The Four Stages of the MacIntyre Student:

There have been four stages in the development of my opinion of Alasdair MacIntyre. Perhaps some preliminary stages might be inferred, but they are secondary to the discussion. These four stages, essentially three stages which are then synthesized into one, are all unique responses to some of his condescending tendencies, and each grows logically out of its predecessor, as a counterargument.

1.    MacIntyre the Impersonal Ideologue, or the Idea Person.

What one notices most peculiarly about MacIntyre is his tendency to put down matters of personal preference and taste. This immediately creates our first impression of him: that of the Idea Man who is NOT a conventional “people person”. It is, of course, possible to be BOTH Idea Person AND People Person, yet this balance is seldom achieved, and MacIntyre drifts to the former extreme. When we think of “people people”, we are accustomed to agreeable socialites who might very well harbor deep-seated feelings of cynicism and insecurity, but who routinely gloss over those feelings with charm and tact. These people “love people” and love to be around people, quite openly and shamelessly, drawing energy and wisdom from interaction. They busy themselves with the careful study of human motivations, often manipulating social situations in their own favour or the interest of their friends. They put ample thought into their appearance and presentation, leaving little to chance in the observation of fashion, though they do their level best to hide their own efforts and to appear “naturally” and “relatably” appealing.

By contrast, the Idea Person tends to be the outcast and the critic. More common among introverts than extraverts, the Idea Person usually appears on Life’s Stage (if not only behind the scenes) as a stubborn, cloistered intellectual who swiftly tires of public life and wishes to make the World conform to a conceptual scheme which he alone deems Noble.

MacIntyre might not be a villain in a film from the Red Scare, but his tendency to criticize the human will does not portray him as a party animal either. Meticulous and efficient, he is the “sort of guy you go to” when you need a job done right, but he’s “not the sort of guy” you invite to a party or to have a drink. He’s like a robot: efficient but impersonal, processing data with self-assured detachment, reacting to every hint of personal bias as an Operating System responds to a bug or virus.

This is the first impression, and it is very immature. Yet what follows becomes even more nebulous and problematic.

2. MacIntyre the Apologist for Conformity.

The Second Impression one receives of MacIntyre is that of the Noble Conformist. It becomes clear, as one begins to acquire a feeling for MacIntyre’s humour, that the man LIKES people, after all; his aversion to individuality is not, in fact, misanthropy. MacIntyre sees the Good in People and wants what both he AND they consider to be Best for themselves and for each other; he simply is possessed of the unyielding notion that such goods can only be acquired by avenue of the Social System. Everything which we enjoy as Individuals emanates, to his mind, from what we have achieved in Groups. Conformism is not a curse but Grace Itself, for when people can be persuaded to get along, good things happen, and evil arises only from one of two sources: the absence of Social Order and the perversion of Social Order by its departure from the Traditions of Previous Social Orders. On that note, an Individual can rob himself and his fellows of an opportunity for the Good Life by deviating from those Traditions, irrespective of whether or not the Society as a Whole commits the same mistake. Conformism is not an end in and of itself, least of all a source of intrinsic comfort for the outgoing hedonist, but rather a means towards a teleological end: the possibility for Individuals to coexist harmoniously and, therefore, nobly and happily. This implies that, in order for Human Life to be Humane, certain inhuman instincts which, as Camus had put it, even human beings secrete, must be suppressed if not eradicated completely. The man consumed by his own jealousy can have no genuine, trusting interpersonal relationships; the woman who gambles compulsively can enjoy no financial security. The simple fact that we exist does not render us good people; we require the support of our fellows in order to prosper, and this support is a human need, perhaps the only universal one. MacIntyre is no longer just “the guy you go to” when you need a JOB done; he’s your advocate whenever you tire of the World. All about us, we are surrounded by drug pushers, libertines, liars, manipulators, bullies, and traitors; MacIntyre is the sort of friend you turn to when you need to KNOW that they are wrong and you want proof to expose them. Conformism gets a bad reputation, though it is the perfect adversary to chaotic, self-serving evil; MacIntyre redeems conformism, stripping it of its Fascist associations and turning it towards Universal Good. Yet this evolved conception of the man is even more dangerous than the primary insult.

