Was Right-Wing Progressivism a mistake?

Reflections on the Death of Alasdair MacIntyre.

I only learnt that Alasdair MacIntyre had died this Sunday, it seems, perhaps driven also by the total lack of anything interesting in British politics, apposite to write something about him. MacIntyre is the political philosopher who, more than anyone, provided the intellectual horsepower to postliberalism and, somewhat noteworthy in light of the growing differences between the two, made his influence felt on both sides of the Atlantic. Yes, the postlibs would occasionally marshal the cuddly banalities of Sir Roger Scruton to their cause, and there was always the occult workings of the man known only as “Maurice” on the policy front – a fish and chips in Grimsby and total forfeiture of Ukrainian state assets – yet, when it came to something capable of actually arguing against Liberalism, rather than complaining about it, MacIntyre remains the be all and end all of Postliberalism:

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers claimed that self-deception is an evolved behaviour, this makes the history of anything like ‘society’ very hard. The historian has access to certain sources yet, by virtue of being written down, presented as arguments, they necessarily ( – even if from ‘below’) constitute a conscious attempt to influence mass opinion by a minority. If one reads multiple sources decrying the vices of the age, it could be equal proof that the people of that time were especially concerned with moral virtue. Intellectuals of the mid 20th century to the early 21st were obsessed with the idea they were living through a period of unique individualism, in fact, the 20th century was the great triumph of collectivism.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in political theory, the venerable saints of both the ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ schools of philosophy, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, were both famous for decentring the ‘Cartesian subject’, that epistemological twin of the more emphatically hated ‘Liberal subject’, in the name of unspecific communitarian palingenesis. Psychoanalysis taught that the Liberal subject was hopelessly conditioned by forces beyond its control, Anthropology taught that symbolic architectures of respective cultures trumped Pure Reason, critical theory reduced the individual intent of authors to fixed systems of communitarian signs. Whether you hate individuals or love them, it is a minimal concession to intellectual honesty to see that the whole gist of the postwar period was overthrowing ‘19th century individualism’ and its various metonyms.

The reason so many confused the triumph of communitarian ethics with rising individualism is that they confused epiphenomena for intellectual substance. Take, for example, a now quite somnolent lion which once roared through the halls of academe, “cultural relativism”. The judgment that all cultures are equal and we cannot truly judge one by the standards of the other would often manifest through seemingly ‘individualist’ behaviours; Fatima gets to wear her Hijab, Navid brings his food to class, can anyone really say if FGM is bad etc. Yet, the intellectual justification for this is inherently communitarian: that the structures we call ‘culture’ so condition our minds that it is futile to access a ‘truth’ outside of them. Sure enough, in the long-run, after a brief frolic of seeming nihilism in which a former liberal society adjusts to its new collectivist conscience, the intellectual basis of these ideas manifests in collectivist behaviour: ‘multiculturalism’ is now replaced by ‘anti-racism’, the mere ‘tolerance’ of funny foreigners is replaced by new positive moral strictures concerning their preferential treatment.

It was MacIntyre’s advantage as a thinker, which places him over Milbank, Scruton, Peterson and co. that he recognised this: the ‘return to tradition’ was already happening under the aegis of Globalist sociology. This was not a conscious polemical ruse but the result of fruitful accident, MacIntyre had been a typical Marxist who came, thereby, into contact with Foucault and, on converting to Catholicism, realised that the antidote to individualism was already present in the Woke Critical Theory of his day. Synthesising the teleology of self-conscious ‘reaction’ with the superior reactionary philosophy of Wokeness would become his signal contribution to our time.

MacIntyre’s central argument in After Virtue is that much ethical and political language is meaningless because it has been divorced from the concrete forms of life where they make sense. Consider, for example, the category of ‘religion’, religio originally referred to the rules of a monastic order: to be ‘religious’ in Medieval Europe meant to take holy vows and live by rules of observance. In the polemical battles of the Reformation, the term gradually took on its current meaning as a catch-all term for ‘belief’. Words like ‘justice’, ‘utility’ or ‘liberty of conscience’ all once had specific meanings like ‘table’ or ‘friendship’; Philosophers, seeking to ape the natural sciences, had detached them from these contexts and transferred them to an abstract realm in which individuals made choices according to reason. There is much similar here to Hegel’s original birthing of that great ponderosity ‘the Ethical Life’ as a giant velcro manacle in which to bind humanity, as well as the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ current around the start of MacIntyre’s career.

