Michael Tracey contra the “Now is the time for complacency” school of left of centre politics
Chumminess is next to Godliness: Jake and George enjoy a safe space.
He might have been in visible cognitive decline even before his Presidency began, but not recognising George Clooney was obviously taking things to another level.
Last month I had the extraordinary privilege of seeing "Good Night and Good Luck" on Broadway, starring George Clooney, thanks to the invitation of a friend with an extra ticket. This was not something I probably would have ever considered doing on my own volition. For one thing, I'm generally so uncultured and uncouth that the very concept of theater-going almost seems a bit alien, despite my physical proximity to Broadway, and despite scattered occasions in the past when I've wound up seeing a show for whatever reason, albeit not strictly by my own devices, and found the experience basically enjoyable. Furthermore, in the once-in-a-blue-moon chance that I could theoretically be motivated to seek out a Broadway show, there's virtually no chance I would proactively choose a mawkish George Clooney production, especially one so clearly predicated on flattering the sensibilities of middle-aged cultural libs...
Among my first observations was that the average age of the audience had to be something like 55 — not necessarily an indictment unto itself, and possibly just representative of theater-going demographics in general, but does roughly correlate with the demographic one would expect to see populating various "Resistance" functions from 2016-present, even if those functions have by now dwindled into limp facsimiles of themselves.
If you weren't aware, "Good Night and Good Luck" was originally a 2005 movie also directed by George Clooney. I can recall having the DVD for some reason, back when I thought there was impressive social capital to be gained by accumulating a robust DVD collection. The impetus for the original movie was Clooney discovering an urgent moral imperative to sound the alarm about a resurgence of McCarthyist dangers under George W. Bush. Twenty years later, Clooney realized he could transplant the exact same material onto stage, and voilà, he's got himself a trenchant parable for the Trump 2.0 era.
The movie and play romanticize the CBS anchorship of Edward R. Murrow, who clashed with Senator Joseph McCarthy upon producing skeptical reports about McCarthy's claims of widespread communist infiltration. Murrow (played on Broadway by Clooney himself) is portrayed as having intrepidly stuck to the story, despite mounting pressure from corporate CBS bosses to back off...
During the play I found myself bemusedly tracking when the audience chose to cheer or gasp. There's a scene in which Don Hollenbeck, a Murrow associate, laments that it sure feels like all the reasonable people in America (circa 1953) have up and left for Europe. The actor had to take a beat, because the theater full of middle-aged libs burst out into rapturous applause. Of course, the applause was not for the wit of the writing, or the majesty of the delivery, but for the implicit present-day parallel — implied with the subtlety of a ton of bricks — that the audience specifically came to have validated. Any challenge to their assumptions or biases, or any allowance for moral or historical ambiguity, was not on the menu.
Clooney's apparent belief that these timeless moral instructions are neatly recyclable from Bush to Trump 2.0, with no creative update required, would seem to suggest that the McCarthy parallel has become a handy default rebuttal to any disfavored (Republican) administration...
What perhaps stood out most about "Good Night and Good Luck" was the total absence of any interesting dramatic content. They try haphazardly to get us invested in Don Hollenbeck's suicide, and the relationship between Murrow staffers Shirley and Joe, but it's all too undercooked to have any real resonance. Everything is instead subordinated to the overriding theme of a hortatory political lecture; the show is bookended by a literal lecture from Clooney, standing alone at a podium, solemnly educating us about the importance of press freedom.
Just before Clooney's final lecture, a screen descends, and we are treated to a stirring video montage of TV news clips from the past several decades, intended to illustrate how the televisual medium has been abused to manipulate and distract the American People — thereby dishonoring the legacy of Murrow (???). The sinister turn seems roughly dated to the 1990s, with clips of Jerry Springer and the OJ Simpson trial marking a grim pivot from the wholesome days of "I Love Lucy," televised national triumphs like the Moon Landing, and televised national sorrows like the JFK Assassination...
The final footage is Elon Musk delivering an infamous Roman Salute (shrilly alleged to have been a Nazi Salute) on the eve of Trump's 2025 inauguration, and the audience at my showing belted out a collective hiss/groan/gasp.
Clooney seems to pride himself on the tasteful subtlety of his political parallel, even though it couldn't have been more un-subtle if an usher came out and bashed each audience member over the head with a solid-gold MAGA truncheon. In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Clooney said of Trump's omission from the play, "We don't mention his name," as though pleased that the audience will have to draw their own conclusions — like the conclusion hadn't been formed long before they'd ever walked into the venue.
Tapper, a huge fan of "Good Night and Good Luck" and a huge fan of George Clooney, scored an exclusive sitdown with the megastar, along with an exclusive tour of the set at Winter Garden Theater. In the interview, Tapper mentioned the brief inclusion in Clooney's final montage of the Democratic operatives claiming that Biden was in impeccable cognitive condition, which is now understood to be another example of official deceit...
Given their chummy rapport and mutual appreciation, it stands to reason that Clooney was a source for Jake Tapper's new book "Original Sin," co-authored with Alex Thompson, which has taken the political and media world by storm. One chapter details Clooney's encounter with Biden at the LA Fundraiser, more-or-less told from a first-person Clooney perspective, with the big revelation being that Biden could not recognize Clooney until prodded by an aide...
I didn’t want to read all 6,000 words of this article, but did want to know what it said. So I got Claude to ‘bottom line it’ for me in 500 odd words. Then I asked it to reduce it down to 250 words for your delectation. I then checked it out with someone who knows this stuff and he said the basic story stacked up.
