The March of Technology

Battersea Temple of Power.

A cold rain is dripping on London, but I am in a warm, modern flat looking over the Thames and Chelsea Bridge. Below are the same old multiple railway tracks that I quite often trundled over in the days when the power station actually turned coal into electricity. It's resemblance to the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral was no mere coincidence; they were both designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Considering what a massive construction the power station is, all built in brick, it did not actually serve its original function very long,- forty years in the case of the first half, and only 30 in the case of the second, which was built just after WW2.

Since electricity generation ceased in 1983, we have had as many years of faffing about plans and money, before the iconic ‘Temple of Power’, with Arabs to the rescue, is realising a new lease of life as commercial and residential property, and a tourist attraction. I wonder what old Denis Guilfoyle would have made of it? Born in Co Kilkenny, he worked here in the power station for years, before retiring to Glencolumbkille with his Donegal wife.  Tourists used to stop and take pictures of him with his donkey and cart, bringing turf down from the bog. “Well then bruvver, doddlin’ along awright today are yer?” he would greet me, with an incongruous Cockney accent.

Even Cockney accents seem to be hard to come by here in London nowadays, though of course they can come out of the mouth of a West Indian as well as that of an Irishman or even of your real Cockney. Into the melting pot we have all gone, strangely enough along with the grand confidence in technology of the second half of the 20th Century. Not that all of us shared this confidence! We contrarians at least half twigged the crises coming up, although actually it was the exhaust fumes in the streets, and the tobacco fumes in the office, that chased me from London as much as anything else. Things have improved since I suppose, but there’s still a long, long way to go. Thank God we were able to rear our family with good air and food!

All nine children! Sometimes this exclamation comes in tones of reproach from the 'environmentally aware'. I am inclined to answer that in this part of the world, it’s not too many people that are the real problem, but too many cars; and indeed we have managed very well without owning a car for four years. One does have to organise one’s life accordingly; living in Horseshoe Cottage only works because we can get public transport to our gate, and especially because this is free for pensioners in Ireland.

There remains the little matter of the Anna M and her diesel engine. I have long thought about some kind of hybrid power for her, as I mentioned in the last post but one, The Rot Beneath the Floor. As things stand, I tie off the prop so that it doesn’t spin uselessly when we are sailing well, thinking meanwhile that it would hardly cause more drag if it were charging a bank of batteries. How lovely it would be to do without noisy, dirty and vibrating diesel engines, quite apart from the exhaust! Such micro considerations should help us address those maxi ones like climate change.

I have plenty of social and psychological objections to the cult of the motor car too, but leave them for another day. I hope that the lifespan of internal combustion engines will prove almost as short as that of coal-fired power stations,- and that our grandchildren will enjoy correspondingly long ones. I am here in London largely to meet our 22nd, Ella. Meanwhile, I also need to find some rich Arab, interested in non-polluting ways of getting around by sea. It would only be a drop in the ocean compared to this Battersea project!

Liberalism's Mortal Sin: Being Undemocratic..

I am penning this post in response to a short opinion piece on the Guardian website by Hugo Drochon, a Cambridge academic, entitled ‘The anti-democratic thinker inspiring America's Conservative elites’, and with the sub-heading ‘In his new book, the Catholic writer Patrick Deneen launches an attack on pluralism – and the Conservative establishment is cheering’. I consider that this article propounds some very important and common misunderstandings about Catholicism; I have not however read the book it reviews, so I have no idea whether these misunderstandings stem primarily from the original author (Patrick Deneen) or the reviewer (Hugo Drochon). Indeed I allow that they reflect misunderstandings on both the liberal and the traditionalist sides of such arguments.

Firstly, let us cut to the core of Drochon’s case, the two reasons that he gives for dubbing Deneen anti-democratic. ‘First, Deneen believes political decisions should not emanate from within the community itself – the democratic ideal of self-government – but from an outside source, namely God (and a Catholic God at that).’ There are a couple of obvious objections to this statement, such as the lack of real life examples where this democratic ideal is actually realised anywhere except in the imagination of what one might call the Liberal Cosmopolitan Church, and hence the question of what that most heinous of mortal sins that we hear so much about actually means,- being undemocratic. Are we seriously expected to believe that the mere act of voting now and again indicates ‘decisions emanating from within the community’?

However, I will allow that the latter do indeed represent a noble ideal, however other-worldly it may sound. Here I come to a much more radical critique of Drochon’s thought; he has evidently failed to study either the New Testament or Catholic theology. Christ said indeed that ‘No man can come to the Father except through me.’ But where do we encounter Christ? In our brothers and sisters, in our neighbours and in strangers who need our help, especially the poor, beaten up and outcast ones. God is by no means merely an ‘outside source’; though He does indeed transcend this world, He is only accessible to us through it, through our brothers and sisters, at the very heart of the human community, wherever people actually manage to love and care for one another; indeed He is the heart and soul of life itself.

