Dependent Rational Animals

an obituarial re-read

Exploring MacIntyre is not going down a rabbit hole; it’s descending into the underground city of Derinkuyu.

—me

I can’t begin to describe how much of an influence Alasdair MacIntyre had on me—a non-academic ex-Army guy and an ex-Marxist, who became a (not very good) Christian late in life. I was introduced to MacIntyre’s work by Stanley Hauerwas, the latter of whom was introduced to me by my former pastor, one of Stanley’s ex-students. I was going to make my next piece about the Bonapartist-creep we’re experiencing in the United States, that being on my mind a good deal these anxious days, when I ran across David Bentley Hart’s remembrance of his time with MacIntyre at Yale. I was surprised by the acerbic Hart’s paean for MacIntyre the Thomist, given that Hart himself said once the only time he would even utter the word “Thomist” was when he stubbed his toe. Obviously, then, the hetero-Orthodox Hart was referring to a species of Thomism that has aligned itself with politically-motivated pseudo-theologies. Full disclosure, I am also a fan of David Bentley Hart. In Hart’s piece, he remarked that his favorite of MacIntyre’s books was Dependent Rational Animals—Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Open Court Publishing, 1999), published when MacIntyre was 70 years old. This remark provoked my to dust off my own copy for a (fifth, I think, idk) re-read, which I’ve decided to share with my few—but incredibly discerning—readers.

As noted above, MacIntyre was a self-declared “Thomist Aristotelian,” which I—in my sparse knowledge of both—will leave to MacIntyre’s own work to define. His field was moral philosophy, though MacIntyre (the polymath) himself—who, without a PhD, went on to teach in Ivy League universities—disclaimed such academic boundary policing. Suffice it to say, he was concerned with “ethical” problems in our metaphysically incoherent milieu in which ethics has become an endless and insoluble menu of quandaries. His mission was to resurrect “virtue ethics,” or the study of virtue rooted in “our lives, social practices, and the community.”

MacIntyre was not averse to admitting oversights and errors, and as one progresses through his work—as we “A-Mac” fanatics do—each book calls up earlier oversights and errors, and attempts to fill them in or correct them. Dependent Rational Animals says in the Preface that his earlier attempts to divorce himself from Aristotle’s own “metaphysical biology” had led MacIntyre to overlook the necessity, in spite of Aristotle’s errors, of incorporating some account of biology into any comprehensive virtue-ethical framework. That’s what this book set out to do, the title actually giving the whole game away.

Biology is back in public debates right now, mostly with regard to gender ideology, to which I’ve devoted a fair amount of thought and energy; but in this case, the issue of biology bases itself on the more general fact that we are animals, and that this animality (1) shares characteristics with other intelligent species and (2) is characterized itself by periods of dependency, vulnerability, sickness, and disability. These animal conditions, then, present themselves socially as ethical questions, and herein is where we differ from other animals, whose adaptive responses to dependency, vulnerability, sickness, and disability are more “hard-wired,” on the one hand, and less ameliorable through that potent partnership between “mind,” opposable thumbs, and collective “memory.”

The way we cooperate is distinguishable from the (very sophisticated) systems of cooperation employed, say, by a pod of dolphins. Nonetheless, MacIntyre criticizes the “linguistic” philosophers and others for not merely overplaying this difference, but of underplaying our cross-species similarities—and then transferring insights about humans to non-human animals while failing to reverse the transfer to discover what other intelligent animals can tell us about ourselves. (Then, of course, there’s the wooden materialist fallacy of behaviorists and Dawkinsians and their ilk which speculates that humans and “animals” alike, are robotically “conditioned” . . . with themselves as the rare exceptions.)

MacIntyre’s complaint against his former self and indeed most of philosophy was that this question of vulnerability is never centered in discussions of human nature, where “moral agents . . . are themselves presented as though they were continuously rational, healthy, and untroubled.” (2)

The philosopher’s world appears as a classroom or a marketplace; it’s the poets and novelists who frequent bars, hospital wards, and morgues (my observation, not A-Mac’s).

(MacIntyre notes that the most important partial remedies to this evasion of carnality have come from pre-poststructuralist feminist philosophers. No surprise there, given that women’s bodies have persistently embarrassed disincarnate philosophy with all that bleeding and gestating and nursing. It took the post-Butlerians to re-valorize disembodiment and put that wicked incarnation back in its place.)

[Commentators] have underestimated the importance of the fact that our bodies are animal bodies with the identity and continuities of animal bodies, and they have failed to recognize adequately that in this present life it is true of us that we do not merely have, but are our bodies. (6)

The whole book, then, is a review of the fundamental moral-philosophical questions, that systematically centers animal embodiment, with its dependency, vulnerability, and affliction. Reason, or rationality, he presumes from the outset, is not and can never be in any regard “somehow independent of our animality.” (5)

Our social-animal lives are a lively intersubjective flow through which we acquire recognition, understanding, and empathy (and yes, power struggles). This is true of how we relate to one another, but also, how we can relate to other animals. Any dog lover can tell you that an actual personal relationship can exist between our animals and ourselves, in which there is mutual understanding, empathy, and yes, occasional power struggles. (The Hegelian “intersubjective” psychologist Jessica Benjamin had quite a lot to say about this tension between recognition and self-assertion.)

Chapter 3 in Dependent Rational Animals explores in depth the practices and minds of dolphins. The whole question of hard-wiring, or the nature-versus-nurture red herring, is similar for dolphins and humans—who are very different in most other respects—inasmuch as dolphins do exhibit predictable behaviors, individually and socially, across each particular species; but studies have also proven that an individual dolphin separated from that social context will not develop typical dolphin “behavioral” characteristics, and will not learn the coordinated and cooperative actions necessary to participate in typical herd activities. This is likewise true of humans, as I’m fond of saying: human beings are biologically determined to not be biologically determined. (In biological reality, form and function are only separable after death.)

Dolphins perceive, distinguish, and respond creatively to dynamic situations with a repertoire of collective practices and tactics, coordinating with a language of sorts. They take pleasure in achievement and they play, including from time to time initiating play with human beings—something I myself have experienced while kayaking in the Atlantic Ocean with our grandson. All this suggests that dolphins, in some ways similar to ourselves, think.

One can overplay the role of language in thinking by focusing solely on the more linguistic species like dolphins and apes. We communicate quite effectively with our dogs, for example, and anyone who says a dog can’t remember and calculate has never had a dog. (David Bentley Hart wrote a book about conversations with his dog, so that may explain his special affinity for Dependent Rational Animals.)

Here’s our dog, Ellie, practicing one of her yoga poses . . . in spite of a few impulse control issues, she also knows how to bullshit, play backgammon, and run a mean guilt trip.

Likewise anyone who’s ever enjoined the struggle to keep squirrels out of bird feeders has seen the little tree rats study their objective and work through serial frustrations to discover fresh tactics. They’re like that fictional master burglar who’s been trained by Chinese acrobats. As to birds, they can employ a variety of sounds and actions to court, feed, warn, and even deceive. I’m nearly convinced, after having watched them closely, that crows and ravens conduct secret councils where they discuss astronomy and particle physics and make fun of us as a form of entertainment.

Chapter 4 asks the question: Can animals without language have beliefs? Believe it or not, this has been on philosophy’s mind for quite some time. A lot of philosophy questions are deceptively childlike in their simplicity.

(Our oldest son, when he was twelve, asked me if a bass could eat a duck; and at first the question was entertaining, but it turns out that the question was serious, an in the case of very small duck, the answer is yes. It may not be a burning question for most people, but it is for baby ducks and twelve-year-old boys.)

MacIntyre, in his distinctive fashion, prefaces his argument with a thick account of what language is and does, noting the ways in which language is associated—of course, for any virtue ethicist—with practices. A pack of wolves in the wild have certain stylizations of common practice and communication, just as we do in our native cultures. If you or I enter into an alien culture with its own beliefs, practices, and language, it would take an effort to overcome these differences, and that can done.

Likewise, we and our dogs communicate across differences. When I was a kid and I grabbed our .22 rifle, my terrier mutt Rinny went nuts with excitement—he knew what that meant—and when we were afield, I recognized his particular bark that told me, “squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.” I’d go to him, and sure enough whatever tree his front feet were on contained an entree for that evening’s supper. (Rinny was rewarded with what was left of the carcass, which he ate patiently, consuming offal, skin, fur, and bones, head to tail. Old school.)

With these intracultural and intra-species, as well as inter-cultural and inter-species phenomena in mind, MacIntyre unpacks the ruminations on animals (pun totally intended) of Descartes, Norman Malcolm, Donald Davidson, Stephen Stich, and John Searle.

Descartes dismissed all animals out of hand as unthinking automatons.

Malcolm made a distinction between thinking and “having a thought.” Old Rinny (RIP) believed (rightly in every case) that there was a squirrel in that tree, but he had no reason, and perhaps no capacity, to “have the thought” that “there’s a squirrel in this tree.” He just knew it. (MacIntyre actually uses dogs treeing squirrels as one of his examples, which triggered this hillbilly memory of my childhood familiar.)

I admit to not being the least bit familiar with Davidson, apart from the Wiki piece I linked, so I’m trusting A-Mac here not to selectively misrepresent the man (and I doubt he would have); but the quote from Davidson, saying “there can be no thoughts and no thinking, if there is no language,” flies in the face of common sense and plain experience. Anyone reading anything about MacIntyre, for example, has had the experience while listening to or reading the work of others who “have a way with words” has had the experience of recognizing with an astonishing and delightful clarity something he or she has “thought” come to life in language for the first time.

Davidson uses the concept of a belief in order to say we cannot ascribe beliefs to animals. Very slippery of you, sir. If I’m incapable of conceiving of a belief, then I’m incapable of ascribing belief, say, to Princess the Poodle. So far, so good; but he’s avoiding the issue of pre-linguistic believing (and conflating it with a belief or proposition), setting up his conclusions about non-human creatures using premises derived only from human linguistic phenomena (like how I can misinterpret your motivation for making some choice or another [ascribing a belief]).

I probably shouldn’t get wrapped around the axle here, but when I read MacIntyre—whose writing is so dense with organized intellection—I’m, demon-like, possessed by a kaleidoscopic array of of tangents.

Searle and Stich come along—two other guys about whom my ignorance is Wiki-minus-everything, though their conjuncted surnames sound like a primetime buddy dramedy—Stich says believing requires the ability to distinguish concepts, and Searle says that to believe demands the ability to distinguish between believing, guessing, hypothesizing, and so forth . . . a criterion that would exclude a good deal of humanity from having beliefs. Obviously, these “distinguishing” criteria rather beg the question, and—for that matter—the business of constantly drawing abstract distinctions is . . . well, philosophy, which few of us bother with at all.

Answering a true-or-false question is surely a linguistically-conditioned action, but Old Rinny knew (believed?) that this tree contained a squirrel and the next tree over did not without having the words true and false, which takes things from an is-or-isn’t plane into something abstract, conceptual, and lingustic: truth and falsehood.

