How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen

Author:Francis Wheen [Francis Wheen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007382071
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

8

Candles in the wind

Ours is an evangelical culture. So many people convinced that they’ve been saved by Jesus, cured by homeopathy or the laying on of hands, abducted by aliens or protected by angels seek public acknowledgement that their convictions are true. Imbued with messianic fervour, or simply seeking ‘validation’, they are not content to hoard the truth; they are compelled to share it and convert the unenlightened, relying on the force of their own intense emotions. Generally, the only proof offered for a fantastic belief is the passion it inspires.

WENDY KAMINER, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials (1999)

In September 1981, a few months after Ronald Reagan’s arrival in the White House, the University of Notre Dame Press published After Virtue, a short philosophical tract by the British academic Alasdair MacIntyre – and suddenly found that it had a bestseller on its hands, thanks to an ecstatic article in Newsweek magazine praising this ‘stunning new study of ethics’ which ‘projects a conservative revolution far more radical than any imagined by the men who rule America today’. As Newsweek reported, ‘His slogan, he quips in conversation, is “forward to the twelfth century” – but he’s not joking about the chaos and decay of modern society.’ MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment had been ‘a catastrophe’ for ethical discourse: by substituting its idea of universally available and necessary moral principles for older notions of virtue ordained by divine authority, and by abandoning religious teleology (the belief that there is an ultimate purpose in life), it had ushered in a ‘new dark age’ of barbarism and nihilism. ‘What, then,’ he asked, ‘is to be done in the face of such wholesale moral collapse?’ The answer, bizarrely, was to take refuge in medieval monastic orders such as the Benedictines.

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 our 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. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St Benedict.

MacIntyre was a former Marxist, whose intense anti-liberalism facilitated his transfer of allegiance from Leon Trotsky to Thomas Aquinas. Ex-Trotskyists who have been ‘mugged by reality’ (in the words of one such apostate, Irving Kristol) usually become enthusiastic cheerleaders for liberal capitalism. Not so MacIntyre, who remained wholly unreconciled to modernity. The natural rights and self-evident truths proclaimed in the American declaration of independence were tantamount to ‘belief in witches and in unicorns’; Edmund Burke, a hero to most conservatives, was ‘an agent of positive harm’. Since writing After Virtue MacIntyre has formally converted to Catholicism, and

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