Lear on MacIntyre
Happy New Year! University of Chicago polymath Jonathan Lear has an intelligent review essay in the London Review of Books (subscription required, Nov. 2, 2006) on a recent two volume collection of essays by Alasadair MacIntyre, a colleague at Notre Dame and Commonweal contributor.
Lear admires MacIntyre’s work enormously, and its coherence over the past thirty years. But he worries that the “small communities which share a sense of the common good ” called for by MacIntyre are “often repositories for unexamined prejudice, scapegoating, bullying and ressentiment.”
He also quotes a lovely MacIntyre pair of sentences on the intellectual life:
“It is characteristic of human beings that, whatever our culture, we desire to know and to understand, that we cannot but set ourselves the achievement of truth as a goal. and among the truths to which we aspire truth about the human good is of particular importance. We move towards that truth by asking what, if anything, the meaning of our lives is, what place suffering has in our lives, and whether or not death is the terminus of those lives.”
Lear’s critique of MacIntyre’s has considerable force. Where is one to find small communities of the sort MacIntyre desiderates? Can they be carved out of the world that we have? And how will they relate to it? The dilemma for the Aristotelian is this: Change the social and political structure to make Aristotle’s ethical and political projects applicable to it, or Find a way to make Aristotle’s ethical and political projects applicable to the social and political structure that we have. Lear clearly favors the latter or something like it. The former is not likely to have much success.
MacIntyre’s position and Lear’s comments on it have considerable relevance to theology, especially to the theology of the Church. The Church is obviously a large institution. What is the relationship between a small community within it, a community made up of like-minded people who voluntarily join one another to share their like-mindedness, and the Church as a whole? In his “I Believe in the Holy Spirit,” Yves Congar brings up this issue in connection with his discussion of the charismatic “movements.” In the course of doing so he praises Paul Ricoeur’s essay “The Socius and the Neighbor,” a reflection on the story of the Good Samaritan and on the “prophetic” elements in the Gospel. Ricoeur’s essay is not the easiest of pieces to read, but it is well worth the effort to work through it. It first appeared in 1954 in “La vie spirituelle” and has appeared in English in Ricoeur’s collection of essays entitled “History and Truth.”
One important part of this essay is its discussion of the relationship between a concern for distributive justice, an issue always of importance in large institutions, and love. In the end, Ricoeur claims that distributive justice is integral to a fully developed love of our fellow human beings.