This piece argues that the Linear No Threshold (LNT) hypothesis—the scientific foundation of global nuclear regulation—is flawed and makes nuclear power prohibitively expensive.
LNT's Origins and Claims LNT holds that any radiation dose increases cancer risk linearly, with no safe threshold, and that small cumulative doses equal one large dose. It originated from Herman Muller's 1927 fruit fly experiments and gained prominence after Hiroshima, despite early scientific skepticism.
Political Influence LNT's adoption was driven more by Cold War politics than science. Nuclear weapons testing scandals like Castle Bravo (1954) created public distrust of the Atomic Energy Commission. Scientists, led by Muller, successfully pushed LNT through regulatory committees despite opposition from pathologists and medical experts.
Economic Impact LNT spawned ALARA ("As Low As Reasonably Achievable"), requiring costly safety improvements regardless of benefit. Examples include UK regulators forcing expensive design changes to reduce annual radiation exposure by 0.0001 millisieverts—equivalent to eating one banana. US nuclear construction costs increased 176% between 1972-1980 due to expanding safety requirements.
Scientific Evidence Against LNT Modern research contradicts LNT: DNA repair mechanisms show cells can heal radiation damage; large studies of 372,000 nuclear workers found no increased cancer rates; populations in high natural radiation areas like Kerala, India show no excess cancers.
Current Status Even LNT-supporting organizations admit it has "no predictive power" at low doses. Despite scientific evidence and Trump's 2025 executive order questioning LNT, regulatory inertia persists, handicapping nuclear energy deployment when rapid decarbonization is urgently needed.
This is what has really been going on as we heard all those stories about flattening management structures to get more 'bottom-up' happening in our organisations. Ehem - the complete opposite! Neo-feudalism.
The slogan "take back control" taps into something deep in the British electorate — or so politicians seem to believe, since it continues to pop up in speeches almost a decade after it was first deployed by the Brexit campaign. But while policy wonks and psephologists have explored why the phrase might resonate with people in terms of immigration or sovereignty, there is another venue in which people have reported a remarkable loss of control in their daily lives: the workplace.
We know this thanks to a government-funded survey of workers called the Skills and Employment Survey which has been running for almost 40 years. One of the most striking trends uncovered by the survey is a steep and steady decline in "task discretion" since the 1990s. This is a measure of how much influence people say they have over their day-to-day work, such as which tasks to do and how to do them. In 1992, 62 per cent of surveyed workers said they had a great deal of task discretion. By 2024, only 34 per cent said the same.
Before 2017, this decline was most evident among people in lower-paid jobs. But between 2017 and 2024, task discretion fell among professionals and more highly skilled workers too...
Alan Felstead, a research professor at Cardiff University who worked on the survey, told me the most "likely culprit" was "the increased use of digital technologies" in the workplace. "It's not a coincidence that one has rocketed over that time period, and the other has gone in the opposite direction," he said.
It is easy to think of examples of software which has made work more prescriptive or structured, from real-time tracking of logistics workers to the use of tools which allow managers to keep track of white-collar workers' productivity. Felstead describes this trend as "discretion-sapping technological change."
Of course, these interventions may have made workers more productive and improved the standardisation or quality of their work. But there is a body of research which suggests that having little control over how you work can also be bad for your mental and physical health...
The question now is whether generative artificial intelligence will reverse or accelerate the trend. Notably, the spread of AI has been much more organic and "bottom up" so far than previous waves of technological change in the workplace. A survey of more than 48,000 people in 47 countries found that 58 per cent of employees were intentionally using AI tools at work on a regular basis, but more were using free public tools than were using tools provided to them by their employers.
If workers are taking the lead with these tools, that suggests a moment of increased autonomy... But it is still early days. Already, some employers are beginning to exert top-down control over the process. Shopify, for example, has said AI use is now a "fundamental expectation" and told employees it will add "AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire".
The "wild west" phase of AI adoption offers workers a rare opportunity to experiment and change the way they do their jobs. Perhaps even to "take back control". Whether this turns out to be a brief phase or a new norm will depend on what employers do next.
Fork in the Road, an art piece Elon Musk commissioned at Burning Man
Really powerful and enlightening expose of what’s really going on delivered in a style of high grooviness that I found irritating. Oh well, I’d better just get used to it with noms de plume of some of the smartest stuff around like “slimemould:timemould” and HeySlick.
When the hapless Sean Spicer stood before the press to argue that the crowd attending Trump 1.0’s inauguration was larger than Obama’s there was much commentary, as well there might be, as to its political and sociological function. Internally it was the test of the gangster - trash your reputation with outsiders to identify yourself as a true insider. But reading this (actually listening in the gym, but that’s probably over-sharing), it hit me that transgression is also a powerful form of virality.
What really hit home was transgression as performance. Transgression as virality.
Anyway, I’ve extracted a small snippet from a large piece. Read it in its full horror should you wish as we accelerate into those ‘interesting times’ with which we are now, surely cursed.
The American Right is no longer just nostalgic or reactionary. It has become post-democratic, mythic, and ruthlessly elite-driven—civilizational in rhetoric, accelerationist in policy, medieval and sci-fi in aesthetic.
Behind the slogans lies something stranger—a new scaffolding of belief built from forgotten philosophers and fringe ideologues once dismissed as too extreme for the postwar European far-right...
