Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Understanding Alasdair McIntyre: From Marxism to Catholicism and Beyond with Julian Assele
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Can philosophy ever be more than just armchair theorising? Join us as we unearth the insightful world of Catholic philosopher, Alasdair McIntyre, with intellectual aficionado, Julian Ossolay Ossolay. We embark on a stimulating journey through McIntyre's philosophical evolution, tracing his footsteps from his early Marxist days to his conversion to Catholicism and his later works. We examine why McIntyre’s philosophy resonates with Catholics who lend towards philosophy, his critiques of rigid philosophical modes, and the enigma that is his political ideology.
We also unpack McIntyre's critique of Enlightenment rationalism and his intriguing Aristotle-inspired insights. Get ready to question the Enlightenment's morality reduction to singular rules, and to consider McIntyre's contrasting view of morality as a technique. We delve into his perspectives on ethics, politics, human flourishing, and his critique of Marx and the modern society. Explore with us McIntyre's reflections on human subjugation, the fragmentation of man, and the vital role of community and language in forming an individual's identity.
Our deep dive into McIntyre's philosophical world concludes with a thoughtful discussion on the implications of his theories on modernity and human fragmentation. We explore his rejection of communitarian ideas, his challenging concept of biological teleology, and the essence of human flourishing. Join us as we conclude with an analysis of McIntyre's views on social sciences, his take on language games, and his critique of Marx's views on non-European societies. This episode is not merely for the philosophy enthusiast but for anyone ready to look at the world through a different lens.
Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian, Drea, Free Beer
Exploring the Works of Alasdair MacIntyre
Speaker 1Hello and welcome to Varm Vogue , and today I'm with Julian Ossolay Ossolay , yeah , I think I always mispronounced it , a salad , like it was Spanish , but as you corrected me , it's French gone . And so we are talking about the works of my favorite Catholic philosopher , alessler McIntyre . And McIntyre is like lash and he's one of the two figures that I've read as A leftist and a rightist . I read after virtue when I was still considered consider myself a paleo conservative , probably around 2002 To , and I Read Marxism and Christianity . Actually did a couple episodes on it way back , probably around 2015 , but McIntyre's interesting . I kept on noticing , like all my favorite books , whether they were left or right from , like if they were published in In the United States and they were forgotten . I usually found like a McIntyre endorsement , and that also includes much Marxist work that people often forget that he endorsed after he left Marxism , which so it wasn't unique to his Marxist period .
Speaker 1I'm gonna give a brief biographical , philosophical sketch On McIntyre so people can kind of follow along . I think , like in the circles he's big in he's huge in , but in general I don't think people really understand his trajectory and they only really know after virtue and as a general rule he was born in 1929 the motherfuckers , almost a hundred years old . He . I was posting pictures of him , middle-aged , representing his Marxist period and I realized like , yeah , I mean , he wasn't a professor yet , but he was already like 40 by that point . So he's a Scottish American philosopher . He's Scottish by birth , he's American by , I believe . I believe he was naturalized . He spent Up into the 1960s in Britain and most of if you read his Marxist writings are all about , they're all in the British milieu . But he became a professor at Brandeis in 1970 . He , before he , moved to the United States so he taught at Leeds . He taught at University of Exford of Essex and he taught at Oxford . So he , he was there . Wow , he was . He was still a visiting professor at Princeton and he is beloved by Philosophically adjoined Catholics . He's been awarded the American Catholic philosophical associations Aquinas Medal .
Speaker 1Now what I ? What is interesting about Macintyre ? One you know , as a recent article portrayed he hated the rich all his life , but to he has a very interesting Trajectory as far as his relationship to Marxism . He does critique Marxism . Some of his critiques and Marxism and Christianity I don't think are entirely fair , but I Think he is one of the most penetrating thinkers on the problems with both overly rigid philosophical modes . I mean , he really was an analytical philosopher with a Hegelian bent and as a Marxist during his teens and and it was a Mary Lakatoche and Thomas Kuhn that pushed him away from that because he didn't think Marxist Views of science were necessarily justifiable , right , this comes up in one of my favorite books of his and I think is one of your favorite to , jules , and that is who's justice ?
Speaker 1Whose rationality , yeah , which I think more people should read after they read after virtue , because it's it's . It Contextualizes a lot of it in ways that make it clear that he's not just interested in like bringing st Thomas Aquinas back from the dead and having us all live under his rule . After that he wrote three rival visions of moral inquiry , dependent rational animals and His more recent works , I believe .
Speaker 2The ethics in the conflicts of modernity , published in 2016 right .
Speaker 1So also he's still . He's still been publishing Well into his 80s . So this is something to I mean it's kind of impressive . He converted to Catholicism around the time he wrote after virtue , so he was a late convert , um . However , even in his earlier writing he's fairly sympathetic to the religion point of view . I think it's first . I think his first book actually is on Marxism and Unfortunately a lot of his early work I Don't think is really available . A short history of ethics , which , which was originally written in 1966 and was revised by him in 1998 , is still out . But his first book is Marxism on turf , an interpretation . He wrote in 1953 His seventh book with Anthony flew .
Speaker 1Of all people , people know who that guy is . If you don't , I can tell you was new at Essays in philosophical theology . So we're all really dealing with a guy and this is a good 25 years before he conversed to Catholicism , who thought that philosophy , theology was actually worth taking seriously . He wrote a . He wrote a critique and analysis of the unconscious that I think kind of mirrors Sartras , and , and he wrote a secularization of moral change . Then he wrote Marxism and Christianity , which is for his first break . Then he wrote the religious significance of atheism with Paul Ragour , who , which is this is a book I have not read he wrote an Exposition , polemic and and kind of a what we might now call a critical , a critical Biography and engagement of Herbert mccousa .
Speaker 1He wrote another book on Mark who's in 1970 . He wrote a book on Hegel in 1972 and then famously after virtue . So I bring up his early work because his early work is kind of Bracketed out even by himself , even his non-Marxist early work , partly because he kind of gave up on analytic philosophy too . So that is the , the biographical sketch . One of the things about MacIntyre I think we're gonna have to talk about is that His politics are today are actually kind of hard to map on to traditional political Categories , even if you include something like red Tori ism , because he's not really no a conservative in any sense .
Speaker 2He does not like calling himself a communitarian either .
Speaker 1No , he accepts the label only reluctantly and with great protest . Yeah , um , although he is philosophically probably closer to Michael Sandel than Than anyone else I can think of on the current Schema other than like abscom or some of the other virtue ethicists , I Don't even know that he would still call himself a neo-Thomas .
Speaker 2No , he's a he he kind of takes a Leaf out of Herbert McCabe's book , herbert McCabe being this philosopher , catholic philosopher and Dominican , dominican friar , who was also a Marxist back in the 60s and 70s and he died in 2001 . He was a close friend of MacIntyre's and and McCabe used to say that he did not like to call himself a Tomas . He liked to think of himself as thinking with Thomas , but not necessarily as following Thomas , as though his argument is like a reified Doctrine of prep , is of propositions and theses . You actually see a very similar thing with MacIntyre and his argument . And who's justice ?
Speaker 2Which rationality where MacIntyre says the thing he likes about Thomas is that his argument the summa , the summa , all 2000 , some odd pages of it is essentially dialectical . It is like every question is sort of proposed with the assumption that there is no set answer to that question , because Thomas is trying to synthesize different traditions , such as you know is the , you know , islamic philosophy , augustinianism , aristotelianism and although to some degree Islamic philosophy and a strata and their stately anism are redundant but right well with with Thomas , and what MacIntyre likes about Thomas is that Thomas is very much like .
Speaker 2He is not trying to set forth a demonstrative argument like , say , descartes would , where Descartes and this is a passage in whose justice , where Descartes thinks you know you , I think . Therefore , I am with the assumption that Once one makes that step , they fully apprehend that step , whereas for MacIntyre and his critique of Descartes and what Aquinas is critique of Descartes would be is in order . It's essentially demonstrative but not dialectical . Like a human does not Understand a fact and then completely understand that fact . What usually happens is , you know , we kind of understand this fact and then , a little bit further into our experience and into our argument , we have a better comprehension and apprehension of that fact and then it changes the argument and it's almost like a spiral that keeps going upwards and upwards and upwards , closer to the truth .
Speaker 1Yeah , one of the things I think that we have to delineate is Pre-German idealist dialectics and what it is , because dialectical modes of reasoning are Ancient , yeah , the what we would now call the Hindu , and that in itself applied . That for back is actually kind of anachronistic . But what we now call the Hindu tradition has a dialectical form . The abhidharma tradition and Buddhism is dialectical , as is the argumentation of , like the galupa school of Vajrayana , buddhism . What dialectics is is An open-ended inquiry where the terms are Not already defined because they can't be . They're contested . So in and In , to go back into , like a very , very old I mean , we're going back to ancient Greece here .
Speaker 1The distinction between the dialectic and analytic is . Analytic is is dealing with philosophy , where terms are More or less axiomatically agreed upon . You can make Statements and they can have meaning , because we agree that the axioms we are using are true . So we can make you know all All kinds of clear statements when the meaning is contested , like , like in most of the public dialogues of Plato , and we don't have Plato's non Dialogic and and also non-dialectic writing , although we are told it existed . One can see this as well . So this is why get frustrated with like these .
Speaker 1This is Dialectics as a kind of like folk magic or something that you get in a lot of like modern , post modern , post 20th century leftism , because it's like well , so the synthesis of contradictions , of a contradiction . We mean this , and while dialectics after German idealism does mean something different . Basically , what Kant and Hegel are trying to do in their conceptions of dialectics is argue that , instead of in an argument , history itself is Doing the dialectical process . So it's not just a temporary process , right , it's like the , the movements of history are actually clarifying the concepts closer and closer to what the , the absolute idea is . The absolute idea will only manifest itself negatively Because humans have free will , because the absolute idea is God . Well , and then ?
Speaker 1yeah and a Marxism that's flipped . We don't assume that this is building towards God or whatever . Marx is , I think , a fairly Teele logical thinker . He does seem to think that , like either socialism or common , ruin is inevitable . He doesn't seem to think there's any other way things can go , except for when he does in his late life , but definitely in young Marx . He's , he's , he's Clearly like this , but the difference is he thinks that ideas emerge from human interaction with the world , etc . I only bring that up because dialectics is a word that's thrown around a lot on the left and it makes a brain Turn off , and so every time I mention it now in a context like with McIntyre , I know what you're talking about . You know what you're talking about . I just want people to know that we're not using dialectics as a magic word to shut your brain off .
