Second Retort to MacIntyre:

“For I am never able to seek for the good or exercise the virtues only qua individual. This is partly because what it is to live the good life concretely varies from circumstance to circumstance even when it is one and the same conception of the good life and one and the same set of virtues which are being embodied in a human life. What the good life is for a fifth-century Athenian general will not be the same as what it was for a medieval nun or a seventeenth-century farmer. But it is not just that different individuals live in different social circumstances; it is also that we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone's son or daughter, someone else's cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. Hence what is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my life its own moral particularity.

This thought is likely to appear alien and even surprising from the standpoint of modern individualism, From the standpoint of individualism I am what I myself choose to be. I can always, if I wish to, put in question what are taken to be the merely contingent social features of my existence. I may biologically be my father's son; but I cannot be held responsible for what he did unless I choose implicitly or explicitly to assume such responsibility. I may legally be a citizen of a certain country; but I cannot be held responsible for what my country does or has done unless I choose implicitly or explicitly to assume such responsibility. Such individualism is expressed by those modern Americans who deny any responsibility for the effects of slavery upon black Americans, saying 'I never owned any slaves'. It is more subtly the standpoint of those other modern Americans who accept a nicely calculated responsibility for such effects measured precisely by the benefits they themselves as individuals have indirectly received from slavery. In both cases 'being an American' is not in itself taken to be part of the moral identity of the individual. And of course there is nothing peculiar to modern Americans in this attitude: the Englishman who says, 'I never did any wrong to Ireland; why bring up that old history as though it had something to do with me?' or the young German who believes that being born after 1945 means that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries, exhibit the same attitude, that according to which the self is detachable from its social and historical roles and statuses. And the self so detached is of course a self very much at home in either Sartre's or Goffinan's perspective, a self that can have no history. The contrast with the narrative view of the self is clear. For the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide. Notice that rebellion against my identity is always one possible mode of expressing it.”

 

MacIntyre, Alasdair.

After Virtue.

Chapter Fifteen.

Pages 219-220.

 

This is perhaps the least intelligible part of MacIntyre’s Narrative, and it is thus ironic that it follows his most poetic and precise exposition upon the Intelligibility of Human Life and Narratives. Furthermore, it is yet another passage wherein he most clearly and obviously expresses a Christian bias, the likes of which I have found in a fanatical street preacher who, simply by looking upon me in passing, identified me, upon the Authority of Scripture, as a “low-level Edomite”, insisting, in spite of all the innovations and gifts of contemporary genetics, upon a Global History whereby male individuals possessing eumelanin inherit God’s Love and Favour because their distant ancestors were oppressed by the ancestors of male individuals possessing pheomelanin, automatically putting all members of the latter class in debt to the former class because the Judeo-Christian God equates any father, whatsoever, with his son, and just as surely as the homely details of one’s complexion might be passed down through breeding (as they surely will be, so long as people are much too shallow and prejudiced by history to interbreed) so too can the “sins of the father” reflect upon his otherwise innocent children, simply for the utility of those vengeful instincts which the father’s enemies retain. To call this peculiar fragment of MacIntyre’s otherwise airtight philosophy a demoralizing conceit would be a comical understatement, since it entirely undermines his project of reconstructing virtue and responsibility.

Consider Andy Bernard from The Office. Undoubtedly, Andy exhibits a number of heroic qualities in abandoning his post at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, Incorporated in order to take an impromptu journey South, from Pennsylvania to Florida, if I am not mistaken in my recollection, in order to win back the heart of his beloved Erin. That his flight might have endangered operations at the Company only serves to fit MacIntyre’s thesis even more snugly; the conflict between virtues, one which MacIntyre insists upon as an improvement (and perhaps a subconscious attempt to one-up) Aristotle, is right there in broad daylight, and it certainly invokes a quality of character in Andy which, in spite of his general foppish clumsiness, can be called Courage. By endangering his position as Leader of a Company in favour of redeeming the identity of Erin’s Lover, Andrew Bernard lives up to the idealism he might presumably have inherited as a Cornell Graduate and a member of the Bernard Family Bloodline, even though neither his fellows at Cornell nor his living family members exhibit such virtues. Furthermore, he exhibits the same Courage when he confronts, with all due honesty, Erin’s new associates, though they hardly reciprocate the courtesy. When he finally returns to find that the lecherous and manipulative Nellie has usurped his post, he exhibits unwavering loyalty in reporting her to David Wallace, even though he endangers his popularity with his coworkers by so doing, again exhibiting Courage and even, one might easily argue, Fortitude coupled with a strong sense of Justice. This Justice is not, however, untempered by Mercy when he has the opportunity to fire Nellie, who, being portrayed by Catherine Tate, resorts to reciting a monologue from Shakespeare which moves him, almost against his will, leading him to ask the thoroughly MacIntyrean question: “Why did you have to play the Bard Card?” The scene is unequivocally consistent with the Scot’s ethos; Andy, confronted with the facts of tradition, a tradition with which he is familiar by avenue of his education and upbringing, or perhaps simply his faith in both or either of them, feels he has no choice but to forgive Nellie and to spare her job the axe, in spite of his personal interests and feelings towards her, including those of righteous and legitimate indignation.

