, the world was full purpose, pattern, plan and meaning. And men and women, too, had a telos, and ethics was the science of realizing the human telos.

It was a symptom of the loss of a teleological worldview that Hume took it to be a principle of logic that you can't derive an “ought” from an “is.” That would have made no sense to Aristotle, for whom a thing’s telos, its perfection, what it ought to be, was an essential and definitive part of what it is. Already, Hume lived in a world largely desiccated of the plan, purpose, and the secret meaning that Plato, Aristotle, and the medievals all, in somewhat different ways, looked for and sometimes discerned in the world. Hume lived in a world of matter and energy, efficient causes, and “facts.” Morality was still very present to Hume. It was one of the things a thinker wanted to account for in order to make his picture of the world complete. Yet it just didn't really fit in. The emerging scientific materialist ideology, which was becoming the lens through which modern people saw the world, sometimes without even realizing it, was starting to exclude morality. And so Hume codified the principle that has seemed like basic common sense to many people since, that you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” But that principle tends to detach ethics from objective reality and turn it into something arbitrary and superfluous. Morality’s obvious importance kept motivating thinkers to try to account for it and anchor it in reality again. But they kept failing, because they could scarcely conceive of the kind of world in which ethics would be at home. Moreover, they had a quite well developed concept of what the content of ethics should be, which they had inherited from two thousand years of Western tradition, and especially from Christianity. But that ethics was especially alien to a scientific materialist world.

Probably the greatest, the most persuasive, influential, and long-lasting of these attempts to refound morality was utilitarianism. Its postulate was that the ethical was whatever served “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” That phrase, popular among early utilitarians and immediately appealing, will have to stand because no attempt to clarify it has been very successful, even though it begs important questions. For example, what if one action would benefit one person very much, while an alternative action would benefit many people a little bit? Which action serves “the greatest happiness of the greatest number?” Which action should an ethical person choose? You can give a clear answer to such questions if you quantify happiness and say that each beneficial action adds a certain number of “utils” to a person's happiness. Then you can say that an action which gives 100 utils to one person is better than an action which gives one util to each of 50 people, but an action which gives 50 utils to one person is less good than an action which gives one util to 100 people. But such quantities are obviously fanciful. 

Utilitarianism has been refined over the generations in response to such critiques. A version of it lies at the heart of modern economic theory. According to the modern economist’s “utility theory,” we have no firm evidential basis for making utilitarian comparisons across individuals, but we can systematically discern a person's preferences, which are taken to be a kind of fixed fact about the person, by observing their choices, while considering what their options were. The taboo against interpersonal utility comparisons is more crippling than economists sometimes seem to realize. It allows them to make well-grounded normative claims only in situations where one feasible outcome is “Pareto-superior” to another, that is, preferred or at least not dispreferred by every single person without exception. And while this often occurs in idealized models, where the agents are homogeneous in most respects, the real world is too messy for that. Nothing would get done if everyone had a veto. No wonder President Truman complained that his economists were always telling him “on the one hand” and “on the other hand!” The puzzle is how economists are ever able to give confident advice, and the answer, at least the most creditable one, is that economists use their common sense to make the interpersonal comparisons that utility theory forbids, and by this somewhat illegitimate expedient render themselves “one-handed” enough to be useful.

On a side note: During the coronavirus pandemic, people in the West were suddenly and unexpectedly required to give up an unprecedented amount of liberty in an effort to prevent the spread of a disease and a catastrophic loss of life. The rationale for the shutdown of much of the economy and face-to-face civil society seemed vaguely utilitarian, and decidedly but perhaps unavoidably illiberal. Young people who faced little risk themselves were condemned to loneliness and/or unemployment to protect a small elderly minority who faced very elevated risk. They were asked to stay home, sometimes forced to stay home, but surveillance was imperfect, and many broke the rules. Some people became scofflaws, others scrupulously conscientious and compliant, and it was hard to understand why. Large moral issues were suddenly and obviously at stake, but not only did we not agree about them, we didn’t have any real common ethical language in which to discuss them. How can a society without a shared moral foundation hang together? Well, it can hang together for a long time, as it turns out, based on mere custom and habit. Even in the pandemic, though crime rates were elevated, we maintained civil peace, and law and government continued to function. Still, it was an unsettling experience. The routines of daily life in America seem more transient than they used to. And it was a reminder that GDP isn’t enough. 