Speaker 2I'm happy that happens , too much , I mean . And it don't deals very well with why . When McIntyre calls Aquinas is sort of like long argument , dialectical , what he means is that it's a real movement , it is a move towards something , and McIntyre likes us because movement , to put it kind of in a vulgar sense , is activity , and McIntyre is very heavily influenced by you know that the early Marx , especially like , say , the theses on fearbock , where McIntyre often talks about how the point of philosophy is not to interpret the world but to change the world . And part of McIntyre's project is to sort of desegregate morality from this kind of it being a separate sphere of life , as , like Kant or other kind of say liberal thinkers would put it , trying to Integrate the is and the ought . And McIntyre Believes that or , as a , as you , as a virtue ethicist , believes that One cannot understand the world without participating in the world Right or , to put in more Marxist term terminology . While you know , theory and praxis are not just two separate spheres but are one in the same movement .
Speaker 1So for for McIntyre , I Mean we're going to be stressing in the ways in which there's a continuity with this early back entire who's a Marxist in the first 20 years of his life . But there is a rupture . There's no way around that . There's a kind of reintegration you and I both think and I know some other people would think this with Marxist like ideas of history In very late McIntyre . So in the last 10 years Some people talk you know we're referred to this as a return to the left , but McIntyre doesn't think those terms have particular meaning for him because those terms come out of the Enlightenment and the removal of things from action and community .
Critique of Enlightenment Rationalism and Aristotle
Speaker 1So For McIntyre , one of the key problems with the amount with the Enlightenment is this tendency to to clarify by reduction right , like we're gonna reduce everything to singular rules that we can operate on a rational principle and and every person across all cultures can understand right so both deontology and and Utilitarianism Are , are the or examples of that , that we can either calculate utils or we can formulate things according to a formulation that is a rule of which we can deduce all other rules .
Speaker 1And McIntyre says not only is this transparently Fucking stupid , to put it , to put it about as vulgarly as I can it actually ends up inverting on itself very quickly and becoming either total relativism Are emotivism . Now , I say total relativism because one of the interesting things about virtue , about virtue philosophy they pronounce the people is that it does actually pause it a Relative worldview , meaning different virtues exist for different reasons . People can be moral actors and act morally and actually be directly in Conflict , which is something you get the feeling . The I don't . This doesn't come so much come up and and after virtue , but it does come up in .
Speaker 2It definitely comes up in dependent rational animals and in whose justice , especially in his conversation about Morality being a technique or , in the Greek , like technic .
Speaker 1Right .
Speaker 2Yeah , like , essentially for McIntyre , Morality is not just some like arm cherry , a exercise , or like a series of case studies . It's something that you have to live through , like a lot of liberal philosophers . Take like , let's say , descartes I don't want to call him a liberal philosopher , but this is someone who a lot of them tend to take from . Morality starts within the individual and Then is imported into the world . It starts with the mind and then goes into the world , whereas for McIntyre , he believes and I tend to agree with him that this posits a kind of contradiction between the individual and society , the particular interest versus the universal interest . And McIntyre takes a lot from Aristotle in saying that humans are social animals or in terms of his book here , they're dependent , rational animals , and what that means here is that there is no individual without the society and then there is no society without the individual . What does that mean ? He actually oh , go ahead .
Speaker 1No , I mean , he comes to something that you know for all of our critiques and we can have many of Hegel , including Hegel being kind of more individualist in this but Hegel does kind of immediately point out that , like both through conflict and community , it is not meaningful to have an individual without another and without something from which you are modeling and or contrasting and differentiating yourself from . So , literally , mcintyre is a good reader of Hegel , although that's not where he gets it . He goes back even further and gets it from Aristotle . And you know , and it's one of these funny things where I'm always like , yeah , pull moral philosophy from Aristotle and maybe some epistemology , because his science is stupid . But well , actually , when I say his science is stupid , I should actually say his science was brilliant , but in almost all cases not all cases , but in almost all cases wrong .
Speaker 1And our weird contention with Aristotle today is kind of like our contention with Plato . We reduce Plato down to the dialogues and ignore that there's actually a pretty complicated theology and esoteric knowledge set that is mentioned implicitly and explicitly throughout his text and we just like , pretend that's not important to him and it seems to be . That's the primary importance . Similarly with Aristotle . Aristotle thought he was doing natural philosophy in this context and also theology and a bunch of other stuff , but basically like coming up with a set of series of rules that made knowledge comprehensible across the board . And we don't read him like that . We tend to read him as a guy who invented predicate philosophy , like in , like maybe some ethical categories .
Speaker 2And if I may , I want to kind of briefly explain what I mean when I say like Aristotle's dictum of like humans being social animals , which is what McIntyre's whole kind of shtick is and what he uses to implode the notion of like . Here's the individual and here's society . So basically , what he kind of means here is what is it that makes humans humans ? Language essentially for McIntyre , that's essentially what kind of boils down for like rationality for him is the ability to make ourselves intelligible , not only to others but also to ourselves . Because how can you have kind of thoughts or like predicates or words , or like language or like symbols that transcend your individuality without language ?
Speaker 1And why would you have ?
Speaker 2language without sociality ? Right , how do you acquire a language ? It's not how a lot of say liberal philosophers start from , where you contract yourselves into associations of people . No , you are born into a community . You acquire a language by inhabiting a way of life and you are born into a set of ever influx customs and mores and traditions that at first you may adopt or at first you're like faced with . But as time goes on , the goal to being a fully into individualized human person is being able to use your rationality to adopt those traditions or more mores , or to repudiate them or to change them , but in any case becoming a fully actualized , individual , rational thinker . And that's only possible by being born into a community .
Speaker 2This is why Aristotle in the politics in the first book , this is why he says that a human being without a community is like a hand without a human body . It's no longer a hand . Think of , say you know the . Every once in a while there's the new story of a person who is kept in a cage or in a basement for like 10 years . And they're more , they appear more animal than they do human , because they're unable to like , articulate themselves , because they don't have language that transcends their individual .
Speaker 2Which is where this is where a lot of the Wittgenstein comes in .
Speaker 1One thing I would say to that is some of the cases of humans isolated like that , I feel like they don't even feel animal , they feel subjugated , even beyond that .
Speaker 2Yeah , that's a good way of articulating it .
Speaker 1Like , and this is why it's so hard to imagine like , what would a human be if they were completely isolated ? Well , what we probably find is they'd make a community out of like projections , like kinship with inanimate objects and and animals . Because it's , it's literally almost impossible to imagine a human surviving completely , a socially I mean . For one , for reasons of complex biological development , we are useless for the first three years of our lives . Yeah , like all other , like even other mammals , and mammals are more dependent on their parents than most other forms of life . But most of their mammals , with the exception of some primates , don't birth things with giant heads , that literally , that you literally have to birth premature . That's totally dependent on you Because you can't gestate them to I don't know toddler size like a calf would be gestated without dying . So that that's unique to humans , or it's at least unique to primates and it's it's even amongst primates .
Speaker 1And this is an insight Marx actually has . That , I think , is really really important . But it goes all the way back to Aristotle , and Marx is is a Hegelian Aristotelian in his early life . Well , he's a Hegelian Aristotelian particularly interested in Epicureanism . That's what he did his pre political work on , to be completely .
Speaker 1He was a human being , sensual animals right and based off of Epicurus , but he's reading Epicurean through Aristotle and Hegel , regardless the the the whole , the whole insight there is that , even compared to our primate relatives as individuals , without mediating technology and communication and communication being the big one , even more important than our thumbs we kind of suck at surviving like , in a very real sense , a chimpanzee can rip our face off . We cannot rip their face off back without technology or help from another human .
Speaker 2The only thing humans I think have over most animals is we're like really good long distance runners , but I think that's pretty much the only purely physical attribute that we have over most animals .
Speaker 1And I think that's that's something to consider . And and then only most . We would not even be apex at that by far Right . So this is something that that I think you know if you're not convinced by the theological elements of this argument , and that is , that is a consideration for McIntyre . We are not dropping that out , it's still what he's saying is very true .
Speaker 1And this whole antinomy between collective and individual , I used to get really mad at , because when people talk about , oh , there's collectivist and individualist societies and I'm like , okay , maybe if you're talking about Europe , like Sweden versus the United States , but in most places in the world that I have lived that doesn't mean that much .
Speaker 1And when it's encountered it's kind of imposed , yeah right , and I think that's like because also , the collective is pre presupposes an individual , that is , that is isolated .
Speaker 1And the more you study anything like development on apology or whatever and I have my critiques of anthropology not to go off on that , but I want people to know I'm not me about this I see that like , yeah , most societies , even relatively egalitarian ones , see individuality and collective identity as cohesive and informing and and that's important to understand . Now , what is interesting ? Now , I've been told that that you know , I had an indigenous friend of mine read after virtue and he said that McIntyre kind of slightly misunderstand some of the stuff about the Polynesians the Polynesians but that he understood , misunderstands it , based on common history and anthropology at the time . So he doesn't know you like if we should hold McIntyre accountable for that , but that there is some truth to it . And so I guess we do have to come to one of the key points and and McIntyre's moral , moral and political thinking , which is his concept of moral disorder and what causes it . So you want to like to talk about that .
Speaker 2I think that'd be a great idea . And I think this actually dovetails very well with the animal discussion , because rationality what essentially , what essentially makes rationality so powerful is ? It allows humans to step back from their immediate desires or sensations . So when we see it , when a dog sees a juicy steak , they think or this is . They don't think this , but this is kind of what they feel is oh , I'm hungry , I want that steak . But human beings are the only animals who are able to state , take a step back and think who's steak is this ? Should I eat this steak ? I'm kind of hungry right now , but I don't really feel like eating , I don't know . And this kind of ability to take a step back from our sensations is the thing that allows us to sort of transcend our individuality and what makes humans social animals , because we're able to take a step back from the narrow , in particular , interests of the animal and are able to establish long form associations , to put to put this back to like a more Marxian terminology . And this is something that makes clear in the manuscripts and in capital , and it's a metaphor I think is very interesting and one I'd love to kind of write more about or read more about ? Is this thing about what makes animals animals and humans humans .
