MacIntyre on NOT Having Your Cake and Eating It, Too

I'm spending some time in Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue today, and was particularly struck by the incisiveness of his diagnosis of a society that recognizes only "external" goods. As he discerns, "in any society which recognized only external goods, competitiveness would be the dominant and even exclusive feature" (p. 196). And then this fabulous quote:

Notoriously, the cultivation of truthfulness, justice and courage will often, the world being contingently what it is, bar us from being rich or famous or powerful.

The qualifier "contingently" is brilliant, and pregnant with theological insight: he doesn't given in to saying that these are always and essentially mutually exclusive, but only in the contingent configurations of our (broken, fallen) world. (It calls to mind some of Augustine's ruminations on "the praise of men" in Book 10 of the Confessions.)

MacIntyre then ends with this prescient diagnosis: "We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound" (196).

Gee, I wonder what that sort of society might look like?