Now: consider the consequences of these thoroughly virtuous choices. At the start of the following season, the unchanged Nellie, purely on a whim, decides to circulate false rumours about Andy Bernard’s ancestry. By the end of the day, the entire Office of credulous automatons is utterly convinced that Andy’s ancestors owned slaves. Oscar Martinez, ever the liberal preacher, insists that Andy owes money to his black coworkers, since the Bernard Family’s wealth was partly acquired at the expense of African American blood, sweat, and tears, against the consent of those same African Americans. This remains the general attitude of the Contemporary Left in its theory of White Privilege and its influence upon socioeconomic disparity within the United States, leading sociologists, apparently estranged from psychology except at its most banal and unimaginative, to equate monetary disadvantage with oppression, thereby rationalizing the murder of innocent affluent people in the film Parasite. Now, of course, it does not take long for Nellie’s hoax to become exposed, yet by this moment Andy has already made a spectacle of the affair (with plenty of help from his accusers) and contacted his family by phone, instinctively, before a makeshift jury of his peers. Incapable of a lie, he reveals that, in fact, (or to the best of his present knowledge) his ancestors did PARTICIPATE WITHIN the Slave Trade, yet they did not own slaves. Famously, he remarks that they were “moral middlemen”, an assertion which does not go over well with his colleagues or subordinates, and probably far less the casual viewer.

Be that as it may, from a Kantian standpoint, for instance, Andy was right in defending his ancestors and, as a consequence, himself, though I maintain that the former was no prerequisite to the latter. From a Kantian standpoint, the “mature” adult, of which there are very few in any contemporary society, and probably far fewer now than in Kant’s age, is capable of subordinating his or herself to the social machinery of his or her Society while at the same time retaining personal convictions to the contrary, the outward expression of which, far from appearing hypocritical to one’s fellow mature and Rational adults, would be instrumental in the eventual reformation of Society, which could only be carried out effectively so long as all such reform passed through this channel and not through personal acts of social deviance.

While MacIntyre rejects Kant numerous times, one cannot deny his similitude to Kant; in practice, they are two thoroughly Earthbound Christian Rationalists seeking the same basic goals by nearly indistinguishable means. Kant’s ideal of the mature man is not at all out of place in MacIntyre’s illustration of the virtuous man, nor vice versa. Both conform to the standards of their respective Societies, among whose practices there is included the institution of the Public Forum wherein Reason directs the telos of Law and its transformation of Society as It Is into Society as it Ought to Be. Both assume the burden of tradition and social pressure, almost as beasts of burden do. The only difference lies in this: that whereas Kant’s ideal is that of an Individual Agent whose own Reasoning contributes to the Future Salvation of Society, creating integrity within the life of an automaton akin to a Ghost in the Machine, MacIntyre presupposes that all genuine Reasoning will lead back to a sort of Collectivism which reduces that Individual completely to the PRODUCT of that Society’s Past Sins.