Speaker 2He has this important metaphor in Capital , volume one , where he says what separates the best of bees from the worst of engineers is that the bee builds by instinct . He is immediately identified with his life activity . He builds hives , he makes and consumes honey . The worst of engineers ? They're really bad at making buildings , but they're able to take a step aside and conceptualize before they execute what they need to do . Now , there's like a spectrum to this . Of course , there are many animals like dolphins or other primates , who are essentially pre linguistic , who have primitive modes of communication that allow them to basically produce sounds or produce signs that allow them to kind of communicate how they feel or that sort of thing , but and this is a point that McIntyre makes independent , rational animals Dolphins . So the thing that separates dolphins from humans in terms of sociality is that a dolphin can still flourish without having to argue or reflect upon the meaning of dolphin flourishing , unlike humans . And this is where the virtues come in which we can talk about now or a little bit later .
Speaker 1Well , I mean we should talk about what virtues are . One I just tell people to ask me like as virtue ethics ? Consequentialists are deontological and I'm like no bad question , wrong question , not even helpful .
Speaker 1Yeah , not a good question Like one virtues are not just moral virtues there , anything that you can model and has a power to . How do we know that virtues work ? Well , because we have a model for them , usually in some heroic figure or some can figure whatever , often quite mythic , but it's a model . Three no one expects virtues to be coherent . Virtues have different needs and different historical and social context , meaning that also different parts of society and different groups would have different virtues . And actually , interestingly , when Marxist whether they're Marxist , leninist or Trotskyist or Malist have talked about ethics at all , which they generally avoid like the plague , this is the framework they talk about it in . I mean , you think about Trotsky , is the pamphlet , their virtues and ours .
Speaker 1This was also picked up by Iron Felix . So this is not just Trotskyist thing , that there are virtues and morality , you know , for the Communists man or the proletarian or whatever , and they are context derived . But what makes a virtue of virtue is that they are embodied and part of a social world . Now McIntyre extends this to like a traditional world that is coherent , not because it is logically coherent , not in the like analytic sense , but more in the maybe you're right to break up Vicencent earlier more in the Vicencinian sense is like we recognize these things as things we do in a cluster of things that is meaningful in our social life and our production and reproduction and our modes of values , etc .
Speaker 2Right , like McIntyre , is not into tradition because he's a traditionalist . Mcintyre is into tradition because he essentially conceives of tradition as like a way of life and a form of living that is ever changing and is open to change . This is essentially why McIntyre likes Aquinas , because , like the summa , you know the form , the art , the form that the argument , the summa takes . It is essentially an extended argument that takes generations and that people are partaking in and modify in different fashions according to how life changes .
Ethics, Politics, and Human Flourishing
Speaker 1So one thing that you have to think from McIntyre that I think is interesting is like when we talk about tradition or when we talk about ethics , even virtue ethics he mocked the idea of ethics courses , just outright wrote a whole polemic against them , and the reason why he did is that , one , he said they didn't work , but two , that they're decontextualized from actual life and that they kind of try to reduce things to rules or legalities .
Speaker 1So either either a motive you know constraints , or legal constraints , but not much else . So it's either your aesthetic because you want to be in a good person , and this is your aesthetic , to be a good person he kind of takes like the carnappian view of ethics , and that's what a lot of people's view really is like . When people always tell me , like , how can you separate morality from politics ? And on one hand I actually agree you can't . On the other hand , they aren't the same thing . And when you conflate them like , and when I say they aren't the same thing , no more than say my lungs are me , yeah , like .
Speaker 1Or my microbiome are me , they are me Like , they are part of me . They are also coherent things in and of themselves . They , me and them cannot exist without each other . We are in a very real like . I am an ecology and up in and up to myself , but also they are not me in that . That to do that as a part , the whole fallacy right , and this is a lot of problems with modern left-wing thinking , is that it you know , I used to point this out all the time that it reduces our moral response to either pure self-interest or aesthetics , and then it equates our political response and our moral response as the same thing and then Does not embed that in any community function . Really at all .
Speaker 2Yeah , so a quick word on that . In the ethics and one of the things I really like about the ethics is at the end of the book McIntyre dedicates the last part of it to basically biographical sketches of four people , one of them being Sandra Day O'Connor , another one being Vasily Grossman , another one being CLR James and the other one being a what was his name ? Oh , dennis Fowle , who is an Irish priest . And one of the points McIntyre makes about CLR James , which I think does an excellent job of kind of summarizing like what he dislikes about a lot of mechanical Marxist approach to morality or ethics , is that for a lot of communists , when they try to talk to others about why they should be communists because they don't really have a conception of what the human person is for or like what human flourishing is they tend to kind of backtrack to crude utilitarianism of like it's the greatest good for the greatest number of people .
Speaker 1Yeah , which , and I know many Marxists who will say this outright as their ethical stance , and I'm just like I don't know how you read Marx and say that I can only cite like 50 footnotes against them in mill like , whereas for CLR James , his why he was a common , he was a communist , was a bit deeper in that , because it was rooted in a firmer conception of like what is the human person for ?
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean I have my critiques of CLR James , but I tend to like him , but like I think he does , I think he actually struggles with that James , and I think towards the end of his life is clear , but like if you read the black Jackabins , he actually does a lot of parsing this way and that way to like make a narrative fit , a kind of like bourgeois , clear narrative about how national liberations work and kind of softens the edges of Trussant-Lavenchure and kind of just avoids an actual discussion of the of why Dessaline massacred the whites , but like , not most of them actually like , and but he does this partly for Marx's reasons , I think , partly for moral reasons , because CLR James does kind of get that , particularly after the Bolshevik Revolution , there's this tendency in Marxism to pretend that not only does you know , this is all science and obvious and just clear to it , should be clear to everyone , and anyone who has an objection to it is guilty of false consciousness .
Speaker 1But also , which is kind of ironic actually , because false consciousness is a term that like Ingalls and Marx use a few times , but it's really more used by Lukash . But Lukash , interestingly , does talk about things like Poletarian virtue and stuff . So I don't know . But by the time you get to like the 1950s , it's sort of like the ends justify the means , but the ends never really happen . And so there you go . And I know there's a lot of alienated people right now who reach to that particular form of Marxism as a way to differentiate themselves from both anti-communism and the prior popular forms like the DSA . And they'll say , but it's what one ? And I'm like , hey , the Soviet Union didn't last three generations .
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah what happened next , like , like , just there are people there are not that many of them anymore , but there are people alive who were born when that happened and there are definitely people who are alive , who remember the 30s and 40s . So you know they're dying breed . But and I actually think you know , one of my unpopular people will say , okay , boomer takes . But I actually think that is part of why we get these like ridiculous caricatures of the left and right of like societies prior to the 1960s is because , like , we live in a very media saturated world where we've outsourced a lot of our cultural memory to very present , to media , and , in fact , sometimes so much so that people don't remember what happened 10 fucking years ago .
Speaker 2Oh yeah .
Speaker 2But to bring it back to CLR James , because I like what you said about James and what McIntyre one of the big points he draws out of James and his biography in the ethics is James's love for cricket , the sport of cricket .
Speaker 2James was obsessed with cricket back when he was younger throughout his life really and he wrote a book , a series of essays , on cricket I forgot the name of the title , but it was one of his more major works and one of the things that McIntyre draws out with playing cricket and like thinking about virtue is that essentially , one can conceive of ethics as like how to play life in the same sense that how to play cricket or to be a good cricket player and understanding the rules of life .
Speaker 2Just as understanding the rules of cricket does not actually make one a good cricket player or a good human being . That's a very legalistic understanding of what it means to be a good human or what it means to be a good cricket player . What it means to be a good cricket player has to be discovered through the game in a framework of rules agreed upon by all parties , and being able to refine those skills and those attributes that make one a good cricket player , because just because you say you can't go out of bounds doesn't mean , oh , I didn't go out of bounds , I'm a good cricket player . I would say you shouldn't murder . You don't murder people . That doesn't make you necessarily a good person .
Speaker 1Right .
James and MacIntyre's Shifting Thinking
Speaker 1I mean it's always interesting to ask yourself how did a formerly Trotskyist , pan-Africanist , marxist , right towards the end of his life , a moving autobiography on cricket ? And you're right , I mean , I think the book is called Beyond a Boundary and all of the two things written by C L R James , which is the Black Jacketman's number one and number two , which I believe actually MacIntyre has blurbed , but in number two is his cricket book and I think that's interesting . I mean C L R James is a fascinating character like all together , in that he was a diehard pan-Africanist his entire life and a diehard anti-racist but also , like wrote a lot about how influenced he was by European history and culture and how he couldn't , like he had no want to completely remove that from his life . And you know he was a Trotskyist in the 30s and , you know , did a speaking tour in the US . He met Trotsky , then kind of gave up on Trotsky , left with Mac Chapman , ended up in the Forest Johnson tendency , ended up hanging out with Ruda , just left , you know left and formed his own tendency , went back to Britain . We're , I mean , a fascinating guy and somebody that someone like MacIntyre would be fascinated with . Also , weirdly was was into Oswald Spengler before he came to Marxist as a child , like C L R James , is a weird dude , but I think it's interesting because he was not even when he tried to be a mechanistic Marxist .
Speaker 1And this has been something I've been pushing back on , because there's two tendencies in the mechanistic Marxist camp . There's a structuralist tendency which tries to take all the teleology out but keep all the teleology in simultaneously . By that I mean it kind of does the thing where it found structures and gives the structures at the high level causal agency and this and the other . It's the stuff that E P Thompson mocked , particularly in Althusser . And then there's this other tendency , kind of an analytic Marxism is to reduce Marxism down to morality but then to kind of aha , but if we define morality in the right way we can do morality objectively . And both these tendencies , actually even in his Marxist phase , are things that MacIntyre reacts strongly against and in fact he talks about like well , a lot of the attempts to undo the isot distinction in him he's got a whole essay on that in this book Actually weirdly still end up problematic because they just want to get rid of the ought entirely for the is and kind of pretend that they're the same thing , whereas you know , for , like when I said that metaphor about my lungs and me , or my microbiome and me for Alessna MacIntyre , neither of those things really makes sense .