It is the failure to understand the above which leads to Drochon’s second objection:- ‘Deneen believes the Catholic community has a privileged access to the truth that the rest of the political community – which has already made up its mind on gay marriage and premarital sex – does not. From this perspective, the national community is wrong, and democracy is mistaken.’

This is broadly true, but are we to believe then that the great Liberal Church, with its priesthood of media pundits and academics and their ‘democracy’, is infallible, rather than the Catholic Church? And after all, not just the Catholic Church, but in the case of homosexual marriage, just about the entirety of humanity’s religious traditions, and previous generations to the year dot, along with any previously known humanistic understanding of marriage, seem to me more credible than any bunch of contemporary politicians. Are we to believe that democratic majorities are not subject to manipulation and mistakes, that their decisions are not to be subject to any objective critique, and that notions of any natural law are merely Catholic hocus-pocus? Evidently Mr Drochon has forgotten that, for example, Herr Hitler established his power on the back of democratic votes and referenda; and on what basis did the small minority who continued to oppose him within Germany  take their stand? Again, does he consider that those of a European bent within Britain today should just shut up and abide by the majority democratic decision on Brexit?

The attempt to write such concerns off as merely those of the Conservative Establishment, and to pretend that it is only the Left that is interested in building bridges, is grossly misguided. It is a commonplace to say that you can only build bridges from firm ground. The political ideologies of right and left both are much more inclined in practice to consider that they have a monopoly of truth than practising Catholics who, believing they have indeed a good handle on truth, and that truth is ultimately indivisible, are prepared to look for truth everywhere and to respect it when they find it, be it in a Muslim, a Hindu or even a Liberal!

Which brings us to a place where we might look to build the odd bridge. Ideals of democracy after all were transmitted from the brief experiments in the Ancient world to our own by way of those very monastic communities that our columnist decries, but which were enduring democratic institutions in their own right.

Surely you do not have to be a member of the ‘American conservative establishment’ to believe that there is a very grave crisis going on for the credibility of democratic institutions everywhere, and that one way to address it is by reinvigorating democracy at the community level, and building on that to ensure that the macro institutions are much more rooted in and answerable to these communities? Perhaps our friend would consider taking a look at the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and at Catholic social doctrines, notably concerning solidarity and subsidiarity, before he goes preaching at us again?

 

The Rot Beneath the Floor.

A 'floor' comes out and the keel bolt is good!

Whether it’s a boat that leaks too much, climate change, the war in Syria or the war on unwanted babies, which is currently in danger of spreading to Ireland…;  they all contribute to a rising tide of anxiety. We may refuse to acknowledge it, and many are the resources available for us when we just want to drown it out and float away on a tide of addiction of one kind or another, junk food for the belly and the media circuses like football for the mind; but the fearful anxiety is there, and it fuels all tyranny as well as poisoning our own relationships and perceptions. The less it is confronted, the more dangerous it becomes, distorting and obscuring all perception of truth.

The struggle for peace is the struggle for truth, which is however, as George Orwell pointed out, the first victim of war. Our first move, if we hunger for truth, justice and peace, is to combat our own addictions, ‘remove the plank from our own eye’. For example, a society which counternances in late term abortions the killing of the baby by lethal injection would do well to think about that before getting too self-righteous about other forms of chemical warfare. Which said, the very blatant lies from the murderous thugs who run the Syrian and Russian Governments do have to be confronted.

The West’s ability to do so effectively has long been compromised, especially since the invasion of Iraq. It’s not, as seems to be commonly accepted these days, that the rationale given for that war was necessarily a lie, since no weapons of mass destruction were eventually to be found there. Saddam Hussein had already used them, and according to an Iraqi Airforce General whom I happened to hear on the radio, at the time UN inspectors were looking for them, they had been sent over the border to Syria. The fundamental hypocrisy involved in the decision to invade Iraq was again a matter primarily of the West’s addictions; in this case, I refer to the addiction to oil.

If we are serious about trying to take the burning heat out of the Near and Middle East, and about also tackling our own anxieties, above all and first of all we have to recognise that our use of oil is very often as a destructive addiction, and it is causing havoc on all sides. We try to assuage our anxieties in all kinds of hidden ways, some of them perfectly reasonable, like for example going to sea in small sailing boats. When anxieties take immediate and concrete form, such as whether our boat might sink, then we can confront them and do something about them, thus perhaps assuaging the more fundamental ones in relation to which we feel completely powerless. Sometimes, in times like these when the rockets are flying, our little finger in the dyke is overwhelmed and our strategy breaks down.

