R.I.P. The Super League

The Super League is no more.

Fans protested; pundits criticized; politicians threatened. The English clubs withdrew. Other clubs withdrew.

(So much for the spiffy website.)

Now the clamor is for owners’ and sporting directors’ heads to roll.

Meanwhile, Florentino Pérez of Real Madrid continues to advocate for the Super League.

(The whole video is worth watching. This issue is so clear-cut, the pundits can’t say a wrong word: even terrible Alejandro Moreno delivers some nice zingers.)

European soccer will change, though. An overhaul of the UEFA Champions League was approved even before The Super League declared its intentions.

This video explains the changes:

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I should say a few things about my family, or at least about the boy. For several days, he has suffered from an ear infection. Sometimes he has been feverish. Today his mood was better, but he broke out in a rash: he appears to be allergic to his medicine.

We took him to Walmart for the first time since the pandemic began, and he was pretty amazed by everything.

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Oh, and I gave my last guest lecture on Alasdair MacIntyre. The students clearly were struggling to read all of After Virtue. Perhaps I ought to have refrained from mentioning other readings, so that the students could focus on getting through the book that had been assigned to them. But instead, I recommended a few shorter pieces that, realistically, they might digest by the end of the semester: “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” and “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good.” I think those essays display what is best about MacIntyre’s moral and political philosophy, more or less independently of his history of moral and political philosophy (which, tantalizing though it is, I am inclined to reject).

The loneliest practices

I suppose Mishawaka could have another deep-freeze, what with it’s being April, but I’ve begun cutting the grass again. A week after the first mowing, the lawn has regrown so quickly that it looks like a jungle. Mowing is much easier this year, now that (a) I know better what I’m doing, and (b) I’m in better physical condition.

As my mower chews up the cud, I can’t help but to ruminate over After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. His theory of the virtues depends, in part, on the notion of a practice, which he defines as

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

By way of illustration, MacIntyre says – notoriously – that “bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is.”

I wonder if J.M. Coetzee is having a little fun with this statement when, in Summertime, he writes of himself –

week after week, using a shovel and a wheelbarrow, he mixes sand, stone, cement and water; block after block he pours liquid concrete and levels it. His back hurts, his arms and wrists are so stiff that he can barely hold a pen. Above all the labour bores him. Yet he is not unhappy. … In fact, once he forgets about the time he is giving up, the work begins to take on its own pleasure. There is such a thing as a well-laid slab whose well-laidness is plain for all to see

– and when, a little later in the book, he attempts to situate his own slab-laying within a cultural history.

I take it that if laying brick isn’t a practice but architecture is, then mowing the lawn isn’t a practice but lawnscaping is. (Surely, what Hank Hill and his neighbors do is a practice.) So, perhaps I’m engaged in a practice when (a) mowing “begins to take on its own pleasure” – when I derive satisfaction from going in straight lines, not damaging the grass, etc. – and (b), what arguably is more important for MacIntyre, I ask friends for advice about how to cut the grass.

More likely, though, for MacIntyre, what I’m doing is not a practice. This is because, for the most part, it’s only incidentally cooperative. I very well could mow my lawn (lay brick, etc.) – mindful of “goods internal to that form of activity” – in drastic isolation. To a considerable extent, because of COVID and because of who I am and the society in which I live, I have no other option than to realize these goods in isolation.

This is what Coetzee does when he lays concrete; this is what Coetzee’s Michael K does when he gardens clandestinely – at night, on an abandoned farm in the countryside (where “there is time for everything”). This, mostly, is what I do when I mow the lawn or study philosophy or the Bible. This is what my life has come to – where it was headed all along.

I reacquaint myself with MacIntyre

Well, the vaccination did give me aches, chills, etc. for much of Saturday. But by Easter morning I felt all better – except in my arm. I continue to have “pain at the injection site.”

I should have remembered, before I got the shot, that this area of my shoulder is where Samuel likes to rest his head.

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My Uncle Tim has asked me to give two more guest lectures. The topic is Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.

I can think of at least four other graduates of Bethel’s philosophy program who are better qualified to discuss this book. Still, I’m glad for the chance to reacquaint myself with it.

I now know more about the philosophers discussed therein, and so I grasp better what MacIntyre is saying.

(Famous last words.)

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Usually, I take my sweet time with any philosophical work longer than two or three chapters. I might spend a quarter of a year, or half of a year, or two or three years on something as long as After Virtue (which doesn’t even exceed 300 pages).

(Of course, I would also read other things during that time.)

This reading of the book will have taken just three weeks.

I’ll also have read several articles by or about MacIntyre – which is all to the good, except that I feel a little weary from having stuck so closely to one author, day after day after day. I keep on having to resist the temptation to read within fields that MacIntyre mentions but doesn’t discuss in detail. I’ve been gazing longingly at my books on social epistemology and free will; more generally, my appetite for studying the metaphysics of agency has been whetted again.

There is just too much to read.

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What my uncle’s students are making of After Virtue, I’m curious to find out. It can’t be easy going for them. Too many of the names, they won’t know from “Adam.”

Some polemical texts serve as good introductions to the ideas that those texts argue against. This is emphatically false of After Virtue.

If a student’s sole exposure to, e.g., John Rawls’s ideas is through this book, it will be very hard for him or her to give those ideas a fighting chance.

To be fair, if one’s sole exposure to Rawls’s ideas is through Rawls’s own books, it also may be hard to give those ideas a fighting chance, just because those books are so long, complex, and repetitive that it is hard to read them carefully.

I wouldn’t say the same about Rawls’s articles. Rawls’s ideas may be expressed canonically in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, but often they are more alluring, more clearly motivated, in his briefer, less rigorous statements.

To some extent, this also is true of MacIntyre’s writing. This summary of After Virtue should help the students.

But I do hope that they carefully read After Virtue’s chapter 14, “The Nature of the Virtues.” The book’s constructive proposal is much more interesting than its criticisms of rival philosophies.