Hildegarde

An addendum, actual post below.

ACK.

       Okay–I’m going to try t his one more time.

        Mique say–

<<<Sowell is not talking about smart people. 

       I KNOW THAT.

       IT DOESN’T MATTER.

       Sorry to shout, but I’ve got no idea why so many of you find this distinction so hard to understand.

       It doesn’t matter what Sowell is talking about.     
      
       It ONLY matter what people will THINK he’s talking about when they HAVEN’T read his book.

       I’m talking about the creation of a climate.

       Sowell adds to the GENERAL IMPRESSION that Republicans and conservaties hate smart people.

       IT DOESN’T MATTER that the  INSIDE of his book says something else–the people he gives this impression to by using the word “intellectual” in the way he does WON’T READ THE BOOK.

       I’m sorry to do all this shouting, but no matter how many times I try to make this point, people persist in discussing what Sowell actually says INSIDE the book.

       It literally DOESN’T MATTER what he says inside the book.

       All that matters is the  IMPRESSION the mere fact of the title gives people who WON’T read it.

Every once in a while, something happens here that really takes me aback, and the responses to yesterday’s blog are the kind of thing that does it.

Everybody who wrote in with a comment did the same thing–returned to the conception of the problem in Antigone as one of “good” vs “evil” and “right” vs “wrong.”

But MacIntyre’s entire point is that this is NOT what is going on for Sophocles.

For Sophocles, Creon is right to do what he does

AND

Antigone is ALSO right to do what she does.

Antigone does not do what she does because Creon is wrong, or to protest Creon’s tyranny.

Antigone does what she does because that is what she must do as a sister.

The moral rightness of her actions are defined by her ROLE.

In the same way, Creon does what he does because that is what he must do as king.

The moral rightness of his actions are defined by his ROLE.

Both Antigone and Creon do the morally right thing. 

When morality is defined by roles and not by autonomous individuals, it is possible for two people to BOTH be morally right in what they do and yet to be in conflict.

You all gave exactly the kind of modern reading to Antigone that McIntyre was warning against.

If you think about it, this understanding of a way of approaching morality explains a couple of things I’ve always had trouble with.

The first is the abundance of what I would call “double standards” in the classical through Medieal periods.

In a post-Enlightenment world of autonomous individuals, we assume that, as the saying goes, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  Therefore if men are to be indulged in screwing around outside marriage, women should be too–what is okay for the man must be okay for the woman, and what is condemned in the woman must be condemned in the man.

But in a moral universe where what is morally right is determined by how well any individual person fulfills a role, this would not be the case.  It would not even be intelligible.

For much of the Middle Ages, moral worth was determined by roles, not by individual behavior–hell, that’s probably been the case through much of human history.

Therefore, for Mary to be morally good, we have to ask what she is–a mother?  a daughter?  a wife?  a queen? 

Each of those roles have different requirements, and Mary can only be called morally good if she fulfills those requirements.

She is not a barber, so if she fulfills the role of barber it is not to her credit–and if she fulfills the role of barber to the exclusion of her ability to fulfil her real roles, then she will be “morally evil” for doing what an actual barber would be called “morally good” for doing.

I have no idea if I’m getting this across.  I thought I was, yesterday, but the comments didn’t disagree with the point so much as they just ignored it and behaved as if it hadn’t been said, so I’m not sure what’s going on.

It also explains a little why Aristotle made such a mess of the Poetics.

And he did make a mess of it.  When I first read that book–and it’s a very small book–in high school or so (no, not as part of the official curriculum), I imagined Sophocles reacting like all the other playwrights have acted when reading the critics ever since–by rolling his eyes and sighing.

Because although the Poetics is supposed to be basing its aesthetic theory on Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, it is in fact a very bad account of that play. 

Aristotle’s explanation for the action was that Oedipus had a “fatal flaw,” something lacking in himself that drove him to his fate–but, in fact, although Oedipus has indeed got such a flaw (and maybe a few of them) what drives him to his fate is…fate.

Oedipus’s assigned role on this earth is to work out this particular fate.  If he accepts it, he will meet it.  If he fights against it, he will still meet it.  He has no choice, and there is no solution to his dilemma.

None.

Oedipus did nothing to deserve his fate, and his father–his real father, the one he kills eventually–did nothing wrong in putting him out to die as an infant.  In fact, it’s exactly what the old king should have done under the circumstances.

