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Forbes
5 hours ago
- Sport
- Forbes
Willie Mays Personal Collection To Highlight September Auction
Willie Mays, who played stickball on the street with New York kids between games with the Giants, ... More will help them even more with the posthumous auction of his personal memorabilia. Just days before the Baseball Hall of Fame inducts its Class of 2025, Hunt Auctions has announced that the personal collection of Willie Mays will be unveiled for the first time at the National Sports Collectors Convention. Mays, whom many historians rate as the greatest player of the postwar period, asked in his will that proceeds from the auction provide funding for education, training, and health services for youth via the Say Hey! Foundation he founded in 2000. The late superstar, who spent most of his career with the Giants in New York and San Francisco, hit 660 lifetime home runs, winning two MVP awards, a World Series ring, and 24 trips to the All-Star game. The auction of his memorabilia will take place Sept. 27 at the King Street Warehouse adjacent to Oracle Park, home of the Giants. A member of the Baseball Hall of Fame since 1979, Mays was memorialized in the song Willie, Mickey, and the Duke, which also saluted fellow centerfielders Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider. At one time, all three played for New York teams. Fans will now be able to see and bid on Mays items and artifacts and receive free appraisals of other sports memorabilia they own from Hunt Auctions experts. This catch made by Willie Mays during the 1954 World Series was one of the best defensive plays in ... More baseball history. Up for auction are the 1954 Mays World Series ring that he won with the New York Giants, who upset the favored Cleveland Indians, and his 1954 and 1965 Most Valuable Player Awards. Projected revenue from the auction of the ring is $500,000-$1,000,000 while each of the MVPs is expected to draw $500,000, according to Hunt Auctions organizers. His 1954 National League Silver Bat, presented after he led the National League is hitting, is valued at $200,000-$400,000 while his Presidential Medal of Freedom could sell for $50,000-$100,000. Also on sale are the outfielder's 1955 Willie Mays model glove, his 1963 All-Star Game MVP award, and many of the multiple Gold Gloves he won for defensive excellence. His Hall of Fame Induction ring is also included in the upcoming Hunt Auction. A San Francisco Giants warmup jacket and rare 1962 Sultan of Swat award are also going to the auction block. According to David Hunt, president of the Pennsylvania auction house, 'We are deeply humbled and grateful to Willie Mays for having been selected to represent this important offering of his personal collection. 'Willie embodies the American success story from his humble beginnings in Fairfield, Alabama through his ascension to become the greatest all-around player in the history of the game of baseball. 'Perhaps more impressively, Willie lived a life of service matched by very few. Whether sharing his knowledge of the game with young players or helping underserved communities to better their lives he was fervently committed to help those whose shoes he once occupied so many years ago. Willie has ensured his generosity will continue long into the future with the wonderful work that his Say Hey! Foundation has accomplished with the proceeds of this auction going to help further that good work.' A five-tools player, Willie Mays had two 30/30 seasons — the first in National League history. Mays began his baseball career with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League in 1948, then signed with the New York Giants two years later. He was National League Rookie of the Year in 1951, when he helped the Giants win the pennant in a dramatic pennant race with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Three years later, he led the team to a world championship over the Cleveland Indians. The Giants also won a pennant in 1962 but lost a seven-game World Series to the New York Yankees. Among other accomplishments, Mays won two batting titles, hit four home runs in a game, and the first two 30/30 seasons in National League history. He had a .301 batting average and 3,283 hits over a career that lasted 23 seasons. He also made a hit with the kids of New York when he joined them on the street for impromptu stickball games during his East Coast career with the Giants. Known as 'the Say Hey Kid' because he used the greet writers and teammates with the word 'hey,' Mays not only made the Hall of Fame but also the All-Century Team picked during the 1969 Baseball Centennial. 'His one instruction to Dave Hunt at Hunt Auctions was to make this the best auction ever to help those kids,' said Jeff Bleich, a Mays friend who chairs the Say Hey! Foundation. "For all of his extraordinary achievements as a baseball player, Willie Mays wanted his enduring legacy to be helping children. He preserved his most treasured awards so that one day he could pay it forward. He wanted to share these items with his fans so that together they could raise as much as possible to support other kids starting out in life the way he had.' Mays grew up in poverty and attended a segregated school in Birmingham but parlayed his baseball ability into a career that will live in memory. His top salary was $165,000, the amount he earned while concluded his career with the New York Mets in 1963 – years before free agency greatly increased the salary scales for players. Commercial endorsements helped him earn considerably more. The first public display of the Willie Mays collection will occur at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago, IL between July 30th and August 3rd, 2025.
