Thoughts on MacIntyre

Via Alan Jacobs, I’ve learned that Alasdair MacIntyre passed away on Thursday, at the age of 96. Unlike other philosophers, theologians, and political theorists I’ve written memorials to on my blog over the years, MacIntyre’s work—which engaged deeply with issues of ethics, Aristoteliansim, and rationality—never had a major impact on my own. Still, I don’t see how any English-speaking student of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped by After Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981; I was, like everyone else, and in that sense I owe him as much a debt as any other thinker I linked to above.

For a long time, my understanding of that debt was inextricable from the liberal-communitarian debates which academic philosophers and political theorists (including folks like me who were trained to become such, and for whom even if it didn’t quite work out that way, still can’t get that debate off my mind) who are today in their 50s were inundated with in graduate school. MacIntyre always denied being a communitarian, though he was lumped in with them anyway, and I think not inappropriately so. Beyond all the sturm und drang which attend any kind of intellectual argument over the drawing of disciplinary and ideological lines, there remains the simple fact that MacIntyre self-professed “revolutionary Aristotelianism” ultimately pointed to the local community, to the centrality of tradition, and to the continuity of stories and language—in other words, to things and phenomena very much beyond the ambit of the sovereign, rights-bearing individual—as the starting point to any of kind rationally defensible moral philosophy, to say nothing of any kind of actual civic health. By making the—I still think highly persuasive—argument that liberal individualism leaves us with what he called a mere “emotivism” as a basis for understanding, interpreting, and judging our own and others’ actions, he absolutely add significantly to a broad set of communitarian ideas which are still valid today.

Of course, today it is the postliberals who are most interested in claiming the communitarian MacIntyre for themselves. As bizarre that MacIntyre himself apparently found the prospect that his writings had somehow inspired people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others to embrace the goal of a retreat from and an overturning of the current liberal order, MacIntyre’s contempt for the conservative acceptance of capitalist inequality (when asked in 1996 what he still retained from his pre-Aristotelian Marxist phase, MacIntyre simply stated “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post”) probably isn’t enough to prevent that appropriation. Fred Dallmayr—who, as I’ve written, understood what it means to move beyond liberalism much better than most of those who parade that label—noted in a chapter from his book Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World that MacIntyre’s thinking, which he called “stellar,” nonetheless evinces a certain “metaphysical realism” and “functionalism,” thereby undermining ways of thinking about our situation which call for a more immanent, more attendant, more patient approach. MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelianism absolutely does not call for a revolutionary communitarian imposition, but it’s possible the way in which he formulated those ideas opened up an interpretation of them that he firmly disagreed with.

But it would be wrong to make any set of reflections of MacIntyre’s immense philosophical achievements to rest entirely upon the political contestation over his prioritization of community. Far better, I think, would be to say something about how MacIntyre defined the communities of tradition, locality, and story in question. Because that can take us in an interesting direction.

In a book of MacIntyre’s that doesn’t appear to me to get much critical praise, but which was very important to me once upon a time (maybe even more so than After Virtue), he explored a fundamental, philosophical challenge to communitarian ideas, though he didn’t use that language to set up the problem. Essentially: if you’re not going to employ universalist concepts whose rationality are available to all individuals equally, and rather are going to insist upon the priority of concepts that have some communal, historical, or cultural particularity, then how can you avoid relativism? In short (and as the title of the book in questions asked): if you’re going to tie the possibility of rational, moral judgment to particular communities, then Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? should we employ? MacIntyre’s answer to these questions is dense and rewarding, and pretty much impossible to briefly summarize. But the first step is recognizing how forthright he is in accepting the puzzle. There is no attempt to sideline what it means accept that Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment, cannot be made logically universal:

But since practical reasoning, as Aristotle understands it, involves the capacity to bring the relevant premises concerning good and virtues to bear on particular situations and since this capacity is inseparable from, is indeed a part of, the virtues, including justice, it is also the case that one cannot be practically rational without being just. And for reasons which are in essentials the same as those which entailed the conclusion that one cannot be just apart from membership in some particular polis, one cannot be practically rational apart from membership in some particular polis. That one’s rationality should be not merely supported by but partly constituted by one’s membership in and integration into a social institution of some particular type is a contention very much at odds with characteristically modern views of rationality (p. 123).

Philosophical liberals will, of course, tear their hair out at that conclusion, but the rigor with which he makes this argument has stood the test of time: we are not self-constructing, but rather socially constituted beings, and thus, most think, and judge, by and through those institutions and histories and forms which characterized our constitution. Okay—but does that mean all of them? Obviously not; some communal phenomena and constructions are far more relevant to questions of justice and rationality than others. For MacIntyre, the primary one—obviously so, given the importance he attaches to stories—is language, and structural forms by which language is conveyed. On his reading of history, the boundaries of any shared, spoken, written language are what give us linguistic communities, which in turn provide our social communities. He never quotes Herder or Gadamer in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?, but he’s plainly working in the same vein as them: trying to articulate, in Aristotelian terms, a philosophical hermeneutics, a way of understanding the constituting power of language over time and through the social bonds and interactions which define us.