The radicalising import is given by MacIntyre’s claim that this great unmooring has political causes and political solutions. The context in which all of humanity finds itself is our role as ‘social beings’. ‘Integrated’ societies are those governed by an explicit moral code, in which the essence of the state precedes its existence; being an integrated society has nothing to do with one’s electoral system or laws, Israel, for example, is an integrated society as it explicitly defines itself as a land for a certain people, the definition thereof is independent of the liberal-contractualist state; Saudi Arabia, in declaring itself a state existing only insofar as it has relation to a particular family and faith, is also an integrated society. The ideal, for MacIntyre, was the Roman Catholic Church, a universal monarchy in which each judgment is locked-in to a millennia-spanning ‘tradition’, in which every ethical judgment requires consideration of the whole.

We can divide the basilica of MacIntyreanism into two equal parts, one is a moderately revisionist intellectual history with some epistemological consequences in the form of a radically sceptical-relativistic agenda; the other is a universalistic positive moral theory, which we shall try to address as if it does not depend inherently on God. The criticisms we shall briefly, and completely insufficiently – I recognise finishing this piece, explore largely derive from clashes between these two tectonic plates.

Sometimes, MacIntyre can be insightful as an intellectual historian, at other times, he appears to seriously suggest the idea that concepts have histories is a sort of novel insight accessible only to those who have submitted to the magisterial wisdom of ‘Thomism’. As in Whose Justice, Which Rationality where he defines “tradition” as “an argument the premises of which are extended in time” and thus uses this to claim it is impossible to be a non-traditionalist thinker. I’m not quite sure how the idea ‘arguments are premises extended in time’ leaves the libs as owned as they appear, although I’ve known several excitable chaps to swear by it. The eminently liberal Quentin Skinner made his name saying much the same thing in a career which paralleled MacIntyre’s. You can clearly see how this stuff could be a lot more impressive in the days before Wikipedia when knowing, for example, the influence of Roman law on 18th century Republicanism, was a vaguely esoteric fact requiring advanced study to understand, rather than a fact one can prove (and thus adapt one’s identity around) with a link to the Wiley online library. Needless to say, of course our politico-ethical concepts are derived from premises extended in time, the whole journey of philosophy is studying these premises (which must be assessed by a non-social criteria of TRUE/FALSE) to see if the conclusions are true.

Since Postliberalism was overthrown in Britain, a few of its erstwhile defenders have attempted some form of apologetic. Mary Harrington has written perhaps the most spirited one, in response to the Havering Pamphlet, and Capel_Lofft, while refraining from anything as substantive as a blog post, had a few tweets in response to J.Sorel’s exposition of post-postliberalism. Broadly, the argument of both is that collective moralities enshrined in law today, like Universal Human Rights, are different from Postliberalism as they do not stipulate duties in exchange for their rights and make no reference to specific communities. As reading MacIntyre shows, Postliberalism is, by virtue of its Thomistic agenda, a universalistic ideology. Societies do not decide their internal goods in a vacuum. Nazi Germany was an ‘integrated’ society, yet Postliberals would hold moral categories like ‘evil’ can apply to it. If we can identify a common ethical rationality by which we judge other societies, then humans have the same capacity to judge their own societies by it. Duties towards refugees, the underclass and criminals are indeed necessary consequences of the postliberal project.

If we accept ‘dependency’ and ‘vulnerability’ are ontologically necessary parts of humanity, we ignore the fact that this dependence is not equally distributed – i.e: such a thing as universal ‘humanity’ is still being presupposed and that dependence does not imply equal treatment either. A 10th century Sicilian baron may very well be in a ‘dependent’ relationship to his serfs, this doesn’t stop him from self-assertion far more egregious than that engendered by supposing himself ‘an autonomous individual’ – cutting off their ears for example, or sleeping with their daughters. What makes Nietzsche such a dangerous thinker is he requires no proviso of individual autonomy for his argument, the claim that ‘morality is constructed to serve the Master caste’, is completely harmonic with the definition of man as a ‘rational dependent being’; what makes Nietzsche a friend of Enlightenment is, having proven this, the weapons of ‘morality’ of social ‘value-creation’ are handed to whomsoever desires to pick them up; with most of us, unfailingly, deciding to imitate the behaviour of the Masters rather than the Slaves. MacIntyre has no real answer to this, that one might, in studying how ‘dependent relationships’ condition morality, strive to place yourself in a clearly superior position within this relationship, unless he were to claim some are by nature better suited to holding those positions in perpetuity: in which case, their value cannot be defined by ‘society’.

People with severe learning disorders are far more dependent on others than those who are not. An 18 year old triathlon contestant and mathematical prodigy is ‘dependent’ on many (for calories, for books) to fulfil his potential but once he does, it does not require an ‘individualist’ anthropology to state he is fulfilling a humanitas to a greater degree than the fruitful souls who exist to support him. In classical Aristotelianism, the virtues facilitate an almost biological flourishing of the human being, as a type (In Christian Aristotelianism, this is role is filled by piety to God); society (as the word is used post-20th century, we will come to this) is not the actual end of ethics. By identifying a fact of human nature, like our social interdependence, it does not follow that the purpose of ethics is to become more servile, communal and obedient; this is a very modern case of instrumentalisation, where means become ends. Yes, superficially, Aristotle says that the ultimate goal of becoming a complete person is participating in society but by this he means ‘the life of a freeborn aristocrat/commercial elite who owns slaves and can participate in the rule of his city-state.’