Speaker 1It neither makes sense to say that the ought is somehow numinously removed from the is the way the thing in itself and the thing for itself , you know , are different . We can know the thing , or we can know the thing yeah , the thing in the world but we can't know the thing in itself , et cetera , et cetera , et cetera . And Marks just thinks I mean not Marks , macintyre just thinks the separations are ridiculous . And so it was Marks . But his criticism of Marks is that Marks just goes to the , to the ought , most of the time . Although anyone's actually read a lot of the scholarship on Marks , he's not consistent about that . He does that in certain works and not others . So , yeah , it's very clear in the early works , which MacIntyre likes , but even in Das Kapital that he's doing that . If you read the journalistic works of the letters , sometimes he feels that way and sometimes he doesn't . Marks is not always the most consistent person in the world . Sorry , marks is humanist , but that's . Marks is humanist with a dash , apparently that dash matters .
Speaker 1But anyway , that's a long digression , I think I mean one of the things I remember when I first went you know what you're calling the ethics at you know , is that after virtue .
Speaker 2The ethics and the conflicts of modernity .
Speaker 1Okay , the newest , the most recent . That's when he does the four biographies . Okay .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1I was about to say . I don't remember that and after virtue but you . It's one of the one MacIntyre pieces I haven't read , but I think now , after this , I'm going to have to .
Speaker 2It's wonderful , it's great .
Speaker 1So him writing about CLR James at the end of his life is actually instructive .
Speaker 2So and he doesn't . He doesn't write after writing about Sandra Day O'Connor . It's so fun . It's a fun part of the book .
Speaker 1But what is interesting with with MacIntyre versus , say , I figure , like Christopher Lash Mike , you and I talked about Christopher Lash , I'm a Lash defender , you're a Lash warrior but I actually do see with you that there's a shift in Lash that he's not acknowledging that does seem to move him from his early writings in the 60s and 70s into something completely different by the early 90s when he dies , and while even the revolt of the elites , I think , has left wing elements still in it , I don't think it's a completely right wing book . You see a whole lot of things in there that are more conductive to the right of the 1990s . I don't know if he would have stayed that way . I mean , the more I study Lash , the more I actually think he's really hard to place on our current political spectrums , and most people who are doing so are literally just using him to get back at liberals . Yeah , but with MacIntyre it's interesting because the break is acknowledged and clear and it happens about . I mean , it feels like the beginning of his career , but only because apparently he's immortal , because it really happens around his 50s . So it's something to think about when you're thinking about a person who has been conceived of and loved by the right wing .
Speaker 1A lot of right wingers love afterwards you A lot of them do . I don't . This is why I said people need to read who's justice , who's rationality , independent , rational animals , because it will contextualize some of that for you . But as he ages , you see a lot of his early concerns from his Marxist period come back , as you were talking about , with that CLR James . So he actually does see the world in this historical way , in which virtue .
MacIntyre's Critique and Historical Context
Speaker 1One of the interesting things that I think has implied in the Lester MacIntyre's writings is even if you wanted to be a Thomas , he can't be . He can't be an Aquanian because he doesn't live in that context . That's not the community he can be embodied in . And if he wants to embody community of virtues , it cannot be , even from his Catholic perspective , the same one as Saint Thomas had Right .
Speaker 2This is something important that I . What I really like . What he does in who's Justice , which is about rich rationality , is he has a large section where he talks about David Hume . But before he gets to Hume he spends like 80 or 90 some odd pages talking about the historical context of 18th century Scotland and Roman Dutch jurisprudence and the efforts of Scottish jurists and philosophers to either break out of the bonds of English philosophy or to integrate into that kind of imperialist sort of way of thinking back then with the British . And he offers like a really interesting biography of David Hume .
Speaker 2Macintyre is he's charitable towards Hume . He doesn't call him an idiot . He says he's very smart . But he does note that there are certain blind spots in his thinking , that he roots back to the social conditions in which he grew up . For instance , throughout most of his life David Hume did his best to shed his Scottish background to become English . Same thing with Edmund Burke and how he was Irish and how he repudiated a great deal of Irish heritage in basically being pro British imperialism . And that's what I think is where you see a lot of Marx comes in , where MacIntyre does not deal with these historical figures as a bunch of rootless ideas floating in the ether , but are instead rooted in these social conditions , not necessarily reflecting these social conditions , but are individuals who are trying to make sense of and survive in these different historical conditions .
Speaker 1One of the things that I think that I got , that I think is contextualized in the pen and rational animals and in his justice , his rationality , but I think is really important . So a lot of people think one of the biggest critiques that MacIntyre has is his critique of emotivism . But emotivism for him is not the like clear distinction between emotions and reason , because that doesn't make really sense to him either . But what emotivism is is kind of a philosophical doctrine where , since we are not dealing with our social embodiedness , basically aesthetics , emotional responses , which is what you know , have to be where we get our morality from . And this is open for him to easy manipulation . And in fact he says I mean I'll just quote after virtue here , this is on page 23 .
Speaker 1The key to the social content of emotivism is the fact that emotivism tells the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations , like , so what does that mean ? Well , if everything that you have is about your response to say your group belonging , like not your embodiment in the group and protection of that group , but this sense of projected identity of what you have to that group , right , like you know , the most obvious and banal example this is race and racism , et cetera . But in general an embodied social relationship is with people who you actually see your future with and eat together with .
Speaker 2Yeah , it's not what I should do , but it's what we should do .
Speaker 1Yeah , what we should do , Whereas if you're in an emotive context , this is easily manipulable because the context and deliberation of the we , of me as part of the we and the way I can deliberate that can be manipulated by a projection of an identity that supposedly stands in for the we . I actually I take this deeper than McIntyre . I think it stands in for symbolic kinship but is a form of manipulation of symbolic kinship but like this , projected like we as left is fully blank . But anyone can say and speak as the we and since there's no community of which you're sitting at the table and can say that , motherfuckers , an outsider , you can't really protect yourself against that either , but it can pull in your emotions in any sort of way . So it's not that the emotions are the problem , it's the fact that we rely mostly on our emotive responses , often hiding them from McIntyre and like pseudo responses .
Speaker 2Yeah and McIntyre makes clear what makes us clear in a lot of his late work , but especially in the ethics that this kind of thinking really comes into its form under like the in like modernity
Understanding Modernity's Fragmentation and Division
Speaker 2. And what he means by modernity is those communities and those social relations that are undergirded by private property , relations of making contracts with others , where there is no more the corporate community . And by corporate I don't mean corporation , but I mean corporate is in like the whole community , like an organism .
Speaker 1But he also imposes , go ahead .
Speaker 2No , go ahead , I was about to say , but instead a bunch of different individuals who are coming into relations with each other , and not only that , and this is very important .
Speaker 2But McIntyre has this understanding of compartmentalization which I think is crucial , a very crucial insight that he has that complements a lot of Marxist thinking , which is to say that under private property relations you have these different spheres of life .
Speaker 2What do we mean by that ? Well , back during the , let's say , a medieval village , you had the economy and there wasn't really a strong demarcation between the public and the private , because the home economy , the base element of it , was the home . But then , as the economy , the motor of the economy , slowly came out of the home into the workshop and then the factory there began to create this kind of set of , like different spheres of life where , for instance , you , when I am a , say , working as a Starbucks barista , and you , vaughn , come in for a drink , you do not confront me as Vaughn , you confront me as a customer and I confront you as a barista , and we do not see each other as full , integrated human beings . We see each other only in the role in which we inhabit , and this is the chief thing that kind of characterizes modernity is the fragmentation of man in the inability to integrate all these different small selves that we inhabit in all these different spheres of life , into one being .
Speaker 1Right . I mean in some ways this picks up from Mark's the alienation problem , but actually I would say it probably goes a little bit deeper than Mark's because it marks . You know Mark's doesn't delineate it this way , but if you read the early philosophical manuscripts it's really clear that Mark's talks about four forms of alienation alienation from your labor Yep Alienation from your , from yourself , from others from others , from others both in general , and others from other workers , because you're in competition with them .
Speaker 1Yes , but MacIntyre actually takes this and goes further . But it's not just alienation from our labor . We actually now have to compare , we have to reflect within ourselves the division of labor in a way that , yes , other societies have had divisions of labor , but they have not asked us to fragment ourselves to reflect that , so that we are a completely different instantiation in this form , when we're doing this function , then in this form we're doing this function .
Speaker 2Right , and this is what makes possible the notion of like morality being a fundamentally different sphere from politics .
Speaker 2Because , say , in ancient Greece , this is something that'd be a little bit a bit of an odd conception to have Like .
Speaker 2Take reading the Iliad , which MacIntyre has an extended commentary on the Iliad of the different ways in which translators from the 15th century , the 18th century and the 20th century translate how Achilles is able to sort of think through his anger , and we kind of , as modern readers , read , read the Iliad and we think , oh , Achilles , he's very angry and he uses his rationality to select from these different choices of what he ought to do , and then he chooses that and then he does that thing .
Speaker 2Whereas for like the ancient Greeks , it is more like because Achilles occupies this certain role in the social hierarchy as a warrior , aristocrat and as a well educated and by educated I don't mean he went to college , of course , but I mean like a well morally formed person . He just knows what he has to do and the only thing that is left to him to do is not to choose from all these different things , to like , pick and choose like a rational individual actor that we can see of like 18th century philosophy , but instead he just has to summon the thumos , the will , to accomplish the thing that he already knows that he ought to do , as according to his role as a warrior aristocrat fighting this conflict . So you have morality and religion and aesthetics being integrated into kind of one general sphere .
Speaker 1Which I think is fair enough . I mean one of the things I would say to that that I think like and again , we keep on making this body metaphor , because I don't really have a better one but the general sphere is like yes , there are different , you have different functions in society as a leader , as a and it's not like in pre-modern societies and to be for people who are Mac and Tyre's Eurocentric yes , but also no . He does actually mention non-European societies a fair amount in these books . He is Christian , though , so you do have to take that into account . But he does seem to imply that , like , these conceptual schemas are parts of holes , that , yes , we know , like , when a person is functioning as a politician , but we do not expect them to act as a politician in this sphere of life and then go home and then do this completely different thing .