Even when it comes to individual choices, utility theory is unsatisfying. Asked for advice, the ideal economist would inquire about your preferences, then advise you on how best to get the most of what you want. But if you ask him what your preferences should be, he would say he doesn't know,  or perhaps that he doesn't understand the question. Then, when you do make a choice, he will say “Now I know what you prefer!” Yet you may not feel sure that you did the right thing, much less that it was an inevitable expression of a pre-existing preference. You could have chosen differently. And any quantification of the consequences of the choice for your happiness, saying that it gave you 10 utils where the next best choice would have given you seven, will seem almost as fanciful when comparing alternatives for a single person as when it was used to make interpersonal comparisons. The pleasures life affords are of different kinds which defy comparison, and there is in the experience of individual choice something more creative, free, and tragic than any notion of utility maximization can do justice to.

By the way, this is a good time to mention one respect in which economists have lately become a good deal too “one-handed.” It’s now the conventional wisdom among economists that something called “modern economic growth” began around 1800 and that the human condition before that time was approximately one of a uniform misery known as “subsistence.” Many might regard this as a plausible opinion, but the odd thing is that contemporary economic historians tend to treat it as a fact. They arrive at this attitude through a series of the sort of lazy simplifications that they have to use to get past their skepticism and be policy advisors. First, they treat “utility” as the ultimate standard of happiness. This sounds crudely reductionist, yet it’s actually close to being an innocuous tautology, if one uses utility in a certain rigorously abstract sense. But second, since utility isn't observable, they treat GDP per capita as a proxy for it. Third, they extrapolate backwards, estimating the real growth rate of GDP per capita, and find that exercise yields a very low number by the year 1800 or so. Fourth, they take international estimates of poverty thresholds and the minimum income needed to live on, and find that they are comparable to their estimates of GDP per capita around the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Therefore all pre-modern mankind must have been desperately poor. This conclusion is then popularized in ways that mask its technical origins while deepening its aura of expertise.

The weakest links in the argument are the substitution of GDP per capita for utility, and the extrapolation of real GDP per capita backwards using estimated growth rates. It's well known that from year to year, inflation is a biased measure because the set of goods available changes, along with their relative prices and their quality. From year to year, measured real GDP per capita growth rates are still meaningful, but when such biases accumulate over centuries, real GDP per capita comparisons become too hard to interpret. Moreover, GDP measures only what money can buy, and money can't buy most of the best things in life, such as love, or faith, or political freedom, or true adventure, or sunrises and autumn leaves. At a given moment in history, national GDP per capita is usually correlated with many other good things, and within countries, income is often correlated with other aspects of happiness. Thus, today, rich countries tend to have more freedom, and rich people tend to have happier families. This can make GDP, and income, seem more important than it really is.

Admittedly, if you're starving, you might not care much about anything else. It's hard to say. But most people, most of the time in history, have not been starving. Even if you have enough to eat, you might value the greater comfort and convenience and variety of consumer choices that modern society affords, at least in developed countries, relative to pre-modern times. But if you're wise, you will value having 15 brands of deodorant on the store shelves a lot less than a faithful spouse, sweet, obedient children, a good church with a wise and pious pastor, sunrises and autumn leaves and spring flowers and bird songs and all the beauties of nature, songs and stories and games, memories, truth, and loving or entertaining or fascinating or soothing or wholesome conversation, far more. Whether pre-modern people tended to have more or less of these good things than we do is a difficult question, but at any rate, attempts to compare real GDP per capita shed very little light on the answer.