3. MacIntyre the Bully.

The moment of disillusion comes in when MacIntyre’s condescension apparently “goes too far”. This moment may come for different readers and listeners at different times; for some, it may never come at all. At this stage, whether it is under the sobriety and lucidity of the University classroom or the intoxication of late-night, drunken reading, MacIntyre is unmasked as an apparent bully. One gets the surreal impression of a Scot who attends the sidelines of a rugby game and boos the players for every fumble. This man does not simply partake in condescension towards individuals; he ENJOYS it. His drive to conform and to belong is not simply a matter of principle and intellectual stance, but a profound personal bias, the likes of which he projects upon the perpetual scapegoat and easy target of the outcast. This political caricature of MacIntyre NEEDS appraisal to fuel his temperamentally insecure ego; devoid of genuine conscience and self-knowledge, he surrenders both in favour of the pack, and the perpetuation of his feeble ego must by necessity thrive off the denigration of all natural deviants. This observation is, of course, overwhelmed by the extreme attention to detail with which he covers his tracks, yet the simple appearance of this specter in the night does not invalidate but consolidates the conclusions. MacIntyre is not a people person but a pathological narcissist, and his contempt for other narcissists is purely competitive in nature. His conformism is only on your side so long as the mob he represents does not see “through” you, and it is every bit as much informed by subjective bias and loneliness as is the fault he finds within you, to the jeers of his peers.

This caricature, while it is absurd and insulting, completes the preliminary picture this reader envisages of MacIntyre the Man, and it is crucial towards the final incarnation of his image, owing both to its verifiable AND its radically biased and subjective, projected contents. The reason for this is that one can identify very similar fears and projections in the objective assay of him.

4. MacIntyre the Champion and Enabler.

The Final Image of MacIntyre is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, which is of course an ironic thing to say, since he at once lags behind and surpasses his hero Aristotle, his savior and his downfall. One must assume that MacIntyre thinks highly of Aristotle, even to the point that a son defends his Father. Were a passionate student of Nietzsche to accuse Aristotle of prejudicial bullying, we ought not to be surprised to find MacIntyre acting in Aristotle’s defence, both from the Witness Stand and as his Legal Counsel. Were MacIntyre himself accused of the same crime, he is likely to defend himself just as piously, for the piety of his Ideals and his belief in them is authentic, and such Ideals do not sit well with the suggestion that exercises of authority are arbitrary at heart.

Ultimately, MacIntyre is revealed, even in his eighties, to be a child. An introvert by nature, he must be assumed to have endured some “fair share” of bullying at the hands of extraverts. Not one to fight back without a strong arm, he is likely to have internalized the abuse, disowning his own virtue and projecting it upon the Extraverted World.

Aristotle became his extraverted role model. A sort of monolithic Father Figure, Aristotle, as well as all Platonic conceptions of him after Plato, has come to embody the archetypal extravert; even Jung used him as his prime example in the coinage of the dichotomy of types. To MacIntyre, Aristotle is the Platonic Ideal (in fact: an introvert’s projection) of what an outgoing, social man SHOULD be. Aristotle’s Athens, as it was, as Aristotle wanted it to be, as it had been and as Aristotle has presumed it to have been, is a sort of Heaven on Earth for introverted intellectuals such as MacIntyre. There, the philosopher is no longer left out, cast in an inferior position; in that Athens of Virtue, young MacIntyre is allowed to thrive, and all bullying is simply the society’s contempt for those wayward, abusive deviants whom MacIntyre still resents in secrecy. MacIntyre’s thesis is that those deviants have come to power and turned the language of Great Men like Aristotle and Christ to their own purposes. If Aristotle is ever to be redeemed in the public eye, it will be only by matching their perverse transgression (the memory of the abuses) with an equal and opposite Authority (the projection upon idols).

MacIntyre’s lifelong academic career allows him to inhabit a minute vestige of that lost, Atlantean world which Aristotle had inhabited, either in flesh or thought. MacIntyre is the introverted child who sought, unsuccessfully, through no fault of his own save sheer naïveté, to earn the approval of his bullies, who had come to comprise a ruling class. Failing to win their support whilst feeling inwardly entitled to it, (rightfully, for it was only HIS virtue to begin with that he had projected upon his “superiors”) MacIntyre came to the only natural conclusion: that Aristotle, the Good Man, had fallen.

Why Aristotle? Only because Aristotle IS what extraverts OUGHT to be. His approval represents a harmonious synthesis between people of his kind and people like MacIntyre. He is that mythological guide who leads MacIntyre through Hades. Conversely, MacIntyre’s spiritual role model, Christ, represents the Introvert’s Homecoming. It is quite obvious that Academia, amounting to little more than a slice of old Athens, cannot welcome Christ as the Church does; hence MacIntyre’s University lectures and texts tend towards Aristotle whilst his musings in the Catholic Church concern the rejection of Christ. Just as Aristotle was cast out, so was Jesus of Nazareth. The former represents that Authority which the introvert envies when he finds it in extraverts, though he finds it only because he wishes to, desperately. Yet Jesus is simply the other side: if Aristotle represents all that extraverts ought to be as leaders in secular life, Jesus represents all which MacIntyre aspires to be as a leader in Spiritual Life. The synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem, though easy enough for the iconoclastic, Aquarian Shestov, remains a pipe dream for the dour Capricorn named Alasdair MacIntyre, and it is the very fantastic nature of this dream which renders it an escape.