Speaker 1There is a distinction between public and private in a lot of these societies , but even that is probably too modern , right , like a way to conceptualize that . I know we have broken down the distinction between public and private , but I think that's really crucial . I think that it's .
Rejecting Communitarianism and Exploring Human Flourishing
Speaker 1Is that really clear in ? In ? Is it who's justice and who's rationality , or after virtue , where he talks about that , the most I'm trying to remember .
Speaker 2He talks the most about the Iliad comparison in who's justice ? Which rationality right .
Speaker 1I kind of read those two books together as like a cluster , so I often forget what things and what there . I think this is important because he thinks like this is why this is why a lot of things don't work . But let's talk about why he rejects the notion of communitarian or corporatist , cause we talked about his despair over the breakup of the corporate society , and by corporate we do not mean corporation and the limited liability sense . But this , I think , led to a lot of people who are basically fascistic , if not out and out fascist , to be attracted to him because they are corporatist or integralist and if for anyone knows what that means in philosophy , this is an attempt to get class collaboration together to build an integrated state from the standpoint of the state down .
Speaker 2The workers have their place , the capitalists have their place , and so on and so forth . It's like the way a lot of fascists like to put . It is like it's like a human body , but it's the reactionary conception of the human body is like the brain is for thinking and then the hand does what the brain says . Yeah , I think .
Speaker 1Exactly so . The brain is the leader who controls the otherwise developing and problematic elites , scares them in the shape . They all function together . There is justice in that the workers get what their due share is , but of course that is not . That's actually a lesser portion , and there is some pushback on capitalist . But when people are always like to me , ex state kills their capitalists , that means that they're more socialistic than we are , and I'm always like fascist , kill capitalist . My friend . Yeah , like all kinds of people , kill capitalists .
Speaker 2That doesn't tell you that is not a socialist signature move , that doesn't tell you anything actually Capitalists kill capitalist .
Speaker 1Even we don't tend to our government , our state doesn't tend to do it here that much , but it used to . So I think this is a kind of interesting development . Now the one thing I will say that you do have to kind of deal with in McIntyre , that may be a hard thing for non-religious people to follow , is his idea of , like biological teleology .
Speaker 2So yeah , he talks a lot about that independent , rational animals , and it's very much like he is not . He doesn't really reference God in it , but he's very much like look , humans are animals , they're like dolphins . He does not try to say that human beings are special insofar as we're somehow above dolphins or other animals , or like we have souls and they don't . What he's trying to say is that , by virtue of how we've kind of evolved , there are certain conditions in which we can say we objectively flourish more in others , in such a sense in which , like in the ethics , he says like if you put a set of gorillas in the Arctic , they're not going to flourish . And what does flourishing mean ? Well , for McIntyre he defines it as flourishing being the exercise of those particular animal or particular powers that , say , a gorilla or any other animal has . For obvious reasons , gorillas would not flourish in the Arctic . Same thing with humans , where there is a spectrum of environments , a spectrum of different environments in which human beings flourish and in which human beings do not flourish .
Speaker 1Yeah , and if we encounter environments where we don't flourish , we figure out artificial way this is where we're , where .
Speaker 2This is what makes human beings the universal animal .
Speaker 1Right , animals do this too . For people who think that I don't realize that , don't at me . I do realize that animals modify their environment . Some of them do severely go meet a pack of termites sometime . But it's actually interesting because one of the things that McIntyre does is , while he does , I think yeah , he doesn't mention that . He doesn't try to root this in any God thinking , although he clearly does think this is a implication inconsistent with Christianity . But what's interesting and different from him than like other Christian philosophers he actually talks about ? Like humans can learn from watching animals like engage and maximize their flourishing and not , and how they act and interact with each other . They can also learn bad things from it , but we can learn it .
Speaker 2That's what makes us rational , is our ability to take a step back from our life activity and understand or incorporate , like the different parts of the life activities of other animals .
Speaker 1So and this is basically for those of you who hadn't realized this is basically Aristotle made less stupid .
Speaker 2There's also a lot of marks in the manuscripts , since he talks a lot about the animal and what makes humans the universal animal .
Speaker 1Right and like social constraints on species being being in , like one of the things that Mark said . I look that I think people get tired of me bringing up at this point , cause I brought it up so many times . But in Marxist , not that there's no human nature is that human nature is always mediated through sociality , by its nature . So it's very hard to say what is pure human nature outside of social construct , because there is no human outside of social construct . That's part of what it means to be human Right .
Speaker 2Human beings are the only animals who , like , can be tricked into doing something that is bad for their long-term survival , like monkeys are like . You can put like drugs and like monkeys or mice kind of food and make them act stupid , but you can't really trick a monkey into not eating food in the way you can treat . You can trick a human into not trick but argue a human into engaging in behaviors that is bad for their long-term flourishing .
Speaker 1Yeah , there's another example of this that I always talk about when I'm talking about like okay , so you think that what makes human special is mechanical rationality or ability to make tools . Yeah , me complicate that for you . If I sit down with a chimp and make a device that gives them food and it's mechanically complicated , and I model it for them , and in that modeling I include steps that are unnecessary , A monkey , a champ , will eventually drop those unnecessary steps . It will manipulate it enough to realize the unnecessary steps and drop them away . Human beings do not drop the unnecessary steps . No , we come up with a rationale about why the unnecessary steps are actually necessary Right From the stint .
Speaker 1Now this seems completely perverse and maybe even anti-evolutionary . Until you realize that part of what's going on there is , we assume high levels of social trust , like naturally with our immediate you know whatever . Now , outsiders , free fucking game is one of my things about . I always talk about Hobbes . When we act alienated , we do act Hobbesian . And when we compete between groups , we are totally Hobbesian . But in our relationships with other human beings , even with other government , as long as we see ourselves on a spectrum of relation with them , we do not act Hobbesian . Right . By that I mean all against all . We just don't do that .
Speaker 2And to bring this back , to the point about McIntyre not being a communitarian when we talk about their environments in which we can say human beings objectively will not flourish in , and human beings are some of the only animals that can be tricked or argued into engaging an animal in behaviors or dispositions that is bad for their long term survival or their community's long term survival . This feeds into why McIntyre is not a communitarian in so far as Any community is actually good .
Speaker 1He does think we can distinguish between flourishing and nonflourishing communities .
Speaker 2Yeah , a good way of putting it here is that food is necessary for our survival in the same way that community is necessary for our long term survival . That does not make all food equally as good for us as , say , all communities are equally good for us . For example , I could technically survive off of eating gruel and cardboard . Technically that's not good for me in the long term . Same thing with communities like , say , the Jim Crow 1920s , 1910 , small town in Alabama . That's not a very flourishing community . That's not a good community for , not just for the black members of that community , it's really not great for anybody .
Speaker 1It's bad for everybody . It brings out social pathologies , even in the victors .
Exploring Human Flourishing and Societal Norms
Speaker 2Yes , this is something James Baldwin talks about , where the white southerner is paranoid , extremely paranoid . This goes back to 16th , 17th century Barbados , where white planters often just have nightmares , just waking up terrified thinking that they've just had a nightmare where their slaves have finally revolted and are going to kill them . That is not the sign of a well functioning , developing human being . Being outflanked by paranoia and these things of like , oh no , they're going to do to me what I've been doing to them for several decades now .
Speaker 1Yes , this is something that I think people miss . One thing I recently talked with my friend , jules DeLio no , jules DeLio , I'm going to pronounce her name right , everyone's name , I messed up Is that there are a variety of ways in which humans live , but they do certain things and not others . But a lot of the way we get into things that are not healthy for us . I'll give you an example of something that is not healthy for us . Actually , that's kind of a unilateral idea that we move from agriculture , from pastoralism and or horticulturism or permaculture things that are these early modes of human subsistence and or even sometimes flourishing into agriculture where our bone density dropped , etc . People often make this teleological argument about that , that we had to do it . Maybe there is some sense in which to get enough calories in the population we did have to do it , I don't know or at least to build relative social surplus . But here's one thing we never talk about . When we talk about that in transition , we know for a fact that in a lot of those transitions from pastoralism to agriculturalism etc . The people who were made to do the agriculture were enslaved . They didn't choose that life . But even when they did , if they did do it voluntarily . There is usually a really aggressive myth to get people to do it . That's a crucial thing to talk about Now .
Speaker 1I combine that with an insight from a book that is generally considered to be conservative . I don't think it is . It is Robert Edgerton's Six Societies Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony , which is not saying that all quote primitive societies are bad . What he's saying is no , they're human societies that have pretty profound ills , that are not modern . When we study them , we see high levels of cortisol . We see high levels of stress . We see people who report things they view as horrible , like certain kinds of human sacrifice , trigger warning institutionalized , explicit , as in , not hidden from general society rate stuff like that we have . Edgerton demonstrates people do not flourish in those conditions . Period . Just because people are primitive and they do these kinds of things does not mean that most of the people in those societies are flourishing . There are societies where people flourish and societies where people don't .
Speaker 2Because we can construct stories and have narratives with our language about what constitutes human flourishing and we can understand what human flourishing is . We are able to understand . Okay , this is what a flourishing human community looks like . This is what a flourishing human being looks like . What are those dispositions that allow one to be a flourishing human being , ie to actualize their uniquely human powers as a human being ? Those dispositions are what we call the virtues . That does not mean these are the behaviors that are going to live a guaranteed good life , because , as we all know , there are plenty of good human beings who have bad ends , whether through sickness or through bad acts performed upon them . But what virtue ethics essentially says , and what McIntyre argues , is that there are dispositions within both communities and individuals , and common goods and individual goods , that we can definitely say this is what a good community and this is what a flourishing individual looks like , and these are the behaviors and dispositions that lead one to flourish .
Speaker 1So what this pushes back against communitarianism , before people don't get what we're getting at . They're not all communitarians , but there is a subset of communitarians . One of the fun things about communitarians is what we're talking about this . No communitarian I know will admit they're a communitarian . I think I say I'm a communitarian , but even I put a hashtag I'm a communitarian socialist , and also there's a hashtag on communitarian . I don't believe all communities are quite equal . Thank you very much . So , for example , there are people who will say well , people didn't know any better in the Mexica community that's the Aztecs when they were doing that .