Case in point: when coronavirus has suddenly subtracted much of the sociality from Westerners’ lives, while increasing death rates, they still had electricity, running water, plentiful and varied food, the Internet, and many modern luxuries. Were they still richer than people in, say, the Middle Ages, who had less stuff but more human contact? Revealed preference is clearly of no use in answering the question. Coronavirus made most people more lonely and isolated, yet there was already a great deal of loneliness and social distancing before coronavirus struck. Why? It will hardly do to cite revealed preference and say that loneliness was a choice. Clearly my escape from loneliness depends on others’ choices as much as my own. Community matters more than consumables, and consumables are often means to communitarian ends, inputs to social enjoyment. So one can’t properly value even the material and monetary economy without integrating it into a vision of how communities are formed and maintained and governed and meet human needs, and for that task, the method of revealed preference is very inadequate.

Another fatal objection to utilitarianism is that human affairs are systematically unpredictable. I must admit that the laborious, ingenious, and varied arguments by which MacIntyre proves this seem almost superfluous. It is sufficient to say that human affairs are unpredictable because human beings are unpredictable because they have free will. Still, not everyone believes in free will, so MacIntyre's arguments expand the audience for whom his larger case could be persuasive. Anyway, the case for unpredictability is stronger if human affairs are unpredictable because human beings have free will and because life is full of game theoretic random strategies, and because creativity, invention, and innovation can't be predicted in detail without being achieved, etc. Now, the unpredictability of human affairs isn't a problem for Immanuel Kant. He insists that morality must consist of hard and fast rules that apply everywhere. In that case, the ethical person can simply follow those rules, come what may, consequences be damned. But if, as the utilitarians hold, the rightness or wrongness of an action depends upon its consequences, the impossibility of knowing and the great difficulty of even guessing what those consequences will be is much more of a problem.

If the consequences of actions could be discerned, and ethics derived therefrom, its content might be very different from the ethics that we're used to. It's very easy to go from utilitarianism to the doctrine advocated by the student murderer Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, that ordinary moral rules are for ordinary people, while great, extraordinary people may rightly commit all sorts of crimes in order to achieve the great purposes by which they move mankind forward along the path of progress. A generation later, a flood of real life Raskolnikovs burst upon the world in the form of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik revolutionaries, spilling oceans of blood to make a utopia that would justify all the sacrifice. They were not the only ones. If Kant dimly anticipated this, it's easy to forgive the bad arguments by which he tried to give moral rules a rational foundation, as a kind of firebreak against unscrupulous consequentialism. For that matter, we should be grateful for the pervasive influence of modern economists today, if only because they are too agnostic about human happiness to make revolutions.

One more idea, rights, needs to be knocked down to complete MacIntyre's demolition job. But here he makes a bit of a mistake. Human rights enjoyed a renaissance after World War II, because they were the best antidote to totalitarianism and genocide. But they also had deep roots in a tradition of natural rights, and natural law, going back to the Middle Ages and beyond. MacIntyre, unfortunately, completely rejects them and denies that they exist! He was a recovering Marxist and he still had a few collectivist blind spots left over from that phase. He should have seen that natural rights were part of the teleological worldview that he was trying to resurrect, and also that his own definition of justice (later in the argument) as “giving what’s due” makes no sense unless something is due, that is, unless there are rights. But he was quite right that in the context of a modern scientific metaphysics, human or natural rights are even more illegitimate than other concepts that knock about in the free-for-all of modern ethics. Few people are more to be admired in today's world than human rights activists, but their fervor tends to have the character of an irrational faith. Nothing in modern ethics, not even utility, is more easily manipulated and appropriated for any random cause than the language of rights. Utilitarianism at least has some room for evidence. Rights, in a post-Christian, post-teleological world, are anything you want them to be.

