Hildegarde

Well, first things first.

I’m not really talking or thinking or writing about all this stuff because I want to apply it to the contemporary world and construct some kind of universal moral code for all of us to follow.

Sometimes I like to think and write about this stuff because I just do–I like to know because it’s there to know.  Or at least investigate.

And I don’t really care whether or not people here and now would agree with me or not.   The status of truth, and of reality, is not dependent on its popularity.  If everybody on the planet thought the world was flat, it would still be round.

MacIntyre brings up some points that are interesting to me in and of themselves, both in his central argument and in some of the side issues he deals with.  This morning, about halfway through the book, I found the most coherent reading of Sophocles’s Antigone I’d ever seen, and it cleared up a lot about that play that had always puzzled me.  It also cleared up a lot about my response to that play in its various guises and versions and modern retellings.

I may actually get around to talking about that eventually.

For today, though:  aside from the differences in the premises and content of moral philosophy I’ve already been on about here, differences between the world before the Enlightenment and the world since, MacIntyre points out that there is a difference in the questions that philosophy was supposed to answer.

In the world before the Enlightenment, the question moral philosophy was supposed to answer was:  what kind of person should I be?

In the world since the Englightenment, the question moral philosophy was supposed to answer was:  what rules should I follow?

And even though it appears as if the first of those two questions should entail the second, it doesn’t quite, and the lack of the first question in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment moral philosophy causes a lot of problems in answering the question it did attempt to answer.

I feel like my tongue is turning into ribbons and bows.

And no, I’m not talking out loud here at the computer.  But you know what I mean.

What strikes me about this, though, is that, if there’s a single signature characteristic of twentieth and twenty-first century American life, it’s the idea that each of us can make ourselves into what we want to be. 

That is, that each of us can decide that we’d rather be very different than we are, and by hard work and perserverance change ourselves into whatever that is. 

And we mean that radically–we resist the idea that we have any inborn limitations at all.  Don’t like your sex?  We have sex-change operations.  Don’t like the way you talk?  We have speech therapists, accent training. 

There’s even an MTV reality show called Made on which teenagers who desperately want to be something they aren’t likely to be successful at get lots of help and coaching:  the fat, unatheletic girl who wants to be on the cheerleading team was the one I actually watched several episodes of.

It seems to me that in a culture so determined to have each of us be whatever we decide to be, there ought to be at least some examination of what kinds of things it would be a good idea to aspire to.  What kind of person should I be? sounds like it ought to be our central cultural question.

I don’t think it’s a question anybody asks, however, because we have resolved it, and not always tacitly, with the answer, “anything you really want.”

And we believe that even though we don’t actually believe it, if that makes any sense.  We would not think it was all right if somebody answered the question with “I want to be a pedophile” or “I want to be a cannibal” or “I want to bring National Socialism back to Europe.”

In the meantime, we do address the question of what rules I should follow, but we largely do it by saying that there should be as few rules as possible, close to none, because rules are inherently oppressive.  They’re just you imposing your religion/philosophy/whatever on me.

And we do all that while organizations both on and off college campuses campaign vigorously for a conception of the self as completely static in all kinds of ways–bound by race and sex and ethnicity in ways that we cannot escape.

In other words, the culture of autonomous individualism is getting increasingly incoherent, and what is incoherent is, in the long term, unstable.

All of which brings me back to the question that started me going on all this a few days ago:  is it possible to construct a single, universally applicable moral code founded, as Thomas Aquinas would have put it, on reason alone?

The question is:  is it possible?

It’s not:  would people accept it?

For the moment, I just want to know what’s true.