MacIntyre uses these guys to get at the question of beliefs from different angles—aiming his readers from critters to pre-linguistic children to show how how, through their development, they build the linguistic upon the pre-lingustic: beliefs/believing require a repertoire—founded on our biological make-up and gained through experience and formation—of remembered perceptions, identifications, distinctions, etc. As promised, he uses non-human animals (and biology) to tell us things about ourselves.

With a pin stuck in that, he jumps off into Heidegger in the fifth chapter (“How impoverished is the world of the non-human animal?”), using this “Continental” philosopher to expand beyond the “analytical” philosophers above. (One over-simplified way to distinguish between [there’s that distinguishing thing again] analytic and Continental philosophers is that the former were preoccupied with the bloodless dissection of language and the latter with the experience of experience.

Heidegger begins with his (phenomenological) definition of the human being as “world-forming.” At the other end of his spectrum is a rock, which is “without world.” In between rocks and people, he situates animals as “world-impoverished.”

Animals, according to Heidegger, while more “worldly” than inert objects like rocks, are bundles of genetic instincts and conditioned reflexes, though he loads the dice by using the “less intelligent” species like lizards and crabs as his main examples, leaving out dolphins, elephants, primates, and the like. (If you’re interested in Heidegger on this, look up “Dasein.”)

Heidegger was big on the distinction between Being and beings, the former being (snort) the Ontological Everything At Once, and the latter, e.g., as ourselves, world-making instantiations within The Big Ontology who “attend” to other beings. (I wonder what he’s say about the attention economy.) This attending is a big deal for Heidegger. Bees, per Heidegger, are guided by light, but they’re not aware of light as light. (We could say this about a host of things with regard to humans, but I’m not here to start any shit.) Animals—undistinguished by species—are “captives” of their environment, whereas humans fuck theirs up (okay, I made up that last bit) . . . whereas humans not likewise “absorbed” by nature as environment and instinct. We grasp the world and things in it “as such and such.” Trees and fire hydrants are distinguishable beyond their sameness for dogs as piss-telegraphs. For Heidegger, human beings experience something called an “as-structure,” that is, they see the tree as a tree (concept) and the hydrant as a hydrant.

MacIntyre isn’t buying Heidegger’s wholesale dismissal of non-human animals. His trans-special homogenization of “animals” is almost thuggish. There’s a big difference between a caterpillar and a chimpanzee. He’s repeating the “linguistic” errors of his Anglophone analytical counterparts. “Higher” animals “do not merely respond to features of their environment; they actively explore it; they devote perceptual attention to the objects they encounter, they inspect them from different angles [those calculating-ass squirrels who raid the bird feeders], they recognize the familiar, they identify and classify, they may on occasion treat one and the same object as something to be played with and then something to be eaten, and some of them recognize and even grieve for what is absent. Most important of all, they exhibit in their activity belief-presupposing and belief-guided intentions and they are able to understand and respond to the intentions communicated by others, both the members of their own species and the intentions of humans.”

Our Ellie will let us know when she needs a walk to move her bowels and when someone forgets to fill her water bowl. She’ll sulk when she’s frustrated, and exhibit shame when chastened. She cuddle empathetically when one of is upset (which she intuits with an uncanny accuracy, even when we’re suppressing out own outward displays).

MacIntyre’s point being that humans are animals and share that animality with other species, but more to the point, there is continuity (as any evolutionary biologist can tell you) between non-human animals and humans. In my well-marked copy, I’ve made a marginal editorial note: “our animal comportment is likewise the basis for continuity of the self.” (I’d been looking at the weird adults who’d declared their “identity” as cats and babies-in-diapers and whatnot, and the even weirder phenomenon of other people pretending to take this horseshit seriously as a sign of sophistication. “He can be whatever he wants.” Uh, no, he can’t.)

So, comportment is a key word here, where, yet again, MacIntyre selects exactly the right term to encompass a specific generality. It was a term we used in the Army. If someone, especially a leader, became visibly irrational and emotional, we said, “He lost his comportment.” This, in the Army—back then, at least—was very bad.

We all know that a baby comports him- or herself differently than an adult. In the continuity between non-human and human animals, as well as the continuity between baby and adult, comportment is tied to our physical animal form and its functions. We all eat, sleep, excrete, mate, seek shelter, and—as MacIntyre also points out, with regard to certain constructions of rudeness—sneeze, spit, burp, and fart. So our inescapable pre-linguistic animal “first nature,” with regard to humans, is ordered and socialized by a linguistic cultural “second nature.” We have customs and rituals for how we eat, sleep, excrete, mate, seek shelter, and so on. We spit and fart discretely, and “excuse ourselves” upon burping and sneezing (we even bless people when they sneeze). Babies eventually have to learn all this.

Our second culturally formed language-using nature is a set of partial, but only partial, transformations of out first nature. (49)

MacIntyre said that Heidegger had foreclosed his own ability to appreciate the importance of how “we remain our animal selves with animal identities” (49), and thereby externalized a crucial aspect of human beings as philosophical and moral subjects—an error MacIntyre says at the outset he was setting out to correct in his own work.

For the exercise of some of these prelinguistic powers provides what in human beings becomes a crucial subject matter for language. And nowhere is this connection between the prelingustic and the linguistic more striking than in the relationship between prelinguistic reasons for action and the type of reason for action made possible only by the possession of language. (51)

And so we arrive at Chapter 6, “Reasons for action.”

Action, according to MacIntyre, is when we “do one thing to bring about something else” (53). Between the prelinguistic and the linguistic, our dog Ellie—with whom we share a kinship—has some reason for looking at me and moaning, but she can’t “give me the reason.” I have to figure it out—she need’s food in her bowl, a visiting dog is in her bed, or she needs to empty her bladder (even Ellie has been potty-trained [second natured] in this respect).

MacIntyre distinguishes—in the prosopopeian voice of Anthony Kenney on Aquinas—humans as “reason-giving animals.” (Accompanying this in the fallen world, of course, is the all-too-human fact that we often give faulty and-or false reasons, and counterfeit reasons, also know as rationalizations. [Dependent Rationalizing Animals?] Higher animals are also capable of deception; and you don’t have to teach children how to lie, you have to discipline them not to.)

MacIntyre is an Aristotelian, so it was inevitable we’d run into some Greek, i.e., phronesis—or practical rationality. By this, Aristotle (and Aquinas, his reinterpreter) didn’t mean simply that the well-learned cat knows better than to run in front of cars, but the ability to “judge our judgements,” which in linguistic humans far surpasses the reasoning of non-human animals (except crows and ravens . . . they’re plotting the post-human Corvus takeover as we speak). Groundhogs—with which I’m super-familiar—get by quite nicely in a more or less natural habitat; but the introduction of county highways into those habitats has resulted in an ongoing groundhog Armageddon.

Squirrels (those guys again) have an evasion tactic for predators, where they use their tails to deceive the predator that they’re going one way, whereupon they switch direction like Hakeem Olajuwan executing a pump fake (engaging a misperception on the part of the predator). It’s probably hereditarily encoded. Introduce asphalt and cars into the environment, and the squirrel does the same thing; but the car just stays in a straight line, whereupon many a hapless squirrels dodging back and forth has had fatal consequences.

No one doubts that our special cousins are more “held” by their environments than we are. In fact, our immense capacity to change our environment, combined with a social system based on the profit motive, has outstripped (or externalized) our capacity to choose wisely about how do change our environments. If dolphins had opposable thumbs, they might have become capitalists (who knows?). (Crows, who’ve secretly studied Lao Tzu, are just waiting patiently for us to self-destruct.)

At any rate, we know—prior to MacIntyre and Heidegger—that humans have a very enhanced capacity for linguistically-supported reflection; but, as MacIntyre said, “this does not remove us from what we share from other animal species (58).”

Intelligence of the sort we’re talking about doesn’t divide us from other species, said MacIntyre, so much as place us on one end of a scale. Just as animal behavior can be placed on this scale, so can human development from infant to adult to elder. But, just as importantly, the exercise of practical reason by any adult human continues to be predicated upon our animal nature, needs, and capacities. To write this article, or to read it, requires eyes, hands, a brain with a big cerebral cortex, etc., and that we come to the task having been housed, hydrated, and fed. While reading or writing it, we will breath, scratch, blow our noses, have a snack, go to the bathroom, and so forth.

Anyone who’s ever planned a military operation or an event knows that a big part of the logistical planning involves accounting for people’s animal needs.

Treating human nature, moreover, as reflective thinking, also ignores the fact that we go through most of our days doing things to which we are pre-reflectively habituated. I made a bed a few minutes ago, and I did so while daydreaming, not engaging in some reflection about beds. The higher non-human animals have plenty of pre-reflective reasons for doing what they do, too.

Practical rationality, or reflective reason, distinguish us by our outsized capacities compared to other species; but that’s not the whole story . . . and pertaining to moral philosophy (we’ll get there), our animality is at the very heart of our concerns.

But what is the point of practical rationality? Well, it aims at something, something we desire, something that is—in the best instance—a good. Prey fish are a good for dolphins who eat them. Geological iron is a good for humans who want to make steel.

Let’s look now at Chapter 7, “Vulnerability, flourishing, goods, and ‘good’.”

Backing up a bit, think of how you care for children, the infirm, and even your pets or livestock. Your most urgent concerns revolve around their animal needs, whether you’re nursing, changing a diaper, swaddling an infant to keep her warm, administering medications, preventing bedsores, ensuring hydration, walking the dog, feeding, providing shelter from the elements, and so forth. We also protect our charges from various harms and dangers, and others do the same for us.

Moving back into the linguistic realm, then—that of practical rationality/reflective reason—MacIntyre builds a discussion from this base of animality (and by inference, vulnerability) about the other three items in his chapter title. Taking dolphins again as his example, he points out that their chances of survival, or better yet, flourishing, are enhanced by orders of magnitude through social cooperation . . . as are human beings.

Six years ago, I built a 16’x16’ cedar deck behind the house. I did the construction—apart from the socially produced truck, tools, and materials—absolutely alone. It took me around nine hours a day (all I could stand, really, at age 67) for ten days. If I’d had one knowledgeable assistant, my guess is that it would have been finished in three. Old hands at construction have all heard the saying, “two men can do the work of three.” Social cooperation is far more than an additive function (unless it’s administered by bureaucrats, but that’s a different story).

Yeah, kinda proud of it.

To make the deck, I used goods (particular materials) to produce a “good” (a comfortable, relaxing, contemplative, outdoor space). Foods are goods; and robust health is a good.

MacIntyre throws some language at us here, to wit, univocal, equivocal, and analogical. Univocal means a word or phrase that means the same thing every time you use it (though, paradoxically, this particular word can be used equivocally, having more than one meaning . . . see Brad Gregory’s description of Duns Scotus’s philosophy as occurring in a univocal universe [as an anological term, speaking of one thing as if it were alike to another, i.e., the universe as a speaker] in The Unintended Reformation.) Gets sticky, okay. A-Mac will spin ya.

