By Design or by Chance?: The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life in the Universe Book

I began this book around September 2015, then reviewed the first half in January of 2016 in advance of a hiatus in reading. I resumed in April, but this time I wasn't alone. It had looked like such fun that Dennis wanted to study with me.

First we backtracked and did some review, and then we forged ahead, reading out loud, mostly me. I read over half the book out loud. And then I took notes on every paragraph, since that's the only way I could digest it. My notes constitute, in effect, a condensed and semi-digested version. We also discussed and argued as we went--as I've done with some of you, as well--and it's still not any easier to review! It's like math or a foreign language. The author keeps building his edifice. If you don't keep track of where you are you'll get lost, and despite everything you can lose track of where you've been.

In my review of the first half of the book, I wrote how farfetched it was that MacIntyre could ever convince me we're in a new dark age. That was hyperbole to me: as Steven Pinker would say, those were the words of believers in some lost cause they are trying to keep alive. Then, in Chapter 18, MacIntyre is explicating Nietzsche's Ãœbermensch, via whom post-Enlightenment society is to escape pseudo-concepts such as utility and natural rights but instead brings forth something far worse: this man who, in his will to power bursts all constraints, wears a mask, is beholden to no one but himself, lies rather than tell the truth. And so, he writes, we may expect society to breed these "great men" from time to time, "Alas!"

Those words have a kick to them. It's what we were reading when the election happened.

I've left the review of the first half as-is, other than a few corrections. Then I'll touch on high points from the remaining chapters, and on to conclusions and closing thoughts.


Thoughts at (Near) the Halfway Point (from January 2016)

The Enlightenment Project--that is, the attempt to establish a secular and rational basis for morality--is a failure. All attempts to do that are mere masks for what you want. The society we have is a reflection of that basic fact. So says Alasdair MacIntyre. This is the new dark ages.

Even if the first part were true, that morality as we know it today is a sham, I don't know how he could convince me of the second part about the dark ages or of the seeming implication that past times before the paradigm shifted was better.

Another consequence of the failure of morality are our interminable arguments. Our lived reality, which always reflects the philosophical paradigm that is in effect, is deeply emotivist, emotivism being "the doctrine that all evaluative judgment, and, particularly, all moral judgment is nothing but an expression of preference." That being the case there is no moral basis on which to settle any argument.

Each society is represented by characters for whom personality merges with social role, for example, that of the headmaster in Victorian England or the Prussian officer. Other societal roles don't require that synthesis: think of a clergy person who could go through the motions even if he has lost his faith. The character, in Alasdair MacIntyre's sense, can't do that; "Characters are the moral representations of their culture." The three characters we have today are the manager, the therapist, and the rich aesthete.

Organizations have aims assumed to be value-neutral, yet unavailable for conscious scrutiny; the personal is the realm for debate over values--but no resolution is to be had. Modernity celebrates the individual's release from the confines of social identities and telos, while leaving us stripped of telos and identity.

A breakthrough? Not so fast, according to Alasdair MacIntyre. Picture from Münchhausen's Pigtail, or Psychotherapy & "Reality" by Paul Watzlawick

With me so far? The philosophers of the Enlightenment sought to find rational bases for morality, for example, Kierkegaard and radical choice, and Kant, reason. But each attempt involved a first cause beyond which reason couldn't go. And Hume saw Kant had failed, so he used the passions as his basis for morality. We thus have the various philosophers debunking each others' theories--which reminds me of religions critiquing and defaming each other, thus doing the work of atheists for them.

The only reason their moral theories worked at all was that their bits and pieces had a previous life in a prior social system and philosophical paradigm from which the philosophers had unwittingly retrieved them. The picture I get here is of the cartoon figure zooming along so fast that, when he runs off the precipice, he is suspended in the air momentarily--before dropping like a rock. In other words the moral theories can still seem to make sense even though they have lost their foundation. We still talk as though they are true, even while living the emotivist lifestyle that reflects our actual philosophy. It is that philosophy Alasdair MacIntyre claims has let us down.

So, the Enlightenment Project only worked, according to him, because its philosophers were coming out of a shared Christian moral tradition, part of a more sweeping classical tradition in which people had a purpose (an end; a telos): good was anything that contributed to that purpose, while bad detracted from it. Thus, in the classical tradition, a role did carry moral weight, and unlike within our present system, you could derive "ought" from "is" (that is, values from facts). By rejecting everything but reason, the modernist philosophers could deal only with means, not ends. Thus it is that thought reflects practice, and the modern self requires a new social setting: the individual in his emotivist culture, within which meaning has fallen out from under him.

One of the implications is that, in the culture we have, rights cannot be established; rights require a socially established set of rules. The author asserts that claiming rights without the requisite social order is like presenting a check for payment in a society without money. Thus it is that rights, like utility, is a fiction. We're taught to see ourselves as agents but become engaged by modes of practice (aesthetic or bureaucratic) that are manipulative (in other words, treating others as means, not ends). He goes so far as to say that, like witches and unicorns, there are no such things as rights.

Without any rational way to decide, we have protest, which used to be a positive, a la Protestants, or protesting the truth, but now we have protest against. Given its predicament, protest is reduced to preaching to the choir and has acquired its quality of shrillness. Since what passes as morality reduces to preference and predilection, the function of protest is unmasking, to which everyone is vulnerable, with defensive unmasking as doing unto others before they can do unto you (he credits Freud for that insight).

He uses these issues to further elaborate the stock characters of our society, the aesthete, the therapist, and the manager. The aesthete, he says, is the least likely to be deceived by our societal fictions (utility, rights, etc.). The therapist is most likely to be deceived, and not only by moral fictions, yet to keep on keeping on despite being unmasked (as with psychoanalysis). Lastly are bureaucratic managers of all kinds (government and in the business world), the coin of whose realm is manipulation (that is, means, not ends).

It is in MacIntyre's discussion of the fiction of managerial effectiveness that he shows his kinship with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's thought, management science being an oxymoron and Fortuna his black swan. The game is not the real thing, nor the map the actual geography.

We all want predictability so our own plans will prevail, so we aim to keep ourselves unpredictable to others ("play our cards close to our chests") while making others predictable. In bureaucracies, predictability and effectiveness are mutually exclusive, since achieving the former would entail total control, while the latter requires flexibility and spontaneity. The fiction of managerial effectiveness functions as the belief in God functions (for those for whom that is a fiction):

It is one more illusion and a peculiarly modern one, the illusion of a power not ourselves that claims to make for righteousness. Hence 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. For it follows from my whole argument that the realm of managerial expertise is one in which what purport to be objectively-grounded claims function in fact as expressions of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference. (p. 107)

The example that comes to mind is our manager-in-chief, the US President (the role, not the current inhabitant of the White House [who was Barack Obama at the time of this part of the review]).

In the final chapter that I have read, the author says Nietzsche's role is to have shot down our societal roadrunner who had found himself unsupported and out over open space. Nietzsche demolished the moral fictions (British emotivism and French existentialism) to reveal our true state, that is, unless Aristotle's telos, or something like it, can be supported.

That touches on Jonathan Haidt's Westerners who found themselves tongue-tied when trying to express moral intuitions other than those involving fairness or harm (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion). It also is consistent with Steven Pinker's description of the function of "political correctness" in guarding against resumption of past moral failures (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined), and how it is that PC is showing failure in its function.

For Aristotle, honor is secondary to that for which it is deserved, but in emotivist society, success is only what passes for success. Honor in pre-modern societies was due to position in the social order. Today, an insult is considered a private matter. How this all contrasts with Pinker's value system, in which honor systems are the source of evil and modernity the wellspring of "the better angels of our nature!"

Yet it is not of course just that Nietzsche's moral philosophy is false if Aristotle's is true and vice versa. In a much stronger sense Nietzsche's moral philosophy is matched specifically against Aristotle's by virtue of the historical role which each plays. For, as I argued earlier, it was because a moral tradition of which Aristotle's thought was the intellectual core was repudiated during the transitions of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that the Enlightenment project of discovering new rational secular foundations for morality had to be undertaken. And it was because tha project failed, because the views advanced by its most intellectually powerful protagonists, and more especially Kant, could not be sustained in the face of rational criticism that Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors were able to mount their apparently successful critique of all previous morality. Hence the defensibility of the Nietzschean position turns in the end on the answer to the question: was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle? For if Aristotle's position in ethics and politics--or something very like it--could be sustained, the whole Nietzschean enterprise would be pointless. This is because the power of Nietzsche's position depends upon the truth of one central thesis: that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail and that therefore belief in the tenets of morality needs to be explained in terms of a set of rationalizations which conceal the fundamentally non-rational phenomena of the will. (p. 117)

If a premodern view of morals and politics is to be vindicated against modernity, it will be in something like Aristotelian terms or not at all. (p. 118)

There you go. What about all the killing over whose system of the good would be enforced? What about people outside the going system and therefore unavailable for honor, or people who don't care for their position in the system?

MacIntyre does some initial talking about philosophers whose claims have been refuted but who don't accept that they've been refuted. Might not his proposed system suffer from the charge that it embodies his preferences?

He is not writing for the masses here. He uses terms he doesn't translate and concepts he doesn't deign to explain. There is a degree of esotericism in the formal sense. We could call this modernity he condemns "Protestantdom;" I flashed on that just before the last chapter I've read. But at least he carries his arguments to their logical conclusions and comes out and says what they are. No hypocritical half-assedness here!