The complaint about linguistic communities is, of course, obvious: languages change! They change through translation, through interpretation, through just the generational process by which stories that revealed to one set of listeners one set of references upon which they could reason, end up revealing to another, later, set of listeners an entirely different set of references, because of geographic or technological or cultural change. MacIntyre acknowledges this, insisting the every tradition is open--by definition, as a spoken, written, particular thing—to evolution: “[T]he time and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through the language-in-use which gives expression to [their tradition] may encounter another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use, and may discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history, and their own language-in-use, it [nonetheless] provides a standpoint from which, once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second language, the limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within their own tradition” (pp. 387-388).

That’s a long sentence, and appropriately so, because he’s talking about a long process. (Whether his own articulation of Aristotelianism supported it or not, his work on thinking through the real world process of phronesis absolutely had a patient, immanent character to it.) MacIntyre is telling us that in encountering differences, and as we learn about them and even embrace them, there will always be a constant need to maintain our own received traditions, stories, and language—not to defend them from some kind of pollution, but because it is through working through their interaction with one another that we can see clearly what one story can teach which another story cannot.

It's worth saying in conclusion that, dense as MacIntyre’s work often was, he could be viciously funny (at least in an academic sense). One of my favorite passages from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has stayed with me for decades, because it’s such a thorough dumping on those who talk blithely about “the Western tradition” or “the Christian tradition” as something to be defended. Building upon his own careful philosophical consideration of linguistic communities and historical traditions, he takes the time castigate the type of teaching every one of us who has ever had to take on a survey course usually fall into, faulting both modernity, but also a flawed conservatism that doesn’t understand what it’s about:

The type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges [guilty!], in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else as is possible if one is to reach Satre by the end of the semester. If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a reintroduction to the culture of past traditions, but is a tour through what is in effect a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reaching of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as “the Judeo-Christian tradition” and sometimes “Western values.” The writing of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives, such as William J. Bennett, turn out in fact to be one more stage in modernity’s cultural deformation of our relationship to the past (pp. 385-386).

It’s not surprising that a man who could write a passage like that was the kind of professor who insisted on referring to his students as “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and once handed out a “B minus minus” as a grade. Thinkers like this leave a profound legacy, and even if MacIntyre’s is, I fear, fated to be misappropriated, his own arguments make it clear that, so long as we speak our language and tell our stories, there are always practical possibilities for some St. Benedict, like MacIntyre himself, to come along a remind us of the immense gifts of connection and continuity we possess. Requiescat in pace, sir.

Regarding John (and Paul, and the Beatles too, but Mostly John)

Paul McCartney has been my favorite Beatle for years, as the long journey I took in 2019 through Macca's then-nearly-50-years' worth of solo, non-Beatles recordings should prove. The man is simply incredible, as a musician, performer, arranger, and instrumentalist. He's got an uncanny ear for melody, and his elastic appreciation of different sounds and styles, along with his incredible (however inconsistent) work ethic, has meant that he's built songs for decades that demonstrate a mastery, or at least a partial mastery, of the capaciousness of pop music. I can't think of any English-speaking artist besides Bob Dylan whose influence on popular music in the 20th century (and more!) can compare with Sir Paul, and it frustrates me to no end that while I was able to finally catch the former in concert, I've probably missed my chance to ever see the latter. 

But all that said, after recently reading Ian Leslie's tremendous John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, I found myself thinking: have I, perhaps in kind of a perverse refusal of the worship of John Lennon which I saw all around me in pop culture as a young person in the 1980s, purposefully underplayed the role John played in making Paul the musician he became? As a pop radio kid, I was vaguely learning who the Beatles were at a very young age--and yet out of any of them, it was the groovy hits that McCartney put out that I learned first, and that perhaps overshadowed whatever else I was picking up. Despite being a news addict from elementary school on, I actually have no memory of the announcement of Lennon's murder in December 1980 (just before I turned 12). Instead what I remember was the endless reminiscences of him, on every station and in every publication, for months if not years afterward (a sad scene about how devastating many found his murder even showed up in one of my Moon Knight comic books). Perhaps all that--no doubt combined with the anti-hippie vibes that weren't too hard to find in the conservative Mormon milieu I was raised in--made me inclined to just not take John seriously.

If I did, that's a huge mistake, not just because Lennon is an artist worth reckoning with, but because it undermines my own understanding of  McCartney. As all the very biographies of Paul I read confirmed (indeed, how I even noted here when talking about Peter Jackson's Get Back), John's relationship with, his competition with, and his collaboration with Paul is probably incalculable in terms of how they all contributed to Paul's musical genius. I'm not saying the world wouldn't have known Paul McCartney if the 17-year-old John Lennon hadn't have captivated him and then, upon sizing up the 15-year-old Paul's audition for him, invited him to join his group The Quarry Men when they first met in the summer of 1957; I think Paul is just too protean an artistic force to have been kept down by any circumstance or lack thereof. But without his older friend's wit, his anger, his arrogance and his neediness, his mix of idealism and cynicism, and most of all his friendship? Black 47's Larry Kirwan once wrote a play--"Liverpool Fantasy"--that imagined an alternative history where the Beatles hadn't made it (in Kirwan's imagination they broke up, tellingly, because John quit the group when they seemed ready to acquiesce--as did actually happen--to studio demands for them to play something other the rock and roll John was devoted to at their very first recording session in 1962). While Kirwan presented John, George, and Ringo as all still living in Liverpool, Paul wasn't; by the play's imagined 1986, he'd become a massive American pop superstar, singing in Las Vegas and cranking out heavily orchestrated, disposable hits under the name "Paul Montana." I think that's a little cruel, a fiction that leans too hard into the mostly (but only mostly) false image of Paul as a crowd-pleasing, superficial hit-making machine. But still: any honest reckoning with Paul's history and accomplishment simply cannot due without considering what John's drives and hang-ups and delights and hatreds helped make him into.

