Addendum to Second Retort to MacIntyre:

The comfort I derive from this realization about MacIntyre’s flaws is augmented by the fact that I have no personal stake in exposing them. Were I at all interested in my own genealogy, enough at least to warrant an investigation into my family history in search of some “inherited sin”, I would have no reliable means by which to go about it, and it would not take long to expose the absurdity of the venture.

Consider me as I stand now. As a White American cis-gendered Male living in Suburbia, I might easily attract hostility from those who underestimate the social difficulties inherent in such a cloistered lifestyle. Yet none of this hostility would render me the rightful inheritor of the sins of the Home Owners’ Association, members of whom I routinely avoid out of a mutual enmity between us whose historical precedent has markedly less to do with ancestry. Therefore, any attempt to implicate me in a collective sin, perhaps to explain a run of bad luck by reference to group karma or something like the Yelnats Family Curse, would have by necessity to address my identity as a Russian Jew borne at the end of the Soviet Era. Immediately this should entitle me, in theory, to the benefaction of my fellow Americans who happen to be German, and the jury is still out upon whether or not such a debt is equally binding upon my fellow Americans who happen to be Arabs, or perhaps whether the opposite is the case. (Incidentally, the question of whether we ought to be “pro-Jewish” or “pro-Arab” is in itself practically insoluble owing to the same fallacious line of reasoning.) Furthermore, it might be argued that the average American, especially the average Conservative American, owes me the payment of certain reprations on behalf of the Cold War, which, coldness notwithstanding, took the lives of many Soviet Spies during the Red Scare, as well as, presumably, various Russian Americans who may or may not have been subject to hate crimes. Yet if I should seek payment from any number of these aforementioned cultural debtors, I might swiftly find I am out of luck in collecting, either because my fellows have limited means or because they have strong, individualistic ethics.

This would, of course, put me at a disadvantage in paying my own debts to the Armenians, in theory. However, already I can point out that one of the reasons for the Cold War, as well as one of the evils of the Soviet Union, was precisely in how much separation there was between the State and the People it represented; whereas democratic society aspires to “Government by the People, for the People”, Soviet Society was notorious for pursuing the latter by abolishing the former. In this sense, I was as much a victim of the Soviet Union as a whole as the survivors of the Armenian Genocide are its victims; our mutual creditor, dissolved within my year of birth, is nowhere to be found. In another sense, I might only be considered party to the Armenian Genocide insofar as I am a Communist, unless of course one were to maintain that the Soviet Union of my birth was only TRULY incarnate in the year 1922, since the Bolsheviks came to power two years AFTER the Armenian Genocide. In this narrative, I can only collect from my Republican (and some Democratic) sponsors for the Red Scare insofar as I pay my debt to the Armenian Survivors, and my choice to identify as a Communist will be entirely contingent upon which strategy is most economically lucrative.

Then we should have ample discussions with my fellow Americans who happen to be Cubans, Spaniards, Koreans and Chinese, in order to determine how best to split our growing debt to the families of those innocent victims of radical Marxism. In the process, it might very well be discovered that my ancestors had even less power under Tsar Nicolas II than they did under Vladimir Lenin, and in the process of absolving my own debt to the Armenians I should have finally to conclude that Communism was never a mistake in my case, though my fellows might shoulder the debt.

In any case, it might just as easily be argued that, if the Soviet Union was an attempt to settle all karmic debts, and if it succeeded for some time in doing so, however painfully and tragically the avenger became corrupted, then nothing in my ancestry prior to the year 1917 would be binding in any way, and any lingering debts accrued by Soviet officials thereafter will have died with them, for the State assumed full responsibility for its People prior to its collapse, for which we might blame Capitalism.

At any rate, the moral of the story is obvious: that just as any other inheritance might be interrupted suddenly by the end of a bloodline, (no morbid puns intended) so too could any karmic debt be interrupted, and the reallocation of the inheritance as well as the debt would be so arbitrary then that it might be called corrosive. At that point, seeking to turn anyone who might otherwise have “rightfully inherited” either the wealth or the debt of his predecessors into a debtor would be malicious and unjust, especially because such a would-be debtor, never having received the wealth, might have not the means to pay the debt. The Myth of White Privilege, one which haunts me no less than my fellow Americans who happen to be Republicans, is a prime example of this Absurdity in modern thought.

Worse still, we must consider that assigning blame to any mass of people ensures that no one will accept responsibility, so that blame will only be deferred further by reaching more deeply into the murky well of history. Did Americans abuse the Africans, or did Africans doom the World by inventing Slavery? If the Bible is to be believed, then by being Jewish I should be collecting from the Africans!!

Not only do we lose all sense and sensibility in abstracting away from the concrete individual in reducing him to his national or family history; this abstraction also acts as a transparent vehicle for only the most vicious of instincts. It is neither uncommon nor surprising, however shocking its extent, that when men and women speak in terms of such collective debt they often do so vengefully; I have heard a Debate Coach say of one hate crime towards white Americans that it was justified because “they did it” to African Americans.

Yet does any debt justify such an offence? The reason that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are honoured alongside Tenzin Gyatso is that they resisted this impulse. Gandhi uttered that “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind”, yet contemporary Leftism turns a blind eye towards this, as if to say, “if you were Indian, this would be more than merely an appropriated excuse”.

Yet I might just as easily expose the hypocrisy intrinsic in the adage that “one ill turn deserves another”. After all: what constitutes an “ill turn” is not MERELY that it disadvantages a private interest but that it hurts Society. As such, far from justifying further errors, the direct witnessing of one ill turn by its victims, while it might require the aggressor to ATONE in some manner consistent with the needs of the victims, in fact REQUIRES the victims and all other witnesses to AVOID repeating the mistake, for only by so doing can we all learn collectively while remaining free in taking whatever turns we will in exploring the available possibilities, rather than simply taking turns repeating one another’s mistakes and destroying one another, rendering the whole world blind in the process. One ill turn requires no more, and he who repeats someone else’s mistake is more foolish and evil than he who innovates the mistake in the pursuit of a Common Knowledge.

It follows logically, therefore, that vengeance is one of the furthest things from Justice, just as cocaine is distinct in its effects upon the mind-body from flour, though one might resemble the other in appearance. More often than not, holding someone to a debt which that person cannot pay is nothing more than an attempt to assert one’s power, yet any “unpredictable”, innovative Society, the likes of which MacIntyre espouses, must always produce unpayable debts.

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

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.)}]

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.)}]