After Virtue: a study in moral theory, by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Published in 1981.
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical
period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels
are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and
North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into
the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning
point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will
turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased
to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the
maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often
not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction
of new forms of community within which the moral life could
be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming
ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is
correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have
reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction
of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and
moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already
upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors
of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This
time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they
have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of
consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are
waiting not for a Godot, but for another - doubtless very different - St.
Benedict.
(p.263)
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| Alasdair MacIntyre |