So that's what I'm going to do for the rest of 2025: listen to John Lennon's solo music--all of it--closely, and see what I think, and how I can put it together with my understanding of the life he led, and what that understanding of Lennon's aspirations and accomplishments says to me. This will be an easier task than what I did with Paul; for one thing, with his life tragically ended 45 years ago, John had far less time than Paul has had to build up a musical library to explore. Thanks to the same friend who encouraged and enabled me to do my deep dive into McCartney's music back in 2019, I have available to me remastered recordings of all eight of Lennon's post-Beatles albums (yes, that means I'm skipping over the three avant-garde albums of experimental music that he and Yoko Ono produced in 1968 and 1969), plus a collection of Lennon's officially released non-album singles and various studio outtakes and home recordings. I'll review and reflect upon one of those albums each month, May through December. For today though, some random thoughts about and reviews of that catch-all collection first.

The singles portion of John Lennon: Singles and Home Tapes consists of six songs, all of which are terrific. This isn't surprising; they all were, after all, studio recordings that the engineers and record company people and John himself all thought worthy of an independent release, and whatever may or may not be said about any of those others, Lennon himself, whatever his limitations as an instrumentalist or solo songwriter, had a deep, intuitive grasp of both the zeitgeist and of American rock and roll as it enraptured him as a teenager in the 1950s--he knew what worked (usually, anyway). Three of the singles are first-rate expressions of that rock and roll sensibility; of the others, one is among the greatest popular Christmas songs written and recorded in the past century, and two more are inseparable from the equally idealistic and simplistic (and "commercializable," if that's a word) peacenik movement of the late 1960s; to criticize them on the level of songmanship, as opposed to the sing-along tunes of protest they were purposefully designed to be, is to misunderstand completely what Lennon, as guided and shaped by his new love and wife Yoko, had determined himself to become. Which is not to say they should be criticized. On the contrary, whether or not they're world-class musical art, the truth is that even John's hippie singles provide more than adequate proof that, at its best, John's talent--mixed up as it was with his anger with himself and the status quo, his deep insecurity about his own accomplishments and relationships, his double-minded contempt for (but also longing for) intellectual and artistic pretension, and his often messianic idealism--could nonetheless still create great music, even without his greatest friend, rival, and partner at his side (or looking over his shoulder).

"Give Peace a Chance," the last of the six on the "Singles" disc, was the first one recorded, in a Montreal hotel room during John and Yoko's "Bed-In" in the summer of 1969, with dozens of hippie hanger-ons and luminaries (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, Tommy Smothers, etc.) clapping and singing along; the second to last on the disc, "Move Over Ms. L," was the latest one recorded, from John's drug-addled "Lost Weekend" period in Los Angeles in 1974, a short and quick, delightfully innocent, mostly nonsense rocker, that shows that all hallucinogenics in the world couldn't stop Lennon from approximating Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins when he had a mind to do so. It's my favorite song out of the whole collection, to be honest; comparable to some of the very best of McCartney's straightforward solo pop, I think. I can't listen to it and not think of the rocking gem from the Beatles' rooftop concert, "One After 909," where John and Paul's love for each other and the rock and roll music which made them who they were is just overflowing.

As for the rest, "Cold Turkey," a bluesy hard rock tune, also from 1969, features Eric Clapton on guitar, and would have been a perfect fit with The White Album's "Revolution" (the single version, not the album one), or when Lennon performed "Yer Blues" with Clapton and Keith Richards as The Dirty Mac in 1968. "Power to the People," from 1971, is a strong, quasi-R&B song that no doubt often fired up crowds during anti-war protests back in the day, with Bobby Keys, the Texas saxophone wonder who went on to power so many classic Rolling Stones tunes--and whom I was lucky enough to see perform live back in 2009--giving this song much of its oomph. "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)," from 1970, is a pulsing, insistent number, with the sound just rushing at the listener from almost the first beat; it's not surprising that Phil Spector was in the recording studio for that one. And who can criticize 1971's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)"? Sure, self-conscious 19th-century traditionalists can, and so can Christians who insist that not centering the Biblical story in every holiday song is some kind of crime. But other than those sticks-in-the-mud, it's hard to imagine finding any sincere fault with the tune. Lennon managed in this song to channel the spirit of the season in a musically simple, politically pointed, historically grounded, yet entirely inviting and open-ended way. Most other songwriters never come close to that level of accomplishment, and John, in 1971, was still just getting started.