The Tradition of the Virtues

MacIntyre's escape from the crazy chaos of modern ethics and its fallacies was to reach for the wisdom of the ages. Starting with the Homeric epics, and continuing through the city-states of ancient Greece then on to the Christian theologians and the Middle Ages, he traced the tradition of the virtues. Thinkers in different ages, living in very different social conditions, read and reflected on and learned from and corrected and supplemented one another, having in common the feeling that there is a contrast between what man is and what he ought to be, that some people are better and others worse and that we can discern, imperfectly, which are which, and that we can study the traits of good and bad people, and describe and generalize them, making lists of virtues to emulate and vices to avoid. We can drop the fallacious modern theories of ethics, relearn the pre-modern wisdom, and take up again the work where they left off. 

MacIntyre thinks the best way to approach the concept of the virtues is through what he calls practices, specific, coherent fields of human endeavor, such as art, music, war, public administration, poetry, law, and so forth. Each of these practices may have its extrinsic rewards: it sometimes enables people to get money, or other things with value unrelated to the practice itself, like power or sex. But each practice also has its intrinsic rewards: there is a value, a characteristic pleasure, a real goodness in the practice itself, and it is susceptible of degree, so that being able to do it really well may be valued more than any money. In any of these fields, if you want to achieve excellence, you need certain qualities. 

You must make plans and reckon up means and ends: prudence. You need to recognize merit in the work of others, and sometimes their superiority to your own: justice. You need to try new things and risk failure: courage. There will always be impulses or tendencies that are good but only up to a point, so you must rein them in: temperance, or moderation, completing the cardinal virtues. 

The theological virtues, too, should get their turn. Even if you’re setting ambitious goals with a risk of failure, you must keep focused on the end and sustain some belief that success is possible: hope. You must stick to the plan in the face of setbacks, and keep it in mind, not just be blown here and there by passing fancies: faith. And you come to feel a disinterested devotion to, and a delight in, your work: love.

One might think this list of desirable qualities is rather random, and that many others could be listed and justified just as easily. But it’s key to the tradition of the virtues that some of these qualities really are more fundamental, important, and universal than others that could be suggested, and that the tradition of the virtues has discerned, through countless generations of reflection, which ones they are. Another way to put it is that other traits can be taken too far, but the virtues can’t. You can be too hard-working, too kind, too candid, too clever, but not– by this account– too just, too faithful, too loving, or too brave. You can take too many needless risks and be rash, but rashness is not the same as courage. All this used to be better understood, when the tradition of the virtues was in health. Now we don’t know how to take it seriously anymore. We’re trapped in the habit of thinking it all rather subjective, semantic, and shallow, and that habit makes all our ethics shallow, transient and unreal.

Why Has Life Been So Good if Ethics is So Wayward?

Meanwhile, we need to address a very large and plausible objection to MacIntyre's whole thesis. For the age in which MacIntyre diagnosed a deepening and cumulatively catastrophic confusion about ethics is the same age which has seen a vast and unprecedented improvement in the human condition, at least in material terms and in the most prosperous societies. Infant mortality plummeted, life expectancies doubled or tripled, literacy became almost universal, famines were no more and hunger was rare, ordinary people had electricity and vacations and airplanes, and freedom of speech, and democracy. A few pages ago, I exposed and refuted the technical argument by which economists think they know that pre-modern mankind was miserable, but that is not to deny the solid commonsense case that the present day seems like a pretty good time to be alive. Without reducing ethics to utilitarianism, MacIntyre emphasized that every morality implies a sociology, that a system of ethics must be writ large to be appraised. By its fruits, at least in part, it shall be known and judged. So if modern ethics is so bad, how could mainstream society in the 20th-century West be so good?

Progress Comes from the Ongoing Influence of Christianity and Classical Culture

Yet the challenge is not really so difficult to answer. The common people, most of the time, were not corrupted by modern moral philosophies because they did not read them. Instead, they went to church. There has been a great trend in the West, frequently interrupted to be sure, towards moral and material improvement, knowledge and liberty, for well over a thousand years. It is the work, principally, of Christianity. And that work continued into modern times because the churches were still there, mixed like yeast among the people and causing the great loaf of civilization to rise. At least until recently, they stuck to their old practices and teachings, sometimes borrowing from modern moral philosophies, but only what they agreed with anyway, and more often ignoring them. America, the country which more than any other epitomizes modernity, was also characterized by its indifference to the latest intellectual trends, its complacent adherence to an 18th-century political creed, its religiosity, and even a certain disdain for European decadence and over-sophistication in manners, morals, arts, and thought generally. 

