A Sea of Troubles.

What with looking after Fiona, with her broken collar-bone, doing the work that she usually does as well as trying to keep my own projects going, I have been working harder than I have done for a long time. Like so many people, according to what one hears, I am sick of following the twists and turns of British politics - it takes too much time and intellectual effort. Most of us would like to live our lives 'above politics', like the Queen. The royal example however is not good, and a Head of State that cannot call conflicting parties back to dialogue is of no use. The fact of the matter is that politics have a profound effect on the lives of everyone, and it's worse it's going to get; they are an essential dimension of our lives, and while most spirituality directs our minds beyond them, the Lord's prayer kicks off with what is surely a political statement - 'thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth....', even if at the same time that Kingdom is 'not of this world'.

     The trouble starts where politics descends into a mere power struggle, as it always tends to do on account of the prevalent narcissism of the human race. Why should we be bothered with that? Well, do we want to be slaves? The life-blood of real democracy is the sharing of both power and responsibility, and resolving conflict through dialogue and rational argument; it begins and ends with the sincere quest for truth and justice. What then can one say to power when it becomes the mere expression of will to dominate and manipulate? Which is about where the present British Government evidently stands - and this the first occasion I have had to say this in my lifetime. 

     No longer even truly rooted in the political tradition from which it sprang, or even in the collective mind of its boot-licking members, it is being driven by a shadowy and ruthless unelected individual and clique, who even have the previously bumbling and ineffective Prime Minister in hand - not that he has been elected to that office either. They really seem to believe that redemption can only come by way of disruption and indeed chaos. Whatever happened to 'the party of business'? One day it will all make a good film - not yet though, for it is actually happening now, though one has to pinch oneself to realise it.

     Yet such a will-to-power cannot get anywhere unless it taps in to some deep and widespread condition in the minds of its victims. In the backgoround of the present drama is deep and widespread anxiety about the way the world is going, and this is an intolerable and paralysing condition. It is so much easier to take refuge in the past than to set out against the 'sea of troubles' that confront us now. How nice the 1950s of their childhood appear to so many old voters now. England was full to the brim with complacent self-satisfaction, and a rosy future beckoned with all the goodies of technology. Pull up the drawbridge; let us get back to the good old days! The odd gent with a posh accent, a plausible way of talking, a smattering of learning and preferably a double-breasted suit is all to the good. 

     But what's in it for the men with deep pockets behind it all? Oh for the days when one could be a real capitalist, with none of your damn social and environmental responsibility! The world will go to Hell if it must - but in the meantime let those of us enjoy it who are smart enough to do so! And if swathes of industry is destroyed, along with the livelihoods that depend on it, well the little people can just get on their bikes. Not, however, to saner parts of Europe! But the real rich of this world have better ways of making money than actual production, and they don't even know what real patriotism is, in the sense of putting one's country before one's own interests.

     Clearly all this must be combatted, but what can we poor powerless people do about it? Well, we can start by listening to people who know what they are talking about and recognising the facts of a world so very much more inter-connected than it was even in the 1950s. We can insist that politicians are called back from mere power struggling to facts and to real dialogue about them. No grand and specious merely national aspirations can possibly deliver the goodies we all desire in the line of the quality of life. 

     The way ahead lies not in less inter-connectedness, but in much more of it, deeper and richer. We must not give way to anxiety, paralysis and laziness, along with the preference not to think or talk about how we can possibly get there! Discussion, meetings, strikes, demos, online efforts, they all have their place, but we must not forget to listen to those with whom we disagree and must insist on non-violence; non-communication is always the prelude to violence, so when people will not genuinely talk to to each other, watch out! There is plenty that can be done, - get out there, you young people, and do it - it's your future that is at stake!

