oratories had been burned down, scientists lynched, sciencernteaching abolished, and anyone’s view of the physical universernimagined to be as good as anyone else’s. Today, he proclaims,rnthere is total moral chaos. The reader is given no chance to demurrnat this powerful image of modern anarchy, and Maclntyrernreturns to it at the end of the book: with the two great rival systemsrnof moral knowledge, Aristotelian and Christian, in terminalrndecline, as he believes, anyone can now be excused forrnbeing morally uncertain about anything. “There are no longerrnany clear criteria,” and those who would justify virtue must beginrnto “look for another basis for moral belief.” It is not just thatrnthere is no agreement. There is not even the prospect ofrnagreement. “Our society cannot hope to achieve moral consensus.”rnWe are waiting not for Godot, as the book strikinglyrnconcludes, but for a new St. Benedict.rnThis is a powerful vision. It is also, as the author implies, arnwidely accepted one. Some years ago Hollywood made a filmrncalled Network based, though less thoughtfully, on the samernpremise, since it showed a clever television producer exploitingrnthe moral despair of America bv urging the inhabitants of onerncity after another, exhausted by a long diet of news flashesrnabout serial murder, hijacks, hostages, and drug addiction, tornhang out of their windows by the thousand and scream. ProfessorrnMaclntyre does not want his readers to open their windowsrnand scream, and those who read a book called AfterrnVirtue, one may safely assume, are not much given to mass hysteria.rnNor can any academic philosopher wish that they were.rnBut his vision of the world is not much different from Network’s.rnMoral anarchy, both believe, is endemic to the world werninhabit; certainly nobody knows the difference between rightrnand wrong any more, as they did in the days of Jane Austen orrnthe medieval Church; and short of another spiritual revival asrnintense as Benedictine monasticism, though “doubtless veryrndifferent,” the world is forever doomed to ethical incertitudernand unknowing despair.rnThere are several assumptions readily made here that needrnto be drawn out and examined. The first is that thernmodern world is an exceptionally wicked place. That is not arnview unique to the present age; doubtless St. Benedict, patriarchrnof Western monasticism, felt something similar when hernwithdrew from the licentious life of Rome around 500 AD. to arncave in Subiaco to write his Rule. The spirit of Subiaco has arncertain recurrence in Western thought. Some 60 years ago P.C.rnWodehouse wrote a song for Anything Goes—”The world’srngone mad today/And good’s bad today,/And black’s white today/rnAnd day’s night today”—which is a sort of musical anticipationrnof After Virtue. I also recall a lapel button at the Universitvrnof California in Berkeley, in the late I960’s, that readrn”God is not dead: He just doesn’t want to get involved,” implyingrnthat matters were by then past the care of even divinernomnipotence. That is going a point beyond Benedict and P.G.rnWodehouse. One senses a throwing-up of hands here, arndesperate or whimsical turning-away from rational problemsolving,rnand an indifference, in general, to the study of cases,rnconsiderations, and evidence.rnIn the face of that despairing mood—whether St. Benedict’s,rnor Wodehouse’s, or Berkeley’s, or Maclntyre’s—it isrnhard to be sure what answer would serve. If you believe that norninterpretation is fixed and no argument uniquely persuasive,rnthen you do not pay much serious attention to argumentsrnwhen they are offered. If you are a moral pessimist in the Godis-rndead Nietzsehean style, playful or committed, then any suggestionrnthat things have once been worse, or that they are gettingrnbetter or may soon be getting better, sounds laughably likernPollyanna. Pessimism has intellectual prestige, after all; thosernwho take that view or adopt that pose are unlikely to be talkedrnout of it by merely rational considerations. I speak of posingrnhere, since it was always plain that the hermits of Berkeley, atrnleast, were not much like those of Subiaco. They went on livingrntheir agreeable lives, cheerfully enough, and are now, it isrnrumored, entered into a comfortable and prosperous middlernage. They knew how seriously to take their own pessimism, unlikernBenedict, as they applied for good jobs, bought homes, andrnmade due and ample provision for retirement.rnBut in any case, it is of little use to talk of such things. Tellrnthe Benedicts of today that the standard of living of the humanrnrace is probably higher than ever before in history, and they willrncharge you with indifference to famine in Africa or draw attentionrnto the moral dangers of materialism—or, with a finerndisregard for consistency, both. Tell them there has been nornmajor war, in the style of 1914 or 1939, for nearly half a century,rnand they will accuse you of callous unconcern about Vietnamrnor the Gulf. Tell them that there are more students in higherrneducation than ever before, and they will speak of the deficienciesrnof the inner-city schools. Hostage-taking, after all, didrnnot begin in the 20th century; nor, as anyone who has studiedrnthe opium wars in China will know, did drug abuse. Thernscreamers of Network were probably well-housed and well-fed.rnThe film was a satire on television, and it is mass communication,rnsurely, not the world itself, that persuades people by thernthousand that they are living in a uniquely wicked age. Theyrnmight not think so if they could watch television coverage ofrnthe Thirty Years War or of the fall of ancient cities where, byrncommon practice, the adult males were slaughtered, the womenrnand children enslaved, and the city razed to the ground.rnThe second assumption is that the modern world, unlikernmany ages before it, lacks moral agreement. That is hard tornfathom. The media often report child murders, and yet no onernever seems to speak up for the murderers. If there were nornmoral consensus, one would expect someone to take the partrnof those who kill children. But nobody ever does, and thernonly issues are whether policing should be more thorough andrnpenalties strengthened. Even pro-Nazis do not exactly defendrnAuschwitz: they deny that it happened and hint at Zionist propaganda,rnwhich surely implies that they too are unready to endorse,rnat least in public, what happened there. There is a vastrnconsensus in economic and environmental matters—that thernWestern world is using too much fuel, for example, and that inflationrnis a bad thing—even if there is less agreement aboutrnwhat to do about them. Ninety percent of the people, asrnWinston Churchill used to say, are agreed about ninety percentrnof the things that need to be done. Western near-unanimity inrnrejecting the violent Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in Augustrn1990 was impressive; so, in August 1991, was the heartfeltrnpopular welcome, east and west, for the failure of the Moscowrncoup. The notion that there is no agreement on moral issuesrnis manifestly absurd. Why, then, is it so confidently made?rnOne answer concerns the recurrent myth of a consensualrnGolden Age. Among modern centuries that age commonly is,rnand has to be, the 18th century, since there were religiousrnwars in the 16th and I7th, as everybody knows, and the I9thrnspawned some highly anti-consensual thinkers like Emerson,rnMarx, and Nietzsche. The grand instance here is usually sup-rnJULY 1993/21rnrnrn