“Flourish” and “need” are, in MacIntyre’s thesis, univocal terms. Dolphins seek to flourish, as do humans, albeit in ways unique to dolphins and humans, but the meaning of “flourishing” is to thrive and prosper. Dolphins need squid, prey fish, jellyfish, shrimp, and octopus. Humans need (in our time) money. He uses the Latin term qua—“in the capacity or character of,” to say certain things contribute to flourishing qua dolphins or qua human being. They can both flourish, but in ways distinctive to their embodied species make-up and social structures.

And what [insert species] needs to flourish is to develop the distinctive powers that it possess qua member of that species, (64)

We’ve obviously moved along now from language as a mere set of syntactical structures.

“Needs,” in MacIntyre’s usage, is a similarly univocal word (the meaning of a word is in the intent of the one using it —Wittgenstein).

“Good,” on the other hand, can be confusingly equivocal. I just ate beans, rice, and eggs, and dayam they were good. They were also good for me. Sherry, who had some with me, is a good person. Willie Sutton was a good bank robber, yet, as MacIntyre is quick to point out, “to be a good thief . . . is to be a bad human being. (66)” One has to specify “good” as character, or associate it with a practice, or to assign value, evaluate progress, etc. Not only that, we need hierarchies of goods in relation to one another. Should I subordinate my desire for a short-term good in order to achieve a long-term greater good? Our granddaughter Janae posts excellent times and wins running the 300 at track meets. Improving her stride is a good for her; but my old ass wouldn’t run fifty feet even if a rabid Rottweiller was chasing me. Improving my stride might put me in the emrgency room. And we haven’t even discussed The Good yet, or the common good, and such. (Sophomoric sophists have a ball conflating these meanings to avoid being pinned down by actual arguments.)

In ordering our goods, we exercise judgement; and good judgement is a virtue (finally, we close in on moral philosophy). We all have to ask ourselves the question, “Why should I choose to do this instead of that?” Or perhaps not do this or that, or not do either. In judging and ordering, we have to consider goods qua utilitarian concerns (good food, good materials, good tools, etc.), good qua practitioner (good techniques, good practitioner, etc.), and goods qua human beings all at once (good for this human being, good for that community, etc.).

With the particular sets of goods for human beings or for dolphins comes a particular set of vulnerabilities for human beings and for dolphins that run counter to or threaten flourishing; and so, in weighing our judgements, we take into account these vulnerabilities qua utilitarian concerns, good qua practitioner, and goods qua human beings all at once. By vulnerability we mean vulnerability to harm.

With humans, we rely on a greater set of goods, including reflective reasoning, which provides us with a longer list of potential harms (to our capacity to reason). Physical harms are joined to threats and harms to our ability to reason, which now include physical crisis, mental disability, psychological disturbance, emotional crises, addiction, demagoguery, and so on. MacIntyre makes the crucial point that the outcomes of disabilities can be the same as social pathologies (like Trump. e.g.): false beliefs and self-indulgent fantasies. Likewise, there are generational “disabilities” passed down through families and communities (race hatred, e.g.).

To complicate matters even further, life presents us with unforeseen emergencies with some regularity, which means we even have to make the judgement that spending too much time in deliberation may lead to greater harm than immediate action which carries its own risks.

Speaking of collective deliberation (and practical reason, which may have a benign, beneficial, or malignant telos), this is a distinctly linguistic/human social activity. We move, as we mature (hopefully) from having reasons to evaluating those reasons. Deliberation employing practical reason in order to build something, organize a coffee klatch, manage car traffic, or pass laws . . . entails identifying and acquiring resources, evaluating drawbacks (vulnerabilities), deciding on how to cooperate through divisions of labor, and so forth. All this requires the ability to at least roughly estimate future conditions and actions, which in turn relies on knowledge and experience. A child imagines the future very differently than the average fifty-year-old, and even among adults (especially in the intellectually deskilled digital age), there are impediments to forecasting the future, like pig-headed stupidity, technologically mediated “reality,” disability, consumerist infantilism, capitalist dictatorship of desire, and so on.

On desire (I wrote an e-book on this if anyone’s interested), MacIntyre says desires are aimed at goods, but “[a]bout both goods in general and our own good in particular we have to learn from others, if we are to be able to judge truly for ourselves, and the others whom we first encounter as teachers are such persons as parents, aunts, nurses, and the like” (slightly autobiographical on MacIntyre’s account, but we get it). From them, we first learn to evaluate, cooperate, and judge our own judgements. (I would recommend Christoph Wulf on “mimetic learning” in this regard.)

I don’t like the word “teaching” (a prejudice from my readings of Illich), and prefer learning as the active verb for the process of personal formation. MacIntyre’s prefatory explications of vulnerability, good, and goods are leading us to questions of formation—personal, familial, communal, and political. It is only here that he takes up his cudgel again on behalf of an Aristotelian approach against Kantian, Benthamite, Marxian, Nietzschean, and other approaches to ethics . . . that is, Aristotelian attention to the formation of virtues.

Back on page 2, he decried how “moral agents . . . are themselves presented [by philosophers] as though they were continuously rational, healthy, and untroubled.” On page 81, he says, “In most moral philosophy the starting point is one that already presupposes the existence of mature independent practical reasoners whose social relationships are the relationships of the adult world.” We can also infer that these speculative agents are in perfect health.

While he didn’t adopt Aristotle’s particular metaphysical biology, he has now given us the basis for incorporating our biological existence across every stage of life into any ethical account.

Chapter 8 is titled “How do we become independent practical reasoners? How do the virtues make this possible?” Emphasize here, independent.

We don’t just show up in the world as healthy and fully-fledged adults. As Annie Dillard noted, with some dismay, in her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, nature (including human beings) doesn’t exist in its purely Platonic forms, but in their warped and bitten instantiations. In nature, she saw something both beautiful and frighteningly post-lapsarian. MacIntyre, in looking at actual human adults, says that independent thought is “an achievement” over and against what has warped and bitten us in our formation.

Most of us, most of the time, are on auto-pilot, and that auto-pilot has been programmed, if you’ll forgive the technological metaphor, via social relations—formative relations with parents, peers, teachers, media streams, bosses, friends, colleagues, bosses, institutions, etc. Childhood development—which he emphasizes—is a prolonged formative process, with its earliest effects ramifying considerably throughout one’s life. In MacIntyre’s words, people “enter the adult world with relationships, experiences, attitudes, and capacities that they bring with them from childhood and adolescence and that are always to some significant, and often to some very large degree they are unable to discard and disown. (82)”

Th biggest impediment to intellectual independence, according to MacIntyre, is inability to regulate our own desires. (He doesn’t go into desire-formation the way Wulf or Girard might in discussing mimesis, which fits tidily in with his thoughts on the social “programming” of our pre-independent auto-pilot.) Reflective practical reasoning demand a kind of re-education into more or less dispassionate reflective evalution; and this is an acievement because it is intellectually as well as emotionally strenuous—a discipline coupled to accountability. (One of my favorite hobbyhorses of late has been society-wide infantilization, a kind of Bravermann deskilling writ large.)

[O]ne outcome of failure to transform the attitudes and relationships of early childhood is an inability to achieve [italics mine SG] the kind of independence that is able to acknowledge truthfully and realistically its dependences and attachments, so leaving us in captivity to those dependences, attachments, and conflicts. Acknowledgement of dependence is the key to independence (85)

Stanley Hauerwas, who put me onto MacIntyre in the first place, apocryphally told his students, “I don’t want you to think for yourselves; I want you to think like me.” As provocative as that sounds, he’s referring to the professor-student relation as something akin to the master-apprentice one. Learn the discipline first, gain mastery, and the creativity part comes once the person is him- or herself a master practitioner.

Let me climb back out of the rabbit hole. Children, at every stage of development prior to around 21 years, have not yet developed (biologically) their full cognitive capacity. This developmental process, at each point along the continuum from infancy to full adulthood, is marked by states of vulnerability (and dependency) that decrease progressively, barring disability, accident, infirmity, etc. On the question of wisdom, that too is a developmental process, and one that is accompanied by an increase in learning and experience, which also progressively acknowledges our dependencies (the reason wisdom increases with age—that is, with a stock of experience pertaining to the “slings and arrows of fortune,” or misfortune and vulnerability and their acceptance).

A key aspect of our development, essential for regulating our social relations as well as developing personal integrity, is moral development—becoming a good person. This, too, demands a certain mastery over our desires and the habituated transcendence of infantile impulses (the transformation of our motivations: I want what I want »»» I want what is good for me and others). Becoming and being a good person entails the development of certain qualities directed at good practices, material goods, good decisions, good character, social good, etc. These qualities are the virtues.

The virtues fit together. Temperance, prudence, courage, honesty, patience, justice, compassion . . . they are inflected in one another as checks and balances. Courage, for example, is prevented from shading into recklessness by prudence. (Taking care of one another is virtuous, and here is the direct relation to vulnerability.)

The virtues are learned through practice and habituation. Two of our granddaughters play soccer. They learn discipline, teamwork, patience, persistence, fair play, rule-acceptance, sportsmanship, acceptance, and so on. Those virtues are transferable into other aspects of their lives. (I wrote a somewhat whimsical take on kids fishing in this regard.)

MacIntyre, in sticking with childhood development, unpacks parenting—in the child’s development of virtues as well as the virtues necessary to be a good parent. Failure in parenting can, as we all know, lead to physical, psychological, and moral disability in children. Good parenting demands the virtues of unconditional love, long-term commitment, selflessness, and, in the case of children with profound special needs, all of these in their more profound forms.

All this to say, by way of recapitulation, that humans, as linguistically sophisticated animals, can evaluate our reasons, that this capacity is enhanced or retarded by our social relations, and that the virtues are necessary to regulate and optimize those relations. Moreover, while dolphins and elephants can’t look back reflectively on their own pasts as we do (being linguistically sophisticated), we can; and this can help us to recognize our perhaps less benign dependencies and habits in ways that help us overcome them. (Our dog Ellie has a memory of sorts, but she doesn’t have the biologically-grounded language capacity—developed through imitation and a more sophisticated memory—to supplement that memory with the kind of complex reflective reasoning that we do.)

Play plays an important part (equivocal, haha) in the development of independence through the release of creativity through loosely structured experimentation and interaction with the environment and others. Ellie plays, and dolphins play, but a child might play at building sand castles or pretending to throw a highly conversational tea party with dolls. (I am fairly certain that electronic games, eclipsing earlier forms of play, enhance certain very limited skills in sometimes questionable fantasy envirnoments, but have contributed to a general loss of both creativity and imagination, creating new and anti-salubrious forms of dependency—for children and adults.)

Some people confuse virtues with rule-following; but while rules are important (imagine trying to play baseball without the rules established in baseball’s tradition) in life, no rule can anticipate every circumstance. The development of the virtues enable us to evaluate the situation, even in exigent and atypical circumstances, to make morally and practically sound decisions about how to act.

Reflective reason arises with questions: Who am I? What am I? What to others think I am? We answer these questions through reflection. Errors in this kind of reflection can lead to total loss of self-worth or debilitating shyness on the one hand, or megalomaniacal self-regard on the other. This is the stuff of what MacIntyre called self-knowledge (which he takes to be the best purpose of psychology and psychoanalysis).

