Wolfe, Brooks, MacIntyre, and Leff

In today's New York Times, David Brooks reviews Tom Wolfe's latest novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," which is about "a young woman who leaves Sparta, a small town in North Carolina, and enters an elite university. She finds all the rules of life there are dissolved: the rules of courtship, the rules of decorum and polite conversation."  Along the way, Brooks observes: 

The social rules have dissolved because the morality that used to undergird them dissolved long ago. Wolfe sprinkles his book with observations about how the word "immoral" now seems obsolete, about how sophisticated people now reject the idea of absolute evil, about a hypermaterialistic neuroscience professor who can use the word "soul" only when it is in quotation marks.

Wolfe describes a society in which we still have vague notions about good and bad, virtue and vice, but the moral substructure that fits all those concepts together has been washed away.

This observation echoes, in a way, the powerful first chapter ("A Disquieting Suggestion") in Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue," in which MacIntyre identified what he regarded as a "moral catastrophe", namely, that the "language of morality is in . . . [a] state of grave disorder," in that, "while "[w]e possess indeed, similacra of morality [and] continue to use many of the key expressions[,]" "we have -- very largely, if not entirely -- lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality."  And, turning to this blog's legal-theory focus, both Brooks and MacIntyre would seem to underscore the urgency of Arthur Leff's 1979 essay, "Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law":

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us "good," and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us, could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things now stand, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved. Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot-- and General Custer too--have earned salvation. Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.  There is in the world such a thing as evil. [All together now:] Sez who? God help us.

Rick