Certainly, America participated in and believed in the Enlightenment after a fashion. But the Enlightenment as a whole was far from being a post-Christian phenomenon. Even Descartes, if we take him at his word, believed in the arguments that have convinced few others, by which he refuted the earth-shattering skepticism with which his philosophy begins, and found his way back to orthodox Catholicism. Locke, certainly the most influential Enlightenment thinker in America, was a Christian apologist who took the Bible literally, and whose political thought later, more secular philosophers have recognized as being inseparable from his theology, to the frustration of later liberal thinkers who would like to take Locke, but not the Bible, seriously. Even thinkers whose thought does seem, sometimes only with the benefit of hindsight, to lead out of Christianity, such as Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, often maintained a formal allegiance, sometimes insincere, to Christianity, and believed in God. They were not clearly alternative to Christianity and their influence did not always undermine that of the churches, especially in the short run. (One 17th-century pseudo-Christian thinker, Thomas Hobbes, was widely recognized as an atheist even by contemporaries, but even he made a show of believing in God and the Bible.)

Among the aristocracy and the intelligentsia, there was more of a tendency for Enlightenment thought to displace Christian belief, but European elites still immersed themselves in Greek, Latin, and the writings of the ancients, well into the twentieth century. So they had plenty of exposure to the tradition of the virtues, even if modern ethical thinkers were losing touch with and undermining it. Only in the late 20th century, when Greek and Latin and the classics lost most of the space they had long held in school and university curricula, while at the same time an enormous expansion of classroom education made the ideas of modern intellectuals reach down into the minds of the common people and compete effectively with ideas emanating from the churches, and when many of the churches themselves made major doctrinal shifts in order to integrate modem, liberal, Enlightened thought, did the moral waywardness of modern ethical thought have its full impact in America. There had been earlier such episodes in Europe. But by and large, the modern world is still the work of the Christian churches and the tradition of the virtues, and the institutions that they made, even as their influence has gradually, but especially of late, been undermined or shattered by modern sophistry.

If this suffices is to explain why, although the crisis in modern theoretical ethics goes all the way back to the Enlightenment, its full impact on practical morality was delayed until a few decades ago by classical education among the elite and church-going among the uneducated masses, the objection still seems to have force. After all, the last decades of the 20th century in the United States represent a paradigm of prosperity that the whole world looks up to, and in the first decades of the 21st century, it looks like that kind of prosperity is finally spreading to much of the world. Why, to repeat, is the modern world, this time defined as the past few decades rather than the past three centuries, so good, if modern ethics is so bad?

But the spirit and ethics and institutions of an age should be measured by the age’s creativity rather than its comforts. The key factor that must be borne in mind is the legacy that each age inherits from the past. A brilliant age may have a lot of misery because it starts with a poor legacy, but it adds to that legacy and leaves posterity more fortunate. A lazy and ineffectual age may be opulent because the legacy it inherited was particularly rich, but it depletes it, and leaves posterity poorer. The legacy consists of capital in the broadest sense: buildings and infrastructure and machines and improvements to land, but also, and more importantly, culture and music and art, the education of the people, wise public opinion, technology, just and effective institutions and organizations and habits and networks that facilitate enough cooperation and solidarity, and also enough critical thinking and creative disruption. 

