MacIntyre and Mumford
I’ll begin by quoting extensively from some articles on Alasdair MacIntyre, encouraging people strongly to read these articles in full, and ponder the issues they raise at length.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2016. 332pp.
MacIntyre’s work “is cited usually only to illustrate a radical and misguided form of communitarianism, or as a key catalyst of modern virtue ethics. To some extent this is unsurprising. MacIntyre has consistently swum against the current in moral and political philosophy. His first book, Marxism and Christianity (1953), gave systematic attention to two movements which most contemporary anglophone philosophers – with their entrenched liberalism and anti-theism – found embarrassing and disreputable. Since then, moreover, MacIntyre has not given an inch to the status quo. Not only did he deepen and widen his critique of moral and political liberalism – most famously in After Virtue (1981) – he also elaborated a Thomistic Aristotelianism in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), which managed to alienate the anglophone consensus still further. His philosophical project, in both its negative and positive aspects, has drawn many admirers. But that it set him at odds with the majority of his colleagues was hardly unexpected.'
What, then, do we have in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity? First of all, we have a remarkable consolidation of work that spans over six decades (MacIntyre will be ninety in 2019).
‘Turning to the philosophical core of this astonishingly wide-ranging work, my main criticism is that it is uncertain whether MacIntyre has made good on his claim that only NeoAristotelianism ‘captures certain truths about human beings, truths that we acknowledge in our everyday practices even when they are inconsistent with the way in which we represent ourselves to ourselves [as Moralists or expressivists]’ (201-202). His central reason for holding this is that in practice we cannot help affirming that our lives are teleologically-ordered wholes, whose final end is flourishing, and that we move towards flourishing when we pursue objective goods, and move towards failure when we pursue objective evils. But is it not possible that MacIntyre’s posited final end, together with the specific ‘goods’ which he claims constitute it, are simply an expression of his own, personal – perhaps class-, culture- and family-informed – desires? After all, it is psychologically and sociologically hardly unaccountable that someone born in depression-era Scotland would wish for a revolutionary transformation of society, and be attracted to a religion promising the redemption of suffering. But that such desires, wishes and attractions also establish – and serve to identify – the final and objective good of humanity seems quite another matter. Perhaps an accurate narrative of MacIntyre’s life would reveal that idea as little more than wishful (if also highly original and intelligent) thinking. Many, myself included, hope not.’
‘Yet even seemingly solitary concerns arise, take shape, and are only intelligible due to networks of past, present, or anticipated relationships; shared interests and values; and common goals. This is no less true in art and astronomy than it is in baking and building. Moreover, Williams is unable to address the kind of question that for MacIntyre is central to ethical thinking: I know what I feel, or desire, or am drawn to identify with, but what ought I to do? Are these feelings, desires, and tendencies good? Which is to say, are their objects good? To answer these questions we need a standard beyond desire and commitment. For Williams, human nature, to the extent that we can assume there is such a thing, is only a source of value-free biological and psychological facts, while for MacIntyre it provides a factual and evaluative ground. “What ought we to do?” is ultimately a question about what it would be good to do given the kind of (common) nature we have, about what pertains to it as conducive to or constitutive of human flourishing. I know my good in so far as I know the kind of thing I am, and unlike an angel, I am not a species unto myself. So the standard by which to determine what to do is “common” twice over, being the good of a common human nature and being a good that is realized and shared in common.’
‘MacIntyre’s argument is intricate and moves between abstract philosophical reasoning, historical analysis, social critique, and biography, but what it leads to is a re-expression and validation of a sophisticated version of the basic Thomistic-Aristotelian account of what is involved in asking and answering questions about what ought to be done or avoided. There needs to be a standard against which to measure the deliverances of sentiment and content of social agreements, for these sources are neither self-validating nor fundamental. What underlies human practical reasoning is human nature and the goods internal to it. Only these can halt the regress of questioning: What ought I to desire? What ought I to desire to desire? . . . What ought we to agree to? What ought we to agree to agree to? Not only can such an approach provide an objective standard, it can, with aid from Marxian social analysis, explain the failure of other approaches to account for, let alone to resolve, their theoretical disagreements and the disagreements at the level of pre-theoretical moral thinking. It does so in part by showing that the source of some disagreements lies in false consciousness, and by recognizing that the ways in which human capacities may be realized are diverse and that the range of considerations relevant to human flourishing are also variable. Philosophical ethics can bring order to the variety of values and principles not by converting them into a common currency (welfare, rights, duties, etc.) but by showing how in often complex and culturally mediated ways they relate back to human nature and the diverse constitutive goods of that form of life.’
A conservative appreciation
A Good Ethics Professor is Hard to Find by C.J. Wolfe
‘“How should I live?” In his latest book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre takes up the question Socrates asked. He arrives at the same answer as Socrates—live the good life—in the course of discussing what that concept means for laymen who will never visit, much less teach in, an academic philosophy department.
