about:
I’m Madoc Cairns: a writer and editor based in London, England. My work usually covers a broad range of subjects: politics, religion, history, literature, philosophy. I use this space to write about a question that cuts across all of them: what if history already ended, and everyone lost?
In asking this question, I’m following two figures who posed it decades ago. Alasdair MacIntyre and Cornelius Castoriadis are, in some ways, very different; MacIntyre is, like myself, Catholic, and Castoriadis a convinced atheist. But both came to believe that the contest Marxists thought defined modernity - between socialism and barbarism - had, in their lifetimes, come to a close. Barbarism had won.
If this is so - if, as Mario Tronti thought, we’re trapped inside a history that has gone wrong - how should we understand the times we’re now living in? And if we’re living in, as MacIntyre and Castoriadis believe we are, a new dark age, where is that age taking us?
A whole phase of history, begun, perhaps, in the twelfth century, is in the process of coming to an end, that one is entering into I know not what kind of new Dark Ages, characterized … by violent conflicts and disintegrations, but without any historical productivity: in sum, a closed society that is stagnating or that knows only how to tear itself apart without creating anything. In the expression ‘socialism or barbarism’, this, to be clear, is what I have always held ‘barbarism’ to mean.
- Cornelius Castoriadis, Interview, 1994
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 dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark age, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been among us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981