Yet is this fair? Is this Justice? Clearly, in The Office, it is not. Andy exhibits nothing but honesty, loyalty, and courage to the same extent as his alleged creditors and accusers exhibit duplicity, carelessness, and self-entitlement. This is further reinforced by the character foil of Darryl, a former aspiring Unionist from the Warehouse who expects to earn Michael Scott’s former position (and Andy’s present position) simply by “being black”. Even the revelation of Andy’s history, provoked by a lie, is in itself dubious, and the lie which provoked the revelation underscores this dubiousness; we literally do not know whether or not, perhaps, some ancestor of Nellie, hundreds of years ago, circulated lies about the Bernard Family with the hopes of someday avenging herself upon them. There is literally as much, and no more, evidence to substantiate the narrative which Andy confronts with such a pale face (if you will pardon the play on words) as there is to suggest that Nellie’s ancestors lied about the Bernards, a fiction which might be induced from the equation of the new generation’s imminent and obvious sins with those of previous generations; if Andy can inherit his ancestor’s sins, can we not infer the sins of Nellie’s ancestors from her own, by the same token? Our only refuge would be in fetishizing oral tradition in place of real genealogical research, supplementing it with Oscar’s generalizations about history and probability, and while MacIntyre’s romanticization of ancient cultures might make such primitive customs look good, it is contrary to his epistemological method to defer to them at the expense of modern scientific methods, which in themselves embody the product of a teleology which, having found its consummation in the prosaic annals of Analytic Philosophy, becomes in MacIntyre’s view tantamount to a Godsend.

It ought to be a matter of Common Sense that, as Watts said, assigning blame according to History is as ridiculous as making the tail wag the dog. While I contend with Watts in asserting that an INDIVIDUAL Life might be understood and judged in toto, from beginning to end, as a musical composition whose every note is as significant as the closing cadence, (to borrow Watts’ own charming and accurate analogy, even if only to appropriate it, as Watts often did to others’ work in the same playful Spirit) I agree with Watts that displacing blame upon the parents is often (though hardly always) a mistake, and so too would one be mistaken in assuming blame for THEIR mistakes as one seeks not to repeat them and to become independent of their consequences. It is not simply “all too convenient” to forget one’s ancestors; sometimes, it is essential to do so, and when it is imperative to remember them it is only to pride one’s self in having transcended them, working constantly to learn from their triumphs and tragedies. This can only be done so long as one recognizes that what they did to provide a better future for their children was the “mature” course of action AT THE TIME, and the very nature of any sort of Progress, Aristotelian, Hegelian, or otherwise, is such that their personal reservations about their own Age could ONLY have found its consummation in Reform at a much LATER time. The Bernards, even if they worked on slave ships, might have had as much to do with Emancipation as Abraham Lincoln did, though it is impossible to say for certain, just as we cannot with CERTAINTY determine what their occupations were nor how they treated their African American passengers, as “occupants” or “cargo”. So it is too, though the fact is rarely addressed, in my experience, except by Right-wing Radicals with reformed tendencies, in spite of being known near-universally, that whereas Human Rights, as they are understood today, originated very recently in Europe, slavery originated most probably on the African Continent thousands of years ago, precisely as a product of that way of life which MacIntyre relishes when he says, “I inherit from the past of […] my tribe […] rightful expectations and obligations.” It is precisely within the Tribal Mind that slavery finds both its conception and its justification, and it is out of this vestige of Early Man that we inherit not “racism” but the ability to project racist qualities upon police officers and pizza salesmen. By deferring to such abstractions such as “Racism” on one hand and “Human Rights” upon the other, we unmistakably and unequivocally engage within a theological discussion: a sublimation of the Jungian Religious Instinct in Godless Postmodern Society. The same superstitions which drove the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials can be ascribed to the O.J. Simpson trial, the Bill Cosby trial, the Rodney King riots, the Floyd riots, the Papa John’s scandal and the fact that Mattel released a Zendaya Barbie doll with dreadlocks. Simply substitute for “God’s Will” the abstraction “Human Rights” and for “Witchcraft” “Racism”, and you can see history repeat itself with pitiable accuracy, even within the twenty-first century. It is disappointing, therefore, though not altogether surprising, that after so effectively laying Inherent Human Rights to rest, alongside Unicorns, in a previous Chapter, legitimizing as a result all legal practices and institutions as the very avatar of Justice, merely one Chapter ago, MacIntyre then feeds directly back into the superstitiousness of the New Left in siding with the enemies of “Racism” in America. One has to wonder: if Human Life can be understood as a comprehensible and unified Narrative, how does one comprehend THIS?

