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.Barbarians today, as in classicalGreece, are defined as those who are outside the civiliza-tional circle of conversation about how we ought toorder our life together, about the meaning of right andwrong, good and evil.They are those who know nothingand insist that nothing can be known about such matters.Yet they admit that we have no choice but to choose, toact upon our preferences, in the full awareness that wecan appeal to no authority beyond our willing it to be so.In the famous concluding passage of After Virtue,MacIntyre draws the parallel between our time and thecollapse of the Roman Empire, when Saint Benedict smonastic movement provided a refuge for civilizationand a base from which civilization could be rebuilt.MacIntyre writes:What matters [now] is the construction of local formsof community within which civility and the intellectualand moral life can be sustained through the new darkages which are already upon us.And if the tradition ofthe virtues was able to survive the horrors of the lastdark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.This time however the barbarians are not waiting79 0465013678_Neuhaus.qxd:5.5x8.25sam.qxd 1/9/09 1:15 PM Page 80American Babylonbeyond the frontiers; they have already been governingus for quite some time.And it is our lack of conscious-ness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.Weare waiting not for a Godot, but for another doubtlessvery different St.Benedict.We may think this picture somewhat overdrawn.After all, those who are called barbarians are not primi-tives, and they are not neanderthals; they are frequentlythose who are academically certified to be the bright-est and best among us.But that is to miss the point.The new barbarians are not barbarians because they areunsophisticated but precisely because of the hyper-sophistication with which they have removed them-selves from what I have called the civilizational circle ofmoral conversation.In simpler terms, we may speakof traditional values. The barbarians refuse to be lim-ited by what we know, by the wisdom we have received,about good and evil, right and wrong.For them, the past is merely prelude.The wisdom ofhistory is disenfranchised.Only the present gets a vote.Nietzsche has triumphed, or so it seems.What thepowerful agree to call truth is what we will to be.Inthe beginning is not the Word but the Act.Truth is notdiscerned or discovered but is the product of our acting,knowing all the while that the action we call choice isonly an illusion, for all our thinking, choosing, and act-ing is, in turn, the product of those little synapses in thebrain following their predetermined course.And so it isthat Nietzsche in his apparent triumph is finally defeatedas the will to power is exposed in all its pitiful impotence.One can choose to be a Darwinian or a Nietzschian, but,80 0465013678_Neuhaus.qxd:5.5x8.25sam.qxd 1/9/09 1:15 PM Page 81The Idea of Moral Progresswere they aware of the intellectual incoherence of ourtime, I am rather sure those two brilliant thinkers wouldinsist on the obviousness of the fact that one cannot beboth.We cannot be, at the same time, both the captivesand the masters of nature.What, then, can we say about the future of moralprogress? Within the civilizational circle, there ismoral progress (and regress!) in how we live, but thereis no progress in the sense of moving beyond the moraltruths that constitute the circle itself.We can developthe further implications of those truths, or we can stepoutside the circle by denying that there is such a thingas moral truth.It has become the mark of hyper-sophistication in our time to echo the question of Pon-tius Pilate, What is truth? Pontius Pilate, an urbaneRoman governor ever so much more sophisticated byworldly standards than the prisoner who stood beforehim, was a forerunner of the barbarians who would beand, according to MacIntyre, already are our gover-nors today.Permanent truths are sometimes called natural law.In the Declaration of Independence they are called thelaws of nature and nature s God.Or they are calledthe first principles of ethics.First principles are, by def-inition, always first.Moral analysis cannot go beyond orbehind them any more than human consciousness cango beyond or behind human consciousness.C.S.Lewis,borrowing from Confucianism, called these first princi-ples the Tao. In The Abolition of Man, he anticipatedwith great prescience today s debates in biomedicalethics about reproductive technologies, genetic engi-neering, and eugenic progress.The Tao, Lewis said,81 0465013678_Neuhaus.qxd:5.5x8.25sam [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Barbarians today, as in classicalGreece, are defined as those who are outside the civiliza-tional circle of conversation about how we ought toorder our life together, about the meaning of right andwrong, good and evil.They are those who know nothingand insist that nothing can be known about such matters.Yet they admit that we have no choice but to choose, toact upon our preferences, in the full awareness that wecan appeal to no authority beyond our willing it to be so.In the famous concluding passage of After Virtue,MacIntyre draws the parallel between our time and thecollapse of the Roman Empire, when Saint Benedict smonastic movement provided a refuge for civilizationand a base from which civilization could be rebuilt.MacIntyre writes:What matters [now] is the construction of local formsof community within which civility and the intellectualand moral life can be sustained through the new darkages which are already upon us.And if the tradition ofthe virtues was able to survive the horrors of the lastdark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.This time however the barbarians are not waiting79 0465013678_Neuhaus.qxd:5.5x8.25sam.qxd 1/9/09 1:15 PM Page 80American Babylonbeyond the frontiers; they have already been governingus for quite some time.And it is our lack of conscious-ness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.Weare waiting not for a Godot, but for another doubtlessvery different St.Benedict.We may think this picture somewhat overdrawn.After all, those who are called barbarians are not primi-tives, and they are not neanderthals; they are frequentlythose who are academically certified to be the bright-est and best among us.But that is to miss the point.The new barbarians are not barbarians because they areunsophisticated but precisely because of the hyper-sophistication with which they have removed them-selves from what I have called the civilizational circle ofmoral conversation.In simpler terms, we may speakof traditional values. The barbarians refuse to be lim-ited by what we know, by the wisdom we have received,about good and evil, right and wrong.For them, the past is merely prelude.The wisdom ofhistory is disenfranchised.Only the present gets a vote.Nietzsche has triumphed, or so it seems.What thepowerful agree to call truth is what we will to be.Inthe beginning is not the Word but the Act.Truth is notdiscerned or discovered but is the product of our acting,knowing all the while that the action we call choice isonly an illusion, for all our thinking, choosing, and act-ing is, in turn, the product of those little synapses in thebrain following their predetermined course.And so it isthat Nietzsche in his apparent triumph is finally defeatedas the will to power is exposed in all its pitiful impotence.One can choose to be a Darwinian or a Nietzschian, but,80 0465013678_Neuhaus.qxd:5.5x8.25sam.qxd 1/9/09 1:15 PM Page 81The Idea of Moral Progresswere they aware of the intellectual incoherence of ourtime, I am rather sure those two brilliant thinkers wouldinsist on the obviousness of the fact that one cannot beboth.We cannot be, at the same time, both the captivesand the masters of nature.What, then, can we say about the future of moralprogress? Within the civilizational circle, there ismoral progress (and regress!) in how we live, but thereis no progress in the sense of moving beyond the moraltruths that constitute the circle itself.We can developthe further implications of those truths, or we can stepoutside the circle by denying that there is such a thingas moral truth.It has become the mark of hyper-sophistication in our time to echo the question of Pon-tius Pilate, What is truth? Pontius Pilate, an urbaneRoman governor ever so much more sophisticated byworldly standards than the prisoner who stood beforehim, was a forerunner of the barbarians who would beand, according to MacIntyre, already are our gover-nors today.Permanent truths are sometimes called natural law.In the Declaration of Independence they are called thelaws of nature and nature s God.Or they are calledthe first principles of ethics.First principles are, by def-inition, always first.Moral analysis cannot go beyond orbehind them any more than human consciousness cango beyond or behind human consciousness.C.S.Lewis,borrowing from Confucianism, called these first princi-ples the Tao. In The Abolition of Man, he anticipatedwith great prescience today s debates in biomedicalethics about reproductive technologies, genetic engi-neering, and eugenic progress.The Tao, Lewis said,81 0465013678_Neuhaus.qxd:5.5x8.25sam [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]