Aboard the Anna M, not content with rooting out the rot beneath the steel floors to which the keel is bolted, I’m taking the struggle to a new dimension! Having talked about it for years but never in a position to act, I’m going to take a final swipe at my oil addiction, and see if I can possibly avoid reinstalling the fuel tanks and the diesel engine. Instead, I hope to install an electric drive that will derive its power primarily from the sails when we are sailing well, with sufficient surplus power to recharge the batteries by turning the propellor and the same alternator/motor. Solar panels as well as shore power will also feature, and possibly a back-up diesel generator or even fuel cells. Hmmm, we shall see!

Confronting Anxiety by Fiona.

Dancing at Easter.

There are indeed some lovely old churches in

Nazaré, but the Easter Vigil was held in the large functional square hall in the Pastoral Centre. A lot of work had gone into decorating it and setting things up for the celebration: a huge square table for an altar, and also an enormous font with warmed water in it. All were festooned with flowers and the table was adorned with a Jewish-style lamp or menorah with nine lights, giving to the occasion the atmosphere of a Passover Seder, which of course is at the origins of the Catholic liturgy.

It begins with the blessing of the fire, from which the Paschal candle is lit and processed into the darkened church, where all our little candles are lit from it, the Light of Christ. It is plunged three times into the font where the holy water is blessed, and then we proceeded to baptise a clutch of babies. No half measures here either, the naked infants being dunked three times, entirely immersed on the third one. They were none the worse for it, an atmosphere of fun prevailed, and then we all had the chance to renew our baptismal vows in song.

We proceeded to the narrative of the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and journey through the sea and the desert to the Promised Land, so fundamental to just about any account of our common human vocation. In Ireland this often gets shortened; not so here, where on the contrary, not content with a leisurely reading of all nine readings, we had little contributions from all around when people witnessed, saying what the reading meant for them personally, in the tradition of lectio divina.

Having started at ten o’clock, it was after two by the time we got into the Mass itself. Nothing was hurried, psalms and everything that could be sung was sung, with much rhythmic clapping and music. Communion was an elaborate affair with big chunks of unleavened bread and huge cups of wine. The love feast finally ended with dancing, everyone together doing a rhythmic  four-step while they rotated slowly round the altar. It was half-past three in the morning, and a good time was had by all!

As Psalm 49 says:-

Sing a new song to the Lord,

His praise in the assembly of the faithful.

Let Israel rejoice in its Maker,

Let Sion’s sons exult in their king.

Let them praise his name with dancing

And make music with timbrel and harp.

Whence comes the urge to forsake the churches for this occasion? Part of it surely is the desire to get back to the origins, which involved the exodus of the Israelites from relative comfort, though in slavery, for a hazardous journey in the wilderness on a vague promise, and then the early Christians, living an intense experience of community frequently in danger as well as discomfort. But there is more, and particularly in traditional Catholic countries with beautiful old churches.

Those churches were built in the context of a very different world, which certainly had a grace and beauty about it that we find it impossible to emulate, but which went with a degree of structured authority that, while we may be unwise to criticise it too much, certainly had many shortcomings and eventually decayed into authoritarianism, and with a lack of personal autonomy that today is not acceptable. The authoritarianism worsened as the spiritual inspiration became attenuated and secular authorities of various stripes sought to usurp the place of the divine one. The original inspiration of the Church was frequently resented by the secular powers, though they sometimes sought to coopt it into the various secular forms, notably into the nation states.

But this ain’t working anymore! Our personal identities tend to have outgrown any one nation, just as technology and the world economy have done also. Meanwhile the authorities can say what they like, but are rarely able to deliver; hence the general panic and all sorts of half-baked efforts to resuscitate nationalism. Mere cosmopolitanism is not of course an answer either. How right the Church is to seek renewal in more vibrant and genuine community! If what we witnessed here on Easter morning is happening on a widespread basis, we may indeed expect some exciting and encouraging surprises.

The nation states themselves will find renewal if they learn to act within a continuum between local communities and supra-national organisation, which is the only way any of them can hope to address the major problems of war, migration, international financial banditry and environmental breakdown. Meanwhile, the costs of failure mount and threaten ever more devastation…. And as for myself?

The work on the boat seems endless, and the costs are mounting. In my weariness, I draw indispensable support from the Lady of Nazaré and her community here. The fact is that the alternative of simply letting the boat rot is not a good enough reason to go on. Why bother with an old wooden boat? This too involves a turning away from exploitation to love; a going out into the desert armed only with that elusive transcendent Promise! The work is an act of community, as in any real boatyard and with all work of human hands with natural materials, not produced like most modern boats with noxious synthetic ones in a factory, and orientated to a transcendent purpose, to setting out again on the Gannetsway. So thanks to Alec and all the other people more or less involved! But I am sadly missing sailing the sea….

photos by Fiona