Speaker 1Mass amounts of human sacrifice . Human sacrifice has been a norm in Mesoamerica , but it was a norm for enforcing empires . Let me tell you how to Spanish actually won that . It wasn't the gun their guns were shit . It wasn't even the steel sword , which was , admittedly , a lot better . It wasn't their numbers and it wasn't their science , because for 15th century science like , let's be real here , and in fact honestly , the Mexica were probably more scientifically advanced than the Spanish . They built a living island and put a giant monolithic city on it in the middle of a lake , out of nothing .
Speaker 1But you know why , the Spanish one I mean , I'm sure you know , but it's because , like most of the other indigenous tribes , were sick of being farmed for sacrifices . They hated the Aztecs , they hated their guts and sided with the Spanish . Now they immediately regretted that , but a lot of the Nawa speakers , who are not Mexica , sided with the Spanish right . Yeah , this is just to illustrate that wasn't because they were stupid , it wasn't because , I mean , the Spanish did trick them , but it wasn't because the Spanish set out to even trick them or they converted them to Christianity or any of that . It's that Mexica society . It was an imposition and it was incredibly violent and it maintained a lot of its power base through sacrifice , which people really wanted to stop , and you can't bracket that out .
Speaker 1And I also think one thing I think McIntyre is good on is not sugarcoating , like he's not one of these lapisarians who thinks , oh , everything was good before capitalism . No , capitalism from here is ultimately bad . I mean , he talks about that quite a bit . He does have a slightly Marxist view and it doesn't see it as just bad , but not like most societies , for him , are at best neutral and a lot of them are actively bad , and that has nothing to do with capitalism , although he'd probably include capitalism as a bad one . He doesn't see moral crisis and moral collapse as unique to capitalism .
Speaker 2Right , no , yeah , I mean , this is the big thing with McIntyre . Is that the notion that you brought up earlier about ? They didn't know any better or they didn't know , they were just raised into it ? Mcintyre would strongly disagree with the person who would have that thought , because McIntyre's whole thing is like we are not termites , we are not just a collective hive mind , so to speak . We are rational thinking individuals . You can take these traditional societies and there are people who fit on a very wide spectrum of how they feel about certain social practices . For instance , look at the rise of chattel slavery in North America . There are many people who said it was bad , and not just Black Freedmen either . There are many white people in the South , even up to like the 1810s 1820s , who were fairly vocal about how bad slavery was for their society and how inhumane it was .
Speaker 1It was rare , but it was not unheard of . It was not unheard of .
Speaker 2This is a thing that McIntyre . This is a book of essays . One of my friends did a book club on McIntyre . It's a wonderful essay called Social Structures and their Threat to Moral Agency , where McIntyre tackles the question of the people who basically did those Nazi atrocities , who sat at Nuremberg . Where McIntyre essentially concludes yes , they had to do it because it was their job , but they're ultimately responsible because even though , when you go into your job , when you go into that sphere of work in which you have to alienate all those different aspects of yourself that are not congenial to performing your function , you make that choice to do that . You make the choice to not feel bad for those Jews who are going on to those train cars . You make the choice into going into that work . Yes , history does make men and it presents them with these social relations and these conditions that are not of their own making . But men also make history .
Speaker 1Yes , I think that's absolutely true . I think this is the continuity with McIntyre and his Marxism , but also there is this Aristotelianism . There is this deeper problem . I think one of the things that he would probably grok is and Marxism and Christianity one of the things that he talks about , as Marxism is one of the fully instantiated alternative systems to liberalism . That actually also doesn't predate it emerges from it , but it really becomes a separate thing , which is something I believe too , and that , however , that he still thinks that it has this . He thinks that Marxism does have a naive view of rationality and of science , and that's not something he drops , and I go back and forth on that .
Speaker 1I had , the people may know , there's a whole other podcast where I was basically trying to figure out if Marxism could have ever been called the science , and my answer is basically not really . Like . There are scientific elements to it . Sure there's also non-scientific elements to it . By the way , I'm not sure science , science can be solved . The science in the way . Science wants to be called a science either , and I'm not some loosey-goosey post-modernist , post-structuralist who doesn't believe the word science has any meaning , like I've just been pointing out to people that , like when you tell me that there's a scientific method . Which one are you referring to ? Like science is an embodied tradition , but it's gatekeeping between other things is actually clear in some cases , such as physics , but very unclear in a whole lot of others , such as , say , psychiatry , where there are .
Complexity of Left and Right
Speaker 1It's not to say the social sciences aren't sciences . That's where I don't get on that train , but I do think we have to critique them for pretending , for example , that they're physics or , when they get slightly smarter , that they're biology . Like I also get really annoyed when I talk to mathematicians or physicists or biologists or whatever , and they try to reduce all social sciences to their field and I'm like , well , that's trying to say that all biology is chemistry but all chemistry is really physics , even though , yes , physics is definitely relevant to chemistry and thus relevant to biology . I don't actually know much about animals just by knowing their chemical signatures , so the order of complexity really matters , and I think Mac and Tyre would probably have a similar thing . So he also thinks he's highly influenced by Lakatos . So he thinks that when we talk about science , we're talking about reason in a set of terms that are defined by the science , like biology wants to understand . This thing is terminology and its methods may come from outside , but it's also coming from the community itself in the pursuit of what it is doing , and so attempts to abstractify that are going to be hard , because you're going to have to ask yourself well , what does Lakatos' criterion ? Does the operational definitions make sense ? Are they agreed upon ? Frameworks ? They sent the other , but Lakatos basically throws out the idea . We can have a meta framework or a clear demarcation rule , in the same way that Mac and Tyre throws out the . We can have Runwall to generate morality , that's just . This is a silly pursuit . It's taking outcomes razor to a logically fallacious point in and of itself .
Speaker 1So I think that there's so much to talk about with Mac and Tyre . I mean , he's a hard figure to wrap your mind around , part of which is because he seems to think that are you know why we can't ? And it's not that he would claim to be beyond left and right either , because anyone who claims that you should probably not trust he's not claiming to be beyond left and right . He's claiming that , like , neither side in the current context actually has a good handle on human flourishing . So talking about this in the , in these terms , in these post-front revolutionary terms , all the time does not always really help you understand much , and I am actually sympathetic to that , even though I do think left and right have orientational meanings in some sense although anytime I've ever sat down and tried to get someone to pin down what is the definition of the left and what is the definition of liberal and what is the definition of the right .
Speaker 1I have always found their definition lacking .
Speaker 2I take a Vidkensteinian route to it . You know how Vidkenstein like basically give you , give your viewers context . Vidkenstein is someone who Mack and Tyre takes a lot from . I take a lot from too , but I keep that quiet , no , of course .
Speaker 2And his whole thing is talking about how language can be kind of constituted of what he calls language games where , like , it's a way of participating in a form of life . And like , one rejoinder to that that he addresses in the philosophical investigations is well , what's a game , what's the thing that unites all games ? And with , vidkenstein says , well , you can't really find the thing that unites all games . Like , there , there's not really a set thing that unites everything , it's more like families of resemblances , like baseball resembles football , but neither resembles singing , which can be a kind of game that can be cooperative , but sometimes isn't co-op , but sometimes is just performed by oneself .
Speaker 2And I take that view with , like the left and the right and when someone's like , well , the left and the right have these two very different understandings of what human flourishing is . And I think a lot of people can agree with that . I agree , I agree with that as well . But I think trying to nail down this is the formula to determine what the rights conception of flourishing is and the lefts , I think is a bit of a dead end because the left and the right is constitutive many different traditions .
Speaker 1Yeah , I used to even think that maybe okay , the left was , was an . I used to take this like early Kowakowsky I'm going to say his name right , because I've been practicing , I usually call him Kowakowsky but Kowakowsky stance that the left is negationist but towards building something for the future , whereas the right is preservationist . But even that , even that orientation , isn't really totally true . I mean , like if you read even someone as early as Demestra , it becomes clear that no , the right isn't necessarily preservationist at all .
Speaker 2Or like when I got into a bit of a tiff with a conservative Catholic because they were saying , like all conservatives are basically those who stand for tradition and stand for orthodoxy and preserve against leftists who want to do the opposite , and I say , okay , was letting a conservative , was stalling a conservative , because they want to preserve the core tenants of Marx conservative .
Speaker 1Hannah Arendt says yes , but I think that's a ridiculous answer . Yeah , you know , like you know , I do think there are certain orientations of power in the status quo and that family of resemblances you can call right and left , that leftist want . Well , I keep saying that , but I can think of examples where that's not true . It's tough , isn't it Right ? And leftists generally want a more egalitarian or at least less arbitrary set of hierarchies and power structure . But then I'm like , yeah , but not always .
Speaker 1And when we get to liberalism and I've told people before when they get mad like , well , conservatives , you know ? I think Ashley Frawley said you know , scratch a conservative and you find a classical liberal . And I'm like , yeah , that's because almost everybody's a liberal . That doesn't actually tell you anything . But also , you're using one definition of liberal and implying another .
Speaker 1And by liberal in our society in America , due to the legacy of anti-communism and the Cold War , liberal for us means progressive , which itself is a confused term , but we kind of know what that means . And right means conservative . And by our conservatives generally that either means white supremacists are nationalist or libertarian , but it does not generally mean like a blood and soil monarchist who wants a theocracy , although some Protestants want a kind of theocracy sometimes . So you know , even there , when I'm trying to define these terms , it's hard to do . But one of the things that I pointed out , you know the people in the past when they go . Well , you know the right and you know the left and in America is really the right in Europe , but I'm like , except for the hard right in Europe , which is righter than anything viable on the American political spectrum at all , Right .
Speaker 1And I'm like you know there are . There's nobody who's trying to restore the Habsburgs in the United States who's not considered kind of a loom .
Speaker 2Right , and this is why this is where McIntyre is useful , because you know McIntyre is very much into we have to talk about left and right historically , and he says this in response to , say , some conservatives who say there is a strong conservative tradition that goes back to before Edmund Burke or comes back to Edmund Burke . But then you have people like Eric Habsbaum who show like , well , I mean , the conservative view of the revolution as modern conservatives have it these days , doesn't really show up in the historiography until like the 1940s and 50s .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean basically the conservative tradition from Burke to Elliott is invented by Rachele Kirk .