The "Home Tapes" disc of the collection is a mixed bag. It's interesting to hear early and alternate takes of such songs as "Mother," "God," and "Beautiful Boy," but they can't compare to the official album tracks--though perhaps, as I work my way through the albums themselves, I'll change my mind. For now, I think the only track that truly makes it worth owning is the solo piano version it contains of the unreleased "Serve Yourself" (a track that exists in many bootlegged versions, some of them exceptionally profane). I don't consider it a particularly good song--but then, I'm biased, as I consider Dylan's Christian albums mostly strong and powerful music, and the specific song that Lennon found infuriating and was inspired to respond to--"Gotta Serve Somebody"--a masterpiece for both gospel and rock and roll. Lennon didn't agree, unsurprisingly. Which is okay; John followed his own path, one that was tragically cut short far too early. For the rest of the year, I'm going to follow it the best I can.

Thoughts on Dylan

1) I saw Bob Dylan on Saturday here in Wichita, which was only the second show of his 2025 extension of his never ending tour (nominally supporting his most recent album, the excellent Rough and Rowdy Ways, but really just Bob being the traveling poet and song and dance man he's always been). It was a great show, with Bob sitting at the piano the entire time, playing pretty consistently, adding bluesy chords, rockabilly swing, and some romantic melody as the song required. And his four-piece band was tight, never showing off, but providing a solid foundation for a supremely musical evening. I wish I could have snapped some pics, as I have a very good seat, but it was a strict no-device show (including old cameras like mine!), and security was tight. But other than that, I had a wonderful time.

2) His set list? Almost exactly the same as his set list from Tulsa last Tuesday, where he kicked off this round of touring; the only change for us in Wichita was the addition of "Across the Rubicon," which was awesome, since I think that's maybe the best song on Rough and Rowdy Ways. ("Murder Most Foul" would outrank it, except I have a hard time considering it an actual song; more like some ancient bard orally capturing the whole gestalt of a particular society at a particular moment in time.) I was moderately disappointed with his significantly shorted version of "Desolation Row," and would have preferred almost any cut from Nashville Skyline aside from "To Be Alone with You," but I loved his harmonica work on "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and, especially, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," which he and his band made whimsical, upbeat, and almost sweet; on the basis of the couples I saw leaning into each other and swaying to the song, I'd bet that I'm not the only one who considered it the highlight of the night.

3) Speaking of Tulsa, Melissa and I took a day-trip there only two weeks back; we've lived in Kansas for going on 19 years, yet in all that time, Melissa had never seen this city only a little over two hours southeast of us, and I'd only been there once for a conference which didn't give me any time to explore. We had a grand time there--and for both of us (which is surprising for my wife, since she's not a Dylan fan), the highlight was the Bob Dylan Center. I had kept my expectations low, since I feared that it would just be a glorified add-on to the Woody Guthrie Center next door, which I've long heard raves about. But a bookseller at Magic City Books strongly encouraged us to check out the Dylan museum, and I'm glad we did. It really does a brilliant job at organizing its immense collection of photos, letters, films, notes, and more; the introductory videos do a great job situating Dylan as an artist and a cultural figure, and the main exhibit is filled with wonderful discoveries (the loopy, gushing letters Johnny Cash wrote to Dylan were charming). My favorite feature was a jukebox programmed with Dylan songs, Dylan covers, and "Dylanesque" tunes selected by Elvis Costello, but that just scratches the surface. It's not a huge museum, but after two hours there we still hadn't seen it all.

4) Becoming the sort of person who could spend most of an afternoon hanging around a Bob Dylan museum has been a long process. As I've detailed here on my blog many times over the years, my pop music sensibilities have always been, first and last, about the radio--and by the time I really started listening to pop radio around 1978, Dylan's time as someone who got much radio airplay were done and gone. So I was generally aware of him as a singer and song-writer, and occasionally recognized when other artists were covering his songs, but it wasn't until sometime in late 1993, when I picked up a double VHS tape copy of the 30th anniversary concert held for Bob at Madison Square Garden, that I really woke up to this astonishing and unpredictable artist. Besides all the wonderful music, just the range of the man's writings, both in substance and style, blew me away. I mean, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"? "My Back Pages"? "When the Ship Comes In"? I mean, it's folk, but also rock; it's political, but also personal; it's judgmental and dismissive, but also sneakily open-hearted. It's hardly an original realization, that Dylan contains multitudes, but it's what began my 30-plus years of recurring curiosity in the man. Being the political nerd I am, I dived into analyses of his lyrics, examinations of his interviews, reflections on his historical role--but more than that, I listened to his songs.