He didn't veil his ideas in theory. He embraced collapse, sacred war, and high-tech sovereignty. He didn't want to preserve Western tradition. He wanted to forge a new civilizational order from its ruins...
His name was Guillaume Faye. And his vision might explain everything from Trump 2.0 to Elon's Mars talk to Peter Thiel's bunker logic.
The French New Right: Metapolitics and Myth as Strategy
The Nouvelle Droite (New Right) emerged in the late 1960s... Their strategy, called metapolitics, drew from Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony. Political power, they argued, was downstream from culture...
What began as leftist critiques was recast—not to liberate, but to rearm the Right... In this worldview, myth isn't entertainment—it's the operating system of rule...
Guillaume Faye: From Pagan Firebrand to Prophetic Madman
Faye began within this world. But by the late 1980s, he broke ranks... Where the Nouvelle Droite was skeptical of technology, Faye was defiant. He believed technology wasn't the enemy of tradition—it was its weapon...
Archeofuturism was born.
Faye escalated metapolitics into parapolitics: myth as mandate, collapse as cover, and seizure as strategy... This was Faye's true departure—seizure over persuasion. Archeofuturism wasn't just a worldview. It was an insurgent logic of elite rule, waiting for collapse to crown it.
From Europa to America: The Mutation
Guillaume Faye may have dreamed of Europa. But the implementation is happening in America...
The American techno-Right is building Faye's world, with different aesthetics but the same metaphysical core... It's sovereignty through infrastructure.
Palantir can predict behaviour, flag threats, and map dissidents... X (formerly Twitter) is a memetic control centre. Not just a platform—a weapon of cultural soft power...
They didn't just influence power. They bought it. Built it. Hardened it. And they don't need your vote to rule you.
This isn't policy reform. It's parallel civilization, a new sovereign class that doesn't need the nation—just the myth.
But it wasn't just the ideas that spread; it was the method. Faye didn't just theorize power, he weaponized transgression. For him, taboo-breaking wasn't provocation—it was initiation. Liberalism, he claimed, survived by cloaking collapse in civility. To name the forbidden—to speak of race, replacement, domination—was to pierce the veil.
It wasn't just speech. It was mythic theatre. That ethos is everywhere now.
In edgelord meme accounts flirting with eugenics and monarchy. In podcasts where irony licenses extremism. In billionaire manifestos that question democracy without apology.
What was once shocking is now a test. Taboo-breaking sorts the faithful from the fainthearted; it reveals not just belief, but allegiance. Not just what you're willing to say, but what you're willing to become.
Faye believed collapse would filter the weak. But it was transgression that revealed who was willing to rule.
The Archeo-Future is Here
What began in the ruins of the French Right has metastasized into a techno-doctrine. Faye's fantasy of a civilizational warrior elite, commanding fire and silicon, is being enacted—not by nobles in helmets, but by billionaires in hoodies...
Archeofuturism isn't coming. It's here. It's operational. And it speaks English now.
With a lot of people hyperventilating about the tectonic shifts portended by the big ALP victory, we need someone a little more persuaded of the randomness of the world of politics. And who could (possibly) understand randomness better than a fellow second generation Dunera Boy — Peter Brent.
Last Wednesday Labor's national secretary, Paul Erickson, delivered the traditional election winner's speech at Canberra's National Press Club. This opportunity to exercise bragging rights and feed journalists the government's preferred narratives about what happened and why is as longstanding as it is ritualistic...
Although Erickson's remarks were naturally self-serving, some were still interesting and informative. But there was a glaring omission: the role of Donald Trump in Labor's win. In fact the American president got not one mention in the transcript.
The party boss did make a quick reference to "Liberation Day" (when Trump's tariff announcement sent the global financial market and news cycles into a tizz), but only as part of a list of events about which Peter Dutton apparently "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity."...
It's no surprise that the conquerors would wish to downplay luck as an ingredient in their heroic achievement. But starting on the night of 3 May, commentators, journalists, party insiders and outsiders — virtually everyone with an opinion on politics — seemed to forget what they knew until a few hours before: that Trump was a major part of the Labor government's revival. This mass forgetting extends across all the media, from the Guardian and Crikey to News Corp. The story of the Liberal Party's woes is just too compelling...
And so it is now clear that Anthony Albanese always knew what he was doing and Labor as an institution possesses an unsurpassed understanding of Australians. The sexier story is, of course, the Coalition, whose flaws are now glaringly, embarrassingly on show: disorganised, burdened by poor candidates, philosophically estranged from the electoral mainstream, riven by irreconcilable conflicts between urban and rural voter bases.
Liberal MPs, trapped in the Sky After Dark ecosphere, feel obliged to placate a rabidly ideological party membership on matters of "culture." The Nationals, meanwhile, pull the party even further to the right — and then in a neat twist get to gloat about their own relatively good electoral performance among the small subsection they represent.
Dutton in particular, with his longstanding tendency to get sidetracked by niche ideological crusades and his conviction that punching down on minorities delivers electoral nirvana, was precisely the wrong leader for the times.
All of these criticisms of the Coalition parties are valid. But they've been valid for many years. It didn't stop the Coalition winning three elections on the trot not too long ago...
Still, the 2025 win was one out of the box in several ways. First of all was the sheer size of Labor's national two-party-preferred vote and its highest proportion of House seats since 1943 — although the win is several rungs lower on the list of postwar landslides for either side, easily eclipsed by Malcolm Fraser's 1975 and 1977 demolitions of Gough Whitlam and Labor...