Ut Migraturus Habita

The summer proper ended on Sherkin on the evening my Fiona fell off the style and broke her collarbone. It was one of those perfect evenings, August 11th; then the old west wind set in, cool and pleasant, but blustery and with the odd bit of rain. In addition to working away at finishing the West Room, I now find myself nurse, cook and housekeeper; it is my privilege and pleasure to be looking after herself for a change, but a shock to the system nonetheless, and a reminder of our mortality.

     When Ken Thompson came to visit us in our cottage in Somerset nearly 50 years ago, he spent most of his time chiselling Migraturus Habita across the large stone chimney breast. It means something like 'Live as one about to migrate'. I suppose he had the final journey in mind, but perhaps he didn't want us to get too comfortable where we were either, though I doubt if he foresaw that we would up and go to live in Ireland. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that we would have done so without his influence. I remain most grateful, even more so lately. I always felt that I was banging my head against a brick wall in Blighty. Nowadays, bad and all as it is to be watching the B saga from here, it would simply do my head in to be so arbitrarily deprived of my European citizenship. Had we stayed, I would not rate the chances of either my sanity or my marriage being in one piece very highly.

     Ireland is far from perfect, but especially here in the West I find myself on firmer ground. Our island home is better still.  Then there is the sea, which prevents us from getting too

Landfall, Galicia, 2007.

introverted. Over the horizon as we look out to the south is Santiago de Campostella. I find that very many people these days do not even know where the South is, but you may be sure the dear little swallows do, as they head that way so bravely; and just as surely, there is a sixth sense in every human being that tells them of that City over the far horizon which they yearn for even if they do not realise it. In fact every human society worth the name is like a ship's crew, bent towards that goal; otherwise they will soon be nothing but a mere brawling rabble, and their destination will be wreck upon the rocks.

     The inescapable life-task of a person, however dimly perceived, is to understand that far city more clearly and to relate to it more nearly, which necessarily entails sharing this perception with our fellow crewmen. Like any image of God and His Kingdom, such perception is necessarily very partial; but we have to try to share it with everyone whom we encounter, while respecting any concept they may have which enables them to steer a good course in more or less the right direction. As a Catholic I may believe that the Church actually holds the coordinates, though even this fact can bring on a kind of pride that takes us astray. As one approaches the Port of God's City, the entrance is fraught with danger; yet we have available to us the Supreme Pilot, who will not let us down. The wise ship's captain will trust this pilot, listening for his commands!

     Yet a funny thing happens, in any ship that is under good command, the crew working well together as they sail toward that far haven - which actually as it were comes to meet them, materialises even in their midst. The good ship already partakes of the life of her distant destination. That destination turns out to be something more than a city - it takes on the form of a person with a face. We may become caught up in the dynamic of the Trinity. God is both in His far, transcendent city, and in the here and now. But meanwhile vessels tack about with all kinds of strange ideas born of the longing deep within the breasts of their companies.

     I used to think that the 'Roman' bit added to the term 'Catholic' was rather an unfortunate prefix born of the need to distinguish us English Roman Catholics from our 'Anglo-Catholic' brethren, with their insistence on the outstanding classic English formulation of  'having one's cake and eating it'. Now I think it is much more valid and important, for it is this little prefix Roman that actually and genuinely situates the universal religion in history and the here and now. If we cannot identify it so, in our story and our human relationships, Heaven becomes pie-in-the-sky, hardly to be preferred to the fantasies of, for example, some workers' future utopia, a consumerist cornucopia or a myth of National Destiny.

     Messrs Johnson and Farrage are correct in identifying the EU with its Roman predecessor; there is a noble aspiration there that keeps cropping up in different forms. It's such a pity that they, and so much of contemporary culture, cannot appreciate the wonderful formula whereby the essential and positive spirit was in principle long since detached from the will of proud men, and remains available to form the basis of a new world. It is interesting that even the British Empire, having turned its back on 'the ghost of the Roman Empire', nonetheless continued to educate in the Latin language, to use it for mottos and scientific terms, and even to copy classical architecture. The awareness lingered that it remained embedded in the foundations of our later buildings. It was only in the death throes of the British Empire that the requirement to study Latin was dropped, if one was to study in the leading universities; it hardly helped in my working life that I was just in time to learn it, but I am grateful now.

