Religion & Law

"The man in a modest dark suit and grey shirt could be mistaken, save for the presence of his wife of 33 years, for an off-duty Benedictine abbot. We?re dining in the elegant ambience of the Cambridge Catholic university chaplaincy; the conversation is animated, but the man, an 81-year-old philosopher, contents himself with a glass of water, leaving the dishes and vintage claret untouched. Self-effacing, a trifle austere, he nevertheless exudes a benign humanity from the top of his monkish haircut to his scuffed toe-caps."  So begins this essay, by John Cornwell, called "MacIntyre and Money."  The (long) piece concludes with this:

If MacIntyre?s ethics of finance raises more questions than it settles, he still beguiles with his illustrations from history. For example, he entertained his listeners with the story of the founding of a diesel engine factory in which an investor and engineer came together to create an ideal small-scale business for their mutual benefit and that of the local community. Later, demonstrating the ways in which globalised ?bad character? can be resisted by ?virtuous risk taking,? he cited four narratives: the 18th-century Guaraní Indians (depicted in the film The Mission) who chose a collectivised future under ?proto-Leninist? Jesuits rather than slavery; the early founders of the kibbutzim at odds with competing visions of collectivisation; the Kerala leaders of the Marxist Communist party of India in 1957, who placated landowners and government while helping the poor; and the small farmers of Donegal in the 1960s who chose to establish a co-operative that sustained their Gaelic-speaking community rather than emigrate.

Such stories are fascinating, but contribute little to the larger woes he had set out in his lecture, the solutions to which demand, as he acknowledges, ?social structures of an economy? very different from those of either a wholly free market economy or the state-and-market economies of present-day Europe.? Other than telling us that ?it would be an economy in which? deference to wealth would be recognised as a vice,? he does not enlarge. His micro-models of a proto-Leninist theocracy?a kibbutz, a Marxist Indian state, and an Irish farming co-operative?do not lead one to believe that his ideal replacement for western-style democracy and the global economy would be realistic let alone desirable.

At the end of After Virtue, however, he argues that we have already entered a new age of ?darkness and barbarism? similar to the decline of the Roman empire. ?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.? The survival of virtuous civilisation may depend, he implies, not on a world revolution but on the persistence of isolated communities similar to the monasteries that withstood the depredations of the dark ages. ?We are waiting not for a Godot,? he concludes in After Virtue, ?but for another?doubtless very different?St Benedict.? But who or what would that look like? He does not, as yet, say.