But where 2025 really stands out is the unprecedented level of revisionism. We all remember the effect "Liberation Day" had on the polls, and on Australians' attitudes to the products on offer in the upcoming contest. Don't we?
Yes, green shoots for the government were spotted in public polling before that, throughout March... But Labor's measured support jumped after 2 April, and some surveys specifically pointed to Trump as a major driver. Dutton's ideologically charged public persona and his recent praise for the American president, and the behaviour of high-profile colleagues including Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and, less famously, Michaelia Cash, simply came at the wrong time and place. Even at the time, Dutton's January promise of an Australian DOGE, with Price as its head, was obviously bonkers.
It was a perfect storm.
The long-term dynamic is not that Labor is the natural party of government or that the Coalition is unelectable, but that the two-party system continues its decline. That fact will outlast the swings and roundabouts, off lower and lower primary support, between the pair. Labor will be out of office one day, and what will its primary vote look like then?...
Still, one of the worst takes from this month's result is that it all but guarantees Labor will be re-elected next time. Elections are discrete events. Three years is a long time. On 3 May, international developments turned a likely run-of-the-mill Labor victory into a huge one as voters flocked, directly or via preferences, to the safety of the centre-left incumbent... Who knows what the world will throw at us over the next three years?
Thanks to Danny for drawing to my attention this this small bit of establishment candle lighting in the darkness. Republican Jeff Flake represented Arizona in the U.S. Senate from 2013 to 2019 and the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2013.
My fellow Republicans, the responsibility to speak out rests with you
Congress can reassure foreign allies that this U.S. isolationism will pass
When I served in the Senate during President Donald Trump's first term, I often raised concerns about his administration's policy choices and the coarsening of our political discourse. But what worried me most was the erosion of U.S. leadership on the global stage.
Those concerns are more urgent today than ever...
But today, that containment is gone. The voices of restraint within the administration have largely fallen silent. Degrading our allies and admiring autocrats are no longer exceptions — they are part of the message. Diplomatic damage control is rare, if it happens at all.
America's global leadership has never been perfect, but it has been indispensable. For decades, our willingness to engage — to lead not only with our military or markets but also with our values — has helped sustain global stability and promote freedom. That role is now in jeopardy...
That brings us to Congress — particularly my fellow Republicans. The responsibility to speak out now rests with you.
No one expects every incendiary comment from the president to be rebutted. But when the commander in chief refuses to rule out military action to coerce our own allies to cede territory or sovereignty — that demands a response. And our allies need to hear that response.
I learned during my time in the Senate — and saw it reinforced as U.S. ambassador to Turkey — that our allies and adversaries alike pay close attention to what members of Congress say and do...
Our allies need to hear that there is still bipartisan support for countries standing against Russian aggression. They need to know that NATO and other security alliances remain a priority. They need to know that when our allies choose an alternative to Chinese economic hegemony, we're here to help them, not punish them with indiscriminate tariffs.
Most of all, they need reassurance that this bout of isolationism and protectionism in U.S. politics is not a permanent affliction — that America will once again lead through not just economic might but also democratic values.
When the United States retreats from diplomatic forums and security alliances, we create a vacuum. And that vacuum doesn't remain empty. It is filled by actors — often adversaries — who do not share our democratic ideals or our commitment to a rules-based order...
I know that many of my former Republican colleagues understand the need to speak up... But that's a dangerous gamble. The world doesn't pause for long while we wait for better leadership. Trust, once lost, is not easily regained.
The world is watching. And our allies are listening to what members of Congress have to say. Let's give them reason to believe that the American leadership that they have come to rely on can endure far beyond this administration.
Alasdair MacIntyre reviews Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Published in the year before he published his own blockbuster After Virtue, MacIntyre’s review of Rorty’s blockbuster was generous in its praise and scathing in its dismissal.
The concerns of academic philosophy are to some degree the concerns of everybody. At the same time, they often appear to plain pre-philosophical men and women – including those perhaps not so plain persons who are professors of English or History or Physics – as vaguely ludicrous. On the one hand, academic philosophy is centrally concerned with such all-pervasive concepts as those of truth, rationality and goodness: and who, whether in other academic disciplines or in the transactions of everyday life, can disown an implicit commitment, at the very least, to some view of what rational justification consists in, and of what constitutes sound evidence for a belief, and who, consequently, can avoid admitting to a certain vulnerability to the conclusions of professional philosophers on these matters? Yet, on the other hand, the level at which academic philosophers treat these questions often appears to outsiders – including some philosophers themselves in their off-duty moments – as disturbingly abstract and unrealistic. So that outsiders tend to oscillate between a reluctant admission of the philospher’s status as universal legislator and an irritated dismissal of philosophy as unworldly and irrelevant. Philosophers themselves all too often respond by alternating between an ingrown professionalism in which they conceal themselves behind thickets of technicality and an equally self-indulgent form of popularisation in which the proportion of rhetoric to argument is unduly high. It is, then, something of an event when a book appears in which the central task which laymen demand of the philosopher – that of providing a clear and forceful statement of what conclusions of general importance emerge from the tangled encounters of professional argument – is discharged without sacrificing the requirements of detailed and rigorous argument.