    Our blessed Saviour drew a red line in history - no more narcissistic rulers setting themselves up as god-kings-emperors. However, they keep trying. Prophets who stand up to them and criticise them are being jettisoned again, though in this part of the world at least, they generally keep their heads on their shoulders nowadays. But must ships be actually wrecked before they are found to have been right? It's rather like watching drunken alcoholics going on a bender - how bad does it have to get before they pull themselves together? Or will they even manage to do so at all?                                                         

     

     

The Prize.

A world at peace with itself, mankind working in harmony

with nature. No more greedy individuals seeking to manipulate and dominate the rest of the world, everyone taking their share of ownership and along with it, responsibility, within renewed families, communities and indeed nations. Humanity cured at last of narcissism, orientated rather to the common good, to beauty, truth and justice. This prize, this dream is as old as human consciousness. Usually it has remained but a dream, more in the line of a fantasy than a firm vision upon which most people act. The difference today is that there are only a few short years left for us to actually make it happen, the alternative being unthinkable.

      Which presents us with the gravest of problems. Because this alternative is so unthinkable, we desperately avoid admitting that it is what we are currently heading for; added to which contemporary culture finds it very difficult to get a serious and practical handle on notions like 'the common good' and any vision that might sustain them. We are now way ahead of Narcissus, and we don't have to gaze into a pool to reassure ourselves with looking at our glorious reflection therein, to polish our 'image'; nowadays our mobile phone will do. Mighty corporations, with Facebook at their head, feed our narcissistic dreams. Small wonder that we find ourselves with narcissistic leaders. The cult of the individual, celebrating autonomy above all, has brought us to the very brink of massive self-destruction, with deranged individuals already and increasingly acting this out.

     This is the end of the road for 'progressive liberalism', now hopelessly compromised by the neo version. I do not mean for believing in human progress and freedom, but for the mistaken idea that these can be achieved by stripping humanity of all context and reference points beyond those dictated by the cult of individual autonomy, the markets and the survival of the fittest. As liberalism became neo-. we have watched on as progress came to mean deconstruction, a zero-sum game, till madmen gun down their sisters and brothers for no reason but the anti-logic of evil, while, by no coincidence, we find ourselves increasingly subject to leaders who take that narcissistic cult to levels beyond the constraints of your normal, sane and decent person. The results are coming in. For instance the Ducky, who set out 'to make America Great Again', has much diminished the standing of his country in the eyes of sane people all over the world. As for what Mr Johnson bids fair to do to his country.... 

     Our dilemma may be becoming more acute by the day, but such observations as the above are very far from being new. Sometimes they have sent people crazy, ricocheting off into other forms of madness, be they of the left or right wing variety. One institution, one tradition, has managed to keep more or less a sane balance down two millenia. I refer to the Roman Catholic Church. Yet trying to extract a viable political stance from it remains problematic. I had a go in the 1990s, as a parliamentary candidate for the Christian Solidarity Party here in Ireland. Among other things, I got myself called a fascist by some for my trouble. Indeed one finds that the very mention by Catholics of the term 'the common good' sometimes provokes this reaction, from people who of course have not bothered to look up the term in, for example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which begins by stating 'First, the common good presupposes respect for the person as such.' Such is the difficulty that contemporary culture tends to have with what the Catechism calls 'the social nature of man'! We are however in the process of getting a crash course in this, a lesson which will just get tougher and tougher until we take it aboard. Evidently the last such course, at the time of World War II, was suffered and taken much more to heart by our continental neighbours than by the English.