Nor is Oedipus wrong to react the way he does when he hears that the murderer of the old king is known.  In fact, had he acted in any other way, he would have committed a moral wrong.  His declared punishment of the wrongdoer is right and just.  It is right and just even though the wrongdoer turns out to be himself.

For Sophocles, the moral rightness or wrongness of any act was in whether or not the person committing it was fulfilling the duties of his assigned role, NOT in whether or not the act itself was intrinsically good or evil on some abstract measure.

For what it’s worth, Aristotle was almost as uncomfortable about this idea of morality as we are.

I say almost, because Aristotle solved the problem mostly by simply denying that people in certain roles could actually be moral at all.

Therefore, the moral person was a free man in a free state with enough means at his disposal to meet the requirement of magnanimity and generosity, and to be free of the burdens of chasing after money to secure his sustenance.

And yes, under this definition, both Aristotle and his teachers, Plato and Socrates, would have found themselves unqualified to aspire to living the life of a good man.

But my point here, I think, is that even Aristotle had to acknowledge the importance of roles to moral standing.  He could not deny what he saw around him, which was that we do not call a wife “good” for doing the same things a warrior does, or vice versa.

We, of course, do not accept this at all, because we do not accept the idea that people are what their roles make them.  We see ourselves, and have seen ourselves since the late Renaissance, as free and autonomous individuals for whom roles are like clothing.  “I’m going to put on my chef’s hat,” we say, when we settle down to cook after a long day working as an accountant. 

For Sophocles, for Aristotle, even for Aquinas, a role was not something you could take on or off.  You belonged to it–it defined who you were, and what was required of you to be good. 

Therefore, it was possible to identify and codify an objective moral code for human beings, because all you were doing was listing the requirements of the roles.

Which is not the same thing as saying that nobody ever legitimately got to change their role–but that’s for a future day, and I want to go listen to some music.

P.S.  I don’t remember who posted the comment, but I knew, even when I was writing those posts, that Sowell was NOT talking about the broad standard definition of “intellectual” when he was using the word “intellectual.”

And that was my problem with him–I’ve read the book by now, and I know what he’s going for, but the man or woman on the street is just going to go, “Hmm.  Sowell. Conservative, isn’t he?  Well, there the conservatives go again, bashing smart people.”

That is the impression that kind of thing gives, and that impression turns off a lot of people who might otherwise vote Republican and/or be conservatives. 

It’s the Republican Party shooting itself in the foot, once again–no matter what Sowell ACTUALLY meant. 

I still say he should find a different word instead of misusing “intellectual.”

Let me go back for a minute to Sophocles’s Antigone, a play about a sister who buries her brother when the King (her uncle) has forbidden that burial. 

That sounds a little dry, put that way, but the play itself isn’t dry.  Over the years it has not only had many productions, but many modern versions, sort of like Romeo and Juliet.  There is in this play something that commends it to modern writers, and especially to modern writers concerned with the Fascism, the Second World War, and, later, Vietnam.

I first read this play in a college course, which is an interest fact in and of itself, at least to me.  I read almost no literature for the first time in a college course, because I was one of those people who read obsessively from a very early age.  I discovered Hemingway and the Lost Generation in junior high school, and I’d gone through most of the Greek dramatists at least once by the time I was fifteen.

But although I’d read Oedipus Tyrannus during the long run up to finally getting the hell out of the house and out of that town to what I hoped was real life, I’d never read Antigone.  That means I’ve never been able to read it without an official interpretation already in my head.

I don’t know if I’d have had the problems I’ve had with it if that hadn’t been the case.

The interpretation I was given in that college course matches the interpretations I have run into since over the years:  that the play is a dramatization of the clash of individual conscience and state authority. 

The plot goes, more or less, like this:  Oedipus is forced to leave town and give up his throne when the world (and he himself) learns that he has murdered his father and married his mother.

His two sons by that marriage fight over the throne left vacant, and the fight is won by the younger son, Eteocles.  The older son, Polyneices, refuses to accept this, and mounts an armed rebellion against Thebes.  The two brothers then kill each other on the battlefield, and their bodies lie out in the open air until some member of their family is willing to bury them.