Speaker 2Right .
Speaker 1Exactly , you know , like most tradition . I mean , this is one of the things where I get all Habsbaum me and but I'm like most traditions like that are invented anyway , Like they're always post-hoc rationalizations , and this is where McIntyre in , one of the symptoms of a decaying community is a community that insists upon itself because of its age .
Speaker 2I think in who's justice which rationality he brings up through citities with the like conservatives , who make it Absolutely ironically are now aware of a decaying set of social practices whose political program is now we have to go back to thinking unreflexively about those social practices and unreflexively accepting those social practices , the irony being that in saying we have to unreflexively embrace these practices that are now decaying , you're not actually doing that . You're self aware . You're , in an aware fashion , trying to resurrect or prop up these practices that are dying , where , if you're essentially saying like , oh , a thing is really dying , if you're saying , guys , we have to preserve the thing that's dying , Interestingly , that's also something that Demastra actually argues , but he takes it in a very , very different way .
Speaker 1Demastra's whole point is , like anything that's trying to conserve something has become aware of its instantiation and because of that it's already losing , and thus the demonic horde of the French Revolution is actually still doing God's work , despite of itself , according to Demastra . Demastra's weird , though , because he's like as Catholic as he is , he's also like as one of the first Catholic thinkers who's really really , really insistent on , like there's no such thing as human universality . So it's , you know , these figures are actually really important to kind of understand in European thinking
Engaging With MacIntyre and Marxist Perspectives
Speaker 1. And I think MacIntyre one of my things about MacIntyre there is tell people when people like , well , you Catholic and I'm like , no , but I'm not at all . Nor do I limit myself to examples from the Western world .
Speaker 1I'm very interested in , like , when I talk about the ancient world , for example , and antiquity , even though Rome comes up a lot because we talk about it in the way that capitalism developed . And my big question about why didn't Rome just go directly capitalism ? Why are there these weird forms that we kind of hodgepodge and call feudalism that emerge where , like , there's an informal relation and there's kind of a government , but not really . And like you know , but one of my main criticisms of Marx , until very late in his life , is he really does not deal with non-European societies , and so I very much try not to do that because I think , like , like , yes , there is something necessarily Eurocentric about Marxist project because capitalism as we know it developed in Europe , but we don't have to stop with that . We don't have to do the age , the age , the adic despotism here , be dragon to the rest of the planet or take on a wiggish enlightenment notion that is naive and I'm not even entirely sure consistent with all of Marx's life .
Speaker 1Yeah , and there is a certain kind of Marxist right now and yes , my listeners , if you are one of them , I am chastising you who pushes this and then wonders why their politics seems impossible . Because I'm like well , your notion of what a human being is is just wrong . Right , we are not homo economicists , who also just happens to come by a set of universally obvious booze while rights . That does . That exist because of , because we've always really had them , but now we're at the , at a certain point of development where we can finally deliver on them , yet somehow we never do .
Speaker 2So I think , like Macintyre , has helped me engage with the black radical tradition , like Du Bois , james Baldwin , and who is the fellow who wrote why how Europe underdeveloped Africa ? Walter Rodney . Walter Rodney , yes , because they do a good job of vitalizing the Marxist tradition by not negating what Marx wrote , but by building upon and transcending what Marx wrote and trying to understand , say , africa and Asia . In fact , macintyre , one of his big things throughout a lot of his later work , ever since after virtue , is saying that you know again , the way one knows that a tradition is dying out is the inability to do what Marx wrote , and this is the inability to incorporate other traditions into itself or to understand those traditions in its own terms . And this is what I see a lot of say and this is very inside baseball , like Twitter Stalinist or Twitter Leninists , who talk and write as though it's still like 1914 Moscow .
Speaker 1This is to me this is not just a failure from the Macintyre and perspective , it's also failure from the Marxist perspective , because , even by any Marxian definition material conditions you don't exist in those . Yeah , you're not . I'm not even sure there is a society on earth that actually would replicate the precise conditions of either Russia or China in the semi perit theory at the time of the early 20th century . Today I don't . I don't know of societies that are like that , definitely not any that are that big yet that underdeveloped , like I still need to .
Speaker 2I think it's by his last name is Heywood . It's about Civil War , spain , and he essentially talks about the social conditions of like basically why the Leninist failed in Spain . And it basically is chalked up to like a lot of the Leninists basically saying , okay , if we , if we close our eyes and if we blur our eyes enough , spain kind of looks like Zorist Russia , therefore we should act as though it's Zorist Russia . And so a lot of the Leninists alienated a lot of peasants who had very different relationships with the Catholic Church than said a lot of the Russian peasants had with the Orthodox Church , and doing all these different kind of maneuvers . That was backfired on them on the massively . And that's what happens when you treat Marxism as a doctrine .
Speaker 1You know that . Yet I also have this with ultra leftist . When they're like I'm an invariant , I'm like if you're an invariant , you're already like wrong .
Speaker 2Sounds like an X mentor . I'm an invariant .
Speaker 1I mean , it's a bodega term , you know what that means , but like it's like no , I know that , I know the rational program and it doesn't change . Okay , you know , and to me , I didn't even get to this from a MacIntyrean perspective , I got it from a Lackatochian perspective . But to me is like you're , you're , you're making these categories rigid because you lost , and dealing with in changing your practice is too hard , so you're going to remove your categories from practice altogether , which also means they don't really mean anything .
Speaker 2You're going to be an armchair guy . You're just going to be a guy in the armchair , not doing anything .
Speaker 1Right , and this is another point for MacIntyre , but I also think it's important for Lackatoch to these are things you do .
Speaker 1Yeah , they're not just things you believe , and actually this is sort of MacIntyre's kind of crypto chastising and Protestant Christians , because there's some of that too . We don't get into that here because we're in Marxist and we don't really care about it . Well , you might care about it because I would care . You're actually Catholic and and I am not a Christian . But I will tell you if I have a bigotry other than against the English , it is against Protestants . I don't trust Protestants as far as I can throw them .
Speaker 2I'm a Georgia boy , born and raised over here .
Speaker 1But no , I mean to be fair and I think this is actually particularly interesting about a paradox and like , say , evangelical Christianity , because , on one hand , there's a tendency in evangelical Christianity to reduce Christianity not even to creeds or dogmas , but to mere basic belief . On another hand , however , the only reason it has been successful against like mainline Protestantism and not always that it is declining rather rapidly these days Is that it actually has an embodied practice with embodied things , where people do things together and incorporates most elements of your life , like the football team and etc . And this is one of my like real big angers back in the DSA debates and people be like , oh , the left is not a church , and I'd be like , no , it's not , but also like church succeed and you don't have you ever asked yourself why ? So like , maybe the left is not a philosophical debating group on Twitter is perhaps also something that you should be saying simultaneously , because , well , no , we are not a church .
Speaker 1There are things that churches do that socialists used to do , that we don't do anymore , and this is a problem . Now , some of that , I think , is like and this is why I've become more and more I've actually become more sympathetic to this point of Mac entire and after virtue , even though I am less sympathetic to the religious elements of it , and I'm going to lie . But is the bowling alone ? You know Anton Jaeger description of general society right now where , like mass politics seems impossible because math life seems really really hard , right , and that makes doing much of anything very , very difficult . Yeah , and if , if , if , you're a leftist and you don't really address that , you're going to have some real problems , I think .
Speaker 2Yeah , and to kind of go back to your point about marks or Marxism or being a leftist , is not something you think it's something to do .
Speaker 2I'll relate it to a personal experience of mine .
Speaker 2A few years ago when I was in DC , I was doing DSA stuff , doing housing , housing organizing , and it was in a predominantly undocumented , like immigrant community , mostly Spanish speakers , some Middle Eastern immigrants , but for the most part English was one of several languages amongst the residents and we were doing this kind of we're on one of the the lawns or something , and we were passing out food or cans of food and a lot of the residents were coming in and we were having a difficult time talking to them because they were like they only knew Spanish .
Speaker 2And one of the one of the women , one of the residents of the apartment complex , was like a single mother , came up and was like just started helping us translate and that made such a huge impact on me because , you know , it's one thing to say like oh , the proletariat is a , has its own self activity , it's like an active , vital force . But it's another thing to see that in action where , like you see , like oh , these mostly white collar kind of professionals coming into this community trying to do tenant organizing and then several members of the community helping us do that and take leadership of that , like that made a huge impact on me and I think that dovetails with Mac and tire and Marx's whole thing about theory informing praxis and praxis informing theory . And if you there's , this is a very real type of person who they lean so hard into theory and lean so hard into the PDFs and at the same time can barely order a play , a plate of eggs and bacon waffle house without stuttering and losing their mind .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think I think that's true . I also think can concurrently , just to put the other spin on this the destruction of working class communities is a very real and has very real effects and you can't just romanticize that away because it's a destruction of a way of life .
Family, Marxism, and Community Dissolution
Speaker 1Yeah , I talk about like a lot of times . Like you know , I'm ambivalent about family abolition because , on one hand , I actually think we've actually achieved a lot of the stuff that Marxist meant by it when they brought it up 200 years ago and socialists in general .
Speaker 1On the other hand , I have seen what has happened in this post family society where , like partner stability and support for children in terms of what we in terms of marriage in our society , because that's the legal thing we rely to , but also in general , even beyond marriage , like I'm not just I'm not crying about the end of the bourgeois marriage in the way Christopher lashes , for example really have become class goods in a way that they kind of weren't for most of the 20th century and this has pretty profound effects on things like the proletariat , because I don't know , last time I checked it's , at least until very recently , was like majority female . Now it's gone back to not being , but it's still pretty close . And weirdly , now I've read axios and liberals talk about like oh well , the progress of women entering work first has stopped at 70% . It's still . I wonder why . And we need them because we're losing workers and a mic . Of course that's what you're thinking and you don't even have the sense to not say that out loud .
Speaker 2Marxist feminists enter the chat yeah .
Speaker 1And I just I think about that because I do think we've made a lot of these communities very hard for them to sustain themselves and they had adapted to certain degrees and that has been largely undone , particularly after the industrialization , even before you get to neoliberalism in that period in between , when you start seeing this crop up at the end of the 60s and the 70s .
