44 Chapter 1 together the different fragments left behind. A comparison is made with a fragmentation bomb, destroying a building down to its very foundation, ruining all relevant information about it: construction plans, detailed pictures, functionality descriptions, et cetera. As children of a new age, ‘bearing its social and cultural marks’, we cannot comprehend the way of life, or the vision of the good life, that the classical Greek philosophers adopted and internalised and that deeply impacted Christian religious thought and behaviour throughout the Middle Ages. What has been lost is ‘a context in which moral judgments were understood as governed by impersonal standards justified by a shared conception of the human good’, as MacIntyre (2007) stated in the introduction to his book. Instead of this impersonal justification of standards, MacIntyre (2007) depicted modern society as morally confused, finding itself in ‘a period of social and cultural darkness’. The public space is conceived by dominant liberalism as a neutral space wherein many stories can come together and each and every person can hold his or her own, personal idea of what the good life entails. This very individualistic way of apprehending the good obscures the vision of how morality once functioned, which can be considered MacIntyre’s (2007) central hypothesis: What we possess (…) are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality. (p. 2) ‘There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture’, added MacIntyre (2007, p. 6). He illustrated this claim with three examples: on the just war, on the legitimacy of abortion and on equal opportunity and access to good healthcare and education versus the freedom of choice. There is no possible way to reach any form of fundamental agreement if there are no joint standards of morality and only rival claims as to what is good, which put each other to shame. What is fundamentally lacking is a ‘narrative unity of human life’ (which MacIntyre mentions six times: in his introduction and on the pages 226, 227, 228, 242 and 258). To regain this unity, a new orientation towards the metaphysical world is necessary, with a clear sense of telos: a joint understanding of what is human life for, why we are on Earth and what is necessarily and intrinsically good to do and aspire to. MacIntyre seemed to have practically no hope of this occurring in a globalising world, for which he predicted ‘coming ages of barbarism and darkness’ (p. 263). What he
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