In speaking of errors, MacIntyre noted that intellectual errors can lead to moral errors, and vice versa. I can’t help but think, in the face of the recent Israeli-initiated (and US supported) war with Iran, of when the moral error of the Bush administration, in wanting to capitalize on 9-11 to re-make Southwest Asia (in their disordered desire for power and historical esteem), leading them to the disastrous intellectual error of believing this was something that could be done and dusted in three weeks (they knew next to nothing of the region, the people, or the socio-political dynamics).

The virtues are necessary (some people displayed moral and intellectual virtue in the face of the Bush administration’s murderous stupidities [now redux with Trump’s bumbling around while Netanyahu leads him by that ring in his nose]) to protect ourselves and others to the degree possible from the consequences of these moral and intellectual errors (and sins, I’ll just say it, playing political games with millions of people’s lives is evil in its most unadulterated form).

In Chapter 9, “Social relationships, practical reasoning, common goods, and individual goods,” MacIntyre introduced us to the concept of “asymmetrical indebtdness,” regarding how we give and receive, especially as it applies to how we respond to vulnerability in others.

By debt, he does not mean monetary debt, but reciprocity of care. When you and I were infants, someone cared for us without the immediate expectation of a reciprocity of which we were, in any case, incapable. Years later, as parents and-or carers, our reciprocity, as it were, was in caring for our own infants and-or the infants of others. This is different from a symmetrical one-to-one gift exchange. On a broader view—and here MacIntyre blows up the libertarian fallacy—we all owe one another an asymmetrical debt of care in particular circumstances, and not just some theoretical quantity of debt, but debts of entirely different quality (this is the basis of common decency). Most of us would stop someone from walking in front of a bus, or help him or her if he or she falls. Many of us have cared for aging relatives without expectation of pay; and we would hope that when it is us who needs this kind of care, someone else will come through. No parent raising a severely disabled child has the expectation of direct reciprocity; but he or she might have the expectation of various forms of compassionate assistance from others. This asymmetrical indebtedness is ritualized in forms of courtesy between strangers, which effectuates a degree of peace and social stability.

“It is in virtue of what we have received,” summarized MacIntyre, “that we owe.” These virtuous norms, of course, are subverted and violated in any number of ways. The commodification of care is one striking example. Enforced scarcity can pressure people into a more dog-at-dog mentality (or be met with heroic selflessness). Obviously, one’s formation has a great deal to do with whether one recognizes and responds to this social debt (Donald Trump is an example of someone who quite literally takes as much as he can get and refuses to pay his debts.) This socialized asymmetrical indebtedness is the foundation of common good.

(I won’t digress for long here to point out that this ethos is, especially in the West, a Christian inheritance, as historian Tom Holland has aptly demonstrated; and herein is another rabbit hole parsing the mixed blessing of this valuation of care, compassion, selfless service, and forgiveness on the one hand, and the institutional perversions of the Church’s parsimonious juridical turn and its deeply problematic alliances with worldy powers.)

There is an mutually reinforcing interplay between defective social arrangements—from dysfunctional families to destructive political economies—and personal character defects.

“[T]here are always possibilities,” wrote MacIntyre, “and often actualities of victimization and exploitation bound up with participation in [social] networks.” (I’m sure Donald Trump was once a victim of his asshole father; but now he’s practicing viciousness [root word: vice, the opposite of virtue] and encouraging the viciousness in others.) As I emphasized in Borderline, my book on warfare, violent masculinity, and misogyny, “War is implicated in masculinity. Masculinity is implicated in war.” Men like Putin, Netanyahu, Trump, and Modi, e.g., are motivated in their systemic violence toward others by a perverse personal construction of what it means to be a man.

Social networks/systems have always been a struggle between the requisites for the common good and the perverse temptations of power. Actual families range from well-adjusted and flourishing to severely under-resourced to hothouses of psychotic abuse.

It is at this juncture we have to address the issue of power head on (okay, I got ahead a bit with my political editorializing).

The virtuous exercise of power facilitates a generally network of social relations—of giving and receiving—that “bends toward justice.”

The vicious exercise of power facilitates exploitation for the purpose of reserving and expanding the power of power-holders (wealth is a form of power).

We’ll get to Nietzsche by and by, as well as social Darwinism; but Nietzsche and the social Darwinists have tried to flip the script and make power a good unto itself, and compassion a vice. The crackpot “philosopher” Ayn Rand wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness, that claimed (against all historical evidence) that the pursuit of egoistic desire by all somehow, magically, tends toward the common good. These thinkers have provided intellectual cover for viciousness in the form of elaborate rationalizations (Curtis Yarvin is just a recent example of this malevolence.)

Reflective and practical reason, returning to the flow of his theses, are prerequisite to the exercise of the virtues. If we break actions down, they begin with the desired “end-state” as a goal, for which we have to employ certain means. At the outset, we need to evaluate whether the desire itself is “good for me and-or others.” If it’s not, we “should” discard the option of acting on that desire. I’d love to drink a nice cold beer—in my memory I hold a whole complex of pleasures associated with beer—but I have alcoholic tendencies (true), so it’s better I leave that alone.

From the desired end-state, we have to imagine and evaluate the means to get there. Will they work? What are the possible and probable consequences?

We recently participated in the No King protests (June 14, 2025). I haven’t done political organizing for years, but I know how it works. First, there are discussions and debates, using a set of agreed-upon rules, to arrive at decisions about the nature of the action, how to conduct it, and finally what specific people, resources, and tasks are necessary to get it done.

At things like this, there are always those who want to push for maximum provocation (not speculating now about the layered Lacanian sub-terrain of motives that enervate these people). “We need to stop traffic, show them our power. Disrupt some shit.” Okay, first of all, the one saying that is likely as not a provocateur from the other side; but even if s/he’s not, when we evaluate that tactic, we conclude—given that winning over more people to our point of view is the goal, and not showing our asses like juvenile delinquents—this will unnecessarily piss the people off who we want to win over, quite possibly endanger people who are responding to emergencies, and discredit us to the public by demonstrating how we didn’t consider consequences or needs other than our own desire to act out. In this demonstration, the organizers had marshals, people who wore safety vests and enforced the rules for demonstrators from within (stay out of the thoroughfares, don’t respond to moronic interlopers, don’t provoke police, and don’t carry signs with profanity (some people don’t want their kids seeing that crap). Those were well-considered rules and actions.

This is independent practical reason in action. It weighs good and goods. It aims to get from “I want” to “we want.” Persons are not consumed by the collective; and neither is the collective hijacked by persons. (Jessica Benjamin once summed up love as, “I am yours and still myself, and you are mine and still yourself.”) For it to work, the participants must follow the rules, as well as—consciously or unconsciously—exercise certain virtues. I remember a political group with whom I had the misfortune to work once, who would get their members onto other people’s organizing committees for the purpose of trying to take over projects and actions in the service of their own (delusional) agenda. It was sneaky, manipulative Machiavellianism, by dangerous fools.

I rhetorically apologize for the autobiographical excursions, but what MacIntyre was getting at—in terms of giving and receiving, of asymmetric indebtedness—is that to receive trust and reliability from others, they have to assume that I’ll give it back. This is a confidence (which we recognize and appreciate through the fact that it can be betrayed). Trust, good will, reliability and such are what “fill in the spaces” between the rules.

I’m particularly fond of MacIntyre’s description of “conversational justice.”

Conversational justice requires among other things, first that each of us speaks with candor, not pretending or deceiving or striking attitudes, and secondly that each takes up no more time than what is justified by the importance of the point that she or he has to make and the arguments necessary for making it. The first of these requires conformity to certain rules, but the second requires what cannot be reduced to rules, (111)

If you want to go a bit further out into the weeds (weeds are only weeds when we don’t know what they’re really called), check out MacIntyre on a weed called natural law—not natural law like (p=mv) the law of momentum. Natural law here is a Thomist concept within which are St. Thomas’s thoughts on the deliberation necessary to achieve the common good.

Fake it ’til you make it.

—12-step suggestion

The emphasis in my earlier account was on the indispensable part that the virtues play in enabling us to move from dependence on the reasoning powers of others, principally our parents and teachers [let’s just add media -SG], to independence of practical reasoning. And the virtues to which I principally referred were familiar items in Aristotelian and other catalogues; justice, temperance, truthfulness, courage, and the like. But if we are to understand the virtues as enabling us to participate in relationships of giving and receiving through which our ends as practical reasoners are to be achieved, we need to extend our inquiries a good deal further, by recognizing that any adequate education into the virtues will be one that enables us to give their due to a set of virtues that ate the necessary counterpart to the virtues of independence, the virtues of acknowledged dependence. (199-120, italics added)

In Chapter 10, “The virtues of acknowledged dependence,” the title refers to what we just covered (in my own rambling way) regarding the asymmetrical indebtedness of our general mutual dependency (our networks of giving and receiving)—a condition of our (animal condition) vulnerabilities, personal and collective—which calls upon particular virtues for persons and groups in order maintain the relationships necessary for flourishing. Exercising virtue presupposes the exercise of the uniquely human, linguistic power of independent practical reason.

Let’s begin with education, a word that comes up repeatedly throughout the chapter. By this, MacIntyre does not mean a commodified, credentialing product, produced by universities and so forth (he himself taught without a PhD), but a process of personal formative refinement that occurs in life more generally. Another term that will need prior clarification is liberality, which has little to do with liberalism—a political philosophical tendency and tradition of which MacIntyre is extremely critical. By liberality, he means something close to generosity. Okay . . .

And to him who wishes to bring a judgement against you, so he may take away your tunic, give him your cloak as well.

—Matthew 5:40

Justice, the virtue, is based on the debt, or what is owed. This is sometimes calculated (badly) by the law. In our pre-legal day-today interactions, we have already acknowledged many things that are owed, even if they are owed in the more impersonal realm of asymmetrical indebtedness. Courtesy comes to mind. Fair recompense for work. Proportional punishment for wrongs, and so forth. The acknowledgement of mutual dependency is manifest in plain persons as an intuitive grasp of of that mutual dependency rather than some formal proposition. But what is grasped is more than mere justice in this strict sense. MacIntyre uses a Lakota term for this sensibility of something more than reciprocity and proportionality— a virtue called wancantognaka—which is “a generosity I owe to all others.”

Liberality is the virtue of giving more than what is calculatedly owed: the justice-surpassing virtues of unconditional generosity, charity, pity, and friendship.

As to education into this or that virtue, we might think about two things: early childhood development and childish adults. An infant does not experience the emotion of disgust in the presence of substances—take feces, for example—that are unhealthy if ingested, or even touched. She is eventually educated into the avoidance of, even revulsion to feces. By the same token, I know adults who will say that their criterion for not doing this or that is, “I don’t feel like it,” as if this alone were sufficient reason not to do something that needs doing, or ought to be done (there’s that infantilization I keep decrying).