Inwardly yet transparently, MacIntyre cherishes the thought that Aristotle COULD, in some Platonic Heaven, share wine with Jesus, despite those doctrinal differences which, in the Eyes of an Omniscient Logos, amount to little more than differences of personality and temperament. On Earth, these doctrinal differences are absolutely crucial, for it is only by observing their strictures and doing as the Romans (or, in this case, the Greeks and Judeo-Christians) do that one manages to lead a life worthy of Salvation. Alasdair MacIntyre’s rationalism is nothing more than an epic poem on behalf of Introversion: the Quest for Acceptance into Society.

Yet this Society must always, by its nature, fail, since we know from Nietzsche (though MacIntyre continues to deny this with contempt and grudging respect) that the Strong are in fact totally arbitrary in their rulemaking. Aristotle’s immunity to rules is not simply the exaltation of excellence, but rather the exercise of will. Aristotle was never himself an Aristotelian, and those who follow in his footsteps can never amount to him in terms of charisma. MacIntyre knows this, but he must recognize, upon some level, that Aristotle’s path is not for MacIntyre to walk. Aristotle was simply a philosophical bully: Plato’s problem pupil.  Deep down, MacIntyre must recognize that he can never BECOME Aristotle, because Aristotle is NOT the Great Man he was once remembered to be. The idols which extraverted leaders erect are often simply in their own image, and the victims of their followers tend towards their idolatry. Only once every thousand years or so does an introvert come along like Jesus or Nietzsche to decimate the idols. Most introverts, unfortunately, bow low before the ghosts of their childhood oppressors, becoming spokespeople for the tyranny of the Strong, perpetually disappointed by the Platonic Ideal once put into practice.

To what can we ascribe this tragedy? Only to this: that the men who fashion the idols have none of their own. Aristotle was a bully and a teacher of bullies; his teachers were the True Idealists, as in MacIntyre, and because most people enable bullies, “Society” is always broken. MacIntyre cannot recreate it, since only aggression forges civilizations. Do not be misled by the Rationalism Alasdair MacIntyre has gleaned from the Analytic Philosophical School. Yes: it can be proven that Aristotle has fallen. Yet why him? Even MacIntyre himself admits that the choice of idol is arbitrary, and his defence, though resounding and poignant, is not altogether convincing by the same stringent standards which MacIntyre assigns for himself and all of Humankind. Aristotle himself will never live up to MacIntyre’s standards, simply because that virtue which Aristotle ostensibly possessed and professed was only ever projected upon him by the Platonic minds of sensitive introverts. He is to MacIntyre as the Pharaoh was to Yugi Mutou or, worse yet, as Heisenberg was to Walter White.

[({R.G.)}]

It May be True...