The post-World War II West was born with a very rich legacy. The modern American home is full of electricity, light bulbs, indoor plumbing, a car in the driveway, a radio, a TV. All were available and even commonplace in 1950, mostly invented before 1900. Compulsory, universal public education, the 40 hour work week, hundreds of universities dotting the landscape, and the public corporation whose shares are traded on the stock market, have been well-established for generations. Recent decades have seen three big new technologies: computers, the internet, and mobile phones. And one small one: the microwave oven. Compared to cars, electricity, the telephone, the airplane, the bicycle, steel, radio and TV and motion pictures, central heating and air conditioning, assembly lines and mass production, and all the rest of the novelties a person born in 1880 would have seen appear and spread in their lifetimes, our age actually isn't very technologically creative. We are, for the most part, more comfortable than people a hundred years ago, because older technologies have matured and made a good deal of economic growth rather easy in the process. But we are enriching posterity much less than our ancestors enriched us, even in material technology. In family culture, we have retrogressed disastrously. The great achievements of our more virtuous ancestors largely explain our affluence. The loss of the tradition of the virtues largely explains our stagnation, our inability to become or to admire heroes, or to move beyond what we have inherited to worlds still more just and beautiful and free. 

Three Waves of Post-Christian Values 

There was also, alongside Locke, a radical, post-Christian Enlightenment, sometimes covert or unrecognized, but lasting, and not innocuous. Its influence has been intermittent, but at times drastic. It has been rather like a swamp fire that goes on smoldering, and sometimes, stirred by strong wind, sets the forest ablaze. The first wave of post-Christian values festered in the late 18th century and culminated in the French Revolution, with its Terror, its guillotine, and its Napoleonic wars of conquest. It was put down, and decades of peace followed, but a second wave of post-Christian values gathered strength in the later decades of the 19th century and broke in the early 20th. Marxism saw itself as the climax of modernity, the fulfillment of the promise of the Enlightenment, and with good reason. To destroy the belief in private property was a huge blow against traditional ethics, and the Soviet Union and other Communist regimes remain the most atheistic polities in the history of the world. Fascism and Nazism were, above all, offshoots of socialism and from that source derived the totalitarian model of governance. This has been somewhat deliberately forgotten by a left-leaning intelligentsia. But they had another element, too, which might be roughly understood as a fusion of the ethos of Nietzsche with the theories of Darwin. They saw themselves as Nietzschean supermen, disdaining the bourgeois virtues and practicing a new kind of artistic and violent heroism. And they cast human history as a biological struggle among races, as Darwin saw natural history as a biological competition among species. Oddly enough, the regimes founded on these very modern ideas proved unable to compete with the muddle-headed, old-fashioned, and rather religious polities of Britain and America.

Now the third wave of post-Christian values is upon us, and we will probably not be able to count the cost until it is over. Tens of millions of fetuses have been aborted, tens of millions of children raised in broken homes, millions of lives shattered by divorce, but it still seems less evil, all in all, than the second wave. But we may be blinded by its propaganda, as in retrospect, we can see that even some of the dissidents from and critics of the second wave of post-Christian values were. Hardly anyone believed  in the 1930s, for example, that the Soviet Union was as bad as we now know it was. 

Loss of Conviction 

But the harms from the loss of the tradition of the virtues are not only that the moral confusion of the age repeatedly spawns evil ideologies. It is also in the feebleness of the resistance of civilization, which still inherits much of the more wholesome ethical customs of the past, to these evil ideologies whenever they arrive. Even when our ethics have fairly wholesome content, it is so inadequately grounded that many people abandon it freely and with a sense of relief from cognitive dissonance when they get the chance, so evil ideologies make easy converts. It goes against the grain to believe in property rights in a scientific materialist age whose metaphysics make property rights odd and nonsensical. What could property rights be, really? And so socialism can easily become the default position of all thinking people, except of course the remnant of the Christian faithful, until it is discredited by harsh experience. It is difficult and odd to believe in human rights in a scientific materialist age. Aren't human beings just another animal? Why not treat them as we treat animals, and improve the breed by dispensing with the inferior ones and breeding only from the best? And so eugenics and fascism become terribly plausible. It is hard work to believe in marriage in a scientific materialist age, whose metaphysics can make nothing of the mystery of two becoming “one flesh.” And so the Sexual Revolution sweeps the land, unburdening people of the strain of  sexual scruples that they could not understand.