As a younger man, I was highly energetic, to the point of being called “hyper,” a regular Energizer bunny. But when called upon to take a job that required quiet patience—which did not “come natural” to me—I studied the most patient-seeming guy I knew at the time, fella named Eric. I watched how he quietly waited to respond to situations, took his time with tasks, refused to be pulled into the agitations of others, and so forth. I didn’t feel that at the time, so I mimicked it. When I recognized my own impatience, I pretended to be Eric. To my surprise, it worked. Playing at being Eric was a way to exercise outward patience, and effectively do my job; and it eventually became a habit, whereupon I began to understand all the benefits I enjoyed from the exercise of patience, apart from the job, and so I started, bit by bit, to really feel that patience. I was not only educated into patience, but educated into feeling like being patient (and feelling impatient at impatient others . . . it’s a process, okay) I had lost some of my former impatience; and to this day, not only in the practice of this virtue, but in a more comfortable personal and psychological adjustment to the world.

MacIntyre named that for me in Chapter 10 as “education in emotion” and “education in disposition.” It’s acting as if, then acting from habit, then acting from inclination . . . which initially required that I not act from inclination.

A moral education, said MacIntyre, “has to include . . . the education of the affections, sympathies, and inclinations . . . it is sometime said that our affections are not ours to command . . . but . . . we can cultivate and train our dispositions to act and indeed to act with and from certain feelings.” (121-122) When I was a card-carrying member of a twelve-step program, this was summarized as “fake it ’til you make it,” and it is only on this basis that we can first practice wancantognaka—that liberality of character.

There are many cultures for whom hospitality is owed, even to strangers. A colleague and I were in Petra, Jordan once, walking above the Nabatean ruins there, when we ran into an old Bedouin woman with a little herd of goats. She stopped us, rather aggressively it seemed, saying things we didn’t understand but finally interpreted to mean “sit.” Within ten minutes, she collected scraps of vegetation, started a small fire, produced a teapot from her bag, and shared some extremely sweet tea with us. When we were finished, we repeated shukran over and over (one of the few words we knew), and she went on her way (never so much as cracking a smile). She felt she owed us—complete strangers—this hospitality (for which I was very grateful . . . I’d been gagging for some caffeine).

I’m sure this would have baffled J. D. Vance.

MacIyntyre places a special emphasis on the virtue misericordia, something akin to compassion—sorrow at the distress of another, known or stranger—owed “beyond communal obligations” in response to “urgent and extreme need.” Entailed by this duty are the virtues of industriousness and thrift, because if I simply accumulate and consume for myself—barring conditions of great scarcity—I haven’t the means for generosity. I should not calculate for reciprocity from s/he who receives what I give, but I should calculate my own fealty to the enabling virtues of industriousness and thrift. This flies in the face of the predominant market ethic now that can be summarized as Mine-More-Now, the watchwords of of bratty toddlers and CEOs everywhere.

In all of this, what must remain in the forefront of our consciousness is the fact that we ourselves are dependent—the self-sufficient individual is an ideological fallacy, a peurile one at that.

In Chapter 11, we arrive at the question of politics.

What I am trying to envisage then is a form of political society in which it is taken for granted that disability and dependence on others are something that all of us experience at certain times in our lives and this to unpredictable degrees, and that consequently our interest in how the needs of the disabled are adequately voiced and met is not a special interest, the interest of one particular group rather than of others, but rather in the interest of the whole political society, an interest that is integral to the common good. (130)

(Yep, one sentence. MacIntyre studied at the Faulkner School of Composition.)

MacIntyre was a Marxist before he was a Catholic Thomist Aristotelian. He once quipped that “the only thing upon which Thomists and Marxists can agree is that Thomism and Marxism are incompatible.” I, too, am a Catholic ex-Marxist, who appreciates MacIntyre’s dry Scottish humor and his penchant for sardonic overstatement.

The reason many of us became Marxists in the first place was that Marx, especially with regard to diagnosing the blessings and curses of a purely transactional political economy, hit a lot of nails squarely on the head. And so, it is not surprising that MacIntyre merged Catholic Social Teaching and Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program in his explication of the ideal political economy in the preceding block quote, grounded in the virtues, and of the reasons this ideal has become increasingly improbable.

In this chapter he looks at both the nation-state and the family. I wrote a whole book about money, as what Alf Hornborg called an ecosemiotic phenomenon, called Mammon’s Ecology, so this chapter hit home. Before unpacking MacIntyre on nation-state and family (in dialectical concert), I hope we can agree that money is a species, if not the primary species, of power in today’s world. You can buy my book if you want this described at the molecular level (giving me a couple bucks worth of power); but suffice it to say that the power of money is such that it has set up a dynamic wherein the accumulation of monetary wealth through the production of commodities trends toward the progressive commodification of more and more aspects of our lives.

MacIntyre reviews all the ways that money perverts the political process, with which I’m pretty confident most readers are already familiar. It crowds out any shred of rational democratic deliberation with backroom bargaining and manipulative hucksterism, monopolizes elections, and puts the juridical and armed forces of the state in the service of the rich. What’s assumed and left unsaid by MacIntyre, but which we’ll state here, is related to a perverse kind of dependency—that of all of us on money for survival—by which everyone of us is annexed into an economy of enforced scarcity. The rich have the money, you need the money, they make sure you never have enough money, and so you become beholden to those who have the money. With general purpose money as the main medium of exchange, and the only medium of exchange that can “keep up” with the speed (and enforced scarcities) of a monetized economy, there can be no such thing as “living off the grid” to escape monetary dependency.

This inescapability is such that is takes an almost Herculean effort to resist all the forms of vice that profit-seeking promotes. The “seven deadlies” of greed, envy, gluttony, pride, sloth, wrath, and lust might lead the list as each and all extremely monetizable; but we can also list vanity, avarice, deceit, fanaticism, obsession, wastefulness, stubborn stupidity, manipulation, negligence, jealousy, arrogance, egotism . . . where shall we stop? And which of us hasn’t seen direct appeals to these vices in advertising? Who among us hasn’t seen someone try to justify these vices or pretend they’re virtues (deceit)?

And if the exercise of independent practical reason is prerequisite to the kinds of deliberations that would constitute a virtuous practice of politics, what happens to us when this capacity is systematically deskilled by demagoguery, propaganda, cheap entertainment, addiction, disinformation, chronic poverty, and technological dependency?

A nation-state that is de facto constituted on the hegemony of profit-taking is not one based in virtue. Our principle governing institution cannot does not, and cannot, create conditions that are amenable to the exercise of virtue by its citizens and residents. The applies especially to the family (what Marx called the baseline economic unit in any society).

Many have noted the ways in which the family—in the best of available circumstances—can be an island of loving selflessness in a sea of relentless and impersonal competition. Redistribution of goods to the dependent and vulnerable is a given with children, for example. Loving couples do not engage in a clerical accounting of their relationship. Some people, if they have the time and means, still care for aging and infirm relatives. But the fact is, families are not only not immune to the impositions of a market-driven political economy, that political economy determines has already infiltrated into the most intimate spaces of their lives; and it demands of us—whether we like it or not—degrees of conformity to the cutthroat ethos of enforced scarcity.

What families need, if they are not to be totally subsumed into this ethos, are intermediary institutions—faith-based institutions, sports clubs, unions, and so forth—which can foster, against the grain, self-respect, respect for others, cooperation, charity, and a common commitment to the common good. Institutions that habilitate against the dishabilitations (and moral deskilling) of monetary social Darwinism.

As another aside, in thinking here about structures enabling or disenabling virtuous actions and practices, MacIntyre’s remarks one in his narrative that with regard to the roles expected of men and women, to become more virtuous, men in general should become more like women in general. (Nietzsche—who we’ll get to again—denounced Christianity as a religion for women and slaves.) This reminded me of something Stanley Hauerwas once said when same-sex attracted people were still excluded from military service. As a pacifist, he said that this rule made gay people more moral than straight people. This was and remains Stanley’s provocative overstated style, but MacIntyre is saying something similar about men and women (and virtue-enabling versus virtue-disenabling structures). In my own book, Tough Gynes: Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men, I explained much the same thing with regard to the (now somewhat diminished) hegemony of men in positions of power. If the exercise of power is vicious, as opposed to virtuous, which it more often than not is, then women’s increased access to vicious practices is not liberation and should not be celebrated. That women are still overrepresented in “caring” roles, this makes them (statistically and practically) more apt to engage in virtuous actions (no essentialism necessary)

A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to be coming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

—Andrea Dworkin

The reason we are drawn into politics, warts and all, is that we recognize at some level that in the highly complex, highly bureaucratized, enforced scarcity society, the family doesn’t have the “position” or the resources to change the environment in which the family is forced to survive. Even if one is, like myself, an acolyte of Ivan Illich, who recognizes development (or what Illich called “the war on subsistence”) as a fundamental flaw shared by capitalists and socialists alike (a position being borne out horribly with biospheric derangement), the state cannot be lazily or cavalierly bypassed as an intellectual inconvenience (something Marx repeatedly emphasized to anarchists). Our Big Problems are structural, and those structures exist on a scale and with a force that is only permeable to the power of the state. When we are talking about structures, bear in mind that we want structures that promote the common good, which means they facilitate the virtues, which means they take into account our nature as dependent rational animals. Which is not to say that the state should regulate Morality—a notion that MacIntyre rather ruthlessly deconstructs in his later work, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity—but to create an environment that is conducive to virtuous practices. (I’ve appended an excerpt from Mammon’s Ecology after this essay, in which I spell out a few amateur suggestions in this regard.)

Unfortunately, the nation-states we have, and in particular I speak of my own, are utterly corrupted, and what they rely on is obfuscation, manipulation, and propaganda—a key piece of which is the notion of a volk, a fictional popular unity of thought and purpose. Every US politician talks about “the American people,” as if this didn’t include 347,275,807 people, from 195 countries, as many or more “ethnicites,” every age group, every rung along the economic ladder, dozens of second languages, six major and more than a hundred minor faith traditions, spread across 182 ecoregions, 3,422 counties, and 19,502 incorporated cities, towns, and villages . . . with nearly a million people each year migrating internally.

This is not a volk. When I hear jackasses like J.D. Vance and misguided intellectuals like integralists pretending it is with appeals to “localism,” I want to stick my head in a wood chipper. (In the comment after the Appendix, I’ll address the difference between economic localism and this imaginary parochial localism using MacIntyre’s critique of the latter “communitarian error,” which include people like Rod Dreher.) MacIntyre says that nation-state appeals to volk are illusory at best, and dangerous at worst (“blood and soil” comes immediately to mind).

MacIntyre then turns his attention to communities of various kinds, and by this he does not mean metaphorical communities, like The black community or The LGB community or The disabled community, but particular groups of co-located people who have personal contact with one another. Black people certainly have contact with other black people in many actual communities, and disabled people have contact with other disabled people in many actual communities, and same-sex attracted people certainly do know other people with same-sex attraction; but for it to be a community in the sense of this discussion, it means people who come into physical contact with other members of the groups with some regularity and with a variety of common purposes. (Many of these metaphorical communities are in fact just as heterogeneous as that imaginary volk.)

Disability does figure into his discussion of communities, but because in many actual communities, there are subsets of the very young, the very old, the physically or mentally disabled, the injured, and the sick—which brings us back to all the ways these dependencies inform the kinds of duties and responsibilities we have to one another, which are formative of the virtues, including the virtues of what givers and receivers can learn from one another.