UPI
2 days ago
- UPI
On This Day, July 23: China launches Tianwen-1 mission to Mars
July 23 (UPI) -- In 1829, William Burt of Mount Vernon, Mich., patented the "typographer," believed to be the first typewriter. In 1962, Jackie Robinson became the first Black player inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947. In 1967, rioting erupted on 12th Street in the heart of Detroit's predominantly Black inner city. By the time it was quelled four days later by 7,000 National Guard and U.S. Army troops, 43 people were dead, 342 injured. In 1973, Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox served subpoenas on the White House after U.S. President Richard Nixon refused to turn over requested tapes and documents. In 1982, actor Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed when a helicopter crashed on the movie set of The Twilight Zone. In 1984, Vanessa Williams gave up her crown as Miss America, bowing to demands by pageant officials that she quit because she appeared nude in sexually explicit pictures in Penthouse magazine. Former Miss America Vanessa Williams (R) poses with the 2015 Miss America, Miss Georgia Betty Cantrell on September 13, 2016. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI In 1999, U.S. Air Force Col. Eileen Collins became the first woman to command a space shuttle flight, with the launch of Columbia on a four-day mission. In 2002, a laser-guided bomb fired from an Israeli warplane hit the Gaza home of Sheik Salah Shehada, founder of the military wing of Hamas, killing him and 14 others and wounding more than 140 people. In 2003, the Massachusetts attorney general said an investigation indicated nearly 1,000 cases of abuse by Roman Catholic priests and other church personnel in the Boston diocese over 60 years. In 2005, three synchronized terrorist bombings struck Sharm el-Sheik, an Egyptian resort, killing at least 90 people and injuring 240. U.S. President George W. Bush (C) and first lady Laura visit the Egyptian Embassy and greet ambassador Nabil Fahmy (L) to sign a book of condolence for the weekend bombing in Egypt's Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheik in Washington on July 25, 2005. File Photo by Jay L. Clendenin/UPI In 2012, the NCAA imposed severe penalties, including a $60 million fine, on Penn State University. One official accused the university of a "conspiracy of silence" about child abuse involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. In 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released a scientific review that said mint flavoring makes it easier to start smoking cigarettes and then harder to quit. In 2014, a TransAsia Airways twin turboprop plane crashed in stormy weather during an emergency landing on a Taiwanese island, killing 48 people and injuring 10. In 2019, Conservative Party members voted Boris Johnson as Britain's new prime minister, succeeding Theresa May. In 2020, China launched the Tianwen-1 orbiter in its first attempt to reach the surface of Mars. The rover Zhurong set down on the red planet on May 15, 2021. The mission's Zhurong orbiter collected data indicating water may have existed on the planet more recently than previously thought. In 2023, Elon Musk announced that the social media platform Twitter would now be known as X. In 2024, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned after it was announced a bipartisan House task force would investigate the attempted assassination of Donald Trump during his 2024 presidential run. File Photo by Jemal Countess/UPI
New York Post
6 days ago
- Sport
- New York Post
Ex-Mets believe injuries robbed David Wright of another special spot — Cooperstown