5) As for the songs, what can I say? I was delighted to finally be able to check seeing Bob in concert off my bucket list, but that doesn't change my most basic judgment about his music (one shared by my wife as well): the man just isn't ever the best interpreter and performer on his own material. I won't go as far as her (and, to be honest, many tens of thousands of others) in declaring that Dylan's voice grates. Like Mick Jagger, I think there's something distinctive and musical to his vocal instrument, even when it's not at it's best (and at the Wichita concert, as indecipherable as many of the words which came out of his mouth were, its sometimes wry, sometimes wistful, always gentle tone was quite engaging). But still, the point stands: he can write incredible songs, but there will always be someone (often many someones) who will be able to do those songs better than he. Examples? Oh man, don't get me started; I could list a couple of dozen. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"? Joan Baez. "All Along the Watchtower"? Jimi Hendrix. "Boots of Spanish Leather"? Nanci Griffith. "Chimes of Freedom"? Bruce Springsteen. "Desolation Row"? Robyn Hitchcock. "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright"? Dolly Parton. "Forever Young"? The Pretenders. "Girl from the North Country"? Rosanne Cash. "Gotta Serve Somebody"? Shirley Caesar. "I Shall Be Released"? Joe Cocker. "If Not for You"? George Harrison. "It Ain't Me Babe"? Johnny Cash and June Carter. "Just Like a Woman"? Nina Simone. "Like a Rolling Stone"? Michael Hedges. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"? Warren Zevon. "Masters of War"? The Staple Singers. "Mr. Tambourine Man"? The Byrds. "Positively 4th Street"? Bryan Ferry. "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"? Manfred Mann. "What Was it You Wanted"? Willie Nelson. "With God on Our Side"? The Neville Brothers. Just accept that, save for the towering exception of the Lennon-McCartney due (who only had about 12 years of collaborative production, whereas Dylan has been producing consistently for over 60), there simply isn't another English-speaking artist in the recording era that has written as many great songs as Bob Dylan has. You don't have to grant that he was the definitive interpreter of all these songs too!

6) Oh, and as for politics? Well, by all available evidence, the man's favorite president was Jimmy Carter. As another great story-teller once commented, 'nuff said.

Minding Laurie Johnson’s Gap

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly conservative state, and am a life-long member of a mostly conservative church; hence, the relatively small number of Republicans I know who still dissent from the faux-populist posturing, paranoid postliberal muttering, and borderline criminality that has overtaken most of what passes for politically “conservative” thought these days tend to really stand out. They’re honorable folk, these teachers and police officers, filmmakers and military veterans, farmers and parents and good friends, and the criticism they receive from their supposed ideological allies when they refuse to celebrate the latest mad (or Musk-influenced) order from Washington DC is painful to watch.

I don’t know if recommending Laurie Johnson’s fine book, The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars, to them would provide them with much solace, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Johnson identifies herself at the start of the book as “an early ‘never Trumper,’” a registered Republican who broke from her party as she saw the conservative movement she’d long identified with turn into a “right-wing capitalist-friendly ethnically based populism” that idolized “an ill-equipped, seemingly unbalanced nationalist” (who also just happened to be a “narcissistic and unstable reality TV star”—p. 11). If you find such language describing the current occupant of the White House inaccurate or indefensible, then Johnson’s book probably isn’t for you. But that would be unfortunate, because the book—which was written and came out before the 2024 election—actually gives a pretty balanced assessment of Trump’s appeal to the sort of culturally conservative and rural voters whom Johnson (who, like me, lives in Kansas; she teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan, while I teach at Friends University in Wichita) knows well.

Johnson’s book is sometimes meandering, but always thoughtful; as she writes at the outset, she thinks that the time for “narrow but safe and sure scholarship” (p. 12) is past, at least for her. Her overarching aim is to sketch out the long history of intellectual developments which have, in her view, turned inside out the positions she once held to, positions which most long assumed were deeply rooted in the cultural practices and perspectives common to our shared home in the Sunflower state. In turning to radical thinkers both right and left, Johnson's account of these developments turns primarily on, first, a process of “dislocation”—both material and moral—which has uprooted the cultural foundations for diverse, stable lives and sustainable living environments which were built up over generations, and second, a process of “strong-arming”—both ideological and religious—by which we submit to or participate in a collective attempt to paper over deep disagreements or deeply inhumane assumptions about the lives we live. I think her account is, ultimately, a wise one—but as someone who thinks Trump’s presidency was and will be appalling, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Johnson is a complicated thinker and a careful writer; those looking for facile diagnoses and easy prescriptions also won’t find this book to their liking. She interchangeably employs both political psychology and political philosophy in building her arguments, making use of everything from sociological examinations of cults to complex agricultural economic data to the history of Bible translations to reflections on television sitcoms along the way. But consistent throughout her analysis is the attention she pays to “domination,” and particularly the cultural and social effects of economic dominion.

Johnson does not frame that domination in terms of class; she’s no Marxist, though she thoughtfully explores what she thinks his philosophy both got right and got wrong. Rather, the domination that she feels far too many of her fellow citizens have chosen not to see or have failed to see clearly is primarily ideational. American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities. The domination of the calculating liberal individualist model has not only pushed us away from one another; it has cramped our appreciation of the real-world diversity and richness which open cultural engagement and collective action ought to allow. The omnipresence of “free-market liberalism,” in Johnson’s view, has reached the point that it “shares some of the totalitarian aspects of more openly apocalyptic revolutionary regimes,” with its insistence that “marketplace thinking works equally well for all people in all times and places” (p. 33).