When it comes to the deliberations of those communities about common goods and distribution and so one, we have entered into the realm of politics.

A great many of our everyday activities, whether organizing a ball game or conducting a PTA meeting, or taking a vote for or against a strike . . . are inescapably political.

In Albert Camus’ short story, “The Guest,” the main character, Daru, is a teacher in a remote Algerian school, where he’s settled in the vain hope of escaping the political dangers and tensions of the world; but the world brings them to him in the form of an Arab prisoner and his guard. I won’t spoil the story, but we are all Daru in the sense that politics is inescapable, and in the sense that it can present us with some really difficult, and equally inescapable choices.

Okay . . . now, I’m going to assail my patient reader with an excursus on Jessica Benjamin’s (Hegel-inflected) intersubjective psychoanalysis as preface to MacIntyre’s Chapter 12, “Proxies, Friends, and Truthfulness.”

MacIntyre said that Freud unmasked our unmasking as projections of ourselves. The context of his remark is the failure of modernity manifest in the emotivist self to establish any universally acceptable basis for moral decision-making, based on the incommensurable premises between contending disembedded “individuals.” Said differently, society had become a collection of “discordant dispositions,” necessitating bureaucratic control. Freud’s accomplishment, according to MacIntyre, was to explain why the unmasking of one position by the other is seemingly interminable. There was no rational basis any longer for asserting a moral position. Each of us is the captive of pre-conscious desires in conflict with irrational but necessary superegos. MacIntyre goes on to say that Freud was mistaken in his belief that he had made some moral discovery, rather than creating an insight about the ramifications of the emotive self.

Jessica Benjamin’s criticism of Freud is based on Freud’s implicit acceptance of the Homo economicus—in Freud’s more feral version above, Homo homini lupus, a wolf man—a pure strategic being, trapped inside the boundaries of his redoubt, himself the subject and the world his object. Benjamin calls this approach to psychoanalysis intrapsychic, and against it she proposes a model of psychic life that is fundamentally social, between subjects, not be tween subject and objects. This approach is called intersubjective.

The intersubjective view, as distinguished from the intrapsychic, refers to what happens in the field of self and other. Whereas the intrapsychic perspective conceives of the person as a discrete unit with a complex internal structure, intersubjective theory describes capacities that emerge in the interaction between self and others. Thus intersubjective theory, even when describing the self alone, sees its aloneness as a particular point in the spectrum of relationships rather than as the original, “natural state” of the individual. (Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 20)

The term intersubjectivity was coined by Jürgen Habermas. Benjamin’s thesis begins with the human need for recognition. Human beings have a need to belong. They need to be with other people, and they need to be recognized by them as well as granting recognition. Solitary confinement has driven prisoners mad.

Synonyms for recognition in common speech include acceptance, affirmation, validation, and love. Recognition is mutual. Both of us need to do it at once. For you to recognize me, I need to acknowledge you as a subject like myself, and vice versa. Research with mothers and infants shows that this mutuality begins very early. Unlike the object-relations approach of intrapsychic analysis, the child is not merely an appetite aimed at a breast or seeking warmth. The child and mother actually recognize one another. An infant in short order knows the sight, smell, and sound of his or her mother and takes pleasure in her presence beyond the mere satisfaction of appetites.

In this mutuality, psychic boundaries are necessarily permeable; therefore there’s an element of vulnerability. There’s also an element of self assertion. Self-assertion exists in tension with the desire for mutuality when we simultaneously recognize another and want something from him or her. When that tension, or balance, is broken by the polarization of self-assertion and vulnerability between two people, the love that is constituted in mutuality—in fusion, as Nancy Hartsock put it—gives itself over to a dynamic of domination. Benjamin emphasizes this dynamic in her study of sadomasochistic relations, when “the inability to sustain paradox . . . convert[s] the exchange of recognition into domination and submission.”

The “fit” that Ivan Illich describes in the encounter between the Samaritan and the robbed and beaten Jew (Luke 10:25–37) is that mutuality, which in the parable transgresses social boundaries, rendering them permeable with (highly animal-embodied) love. It is the paradox that you are mine and still you, and I am yours and still me.

Richard Beck talks about love as the permeability of boundaries in the context of disgust psychology, saying, “love is on the inside of the symbolic self .” I never had the urge to drink spit, but the first time a girlfriend French kissed me, it sent goosebumps down my legs.

This intersubjective dynamic creates a situation in which “the other plays an active part in the struggle of the individual to creatively discover and accept reality.” [Make a note.] Refusal to accept reality can disrupt intersubjectivity, and failure of mutual recognition makes acceptance impossible. referring to Hegel, Benjamin summarizes this paradox as the simultaneous need for the “independence and dependence of the self-conscious.” In Hegel, this is a struggle to the death that leads to a master-slave relation, because in Hegel, as in Freud and Hobbes, mutuality is foreclosed by a view of the person as a strategic (agonal) being. Benjamin allows for a tension between independence and dependence in which mutuality is possible.

Part of this tension is the fact that the other person is held in my mind in a way that never completely accords with the other person’s own experience of existence. This can produce expectations, the frustration of expectations, and misunderstandings. In a sense, the other person must continually be tossed out in my mind, like an early draft of a composition, then “re-written” (to have survived that “destruction”) in order for me to reassure myself of her existence, an existence that makes (her) recognition (of me) possible. Her independence is necessary for her to recognize me, subject to subject. Yet the way I know she is independent is by challenging her independence through my own self-assertion.

We’ve all experienced this tension with our children, our friends, our colleagues, our lovers, our spouses, or our parents. When this dynamic involves a ready state of forgiveness, of starting over, power is negotiated and mutuality is retained. When one ego has to prevail and another submit, mutuality is lost and a domination-submission dynamic replaces it. (The submissive then desires revenge.) The dominator loses recognition, because his objectification of the other out of a desire for omnipotence (also the original sin) has erased the subjectivity necessary for mutual recognition (leading him to desire revenge).

If one asserts his will, destroying the other in his mind, and the other survives without becoming combative, without pitting the two egos against one another, then rapprochement is possible. Serial experiences of rapprochement lead to attunement, and the earliest experiences of attunement—usually between mother and child, but now a little more often including the father—are bound to the development and experience of the erotic, that psychosomatic sense of deep attachment.

The erotic here does not mean simply sexual feeling, but the experience of oneness, which presupposes the permeability of boundaries. Children who are raised in a zero-sum atmosphere of parental omnipotence form powerful defensive psychic boundaries early, which can lead to abject submission accompanied by feelings of vengefulness and resentment. They often have difficulty later in life forming relationships characterized by mutuality. On the other hand, children who experience attunement, which is a balance of self-assertion and recognition (not permissiveness), are habituated to the practices of mutuality. Erotic attachments later in life, which can include, but are not limited to sexual attraction, are likely to reflect these early experiences of attachment; and some will tend toward attunement, while others will tend toward the domination-submission dynamic. While this is not a perfectly predictable pattern, the sons of men who abused the boys’ mothers are more likely to abuse their partners, and the daughters of men who abused the girls’ mothers are more likely to neglect or abuse their children.

When a person can no longer tolerate (or whatever reason) the paradoxical tension between recognition and self-assertion, a tension that makes many of us anxious, he or she will default to domination—directly or through the more passive-aggressive measures like compulsive control.

Benjamin goes on to describe how this breakage of intersubjectivity plays out in sadomasochistic relationships (see Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) . . .

. . . but we have enough now to return to MacIntyre’s thoughts on proxies, friendship, and truthfulness as “one of the virtues of acknowledged dependence.” (151)

What Benjamin describes as attunement, and Hartsock as fusion, is the achievement of mutual intelligibility in MacIntyre’s terms. This is the basis of accountability, of treating one another with justice and honesty and meeting our duties and obligations to one another. Alternative to Benjamin’s object-relations idiom of “surviving destruction,” MacIntyre simply says we are obliged to try to understand each other as prerequisite to accountability; and accountability is required if we are to achieve the “common mind” that is the telos of shared deliberation, not only in politics, but in relations of care and in friendship. To do so calls upon a fluent exchange of interrogatives and answers, and attention to non-verbal reactions, in the course of our relations to maintain that attunement.

Looking to the other and asking/answering not only refines our understanding of the other, but of ourselves as well, because we know ourselves through others. Self-scrutiny is more rigorously truthful task when done in our exchanges with others. And in learning to speak for ourselves, we are learning to speak for others.

To speak for another is to speak as a proxy. A proxy is stand-in, a representative. If I can’t make it to a meeting for a vote, I can give another person my proxy vote. In legal terms, a child is a citizen, but until he or she reaches the age of majority, a parent or guardian acts as their proxy in legal matters. If I give my wife a Power of Attorney, in the event that I develop full-blown dementia, she becomes my proxy. Proxy is “the authority to act for another”; but to speak for another with any integrity, I first have to understand that other person’s point of view (and-or needs). For us to exchange this understanding, if that understanding is to be real, we require truthfulness. Only in this way, can we be accountable. An untruthful politician, our supposed political proxy is evading accountability (that would be the vast majority).

The proxy has its analog in the other to whom we make ourselves accountable in a community, insomuch as we have to be able to “speak for the other” in order to make ourselves mutually intelligible to one another; and we owe this intelligibility to one another if we are to be genuinely accountable to one another. MacIntyre embodies this in his critiques of other philosophers, in that he studies them closely, and faces himself off against their strongest arguments, which he lays out fearlessly. (We never see this in political discourse, which is manipulative through and through.) The deliberations of a community are like the point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center on a basketball team—they need to know what the other is thinking.

A rivalry with which I was long familiar

Lies and evasions are injustices, inasmuch as they deprive others of what we owe to them (asymmetric indebtedness). MacIntyre describes some key obstacles to the virtue of truthfulness. He doesn’t say “dishonesty,” but “offenses against truthfulness.” Those offenses fall into three major categories: preventing others from learning, concealing the nature of relationships, and irony (or assuming a position of ironic detachment). I’ll give the last special emphasis, not only because MacIntyre does, and not only because it segues into the next discussion about Nietzsche and his devotees, but because it’s a personal peeve that I’ll indulge which connects to other issues taken up in other articles in Molting.

If, in order to flourish, we require independent practical reasoners, then prerequisite to that is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge demands a particular kind of (giving and receiving) relationship in order to determine then articulate, using a common vocabulary, our common goods.

It is with regard to that vocabulary that MacIntyre criticizes irony, or iroinic detachment. He focuses his critique on Richard Rorty’s advocacy of irony, which reflects and earlier debate between Hegel and Schlegal. By irony here, we mean an attitude of relentless suspicion toward one’s own vocabulary, manifested in a kind of arrogant aristocratic bum’s detachment that these matters are beneath us (I don’t take myself or anyone or anything else too seriously). It’s evasion masquerading as sophistication—a privileged position—that evades by questioning that there can be any final common vocabulary at all. Where “standing back” from our desires is prerequisite to independent practical reason, “standing back” from a shared vocabulary is standing back from commitment.