David Wright will be honored Saturday at Citi Field by having his No. 5 retired by the Mets. But twice Friday, people who knew Wright well said if things had worked out just a bit differently, it wouldn't be just the Mets celebrating Wright. 'David is one of the greatest players,' Billy Wagner said during a Zoom call in advance of his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame next weekend. 'If he's not hurt, he's probably gonna have a chance to be in the Hall of Fame,' said the former Mets closer, who spent parts of four seasons in Queens with Wright. 'A great leader, a great person, a great teammate. I'm so excited because he deserves this. I think he is the face and captain of the Mets. We've had a lot of people go through the Mets like [Tom] Seaver [and others], and he's just right there with the greats.' 4 David Wright will have his No. 5 retired on Saturday. Charles Wenzelberg/New York Post A few hours later, one of Wright's old managers, Terry Collins, shared a similar sentiment while praising the third baseman. 'He meant a lot to the organization,' Collins said prior to the Mets facing the Reds at Citi Field, where Collins and plenty of others will be on hand to cheer Wright. 'He's absolutely humbled by what's gonna happen [Saturday],' the manager said. 'And I talked to him and told him, 'If you don't get hurt, we're gonna be talking about what's gonna happen [later] in July [at the Hall of Fame].' But he was just happy to do what he could do as long as he could do it.' For Wright, that meant playing 14 years for the Mets before the back and neck woes that plagued the latter part of his career eventually led to his retirement in 2018. 4 Billy Wagner and David Wright before the 2008 Home Run Derby. Causi/The New York Post 4 The early back page for July 19, 2025. His impact began when Wright was drafted by the Mets with their first pick in 2001, continued through his MLB debut in 2004 and the team's most recent World Series appearance in 2015. Wright missed more than four months of the 2015 season, diagnosed with spinal stenosis, before he returned to the lineup in late August, with the Mets holding a healthy lead in the NL East. Collins recalled Wright telling him he didn't expect to hit in the middle of the lineup when he came back or disturb the way they were performing. 'He always put the team first,' Collins said. 'That's why we named him captain.' But instead of listening to Wright's lineup advice in his return in Philadelphia on Aug. 24, 2015, Collins penciled Wright in the cleanup spot, and he responded in style to lead off the top of the second inning. 4 David Wright of the New York Mets hits his first home run in the second inning against the Philadelphia Phillies at Citizens Bank Park on August 24, 2015 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Getty Images 'What does he do?' Collins said. 'He hits a homer his first time up. … He came back and did that and then hit that World Series home run [against Kansas City].' And his presence still is felt now, with Francisco Lindor noting how special it was to be given the same locker Wright had at Citi Field. Lindor also politely declined to discuss in detail the possibility of being named the Mets' first captain since Wright in deference to Saturday's festivities. 'It's always great to be mentioned with him, but this weekend is about David Wright,' Lindor said. 'He deserves all the love. Whatever happens with [the captaincy], happens. But nothing can take away from David Wright.'
Los Angeles Times
08-07-2025
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
Dodgers Dugout: Who's better, Clayton Kershaw or Sandy Koufax?
Hi, and welcome to another edition of Dodgers Dugout. My name is Houston Mitchell. Sorry we are a day late, asthma, plus a cold, plus smoke in the air from fireworks equals bad breathing. For the next part of our 'Ask....' series. Jaime Jarrín, the Spanish-language voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, for 64 seasons before retiring after the 2022 season, will answer selected questions from readers. Jarrín is in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a broadcaster and was the longtime interpreter for Fernando Valenzuela. Please send your questions to askjaimejarrin@ before 10 p.m. Friday. When Clayton Kershaw reached the 3,000 strikeout mark, Bill Plaschke wrote a column saying it clinched Kershaw being the greatest pitcher in Dodgers history, greater than Sandy Koufax. I could give you pages of stats and biographical information on both men, but I'm guessing most of you already know about them. Books have been written about Koufax, and books will be written about Kershaw. A few weeks ago, I wrote 'Kershaw and Koufax are the two best pitchers in Dodgers history,' and I got inundated with emails from angry Koufax fans, wondering why I would mention them in the same sentence, let alone list Kershaw first (um, alphabetical order). So, I broach the topic very carefully. The thing to keep in mind is they are both great pitchers. Both first-ballot Hall of Famers. Both have won World Series, Cy Young Awards and MVP awards. So how do you determine who is the best? It depends on how much you value certain things. Let's look at some arguments. 