MacIntyre, now 88 years old and an emeritus professor at Notre Dame, has lived as a maverick philosopher by virtue of supporting rather than attacking traditional views of ethics. Thanks in part to his work, “virtue ethics” is now a respectable field in academic philosophy.
Seventy years ago, when MacIntyre was pursuing his own philosophical education, utilitarianism framed most Anglo/American philosophers’ consideration of ethics. MacIntyre’s magnum opus, After Virtue (1981), rejected utilitarianism in favor of Aristotle’s virtue-centered approach. Rather than focusing on whether actions brought about a more pleasurable state of affairs, virtue ethics focuses on ascertaining habits good for a person’s soul. After Virtue was compelling because it provided a rich historical account of why Aristotle’s virtue ethics fell out of favor in the first place.’
Wolfe is a conservative who argues that ‘most American conservatives have more in common with Aristotle’s ethical views than with the Marxists MacIntyre admires. MacIntyre does not fully appreciate the possibility that American principles are rooted in the same natural law he himself advances.’ OK, but I’d say that most of such conservatives do not fully appreciate the radicalism inherent in the natural law and that, for all of the historicist terms in which Marx couched his realization of the good life, Marxism itself gains coherence only from having a foot, at least, in the natural law camp. It’s a contentious issue, of course, but one I shall be arguing with respect to Rousseau in a forthcoming book. For now, I’ll just say that many conservatives don’t quite realize how radical Aristotle is (and Aquinas for that matter) in relation to the dehumanizing, autonomy-denying structures and institutions of the capital system. Which is to say that there is no great division between Aristotle and Marx here, and we don’t have to choose one or the other.
‘For Aristotle, as we have seen, ethics and politics are intimately related. Ethics is about excelling at being human, and nobody can do this in isolation. Moreover, nobody can do it unless the political institutions which allow you to do it are available. It is this kind of moral thinking which was inherited by Karl Marx, who was much indebted to Aristotle even in his economic thought. Questions of good and bad had been falsely abstracted from their social contexts, and had to be restored to them again. In this sense, Marx was a moralist in the classical sense of the word. He believed that moral inquiry had to examine all of the factors which went to make up a specific action or way of life, not just personal ones.’
‘Marx, however, made the mistake of defining morality as moralism, and so quite understandably rejected it. He did not seem to realize that he was the Aristotle of the modern age. The paradigm of classical morality in our own time has been feminism, which insists in its own way on the interwovenness of the moral and political, power and the personal. It is in this tradition above all that the precious heritage of Aristotle and Marx has been deepened and renewed.’
Terry Eagleton, After Theory 2003 ch 6
And MacIntyre too is against this abstraction of moral questions from social contexts. Wolfe continues:
‘His latest book, like several of its predecessors, suffers from his failure to accept more friends where he could find them. His many American conservative readers see Alasdair MacIntyre as a friend—and one of the great philosophers of our time, providing wise insights on how we as individuals and communities should live. As Bernard Williams once wrote, that “is not a trivial question.”’
I agree very much. And would offer the hand of Marxist friendship to those conservatives who take their Aristotelianism and Thomism seriously at the level of principle and, especially, practice.
‘A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.’
Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics
October 2007
A long article, but well worth the time of anyone serious about ethics.
‘Few dispute that Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most important philosophers of our time. That reputation, however, does him little good. It is as though, quite apart from the man, there exists a figure called Alasdair MacIntyre whose position you know whether or not you have read him—and whose name has become a specter that haunts all attempts to provide constructive moral and political responses to the challenge of modernity. The curious result is that MacIntyre’s work is often dismissed as too extreme to be taken seriously. In fact, MacIntyre’s work is extreme, but we live in extreme times. And though he is certainly critical of some of the developments associated with modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre is also a constructive thinker who has sought to help us repair our lives by locating those forms of life that make possible moral excellence.’
MacIntyre is the philosopher I value most of all in the modern world, for reasons given in these articles, and more besides. I just wonder if there is a tendency to a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism that diminishes the spiritual dimension that may well be required to make good the claims made (along the lines of Finnis’ argument in Natural Law and Natural Rights), that this neo-Aristotelianism and Thomism is pretty naturalistic and materialistic (quite Marxist, which is no bad thing in itself), but not true to Thomas and not even to Aristotle’s own spiritual dimensions. And there are other issues (I’ll leave aside the Marxist view of immanent lines of development pointing to socialism as the immanent society, an immanent critique which has us (re)valuing practices repressed within prevailing society as liberatory potentials, new and emergent forms of solidarity – which is certainly my view).