Such a book could not escape being controversial. For to accomplish its goals its author has to pass a verdict on issues and arguments which remain matters of high contention among philosophers. But when the controversial stances emerge from a fair, lucid and comprehensive review of the present state of the debate, the only legitimate form for complaint will be to write an as good or better book in rejoinder. It is going to be a long time before a better book of its kind appears than Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The elegance of its style, the easy and effective deployment of historical scholarship, and, above all, the ability to distinguish the central threads of recent debate from the side-issues and to follow through their implications in an original and exciting way, combine to charm the reader as well as to engage his or her argumentative powers. (Camus defines charm as that quality which produces the answer ‘Yes’ before any question has yet been asked.) Since I shall want in the end to quarrel with some of Rorty’s central contentions, my admiration for his book is tempered by my hope that readers will not too easily be seduced by it. What is it of which Rorty seeks to convince us?
Primarily, that since the 17th century, philosophy has been dominated by a master image, the image of the human mind as a great mirror in which the facts of nature are represented. The elaboration of this image in argumentative terms was chiefly the work of Descartes, and at the core of Descartes’s philosophy is the question: how can we be sure that what the mind represents as the facts of nature are indeed faithful representations? The main professional duty of the philosopher becomes the provision of answers to this question, and the evaluation of the answers provided by Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant, and others from then on, furnishes philosophy with its central subject-matter. If the originally Cartesian question is correctly posed, the importance of philosophy for all other disciplines is obviously vindicated. For by the way we answer that question, claims to knowledge in every discipline will succeed or fail. But, on Rorty’s view, the question is not correctly posed. For the Cartesian view of ‘the’ mind on which everything else depends cannot withstand critical examination.
So influential has Descartes been that we are apt to suppose that his distinction between ‘the’ body and ‘the’ mind is somehow the natural and fundamental way to classify human activities and experiences. In fact, however, Descartes invented this particular dualism. The older dualisms of body and soul, whether in Biblical or Greek versions, are very different from the Cartesian. In particular, they do not set up, as the Cartesian dualism does, a general problem of how the contents of the mind can be related to the realities outside the mind. It is when and only when this particular problem becomes central to philosophy that power is conferred upon the image of the mind as man’s ‘glassy essence’ (in the words of Measure for Measure), where external reality supposedly is reflected in ideas which are taken to be representation of those realities.
Rorty’s battery of attacks upon Cartesian dualism is therefore followed naturally enough by a systematic criticism of the notion of representation and of justification inherited from the Cartesian setting. His most powerful instruments are Quine’s dissolution of the analytic-synthetic distinction, which does away with the notion of there being any specially privileged foundational statements which furnish us with evidently true first principles in terms of which to justify our beliefs, and Sellars’s unmasking of ‘the Myth of the Given’, which removes any grounds for believing in an uninterpreted, unconceptualised reality ‘out there’ to which the ideas ‘in’ the mind have to correspond.
The whole interest of Rorty’s use of arguments drawn from Quine and Sellars, and indeed from Davidson and Kuhn too, lies in the detail. His book cannot, therefore, be summarised by the reviewer for the reader: it has to be read. But it is important to notice that Rorty is not claiming that he has summed up the force and the outcome merely of the central arguments of recent American analytic philosophy. For he believes that precisely the same morals are to be drawn from the modern history of European philosophy. On Rorty’s interpretation of the history of philosophy in this century, it was Wittgenstein who effectively and finally put paid to the false claims and problems of epistemology. Wittgenstein was still preoccupied initially, in the Tractatus, with the problems of representation, but his later discovery of what was wrong with his own project enabled him to diagnose what were, on Rorty’s view, the errors in the whole post-Cartesian tradition. His fundamental achievement was, from this point of view, to see that our beliefs and assertions are not justified by meeting some standard of representation or correspondence with external reality which can be specified independently of context, but rather by meeting those standards which are embodied in our various social and cultural practices. To ask if what meets these standards is ‘really’ true or rational or good is to suppose that the mind has to make contact with some general metaphysical external reality specifiable independently of the contexts of particular practices.
What Wittgenstein achieved for himself and for English-speaking philosophers, Heidegger paralleled in the phenomenological tradition. Husserl remained trapped by the Cartesian image of the mind; Heidegger, using a very different idiom from Wittgenstein’s, liberated us from that image in more or less the same way. Moreover, although Wittgenstein had analytical powers that Heidegger lacked, Heidegger’s understanding of the history of philosophy and of the need to rewrite it surpassed Wittgenstein’s. The third member of Rorty’s liberating trinity is – surprisingly – John Dewey, for whom Rorty claims the honour of having understood the importance for the general culture of making essentially the same breach with the philosophical tradition as did Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
Philosophy, then, has already undergone its crucial transformation. The task Rorty has set himself is merely that of enabling us to recognise what has already happened. That philosophers have not yet recognised the fundamental transformation of their own subject is partly due to the fact that they have not yet grasped the full extent of the implications of the work of Quine, Sellars, Davidson and Kuhn – among those whom Rorty chides for not having recognised the true place in the history of philosophy of Quine and Sellars are Quine and Sellars – and partly due to a failure to see how much of contemporary discussion is an unnecessary and obfuscating re-enactment of familiar but unrecognised post-Cartesian themes. So, for example, Rorty argues that contemporary analytical discussions of naming and referring revive precisely the mistaken Cartesian project of somehow bridging a gap, a gap which Rorty claims was never there in the first place, between mind and language, on the one hand, and external reality, on the other.
