Saturday 19 May 2018

'The Revolution in the Revolution'.

In May 1968, I was about to finally leave Cambridge, and in Paris at the time.... To this day, when I see the nice cobbled streets of Portugal, I occasionally ask myself if cobbles are an essential feature of a democratic society - the people's weapon of last resort! Nonetheless, I never saw much future in battling riot police with them. As subsequent events showed, no great forward movement resulted, from the political point of view. The whole jolly show dissipated in a cloud of drugs and promiscuity. Somehow or other Fiona and I, already married at the time, were spared the illusion that this afterlife of the 'revolution' represented any genuine kind of liberation. Politically speaking, one may ask whether its prototype, the French Revolution proper, was really any more successful, let alone its many derivatives such as the Russian one.
Over the Cobbles.


Fifty years later, our attitude would lead many people to dismiss us as 'socially conservative old foggies', or worse. However, insofar as there was something special in 'the spirit of the times' of the late sixties, a genuine revolution in the air which evidently failed, I claim that we remain basically true to it. This leads me to ask myself what, if anything, that essential 'it' was, and is it perhaps coming around again at last today? 

Maybe the feeling that 'things just can't go on like this', the sense of an opportunity for humanity to take a great leap forward, perhaps circles our planet on an elliptic orbit, coming closer every so often. 1918? Maybe then too! But then it trundles off into outer space, and only a few 'dreamers' are left wondering, what was that? Will it ever come back again, that wonderful sense of opportunity? The heart of the matter is the belief that human beings may be finally freed from fear and oppression, freed to be their authentic selves.

These opportunities come with the rumble of  empires crumbling down, the smash-up of the status quo; and with that comes much carnage and general horror. It takes a while for the dust to settle, so that we are able to figure out what still stands and what is gone for good, and so to get our bearings again. In some gilded halls, it is possible to carry on as if nothing has changed; but after all, bit by bit, things do!

We are inescapably members of some kind of greater whole; however, successive emperors are but passing attempts to personify it, and their turn comes to lose their clothes. We put up with them so long as they deliver the necessary modicum of bread and circuses to keep the show on the road. After all, so long as he manages to 'hold the ring' in the midst of the swirling masses of competing tribes, maintaining the conditions  wherein at least the more enlightened (not to say privileged and influential) can trade, travel and generally do their thing, then he will be forgiven whatever demands he may make. But when this breaks down, the costs becomes too exorbitant and the price too onerous, he is a goner! So we have to look around for some new formula to integrate life's seething possibilities and demands. All too often, it is indeed the old case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

It is curious how personal morality gets bound up with the whole political and social order. Life becomes increasingly impossible on the personal and family level in step with political and social disintegration; it's almost as if we were all living at the Emperor's court. And when the court is one of those gilded halls that manages to hang on despite everything, quite out of sync with political and social reality, it's like being caught inside a circus tent that is in immanent danger of being blown down. For such reasons, I'm glad I 'escaped' from England when I did.

What of the Irish Revolution? Where has that got us? From one empire to another? A big question now is, how viable is this new 'empire', the European project? There are those who claim that Ireland's escape (and my personal one) will prove of the frying-pan to fire variety. We shall see, but meanwhile, here are a few signs that will give grounds to hope for the best: a successful Europe will lead the way in convincingly tackling the environmental crises on all fronts, including the human facets of migration, war etc, and also in reversing the tide of gross inequalities in wealth and power. Democracy and accountability will be more than empty catchwords; patient communication will replace braggart bullying. It will mysteriously, but as a matter of fact, be more convincing if accompanied by a renewal of personal integrity and morality. Banished words like adultery and fornication might even make a reappearance in the English language, not for reasons of oppression or repression, but because it is realised that they point up snags in the way of such genuine human fulfilment as is possible in this world, not to mention the next!

Yes, we also have to rediscover that this world is on a trip to some magnificent destiny beyond us all, which nonetheless is coming by way of increasing and more sophisticated integration, on both the personal and social levels. This is what we Catholics mean by 'the coming of the Kingdom', the establishment of 'his body' which we celebrate at every Mass, the 'true vine' of which we are the branches.... Any particular society succeeds or fails to the extent that it reflects such reality, and I remain convinced that the Irish version of revolution was relatively benign precisely because it did not altogether fail to
do so. Let us hope that it is not about to turn its back on that precious heritage!

Saturday 12 May 2018

C'm'on there Robert Mueller!