Okay, actually, all that happens off stage and before the play starts.  The play actually starts with Creon–Oedipus’s brother in law, I think–taking over the throne and commanding that Eteocles’s body will be buried, but Polyneices’s body will not, and must be left outside to rot, becaue Polyneices had waged war against a legitimate king.

Antigone, the sister of the two dead brothers, takes offense at this, because proper burial was enormously important to Greek society, and to leave a body unburied was to dishonor not only the man but the family from which he came.

Okay, let me interject here.  One of the things that always bothered me about this play is the fact that worrying about unburied bodies in a family whose children were the result of mother-son incest is…ah…possibly disproportionate.

Anyway, Creon decrees that anybody caught even trying to bury Polyneices’s body will be put to death by being walled up alive.  Antigone goes off and does it anyway, and in due course in the play, she admits to her act (boasts of it, finally) and is in fact walled up.

After this, it gets a little complicated–complicated in a way that Sophocles likes to make things complicated.  Creon is told by Tiresias–the same blind seer who brought Oedipus to justice in the end–that the gods want Polyneices buried, and if he is not then Creons own son will die in punishment of Creons acts.  Creon then buries Polyneices again himself and goes to rescue Antigone, but Antigone turns out to have hanged herself in her prison, and the whole thing ends in tragedy.

If that last part seems a little confused and meandering, it always seemed much the same to me.  And I think it goes a long way in explaining why so many interpretations of the play have assumed that the issue here is Tyranny, in the person of  Creon, and the right of the individual conscience to resist it.

That was certainly the interpretation  Jean Annouilh used for his 1960s version of the play, in modern dress, that was later made into a television production with,  I think, Genevieve Bujold as  Antigone.  Creon was played as if he were Mussolini.

This is not surprising, really, because the right of individual conscience to resist and oppose tyranny was Annouilh’s constant subject.  It’s the foundation of his Becket, which is interesting.  The real Jean Annouilh would almost certainly have taken the other side in that debate if it had recurred in twentieth century France, but Becket’s resistance to state power was so important that Annouilh doesn’t seem to have bothered to examine the issue at hand.

For me, the odd thing about Annouilh’s Antigone is that I finished watching it firm in my conviction that it was Creon, not Antigone, who was right.  I’m as touchy about the uses of state power as anybody could be, but in Annouilh’s version I thought  Antigone’s position had very little to commend itself, and that she was acting like an adolescent.

There is, of course, no real way to see Creon as in the right in that play, in either version, if you assume that the play is about the individual conscience’s right and duty to resist the power of the state.

What MacIntyre did was to show me a possible alternative interpretation.   We think the play is about the right of individual conscience against the power of the state, he says, because we assume that somebody must be right and somebody must be wrong, that virtue requires clear and unambiguous and unconflicting rules for human behavior.

For Sophocles, however, the great tragedy of human life is precisely that the rules do conflict.  Each of us is “good” by virtue of whether or not we properly fulfill the roles assigned to us by birth and fortune, and if we all do that, we will inevitably clash.

Antigone is right to do what she does, and Creon is also right to do what he does.  Antigone is upholding piety.  Creon is upholding justice.  In this particular place at this particular time, these two virtues are in conflict–and there is no possible resolution.

When Creon finds that the gods want Polyneices’s buried, it isn’t because the gods think Antigone is right to do what she does and Creon is wrong, but simply because the god prefer it.  They come in to end the argument on Antigone’s side, but they do not thereby resolve the argument on Antigone’s side.

There is no resolution to the argument. 

I’ve been looking around to see if I can find any of my copies of this thing, or even a textbook which has it, because I’d like to reread it and see.  Without such a chance to recheck, though, this interpretation makes a lot more sense to me, given the content of the play itself and the narrative arc as it works itself out, than the interpretations I’d been given in college classrooms and that I have myself sometimes given as a teacher in those classrooms. 

In Greek society, MacIntyre says, human life is a struggle that always ends in defeat.  Sophocles’s interest in that struggle is to illuminate it and its conflicting demands on us, and finally to make us aware of that defeat.

The first thing to occur to me here is–no wonder Christianity went through Greece like wildfire.  

Whatever.  My thing on Antigone.  I’ll get to the social sciences later.

P.S.  Up on Arts and Letters Daily today was this article by Theodore Dalrymple on comments that go up on the Internet

       http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/58706/sec_id/58706

And I’ll have to admit, the funniest thing about it is the fact that you can leave comments.  But its an interesting issue, too, and does not hold true for the comments to this blog, for which I’m grateful.