Are there transcendent norms, truths and values (Plato and justice); or is ethics/politics merely conventional, Thrasymachus and justice as the interest of the strong? (forwards to Hobbes and Hume, in which case, why are you complaining when the strong win and impose their interests, you are free to invent and reinvent value and ethics and politics insofar as you have the power so to do .. if we don’t feel that that is right, then we are appealing to a transcendent standard in some way). Marx and justice as something that unfolds within the emergent potentials of the historical process? How to maintain that position without thereby falling into historical relativism? I know what my answers are, and I am setting them out in a number of works. The final passage of the article in Marxism and Philosophy cited above raises a key issue for me: ‘is it not possible that MacIntyre’s posited final end, together with the specific ‘goods’ which he claims constitute it, are simply an expression of his own, personal – perhaps class-, culture- and family-informed – desires? After all, it is psychologically and sociologically hardly unaccountable that someone born in depression-era Scotland would wish for a revolutionary transformation of society, and be attracted to a religion promising the redemption of suffering. But that such desires, wishes and attractions also establish – and serve to identify – the final and objective good of humanity seems quite another matter. Perhaps an accurate narrative of MacIntyre’s life would reveal that idea as little more than wishful (if also highly original and intelligent) thinking. Many, myself included, hope not.’
If this is true, then we remain within the realm of imposure, the idea of value as something projected on an objectively valueless world by human valuers – and such valuers are never merely abstractly ‘human’ as such, but particular humans within specific – and usually – asymmetrical social relations, relations of power and resources which, being unequal, give some greater power than others to persuade society that their perception of reality is the right and the true one. And I do, indeed, hope that that’s not the case. Because that is precisely where we already are in the modern world, and it is unsustainable, empty, hollow – the search for (invented) meaning and value in an objectively meaningless and valueless world is … well, pointless, self-defeating.
As for ‘grounding’ and objective standards … where, who and what? In After Virtue, MacIntyre asks this question of himself: ‘More particularly I seemed to be asserting that the nature of moral community and moral judgment in distinctively modern societies was such that it was no longer possible to appeal to moral criteria in a way that had been possible in other times and places—and that this was a moral calamity! But to what could I be appealing, if my own analysis was correct? (MacIntyre 1981: 1 Disquieting Suggestions) So, to what is MacIntyre appealing? This is the key question when it comes to the location of value.
The ontological status of anything is uncertain. The question of grounding and foundations is the wrong one to ask. Which is why I raised the spiritual dimension of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas … I’ll go with MacIntyre’s communities of practice and Stanley Hauerwas’ communities of character, I’ll go with Finnis’s form/s of the common life, I’ll go with narrativity, and recognise a degree of ‘wishful thinking’ in a practice that is self-validating in the fact that it ‘works’ and supplies meaning.
As John Haldane writes in the article cited above:
‘There needs to be a standard against which to measure the deliverances of sentiment and content of social agreements, for these sources are neither self-validating nor fundamental. What underlies human practical reasoning is human nature and the goods internal to it. Only these can halt the regress of questioning: What ought I to desire? What ought I to desire to desire? . . . What ought we to agree to? What ought we to agree to agree to? Not only can such an approach provide an objective standard, it can, with aid from Marxian social analysis, explain the failure of other approaches to account for, let alone to resolve, their theoretical disagreements and the disagreements at the level of pre-theoretical moral thinking. It does so in part by showing that the source of some disagreements lies in false consciousness, and by recognizing that the ways in which human capacities may be realized are diverse and that the range of considerations relevant to human flourishing are also variable. Philosophical ethics can bring order to the variety of values and principles not by converting them into a common currency (welfare, rights, duties, etc.) but by showing how in often complex and culturally mediated ways they relate back to human nature and the diverse constitutive goods of that form of life.’
As for MacIntyre, he’s been party to the debates proceeding within the professional circles of philosophy, and now seems glad to be out of them. Here is what he writes in his new book:
"Readers should be warned that my references to this literature are selective and few. Had I conscientiously attempted not only to find my way through all the relevant published writing in the philosophy of mind and in ethics but then also to explain how I had come to terms with the claims advanced by its authors, I would have had to write at impossible length and in a format that would have made this essay inaccessible to the lay reader for whom it is written. Nonetheless, I have worked my own way slowly and painfully – the pain is sometimes, although far from always, the pain of boredom – through what matters in that literature and, if I have readers who are professional philosophers, they can be assured that if I make no reference to a vast body of published work, including their own, it is because nothing in it has given me reason to abandon or to modify the views here expressed and the arguments here advanced." ECM (p. ix)
Dismissive of the good work of many contemporary philosophers? Has he missed something?
I will be writing more on Alasdair MacIntyre, whom I greatly admire. But there are two things I find lacking in his work,
a valuation of the transformative potential of forms of social organisation and praxis within modernity (which is to say Marxism in its self-emancipatory revolutionary aspect, society as a field of materialist immanence constituted by lines of development pointing to its self-transcendence) and but his ethics lack transcendence. The civic virtues to the exclusion of the theological virtues;
the spiritual dimension and an ethics of transcendence.
This leads to a double deficiency. If the former is too Thomist and not Marxist/Aristotelian enough, the latter is too Marxist/Aristotelian (materialist/naturalist) and not Thomist (transcendent/spiritual) enough. I would look to integrate all aspects. Reading MacIntyre on desire and decision, he comes over as very much an Aristotelian. That’s all well and good, as far as it goes. The problem for me is that such a position rests ethics on a quasi-scientific naturalism. And that involves all manner of problems. If I ever clear out the backlog of work I have in front of me, I will write at length on this, developing a position somewhere between and beyond the old natural law and modern rational freedom, an ethics that is quite distinct from naturalism and which puts reason, nature, will, contemplation/disclosure and action/imposure together.
MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism leads him to neglect the spiritual dimension and lack a sense of the transcendent. I think that is a big deficiency, and leaves his ethics open to reduction to naturalism. That said, the strength of his approach is to take (secular) reason seriously. What one thinks of this depends upon one’s view of modernity. MacIntyre is a critic of modernity and its moral theories. Modernity can generate a number of moral theories, but cannot offer good reasons for taking any of them seriously. MacIntyre thus shows that our debates lack resolution in that the positions being exchanged are incommensurate. We talk past each other. I agree. And I’m not sure that we could achieve an overarching moral framework capable of doing otherwise, if we focus on ethics alone. The moral problem goes deep into the moral and social infrastructure, into social forms, relations and identities in which a person’s views and beliefs and worldviews are bound up with social positions, interests and actions. It is at that level that moral confusion arises.
I’d draw attention to the work of those looking to reinstate the spiritual dimension in relation to both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, checking tendencies to a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism that risks diminishing the autonomous status of morality. That keeps us confined within the modern moral condition rather than offers a coherent response to it. MacIntyre reinstates the importance of Thomas Aquinas, for whom the human good is ultimately ordered to the beatific vision, but does not theologize his project. He does, however, show the extent to which practical deliberation, upon which his consistent focus falls, does open expansively upon the transcendent and the divine:
“At certain points in her reflections upon herself [an agent] may well be compelled to resort to higher order reflection upon her practical thinking . . . [which may lead to the recognition that] the nature of her practical reasoning and of the practical reasoning of those in whose company she deliberates has from the outset committed her and them to a shared belief in God, to a belief that, if there is nothing beyond the finite, there is no final end, no ultimate human good, to be achieved.”
This argument should be compared to the way that John Finnis makes space for the spiritual dimension of human life – as real as any other aspect of human life – in his Natural Rights and Natural Law.
In criticising MacIntyre for neglecting the importance of the spiritual dimension, and in arguing against a tendency of his Aristotelianism and Thomism to be naturalist, materialist and, frankly, Marxist, let me say that I do not reject any of these things, merely call for their completion with a more robust ethical structure. It is a strength of MacIntyre rather than a weakness that, whilst being a Catholic philosopher, he doesn’t engage in any pointless hectoring and lecturing with respect to secularists and atheists. That approach is wrong, misguided and utterly self-defeating. MacIntyre is doing something much more profound than proselytising, examining the conditions of effective moral reasoning generating answers that merit the designation of truth. The many insights that MacIntyre has generated in his life’s work on ethics have succeeding in drawing interest from a wide variety of people, from conservatives to Marxists, theists to non-theists and secularists, believers and non-believers. So, in making the criticisms I do of a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism, I am far from arguing for the theologizing of MacIntyre’s work. But I am in agreement with John Haldane, who writes: ‘Those who carry on the project that this book and its predecessors represent are likely to find that what began as reasoning about ethical conflict and human nature will lead one day to recognition, and (one hopes) contemplation, of the divine.’
And, at risk of scandalizing the academy even further, I do agree with MacIntyre when he argues:
"‘Philosophy’ in our culture has become the name of a specialised, professionalised, academic discipline, and the role of the professional philosopher is socially defined and circumscribed, so that almost, even if not quite, universally it is not the highly specific activities of philosophical inquiry or the particular philosophical conclusions which some philosopher defends, but rather the status-bearing and role-playing that are characteristic of any professionalised academic that determine the overall shape of a professional philosopher’s life. Philosophers, like other professional academics, become licensed, through competing successfully in those tests that lead to the Agrégation and its sequels, or to the doctorate and the Habilitationsschrift, or to the PhD, and that success is achieved by performing a series of demanding tasks designed to render one obedient and conformable to the specialisations and compartmentalisations of the professional life… Correspondingly, one’s students will generally have learned that the tasks required of them in philosophy courses are something soon to be left behind, part of an educational routine leading towards the achievement of career goals, already determined for them and by them, very likely before they had ever entered upon the study of philosophy, and not likely to be changed by that study. The norms of both teachers and students are well designed for the purpose of defending everyday social life from invasion by philosophy…
Yet at the same time contemporary philosophy, even when most constrained by its academic, professionalised, specialised norms, nonetheless also sustains within itself a very different conception of its relationship to the actions of those who engage in it in any systematic way, and it does so just because it is philosophy. For philosophy, if it is to be recognisable as philosophy, must always be understood as a continuation of Plato’s enterprise. And Plato’s conclusion that engagement in the life of philosophy necessarily involves a radical critique of the everyday social life of political societies, and a consequent withdrawal from that life into a particular type of philosophical community, remains one with which, implicitly or explicitly, everyone who engages in philosophy has somehow to come to terms."