1. Koufax had only five great seasons, and they all came when the rules of the time favored the pitcher. 2. In his prime, Koufax pitched 300 innings a season and had multiple complete games (Koufax had 27 complete games in 1965 and 1966. Kershaw has had 25 complete games in his career and never pitched more than 236 innings in a season). Keep in mind that Kershaw never wanted to come out of games, he was really an old-school pitcher stuck in modern times. 3. Koufax is the best postseason pitcher in history with an 0.95 ERA in eight postseason games, all in the World Series. Of all pitchers with multiple Cy Young Awards, Kershaw is easily the worst in the postseason, going 13-13 with a 4.49 ERA. If we just limit it to the World Series, it's not much better, as he is 3-2 with a 4.46 ERA. 4. Koufax pitched in three World Series that the Dodgers won. Kershaw pitched in only one. 5. Koufax didn't have to pitch in multiple postseason rounds like Kershaw did. If he had to pitch in three rounds just to get to the World Series, his numbers likely wouldn't be as good. 6. Kershaw had a much, much longer career where he was one of the best pitchers in baseball. Depending on what you call a great season, it's 10, 11 or 12. Koufax had 'just' the five. 7. Kershaw has a career ERA+ of 155, meaning he was 55% better than a league average pitcher in his career. Koufax's was 131, meaning he was 31% better. Of course, Kershaw didn't pitch into the eight and ninth all that often, helping save his ERA somewhat. Those are just a few of the arguments. As to what I think? If I had to pick one, in their prime, to start a winner-take-all game, I'd pick Koufax. If you said 'You can have this guy's regular-season career, starting from Game 1, for your team,' I'd go with Kershaw. So, it depends on what you consider great. They were both great. Read Plaschke's column, which has several good arguments, by clicking here. Have you read it? Then please vote in our survey, 'Who was better, Clayton Kershaw or Sandy Koufax?' Heck, you can vote even if you didn't read Plaschke's column. You can vote by clicking here. Of all teams to be swept by, it had to be the Houston (no relation) Astros? They did expose some problems the Dodgers have had all season: Banged-up players and bad pitching. Max Muncy, who was their best hitter in the last six weeks, is on the IL (more on that below). Tommy Edman has a broken toe. Teoscar Hernández fouled a ball off his left foot Saturday, and is still plagued by the groin injury that put him on the IL earlier this season. He isn't close to 100%. Kiké Hernández went on the IL Monday with elbow inflammation. Mookie Betts hasn't seemed to recover from losing 25 pounds just before the season and is hitting a paltry (by Betts' standards) .252/.324/.397. Last season he hit .289/.372/.491. He is currently on track for the worst offensive season of his career. Add in the fact that Teoscar is just a brutal fielder in right, and you have to wonder if a move back to right is being considered, not that they'd talk openly about it. I mean, it was so bad that Michael Conforto hit fifth Sunday. Pitching wise, Ben Casparius is suddenly having trouble getting people out. Noah Davis, with a career ERA of 8.95 was on the staff and gave up 10 runs Friday. Most of the guys in the bullpen are having bad seasons compared to their career norms. The bullpen ERA (4.41) is 24th of the 30 teams. In the rotation, they have one reliable guy (Yoshinobu Yamamoto), two erratic guys (Dustin May and Kershaw), one guy who might be solid, but it's too soon to tell (Emmet