Where are we now, alter Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dewey? Rorty’s negative conclusions are straightforward: philosophy can no longer masquerade as having an ‘overriding claim to the attention’ of those working in other disciplines, for the philosopher can no longer present himself ‘as knowing something about knowing which nobody else knows so well’. His positive conclusions are less clear. Philosophy is to join or rejoin that continuous conversation which constitutes Western culture, a conversation in and through which philosophy can expect to be transformed in a variety of at present unpredictable ways. But in the course of that conversation, one is disposed to ask irritably, what, if Rorty is correct, will there be left for philosophy to say? Rorty’s would-be reassuring final conclusion – that the end of the period in which epistemology is understood as the core of philosophical inquiry does not necessarily mean the end of philosophy – seems to lack the confidence which informs his earlier rhetoric and argument. It is, in fact, the clear and radical conclusion which he disowns – that philosophy is now over and that what Rorty has written is its obituary notice – rather than the unclear and modest conclusion which he avows, which seems to follow from his earlier arguments.
Philosophers who do not wish relegation either to the salons of cultural conversation or to the lines of the unemployed will need to find an answer to Rorty, and I for one am anxious to stress how seriously we ought to take his challenge. Nonetheless, even my genuine admiration for one of the most interesting books in quite a number of years does not prevent my noticing one interesting feature of the cultural conversation of the West which Rorty invites us to rejoin. It is that if I am doomed to spending the rest of my life talking with literary critics and sociologists and historians and physicists, I am going to have to listen to a great deal of philosophy, much of it inept. And this will not only be because academic nonsense – structuralism and Althusserian fantasy and the wilder reaches of psychoanalysis – so often finds a home in some of these disciplines, but also because philosophical problems are not primarily generated from within academic philosophy at all. Indeed if, as Rorty does, we locate their origin and their nature so exclusively within philosophy, understood professionally and narrowly as it has for the most part been during the past two hundred and fifty years or so, we shall never understand the cultural power of these problems.
Jonathan Ree’s review of a 2005 intellectual biography of Macintyre shortened by around a third. Well worth reading methinks.
In 2009, University College Dublin put on a conference for Alasdair MacIntyre to mark his eightieth birthday. The range of participants reflected the breadth of his interests: professional philosophers, social radicals (with a scattering of Marxists), Cardinal Cahal Daly and a coachload of Catholic students from Louvain. We were all admirers wanting to pay tribute, but MacIntyre declined, saying that he didn't want the conference to focus on him. He did agree, though, to give a talk about his philosophical development.
It was in 1945, he recalled, that he embarked on a course in classics at Queen Mary College, a successor to the People's Palace in the East End of London... He fell in with a group of Dominicans who introduced him to Catholic social teaching and the Aristotle-inspired theology of Thomas Aquinas, and joined a local cell of the Communist Party, where he learned about Marx, Engels and the contradictions of capitalism. He was dazzled by the intellectual treasures spread before him, but suspected he could not have them all. 'One thing on which Marxists and Thomists seemed to agree,' he said, 'was that Marxism and Thomism were incompatible.'
Bewildered, he sneaked off to University College London to hear the positivist polemics of A.J. Ayer, who maintained that there was nothing to morality except emotion. He also made a trip to Paris, where he learned about Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialist doctrine that our characters are the product of our unconstrained choices. He noticed that Ayer and Sartre, despite their different styles, were dancing to the same philosophical tune: both hoped to achieve moral liberation by trashing the idea that morality is accountable to reason. Intrigued but not convinced, young MacIntyre drew a conclusion he has stuck to ever since: that philosophy takes time... Forty years were to pass before he reverted to Christianity or, as he put it, 'I discovered that I had become a Thomistic Aristotelian.'
But MacIntyre was already a philosophical outsider. While still at school he fell under the spell of R.G. Collingwood, who lambasted contemporary philosophers for lacking any sense of history. Collingwood illustrated his point with a tale about a scholar who insisted on translating the Greek word τριήρης as 'steamship' and, on being told that a trireme is nothing like a steamship, replied that this just showed the Greeks were 'terribly muddle-headed'. MacIntyre cited the story in his first substantial book, A Short History of Ethics (1966), as he upbraided his colleagues for treating 'Plato, Kant and themselves as contributors to a single discussion with a single subject matter'. They needed to realise, he said, that concepts 'have a history', punctuated not only by the thoughts of the great dead philosophers but also by events like the decline of the Greek city-state, the formation of Christendom, the rise of capitalism and the stirrings of working-class resistance.
Moral philosophy had suffered especially badly from this 'lack of historical sense'... MacIntyre cut out the metaphysics: all we need to know, he said, is that morality is, as a matter of historical fact, woven into the fabrics of mutual understanding that bind us to our communities and give structure to our lives.
Moral notions can of course outlast the societies that nurtured them. 'Courage' and 'compassion' originated in ancient Greece and biblical Palestine, but they fanned out across Europe and beyond, adapting to different conditions while retaining their motivational power. In the 18th century, however, things began to fall apart: the 'acids of individualism' produced by rampant capitalism were eroding traditional social bonds, and a few privileged drifters started to imagine they could rise above the restraints of ordinary morality... when philosophers like Ayer and Sartre proclaimed the essential irrationality of moral decisions they were, according to MacIntyre, mistaking expressions of leisure-class anomie for timeless features of morality as such.
The point owed more to Marx than Collingwood, and MacIntyre could have made it by describing his philosophical contemporaries as pedlars of individualistic bourgeois ideology. But he chose not to, perhaps because he had already travelled some way along his path towards Thomistic Aristotelianism. Fifteen years later, when he expounded a comprehensive theory of morality in After Virtue (1981), the transition was almost complete. Starting from what he called 'the classical view of human nature', he argued that every one of us is essentially a 'story-telling animal', and that our stories provide us with scripts for our lives and templates for our relations with other people... Our stories are not always true, but they constantly 'aspire to truth', and morality arises from the fact that we all live our lives in the hope that they will attain, as MacIntyre put it, 'the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative beginning to middle to end'.