If I can’t commit to some common vocabulary, I can’t commit to any common action for the common good. This doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t question assumptions as part of any deliberative process, quite the contrary. Without some common vocabulary, we haven’t the means to bring assumptions and prejudices and errors into the light of correction. But to put the entire vocabulary into question is to create a kind of permanent epistemological crisis. (Judith Butler’s poststructuralist cult has done precisely this, in promoting poststructuralist “feminism” which effaces the meaning of “women,” who are the historical political subject of feminist enquiry, scholarship, and activism.) We’ll discuss this more when we get to Nietzsche and Foucault (two of Butler’s principle influences).

Rorty is certainly more subtle than this, and his intent is not to produce a permanent epistemological crisis, which MacIntyre acknowledges, then shows how whether this is his intent or not, putting entire vocabularies in doubt inevitably ends in this result. We are not—as suggested by the ironists—the captives of our vocabularies (this assumes their conclusions in their premises); shared language is, as we discussed early in the book, our human superpower. It’s a power that can’t be employed if we pre-neutralize it.

Trying to escape the “bonds of language” is very like trying to escape the “bonds of biology.” It’s the goldfish wanting to jump out of its bowl. It’s an elaborate form of sophistry. Politically, it is a recipe for paralysis—as has proven the case.

It is only with a shared vocabulary that we have the capacity to rigorously put aspects of our ideas, concepts, and deliberations to the test. (We are living through a public epistemological crisis with respect to the language of modernity as this is written.)

The final aspect of this argument, with regard to commitments, is that for shared deliberation in our (inevitably political) communities, we have to begin with a set of unconditional commitments. That basketball team shares the unconditional goal of winning basketball games. Not to say it doesn’t follow the rules; but that the goal itself (within the rules that make the game possible) is not based on prior conditions—it’s a baseline.

Of course, having reached this point in MacIntyre’s extended argument, we now come to the question, “but how can we avoid becoming prisoners of our prejudices?” That’s Chapter 13, “Moral committment and rational enquiry.”

I want to bear down on Nietzschism, which underwrites today’s metropolitan postmodern culture in particularly perverse and pernicious ways. I myself am sort of post . . . modern, but there is post-modern and there is secretly-still-modern “postmodern,” or covert-liberalism sans accountability.

Reviewing the bidding as we approach a close . . .

We share characteristics with non-human animals. These include reasons for action, many of which are pre-linguistic, our biological vulnerabilities, and the inhering telos to flourish. That flourishing, while demanding different goods for different species in variable circumstances, applies to individuals and the collective interdependently. Human beings, by dint of our nature, require post-linguistic practical reason to flourish, and this—based on MacIntyre’s deductive chain of causality—makes us inevitably a political species (Aristotle’s zoon politikon). The sun at the center of political communities’ orbits is a set of common goods. This implies a set of commitments, some of which are necessarily unconditional, that entail relationships of “give and take.” Fulfillment of these commitments depends upon certain qualities of character (exercise of the virtues) in community members and the community as a whole. Our vulnerabilities are, across time, universal to the species, and from those vulnerabilities (and depedencies)—again demosntrated by a deductive chain—we can reasonably impute virtues like miserocordia and just generosity. This baseline unconditionality is then necessary for us to flourish (develop our powers—especially reasoning—to the extent possible). Reasoning is not simply an individual practice, but a community practice, and for it to be effective on behalf of the common good, we have to be accountable, which demands a common vocabulary. (Whew!)

An epistemological obstacle to understanding reason is the belief that reason is a solitary activity—a phenomenon of the individual. But it’s been shown that this is not the case, and that reason is a social phenomenon, a shared practice, a process of give and take.

In fact, the current form of any community or institution is the outcome of having called into question its previous forms using its own vocabluary. We aren’t captives of the very vocabularies that facilitated these formal evolutions; in fact, that shared language is what ensures we aren’t the captives of static practices in a dynamic environment.

Are there circumstances in which we must act without deliberation which still require the virtues?

MacIntyre answers yes, because the internalization of the virtues leads us to act, in emergencies, with integrity and with just generosity, without any reflection or deliberation. If you see a stranger’s child have an accident, will you not immediately go to the aid of that child without taking time for deliberation? And you would not face, in most circumstances, any interrogation of your motives, nor would you be obliged to present some extended argument for justification of your actions. This is not an exception to the obligation of explaining oneself to make oneself intelligible as an act of accountability, but the exercise of an accountability already incorporated into one’s character.

You have been educated into the virtue of immediately responding to urgent need in others. (As we know from apocryphal stories of public attacks to which no observers come to the victim’s rescue, this is not a universal character trait.)

Here is where MacIntyre comes back to Nietzsche. I say “comes back,” because I have repeatedly read and marked up my copy of MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. In this book the compares what he calls the encyclopedic, the genealogical, and the traditional approaches to moral questions (we’ll set two of those aside for now). Nietzsche was the accidental father of the geneaological approach that was adapted and popularized by Foucault.

In Three Rival Versions, Chapter IX, “Tradition against Genealogy: Who Speaks to Whom?”, is a chapter so complex in its reasoning, I had to convert it back into an outline and re-subtitle before I put it back together, then read it four times before I finally apprehended the structure of the argument. I can only recommend the book to readers (and all AMac’s books in chronological order). Nonetheless, I will quote what he had to say about identity at the beginning of the chapter, because it corresponds most closely with what we’ve been discussing.

For anyone whose point of view is defined in terms of some synthesis of the Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions the concept of personal identity must have three central dimensions. Because, as Aquinas puts it, I am and do not merely have a body, albeit a soul-informed body, part of being one and the same person throughout this bodily life is having one and the same body. Secondly, I as a member of more than one community engage in transactions extended through time with others, and because I within my community undertake projects extended through time, it must be possible throughout this bodily life to impute continuing accountability for for agency. So my identity as one and the same person requires me on occasion to make intelligible to myself and to others within my communities what it was that I was doing in behaving as I did on some particular occasion and to be prepared at any future time to reevaluate my actions in the light of the judgements proposed by others. So part of being one and th same person throughout this bodily life is being continuously liable to account for my actions, attitudes, and beliefs to others within my communities. (TRVOMI, 196-197)

Nietzsche had the idea that we should not enter into give-and-receive relations with one another, but radically separate ourselves from others. In his explicitly anti-Christian view, we shouldn’t see non-human animals, as MacIntyre does, in their similarities to us (animal vulnerability, sociability, having reasons, etc.), but in their roles as predator and prey. (As an angler, this strikes me as an odd idea, since most fish are both at once.) Nietzsche says we are ultimately alone, and in a milieu characterized as a kind of transpersonal “will to power.” All reasoning is merely rationalization for our captivity by the will to power. We must make our best friends our enemies, because they might keep us from our “authentic” selves—which we have to continually invent, because the continuous self (“from sperm to worm” in animal terms) is an illusion of our captivity. Deliberation is for sissies. (He tried to live this out, though one disastrous relationship after another, eventually going batshit crazy, to which tertiary syphilis contributed before the end.)

These ideas became incoherent at the outset. Foucault denied that there was a continuous self, and yet he put his byline on all his writings, as did Foucauldian Judith Butler. The accepted salaries, royalty checks, and honoraria in those names as well.

It’s for this reason—that there is no common language to be had with those who deny its possibility—that one cannot respond to them. There is no rational deliberation possible with those who deny its existence. It is within the safety of this evasion that someone like Butler can assert such a thing as declarative identity (a man who declares himself a woman, e.g.). Instead, they can just reply to our responses from inside this evasion that our own arguments are nothing more than expressions of the vaporous will to power.

Where Nietzsche became a de facto advocate for the raw, brutal power; Butler, via Foucault, tried to square the circle by posing as an advocate for the marginalized with the politically impotent idea that power might be paradoxically confronted (yet another way in which this woman was utterly incoherent) by “troubling” the vocabularies of what she interpreted outgrowths of the will to power. Calling a woman a woman inevitably, in her view, comes with a whole set of normative implications. From here, we see vocabularies “troubled” by the sly insertion of ideological claims into the exceptionally non-ironic vocabulary of an ideological cohort (gender assigned at birth, e.g., replaces sex identified at birth . . . sex and gender in this situation were once interchangeable, precisely because they carried no inevitably normative baggage).

MacIntyre’s final critique is of altruism, which has a bearing on the previous gender business, inasmuch as the cultural policing of the ideology is self-enforced in certain communities by the aversion among their members to being seen as or accused of being somehow unaccepting of others, the desire to appear to be as sensitive and altruistic as everyone else.

It is of great importance not to confuse character of this kind, character informed by the virtue of just generosity, with altruism as it is usually understood. A presupposition for the application of the notion of altruism is a conception of human beings as divided in their inclinations and passions, some of those being self-regarding, others being other-regarding. Altruists are those in whom on occasion at least the other-regading inclinations and passions prevail over the self-regarding. The altruist is the counterpoint to the egotist and there are of course influential accounts of altruism according to which it is either a disguised form of egoism, or in some sophisticated versions, a transformation of egosim in the interests of satisfying egoism’s original goals. (160)

This has bearing on the dialectic of “identity”-based performative empathy and valorized “victimization”—an ego-pleasing perversion of miserocordia and just generosity—that characterizes pseudo-leftist discourse nowadays, something that is infinitely exploitable by right wing demagogues, which is but one aspect of self-imposed, post-Nietzshcean political paralysis in a time when a politics of the common good is so desperately absent.

APPENDIX

Excerpt from Mammon’s Ecology (2018)

We do not possess money. People do not possess idols; they are possessed by them, especially those who have the least of it. Yet as we have noted again and again, this is more than a matter of a person possessed by the need for money or the obsession with its accumulation. We are its structural captives, which at least means we can face our captivity without worshiping our captor provided we recognize money-idolatry for what it is. Economics—in the way that it excludes everything non-monetary, in the way it subordinates all things to money—is a liturgy for this idol, in the same way that our patriotism is a liturgy for that co-idol, the nation. As Prather describes it, we have twin idols: Mammon and Leviathan. It is only with this in view that we can begin to decide what is to be done, based on what can be done.

We can parse words and correct popular misunderstandings as we go along, but we’ll begin with a blunt statement. Wherever capitalism is headed from here, the continuation of the monetized industrial capitalist epoch (within which state socialisms were themselves entrapped by industrial Promethianism, and therefore part of the capitalist order), is suicidal. There will be no soft landing. Continuing on this same path is already disastrous for most of the world, and that disaster is creeping back from the margins— where it had been exported through violence, fraud, plunder, domination, and unequal exchange—toward the centers. The ecology of general-purpose money tells us this in the way that its use is contrary to those natural processes that constitute the very biosphere upon which we all depend and of which we are all a part.

There may be movements for an economic model that is designed to break us away from economic models and return to uniquely situated, relocalized, subsistence. . . . What are needed first are some very radical policy prescriptions; and whether they are possible is another question.

You can call it whatever you like, but the central state would quickly need to take control over productive processes as a form of triage. New social organizations cannot be created by decree or wholesale abandonment of current systems. If there is a resolution to our crises, then it will take more than a generation, and it will require complex, detailed, and carefully thought-out transitions. When I said triage, I meant exactly that. Such a movement would have to stop the bleeding and restore the airway first, and that would mean a strong (not violent) state that does several specific things as soon as possible.