P.P.S.  I find myself a little bemused by the comments on Band of Brothers.  I’m grateful for the input on things like the historical accuracy of the battles and the uniforms, but what I was really wondering was whether or not you guys thought the portrayal of the officers and enlisted men was good, bad, indifferent, accurate, inaccurate, whatever.

This may have something to do with the fact that I had just read the Sowell, which includes two chapters on “intellectuals and war,” and one of his big points had to do with the portrayal of soldiers in the media–as heroes in WWI, and then as victims, often mutual victims on both sides, on the other, and then (in Vietnam) as babykillers and worse. 

I am, I’ll admit, watching this series obsessively.  So it’s not that I don’t like it.  I just don’t know if the portrayal of the men and officers is as admirable as I think it is or if I’m just so used to military people being portrayed as wimps or nutcases that even sort-of good looks wonderful.

If that makes sense.

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.

Spring Break starts on Monday.  That means that, as of Saturday, I have an entire ten days when I do not have to get up at three thirty in the morning even once.  I must be getting old.  I used to do that all the time.  Now, if I don’t get the extra hour, I’m grumpy.

Let me clarify something, to begin with.  When I said that the idea of the autonomous individual was necessary for the advancement of science on the scale we’ve seen it over the last two hundred years, I didn’t mean that scientists had to view human beings as autonomous individuals.

I meant scientists had to view themselves as autonomous individuals.

Those paradigm shifts are the ball game.  They occur seldom or never when people view themselves as embedded in webs of relation, because, historically, viewing oneself as so embedded has meant viewing oneself as required to show deference to those older and wiser than oneself.

The advancement of science requires people–most often fairly young people–who are willing to say, “look, old fogey, step aside, you’ve got this all wrong.”

A person in the middle Ages–or in Aristotle’s Athens–with such an attitude would have been viewed by his society as, at best, a barbarian.  At worst, he would have been labelled hopelessly and fatally corrupt. 

That was why it took so long to break away from Aristotelian natural science.  The old canard about how the Middle Ages simply “thought” about the natural world while in the late Renaissance and Enlightenment they started to experiment with it is false.  The Middle Ages saw a great deal of experimentation, including the first attempts at controlled experimentation, in science.

And if you can find one of those books that contain translations of scientific notebooks and observational diaries from the years around 1200 or so, you’ll be surprised at how meticulous those operations were and how carefully designed were some of the experiments.  

The problem was not lack of empirical research but the felt need to explain such research in Aristotelian terms–Aristotle was, after all, the master, and we were his students, and a good student does not contradict the master, because the master’s wisdom is (by definition) superior to his own.

Robert says that, even using functional or teleological definitions of the human, it would still be impossible to construct a moral code because we would still be fighting over the definition of “good.”

And all I can say is–no, we wouldn’t.

The entire idea of different and competing definitions of the good was alien to classical society and to Christian Medieval society both.  The two worlds didn’t even see themselves competing on that score.

There was a lot of argument between Christianity and Pagan culture, but none of it was over what was to be accepted as “good.”  Augustine was able to be a highly successful and highly productive Pagan philosopher and later Christian philosopher precisely because understanding of the morally good and morally right had more in common between the two cultures than at variance. 

On the subject of the human being defined by role and function, the two societies were virtually identical, and they were more like than unlike the societies of the East to which they had little or not access. 

What made a woman a good mother and a good daughter, what made a man a good father, a good husband and a good son, what made the man a good citizen or a good subject–these roles were considered immutable and fixed.  Study them and you could determine what actions were proper to each, and therefore determine what was morally right for you to do. 

As for teleological conceptions of the human being–well, there were certainly arguments over that.

Sort of.

It would seem, at least on the surface, that Christianity introduced a new and alien teleology into the Pagan world–and it did.

Sort of.

The thing is, if you look at the history of philosphy over time, what you see is that Christian belief added something to the classical understanding of the ancient world, but it did not reject the pagan understanding of what it meant to be moral.

That was why Christians were universally admitted to be morally exemplary by the pagans who met them, even the pagans who disagreed with them about things like the divinity of Christ or the need to cast away the worship of the old gods, or thought that they were all a pack of cultural barbarians. 

