Alasdair MacIntyre and the virtues of pickleball

Plus Stephanie's story of recovering from four years of post-psychedelic difficulties

For psychonaut subscribers, after the paywall you can access a video of an interview with Stephanie, who opens up about the four years of post-psychedelic difficulties she experienced, the 50 different treatments she tried to recover, and what finally helped her. But before that, I need to share a dark and shameful secret…

My name’s Jules and I’m a pickleball addict.

I started playing pickleball two years ago. Like everyone, I didn’t take it seriously at first. Toy paddles, a toy ball, a toy net, I mean, come on. It looked like a game for retirement homes, right up there with bingo.

I wish I had been more careful. I wish someone had warned me.

One year later, it’s all I think about. It’s got its claws into me, but good. When I close my eyes, all I think about is third-shot drops, shake-n-bakes, APBs, and other pickleball-junkie terminology. I spent a fortune on a racquet that costs about $10 to make. I play for two to three hours every evening. One more game, one more game…My elbow hurts all the time. I even watch pickleball videos on YouTube. Yes, I happily spend my free time watching videos of pensioners hitting the toy ball with their toy racquets over the toy net. What is wrong with me?

I used to have dignity. I used to play tennis. How did I let it come to this? Well, let me tell you, so you don’t end up in a cult like me.

It all begins with a Scottish virtue ethics philosopher named Alasdair Macintyre.

Virtue ethics

MacIntyre, who died in May, was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the late-20th-century, thanks to a book he published in 1981 called After Virtue, which helped spark a modern revival in ‘virtue ethics’.

Virtue ethics is one of the main schools of moral philosophy - it includes the philosophies of the Stoics; Plato; Aristotle; Christian, Muslim and Jewish Aristotelians like Thomas Aquinas; and arguably the Confucians, Taoists and Buddhists.

The focus of virtue ethics is on developing virtuous habits while diminishing vicious habits. The good life is not about occasional decisions, it’s about regular practices and rituals, until living well becomes second nature and you get into a ‘good flow of life’, as the Stoics called it. Both virtues and vices lie within our nature like seeds, and we must learn to cultivate our garden, water the virtues and root out the vices. Human nature cultivated to its fullest potential is called eudaimonia by the Greeks, which can be translated as ‘flourishing’.

The most famous virtue ethicist is Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great and founder of the Lyceum school in Athens. He argued in his lectures (turned into books by his students) that the secret to a good life is a good character, and that means developing good habits through daily practice. After years and years of reflection and training, you will instinctively do the right thing in the right situation, like a good Navy SEAL. You will possess phronesis, or discrimination.

Aristotle thought a good society is one dedicated to eudaimonia or the flourishing of its citizens. This requires freedom, education, a certain amount of material security, and a shared idea of the good life. He didn’t think the good life was always the same for all people - we all have different talents to develop. Some are more contemplative and scholarly, for example, some are more athletic or military, some are more political, or artistic, and so on.

Despite being one of the great champions of rationalism, Aristotle thought ecstatic rituals have an important role in a good society - there should be a place for things like ecstatic communal dancing, or mystical contemplation, or rituals like those of Eleusis and Dionysus, or music and theatre. Ecstatic rituals provide catharsis, he thought - they allow us to let off steam and shake off the discontents of civilization. And perhaps they also connect us to God (although Aristotle is not nearly as mystical as his teacher, Plato).

Ancient Greek culture tried to balance the rational and the irrational, the Socratic and the Dionysian. Aldous Huxley once asked, in his last novel Island:

‘Which did more for morality and rational behaviour - the Bacchic orgies or The Republic?’

‘The Greeks were much too sensible to think in terms of either-or. For them, it was always not-only-but-also.’ Not only Plato and Aristotle, but also the maenads.’

At the same time, there is always a tension between the Socratic and the Dionysiac. Ecstatic experiences are quite disruptive to the psyche and the social order, and ecstatic rituals could be quite problematic in classical culture - the Romans occasionally banned the Bacchanalia, or rite of Dionysus, for the perceived threat it posed to public morality.

You could argue, from an Aristotelian view, that ecstatic experiences are not essentially moral, rather they can be guided towards virtues and character-building, or they can also contribute to the growth of vices and character-dissolution.

This is why we need strong ethical containers for ecstatic experiences, so they enhance the virtues and build character, rather than leading to character-dissolution. Civilization needs good outlets for catharsis, ‘controlled spaces to lose control’ as Robin Carhart-Harris once put it, places for what Aldous Huxley called ‘healthy transcendence’ as opposed to toxic transcendence. That might include churches, the arts, raves, sports and so on. But each of these containers are also not essentially and always ‘good’ - you can of course have immoral or harmful churches, immoral or harmful arts, immoral or harmful sports and so on. Each activity or culture has the seeds of both vices and virtues within it, and it’s up to you and your fellows if you let the virtues or the vices grow.

Alasdair MacIntyre and After Virtue

In 1981, Scottish Neo-Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre published After Virtue. He declared that western civilization was in a moral crisis, because we no longer have any shared idea of the good life, no common moral language, no common idea of human nature and how best to develop it to its fullest potential. Instead we have radically different moral philosophies or, often, no philosophy at all beyond emotivism - whatever feels good.

Without a common moral framework, moral discussions in western civilization and especially in western politics have descended into a shouting match of various competing slogans - Black Lives Matter, Free Speech, MeToo, America First, Save the Children - which we scream in each other’s faces without the ability to reflect together on shared goals or trade-offs.

MacIntyre was part of a revival of virtue ethics in the second half of the 20th century, led by philosophers like Philippa Foot, Liz Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and later Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum and Pierre Hadot. Academic philosophers became fascinated by the idea of how to build a good character, how to live a good life, how to re-build a good society. I wrote a few pieces and even made a BBC Radio 4 programme about the rise of Neo-Aristotelianism in politics, and the Stoic revival (which I was part of) is part of a similar cultural movement.

More recently, post-liberal thinkers like Patrick Deheen have suggested we need to abandon secular pluralist liberal democracy and return to a common Catholic idea of the good life, perhaps enforced by the Catholic Church and a Catholic-aligned ruler (like, say, Franco).

Alasdair MacIntyre was not optimistic about such attempts to return to a collective idea of the good life. Let’s be honest, the only way that is going to happen in western civilization is if the Caliphate conquers liberal democracy and an Islamic State-stye virtue police drive around beating us for any infringements of Shariah law. Theocracy doesn’t sound very attractive to me - neither the Catholic or the Islamic version of it. Pluralism lets us pursue our personal idea of the good life rather than having someone else’s imposed upon us.

Instead, MacIntyre suggested we can build small communities of virtue and excellence. He gave the example of fishing communities where the families develop the virtues of courage, endurance, team-work and skill. Think of Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm - in some ways, it’s a celebration of the heroic virtues of a fishing community. At the same time, of course, there’s nothing essentially virtuous about fishing, and it could equally be done in a vicious, toxic and harmful way - for example if you are ruled by greed and carelessness and use illegal fishing techniques to maximize profit while damaging the ecosystem.

You could see the Navy SEALs as a similar community of excellence. It is trying to maintain its ethics in an age of online celebrity and widespread drug use, as I wrote about on Monday, and that’s challenging. Every garden has the seeds of virtues and vices within it, and every day we have a choice which ones we water.

The same is true of sports clubs. I ran philosophy classes at Saracens rugby team for three seasons, and saw close-up the virtues and vices of professional sports. On the one hand there are the core virtues that Saracens tried to develop - team-work, discipline, work-rate, humility. On the other hand, there is ego, greed, gossip, the temptations of fame or casual sex or performance-enhancing drugs…

The virtues and vices of pickleball

This brings me to pickleball. My partner (now my wife) and I moved to a beach town in Costa Rica, where it was too hot to play tennis, so I tried playing this silly little game called pickleball.

Expats and locals would gather every morning in an incredibly hot municipal hall and hit plastic balls over a net. Then an American expat called Rick set up the town’s first private pickleball club, which was quite pricey to join. That prompted its own ethical discussion - should you play in the free Muni or the private club? Pickleball for the people or only for the well-off? We joined the club, just because it was a higher standard and you got a lot more exercise. And then, slowly, I started playing pickleball more and more, to the point where I’m now playing most evenings for 2-3 hours. I’m almost 50 and I didn’t even play this much sport at school.

Pickleball, like every sport, has its inherent virtues and vices. I used to play tennis singles, which is an extremely Stoic sport. You’re out there on your own and you need to practice the virtues of self-reliance and self-control. It’s fun but lonely. Pickleball is much more Aristotelian, ie much more social and collective in its virtues. It’s mainly doubles, and games only last 10-20 minutes, so you are constantly changing partners and playing with everyone in the club. So you need the virtues of conviviality and friendliness, to not care when your partner is making a lot of mistakes - who cares, the game only lasts 10 minutes!

In pickleball doubles, you’re only as good as your partner, so you need to encourage each other…I am not always good at that but am trying to develop this team virtue. You also need patience - you can’t just bash your way out of trouble like you can in tennis, you need to ‘dink’ and wait for your opponents to make a mistake. And you need to not take it too seriously but remember it’s a sport, you’re doing it for fun.

The vices of pickleball are over-competitiveness, rage, criticizing your partner, cliqueishness and superiority (ie not wanting to play with worse players); cheating - there are rarely refs so you can easily get points by calling your opponents’ shots out; not to mention obsession - talking about pickleball all the time, becoming a pickle-bore, or playing so often you actually injure yourself.

Anyway, I love it. We even won our first tournament last month. I encourage you to join the cult.

After the paywall, Stephanie’s story - how psychedelics led to her leaving Mormonism, how an extremely-challenging psychedelic experience left her struggling with severe anxiety and inflammation for four years including being unable to work, how she tried around 50 different treatments - 50! - and spent thousands of dollars trying to recover, and what finally helped her (two Jungian therapists, one of them Otto Maier from Tandava). She also reflects on the similarities between Mormon cultiness and psychedelic / New Age cultiness. Thanks for sharing your story Stephanie! We’ll also put it on the Stories of Recovery section of the CPEP website. These sorts of testimonies are a huge help to others going through post-psychedelic crises.