In his 1981 classic After Virtue, Notre Dame philosophy professor Alasdair MacIntyre offers a provocative diagnosis of the modern condition. Rejecting the assumption that secular modernity is the culmination of centuries of improvement, MacIntyre contends that we live amidst the ruins of Western civilization.
There can be no restoration of the past. Even so, MacIntyre urges readers to take their bearings from a previous experience of loss by pursuing “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.” As he puts it in a famous sentence, “We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”
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