MacIntyre rejects the elitism of classical Aristotelianism and, as a member of the 20th century academe, cannot openly state that his system only makes sense if you assume the existence of God; and so, he is essentially forced to turn anthropology into a doctrine of obedience. Because Postliberalism is so invested in the epistemological critique of ‘the Liberal Subject’, they often write about politics as if all vice in the world were the result of bad philosophy. The simple fact ‘freedom of speech isn’t actually real because everyone’s speech is informed by social contexts’ does not actually abolish the fact people will voice things governments dislike and, by Wittgenstein’s Law, inevitably develop words to express what this means. Politics is ultimately about what is to be done in the event of conflict. It is perfectly true that humans learn a great deal from their parents, or rely on the skills of many other people to survive; how helpful is this fact if you are a 17th century King confronted by the most powerful of your many powerful magnates raising an army to march on your capital? Or the leader of Burkina Faso if the Russian-trained command of your northern military base strikes an alliance with pastoral nomads to ethnically cleanse your people from the land? Can one stop these rebellions by simply enunciating the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis before their armies? ‘You must lay down your arms and obey me because, in fact, your socio-linguistic environment has shaped your beliefs, checkmate libtards!’ A dependency is either real, in which case MacIntyre is correct, it need not be rationally articulated for it cannot be challenged by the potentially seditious party, or it is not; in either case, it is superfluous as a doctrine of obedience. Yes, my friends, it is true that humans are babies – but babies, crucially, become bigger and more powerful babies.

This, rather than the cliched stereotype about nasty brutish short lives, is the actual point made by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes very explicitly sees human beings as sociable, rejecting as comical the idea we ‘sprung up like mushroomes out of the ground.’ His point is that, uniquely, human sociability is ‘obnoxious to sedition’ because humans A) possess language and thus capacity for deception B) desire recognition from their peers to the extent they will sacrifice themselves to obtain it. Hobbes acknowledges the existence of families and classes them under the species of human sociability he calls Dominion – relationships established by the overwhelming force of one party (this ‘force’, per von Haller, is not necessarily violence it can simply mean monopoly of patronage); this is, interestingly enough, the same category to which he assigns his little discussed ‘Commonwealths by Acquisition’ (as opposed to the famous ‘Commonwealths by Institution’, which Postliberals treat as the only Hobbesian polity). Dominion, Hobbes concludes, esoterically (I wrote a very long academic paper on this), is insufficient to establish polities because it can always be challenged by violence: one does not have a natural duty to obey one’s father if one’s father is decrepit and impoverished. The tradition MacIntyreans call ‘Liberalism’, which Hobbes does indeed inaugurate (although, as a conscious act of deception), is to repress these thymotic instincts through the invention of artificial moralities. The tradition of Meritocracy is to channel them into the state-building process.

MacIntyre did not originate the Hobbes → autonomous individual → Locke → Smith genealogy which is now so wildly popular in surmises of intellectual history one finds in places like The Atlantic; this genealogy owed much to liberals themselves, Alan MacFarlane’s The Origins of English Individualism being published around the time MacIntyre completed his doctorate; and most summaries of Political Thought, like Skinner’s Foundations, repeat a similar narrative. Both Liberals and Postliberals are, broadly, happy to accept this genealogy of ‘Liberalism’. This leads on to a broader point, ‘liberalism’ or ‘liberal democracy’ was, like Communism and Fascism, an ideology of total mobilisation born out of the Second World War. As in Il Duce’s Italy, the aesthetics of older traditions were drawn upon to furnish this counter-modernisation project with legitimacy but it bore no real similarity to what had come before, either in practice, or intellectually. Locke, for example, was barely considered part of the inspiration behind the English constitution until the 1940s. By this point, of course, England and America were both planned economies in which 19th century liberalism was extinct.

Pawttersvill?!! I thought this was the Ukay!!!

I’m very modest in the amount of credit I seek for more or less inventing right-wing politics in Britain, to other heads shall go the laurels; yet I will happily point out to all and sundry I am the sole reason Postliberalism is dead as a political force in the current year. In my personal Its a Wonderful Life (i.e: my suicide in 2017, as was dictated by God) Kemi Badenoch is currently facing off against Sir Keir on a ‘real families, real communities’ ticket. I now, on the whole, have come round to the idea this was a failure.

I increasingly foresee that the real triumph of mediocre complacency will be affected by a sort of global Poujadism-at-the-end-of-History rather than the ‘wholesome chungus’ mutterings of various tenured ‘Thomists’. A global version of Modi’s India.