Sheehan), one guy who pitches well but hasn't gone more than two innings (Shohei Ohtani) and a bunch of wishes and prayers for everyone else. We keep hearing that Tyler Glasnow and Blake Snell are returning soon (Glasnow perhaps this week), but I'll believe it when I see it, and given their history, how long before they get hurt again? Does this mean it is time to panic? Of course not. Despite all of the above, the Dodgers have one of the best records in baseball and have a comfortable lead over the Giants and Padres. They will make the postseason. If you recall, they struggled at times with similar issues last season, and that season ended OK if I remember correctly. Andrew Friedman has shown that he is not afraid the make moves at the trade deadline. You can count on a move or two before the deadline this season (July 31 at 3 p.m. PT). The roster right now will not be the roster on day one of the postseason. So, let's see what happens. You have to feel bad for Max Muncy. He finally had turned things around and was one of the team's best hitters again. Then, his knee is injured when Michael Taylor of the White Sox slides into it while trying to steal third. It looked terrible, as your knee isn't designed to bend that direction. It looked like he had torn everything in his knee and would be out for the season. However, the Dodgers say an MRI exam showed just a bone bruise and he should be back in six weeks. Hopefully, that's what happens and he doesn't lose his swing while he's recovering. However, the Dodgers have been historically vague when talking about injuries. If you remember, Muncy hurt his elbow on the last day of the 2021, in a similar situation, only the runner collided with his elbow at first instead of his knee at third. After that injury, the MRI was described as the best-case scenario, and Dave Roberts said, 'I just don't want to, we don't want to, close the door on a potential down-the-road postseason appearance.' Muncy and the club kept insisting he could return for the postseason if the Dodgers advanced to the World Series. A month or so after the Dodgers were eliminated from the postseason, Muncy said he had torn the UCL in his elbow and knew he wasn't going to play in the postseason. So, hopefully his new injury is the best-case scenario, but I'm not holding my breath. With this injury, the Dodgers said they won't be actively exploring a deal for a third baseman since Muncy will be back, meaning we will know a lot more about the accuracy of what they are saying if they actually don't trade for a third baseman. The five Dodgers who will be on the All-Star team this season: StartersFreddie FreemanShohei OhtaniWill Smith PitchersClayton KershawYoshinobu Yamamoto Kershaw was named as the commissioner's 'Legend Pick.' Christian Walker continues to be a Dodger killer. He had a big series for the Astros, and is one of only nine opponents with at least 20 homers at Dodger Stadium. The list: Barry Bonds, 29George Foster, 23Henry Aaron, 22Dale Murphy, 22Mike Schmidt, 22Willie Stargell, 21Paul Goldschmidt, 20Dave Kingman, 20Christian Walker, 20 In his career against the Dodgers, Walker is hitting .259/.318/.563 with 10 doubles, 28 homers and 64 RBIs in 340 plate appearances. Some have emailed wondering if they should just intentionally walk Walker in every at bat. No. That would be foolish. Just walk him when the situation calls for it (second and third, one out, for example, depending on who is pitching). There is no one in baseball history you should walk every at bat. Dodgers pitchers Clayton Kershaw, Yoshinobu Yamamoto named to all-star game roster Hernández: Dodgers must aggressively pursue pitchers before the trade deadline With Max Muncy expected back from knee injury, Dodgers stick with trade deadline plans Max Muncy heads to IL with what Dodgers are calling a left knee bone bruise Jaime Jarrín's Hall of Fame speech. Watch and listen here. Have a comment or something you'd like to see in a future Dodgers newsletter? Email me at and follow me on Twitter at @latimeshouston. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.
Atlantic
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?