Clearly, the evils of Slavery amount to nothing more than this, as previously stated: that slaves do not consent to their servitude. Yet, according to MacIntyre, neither do heroes in ancient myths, citizens in ancient Greece, nor the sorts of virtuous neo-Aristotelians whom MacIntyre made it his project to produce. White Americans such as Andy Bernard do not consent to the alleged sins of their ancestors, yet they still assume the debts, even as the Bernard Family secretly goes bankrupt. Young men in remote African tribes must still be subordinate to the Ritual of One Thousand Cuts (if I am to trust my source, an amateur expert in bizarre tribal customs) whereas their South African counterparts attain manhood by attending their classes and hearing Derrida lecture them on the sins of THEIR fathers, placing them at risk of suicide whereas their black brothers might die by bleeding and gangrene. Neither wretch is at liberty to deliver the other from his fate, even though the Leftist position presents that as a burden and MacIntyre preaches moral objectivity. Because MacIntyre shies away from Kant’s Universalism, all evils are permitted. Denying certain evils is as much an appeal to “self-evidence” and a conceit to Intuition(ism) as the Declaration of Independence, and perhaps this is precisely what MacIntyre, even in his eighties, ought to embrace, that he might ascend to the Universal Plane of Thought before he gives up the Ghost.

I should note the irony, therefore, that in resisting modernity so piously MacIntyre falls right in league with the postmodernists in his rival school: Continental Philosophy. Derrida, even having successfully deconstructed race in the tradition of Nietzsche, holds South African students responsible for Apartheid according to a very pre-Nietzschean historicity. MacIntyre, disavowing Nietzsche in an attempt to distance himself from the entire Continental School, would likely turn the other cheek in Derrida’s lectures; just as in Ancient Greece, the Goat and the Crab are Father and Mother, containing their children within their bounds. While such visionaries as the Aquarian Individualist Martin Luther King Jr. profess a Future wherein all men are practically colour-blind, judging by character instead of colour, both Derrida’s philosophy and MacIntyre’s philosophy lend themselves expediently and unscrupulously to a society which equates birth with identity in a manner that is not only logocentric but vicious and divisive. Hence both the project of transcending logocentricity (or, in Deleuze’s case, postponing it, since transcendence is implicitly illusory) and the project of returning from liberal individualism to virtuous collectivism fail. The consequences of defining a man by a remote history are such that the excuse is too tempting to kill that man on behalf of a vendetta and then to pardon his murderer on behalf of a special interest group. The sheer disparity of affect between black Americans and white Americans following the O.J. Simpson verdict stand as a testament to the real-world travesty that MacIntyre’s “objective”, “unified narrative” becomes.

One mustn’t forget Alan Watts’ parable, whereby he appropriates the Garden of Eden myth in order to illustrate the absurdities of this sort of historicity. If I wish to blame my parents, my parents can blame theirs, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum, until our genealogy would inevitably lead us back to the Garden of Eden. Therein, we would question Adam as God did, and he would defer to Eve. Then we would question Eve, and she would defer to the Serpent. Then God would question Satan, and Satan would make no excuses, because he is an Angel.

Simply dressing this tendency for blaming the past in a coat of righteousness does little to either legitimately exonerate O.J. Simpson nor to condemn Andy Bernard in The Office or the Park Family in Parasite. Clearly, if I cannot blame my parents for my shortcomings, (except according to actual impacts their actions had upon my mind-body during my formative years, for which Rowling jibes that there is, in fact, an “expiration date”) then neither can *I* be blamed for THEIR shortcomings. Either I am the product of my history or I am not. If I assume no excuse, I assume no responsibility; without the power, there can be no burden, even if some economic history, in its nebulosity, would imply that other powers have come to me by ostensibly illegitimate means called “privilege”.

The utmost virtue belongs to the man who sees not “privilege” but rather the very consummation of a teleological project, that even in poverty that man might have the basic human kindness to delight in his fellows’ prosperity instead of envying it. It is, internally, only this delight which drives men to do good things for good reasons, and if, as MacIntyre attests, behaviour is inseparable from character, then it is only this quality of character which can rightfully direct behaviour, and, as Watts loves to quote the Ancient Chinese in saying, anything else would amount to the “wrong man using the right means”, which then must “work in the wrong ways”.

It must also not be forgotten that the chain of blame functions the same way in MacIntyre’s historicity as in Watts’ fable. If I go back far enough, I can blame Africans for their own enslavement, since Africans invented slavery. Yet by so doing I only enslave both myself and my black brothers to perpetual, hopeless, and ignorant despair.

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