Speaker 1And that's not because all the old ways we had adjusted during the thwartest period were good . I don't think that I'm just saying that , like , for a lot of people the experience was worse . This is one of the points that lash makes that actually do kind of agree with . I don't agree with the way he frames it but , like , when we talk people can go back and listen to , not on the podcast , but if you find the episode where we talk about this particular essay by lash for four hours and I go into a rant about how he doesn't really understand anthropology and family and kinship because he's very much stuck on a very particular model of that from from the early 20th century , but that you can go back , I'm not going to re litigate that . That that rant so from people also think that I'm an uncritical lash in . You're just wrong .
Speaker 2And the disillusion of like these kind of traditional forms of community .
Speaker 2I think that dovetails very well in the animal human distinction of Marx and McIntyre .
Speaker 2Because , to kind of touch on Marx first , marx essentially says that rationality does not , it's not just a thing that is added on to our humanity , but it's something that fundamentally changes the way in which we like engage with life itself .
Speaker 2For instance , when we eat food , or when an animal eats food , marx basically kind of says it's to satiate its appetite , to immediate appetites human beings with a rationality are . It does not enhance our senses , but it allows us to enjoy things in a deeper way that animals fundamentally cannot , for instance eating as a fundamentally social activity . We do not eat because it satiates us or simply because it satiates us , but we eat because we enjoy it . We enjoy it in the company of others , we enjoy the way the food has been cooked or arranged . We enjoy it in an infinite number of ways that is helped by a rationality , and are being in a community with others . This is why Marx says that humans are the only animals that are able to comprehend and build things according to the laws of beauty and with capitalism , with Marx , to use a quote from the manuscripts . It makes our human functions animal . What he means by that is we see eating and drinking and working not as goods in and of themselves but as means to an end , means of life .
Speaker 1Means production of value .
Speaker 2Yeah , to produce a production of value and also a means of , like , reproducing ourselves . For instance , when your workplace if you're especially a white collar professional takes an interest in you attending happy hours or having a good work-life balance , that's not because they're being nice , but it's because , primarily , they want to make sure you're able to get up in the morning and perform work at your best . And what capital does with like in the disillusion of community , is it renders , it negates those aspects of our humanity that makes us human and makes us able to enjoy life in a unique , rich way that animals cannot .
Speaker 1All right , and so try this into McIntyre and we'll wrap up .
Speaker 2Yeah , and with McIntyre , this is essentially what the virtues are for , their goods , internal in themselves .
Speaker 2And these are goods and these are dispositions that , at the end of the day , allow us to align ourselves with our nature as being dependent , rational animals that allow us to be better able at being in a community and sustaining a community and being in the fellowship of others .
Speaker 2But that doesn't mean like the common good is like the , you know , the greatest good though it is , it is a great good . What it does mean is by being able to contribute to the common good , we are able to better actualize our individual goods . When the community is healthy , when everybody can come to the dinner table with their at their fullest selves , giving themselves to others , giving themselves to community , they are better able to enjoy the food that comes to the table and they're better able at appreciating the fine artistry that comes into making the food , preparing the food , serving the food , talking about the food with others and this is where McIntyre gets a lot from Marx , who both get a lot from Aristotle . And why , how a capital income part mentalizing life leads to the fragmentation of the self and the more we see ourselves as fragments into all these different spheres of life , the less able we are at living well integrated lives , which means we are less able at living lives that enjoy and execute our specifically human forms of rationality Right .
Speaker 1So to sum up what I think is important for my listeners , I think all this is important , but for people who asked me all the time , well , what are we to do ? And when I don't answer them and they say , well , you're a grifter , you're not telling us what you're trying to make money off , and I get mad . Part of the reason why I can't give you that is because you're asking for a rule from the context of this parasocial quasi community . Not saying that we don't have community like elements here we do . I'm not saying there aren't real friendships here . There are . There are times where parasociality actually does trip over in the real sociality and there's no way to live without parasocial relationships . That's how we think . It's part of symbolic kinship , my friends , that's not my point .
The Importance of Practice and Virtue
Speaker 1My point is , however , because practice is embodied . I can give you some guidelines on how to build good practices , but you know your environment , you know your life , you know your workplace , you know the community of workers you live with . You know them better than me and if you don't , that's the only advice I can give you Like , not only should you know them , you should know everything around them . And if you don't like , then this becomes something you embody .
Speaker 1I cannot give you a rule for practice , for the same reasons here . Let me give you an example of that and how it relates to virtue . I can give you a model for how to be strong . I can maybe even give you rules , although different bodies are going to be different in different contexts , so those rules are going to be variable . There's going to be play there , right ? We all know that . We know it when we're talking about physical stuff . Why don't you know it when we're talking about social and mental and political stuff ? Like , I can help you , I can coach things for you , you can have models , you can learn from the past , you can learn from history , but your instantiation and the virtues and things you need to do to build a program , all I can give you is orientations , until you were to find examples , and that's it . That's what I can do , and you don't want me to try to do more , because if I'm trying to do more , let's be honest , I'm manipulating you .
Speaker 2Yeah , and it comes back to you begin to reify , like these rules . I mean , we go back , going back to the CLR James perspective . What makes a good cricket player , what makes a good football player , is not one who follows the rules of football , it's one who is able to be a good football player , do score points and to play the game of football well . Same thing with life . We could give you rules on how to live life , but those rules cannot be reified . Following those rules does not make you a good person . In order to be a good person , you have to live your life and you have to live through form of community and being able to basically practice morality , not as a set of rules but as a technique . And McIntyre , if you want a good book to read about how to be a more , to be better able at doing these things , this book is great . Read this book . This book is great because it sums up all of McIntyre's life work , essentially , and does so in a great way . All right .
Speaker 1So , jules , being selfless and somehow very Catholic , you have ended the show with a plug that wasn't for anything . You did , so , as a dirty petite bourgeois teacher , I'm now going to let you plug anything for yourself .
Speaker 2You can follow me on Twitter , but I have a sub-stack . Should I send you the link ? You could link it in your YouTube .
Speaker 1Yeah , I'll put the link in my YouTube show notes . I think I have it in the past , but definitely send me the link again . You guys should support Jules , but read this book .
Speaker 2It's wonderful . You should read it too , Vaughn . I know you haven't read it yet . It's wonderful .
Speaker 1No , it is not . Actually I was like , oh man , you're going to get me on like one of the two Because I've read McIntyre . You haven't too . We're just talking about that before the show , but apparently I have not read new McIntyre that you haven't . So not to make this one off and , by the way , guys , it just has another side note .
Speaker 1I haven't , nor can I , read everything . I read a lot . I read something like 100 books a year usually , and increasingly less than the comment books as I get older . I used to read like 200 books a year , but 120 of them were comment books . But I can't read everything , and nor should I , and nor should you want me to .
Speaker 1The best way to think of self improvement is not to think of it as self improvement . It's to think of it as improvement for those things and those people of which you value . Yeah , like similar with politics , similar with anything else . If you can take anything from tonight , model the virtues that help you achieve what you think will be good for yourself , you have to be included in that . Let anyone sell you out and manipulate you and think you have to negate yourself in this , but for everything else that you care about and some of that's not going to look like . One of the things that I've been big on recently to get people to understand is like a lot of politics does like , if you're really interested in being and being political , a lot of it does not look political . It just won't , because a lot of it is building communities , building trust , building something more than symbolic agreement , having something to base a platform .
Speaker 1If you believe in a platform or a program which you know , I kind of do think programmatic , self-interested unity is important and it's one of the real forms of unity . But that has to come out from people . You can't impose it or it's not real there either . Well , hey , no , yeah . So definitely read that . Read after virtue . Don't listen to what all the right wingers say about it . I will say this , even all super gushy about MacIntyre I don't think either . Well , jules may think he's perfect . I don't think he's perfect , but I think he's great . But I also don't think he's like a crypto conservative philosopher . I kind of think he's something else entirely and it's very hard to put him on that spectrum , but he has very Marxian ideas . If you have liberal ideas grafted on to Marxism , he's going to be a hard take . Yeah .
MacIntyre's Philosophy and Everyday Life
Speaker 2He's , above all , macintyre , at the end of his life , is very concerned with writing philosophy that is applicable to the struggles of the everyday average person . Because , macintyre , if there's one thing that he really is against , it is armchair philosophy , because he believes that philosophy is something that is lived through and is something that informs praxis and praxis informs that philosophy . His big thing is that practicing the virtues and living through your community honestly makes you , it helps make you a better thinker , because the very skills that make one a better person , a more engaged person , a more present person in one's community , are the same skills that help one be a more critical thinker and grappling the problems that face the real and perceived issues that people in your community are facing . Also , you can follow me on Twitter at Catholicclod yeah .
Speaker 1So you snuck that back in in your final statement . Good on you , jules , you're getting good at this after .
Speaker 2This is your fourth visit . Yeah , I love coming out here . You love having me on , apparently I do .
Speaker 1Weirdly , you and I know each other through the same person , of which we are kind of bet gnarred with their general philosophy .
Speaker 2I love him anyway .
Speaker 1Good on Nico and his Althusserian structuralism which , for different reasons actually between me and you , is both kind of anathema . He gets me to take Althusserra slightly more seriously , but only slightly . All right , and with that note we're going to end the show . Thank all your listeners , go and follow Jules , he's fun . And with that , good night .
People on this episode
Podcasts we love
Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.
The Regrettable Century
Chris, Jason, Kevin, Ben
Emancipations Podcast
Daniel Tutt
This Wreckage
Sean KB and AP Andy
The Dig
Daniel Denvir
WHAT IS POLITICS?
WorldWideScrotes
The Constant: A History of Getting Things Wrong
Mark Chrisler
Elder Sign: A Weird Fiction Podcast
Claytemple Media
THIS IS REVOLUTION ＞podcast
bitterlake
Cosmopod
Cosmonaut Magazine
American Prestige
Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison
People's History of Ideas Podcast
Matthew Rothwell
Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour
Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour
The Long Seventies Podcast
The Long Seventies
librarypunk
librarypunk
Knowledge Fight
Knowledge Fight
The Evolution of Horror
Mike Muncer
The Eurasian Knot
The Eurasian Knot
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
The Acid Left
The Acid Left
From Page to Scream
Tara Brigid and Chris Newton