Ehud Olmert on Gaza; reading After Virtue after bureaucracy; A Postscript
Reading, Watching 05.25.25
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First, some shameless self-promotion.—
Tuesday, May 27th, is the official paperback release date of When the Clock Broke, but I’ve seen with my own eyes that it’s already in some Barnes & Noble stores.
June 12th will be the release date for the UK. It’s started getting some British press:
“…[T]he best account I have ever read on the origins of Trumpism…The book’s argument is clear and convincing: understanding American politics in the early 1990s is key to understanding Trumpism today.” — Tomiwa Owolade, The Telegraph
Both the UK and American paperback editions feature a new postscript by yours truly that deals with the 2024 election and its consequences. As I’m sure many subscribers have already bought and read the book, I’ve put the epilogue in this very post, beneath the paywall fold.
In a remarkable op-ed for Haaretz’s Hebrew edition, former Israeli prime minister and onetime Likud party member Ehud Olmert, writes:
.…What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians. We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit — but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, maliciously, with reckless abandon. Yes, we are committing war crimes.
This requires little comment, but I’ll just emphasize: this is not a peacenik, this is not a kaffiyeh-wearing Columbia student, this is the planner of Operation Cast Lead writing. That is how dire things are.
This past week saw the death of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue (1981), one of the great works of 20th-century moral philosophy. MacIntyre began as a Marxist but converted to Catholicism and dedicated himself to the recovery of the tradition of virtue ethics that began in the classical world, was first articulated by Aristotle, and then developed by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. I’ve always been fascinated with MacIntyre and have read After Virtue a few times (although, perhaps, never quite cover-to-cover—the ideas are breathtaking, the writing you have to wade through to parse them, somewhat less so.) When I told a philosophy major friend how much I admired MacIntyre, he replied, “Well, that makes sense since you are both cranky Aristotelians,” which I took as a great compliment.
After Virtue begins with the famous thought experiment of a civilization that underwent a catastrophe where the natural sciences were effectively destroyed. Afterwards, people want to return to practicing science as it was done before, but too much has been lost: they end up doing a kind of cargo cult science with fragments of what remained, but the essential theories and practices are shattered. MacIntyre says this is how we stand in relation to morality in modernity: we have fragments of the language of ethical conduct, but don’t know what it means. The Enlightenment project of giving us a basis of moral conduct in reason has failed, leaving us with mere emotivism, basically the notion that moral judgements are the same as saying, “I like this, it makes me feel good.” This has not reduced, but increased, the bitterness of public moral argument, as everything becomes a matter of “pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence, perhaps the slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate.” Moral language has become just a tool of emotional manipulation and everyone has a sense that it is, at root, arbitrary, which adds to the shrillness.
This anarchic state of moral discourse reflects the situation of the subject in liberal modernity, a self-seeking atom struggling among other self-seeking atoms. MacIntyre refers constantly to plays and novels, and presents the modern world as having a particular dramatic backdrop and set of stock characters. For MacIntyre, the dramatic scene of modern life is bureaucracy. Either careerism within bureaucracy, or aesthetic non-conformism defined against it are just two sides of the same coin according to MacInytre. Among the stock characters are the “Rich Aesthete,” “the Manager” and “The Therapist.” Armed with this conception, he offers a striking critique of bureaucratic rationality as just not particularly rational at all, but a kind of charade. This passage has particularly stuck with me:
…the manager as character is other than he at first sight seems to be: the social world of everyday hard-headed practical pragmatic no-nonsense realism which is the environment of management is one which depends for its sustained existence on the systematic perpetuation of misunderstanding and of belief in fictions. The fetishism of commodities has been supplemented by another just as important fetishism, that of bureaucratic skills…The effects of eighteenth-century prophecy have been to produce not scientifically managed social control, but a skillful dramatic imitation of such control. It is histrionic success which gives power and authority in our culture. The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor.
Now, a cynic would say about this state of moral disorder, “Well, such as it ever was.” But MacIntyre wants to say that there is another way to think about morals that comes from a more ancient tradition:
…man' stands to 'good man' as 'watch' stands to 'good watch' or 'farmer' to 'good farmer' within the classical tradition. Aristotle takes it as a staning-point for ethical enquiry that the relationship of 'man' to 'living well' is analogous to that of 'harpist' to 'playing the harp well' (Nicomacbean Ethics, 1095a 16). But the use of 'man' as a functional concept is far older than Aristotle and it does not initially derive from Aristotle's metaphysical biology. It is rooted in the forms of social life to which the theorists of the classical tradition. For according to that tradition to be a man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family , citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God. It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that 'man' ceases to be a functional concept.
Judgments of good and bad are not hopelessly subjective, but essentially factual, like saying a watch that does not tell time well would be a “bad watch.” A man who does not seek to be a good friend, a good citizen, a good family member, contributing to the harmonious functioning of those larger wholes, would, in fact, be a bad man. Here’s where I am a cranky Aristotelian: I kinda do believe that good and bad are real qualities out there and not just our subjective judgments. And this description of how art or any other practice works just seems correct to me:
A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. It is to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and panially define the prac- tice. Practices of course, as I have just noticed, have a history: games, sciences and arts all have histories. Thus the standards are not themselves immune from criticism, but nonetheless we cannot be initiated into a practice without accepting the authority of the best standards realized so far. If, on staning to listen to music, I do not accept my own incapacity to judge correctly, I will never learn to hear, let alone to appreciate, Bartok's last quanets. If, on starting to play baseball, I do not accept that others know better than I when to throw a fast ball and when not, I will never learn to appreciate good pitching let alone to pitch. In the realm of prac- tices the authority of both goods and standards operates in such a way as to rule out all subjectivist and emotivist analyses of judgment. De gustibus est disputandum.
As someone who believes, perhaps somewhat obnoxiously, that his taste is objectively correct, this obviously would be an appealing line of argument. I’m also a huge believer in the importance of tradition. I am, aesthetically speaking at least, a bit conservative. And it is this conservatism that makes me disgusted with reactionary slop: it provides a false simulacrum of classical virtues. To me, it is base idolatry, not true religion.
But here’s where I depart from MacIntyre a bit: It can get worse than bureaucracy, and we’re getting there. I don’t think modern life totally lacks this classical sense of practice, excellence, and standards. I think such virtues and practical standards were preserved, if very imperfectly, in institutions. Bureaucracy and democratic modernity provided dramas and characters that were just as rich as classical ones. Like the ancient city-state, it provided secenery for both comedy and tragedy, which may have been more ambiguous than their classical predecessors but did have some real moral interest that did not come down to “who knows if it’s real.” It was not an unheroic or lifeless world. The 20th century looks quite classical today. Democratic politics and bureaucracy was not as inhuman as the post-bureaucratic society made possible by A.I. and the computer. In a bureaucracy—understood in the widest sense possible—you could still be an extraordinarily good bureaucrat. Who was Napoleon but someone who excelled in a newly minted Enlightenment meritocracy? The fact that this was all a performance in some sense is not a knock against it: everything is a performance in some sense, as MacIntyre admits with his interest in Homeric odes and classical Greek drama. But today we are witnessing something like the destruction of the notion of learning or skill. ! The therapist, the manager, the aesthete—the stock characters of say, Woody Allen comedies—look like people with rich interior lives compared to what we’re seeing today. Now, I’m gonna sound really cranky: one thing I have noticed with some young people is a sense of entitlement combined with a lack of interest in dedicating themselves wholeheartedly to any practice or tradition. What’s the point if a computer can just spit it out? MacIntyre concluded that we should form communities that try to preserve older practical traditions. I think this is probably more vital and necessary today than when he was writing in the 1980s.