The alarm she expresses at the effects of the homogenizing success of the so-called “American way of life,” as she has come to understand it, is present in every chapter, whatever its specific focus. She sees our valorization of this image in “the imperative to be efficient in the making or acquiring of …goods and services” (p. 99) when writing about human anthropology and psychology; and she sees it in the “politicized Christian opinion leaders” that focus parishioners solely on “worldly ends” (p. 228) when writing about political theology. Near the book’s conclusion, she puts forward a lengthy jeremiad that perhaps comes closer than any other single passage in the book to being an overall thesis statement about how she sees this constrained notion of liberal freedom and economic success as having warped American life:

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are concerned about the current state of our culture because of its contentiousness, seemingly amoral nature, the way it breaks up families, our loss of community, and the every-swifter march of secularization, look no further for the cause than the economy that thoroughly dominates us. Our “freedom to choose” does not stop at our toothpaste brands, though it apparently increasingly does stop at being a small businessperson or a small farmer. We are also free to choose to stay married or not, depending on how we feel. As we have less real choice due to our mounting social stratification and precarity, our “freedom to choose” necessarily gets more and more intensely expressed in our personal moral choices and lifestyles, as well as our stylistic choices. If you don’t like the way the kid down the street dyes their hair purple and wears tattoos, remember that they’ve been taught that the pinnacle of American freedom is in accumulation and personal expression. In effect, we are all in a constant state of flux, and yet we are taught to fear the actual trans person, the one who has the courage to disregard the superficial freedoms most Americans “enjoy” every day because they feel in their interior person that they are not what their exterior says they are. Before we launch any more assaults on our trans neighbors, we need to consider the largely life-frittering ways in which the rest of us are inauthentically fluid, and change our own ways if we do not like what we see (pp. 274-275).

The language by which Johnson condemns the consequences of liberal capitalism--its competitive demands, its expectations of constant change, its condescending charity, its mentality of disposability, its victimizing of those who fall behind, and most of all (echoing Wendell Berry here) its stultifying assumption of “inevitability”--has many echoes, and she does a superb job integrating the many facets of this sort of non-Marxist (though clearly Marx-influenced) cultural critique together. While her analysis mostly bypasses recent integralist critiques, Johnson is clearly respectful of those Christian thinkers who have called for a collective retreat from our corporatized capitalist state. However, reading through her broad-ranging assessment of how the dominance of market values and personal choice has warped American life, and torn a “gap” in structures of community life—a gap which, in her view, Christian churches and those who populate them have overwhelmingly failed to sew back together—makes it pretty clear that she has no interest in fleeing towards some reactionary religious position. (Some of this is plainly personal; twice in her book she details ways in which church communities she was part of simply failed to address the needs of suffering parishioners or to even understand what those needs were, in ways that both involved and affected her directly.)

Johnson’s training as a political philosopher was grounded in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s one she holds to. As such, she blanches at the idea of “a return to some sort of benevolent aristocracy/oligarchy” (p. 231). For her, religious strong-arming and economic domination have mostly developed in tandem, in opposition to a proper articulation of the rights we can exercise in communities built through work and cooperation, free from the worship of political saviors or Silicon Valley “innovators.” That freedom—a small-scaled civic one—won’t be achieved through revolution; as much as she clearly appreciates Marx’s assessment of power under capitalism, she’s not looking for any new vanguard (much less new government programs) to lead us forward.

Rather, Johnson’s hopes—to the extent they exist; her writing is more realist than romantic, and she is better at providing information than inspiration—lay in a different sort of movement, one more focused on recovering habits of work and association than affirmations of identity or authority. Her concluding chapters look closely as distributism and the Catholic Worker movement; she has praise for both, but also gentle criticisms, partly because she is clear-eyed (in ways that more than a few of their advocates are not) about some of the bottom-line realities of exploring these alternatives to capitalism: that is, having less money, less resources, less “stuff” all around. But making due with less is one thing that Johnson can speak to as something more than an academic and critic.

Johnson was instrumental in setting up the Maurin Academy, a multifaceted organization which includes both a farm and a school, one which seeks to provide both content online and food in-person, all in a way which challenges both profit-mindedness and state dependency. Inspired by the legacy of Peter Maurin (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, along with Dorothy Day), the idea is to provide a place for the kind of “persistent, often unglamorous work” that she believes—and, I think, has argued persuasively for in her book—is “real and compelling” in the way that life defined by our corporate capitalist and governmental masters is not (p. 269). She recognizes that what they are doing could easily be categorized—especially in the absence of shifts in the state and federal money which keeps our exploitive food systems operating as they have for decades--as just more “quixotic attempts at economic and social experimentation,” but what else, she says in her conclusion, can we do? “We can smile and talk all we want about the benefits of localism, farmers markets, and mutual aid, but how many of us even remotely approach consistently adopting those practices?” (pp. 286-287)

Johnson’s book may not be the antidote to the Trump years which her (all too rare) sort of small-c conservative might need. But she is at least living out, in part, her own retreat from the corporatizing of disruption that seems to be the American lot, at least for the next four years. She is walking her talk, and as much as there are ideas and arguments her book that I admired and learned from (including a few I strongly disagreed with), I find the person she actually is even more admirable still.