This book was referenced in both Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? and The Sacredness of Human Life: Why an Ancient Biblical Vision Is Key to the World's Future, although for two different aspects. I got curious. At any rate, I want to review what I've read so far--also because I'm studying it alone, have had to pause to accommodate other reading commitments, and have reached something of a turning point in the book.

Oh, yeah--the title. My husband is taking Greek, and he says Aristotle's Metaphysics didn't originally mean transcendent. It just meant it was written After Physics. And Alasdair MacIntyre is an Aristotelian, among other things.

Disclaimer: the unread portion could make me change any overarching conclusions.


The Rest of the Book (from February, 2017)

Chapter 10, "The Virtues in Heroic Societies:" This is my favorite chapter in the whole book. MacIntyre says heroic societies (read Homeric society, his main case) may or may not be historical, but for his purposes it doesn't matter. Traditional societies treat heroic societies as what came before. Here, and in the next chapters, he broadened my understanding of a number of the Greek virtue words.

I was expecting he'd treat bible stories as outgrowths of heroic societies, too, but the author exhibited hands-off of scripture.

Chapters 11 and 12, on classical society, i.e., Athens, and then Aristotle. In Homeric society, there are only the kinship group and friends, and their roles. What you see is what you get. "Owe" = "ought." In classical society there is more complexity, as now there's the added ingredient of the polis. There still is no existence outside social role, but the catalogs of the virtues are different. And there's the "false turning" (to which MacIntyre alludes but never explains) that Socrates made. I think MacIntyre is referring to Socrates' making himself an arbiter of what to do over and above the good decreed by the city--a fatal early turn in a direction MacIntyre decries.

Yet MacIntyre acknowledges that no society may ever have actually conformed to Aristotelian ideals.

For MacIntyre, as I wrote in the first half of my review, liberal, modernist, individualist society, that is, post-Enlightenment society, is what's bad. Dedication to pluralism signals departure from the tradition of the virtues. By the end of the book, he repeats those three words or their stand-ins so often that reading them is like cuing the silent-movie villain-music that plays whenever the guy with black hat and twirling mustache appears.

As with Marx, for MacIntyre there are no better or worse forms of modern society. It's all bad, lacking any foundation and mirroring defective philosophy, and with political conservatism being merely the conservation of a slightly earlier form of liberal individualism.

Remember, from the first half of the book, the emphasis on emotivism and the insolubility of our social dilemmas. If this whole book seems easy to dismiss as so much BS, there are our current dire straits to remind you otherwise.

By Chapter 13, "Medieval Aspects and Occasions," Christianity has made its entrance along with various new virtues. The known world has just emerged from more recent forms of heroic society (e.g., Arthurian), with thinkers and theologians trying to deal with their own inner paganism while creating institutions to bring forth civilization from chaos.

What has yet to be invented in the twelfth century is an institutional order in which the demands of divine law can more easily be heard and lived out in a secular society outside the monasteries.

In subsequent chapters we have MacIntyre forging his concept of a virtue out of the multiple and contradictory catalogs of the virtues across the ages. First, virtues are what enable one to seek the inner goods deriving from a dedication to practices in sort of an apprenticeship in which one acknowledges the need to learn and develop one's skills and capability--inner goods being human capital, so to speak, in contrast to outer goods such as wealth and fame. Virtues exist via traditions, virtues being the dispositions that sustain practices and quests for the good, and a tradition being a living argument about what a given community or enterprise ought to be.

And the crux of the matter: We connect with our history and with the future through the stories we tell. We have been drafted into a certain role or roles that we must come to understand if we are to figure out why others respond to us as they do. And we have to know what stories we're in to know what's the right thing to do.

The above entails a telos, that no-no of science and modernity. (I knew that so I've tried to cover it up when writing about it--but what else is it when one claims to have discovered "one's purpose" or to feel he or she is carrying out one's intended role?) MacIntyre's picture is the mirror image of the existentialism on which I cut my teeth, i.e., radical freedom and the artificiality of all social roles.

There is the appearance of circularity at times, with the good defined in terms of the pursuit of the good.

There is the fact MacIntyre sees all the good aspects and none of the ill of the tradition he supports, and the reverse for the one he abhors.

There is his making of distinctions without differences between the path to which he commends us* and the one he considers a dead end. *That being that we should invest no more energy in liberal pluralistic modernity (cue that villain-music!) but should repair forthwith to some monastic stand-in for the duration.

There is his comparison of noisy, messy present-day reality, not with the reality of other times but with the ideals of those times.

There is the possibility that the foundational order for which he yearns comes not from right thinking but from power.

And, there are conflicting story lines, but there is no sheer chance, or luck.


Yet the thesis of this book cannot be summarily dismissed. Look at the fix we're in!


Even so, it's liberal democracy for me. With all its warts.