The ultimate effect of destroying Postliberalism has been to emancipate the Conservative (Reform is Conservative) intelligentsia in Britain from the pretence of Christian ethics and embrace, more or less, open self-interest as rationale for deporting foreigners. As someone who has always been an Egoist, it is strange to behold the effects it has on previously enchained, timid, souls suddenly finding themselves possessing its license. Egoism, however, can be just as conducive to mediocrity as collectivism; as the Master says ‘the value of egoism corresponds to the physiological value of the one who possesses it’; we are confronted today not with the Egoism of Achilles, or the Superman but of a 61 year old retired matron living in the Kidderminster suburbs who ‘just wants things to be nice again. That’s why I like Nigel.’ Such people do not have deep, forward-thinking or principled objections to modern Britain – they hate immigrants but if someone dumped a proposal to ban ‘hate phones’ for the under 21s they’d lap it up in a heart-beat. You are not going to see British colonies on Mars, genetic engineering or a maglev network under Reform UK. The Monarchy will get 10 years in which to successfully complete one of the quarter-century rebrandings necessary when people remember they are all paedos. Americans will build the nuclear reactors and we shall applaud ourselves for ‘scrapping Motability’ and sending a dozen dusky rapists home.

Those comical, but essentially harmless figures which fell to heaven-storming youth: Pabst, the two Milbanks – enjoying a pint with ‘Lofft in The Father’s Arms, “Maurice”, Krueger and Cates, Vermeule, can enjoy a kind of vicarious triumph in knowing that only they stood in the way of the banalisation of Fascism, at least, outside of America. The price of victory has been boredom. There was much wisdom in the maintenance, by Postliberals, of a sort of cordon sanitaire around certain topics; not because they are wrong, or morally harmful in their consequences but because once this cordon is breached it rapidly triggers an arms race of slop in which performative fashyness is not necessarily matched by genuine radicalisation of policy. So long as the British Right were snoozing to the lullabies of ‘Scrutonian aesthetics’ and ‘Conservative philosophy’, it ensured low-IQ but ambitious people were screened from genuinely popular and revolutionary ideas.

What has emerged in this riot of liberty is an attitude of ‘Why should I care? What about the immigrants?” As the default response to any sort of intellectual critique. It is understandable, given the exceptional dishonesty of pro-immigration arguments in the 2010s, why this is the case; and forgivable when dealing with the lowest sort of libtard who is rapidly going extinct. Inevitably, however, this attitude is going to be carried onto any other discussion of anything vaguely intellectual which threatens the comfortable lives of the online Right. These people never actually understood that the rejection of Postliberalism entailed other rational commitments, i.e: to individualism. They interpreted it, rather, as an excuse to simply ‘believe whatever is convenient to me right now.’ There are things more important than mass immigration. Control of space travel is going to be the key to economic prosperity in the 22nd century. The state that implements Eugenics would make all ‘milling about’ superfluous. These things require people to be forced to make sacrifices beyond their plebeian ‘self-interest’; at the incitement of bold new myths and heroic leaders.

Yet, it is no easier to sell such policies to Racist Liberals than Postliberals, ‘what… you want to put a genetically modified embryo in MY womb???! Why should I care about this??? What about the social housing?!!!’ The British people have not known freedom for a long time and, once they get it back, shall be extremely cautious about all and sundry political projects beyond those which allow them to keep stuffing their gobs. Indeed, the dangerous thing is, Racist Liberalism is far harder to destroy or challenge as it can make endless, performative appeals to anti-immigration sentiment, without ever having to fix the issue (a cynic might say they are, indeed, incentivised to keep foreign populations around for this reason). This is what politics is like in Turkey, India, Russia and Hungary; deeply stupid, traditionalist oligarchs occasionally fending off unreconstructed Neo-Nazi football ultras by bringing back the burqa, bashing the Pakistanis, invading Ukraine or banning the Bully X.L to cheers from the GB Ostankino audience. It is also what the 19th century European societies, who, not Communists, provided the model for Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man’ were like: how deeply one can yearn to see ‘all anti-Semites shot’ after another Fleet Street bogmonster post about grooming gangs.

Things that would’ve excited me at 20 now leave me cold. The system, as far as I can tell, has never seemed more stable: the newly-updated consensus, never more uniform. Areas of genuine disagreement over policy are all rapidly disappearing. The logical thing is, despite my sentimental attachment to the British Right, to start planning for how we influence the next swing of the pendulum in the other direction. The alternative is some kind of crisis, like lockdown, rips the new script from the old choir once again and gives us an opportunity to seize power under more financially propitious circumstances. Perhaps, as some have pointed out, four years is a long time, and something will happen.

And the pendulum will swing in the other direction, because you can’t, ultimately, build a new society on ‘I just want things to be nice again’