Endgame? Part II

In the hope of finding some glimmer of hope and optimism in the face of what looks like catastrophic population decline I went to the ideas of Alasdair McIntyre in his famous book, After Virtue. For it seemed to me that while Klein and Sciubba talked about values, those values only floated in a vague soup of feelings and nothing more. While their analysis and searching for answers remain in the realm of the moral framework of the emotivism which MacIntyre finds at the heart of modernity, they will get nowhere. We have no reason to doubt their good intentions or their sincerity, but are they unwitting victims – as our culture in general is – of the disastrous philosophical turning which occurred after the Renaissance and on into the Enlightenment? The only virtue people seem to talk about in the contemporary context is that barren species known as ‘virtue signalling’. There is a cliche that tells us that ‘ideas have consequences’. They do but they often do so without people realising that the consequences they are suffering, or are about to suffer, are rooted in false ideas.

Alasdair MacIntyre casts light on the darkness confronting our race in two ways. The first does not offer much solace. It envisions the collapse of all that we take for granted in our civilization.

He does this in terms of an allegory suggestive of the premise of the science-fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz: a world where all sciences have been dismantled quickly and almost entirely. MacIntyre asks what the sciences would look like if they were re-assembled from the remnants of scientific knowledge that survived the catastrophe. 

From his extrapolation of that allegory we may extrapolate something about our own demographic predicament: The grim effect of catastrophic population collapse will be the inevitable destruction of the infrastructure which in material terms sustains our comfortable way of life, ultimately perhaps descending into a variation of the kind of unexplained chaos depicted by Cormac McCarthy in The Road.

We already know what a shortage of competent and trained workers means for our daily life and comfort. “I just can’t find a plumber to repair that leaking valve”.

Again extrapolating from the theses of After Virtue, we can find the roots of our demographic predicament in corrupt philosophy.

“The hypothesis which I wish to advance”, MacIntyre argues, “is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described.” He holds that the moral structures that emerged from the Enlightenment were philosophically doomed from the start because they were formed using an incoherent language of morality. In abandoning Aristotelian teleology – the view that only by contemplating mankind in terms of its purpose and its end, and these as the foundation for the moral life – philosophy took a disastrous wrong turn. 

He argues that when we abandoned the idea that human life had a proper end or character we were heading into a dark and confused place. Individualism and emotivism were going to be the ruling principles of what we might call our morality. 

The Enlightenment  ascribed moral agency to the individual. He claims this made morality no more than one man’s opinion.  Philosophy became a forum of inexplicably subjective rules and principles. From this stems the now dominant moral principle of emotivism. We, in our time, now see that it is from this source that the virus of wokism flows  – which is nothing more or less than a deranged moral code. Where that will lead remains to be seen. It may die as most ideologies do, but as long as emotivism remains supreme, worse may follow.

In his critique of capitalism, the bureaucratic state, and its associated liberal and Enlightenment-inspired ideology, he defends ordinary social “practices”and the “goods internal” to practices, much as Edmund Burke did in his critique of the ideology of the French Revolution. MacIntyre argues that pursuit of these practices helps to give narrative structure and intelligibility to our lives. What we have to do is ensure that these goods are defended against their corruption by “institutions”, which pursue such “external goods” as money, power and status.

MacIntyre’s vision, while somewhat dark, is not pessimistic – because he has a Christian vision of our existence. He tells us that we are waiting not for Godot but for Benedict of Nursia. MacIntyre sees morals and virtues as only comprehensible through their relation to the community which they come from – echoes of Burke again. True virtue is rooted in knowing who we are and where we come from. 

It also must carry within it something of the value of sacrifice. I write this on Thursday of Holy Week, the day on which the Eucharist  was given by Christ to his disciples for the first time, he himself, Body and Blood, soul and divinity. As I do, I recall words from G. M. Hopkins’ translation of Aquinas’ great Eucharistic hymn, Adoro Te Devote:

O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,

Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,

Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,

There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.

Many years ago Romano Guardini wrote:

“How great is the transformation of our conception of man through Christianity. It is something we are again beginning to appreciate, now that its validity is no longer generally accepted. Perhaps the moment is not distant in which the Christian ideal, like that of antiquity during the Renaissance, will overwhelm the modern consciousness with its unspeakable plenitude.” (Guardini, The Lord).

We do not need to relocate to Monte Casino to live with this vision. We are, as people of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, people who believe in Divine Goodness, Justice and Mercy, called by God to live here and now in this real world and with this Spirit. Only by doing so will we live our lives with the sense of, and commitment to, priorities, often involving a spirit of sacrifice, which will ensure the fruitfulness mandated for us by our Creator. Thus, and thus only, will we avert the impending disaster threatening our race.

The Lancet reported recently on a study about  the low-fertility future. The interpretation of the study which it offered made sobering reading, much as did the conversation between Ezra Klein and Jennifer Sciubba. 

Fertility is declining globally, with rates in more than half of all countries and territories in 2021 below replacement level. Trends since 2000 show considerable heterogeneity in the steepness of declines, and only a small number of countries experienced even a slight fertility rebound after their lowest observed rate, with none reaching replacement level. Additionally, the distribution of live births across the globe is shifting, with a greater proportion occurring in the lowest-income countries. Future fertility rates will continue to decline worldwide and will remain low even under successful implementation of pro-natal policies. These changes will have far-reaching economic and societal consequences due to ageing populations and declining workforces in higher-income countries, combined with an increasing share of live births among the already poorest regions of the world.

In 1985 the great Russian film director, Andrey Tarkovsky, made his last film, just before his untimely death. It was called The Sacrifice and centered on a man offering his life to save a world threatened by imminent nuclear catastrophe. Mankind has to stop thinking that anything good can be achieved without a spirit of sacrifice. Without sacrifice there is no love and without love there will be no future worth talking about..