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first, second, and third worlds,
First worlds are pagan,
Rieff characterizes such a world as one where fate is the controlling idea.
Second worlds are those worlds that are characterized not so much by fate as by faith.
Third worlds, by way of stark contrast to the first and second worlds,
they have to do so on the basis of themselves. The inherent instability of this approach should be obvious.
The third culture notion of a culture that persists independent of all sacred orders is unprecedented in human history.
the abandonment of a sacred order leaves cultures without any foundation.
the task—for Rieff, the impossible task—of justifying itself only by reference to itself.
Morality will thus tend toward a matter of simple consequentialist pragmatism,
immanent frame.
these third-world cultures are really just therapeutic cultures, the cultures of psychological man: the only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it conduces to the feeling of well-being in the individuals concerned.
Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling.
One important point to note is that all three cultures—first, second, and third—can exist simultaneously in the same society.
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When a representative of a second world, however, clashes with a representative of a third world, there is no real argument taking place. There is no common authority on which they might agree to the terms of debate in order to determine exactly what it is they are debating.
What MacIntyre finds to be helpful in the Aristotelian-Thomist approach to the world is the commitment to a teleological view of human nature and moral action. Actions can be morally assessed only in terms of their ends.
he insists that teleology enables individuals to distinguish between what they are and what they should be.
For Marx, the individual needs to be conceived of not as an isolated figure but rather as she is connected to society as a whole and thus in terms of her social relationships. MacIntyre’s teleological construction of ethics is therefore a point of continuity between his Marxist phase and his later Aristotelian-Thomist arguments.
ethics can exist only within a tradition.
The idea of a neutral standpoint from which some absolute ethical principles can be deduced is for MacIntyre a myth.
a “moral philosophy . . . characteristically presupposes a sociology.”
MacIntyre’s ethics has two overriding and related concerns: the nature of ends and the nature of communities.
Prayer, marriage has a threefold purpose: lifelong companionship, mutual sexual satisfaction, and procreation.
Gay marriage actually demands a fundamental revision of the ends of marriage and therefore of the essence of marriage.
rejection of the notion that marriage must be the proper context—and indeed, the necessary moral prerequisite—for conception.
Emotivism
all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.
emotivism is a theory not of meaning but of use; it is about how we use moral concepts and moral language.
emotivism presents preferences as if they were truth claims.
MacIntyre moves from using the language of emotivism to that of expressivism,
The expressive individual is the same as the emotivist, the one who (mistakenly) grants his own personal preferences the status of universal moral imperatives.
What MacIntyre finds most disturbing is precisely the normative nature of this expressivism in modern society.
emotivism is useful as a rhetorical strategy.
When it comes to moral arguments, the tendency of the present age is to assert our moral convictions as normative and correct by rejecting those with which we disagree as irrational prejudice rooted in personal, emotional preference. That is precisely what underlies the ever-increasing number of words ending in -phobia
neurotic bigotry.
All three would argue that an overriding desire for inner personal happiness and a sense of psychological well-being lie at the heart of the modern age and make ethics at root a subjective discourse.
the intellectual class is devoted to the opposite—to the subversion, destabilization, and destruction of the culture’s traditions.
They are, in the words of Rieff, creating not a culture but an anticulture,
Recycling fantasy firsts, thirds exist only as negations of sacred orders in seconds.
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But in the third world, crudity becomes the norm because the general interdict against such is seen as a tyrannical hangover from an outdated way of viewing the world.
casual use of expletives
relentless cynicism and violence
This is in stark contrast with what Rieff identifies as the destructive approach of third-world elites to the past.
it is the destruction of history and its replacement with nothing of any significant substance.
Deconstructionism
Moral iconoclasm is not so much a positive philosophy as a cultural mood. And it affects everything.
take place within a second world. As Mark Noll has persuasively argued, the issue of slavery was one that both sides saw as a matter to be justified or rejected on the basis of the Bible.
What marks the debates of the present day is that there are no such accepted authorities, and so the cultural game is marked by a continual subversion of stability rather than the establishment of greater stability through clarification of the social order in light of the sacred order.
The inward turn at the Enlightenment may not initially have killed God, but it did make him in practice an increasingly unnecessary hypothesis.
