A propos this review essay by Jonathan Rée, a philosopher in Europe, whose opinion I trust, writes with a rather different take:
I was at that lecture that Rée mentions [at the start of his review], and it is testament to his intellectual weakness that he perceived any semblance of modesty in MacIntyre’s revolting reflections. First of all, the lecture presented his philosophical development as a dialectical necessity, fuelled by his restless genius. Second, it offered an enthusiastic account, largely out of context, of the supposed wisdom of the US Marine Corps in breaking down the selfhood of recruits and reshaping them in a way that was socially productive. No mention of their long list of savage operations seemed worth his bother. (Falluja anyone?) The moronic traditional Catholics who showed up for a renewing dosage of Truth were none the wiser. He lapped up their unthinking adulation. As a deeply troubled reader of After Virtue I was left in no doubt that MacIntyre was a perfect ideological creep.
ADDENDUM: I've heard, unsurprisingly, from MacIntrye's admirers, who obviously do not share the preceding views. I should clarify that the remarks about the Marines occurred in the Q&A of the lecture, not the lecture itself (some of the content of the lecture itself was noted last fall). They are related to views MacIntyre has expressed in print:
"Begin with the record of those notable, although not too numerous institutions that have had significant success in taking young people who have gone badly wrong and redirecting them into participation in constructive activities and worthwhile ways of life, some of them prisons for juvenile offenders or reform schools, some of them tough boarding schools, some of them providing the kind of basic training that the United States Marine Corps affords its recruits. Uniformly such institutions succeed by subjecting the young to rigorous discipline, introducing them to testing activities in which they have to depend on others and become such that others can depend on them, learning a mode of common life, learning some trade, and always incurring penalties, if they fail to learn, until they have learned at last that failing to learn is itself the worst penalty." (Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Irrelevance of Ethics,” in Virtue and the Economy: Essays on Morality and Markets, eds. Andrius Bielskis and Kelvin Knight (New York: Routledge, 2015), 8-9.)
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