Even when people do hold onto the wholesome moral legacy of the past, resisting the siren song of modern ideologies, there is damage done. For they know the rules but not the reasons. They know what but not why. Moral modern people tend to be “fundamentalists,” dogmatists in the negative sense of that word that implies stubbornness and rigidity. They have an intellectual inferiority complex, and are accustomed to losing arguments while pretending that they didn't, or perhaps admitting that they lost an argument but not caring. It is hard for them to be generous to their adversaries, because a judgmental posture is their means of self-defense against giving way and agreeing, and because they envy their adversaries a little, for their greater freedom, as it seems, and perhaps their greater intellectual honesty. And they cannot be creative or pursue excellence as they should, because they are afraid that if they stray outside of a narrow, circumscribed set of traditional behaviors, they will enter enemy territory and be lost. They cannot be as bold, free, adventurous, and inspiring as they should. They cannot be heroes. Moral people, too, have been impoverished by the loss of the tradition of the virtues.

Meanwhile, let’s fast forward to the end of MacIntyre’s argument. 

The Benedict Option and the Ethos of Chivalry

The final paragraph in After Virtue is not the most creditable one to quote. It goes too far. Yet it is very interesting, for it suggests a kind of program of resistance to wayward modern ethics. 

“It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turn aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead-- often not recognizing fully what they were doing-- was the construction of a new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now, we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting… for another-- doubtless very different-- St. Benedict.”

That is, we are waiting for a new Saint Benedict of Nursia (480-547 AD), the monastic founder, who will teach us how to establish small communities, more or less self-sufficient, within which the virtues can best be practiced, when the larger society is irredeemably corrupt. 

It is well that MacIntyre stressed how misleading is any analogy between modern times and the Dark Ages, in most respects. Prima facie, it seemed very implausible to compare the modern, mainstream West of the late 20th century, when the typical person was more likely to be literate and less likely to die a violent death than at any time in history, and when communications are unprecedentedly global, to the notoriously violent and chaotic Dark Ages, when literacy was in danger of being lost, and people's horizons were narrowing. But MacIntyre was not the only one making the comparison. Jane Jacobs, the brilliant urban observer and theorist, diagnosed a Dark Age Ahead in the title of a recent book, and for a similar reason: the loss of community life in America. Robert Putnam, in the 1990s, meticulously documented the decline of community in America over the preceding generation, in his book Bowling Alone. More recently, Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, vividly described the emerging white underclass and its disorder and loss of family life. We should take seriously the suggestion that in peacetime, amidst material plenty, and with the political order intact, the West has been experiencing a rampant destruction of communities and patterns of life comparable to that caused by the barbarian invasions that destroyed the western Roman Empire.

I fear that few readers may feel the proper thrill of excitement upon hearing the name of Saint Benedict. I don't mean that they will fail to recall and rejoice in his great asceticism, his sanctity, and his miracles. That is not to the purpose here. But even secular, irreligious people, if well-informed, should, if only they know enough history, exult in the way Benedictine monasticism spread and flourished even at the nadir of the Dark Ages, keeping literacy alive, preserving much of the heritage of Latin letters, including pagan writings, as they scribbled on parchments in monastic scriptoria, tilling the soil, providing advisors to kings, serving as a veritable Noah's Ark for the arts of civilization as a flood of barbarism swept over the world. 

It is not to be wondered at that the Greco-Roman civilization of classical antiquity went down. Many civilizations have unraveled and sunk into oblivion. Where is the Hittite Empire now, where Minoan Crete, where Carthage and Tyre and Sidon, where Nineveh, where the Maya and the Anasazi? But only one civilization has survived its own death. It is, to borrow an image of G.K. Chesterton, as if a ship sank, until only the top of the mast, which after all has the shape of a cross, was visible, and then the whole ship was somehow hoisted up again by that cross, until, cleansed and emboldened by its sojourn in the deep, it bounded more proudly than ever across the waves, its sails billowing again in the merry wind. It was the Church, with a starring role for the Benedictine monks, that accomplished this miracle; as Chesterton says, “it turned a sinking ship into a submarine.” 

