Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Is this our situation?
And if it is, what are the "local forms of community" that might be constructed?
The following passage is from the end of Alasdair Macintyre's After Virtue (1981). I guess this perspective has, for better or worse, been behind my revulsion at any and all discussions of "politics" as currently configured and enacted.
As much as I sympathize with this point, I guess it is too extreme, too black-and-white: one must both recognize the absolutely bankrupt and moribund nature of the imperium and try to preserve it--though this sort of "preservation" would not really be preservation, but rather a kind of "hospice-care" that will bring about the death of the imperium with an eye towards reducing the mass-death that can easily result from this sort of process.
Any thoughts?
posted by speakingcorpse : 6/20/2006 07:54:00 PM
The following passage is from the end of Alasdair Macintyre's After Virtue (1981). I guess this perspective has, for better or worse, been behind my revulsion at any and all discussions of "politics" as currently configured and enacted.
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined in the Dark Ages. Nonetheless, certain parallels there are. A crucial point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead … was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we have reached that turning-point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the Barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.
As much as I sympathize with this point, I guess it is too extreme, too black-and-white: one must both recognize the absolutely bankrupt and moribund nature of the imperium and try to preserve it--though this sort of "preservation" would not really be preservation, but rather a kind of "hospice-care" that will bring about the death of the imperium with an eye towards reducing the mass-death that can easily result from this sort of process.
Any thoughts?
posted by speakingcorpse : 6/20/2006 07:54:00 PM
