Against Alasdair Macintyre’s “After Virtue”

Alasdair Macintyre, at least in his After Virtue mode, believes that good civilizations are ones with moral consensus led by prophets, rather than ones with moral confusion managed by managers. It is Macintyre’s belief that we should hope for a civilization led by Trotskys (less preferred) or St. Benedicts (more preferred), but in either event it is to be preferred to managerial Keyneses.

If you step back, however, and inquire into the content of the this-world secular ideologies of the Trotskys, it then becomes very difficult to prefer the prophetic Trotskys to the managerial Keyneses.

Trotsky’s gospel, it turns out, is in reality little more than a managerialist gospel.

Trotsky says that History speaking through Marx and him knows how to build a Communist utopia. What is a Communist utopia? It is a society in which humans pull together and coordinate their activities. It is a society in which people are free to do what they want, within reason of what is not destructive for the community. It is a society in which people are prosperous: well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, and well-entertained. Trotsky’s gospel is that Keynes’s market economy is incapable of even approaching such a utopia, while Marx and History have together told him how to accomplish it.

And here we have to bring in history: the regimes that accepted versions of Trotsky’s gospel in the twentieth century and tried to implement it range from Pol Pot’s to Fidel Castro’s, with Stalin’s and Mao’s regimes at the worst, and something like Erich Honecker’s Stasi-spies-on-everyone East Germany close to the best.

The whole point of saying that you would prefer Trotsky to Keynes is that Trotsky has a gospel which, if not true, is true enough to hold society together in moral consensus and produce a modicum of prosperity. But what if Keynes’s managerialism does better at fulfilling what Trotsky claims will be the accomplishments of Trotsky’s gospel more effectively than Trotsky does?

It does.

We can see that Keynes was totally correct in wanting to reduce the influence of a Trotsky in the public square, because a Trotsky’s ideas about good organization of the economy were seen immediately by Keynes as, and turned out to be a horrible disaster, even from the perspective of Trotsky’s values–especially from the perspective of Trotsky’s values.

In a similar fashion, many of the same conclusions follow if you step back and inquire into the content of the other-worldly gospels of the St. Benedicts.

Their lodestones swing from following the ethical teachings of Rabbi Yeshua of Nazareth to worshipping the Anointed Λόγος that is of a higher order of reality than we—with a certain tension between them. But whenever Rabbi Yeshua spoke of what the Anointed Λόγος commanded his followers to do in this world, his followers were commanded to successfully attain managerial ends:

Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: “Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in: Naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me.”

Then shall the just answer him, saying: “Lord, when did we see thee hungry, and fed thee; thirsty, and gave thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and covered thee? Or when did we see thee sick or in prison, and came to thee?” And the king answering, shall say to them: “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”

That is a very powerful statement that what is sought after is successful managerialism–a successful managerialism with a preferential option for the poor: one that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, heals the sick, welcomes the immigrant, and visits the imprisoned. Right ritual, right moral orientation, right faith seem to be nowhere–at least in this part of The Gospel According to St. Matthew.