One Roman emperor after another after Nero exhorted Romans to commit themselves to charity as the Christians did.  Pagan society made giving charity a part of the definition of a morally good person, but the Christians not only gave charity, they gave it unconditionally even to people who didn’t “deserve” it by their behavior and they gave it without seeking praise for it.

In other words, Christian thinking added something to the already existing Pagan moral ideal of giving charity to the poor–it didn’t change Paganism from being a society with no such moral ideal into one that was.

Even the examples usually given as showing that the change to Christian morality was “radical” don’t pan out on deeper study.

There is, for instance, the common practice of infanticide throughout the Greek and Roman worlds.  A father, having absolute power over his family, could command that an infant be exposed on the mountainside if it was deformed, or if there was some other reason why he believed it should not live.

Peter Singer would have felt right at home.

But unlike Singer, the Greeks and the Romans did not think this was a morally good action.  They didn’t event think it was morally neutral.

They thought it was a necessary evil–that it was something that “ought” not to be done, but that circumstances demanded. 

Christianity didn’t change the power of fathers, or protest the nature of the patriarchal family.  (See Augustine’s Confessions–I think one of the more interesting studies somebody could do would be one into Augustine’s relationship with his father, a person he repeatedly refers to as “that man” throughout his autobiography. The Confessions provide the world’s first recorded protest against patriarchal right–not a small thing in the time it was written, and too big a thing for Augustine to realize where his thinking would lead to if he let it get there.)

Anyway, sorry for the aside.

Christianity didn’t change the power of fathers, or even seek to, and did not protest the nature of the patriarchal family.  What it did was add to the definition of a “good father” a few things that hadn’t been there before.

Those thing were not minor–the duty to care for all one’s children, even when circumstances meant that such care would bring the family to utter ruin ; the duty to “love they wife as thyself.”

These had enormous implications for the lives of children and wives in families, but they did not amount to a paradigm shift.

Of course, Robert is quite right.  I probably wouldn’t like much of what would result from a return to functional and teleological definitions of what it means to be a human being.

But the issue isn’t whether or not I’d like it.  The issue is whether or not MacIntyre is correct in saying that no moral system of any kind can be constructed or maintained without such definitions.

That is, if MacIntyre is right that no universally binding and universally understood moral code is possible in a world that defines the human as an autonomous individual.

I say the question is still open. 

It’s true we have maintained widely accepted ideas of the moral throughout three hundred years of the human being as autonomous individual.  MacIntyre would say we’ve done it by clinging to the rules of older moral codes while pretending that their foundation hasn’t be shot away.

And we’ve gotten to a point, now, where the fact that those foundations no longer exist has begun to matter.

But I’ve been at this long enough, and I have tea and and a free morning, so I’m going to go listen to some Medieval English ballads sung by the King’s Noyse. 

Like the Greeks, the Medieval English were really into weepies.

Okay, let me tell you how I got here.

I did intend to go to an Agatha Christie after I finished the Sowell book, but I ran into a snag.

Monday, I had to proctor two midterm exams.  That meant I had to sit in front of a classroom for more than a couple of hours straight, and all I can do when I sit in front of a classroom is read. 

An Agatha Christie is not a good choice for this, because I read her too fast.  I’d be done before I got to the middle of the second exam.  She’s not a good choice for this because she’s also too easy to read, in the sense that I don’t have to apply my full concentration, which is what I want to do when I’m being bored to death in front of a horde of panicking students.

I went looking through my TBR stack and came up with a book called After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre.  It’s one of those books that I bought a few years ago because other people I read on a regular basis keep mentioning it.  In this case, other people on both sides of the present political/cultural divide keep mentioning it.  So I bought it at some point, and then I put it down, and kept circling it for a few years. 

It turned out to be just the kind of thing I was looking for for my exam day, so I picked it up and took it with me.  I was lucky enough to have a green highlighter in my purse, because I needed it.  It has a couple of really interesting ideas in it–already, and I’m only halfway through–but I thought I’d throw out one of them and see where it gets me.

First, though, I should explain that this is not a book of moral philosophy.  MacIntyre is not trying to enact or defend a moral ideal.  At least not yet. To this point, the book has been a project in philosophical criticism, and the criticism is directed at the Englightenment project to found a universally true and applicable moral code on Reason alone.