That said, the strength of MacIntyre’s approach is that his position invites critics to take modern secular reason seriously. The appreciation of this point has led some to criticise MacIntyre here as a paradoxical critic of modernity who, ultimately, cannot escape the modern terms of the debate. I am sensitive to the point. For all of his strong criticisms of the modern moral terrain, it seems that he only has the one tentative foot in the Aristotelian and Thomist pool. That is no bad thing in itself, the caution does him good. Because not all is bad in modern morality, far from it (the emancipation of hitherto excluded, marginalised and oppressed individuals and groups, the recognition of the civic claims and rights of all, is decidedly an achievement, and guards against potentially elitist and hierarchical readings of past natural law/virtue ethics). And there is plenty in that old pool we can do without. Or modify in light of what we now know. The strength of MacIntyre’s approach is that he refuses to resolve the problems of reason in modernity by means of theological appeal. If the problem of modernity is the dissolution of an overarching moral framework once supplied by God – this is what Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ refers to – then the solution would seem, simply, to be an appeal to God and a renewed faith in God. That solution however is no solution at all, precisely because it ignores all the forces which have led to the dissolution of the comprehensive ethical framework. MacIntyre knows this, and he knows how difficult it is to reconstitute that ethical framework. I think that is his great strength. Instead of an abstract common good based on a theological appeal to God, MacIntyre presents an account that possesses social relevance. To be precise, MacIntyre offers a highly differentiated account of the common good as a concrete set of social relations constituted by forms of the common life and communities of practice. I will be arguing that this social and practical relevance with respect to human goods (reflective and substantive) is perfectly compatible with the spiritual dimension of human life (the quest for cosmic meaning is a very real part of human nature) and with the existence of transcendent norms, values and truths (which may go by the name of God). Indeed, my point is stronger than mere compatibility. I think the former requires the latter to make good its claims, and will argue that thesis when I get round to writing the book I have planned on this. My position avoids an either/or. I certainly affirm the transcendent in terms of an objective standard by which to evaluate and orient actions, practices, institutions, laws, politics in time and place. What I am careful to avoid doing is appeal to a theological account of the Good. Asserting a belief in God too easily invites an evasion of the key questions of concrete embodiment and alternative institutions. The approach I take combines the affirmation of transcendent norms, truths and values with the practical institutional work of identifying, developing and justifying the concrete embodiment of the common good via form/s of the common life, social practices and community architectures. That approach is grounded in an implicit, rather than an explicit, appeal to transcendence as the bedrock, proceeding to demonstrate how the social forms and relations composing everyday reality are infused with meaning through their role in facilitating human flourishing. (And planetary health, I hasten to add, seeing as I develop this position as a biospheric ethic and politics.)
The issue seems to come down to the question of whether modernity can resolve its problems within its own terms, without transcendence. I say not. And I take MacIntyre to say not as well, even though he remains more of a modernist and less of an Aristotelian and Thomist than may be apparent given his strong criticism of modernity. That said, the issue cannot be resolved in some simple sense by introducing transcendence, either as a philosophical category (and therefore no different to the other philosophical categories, hence becoming part of competing and incommensurate value claims, not a coherent resolution of the polytheism) or as a theological appeal that is abstracted from the problems of concrete embodiment and social relevance. That is no resolution, it is merely to join the noise as one more voice added to the many others. In raising the question of transcendence, there is a need to avoid collapsing philosophy into theology and theology into philosophy, because there is no possibility of resolution in either of these ways, they merely beg the question we are already being asked, but are incapable of answering it in those terms. It merely restates the problem rather than resolves it. Philosophy can never be complete. Since Creation cannot account for itself, naturalist explanations will always fall short. Hence my scepticism of neo-Aristotelianism as a quasi-scientific account of ethics. I think it is a deficient ethical position and isn’t even true to Aristotle. Philosophies which reduce to theologies and theologies which reduce to philosophies end up corrupting both philosophy and theology.
Anyhow … I have work to finish on Dante, and work to start on Rousseau, rational freedom, including MacIntyre and all manner of other things. And I’m sketching the outline of a research programme on Lewis Mumford.
Talking of whom ..
MacIntyre’s most well-known book, of course, is After Virtue from 1981. Lewis Mumford was writing on the loss of the virtues decades earlier.
