Enlightenment Contested, Part II -- Contra MacIntyre

I'm continuing my way through Jonathan Israel's latest book, Enlightenment Contested. As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the things I have appreciated about Israel's work is his willingness to engage in polemics with scholars who have opposed the Enlightenment project. In this post I'd like to focus on one of those scholars, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

Academic critics of the Enlightenment in recent years can generally be divided into a left camp, which has built off of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and a right camp, which has drawn on the work of Aristotle. The left camp has worked under such labels as deconstruction, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, while members the right camp have been known as communitarians or neo-aristotelians. There is no particular logic to this division -- Nietzsche was no man of the left, and Aristotle of course predates any such political distinctions. My own guess is that Nietzsche's anti-Christian pronouncements may give him a kind of a leftist veneer, whereas the long connection between Aristotle and the Catholic Church might make him appealing to conservatives.

MacIntyre appears to have begun his career as something of a leftist. His first book, published in 1953, attempts to draw comparisons between Christianity and Marxism. However, by the time he wrote After Virtue, MacIntyre had become something of a Road Warrior-style dystopian. I know this sounds dramatic, but a passage from the end of his book should confirm my characterization:

If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. 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 borders; they have already been governing us for some time.

Of course, MacIntyre was not alone in 1981 thinking about apocalypse. I remember watching a Saturday-morning television program in the late 70's, Ark II, which featured a group of scientists, along with their pet monkey, traveling in a souped-up motorhome through apocalyptic landscape, bringing the light of science to those they met. But bringing enlightenment and scientific understanding to a benighted world is not what MacIntyre has in mind to do in After Virtue. The key word in the above quotation is "local forms of community." There is something appealing about this image, in an odd sort of way. Less like Ark II and more like the clan in Road Warrior, who huddle together in their refinery/fortress and use flame throwers to defend against marauders, we must grab at ideas that will help us to support each other in small communities as the world crumbles around us. Well, perhaps I exaggerate when I call this vision appealing. Romantic, perhaps.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here. What does MacIntyre mean when he talks about local forms of community, and why is this his answer to the collapse of civilization as we know it? This is where we get into MacIntyre's critique of the Enlightenment. MacIntyre rejects entirely any notion of ideas that are universally applicable. While an idea may be shown to be true or false within the context of its own tradition, there is no there is no way to adjudicate between the truth claims of rival traditions. MacIntyre reaches for local forms of community not because it's in some way better than a universal conception of human society, but because it's the only game in town.

While he strongly implies that this is true for the natural sciences (take, for example, when he speaks of Newton's laws of physics, which, according to MacIntyre, merely "purport to be universal in scope"), MacIntyre's real focus in this book is on those ideas which govern human action. For Enlightenment thinkers, pre-emininent among such ideas was that of human equality. Not surprisingly, then, MacIntyre spends a great deal of time attacking the notion that humans can be be discussed in any general way without specifying the specific circumstances of the persons under discussion. Paraphrasing Aristotle approvingly, MacIntyre notes that "to be a man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God. It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that 'man' ceases to be a functional concept." In other words, it simply makes no sense to talk about a human without reference to the roles he or she inhabits. A person is not a human being but a worker, minority, a woman, a criminal, a plutocrat, and so on.

So getting back to the Enlightenment again, where does that leave some of its central ideas? Most of us in the United States were schooled in Enlightenment ideas when we learned about the Declaration of Independence. In case your memory is a bit rusty, here's an episode of School House Rock to remind you. Thomas Jefferson and company argued concisely, beginning with the "self-evident" truth of human equality, and then famously asserting several rights, including those of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," that flow from that first truth. MacIntyre is just as swift in his dismissal of these ideas. He begins by noting somewhat wryly that the idea of general human rights did not find expression before 1400, but then he cuts to the chase:

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were.And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.

It doesn't take much in the way of subtle analysis to see something disturbing in MacIntyre's argument. His reference to witches and unicorns is nothing more than a cheap rhetorical ploy, in which a bully tries to foist the failings of his own position onto his opponent. The systematic attack on magical beliefs was unquestionably one of the central (and well-documented) tasks of Enlightenment thinkers, but here MacIntyre attempts to clothe himself in the dress of those victorious thinkers even as he attacks their central ideas. But back to his argument; a paragraph later he lets the other shoe drop. He argues that there is no basis to assert these rights because "we know that there are no self-evident truths."

This exposition has taken longer than I thought it would, and I haven't even gotten back to Israel's critique! I plan on continuing with a follow-up post soon.