      Uppermost in the minds of the founders of the European movement, many of whom were influenced by the social teaching of the Catholic Church, was the absolute desire that such a calamity should never be repeated.  They proceeded on the basis of mutual respect and negociation between the parties, which of course was the opposite of the way the British Empire was founded. Meanwhile our Brexiteers evidently care to ignore the stupendous fact that the European nations have been living an unprecedented degree of peace and prosperity since it was initiated. Mr Johnson of course pays lip service to this unity, and indeed, at least in that iteration of himself which produced a tv series and book entitled 'The Dream of Rome'  back in 2006, is fascinated by it and its historical pedigree. One reviewer states:'his points on the free movement of goods throughout the Roman Empire contributing to a sense of commonality of identity among Europeans are well taken'. 

     Meanwhile nowadays Mr Johnson even trashes its fruit of peace in Ireland; however, I shall grudge him a little credit for at least taking an interest in the relationship between Ancient Rome and the EU.  We seem to have reached very different conclusions, yet even from an Irish perspective, one may well ask whether it is desirable, having recently (more or less) escaped one empire, to get involved in another? How are we to disentangle the common threads, and the radical difference, between the Roman and the British Empires and the European Union?

     I came across this very amusing transcript* of a conversation between Mr Johnson when he was researching that book of his and an archaeology professor, Andrea Caradini, who was excavating a Roman Imperial Palace at the time:- Professor Caradini: "You would like to be an emperor, I can see it in your eyes." Johnson: "I can see a worse fate." The very essence of empire after all is top-down rule - command and control by the great Emperor. Is this the kind of rule that Prime Minister Johnson aspires to? There are signs that this is so, in the way pioneered by his friend The Ducky, which nickname, I would remind you, is my way of rendering Mussolini's title of Il Duce, the Leader or Fuhrer or whatever, into Donald Duckese. 

     Perhaps in its dependence on love of the Supreme Leader, we may actually also divine a positive side to the concept of empire, as it came down to us with so much influence from the Roman version, pace Asterix. A Protestant such as Thomas Hobbes found it aposite to dismiss it as a 'heathen empire' and along with it the 'kingdom of darkness' that was the papacy as 'the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof'. Not that he eschewed the concept of empire itself - in his dismal and materialistic world view, 'The condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone', so the only alternative to life being 'nasty, brutish and short' was a strong monarch. 'To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.' How could this conceivably describe an empire that was supposed to be not 'heathen' and the opposite of 'a kingdom of darkness'?

     Such thinking had a dire but formative effect upon the British Empire. Thomas Hobbes and Mr Johnson would seem to have this in common: they lack a genuine, interiorised sense of good and bad, right and wrong, and are good at standing words on their heads. The one seems to have studied  well the other! But that ghost of which Hobbes speaks in fact performed the amazing feat of disentangling from any narcissistic ruler the personal love, upon which any transcendent commitment of our fealty, and hence sense of truth and good, must depend, if it is not to diminish us and destroy our integrity and freedom as a an individual person. Instead supreme fealty was invested in the Lord Jesus Christ. Did this entail the end of the Roman Empire? Maybe; yet it left that vital positive force for love of our fellows and the whole world available to future societies, and to ourselves in the here and now. The history of Europe since could be seen as one attempt after another to embody it. Now it is looking as if we shall not last much longer unless we make a better fist of it!

     
*https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197612/

Time to Call Out British Imperial Nostalgia...and Unite Ireland.

Back in Ireland, a glorious summer is in full bloom. When summer actually ends is of course one of quite a few points of disagreement between the Irish and the English, the former teaching their children that August 1st is when autumn begins, while the latter insist on September 1st. The truth is no doubt somewhere in between, but already here on Sherkin there are occasional hints of the forthcoming decline. 

     Why must the blissful days, bedecked with a riot of colour, pass so swiftly? How are we to cope with such apparent disillusion, such reminders of mortality? Some would rather push the knowledge that such is our condition from their minds, pretending that the idyll will go on forever. Anyone who refers to the facts of the matter is liable to be dismissed as a gloomy pessimist and thrust aside. Yet the same 'pessimists' may be storing their minds with happy memories, as a squirrel stores nuts against the onset of winter. Their realisation of the transient and fragile nature of the blooms will turn to treasuring their fruits. How I shall enjoy recalling my delicious swims of the last few days, when once again I look on a stormy, foam-flecked Horseshoe Bay! Meanwhile 'optimists' merely gambol on to their demise.