Leslie's Love Story in Songs, and Ours Too.

Ian Leslie's John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is a terrific book. I say that as a major Beatles fan, though not, as I've confessed before, a fanatic. I may have collected and listened to everything Paul McCartney has ever officially released, but I haven't done the same with John Lennon (much less George Harrison or Ringo Starr), and that's a failure on my part. Particularly when it comes to John, I need to correct that someday. 

Why? Because as I think Leslie demonstrates very well in this book, constructing any history of the Lennon & McCartney musical partnership--both before and after the Beatles--which doesn't put their complicated, deeply loving, often deeply resentful, and always deeply confusing relationship at the center almost certainly misses something crucial. That's not to say Leslie does something here that has never been done before; any remotely attentive take on the lives of these two individuals--or at least their lives between 1957 and 1980, and the art they made during those years, both together and apart and with others--can't help but notice how much John and Paul, no matter what else is going on or who else is there, are looking at and to one another, seeking approval from the other, trying to one-up one another, listening to and trusting in each other. I took that away as perhaps the defining revelation of Peter Jackson's wonderful reconstruction of the Let It Be sessions, The Beatles: Get Back, and I know I'm not alone in thinking that way.

But Leslie provides the supporting evidence of the abiding artistic importance of all of John and Paul's looking, listening, seeking, competing, and trusting. Some of the songs he builds chapters around are, admittedly, a bit of stretch; he tells the story of these two artists chronologically, and finding the right song from the particular stretch of their lives he is chronicling (sometimes just a few weeks, sometimes several months) to match what he wants to say about respective artistic and personal as well as their relationship's evolution(s) doesn't always work. But there were so many times when the product of the Lennon & McCartney songwriting partnership reflected exactly what appears to have been going on in their hearts and heads that, more often than not, the songs Leslie chooses for each chapter work very well, sometimes perfectly. (I'll never think about "If I Fell" or "In My Life" or Lennon's "God" the same way again--and it's not a coincidence that these were all John songs: while Leslie's admiration for Paul is endless, he makes a strong case that the brilliant and damaged John was always the force that did more to captivate or infuriate or drive forward Paul as an artist, and the Beatles as a band, than was the case for any other single member.)

Anyway, this is a first-rate work of both popular biography and musical criticism; I have to set it alongside Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles as the best book I've ever read about that band, despite its limitations (he puts an official apology at the end of the book, expressing regret that, because of his thesis--as defensible and correct as I think it is--George Harrison and Ringo Starr get pushed aside). Check it out, if you're any kind of fan of the 1960s at all; you're learn something from it, and maybe be inspired by it too.

Justice Together: Praying, Planning, and Partly (but Not Yet Entirely) Pushed Aside in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Before Christmas, I had some complimentary things to say about Wichita’s city council. Here at the end of the year, though, my thoughts are more critical—though this is really a story about an organization of citizens here in Wichita, one that has pushed and challenged the city council, with some (but not total) success.

Justice Together, an association of nearly 1500 volunteers from nearly 40 Wichita-area congregations, synagogues, and other religious bodies, made local history several months ago, when, at a major public assembly, they pressed and received commitments from various elected leaders that certain positive steps would be taken to assist the homeless population of Wichita. Their well-researched calls for 1) more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, for 2) more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, for 3) a sustainable budget plan for completing and operating the planned Multi-Agency Center (MAC) which aims to bring together resources for homeless individuals, and for 4) a free municipal ID program, all remain on the table. But two weeks ago a proposed set of changes to how the city deals with homelessness threatened to derail the compassionate efforts that Justice Together, along with many other municipal organizations (Wichita’s Coalition to End Homelessness deserves much credit here), had pushed for.

Fortunately, Wichita’s city council was convinced (or pressured) to bypass the worst feature of these proposed changes, and the role JT played in that effort (in over two hours of public comment before the city council on December 17, 21 of the 24 speakers opposed the proposed changes, and more than a third of those were associated with Justice Together) deserves praise. Still, the fact that the other changes which passed through the council on a 4 to 3 vote will increase the ability of law enforcement to treat homeless individuals from a criminal rather than a compassionate perspective is evidence of how much more, and perhaps how much further, the kind of activism JT represents has to go.

As was pointed out by multiple speakers (as well as a couple of members of the council from the bench), the proposed changes in Wichita’s policies were less rooted in local changes (though Wichita’s homeless population has increased, as it has in cities both large and small across the country, for dozens of often intertwined reasons) than they were in national decisions. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its majority decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson last summer, making it clear that criminalizing “public camping”—a euphemism that we all know is ridiculous (“camping” is a voluntary recreational activity, while sleeping or residing outside without shelter in public places is practically never either of those) but seem doomed to use anyway—would not be considered an unconstitutional punishment someone for their condition, but would instead be considered a nominally constitutional punishment of an action, the door to more aggressive enforcement of anti-homelessness policies was kicked wide open. Honestly, those of us Wichitans who recognize both the increased costs as well as the lack of compassion which the further criminalizing homelessness entails should probably be grateful that the city’s proposals didn’t go any further than they did.