A potential critique of Lewis Mumford is possible from the perspective of contemporary multiculturalism. Mumford is open to the charge that his work possesses a generality that neglects diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and class. The interesting thing is that Mumford himself made an argument for inclusiveness, openly drawing upon non-western sources in his own work, and calling for their inclusion in university courses. His point was these sources contained moral, intellectual and cultural truths which transcended their origins in time and place, a point which, therefore, directly contradicted the relativistic premises presented by contemporary multiculturalism. Mumford’s concern, then, was to present a general view of civilisation as composed of the infinite varieties and continuities of humanity throughout history, emphasising that a common humanity is expressed through a cultural diversity, and that an appreciation of both is essential to a culture, citizenship and civilisation. That universal outlook is out of fashion, and is diametrically opposed to the view that everything is a matter of social construction and ideological perspective. But it is precisely the unfashionable nature of Mumford’s concern to educate the whole person, and to set the individual and particular identities and attachments within the bigger picture, that makes his work so timely. Mumford puts the human faculties back together, putting the ethical and emotional component in place in arguing for form and reason, and gives due weight to ethical and aesthetic standards of discrimination and evaluation. And gives due recognition to virtue, character and practice. This is the approach I shall be taking, unapologetically reaffirming universal standards with respect to civilization and citizenship which the liveliest minds of the age seem to think they can discard. They are mistaken, profoundly so.
The important point is that what Mumford wrote in his book Values for Survival in 1946 anticipates MacIntyre’s argument in his book After Virtue in 1981:
‘If we are to create balanced human beings, capable of entering into world-wide co-operation with all other men of good will--and that is the supreme task of our generation, and the foundation of all its other potential achievements--we must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. And values do not come ready-made: they are achieved by a resolute attempt to square the facts of one's own experience with the historic patterns formed in the past by those who devoted their whole lives to achieving and expressing values. If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are not recorded in the day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds. Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.’
Love and Dante? I am trying hard to finish my Dante book, Sweet Symphony of Paradise. It will be a little Christmas present to myself. But Mumford’s argument here takes us directly to the core of the matter. Suffice to say, I am in profound agreement with MacIntyre and Mumford.
The cultivation of the virtues and of moral and aesthetic values, notions of ‘objective’ moral truth and beauty, are, to say the least, contentious issues in an age of emotivism in ethics and subjective preference in market society and economics. Even if we accept that there are such things as identifiably virtues and values worthy of being cultivated, then that still begs the question of the agencies of such cultivation – family, church, school, business organisation, occupational group, professional body, political party, state or an interimbrication of social groups and associational bodies in the virtuous society? Those are questions I am taking up elsewhere. My view is that such cultivation creates what Tocqueville calls ‘habits of the heart’ and comes from within the social fabric of everyday living, what MacIntyre calls ‘communities of practice’ within organised life, human social groups and everyday interaction as a schooling in the virtues. It is not an engineering from the outside in which intellectual, moral and aesthetic virtues and values are taught by an organised system, but mediated within the social, psychic and emotional fabric. I need to spell that view out at length. Here, it can only be vague and suggestive. And quote MacIntyre himself:
‘When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community. And that regeneration enables such plain persons to put to the question the dominant modes of moral and social discourse and the institutions that find their expression in those modes. It was they who were the intended and, pleasingly often, the actual readers of After Virtue, able to recognize in its central theses articulations of thoughts that they themselves had already begun to formulate and expressions of feeling by which they themselves were already to some degree already moved.’
My main concern here, in passing, is to draw attention to the striking similarity between Mumford's view in 1946 that virtue has become ‘like a dead language to which we have lost the key’ and the view of Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1981 book After Virtue that virtue has become meaningless separated from the practices and communities that formed their content. Against the fragmentation of the overarching moral framework and the concomitant hollowing out of moral reasoning and language, MacIntyre presents the virtues as substantial components of the human self as a whole self. This is to offer a particular view of social identity in terms of a self that is embedded within a wealth and variety of social groups, interactions and interconnections, giving a sense of meaning in relation to the good life, cultivating the virtues required for successful living in accordance with goal of the good life, and within which the individual is capable of acting a morally responsible and intelligent being. Like Mumford decades before him, MacIntyre notes that this goal of a good life, ‘is something that ceases to be generally available at some point in the progress--if we can call it such--towards and into modernity.’ Instead of the whole self, oriented by the goal of a good life, modern social identity abstracts the self from social life and its attachments and instead locates it in a bifurcated Weberian organisational order: social life is governed by given impersonal ends of formal and instrumental rationality, a social world which proceeds ‘without regard to persons,’ leaving moral choice available only in the personal realm of the ‘emotivist self,’ a realm of subjectivist ends which, ultimately, are criterionless and hence arbitrary and, ultimately, meaningless.
MacIntyre begins After Virtue by drawing attention to a moral catastrophe that has occurred without us noticing. He asks us to imagine what would happen if every piece of scientific truth we know would come to be eliminated overnight. The result would be chaos. That, he argues, is precisely what has happened to morality and our moral language in the modern world. If you think that that is an extreme view, then bear in mind the way that Nietzsche drew attention to the emptiness of morality over one hundred years ago. MacIntyre takes us Nietzsche’s challenge, in order to avoid having to live in a Nietzschean world of power and power struggles.
Mumford’s ‘methodology’ is very interesting indeed. He draws on a range of sources but was hard on a formless eclecticism which had not undergone a difficult and radical synthesis in thought. There is a consistent thread but … there is a surplus, an excess, something that evades reason, something essential that is left over from philosophical and sociological analysis. Time and again, it is to literature and the great writers that Mumford turns, and his ‘poetic’ prose offers a very serious answer to the aporias and limits of conventional discourse of history, the temporal analytics of philosophy and the ideal-type abstractions of sociology.