We do not construct our stories out of nothing, however. We are born into 'an interlocking set of narratives', which in their turn are embedded in collective life, particularly in 'practices' such as farming, medicine and architecture, or football, chess, painting, music, biology and history. A practice, as MacIntyre defined it, is a 'socially established co-operative human activity' directed towards some concrete common goal – good food, for instance, or good health or good housing. But practices have an educational function as well: they have to train new recruits in the techniques and standards of the trade, at the same time as inculcating a few collaborative skills such as fairness, honesty and generosity, thus ensuring that some sense of morality gets passed down, implicitly, from one generation to the next.
But the mechanism isn't foolproof, and in After Virtue MacIntyre amplified his earlier warnings about the 'acids of individualism'... many are foolish enough to be impressed by the cynical bravado of Brecht's Macheath: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral ('Feeding comes first, morals must wait') – as if morality were a luxury that need not concern us, like fast cars or a top hat.
The decline of morality had been abetted, MacIntyre said, by a vast intellectual movement which he referred to as 'the Enlightenment project'. Proponents of the project believed that human conduct can be explained 'in mechanical terms', without reference to culture, language, meaning and history, and they liked to present themselves as architects of a scientific brave new world. In practice, however, they were less interested in construction than in the conceptual equivalent of slum clearance: sweeping away the ramshackle superstitions of the old moralistic world to make room, eventually, for the splendid truths of science. And they didn't confine their attention to ideas: they were also intent on cleaning up conventional social arrangements by turning them over to a cadre of 'scientific managers'. The 'fetishism of commodities' described by Marx had been joined, MacIntyre said, by another fetishism – the fetishism of 'bureaucratic skills' – and management was threatening to take control of our lives, in the name of abstract all-purpose scientific efficiency.
The enlighteners were obsessed with science, but they had no idea how it actually worked... The Enlightenment project had started off as an attempt to replace our sentimental storied world with a utopia based on the solid facts of science and the 'expertise' of managers; but it was turning out to be just another sentimental story, and a peculiarly unconvincing one at that – and this is why 'the Enlightenment project had to fail.' Its failure should remind us, MacIntyre said, of some facts that the mavens of modernity would like us to forget: that we are not invincible autonomous reasoning-machines, but frail animals shaped by unfathomable traditions; and that the world contains countless other traditions which may, for all we know, be more intelligent than our own. If you are a selfless activist fighting for a just and rational future you may find these facts discouraging, but they are no excuse for despair. You can return to the struggle, according to MacIntyre, but you should first ask yourself the question: 'Whose justice? Which rationality?'
You may be tempted to evade the issue, either by resorting to the relativism which says that you have as much right to your opinion as anyone else, or by embracing the absolutism which assures you that your own opinions are the whole truth, and anyone who disagrees must be wrong... Traditions aren't juggernauts or settled destinies: they falter, duck and weave in response to internal conflicts and external shocks. And they aren't blindfolds either: they offer genuine insights, however partial, into the world we all share. They do not prevent you from criticising your own beliefs or finding out about different traditions, and perhaps becoming an admirer or even a convert... Despite the scourges of individualism, cynicism, managerialism and the entire Enlightenment project, your choices still have their reasons, rooted in the past, and you never reason alone.
One might have expected the account of morality in After Virtue to lead to a turn towards politics. MacIntyre's emphasis on community, tradition and social change seems to point in that direction, and so does his interest in moral disagreement and the idea that, as he put it, 'it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are.' From here it would be a short step to sceptical democratic liberalism in the manner of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin or Richard Rorty, and perhaps to a celebration of politics as the noble art of fostering conversation across doctrinal divides. But that isn't the route MacIntyre took. For him, liberalism is no more than a front for capitalist individualism, seeking to reduce the complexities of human existence to a grim tug of war between 'arbitrary choices of individuals' and 'collectivist control'. Meanwhile democracy – whatever it may mean in theory – is always commandeered by elites who 'determine the range of alternatives between which voters are permitted to choose', so as to ensure that 'the most fundamental issues are excluded.' For MacIntyre, therefore, there has never been any such thing as liberal democracy, only 'oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies'.
His disdain for liberal democracy does not mean he favours any of the alternatives. He surveys the entire field of modern politics with impartial contempt... Politics is optional in a way that morality is not, and in its modern manifestations it is best avoided.
MacIntyre once believed that Marxism offered a solution, but by the time he wrote After Virtue he thought that it was 'exhausted as a political tradition', even if it remained 'one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society'. The familiar liberal explanations of its failure missed the point, however: the problem with political Marxism isn't that it is dogmatic, scientistic, authoritarian or economistic, but that it is 'deeply optimistic'. This is a typical MacIntyre moment: simple, surprising and – when you come to think about it – completely true. If there is a single thread running through the works of Marx, it is that the evils of capitalism, terrible as they are, will soon be outweighed by its double legacy: on the one hand the enormous wealth generated by modern industry, and on the other an international proletariat with the strength and wisdom to put it to good use. But Marx's optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of 'conflicting ... political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners', all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering a 'tolerable alternative'. The resulting 'exhaustion' had spread from Marxism to 'every other political tradition', plunging the world into a 'new dark ages', darker than ever before. ('This time ... the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers,' MacIntyre wrote, 'they have already been governing us for quite some time.') The only chance of building a better world, he concluded, was to abandon politics and concentrate on 'the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained'.
