"C.S. Lewis had marked how, in [Jane] Austen's novels, 'the great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, 'some duty neglected, some failing indulged,' impropriety, indelicacy, generous candour, blameable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason.' This list does not cover exactly the ethical laws outlined in the appendix of [The Abolition of Man], but it comes somewhere near, and the unyieldingness of these standards signifies their objectivity ('the hard core in Austen's mind, the Johnsonian element, the iron in the tonic'). Furthermore, by finishing this list on the note of reason, Lewis emphasizes the fact that Austen's heroines would all accept these standards 'when they are most rational.'
The Austen world testifies to a moral ecology very much in accord with the 'First Principles of Practical Reason,' as [The Abolition of Man] styles them. And that is why Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue can describe Jane Austen as an 'Aristotelian' and as 'the last great effective imaginative voice of the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues which I have tried to identify.'"
In calling Austen "the last" exponent of this tradition, MacIntyre echoes Lewis's 1954 inaugural lecture at Cambridge, 'De Descriptione Temporum,' in which, "as in the Riddell Lectures eleven years earlier, Lewis describes a profound change in human culture." Indeed, he goes so far as to label it "the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West." It is a division "which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen. ... Somewhere between us and Persuasion, the chasm runs." Persuasion is the right work for Lewis to name, not only because it was Austen's final novel and the most mature in thought and feeling, but because the word "persuasion" speaks to something that we have lost in the gulf that separates her world from ours. To persuade, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "to draw the will of another to something, by inclining his judgement or desire to it." The act of persuasion therefore presupposes a common medium of discourse in which both judgements and desires can be shared and differences of view resolved.
MacIntyre observes how, in our present culture, differences of view have become incommensurable; there is no common yardstick against which diverse perspectives can be reckoned. For as long as these differences are considered unimportant, there can be a naïve celebration of "diversity" as a good thing in and of itself. But once diversity reveals its inability to arbitrate serious disputes, the pendulum swings to the opposite pole.
...
The pervasive, almost ubiquitous acceptance of various kinds of emotivism and subjectivism in modern Western culture means there can be no persuasion -- that is to say, rational argument leading to a freely adopted change of mind. Rather, as belief in objective value evaporates and the public square is evacuated of practical reason, what passes for moral discourse increasingly resembles a war zone in which political propagandists, commercial interests, private whims, and animal instincts fight tooth-and-nail in a permanent free-for-all. The leaders and the led, the rich and the poor, the white-collar and the blue-collar, the religious and the secular: these parties look at one another with a rivalry bordering on hatred or simply with blank incomprehension. In this rational desert, the only way people can effect social or political or legislative change is to mobilise a sufficiently large contingent of like-minded protestos and out-protest their opponents. The question of truth, as such, is relegated to a second- or third-order issue: the real question is one of power. And thus we arrive at our post-truth world.
-- Michael Ward, After Humanity, pp. 40-42.
