{"id":1103,"date":"2006-03-26T11:54:41","date_gmt":"2006-03-25T22:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/archives\/1103"},"modified":"2006-08-28T10:40:42","modified_gmt":"2006-08-27T22:40:42","slug":"a-space-opened-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/archives\/1103","title":{"rendered":"A space opened up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The last paragraph of Alasdair Macintyre&#8217;s <em>After Virtue<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It is always dangerous to draw to precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined in the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occured when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman <em>imperium <\/em>and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that <em>imperium<\/em>. What they set themselves to achieve instead \u2013 often not recognising fully what they were doing \u2013 was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.<!--more--> If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consiousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another \u2013 doubtless very different \u2013 St Benedict.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The last paragraph of Alasdair Macintyre&#8217;s After Virtue: It is always dangerous to draw to precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}