The game is on; we’ve a big wedding coming up in West Clare, and the only decent place there for a reception there Darling is… the Trump International Hotel at Doonbeg on the Atlantic coast. My first reaction was NO, but the locals who run it take the line that it’s their outfit, and it doesn’t really matter who the capital comes from; after all whoever that is may be here today, but will be gone tomorrow, and meanwhile God knows where the money actually comes from, and why should we care? After all, we have to find some way of living with the present dispensation in America; maybe we even have to try to butter up the Duckie*, while doing our own thing as firmly as possible, à la Macron. This old sailor has to fall into line again!


Meanwhile that other old man goes from bad to worse. He doesn’t seem to bother with trying to address people with some modicum of intelligence, and gives no reasons in his public addresses for his apparently insane, ridiculous and horrible decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, not to mention from the Paris climate treaty, other than hurling just such epithets at it. What can one make of his contradictory denunciations? Nowadays Iran is the world’s “leading state sponsor of terror”, but in 2015 he described Saudi Arabia as “the world’s biggest funder of terrorism”; that country “funnels our petrodollars – our very own money – to fund the terrorists that seek to destroy our people.”**


I suppose the get-out is that it’s not the Saudi state as such, whatever that may be, which for example sends ‘our very own money’ to ISIS, but this doesn’t really wash. The only relevant difference between the Saudis and the Iranians that I can discern is that the former send sufficient quantities of petrodollars back to buy arms and know how to flatter a certain fragile ego. The Sunni/Shia business is beyond me, but from what I can make out the Wahhabi Sunni version of Islam of Saudi Arabia is particularly obnoxious, and rather like the Puritanical version of Christianity. One is inclined to contrast it with the Sufism, a more spiritual and a non-violent version of Islam, which has a history of being persecuted by Wahhabis.


It has always been a struggle to arrive at some kind of objective grasp of contradictory narratives, which are by no means new to this so-called age of post-truth. I grew up as a boy in England being led to believe that the British Empire was a great bearer of progress, the rule of law and general enlightenment to the world. I was not long finding a different narrative, especially when it came to considering the history of Ireland. Russian communists were continually complaining about ‘imperialists’, even while they sent their tanks into Eastern Europe. For some the big enemy is communism, for others capitalism, but clearly there is no monopoly of virtue either on the Right or the Left. In the end most people tend to plonk for one narrative or another for primarily tribal reasons. So-and-so may be a liar and crook, but isn’t he ‘our’ crook? Where can one find some kind of objective criteria?


‘By their fruits shall ye know them’ seems the most promising line. Does such and such a proposition or policy or approach result in denying opportunities for life or promoting them? Of course, everyone will try to argue that their crowd are the ones doing the promoting; one can but examine the rival claims and try to find out how they work out in practice.


Brexiteers claim to offer some wonderful global role for GB in the future. Looks like humbug to me, a mere chimera stemming from dreams of past glories. Europe actually offers a much more plausible route to a meaningful global role for GB, as this present crisis about Iran demonstrates. One thing is reasonably clear: the life opportunities of millions of British people are going to be curtailed, once they lose their European citizenship.


On an opposite tack, our Irish Government, no less, is asking the Irish people to give their assent to the taking of uncounted innocent and vulnerable human lives. This undeniable fact is dressed up in a narrative of compassion for women in trouble which is, to say the least, of extremely dubious validity. One thing is certain: many more babies will be denied the opportunities of life if ‘Yes’ prevails in the forthcoming referendum.


The proponents of Brexit and those of abortion, especially in America, are generally supposed to belong to opposed tribes in contemporary politics, so one can only conclude that said politics are overdue for a thorough reboot. This side of the end of the world, we may be sure that nobody's politics or tribe will entirely accord with Truth, but wherever one lives and whatever one does, it is our duty firstly to attempt to become more aware of our own tribalism and of its limitations, and secondly to do all in our power to communicate with opposed tribes. The methodology is clearly set out in the New Testament, and probably every major religion has made some attempt to do so. It’s no use merely trying to counter tribalism with Liberal Enlightenment, which sometimes seems to have established a tribe with as little awareness of its own limitations as any.


Tribalism, like language itself, is a constituent fact of our humanity, though it takes very different forms, and some of them are indeed better than others. We have to examine, to interrogate the basis of our own tribe, and transcend its limitations without necessarily abandoning it. Every attempt to do so, every bit of real human communication and accountability, has its value, even if it involves going to a wedding in the Trump International Hotel; maybe that's on our side of some kind of transatlantic bridge? And the better a tribe can come to terms with 'the other', and get to know itself in the process, the stronger it will become. Meanwhile, more power to Robert Mueller!

