Understanding contemporary political life requires zooming out to the big picture presuppositions of modernity. Modernity comes in many shades and histories. Many traditions like to think they can help overcome the pathologies of modernity. But they operate within its frame: The nation-state and capitalism being just two institutional forms we cannot quite escape. Characterising the nature of modernity has been the greatest philosophical prize at least since Hegel. Is it emancipatory? Or does it unleash another dialectic of oppression? What kind of moral life does it make possible? What are its contradictions?
Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, passed away in May. He was an unsurpassed diagnostician of modernity, sharper than his more feted contemporaries like Habermas, Taylor and Foucault. His career is a distressingly rare model of what genuine philosophical seeking looks like. He learnt from every stream of thought and refused all fads and fashions. It is not an accident that his brilliant collection of essays is called Against the Self-Images of the Age. Almost everything he wrote was luminous, deep or profound. Every topic he touched — moral philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, history of ideas, philosophy of science, sociology — was transformed by his interventions. He did not settle for the easy comforts of a single theory. He resisted the temptations of self-satisfied cleverness, where you win an argument but miss the point. His method, if it can be called that, was to often draw attention to the deep and hidden presuppositions of any claim. At every turn, saying: Have you thought of that?
His masterpiece, After Virtue, published in 1981, anticipates many of the pathologies of modern political life. Its central claim is that modern moral life in effect acts as if emotivism were true. Emotivism is a moral theory that all moral claims are, at their base, simply expressions of personal preferences or feelings. If moral claims are simply expressions of feeling, then moral arguments are interminable. It is conflict, all the way down. There is no rational standpoint from which moral claims can be justified. But MacIntyre brilliantly teased out the social implications of this. For one thing, the distinction between manipulation and rational persuasion breaks down; all social life at its base becomes manipulation. Modern culture revels in the task of unmasking hidden motives and structures of power that lie behind particular moral claims and practices. But this unmasking cannot appeal to any higher good. The second implication is perpetual indignation in political life. The shrillness of political life arises from the fact that no one can win an argument. All you can have is indignant self-righteousness, since there is no objective truth. The purpose of protest is to mobilise those who share the protestors’ preferences; it is not to persuade.
How do we manage common life in the absence of a common objective framework? Liberalism might seem the perfect answer to the modern predicament. Under conditions where value is fragmented and disagreement interminable, why not endow each one with the rights to fully realise themselves as they deem fit? But the emotivism and interminable disagreement that characterise moral life go all the way down to conceptions of rights. These are not shared moral truths as much as fictions without shared rational justification. Mere consent is too thin a gruel around which to build a common life. Modern societies sever the connection between the right and the good. The individualist character of rights means that liberals often ignore the constitutive social commitments that make values the object of common action.
Liberalism is powerful in constituting itself as a kind of meta tradition that stands above all traditions and conceptions of the good, only concentrating on the freedom that enables them all. This is the power of liberalism, but also its weakness. As a meta tradition, it becomes immune to criticism, and it has no answer to how we might secure goods that people actually care about. Being above the fray means it is never in the fray, and so undercuts its own political significance.
Three social roles come to the forefront in modernity: The aesthete, the therapist and the manager. Think of these not as social roles but as three dominant needs: The needs of self-fashioning, the management of emotions and the managerial ordering of preferences in society, through application of technical knowledge in different forms of modern organisation. MacIntyre is a defender of science and knowledge. But he was a scathing critic of expertise and managerialism. He rightly thought the claims to effectiveness embodied in managers, bureaucrats, and experts are themselves part of a masquerade of social control. They claim to have forms of social knowledge it is impossible to have. MacIntyre was brilliant on the philosophy of social sciences and the claims of social sciences to represent social reality. The epistemic foundations of the managerialism of modern societies turn out to be rickety. Our condition is characterised by moral incoherence and self-misrepresentation. As he put it, the new dark ages are upon us.
MacIntyre does not convert his diagnostic into a political programme. For all his criticisms of liberalism, he had an anti-authoritarian streak, a serious suspicion of converting any ideology into something that could be deployed by the state. He broke with Marxism over this. He is now deployed as the guru of post-liberalism. But he gives no one comfort. The extent of our incoherence is such that all modern ideologies that claim to transcend modern pathologies end up exemplifying it. Marxism cannot transcend the managerial frame of modernity. Modern conservatism, he presciently observed, turns out to be even more hyper-individualist than liberalism.
It is hard to do justice to a prodigiously productive 70-year career. Apart from his diagnostic, his sense that humans are, above all, storytelling animals, led him to articulate a brilliant account of the importance of narrative to moral and scientific life. His account of how inquiry always presupposes a tradition, concepts like rationality themselves have a history, and how traditions break down, is unmatched. The eloquent opening of After Virtue, the portrait of a society that continues to use scraps of language, where the practices that made them intelligible have long ceased to exist, is a bracing account of all modern traditions (including India). But as he put it, “if we are indeed in as bad a state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury we will have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times.” Wise words from one of the wisest philosophers.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
