Two MacIntyre thoughts
neither very subtle
I have felt all week that I should be writing about MacIntyre; I have also not been rereading him. In any case, I think it is a mind and an attitude that makes the impression, rather than any particular teaching.
There are two consistent features of his thought which explain a lot of his attraction today. The first is the apocalypticism: whether as a Marxist or a Christian, there is a strong sense in all his work that the present world is rotten and must be swept away. It is this attitude as much as anything which explains the post-Liberal crowd; its attraction is not diminished by the way the present world — at least the world before Trump — is being swept away from under us and has been revealed as rotten in the sense of lacking strength even if not (as MacIntyre found it) morally disgusting. His prescription for small moral communities only really makes sense in the same sort of anarchic and barbarian context that St Benedict himself worked in1. .But if we are heading for a complete ecological, political, and economic smashup then apocalypticism makes a satisfying sense. Another, shorter, way to describe the multiple aspects of this catastrophe is “civilisational” and it is, again, reassuring to imagine that it was a failure of civilisation that led to its collapse — that it is somebody’s fault, which means it could have been different — rather than seeing civilisation as a mere epiphenomenon of the underlying forces.
The second aspect of his anti-liberalism which grows more convincing every day is his rejection of the idea that we could satisfy all our desires, and that this is what we should be trying to do. Put like that, it’s the bare bones of Christian anthropology, the most obvious consequence of the doctrine of original sin. Yet this is something that the ad-driven world must deny. “If it feels good to you, it’s got to be good for you” as the slogan went. The only way to bring order to the untutored chaos of our feelings is to find or recognise an external purpose.
The obvious temptation, when you think like this, is to become a thundering preacher of repentance, or at least a thing sonorous, resonant, and hollow. This Macintyre avoided by the quality and integrity of his intellect. I wish the same could be said of those who would sanctify him now.
The other great expression of Catholic apocalypticism is of course A Canticle for Liebowitz