Comments on: Alasdair Macintyre On Rights and Protest: Are We Just Talking To Ourselves?

By: Jarrod Saul McKenna

Jarrod Saul McKenna — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 01:04:55 +0000

this is wonderful Wess. The church is to be about embodiment and ‘pro’test (not ‘anti’-test). Maybe then we can have the imagination of the kingdom and real nonviolent alternative (and therefore resistance) to the industral growth military complex instead of being a dependant paracite on the bum of what Dorothy Day called “The filthy rotten system”.

By: Chad

Chad — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:33:43 +0000

Hey, Wess,
I’ve also been of two minds about this. What you’ve mentioned struck me as similar to the tree-falls-in-the-forest metaphor.

One thing I think I usually forget, but which is also true of blogging, is that success counts a bit on who is paying attention to your efforts. Blogs are sometimes cults of personality, sometimes truly engaging enough for them to become communities and have a life of their own, and sometimes drops in the bucket of an already large pond, which don’t make much of a ripple.

Similarly, rallies and marches are like advertising–it’s one way to bring attention to a cause that doesn’t meet the media-requirements for newsworthiness. I think sometimes we think that the news sources dictate what’s important, but marches try to bring that back around, to take some focus back into the light of people rather than “newsmakers.”

One example of blogs, media, and marches coming together to build a critical mass is the concern (or lack thereof) over housing in San Francisco, which the news media rarely covers in a sexy way. One place where these met recently was at http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=3729. This is a small website devoted to local news as an alternative to the major press syndicate.

Rallies and blogs depend on each other for success, though in this case, neither is classically “successful.” However, without the march, no news for BeyondChron. BeyondChron feeds upward to the local reporters and concerned citizens. So, even though only 100 people marches, many more (like myself) were informed and educated and, soon-to-be voters come Nov. 7th.

Do protests work? Depends on what you want to have happen and how you measure success–a tree in the forest or one drop at a time.

By: -drm-

-drm- — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 02:02:48 +0000

Oh, sure. Well, my claim (and that of others) is that MacIntyre is right about needing tradition in order to have coherent moral reasoning, but his narrative of our plunge into the darkness emotivism in “After Virtue” is in fact too pessimistic. [He does himself back of his claims of large scale moral interminability somewhat in his later works - Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and Three Rival Versions...] If this claim is correct and translation is always theoretically possible across the permeable boundaries of traditions, and if one conceives tradition slightly differently than in MacIntyre’s limited view, then there are quite likely many traditions which can put forth coherent moral statements. It stands to reason that protest can fit into these various traditions in their own unique ways, and in ways which provide the sort of positive stance which makes protest worthwhile.

I agree that being against something without being for something is rarely a helpful enterprise.

By: C. Wess Daniels

C. Wess Daniels — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 03:43:37 +0000

Dan, could you expound a little more in terms of what you mean by protest working in “coherent traditions.”

By: -drm-

-drm- — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:45:15 +0000

MacIntyre’s “After Virtue” is instructive on many points and we all have much to learn from it. However, his conclusions which are somewhat ameliorated in his later work are too dark and therefore close down on the constructive work that ‘protest’ can make in various coherent traditions.