There's a question that's been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn't find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness? I'm going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It's a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It's a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments. The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question 'How do you define the purpose of your life?' would make no sense. Finding your life's purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers. Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. A teacher would not let a student bribe his way to a higher grade, because that would betray the intrinsic qualities of excellence inherent in being a teacher. By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing. If I do this journey well, I have a sense of identity, self-respect, and purpose. I know what I was put on this Earth to do, and there is great comfort and fulfillment in that. If all of this sounds abstract, let me give you a modern example. At his 2005 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the former Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg described his devotion to the craft of baseball: 'I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That's respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you've done it before; get a big hit, look for the third-base coach and get ready to run the bases.' Sandberg gestured to the Hall of Fame inductees seated around him. 'These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It's disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball we all played growing up.' He continued: 'I didn't play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that's what you're supposed to do—play it right and with respect.' Sandberg's speech exemplifies this older moral code, with its inherited traditions of excellence. It conferred a moral template to evaluate the people around us and a set of moral standards to give shape and meaning to our lives. Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn't choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life's purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law. Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can't keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let's privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity. Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don't do the thing that will cause others pain. I think the Enlightenment was a great step forward, producing, among other things, the American system of government. I value the freedom we now have to craft our own lives, and believe that within that freedom, we can still hew to fixed moral principles. Look at the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. if you doubt me. There's an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I'd say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong? And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created. Nietzsche, for example, said: God is dead. We have killed him. Reason won't save us. It's up to heroic autonomous individuals to find meaning through some audacious act of will. We will become our own gods! Several decades later, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler came along, telling the people: You want some meaning in your life? March with me. Psychologists have a saying: The hardest thing to cure is the patient's attempt to self-cure. We've tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, 'Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.' Individuals get to make lots of choices, but they lack the coherent moral criteria required to make these choices well. After Virtue opens with MacIntyre's most famous thought experiment. Imagine, he writes, that somebody took all of the science books that have ever been written and shredded them. Meanwhile, all of the scientists have been killed and all of the laboratories burned down. All we are left with are some random pages from this science textbook or that. We would still have access to some scientific phrases such as neutrino or mass or atomic weight, but we would have no clue how they all fit together. Our moral life, he asserts, is kind of like that. We use words like virtue and phrases like the purpose of life, but they are just random fragments that don't cohere into a system you can bet your life on. People have been cut off from any vision of their ultimate purpose. How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this 'emotivism,' the idea that 'all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.' Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences. One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they're really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences. If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation. Each of us comes to regard other members of society as simply means to our ends, who can be coerced into believing what we believe. (Welcome to corporate DEI programs.) Alternatively, advertisers, demagogues, and influencers try to manipulate our emotions so we will end up wanting what they want, helping them get what they want. (Welcome to the world of that master manipulator, Donald Trump.) In the 1980s, the philosopher Allan Bloom wrote a book arguing that in a world without moral standards, people just become bland moral relativists: You do you. I'll do me. None of it matters very much. This is what Kierkegaard called an aesthetic life: I make the choices that feel pleasant at the moment, and I just won't think much about life's ultimate concerns. As MacIntyre put it, 'The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.' But the moral relativism of the 1980s and '90s looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared with today. Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal. Worse, people are unschooled in the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness. People are rendered anxious and fragile. As Nietzsche himself observed, those who know why they live can endure anyhow. But if you don't know why you're living, then you fall apart when the setbacks come. Society tends to disintegrate. Ted Clayton, a political scientist at Central Michigan University, put it well: 'MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.' Along comes Trump, who doesn't even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn't seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn't subsume himself in a social role. He doesn't try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don't seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves. So of course many people don't find Trump morally repellent. He's just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create. And Democrats, don't feel too self-righteous here. If he was on your team, most of you would like him too. You may deny it, but you're lying to yourself. Few of us escape the moral climate of our age. As MacIntyre himself put it, 'The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.' MacIntyre was a radical—both of the left and the right. He wanted us to return to the kind of coherent, precapitalist moral communities that existed before the Enlightenment project failed, locally at first and then on a larger scale. That's the project that a lot of today's post-liberals have embarked upon, building coherent communities around stronger gods—faith, family, flag. I confess I find many of the more recent post-liberals—of both left- and right-wing varieties—absurd. People who never matured past the first week of grad school can spin abstract theories about re-creating some sort of totalistic solidarity, but what post-liberalism amounts to in real life is brutal authoritarianism. (A century ago, Marxists talked in similarly lofty terms about building solidarity, but what their ideas led to in the real world was a bunch of gangster states, such as the Soviet Union.) We're not walking away from pluralism, nor should we. In fact, pluralism is the answer. The pluralist has the ability to sit within the tension created by incommensurate values. A good pluralist can celebrate the Enlightenment, democratic capitalism, and ethnic and intellectual diversity on the one and also a respect for the kind of permanent truths and eternal values that MacIntyre celebrates on the other. A good pluralist can see his or her life the way that the former Cub Ryne Sandberg saw his—subservient to a social role, willing to occasionally sacrifice immediate self-interest in order to get the runner into scoring position. Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it. We don't need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind.