*http://gannetswaysailing.blogspot.ie/2017/02/eh-duckie-hang-on.html

**https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/is-iran-really-the-worlds-leading-state-sponsor-of-terror

Saturday 5 May 2018

Round and Round the Garden.

One day I was banging nails into the Anna M in Nazaré, Portugal; soon after I was at a book launch in Westminster, London, then again working in the garden here on Sherkin Island; the possibilities opened up by modern travel are all very wonderful. However, it does rather makes the head whirl; how can they possibly fit together? No wonder we are sometimes tempted to think that all this freedom is a bit over the top, and though we do not admit it, some of us undoubtedly actually fear it.


It is very nearly half a century since I had been involved in such an event as that book launch in London, and how life has whirled along since! Young bright sparks like me, who had been brought up in the mindset of the British Empire, were struggling to come to terms with the new realities. Just to think, of all the weird little implications, that in the world which was passing away, gentlemen did not type! Was it considered demeaning, or could they not be expected to catch up with such newfangled gadgets, or what? Anyway they all had female secretaries with neat little hands to do it for them.

The book was ‘On Governing Europe’, subtitled ‘A Federal Experiment’, and it was launched by its author Andrew Duff, a Cambridge based retired Liberal MEP and 'distinguished commentator'. It is a good, clear book, telling the story of the birth and development of the European Union. What a complicated and tortuous process it has been, which Brexiters think, or rather thought, they could so lightly cast aside! The quotations at the chapter heads tell a lot. From Barack Obama, ‘They’ve got 17 countries that have to agree every step they take. So I think about my Congress, then I start thinking about 17 congresses and I start getting a little bit of a headache.’  What was driving them on? From François Mitterrand we have ‘Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre’. From John le Carré’s character George Smiley, ‘If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.’ From Jean-Claude Juncker, ‘We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.’


So there we have it! At the book-launch I commented on hearing Messrs Cameron, Johnson and Farage talking before the Brexit referendum, and thinking it was the Brexiteers who won hands down when it came to finding some bit of resonance that the great British people might get their imaginations round. Even still the twilight of Empire lingers, and the truth is that nothing much appears to have taken root since except weeds, like our garden in our absence. Fortunately in Ireland one is inclined to hear the other side of those echoes from the past, which is perhaps the principal reason why I came to live here; but whether the Irish would actually vote in full awareness to be part of a federal Europe is doubtful in the extreme, yet, as Andrew Duff demonstrates, that is the logic of where we are going, despite the farce of Mr Farage solemnly standing up in the European Parliament and hectoring them about 'their project being over', while he draws his fat salary from them and even hopes for the pension!


If the federal Europe is to be attained, it will have to find its heart; no amount of mere rational discourse will get us there; the numinous will have to be revisited, but actually this can enhance rational discourse rather than destroy it, though I reserve my belief as to how the numinous and reason may be reconciled. Let the world get there in its own time, if it can. Meanwhile religion is eschewed by some as a cause of division, but in fact it is so only when it has been corrupted by idolatry. Those springs of life must be revisited; and there is a surprise in store for those who do so, for a lot of work has already been done by believers, struggling to refine the gold from the dross of falling empires. ‘Assemble, come, gather together, all you who have escaped from the nations!’ (Isaiah 45:20)


It is not however my religion or anyone else’s religion I am insisting on. We can agree that God is always beyond any finite human possession; and probably we can agree that the deepest requirement of a human being, which everyone is looking for, is love, even poor Mr Farage. We cannot come straight to the end, the consummation, but we can start wherever we have an opportunity to take responsibility for each other and for the world, to care and to communicate about all those things that some mystery causes us to recognise as true and good. How could this possibly mean pulling up our drawbridge, lowering our portcullis, and hoping we can have a reasonably enjoyable party before things go to Hell altogether? No, it means getting out of our bolt-holes and doing whatever we can to take those opportunities. It's a pity my particular little way of doing it has such a long way to go before we can set sail again, but we have to learn patience, and we even have to learn what it was about empires that held many people's imaginations for so long, and why in the aftermath of their collapse there is so much carnage, with surviving nations tending to be thoroughly dysfunctional. Hey-ho, there's something for another post!