For mainstream leftists , MacIntyre's shift from Marxism to localism makes him another rogue in their gallery of sell-outs and traitors; but Émile Perreau-Saussine's brief and rather brilliant intellectual biography should give them pause. The book is not exactly new: the original appeared in French in 2005, and Perreau-Saussine, a distinguished historian of Catholic thought, died five years later at the age of 37. But it's now available in a meticulous English version by Nathan Pinkoski, and Perreau-Saussine's argument is as potent as ever: that MacIntyre's changes of mind were not so much lapses or regressions as logical stages in 'the evolution of a sincere philosopher'.
In the preface to After Virtue, MacIntyre himself said that his suspicions about the 'moral impoverishment' of Marxism dated back more than twenty years, to a time when he was 'privileged to be a contributor to that most remarkable journal the New Reasoner'. He was referring to the 'Quarterly Journal of Socialist Humanism' launched by E.P. Thompson and John Saville in 1957 as a forum for what they called 'Britain's largest unorganised party – the ex-communist party'... MacIntyre hoped to lead them to safety by devising a historical account of moral rationality worthy of Marx.
Once he had worked out his theory of stories, practices and traditions, however, he began to realise that he couldn't square it with political Marxism, or indeed with modern politics as a whole. But as usual he took a long time to make up his mind. He spent the best part of the 1960s promoting what he called 'the Marxism of Marx', which, unlike 'the Marxism of Stalin', was about enabling the 'victims and puppets' of capitalism to transform themselves into 'masters of their own lives'... But the events of that year convinced him that 'the labour movement cannot hope to win political power,' and that the moment of revolutionary opportunity had passed.
In 1970 he wrote a short book about the German-American leftist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who was, like him, disappointed with the labour movement, but hoped that the revolutionary slack would be taken up by a coalition of discontented students, sexual radicals and Third World insurgents. MacIntyre was not impressed. 'To be in conflict with the established order,' he said, 'is not necessarily to be an agent of liberation.' The victims of capitalism could not be 'liberated from above': they needed to fight their own fight for freedom, and they didn't need lectures from Marcuse's 'idealised students', who were in any case no more than 'middle-class whites' indulging in 'parent-financed revolts'... And as for countries like China, Cuba and North Vietnam, they were not the beacons of freedom that starry-eyed students imagined, but bastions of 'right-wing communism, an oligarchical disease'.
Many leftists were bewildered by this assault on the gentle Marcuse, but others knew how to respond. 'MacIntyre should understand that the game is up,' Robin Blackburn wrote in Black Dwarf: his 'threadbare political and intellectual clothing can no longer hide the nakedness of his opportunism'...
Unfazed, MacIntyre gave further offence to old comrades by leaving welfare-state Britain to take up residence in the hypercapitalist United States. If Perreau-Saussine is right, however, this too bears witness to his 'unity of purpose'. In the first place, MacIntyre had never really been British, let alone English: his parents were doctors of Irish background working in Scotland, and he was conscious of a deep debt to an aunt who, by teaching him Gaelic, gave him access to aspects of life in the British Isles of which most Britons know nothing... When he settled there a couple of years later, however, taking jobs at a string of different universities before ending up at Notre Dame in Indiana, he found it congenial in ways he hadn't anticipated. In 1980, writing about Garry Wills's Inventing America for the LRB, he praised the US as home to numerous enclaves of 'republicanism' in the classical sense of the word: outposts of resistance to liberal individualism, committed to 'the self-government of ... a "we", not a "they" or an "it"' and inspired by 'a vision of a common good' – self-sufficient communities comprising small schools and hospitals, local voluntary and offbeat religious organisations.
In 1983 MacIntyre delivered another shock to old allies by joining one of the oddest of these American minorities, the Catholic Church, but once again Perreau-Saussine sees consistency where others suspect backsliding. Thirty years before, MacIntyre had criticised the attempt to divide the human world into two 'spheres', one 'secular' and the other 'sacred'. Treating religion as 'one activity among others' – not obligatory but freely available to those who like that kind of thing – might appear even-handed, but according to MacIntyre it threatened to stifle the most fundamental impulse behind religion: 'to help us see the secular as sacred'. His eventual conversion to Catholicism seems to have had more to do with redeeming the secular than retreating to the sacred – or to theology for that matter... For MacIntyre, the glory of Christianity resides not in crucifixes, catechisms, chasubles and censers, but in the monastic communities which for more than a thousand years have provided exemplars of what he has always cared for most – a humble mutuality which treats the world as an object not of utility, but of reverence and love.
The belated appearance of Perreau-Saussine's book in English will give a fillip to scholarly interest in MacIntyre. But he will not be particularly pleased. His work has always been intended for the kind of reader who would, as he puts it, be 'considered marginal by those who occupy the dominant positions in today's societies', and he detests the prospect of being liked by 'lawyers, bureaucrats, business school professors, and the ambitious, the powerful and the rich in general'. He is wary of philosophy too: it 'tends to sterilise the mind and the imagination', he says, especially when captured by the 'conformism' of academic inquiry; and moral philosophy will not flourish unless it takes care to stay 'on the margins, intellectually as well as politically'. His writings are, however, so vigorous, acute and informative that he may have to put up with more admirers than he would like.