As someone who has been associated with Justice Together since its beginning in early 2023, I received word of the prayer meeting being planned for the day of the city council meeting. Multiple faith leaders set the tone for the dozens who gathered for the meeting by emphasizing that pushing back, in whatever peaceful way we can, against adding burdens to the lives of those suffering from whatever mix of causes—poverty, trauma, mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, or all of the above—which had left them living without permanent shelter was a shared religious demand. As I’ve written before, JT is not a radical organization; rather, it is a serious, careful, realistic group of believers, who work in the tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1) researching and proposing responsible plans premised upon compassion and justice, and then 2) presenting their plans before elected leaders in ways that create tension, thereby hopefully forcing action and progress. That was the plan a few weeks ago, with a summary of the changes Wichita’s government was proposing and an action plan laying out a bullet-pointed list of Justice Together’s primary concerns handed out beforehand. (The individuals in the photo above, from the Justice Together prayer meeting before the city council chambers on the morning of December 17, are, from left to right: Pastor Chad Langdon of Christ Lutheran Church; Deacon Lory Mills of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church; Justice Together Co-President Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone of Ahavath Achim Congregation; and Rev. Dr. Karen Robu of Plymouth Congregational Church.)

Topping the list of those concerns was that the city, in the wake of Grants Pass, intended to “remove a requirement that a shelter bed be available for anyone displaced by an encampment removal”—in other words, to no longer oblige law enforcement to confirm that there are beds available at public shelters before enforcing anti-“camping” rules and forcing a homeless person to move from whatever location of rest they’d found for themselves. This central issue was highlighted by Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, the co-president of Justice Together, when he stood to speak before the city council (two other speakers, Revs. Travis Smith McKee of the Disciples of Christ and Jacob L. Poindexter of the United Church of Christ, later underscored Rabbi Pepperstone’s demand): the “removal of bed space verification” from those tasked with the often ugly task of disrupting the attempt of the homeless to find a secure corner or underpass somewhere in public space has, in his words, “no compassionate rationale that I can conceive of.” He challenged the city council to strip that policy change from the proposal, which resulted in some city leaders playing hot potato, suggesting that this odious proposal was really just a matter of police protocol. But thankfully, whomever ultimately owns this obligation, the result was a positive one. The policy changes voted on ended up preserving this restriction, thus making it at least still slightly difficult for those experiencing homelessness to be forced to move and to abandon many of their possessions like herd animals and not human beings.

Justice Together also opposed, along with other groups, expanding the number of city workers who could wield that kind of police power against the homeless, another proposed change which the city council was convinced to drop. Unfortunately, though, the other priority of JT—opposing “a change to shorten the notice to vacate period before an encampment is removed, from 72 hours to 48 hours, and in some cases, allow removal without notice”—went through. Perhaps that’s unsurprising; the city staff made it clear in their presentation to the council that there was, functionally speaking, only two elements of the proposed changes which they considered truly substantive: getting rid of the bed requirement, and allowing for the more immediate removal of homeless persons and the clean-up of their sleeping locations. Despite complaints that went far beyond the religiously motivated—there were speakers who challenged the proposed ordinances from libertarian perspectives on human rights, and conservative speakers who pointed out all the additional costs which ramping up enforcement requires—Wichita will, beginning probably in mid-January, join the host of American cities that are responding to the increase of the homeless population with even more criminalization, even if conjoining that with some additional compassion.

That additional compassion is obviously vital. Justice Together’s slogan for their (in retrospect, only partly successful) action was “Invest in a Fully Funded MAC, not Criminalization of Homelessness,” and there was much discussion of how to move forward with finding the funds necessary to keeping the plans for the MAC on track, and many supportive words from city council members for doing so. (There was an update on plans for the free municipal ID as well, which still seems to me likely the most important single non-structural action Wichita could take to assist the city’s homeless.) Ultimately, though, those who have dedicated so much time and effort to Justice Together must now consider their next steps.

Do they accept this defeat and continue to focus on pushing our elected leaders on the social justice issues which they have not foreclosed? That seems most likely; what JT’s volunteers are best at is speaking practically about policy options and researching how other cities have funded programs or dealt with changes in the legal landscape is the kind of action that appeals to their skill set best. But there is also the possibility of reconsidering what kind of, and how much, tension they can productively generate—perhaps while looking towards this year’s municipal elections, with the aim of changing one of those 4 yes votes. Becoming an interest group which actively promotes or opposes candidates would give Justice Together a very different and much more contentious vibe, yet political challenges are part of the toolkit of any successful advocacy organization, whether they’re used or not. (Sometimes, simply the knowledge that an organization could organize their forces—in this case, many hundreds of mostly middle or upper-middle class Wichitans in dozens of well-established religious congregations, the great majority of which are likely voters—can be persuasive enough.)

Justice Together has worked with and through the religious faith of thousands of Wichitans over the past 2 years to advance the conversation about social justice in our city. As a supporter, I am curious to see how its leadership will continue to try to advance our shared ideals, even as the opposition to some of what has been labored over pushes back. As in so many other ways, 2025 will be a very telling year.