It may be true that a son is responsible for his own finances after a certain age, though let us not forget that it was the father who insisted that those finances be shared in this fashion. A deeper question seems to be that of greed. The son may sit upon the wealth of subscriptions he does not use, and this may be likened to a dragon hoarding. Be that as it may, the suggestion is raised that, were this hoard put to the son’s private use, the expenditure would be rational and hence legitimate, as a result pardoned by the Father. This, at least in part, implies that the son is ENTITLED to the use of the subscriptions, not by his own estimation so much as by his Father’s implication, and, since possession of the subscription is a prerequisite for its use, it follows inductively that the son deserves the subscription. Neither is it irrelevant to point out that the subscription itself was bought with the fruits of the son’s own labours, to be used towards the purposes of furthering those enterprises, and it was kept in the hope of someday finding more noble enterprises in undertaking, about which the Father’s approval means little, for they may very well surpass the Father’s scope and station. Furthermore, the “legitimacy and sensibility” of the expenditure is not entirely absurd and demoralizing, since we all know to whom the money goes: the Gymnasium, the Book Retailer, and, as the result of the missed deadline, the Bank. Any one of these institutions may be considered unworthy of payment, but in that sense they might be deemed to be the ones guilty of greed, in which case the son is not the rightful target for the father’s indignation, and the father’s choice to take his anger out on his own son amounts to nothing more than the impotence of a man who lacks the courage or the strength to confront the true adversaries. In saying this, however, I do not mean to hold my own father to the Herculean task of challenging these institutions, whose bureaucracy and reach render them practically unimpeachable. In order to contend with the TRUE evil, one has no further to look than within one’s own heart. The son may deem himself to be pure of Heart, and he does not do this vaingloriously. Ancient Egyptian Funeral Myths recount the trials of the Soul of the Deceased, who has then to swear before the Gods and Goddesses that he or she was innocent. I knew my innocence, with that same zeal; I simply lacked the tongue to prove it. Yet if the Father were to examine his OWN Heart, he might find that the same greed which he projects upon his son, which is also manifest impersonally in the institutions of these large corporations, in fact lives on within himself. Rather than rejoicing that his son has earned this subscription, though Life no longer affords the frequent payment of the expense, to say nothing of the fact that the son has abstained from its corollary indulgence, for his path has led him to more cerebral pursuits, the Father rages at the loss of money to which he himself felt entitled as the sole regulator and monetary manager. Yet clearly the son had not planned this to be the case either when he had purchased those subscriptions to the Gymnasium and the Bookstore; he simply felt he needed them to do his job(s). The power shifted, but the son remained pure of intent, and having learned from work to shirk harassment, he is not easily rattled and coerced into undoing the purchases he made in good faith in better financial straits. His is not the pursuit of “self-fulfillment” in place of “self-preservation”; it is simply a journey of “self-discovery” which is more important than “self-sacrifice” at this time, for the son remains, as a rule, less obligated to serve others than the man who voluntarily gave up part of his own autonomy to become a Father. To profess the virtues of the lone wanderer but to deplore it within one’s own children symptomizes a narcissistic reading of literature wherein only the reader can be the hero, and not other readers who accompany him. While it may appear just as self-centered to profess my own heroism now, what prompts it, truly, is fascination with heroism as such, as well as an attempt to recover from the heroic battle wounds of traumatic family dysfunction by appeal to the purity of one’s deeper and more enduring Soul, within which the hero always has found Solace even in the Darkest of Places.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

To the Savages who tore down Christopher Columbus...:

To the Savages who tore down Christopher Columbus, all these centuries later:

Why do you think we are here?

What is it that you feel entitled to?

What is your legal basis?

Where is your Moral High Ground, HUH?

Do you pluck your rights directly from the ground, or are they GIVEN to you?

Do you invent your values, or are they INHERITED?

Who are YOU to judge the Past? You are its Product. Who are YOU to form the Future? Do you even know enough of where we’ve been to know where we are going? Will you turn the ship of state by will? Who is your navigator THEN?

There is no sin which has not made your freedoms possible. No God who would reach down to save Mankind. There are no differences between the White Man’s Burden and the Liberal Guilt, no wall between one form of Westward Progress and the history of Social Justice. All are artificial. All were totally legitimate. The Laws of Today hold no sway over the Crimes of Yesterday, for Human Rights, AS WRITTEN, never let the heroes of the past become the villains of the present. Everyone is innocent initially, and no crime can be punished ex post facto in this Nation.

Respect the Fact that Times Change.

Not one of us is God, to travel back in time, to sink the Mayflower and doom this Continent to Spanish Fascist Rule.

Learn this, and this alone:

It made sense at the Time;

It was RIGHT at the Time.

No one existed then to call it wrong, and had it never happened, then it wouldn’t be wrong now.

MOVE ON. Forget not that all History has been this Way.

Rejoice that it is so, and Love Your Fate, for it is constantly improving.

Yet, if you would squander it,

The World will fall apart,

Its roof come down upon your scalp,

Creased not from thought but rage,

As you tear down the walls upholding everything.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Slavery No Longer Matters: Essay One.

We mustn’t concern ourselves at all with what the slave regarded as the Fourth of July. The most important question is this: what is it to the slave’s descendants? That remains to be decided, but it seems fair to say this much: a great many of them enjoy both the food and the fireworks, especially the barbecue and the beer. Such is the nature of progress: once the slaves are freed, slavery itself is largely drowned out in a more collective freedom; this is, in fact, the goal for all forms of “inclusion” which are not Leninist forms of seizure. Those who remain “slaves” are simply those who cannot avail themselves of such collective freedoms, since their minds are still in bondage to an identity which lives only in the past, customarily excavated from ruins and polished to look contemporary by that same sleight of hand which would pass a modern fabrication off as an historical artifact. The only slaves in this country have, for over a hundred years, been what Huxley’s generation referred to as “television and radio fodder”: disenchanted adolescents, some well into their forties, who have neither a sense of immediate connection to their surroundings nor a feeling of solidarity with their society and its constituents, who would gladly submit to the first identity which is imposed upon them, only to buy into the first revolution which is sold to them. Liberalism, especially in the Marxist school, aimed primarily to set people free from these forms of conditioning; corporate liberalism, as presented by a centralized media, only perpetuates this feeling of disenfranchisement, all the while obscuring the phenomenological facts of free, willing choice, vilifying the collective concept of responsibility, and promising, by implication, a form of liberation which it is never legally obligated to provide upon purchase. It is because so much of our information is streamlined, presented as if it conformed to the Aristotelian Law of Non-Contradiction, that these perpetual adolescents who comprise the consuming public gladly take up arms against an enemy on that same enemy’s say-so, dismissing any intimation of an underlying paradox as if it were NOT the start of philosophical insight but rather the End of Reason.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

BOOM:

I don’t see why you would call me a “Boomer”. I was born in 1991, and I have never reproduced, nor taken part in the act of procreation. None of the points of view I have expressed herein specifically advocate for any policies put forth during the Baby Boom, unless, of course, you mean to suggest that the entire notion of stratified credibility were somehow peculiar to that generation, though it was already in deplorable decline then. Regarding stratified credibility, it ought to be obvious that in approaching an intellectual problem one ought to prioritize opinions informed by education and practice, especially in contending with laypeople who claim a difference to be negligible. Invariably, such negligence is the province of extremely dismissive ignoramuses, whose nature and project it is to undermine the disciplined pursuit of Truth.

[({R.G.)}]

One cannot pay people upfront without creating the possibility for the employee to underperform, and that sheer possibility creates for the employer an excuse to exploit the labour of the employee. Since the employer is himself only employed by his superiors or by the market, the incentive is all too tempting to pawn off the work of one’s employees as one’s own whilst underrating the employee’s performance. For these reasons, in the Spirit of creating a non-aggressive work environment, employers must adhere to payment “in the backend”, in direct proportion to the success of the project, according to a ratio previously agreed upon with the employee. This both creates the incentive for the project to succeed as well as eliminating any set of circumstances wherein the employer should “judge the performance” of the employee, thereby impeding any sort of success, spiritual or material, by the imposition of the employer’s biases. Such an arbitration only dooms the “work” to the fate of the “play”: a performance, put on for show and profit, but with marginal Investment.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

When Hate Crimes are O.K.:

The only effective argument against any sort of ethnic or cultural prejudice lies in the time-honoured conviction that moral imperatives are impartial and impersonal. Random acts of violence against homosexuals, for instance, are wrong because they are random acts of violence against people, representing the imposition of primeval disorder upon the only known Rational Animal. No consideration ought to be paid, therefore, to either the sexual preferences of the victim NOR the attitude which the assailant had TOWARDS those sexual preferences, unless of course such an attitude might be used to rationalize and thereby to legitimize the act of violence, such as if the assailant were to provide an unrefuted intellectual proof for how the sexual preferences were, in fact, corrosive to society. Such a proof would establish the act of violence as “not irrational”, but rather a disciplined use of force against an irrational threat to social order. Yet anyone wishing to defend the victim in this scenario would only doom him if such a defence were to amount to nothing more than “surely you do not mean to advocate for hate crimes!!” Yet far more surely is it true that one never “means” to advocate “for” anything; one has simply to examine the inherent facts and to arrive at the inevitable conclusion.

The Nature of the Truth is Constant. The question of what is or is not true is always important; the question of when this Truth may or may not be expressed is never important, since it ought to be expressed in any set of circumstances wherein it pertains, and since it is a Constant, so is its pertinence. The only circumstances under which a truth is expressed inappropriately are those wherein the truth is so banal that even the attention paid to it is wasted, and other truths are robbed of their due consideration consequently. Yet if you agree with me on a matter of agreeable import, even passionately, then you have no ground to dispute my expression of the opinion, since the nature of the opinion yields to no man’s personal agenda, and any worthwhile collective pursuit must not be corrupted by partisan efforts. If the nature of a group is such that it promotes the honesty and prosperity of all of its outsiders and constituents, then it is justified; if its nature is such that it suppresses the flow of resources, either material or mental, at the expense of either its outsiders or its constituents, then it is illegitimate, and no agency which is wedded inextricably to that group’s cause is justified in defending the group OR its constituents from violent retribution. Since the group’s power rests in the irresponsibility of its constituents, namely the felt immunity to any thought which might be disquieting to the private conscience, as though the individual were somehow absolved of the responsibility to question his own actions or those of his fellows, then it may very well be that only acts of violence targeted at individuals within the group can be used to subvert the group’s dominion. As such, it follows that no act of violence can be considered “wrong” because it is motivated by hatred towards “members of a group”; the very nature of the group’s existence absolutely legitimizes the act of reactionary violence.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]