(I’m using “on Reason alone” here the way the phrase was used in the Middle Ages–to mean Reason without Revelation, not “just thinking” instead of “experimenting” or “collecting data.”  For the Middle Ages, Just Thinking and Experimenting and Collecting Data would all come under the category “by Reason alone,” since none of them required recourse to Scripture or the Magisterium.)

Anyway, the first of the interesting ideas MacIntyre comes up with is the possibility that part of the problem the Enlightenment has in its moral project comes from the fact that it does not define “human being” as it was defined consistently before that period.

The Middle Ages, MacIntyre says, and all the historical periods in the West before it, so the definition of “human being” to be like the definition of “watchmaker,’ say, or “dentist.”  That is, the definition was first and foremost a categorical one.

The Englightenment claims that “we can’t get an is from an ought,” as I see it often on the Web, but in fact we get “is” from “ought” all the time.  We can, for example, derive from the definition of “a barber” what a barber ought, and ought not, to do. 

For the Middle Ages, and for classical Athens and Rome, for Aquinas and Aristotle and Cicero, a “human being” was not an “individual,” radically alienated from all other individuals and existing as himself independently of them, but some set in a web of relationships–a mother, a daughter, a sister, a Roman, and on and on and on. 

And for each of these things, as for barbers, we know enough about the role involved to derive the ought from the is. 

It’s only when we begin to think of human beings as essentially alone and atomized, as existing independently of the roles he plays, that it becomes impossible to derive a moral code from our knowledge of what human beings are.

What’s more, the Middle Ages and before assumed that all things, human and otherwise, had “proper” ends.  A bicycle is built to ride on, and its “goodness” as a bicycle is defined by the end for which it was made.  You can use it as found art if you want to, but being useful as found art cannot make it a good bicycle.

So the other thing all the ages before the Enlightenment did was to assume that things existed for a reason, in that all things had a end towards which they were properly aimed–maybe it would be best defined as an ideal toward which they msut aspire in order to be a “good” whatever they are.

I’ve thought about what I known of the Middle Ages, and I’d say he’s right here in the way somebody like, say, Aquinas, or Peter Abelard, saw himself and his fellow human beings.  It kept reminding me of that old question and answer from the Baltimore Catechism of my childhood.

Why did God make you?  God made me to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him, and to be happy with Him in heaven.

It was a very teleological way to look at human beings–it doesn’t take much to derive a universally applicable moral code from an answer like that.

MacIntyre points out that this is not a matter of a difference between religiously based versus secularly based moral codes.  Aristotle and Plato devised secularly based moral codes, but those codes saw human beings in categorical and teleological terms, not as “individuals” the way the Enlightenment defined that term and we now useit. 

The split comes not with a change from religiously based societies to secularly based societies, but with a change from societies which saw the people in them as embedded in webs of functional relations and societies which see the people in them as existing alone and autonomous and both prior to and outside any such role functions.

This managed to unravel a couple of things for me that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, not the least why it is that Aristotle could write an Ethics that was morally compelling not only for the men and women of his own place and time but for people (like Aquinas) living a thousand years later under radically different circumxtances, but modern moral philosphers can’t seem to write two lines that even they themselves will take seriously three days later.

It also raised a question:  how much of modern science is dependent on the conception of human beings as autonomous individuals?

That is, how important is itto scientific thinking and discovery that scientists themselves should conceive of themselves this way?

I’m probably making a mess of this, as usual, but it occurs to me that if science is particular in its origins in Western civilization, so is the idea of the autonomous individual.  And science begins to succeed an a significant scale only after that idea enters the culture and becomes general.

If the two things are inextricably linked, we have a few problems.

The first is that there is no way for a scientific civilization to do without a generally accepted basic morality.  If it tries, it ends up–well, not all that scientific, for one thing.  Freud believed in a death wish.  The historyof the twentieth century looks like a civilizational death wish, and it almost always manifests itself as soceities claiming to be “scientific” by ditching morality altogether.  Thank  you, Uncle Joe.

The second is that, if MacIntyre is correct about the impossibility of founding a morality on reason starting with an assumption that human beings are autonomous individuals, and I’m right that you can’t have science without such an assumption, then the only real choice we would have would be living like Aquinas, without a lot of the scientific technology that makes my life plausible, or living like a Russian under Stalin.

And that seems to me so wrong–so obviously untrue–that I don’t  know where to start thinking about it.

But I’m glad I finally started reading this book.