The most important of those things will be to nationalize the banks, the utilities, and other key industries; to unilaterally and immediately withdraw all US military forces from abroad; to systematically ensure that everyone is housed and fed; to guarantee a universal baseline income to all; to establish civilian control boards over all police agencies and prisons and abolish police tactical units; to make education through graduate school free to all who qualify; to forgive massive amounts of personal debt; and to adopt a single-payer health care system. This is just the lifesaving first step, because people need to be reassured and supported before the real work of redesign begins.

Because the complex crisis we face is ecological, any form of governance will have to address these crises head-on; and it will have to aim all its efforts at ultimately restoring a right relation between humankind and non-human nature that liquidates the subject-object dualism. Because general-purpose money is an ecological phenomenon that dissolves traditions, communities, and the biosphere, any transition worth its salt will have to begin the long march to reduce our dependence on general-purpose money, which inevitably means some form of the radical relocalization of all basic production, draconian control of “markets,” the gradual death by benign neglect of old transportation grids, and the reorganization of political subdivisions around watersheds instead of arbitrary lines drawn on the map.

To this end, the state’s role would be crucial. Once key industries and infrastructure are placed under public control and price controls established, nonessential industries would need to be systematically closed down. As they are closed, massive public works training and jobs programs would be established to guarantee uninterrupted full employment at living wages; and those jobs would need to be geared to the transitional projects for repairing environmental damage and setting the stage for thorough going relocalization. With price controls, the state could print money for this purpose (they’ve printed about a trillion dollars to bail out bond traders so far). Priority programs would remediate areas and communities where environmental injustices have been the worst. a maximum wage system would need to be established for various professionals—doctors, lawyers, etc. Dramatic conservation measures would need to be taken and enforced, beginning with energy rationing and including any nonessential production that relies on imports that depend upon postcolonial (neoliberal) unequal exchange relations abroad. All subsidies and allowances in agriculture and forestry would be cancelled and/or redirected for both relocalization and sustainability. Any industry that exceeds a certain number of employees and which is not directed wholly by the state would be reorganized as worker-owned. All industry oversight and management would be conducted by subsets of the central authority who are representative of their watersheds. All subsidies to fossil energy extraction and refinement would need to be ended, and a transition program for all workers in those industries into public works.

As to money, and this may be the most radical proposal of all—but it takes into account what we have studied with regard to money as the sign with no referent—one proposal has been a two-money system. Alf Hornborg sums it up:

Perhaps transforming our money system is the only chance we have. General-purpose money rewards the dissipation of resources with every more resources to dissipate, until they are gone, or at least inaccessible. The dilemma of sustainability thus seems to be the very juxtaposition of this socio-cultural institution with the . . . facts of entropy, limited land area, and finite stocks of resources. The problem could thus be expressed as the consequences of money in a universe obeying the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If this is indeed recognized as our fundamental problem, it is much less problematic to conclude which of these factors—general-purpose money or the Second Law of Thermodynamics—can be changed through political decisions. Money is a cultural sign system invented by humans and in the long run perhaps the only factor we can hope to transform in the interest of sustainability.

What Hornborg and others have proposed is a dual money system— which they call a multi-centric economy. The state or other polities issue two forms of currency. One form would be the existing national currency, which will be eventually transitioned into a currency for long-distance exchange. The other would be local scripts, exchangeable only within certain boundaries (watersheds?) and only for subsistence commodities produced within those boundaries: locally grown food, locally produced tools, re-used items (thrift shops), organic fuels, materials extracted from local land (wood, fibers, plants, mulch, compost, et al.), local transport assistance, and local services. This script would be issued as a substantial portion of the guaranteed minimum income. Local script would be absolutely tax-free and could be used to hire temporary informal labor. In the short term, this may actually increase the exchanges using national currency, because it would free more income for non-local commodities; but over the longer term, the advantages afforded by local script, in conjunction with policies that promote increased local production, would strengthen the script as well as stabilize the local economy. In particular, given that local food production would be exchangeable for local script that is issued as part of a guaranteed minimum income, this system would promote small-scale, local agriculture, which is an essential—if not the essential—component of any larger transition. It would likewise inoculate local production from the solvent-effect of the national general-purpose currency, and set the stage for the most important general change of all: a de-financialized, de-growth economy.

The goal of short and mid-term social control over the economy through a democratic state is not the stabilization of a social-democratic state, but the transition to a de-financialized, de-growth economy.

Without this kind of emergency program, what we have now—crisis wracked and headed for disaster—will stutter along and crash, leaving us even more vulnerable to authoritarian reactionaries than we already are, as evidenced by the narrow election of Trump. Long-term and intentional watershed-based relocalization is far more radical than the nationalistic and nostalgic Keyenesians of Bernie Sanders’ stripe, but a real alternative needs to be articulated, with a vision upon which to build a real resistance to the period of reaction we are now entering. How that looks will depend on many things that are yet to be discovered in the process of redesigning the built environment; and if we do not redesign the built environment, that very environment will return us to our present practical and epistemological default positions on the runaway train.

Like it or not, we are already miles along the path of a world emergency. We may fail to take this kind of dramatic action, to mount this kind of resistance, to enter into this kind of mass movement; but if we fail at that, we will categorically leave our grandchildren a desperate, insecure, miser able, and more dangerous world. For far too many around the world and at home, this is already the reality.

end excerpt

Comment

I’ll address the difference between economic localism and this imaginary parochial localism using MacIntyre’s critique of the latter “communitarian error,” which include people like Rod Dreher.

-me, earlier

Most of the twenty people who read my stuff already know that MacIntyre and Illich are in many respects my leading lights. I’ve not uttered or written an original thought in my life, even if I like to play at culinary fusion with the many thinkers who I’ve studied and those with whom I, in one way or another, have corresponded. I’m an intellectual food truck, I suppose . . . “Goff’s Grille.”

In Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre takes a time out to criticize the people who have misconstrued and misrepresented his remarks in After Virtue, regarding Saint Benedict as a exemplar of someone preserving a store of intellectual goods through a time of social disruption. Rod Dreher’s anachronistically delusional tract, The Benedict Option, is the first and most notable offender. Dreher is prominent among a cohort of what I’ll call civilizational Christians—people whose devotion to church is motivated not by the desire to follow Jesus, but by the dream of forcibly reimposing the values of juridical Christendom, chief among them, for most of these guys, is patriarchal restoration to somewhere around 1955 in advance of rebuilding the Holy Roman Empire, complete with kings and knights and a good supply of happy, obedient peasants. (None of them, I’ll wager, sees himself as one of the peasants.) I wrote a bit about this in a while back.

It is . . . a mistake, the communitarian mistake, to attempt to infuse the politics of the state with the values and modes of participation in local community. It is a further mistake to suppose that there is anything good about local community as such. The relatively small-scale character and and the face-to-face encounters and conversations of local community are necessary for the shared achievement of the common goods of those who participate in the rational deliberation needed to sustain networks of giving and receiving, but, absent the virtues of just generosity and of shared deliberation, local communities are always open to corruption by narrowness, by complacency, by prejudice against outsiders and by a whole range of other deformities, including those that arise from a cult of local communities. (142)

In After Virtue, MacIntyre, in defining tasks against practices, said that architecture was a practice, while bricklaying was not. This triggered MacIntyre’s colleague and mentee, Stanley Hauerwas, who was, prior to studying theology, a bricklayer in a long line of bricklayers. He wrote MacIntyre and explained why, in fact, bricklaying is a practice. Not to be presumptuous, but I’m going to do something similar here, while acknowledging the ways in which the Catholic MacIntyre’s thought was wrongly appropriated by Dreher and other Christian reactionaries. MacIntyre displayed a prejudice about bricklayers, and he likewise displayed a prejudice about small communities. In fact, everything he claims (rightly) about the flaws in local communities, can be applied with equal force to small groups in New York City or Chicago as easily as it can in Warrenton, North Carolina (population 862). MacIntyre never laid bricks, and he never lived in anyplace smaller than Durham, North Carolina.

To his credit, he does follow up by saying we need to study local communities to discern good and bad aspects, and the conditions surrounding them.

Illich emphasizes something entirely different with regard to “localism,” a deceptive term he never actually used; but Illich was not a moral philosopher, he was a theological-historical phenomenologist and social critic. In spite of the tension I’ll describe between him and MacIntyre, it’s a sustainable tension, in my view, which just needs further elaboration (they were both Thomists).

Illich found value (lost value) in what he called not local, but vernacular communities. By this he meant both relations of production (something MacIntyre as a former Marxist would readily recognize) and shared, convivial practices—the latter meaning tools of a form and at a scale that did not make persons into biological appendages to the technology. Illich’s ideal was a kind of subsistence socialism that took into account the dangers of “development” and “progress,” about which he has been proven prescient and impotent in equal parts. Illich proved, in my view, that vernacular culture is necessarily accompanied by a vernacular language (consistent with MacIntyre’s “vocabularies”). Illich’s point, one that applied both culturally and ecologically, was that delocalization (disembeddedment from traditional, vernacular culture) and the political economy of environmental entropy (see Energy and Equity) were the same phenomenon, which also entail atomization, infantilization, alienation, and the rest in the dialectic of consciousness and material conditions.

Relocalization, as it is called, is—historically speaking—something which cannot happen now organically, but only politically. This ships of MacIntyre’s virtuous community and Illich’s vernacular one have already sailed over the horizon; but as MacIntyre notes—and this informs my own dreamy roadmap (above) from Mammon’s Ecology—we have come to a point, even in the face of its own increasing improbability, where only political solutions—implemented at great scale—are even remotely feasible as remedies to anything like climate catastrophe, war, migration, etc.

These will not work if these remedies are micromanaged by social engineers, but only if new policies are designed to facilitate the conditions. Build the structure, but let the inhabitants furnish it. Relocalization is a pragmatic, not an ideological, matter, a simply accounting for what we know about the inevitably destructive trajectory of delocalization and technological “advances” unharnessed from any precautionary principle at the behest of ruthless, self-serving oligarchs. Thousands of small food, fuel, transportation, etc. grids are insulation against general crises, where communities have at least the possibility of being their own deliberative laboratories using the means that are reliably at their disposal, with emergency interventions coordinated at higher levels (destructive storms, fires, etc.) in a system of subsidiarity.

The reactionaries’ toothpaste is out of the tube, too. It was gone well before the other two. In addition to patriarchal restoration, many of them are ethno-chauvinists who would conceal their racial phobias and xenophobic antagonisms under garbage piles of syncretic philosophical rationalization. Localization is no nationalism, nor is it enclaves of self-eugenic phenotypic conformity. I spoke to the reality of creolization and its inevitable future here, from which—one way or another—any future will be cobbled together.

What’s crucial now, if anything can be done, is that some yet-to-be-organized “we” will navigate between the Scylla of psuedo-leftist political paralysis, the Charybdis of authoritarian reaction, and the desperate temptation to magical thinking.

We haven’t a great deal of time.