A MacIntyre point about politics

I have decided to avoid partisan politics on this blog. Not because I don't care but because it would distract from my primary intention here which is to discuss virtue.

I do have a nonpartisan point to make. In After Virtue MacIntyre talks about three types who characterize modern morality, which is to say morality after virtue. They are the aesthete, the therapist and the manager. MacIntyre goes on to say that the manager is the most troubling of these because he/she makes a claim of managerial competence that cannot be sustained. No person could reasonably hope to have the knowledge or expertise to manage large bureaucratic organizations—public or private—in the way that the managerial class claims.

Every political party in opposition accuses the governing leader of lacking these managerial skills and every party's leader loses favour when elected because they cannot deliver the managerial competence they criticized their opponent for lacking. And when these leaders lose favour with us, we attack them in terms of their moral character. We use terms like weak, unfocused &c. to describe what it is that we think we don't like. And the party in opposition feeds our fear that things are out of control because there is an incompetent manager in office who needs to be replaced.

Shampoo, rinse, repeat.

And it's not them; it's us. Our empty moral understanding of life and its purpose demands this manager. As MacIntyre says, the manager is a central character of modern society. Managers don't just act out their own moral fiction—they embody a moral fiction that runs right through our culture.