It is an inspiring story, well worth emulating, and in a recent bestseller, Rod Dreher took MacIntyre’s suggestion as his point of departure, and advocates “the Benedict Option,” a quasi-monastic retreat into communities of faith that can shelter their members from a decadent world and revive the tradition of the virtues. The Benedict Option is not just a desperate measure for desperate times. Monastic withdrawal from the world has been a continuing, fruitful theme in Christian history in times of comparative prosperity and righteousness as well as times of particular decadence or persecution. America, at least the free America we know, began with the quasi-monastic adventure of certain religious social conservatives called the Pilgrims. It's not everyone's vocation. Some can't, and some have opportunities to do good in the world which they ought not to turn their backs on. But best of luck to Rod Dreher and all whom he inspires to seek the good life in the literal or metaphorical wilderness!

But the story of those who did not turn aside from the task of shoring up the old Roman imperium, long, long after it seemed to have been lost beyond retrieval, is also inspiring, after its fashion, and it is these heroes whom we suggest as role models for emulation in an age of disorder and decay.  

They were mostly foreigners. Long before Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 AD, the Roman legions had become partly Germanic. Spoiled by centuries of bread and circuses, the Roman people, once distinguished for its military virtue, had gone soft. The Germanic peoples from beyond the frontier, their intermittent enemies, whom they still half disdained as barbarians, had more martial spirit, much as many immigrants today have more of the characteristic American values of hard work, faith, and family than most native-born Americans do. They filtered over the border and enlisted. It was a half Germanic general, Stilicho, Rome's last great defender, who held Alaric the Visigoth at bay until he was unjustly executed in 408 AD. Then came a couple of centuries in which war and chaos alternated with periods in which Roman or Romanized populaces lived under martial Germanic rulers, still speaking their Latin  language and practicing their Catholic religion, and sometimes with their laws and economy more or less intact. Theodoric the Ostrogoth ruled Italy rather well, in aspirationally Roman style, from 493 to 526 AD, but the Ostrogoths, like the Vandals in North Africa and the Visigoths in Spain and Gaul, were Arian Christians ruling over Catholic subjects, so there could be no real blending of peoples or consent of the governed. 

Later, the Roman populaces of Spain, Italy, and what we now call France got Germanic kings more to their theological liking. Of these, the first and most important was the kingdom of the Franks, established by Clovis, who was baptized as a Catholic in 508. His dynasty deteriorated, but lasted almost three centuries before being replaced on the throne by their capable stewards, the Carolingians, who had already saved Western Europe from Islamic conquest at the Battle of Tours in 732. It was a king of this line, Charles the Great or Charlemagne, who, already ruling the lands that are now France, Belgium, Holland, part of Germany, Italy, and Spain, and in short, the core of Europe, was crowned “Holy Roman Emperor” in Rome in 800 AD. The title survived until 1806. It's hard to take it quite seriously, yet it is significant, and rather poignant, that these fighters of Germanic descent, almost four centuries after the Visigoths sacked Rome, still somehow thought of themselves, however implausibly in retrospect, as standing for Rome, upholding and defending her civilization. When the Carolingian Empire too unraveled, due to inept succession rules and Viking invasions, these remote heirs of the Roman Republic built castles and began administering local justice. We remember them as knights.

It is to the modern counterparts of the knights, for those who choose to try to practice virtue in the task of shoring up the waning imperium of the free capitalist West, that I am particularly eager to call for a rediscovery of virtue. I hope it’s of use to Benedict Option communities too, but it may be most helpful indirectly, for virtuous individuals amidst the wayward elite may help to make the world safe for Benedict Option communities, and win them space, or give them money, to form and grow. Beyond that, those on whom the scattershot spotlight of fame may plausibly fall can prepare their lives so that if it does, they can give the poor bereft masses of modern civilization someone to admire. They can try to be, if not heroes, then ready for heroism at need.