A very interesting man is Mumford. He is not an academic philosopher, or an academic of any type. He weaves a rich variety of materials together in elaborating his consistent theme. I’m not sure I need to present the man’s work via a philosophical and methodological reconstruction, because there are limits and tensions in theoretical abstraction that detract from the power of the man’s insights. Those are not just limits and tensions in his approach, but in any kind of axiological extensionism. I shall focus on his theme and his critical insights. I suspect there is a reason, indicated above with respect to the aporias and limits of theoretical abstraction and analysis, why Mumford wrote in the literary way he did, poetically and artistically, and is all the more relevant and powerful for that.
He’s full of insights. Just a few examples off the top of my head as I pass by. Mumford was writing of the power of the techno-capitalist social formation to generate universal disorder way back in the 1930s and 1940s. He noted that the rapid development of capitalism and technology in tandem led to a worship pure power divorced from purpose, what he called a ‘purposeless materialism.’
‘Civilisation begins by a magnificent materialisation of human purpose: it ends in a purposeless materialism. An empty triumph, which revolts even the self that created it.’ (Mumford 1957 ch 3).
For Mumford, this sudden evaporation of meaning and value, often coming at the time a civilisation seems to be at its height, is one of the enigmas of history: ‘we face it again in our own time.’
‘If the values of civilisation were in fact a sufficient fulfilment of man's nature, it would be impossible to explain this inner emptiness and purposelessness. Military defeats, economic crises, political dissensions, do not account for this inner collapse: at best they are symptomatic, for the victor is equally the victim and he who becomes rich feels impoverished. The deeper cause seems to be man's self-alienation from the sources of life.’ (Mumford 1957 ch 3).
Mumford describes purposeless materialism as ‘the vice that now threatens to overwhelm our own civilization in the very midst of its technological advancement’. (Mumford 1966 ch 4).
As to the sources of life … and the sources of meaning. These are not just material but moral, metaphysical even. MacIntyre again:
‘Kant was right; morality did in the eighteenth century, as a matter of historical fact, presuppose something like the teleological scheme of God, freedom and happiness as the final crown of virtue which Kant propounds. Detach morality from that framework and you will no longer have morality; or, at the very least, you will have radically transformed its character.' (MacIntyre).
Our mistake is to have treated materialization as an end in itself. Which involves the worship of new, self-created, idols. At least two decades before the phrase ‘the military-industrial complex’ appeared, Mumford was writing at length on this very theme, showing how this complex goes deep into the modern psyche and mentality, the religion of the machine inaugurating a new world of realizable power, inciting the chimeras of infinite technological control and endless domination of space on earth and, if need be, in the entire universe. Fossil fuels? Capitalist industry he showed to be a state of war, class against class, nation against nation, humanity against planet – and a state of mind. ‘The mine is nothing less in fact than the concrete model of the conceptual world which was built up by the physicists of the seventeenth century.’ In this abstractly calculated world, the effects are that brutality, matter and men are organized with the ruthlessness of modern warfare. In the mine, day is swapped for night. Weight, number, speed and above all time (the ‘shift’) create a manufactured environment where even the air has to be imported: ‘blast: dump: crush: extract: exhaust – there was indeed something devilish about the whole business.’ If the mine was war-like, the whole of industrial development tends towards war: ‘The army is in fact the ideal form toward which a purely mechanical system of industry must tend.’
In a lecture given at Colombia University in the early 1940s, Mumford speaks in forthright terms of the illusions and delusions of this power worship:
‘The same disorder today exists throughout the planet, wherever our common civilization, with its railroads, its airplanes, its radios, and its guns has reached. And we in America [cling] to the illusion of isolation, fancying that we are outside these processes of distintegration and by the exercise of a circumspect and pharisaical virtue will escape the evils of our time …
Across the top of the typescript of this lecture, Mumford wrote ‘I was never asked back.’
So there’s another scandal to the academy.
I hesitate to quote the passage with which MacIntyre closes After Virtue because it has been apt to misinterpreted as a nostalgic, and even politically quietist, lament when read in abstraction from his developed arguments. Stated simply, MacIntyre argues for the revaluation of local forms of community and for a reinvigoration of the practices which sustain the making of the good life in Aristotle's sense. He argues for much more than this, I would quickly add, and MacIntyre should be read at length to appreciate the nuances of his argument. (I’m currently preparing a book on Rousseau who has a genius for penning beautifully written, eye-catching, provocative passages that, taken in isolation, give a very misleading impression of his considered view.)
MacIntyre brings After Virtue to a close by drawing parallels between the contemporary world and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. If we accept the collapse of the tradition of the virtues and the commitment to the common good and its replacement by egoism and individualism, then
‘what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.
And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.’
