Passings

Two giants last week: Michael Ledeen and Alasdair MacIntyre. Plus travel notes.

Back in the ‘aughts, Michael Ledeen’s office at AEI was on the same floor as mine, and although there was a shortcut from the elevator through a backdoor to his office, he invariably took the main entrance to the floor and walked the perimeter, often pausing at my door to say “Happy Tuesday!” or whatever day it happened to be. Occasionally he paused to chat briefly about the news or some curiosity on his mind—or mine—sometimes I’d ask him about something, and was invariably treated to a pithy, synoptic treatment of something that offered insight and, frequently, amusement. Our rare arguments (usually about how to understand Machiavelli) were a thing of delight, because there was no more pleasant person to argue with.

I had been reading Michael for years before I made his acquaintance, in the Washington Quarterly, The American Spectator, The New Republic, and other outlets. His books were always enlightening, none more so than Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair, his fascinating account of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan years, where, as a consultant to the Reagan National Security Council, he was an important participant who made one of the first connections with a go-between with the Iranians. I always thought it significant that the Iran-Contra committee of 1987, which Democrats set up to impeach Reagan, decided not to call him as a public witness even though he was eager to testify, ostensibly because he “had no new information to offer,” but he had been deposed extensively by committee staff, and I’ve always suspected that the Democrat-dominated investigation was afraid he’d be another Oliver North and attack the left too effectively.

That’s only a tiny part of his impressive CV from a remarkable intellectual career. He was arguably one of the three or four leading American experts on Italian fascism, which was a major focus of his early scholarly work.

Naturally the New York Times ran a squalid obituary, noting, among other Ledeen positions that it said had been “discredited,” that “the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981 in Vatican City was orchestrated by Moscow.” I happen to know from my own conversations with senior CIA personnel from the time that the CIA had unearthed considerable evidence of Moscow’s involvement with the shooting of the Pope, but that the usual people deliberately contraverted the finding for a variety of reasons. Among them that it likely would have upset the New York Times. But it was hardly “discredited.”

This is only one particular sideswipe of a malicious obituary, and one more data point on why you can’t hate the New York Times enough.

Second, . . .

I never got to meet Alasdair MacIntyre, but like so many people I was bowled over by his most famous book, After Virtue. I no longer have mastery of this book—if I ever did—and I don’t have my marked up copy from 1982 handy (more on this in a moment)—but the title of the central chapter of the book always contained to me its central merit: “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” That about sums it up; full semester seminar to follow.

MacIntyre began as something of a radical Marxist, and never quite shed his social democratic disposition, but became a Roman Catholic in mid-life. After Virtue and other work contributed powerfully to the rise of the “post-liberalism” of Pat Deneen and others. There are a lot of good criticisms to be made of MacIntyre’s blind spots and omissions, but there is no question that After Virtue is a masterpiece that will pass the test of time, as it was splendidly written (rare among modern philosophers, needless to say).

A lot of people recall his closing sentence to the first edition, in the final chapter entitled “After Virtue: Nietzsche or Aristotle, Trotsky and St. Benedict,” which hints vaguely at a rebellious strategy of moral recovery that is easily misunderstood because of its brevity. The closing sentence was: “We are waiting not for Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” However, this sentence and the full architecture of thought behind it, should be understood in light of the sentence preceding it, which is as clear and true today as when he wrote it more than 40 years ago: “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.” Put in place holder here for how Trump figures as a last line of resistance to the barbarians.

In a second edition of the book, MacIntyre adds a new postscript taking up what the Straussians (whom MacIntyre completely ignores to his detriment) call the “theological-political problem.” This refers, on the first level, to reconciling the claims of authority between philosophy or reason and revelation (which is not necessarily the same as theology). This is a tangled subject, again deserving of a semester-long seminar at least, but toward the end of the postscript he says this:

“From the moment that biblical religion and Aristotelianism encountered one another the question of the relationship of claims about the human virtues to claims about divine law and divine commandments required an answer. Any reconciliation of biblical theology and Aristotelianism would have to sustain a defense of the thesis that only a life constituted in key part by obedience to law could be such as to exhibit fully those virtues without which human beings cannot achieve their telos. Any justified rejection of such a reconciliation would have to give reasons for denying that thesis. The classic statement and defense of that thesis is of course by Aquinas; and the most cogent statement of the case against it is in an unduly neglected minor modern class, Harry V. Jaffa’s commentary on Aquinas’ commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, Thomism and Aristotelianism (Chicago, 1952).”

Jaffa later changed his mind to a large extent about his conclusions in this early book, but didn’t live long enough to explain them fully. Part of his revision can be seen in A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War. This may seem like an indirect way to the issue of Aquinas and Aristotle, but indeed it works. But in two weeks Ed Erler will publish a supplement that fills in some of the gaps: Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address. Pre-order today.

Meanwhile, I am in Iceland all this week, hiking the interior of this barren but remarkably beautiful place. Bad news for John Yoo: there are no McDonald’s in Iceland. (There are also no mosquitos, I am told.) But there is my favorite emblem of the administrative state in action: the Monument to the Unknown Bureaucrat in Reykjavik (I swear I am not making this up):

Plus other oddities: