Fiona and I landed back to a beautiful spell of weather on Sherkin; sunshine worthy of Guadianaland, apart from the fact that the sun only achieves about half the height here, and half the heat! It really feels like being on the roof of the world! Unfortunately Fiona promptly came down with a chest infection, and is having to get by on my somewhat inadequate ministrations (they got worse as I went down, but fortunately Fiona was coming round and able to take up the slack).
Meanwhile I see that Pope Francis has been addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, including Stephen Hawking, in some very strong terms, couched though they are in diplomatic language. Decrying the way countries are still “distracted” or delayed in applying international agreements on the environment, he said ‘“It has now become essential to create, with your cooperation, a normative system that includes inviolable limits and ensures the protection of ecosystems, before the new forms of power deriving from the techno-economic model cause irreversible harm not only to the environment, but also to our societies, to democracy, to justice and freedom.”
I wonder who he could have in mind? What could these ‘new forms of power’ possibly be? One might have thought that the Popes have seen it all, but I suppose that the internet and social media have added a whole new twist to populism. But that stuff we’re suddenly hearing again is all too familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of history, concerning ‘Traitors’, ‘Enemies of the People’, ‘The Will of the People’ and the Bright Future that is anything but apparent, but which nonetheless is there for them if only their will, as embodied by the speaker, prevails against the sinister army of liberals, experts, elites, and intellectuals!
I see that old hypocrite Mr Boris Johnson is busy trying to throw people off the scent, accusing the likes of me of “bad motives, with too many people too quick to draw comparisons (of Brexit) with populist movements across the world.” I have a single question for him: would he be where he is today but for Mr Farage and the years of scurrilous campaigning against the EU by the popular press? And who might be your aIly across the Channel? If the cap fits, Boris old boy, you may as well wear it. At least Mr Trump wears his!
Mr Johnson chunters on about how Britain will be a ‘global player and champion of free trade’. As Will Blake pointed out, the General Good was ever the cry of the hypocrite; there can be no such thing as completely ‘free’ trade; and the only people who might profit by it anyway are the global elite of the super rich, no doubt to be ably championed by Mr Trump.
Meanwhile, do such people not realise that the only way through the world’s desperate and multi-layered, interconnected crises is much deeper and authentic collaboration? One must start with particulars, with one’s neighbours, and respecting what has gone before. The only thing in favour of such horrible distractions as Brexit is that in the end they raise consciousness; but time is not on our side.
I’ll be off to Blighty soon enough, and no doubt will soon find myself rebuked by some for failing to ‘respect the democratic will’. I’ve been dismissed as both a liberal and a fascist in my time, and best of all as an ‘idealist’. I like that epithet actually, and it’s quite hard to figure out how it becomes a term of abuse; presumably it is assumed that one is not prepared to be ‘realistic’. But how one sets about being ‘realistic’ when everything said by anyone who might remotely have some claim to know what they are talking about has been ipso facto dismissed as an ‘expert’.
If democracy is to work, it must obviously operate on the basis of informed and rational debate, with reference to those who do know something at least of what they are talking about. This involves listening with respect to them, as well as to all stake-holders, to everyone who will be affected by a decision. It is plain undemocratic to assume that a simple majority in a single vote can overturn decades of patient work by democrats, sitting down together as equals and struggling away to achieve consensus.
Anyway I for one was not consulted about this Brexit lark, yet with the rest of Irish people I will be severely impacted by it, along with all those folk such as the Poles whom Mrs May likes to refer to as ‘our European partners’. There are any amount of rational reasons why Brexit is a bad idea, but what does one do when rational discourse and the give-and-take of compromise breaks down? One is touching on territory where democracy and indeed civilisation itself break down.
They cannot survive if there is no respect for truth. Sure, people will lie; but if a politician gets caught out telling a whopper, can we allow him to merely shrug it off? What does one do with someone who simply says whatever sounds good at the time, without any sense that he needs to be consistent, or indeed that there is such a thing as truth?
I blame the liberals just as much as the populists. How often have we heard them say that there is no such thing as ‘the truth’, only ‘your truth and my truth’? What do they expect to happen, if for instance they think they can suddenly decide to redefine the most fundamental of human institutions, in defiance of physical fact and the view of umpteen generations past?
It was my privilege to spend many many hours listening to the endless chat of Donegal fishermen, and I can tell you they could chat. Everything was discussed in minute detail, from how much fish Jimmy Padraig caught yesterday and where, and ditto this time last year, and how much he was paid for it, to what was going on between Biddie and Sean, to whether Donegal would be better off in ‘the North’ or whether there was life after death…. Running through it all was the leitmotiv, true or false? That was where the fun was, the drama, and they relished it!
Lies were ok, perhaps an inevitable part of life, but still lies. ‘Tell ‘em plenty of lies’ was my old neighbour’s advice when it came to dealing with officialdom. Testing a person’s credulity with lies was great sport. But what was generally not in doubt was the importance of truth and the necessity of struggling to distinguish it from lies.
The sea is a wonderful school of truth, which unfortunately is more than can be said of modern education. The sense of truth goes out the window when there is no viable principle of cohesion, and education with all knowledge is compartmentalised and over-specialised. ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer’
This indeed is where ‘experts’ can let us down. One is educated to suck up one’s subject like a sponge, with no attempt to integrate it with one’s conscience, with one’s own personal consciousness, at its extreme of absurdity when one swots up literature in order to write four essays in a three-hour exam. Not alone does this sort of thing not foster the ‘sense of truth’, but it actively subverts it. That’s how an elite education produces the likes of Mr Boris Johnson.
It is not surprising that, after seeing so many ideals reduced to dust and ashes in the last century, people gave up on the very notion of ideals. Indeed these inevitably fall far short of ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’, as embodied by Jesus; but after all, he asks us to become ‘perfect’; a high ideal indeed, hardly to be achieved in this life; we are now witnessing however that there is quite simply no future at all for mankind if we give up on the attempt! Yet the notion of being 'a good pagan' has indeed fallen apart.
In the face of what had happened, it was hard for the post-war generation to go preaching the ideals of European Civilisation as they attempted to pick up the pieces. Now a full generation has passed with politicians mainly working on the basis of ‘enlightened self-interest’ and ‘realism’. The end of that road has now been reached.
We will have to revisit the ideals of European Civilisation, or forget it. But after all, the Roman Empire, lurking in the background, crucified Christ; yet it also enabled the spreading of the good news of his resurrection. The blood of the Apostles Peter and Paul, along with that of all the martyrs, soaking into the soil of Rome, made of it the seed-bed of the Church.
So also with the imperial phase of Europe. It became the seed-bed of the modern world, so help us God. For all its faults, this continued that work of Rome; it also developed the technology that all the world has adopted, and in the main produced the very terms with which they address life’s conundrums. Where else, we may ask, will the world find the leadership it so desperately requires?
So sorry Boris, we need team players, not people going off on solo runs. There can be little doubt that a stronger and better European Union is in the interests of the whole world, while a return to competing nationalisms is badly regressive and fraught with danger. Terrible as the cataclysm was that propelled Europe beyond nationalism, it might be even worse if we fall back into it today. Now the rest of Europe needs Great Britain in, apart from any other reason, frankly as a counterweight to Germany. I don’t think that even the Germans themselves relish the prospect of finding themselves in the role of hegemon.
I’m on my way to Blighty next month, I only wish I could tell ‘em! I’m hoping the New Year will see a real heave to put a stop to the madness; mind you, Mr Farage is right in one respect; it will involve a recasting of the political order there…. If the heave is to succeed, it will call for a great deal of effort, and everyone should see what they can do!
In the noon-tide of our strength, the presence of the Lord is only a heap of cloud. It is important to try to stay with it; otherwise one might miss the flame that shines out at night-fall. A spot of sickness serves to remind one of this fact. Our sanity depends on it….