MacIntyre 1981: 263
That passage has been quoted so many times, with views being attributed to MacIntyre that he does not share, that MacIntyre has had to explain what he meant on more than a few occasions:
‘In the last sentence of After Virtue, I spoke of us waiting for another St. Benedict. Benedict’s greatness lay in making possible a quite new kind of institution, that of the monastery of prayer, learning and labour, in which and around which communities could not only survive, but flourish in a period of social and cultural darkness. The effects of Benedict’s founding insights and of their institutional embodiment by those who learned from them were from the standpoint of his own age quite unpredictable. And it was my intention to suggest, when I wrote that last sentence in 1980, that ours too is a time of renewal. It is also a time for resisting as prudently and courageously and justly and temperately as possible the dominant social, economic and political order of advanced modernity.’
Those views, calling upon us to retreat from ‘the new dark ages’ that are upon us, are an echo of Lewis Mumford’s call back in 1970 for us to see through the ‘myth’ of the Megamachine, refuse its bribe and resist its bullying, and withdraw from ‘the pentagon of power’ by creating our own organic forms of the common life. In this passage from The Myth of the Machine - The Pentagon of Power, Mumford refers explicitly to ‘human renewal’ and to the ‘renewal of life.’ It was the consistent theme of his work. In affirming virtues and values in the common life, Mumford gives us so much more than a lamentation in nostalgic mode – he sets our sights on a feasible future and looks to ‘a more vigorous life-promoting solution’:
‘How long, those who are now awake must ask themselves, how long can the physical structure of an advanced technology hold together when all its human foundations are crumbling away? All this has happened so suddenly that many people are hardly aware that it has happened at all: yet during the last generation the very bottom has dropped out of our life; the human institutions and moral convictions that have taken thousands of years to achieve even a minimal efficacy have disappeared before our eyes: so completely that the next generation will scarcely believe they ever existed.
If these outer bastions of the Pentagon of Power have been taken, how long will it be before the center itself surrenders or blows up?
The Roman Empire in the East won a new lease on life for a thousand years by coming to terms with Christianity. If the Power System is to continue in existence as a working partner in a more organic complex dedicated to the renewal of life, it will only be if its dynamic leaders, and those larger groups that they influence, have undergone a profound change of heart and mind, of ideal and purpose, as great as that which for so long arrested the decay of the Eastern empire established in Byzantium. But it must be remembered that this intermixture of Roman and Christian institutions was achieved at the expense of creativity. So until the disintegration of our own society has gone even further, there is reason to look for a more vigorous life-promoting solution. Whether such a response is possible depends upon an unknown factor: how viable are the formative ideas that are now in the air, and how ready are our contemporaries to undertake the efforts and sacrifices that are essential for human renewal? There are no purely technological answers.
Has Western civilization yet reached the point in etherialization where detachment and withdrawal will lead to the assemblage of an organic world picture, in which the human personality in all its dimensions will have primacy over its biological needs and technological pressures? That question cannot be answered except in action. But the evidences for such a transformation have already been put forward.
In a hundred different places, the marks of such de-materialization and etherialization are already visible: many more than I have felt it necessary to cite. If I dare to foresee a promising future other than that which the technocrats (the power elite) have been confidently extrapolating, it is because I have found by personal experience that it is far easier to detach oneself from the system and to make a selective use of its facilities than the promoters of the Affluent Society would have their docile subjects believe.
Though no immediate and complete escape from the ongoing power system is possible, least of all through mass violence, the changes that will restore autonomy and initiative to the human person all lie within the province of each individual soul, once it is roused. Nothing could be more damaging to the myth of the machine, and to the dehumanized social order it has brought into existence, than a steady withdrawal of interest, a slowing down of tempo, a stoppage of senseless routines and mindless acts. And has not all this in fact begun to happen?
When the moment comes to replace power with plenitude, compulsive external rituals with internal, self-imposed discipline, depersonalization with individuation, automation with autonomy, we shall find that the necessary change of attitude and purpose has been going on beneath the surface during the last century, and the long buried seeds of a richer human culture are now ready to strike root and grow, as soon as the ice breaks up and the sun reaches them. If that growth is to prosper, it will draw freely on the compost from many previous cultures.
When the power complex itself becomes sufficiently etherialized, its formative universal ideas will become usable again, passing on its intellectual vigor and its discipline, once applied mainly to the management of things, to the management and enrichment of man's whole subjective existence.
As long as man's life prospers there is no limit to its possibilities, no terminus to its creativity; for it is part of the essential nature of man to transcend the limits of his own biological nature, and to be ready if necessary to die in order to make such transcendence possible.
Those who are unable to accept William James' perception that the human person has always been the "starting point of new effects" and that the most solid-seeming structures and institutions must collapse as soon as the formative ideas that have brought them into existence begin to dissolve, are the real prophets of doom. On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by 'going with' its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man's vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine's meaningless existence. But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.’
Mumford, The Myth of the Machine - The Pentagon of Power 1971 ch 15, Epilogue: The Advancement of Life pp 433-435