      What can one say to these gung-ho types who berate the wise ones for their 'pessimism'? They go around saying 'don't listen to them - summer will last forever! In fact it will get better and better. All you have to do is believe in it -  believe in me in fact, I will show you the way! I will show you how to get every goodie you might desire, and with minimal effort too! Ignore that lot with their nit-picking little brains, they're wasting time worrying about the details while they could be enjoying themselves, the miseries! What are facts anyway? Down with anyone who will not follow us - all we have to do is to stay united in the true belief!

     By now you will have worked out where this is going. The peculiar kind of spurious optimism pedalled by the new prime minister of the United Kingdom is pure poison. The best thing we can do for our friends in England is to help puncture the balloon of illusion as soon as possible. But it won't be easy. This particular balloon has been around long enough to have developed a pretty thick skin. 

      Meanwhile we in Ireland may as well turn to our own project of reuniting this little island as best we can, and work with Scotland to keep the aim of a united, peaceful and genuinely prosperous Europe on track in these islands. After all it's not as if a majority in their famous United Kingdom support either Brexit or Mr Johnson. We must help them maintain belief in real progress, based on hard work and the continuous effort to achieve consensus through dialogue, rather than the establishment of a spurious semblance of unity through the age-old methods of the bully demanding credence for his false promises. It is an unfortunate fact that with their 'winner takes all' version of politics, having tended to be so pleased with themselves, they failed to move on to a more mature form of democracy in the 20th century.  

     Mr Johnson has a real talent for standing things on their head. Unused to the continental style of politics, which on account of proportional representation calls for the establishment of consensus through dialogue and communication, he charges in with his rejection of the work of the last three years, not to mention the last fifty years in Europe, and instead insists on the acceptance of his totally unreasonable demands. What's more, he sadly bids fare to caricature and indeed endorse so much of the world's distrust of England. Even his friend the Ducky, though less erudite, is also less duplicitous; we know where he stands, as he doesn't even try to, for instance, paint himself green. But to say the least, the two chums bid fare to present Ireland with some very difficult choices. It would be so much better if we could face them with our integrity restored and our country united.

      It's going to be difficult, but maybe there is a bright side - it might finally force people to recognise that the border is a gerrymander, and the whole huge effort of the plantation was British imperialism at its worst, aimed at the heart of the Irish nation, of which the Gaelic population of Ulster under the ONeills was the very backbone. It is most important that such facts be not abandoned to men of violence. At this stage, especially since we are fortunate enough not to have found ourselves in their line of fire lately, I find it possible to be quite fond of those DUP types with their brittle edginess and their 'we won't staand furrit'; in fact I also think that we would all be happier if we finally let bygones be bygones and settled down to making a success of Ireland. 

     However, this would require the sins of the past to be finally called out; and yet there can't be much joy in being ruled by those Englishmen who, for all their talk of 'the precious union', in fact know very little about Ireland north or south and frankly care less. It will require us in the South to be rather less lazy about the North, and do all we can to make the protestant population feel welcome and wanted here. If they really don't want to come aboard, well there should be a resettlement scheme for them to go to Blighty. But an independent Scotland might help too. 

     It is quite odd how it all chimes with my own little effort to promote a reorientation of our culture to the Gannetsway, from Scotland to the south of Spain, and what's more, how in some rather mysterious way this reorientation chimes with that other one, one might almost call it a migration, from the fossil fuel age to a sustainabile one. When western culture ceased to see God in beauty and in all the marvels of the universe, to almost effortlessly perceive the amazing intelligence and love that fashions and sustains it, and to see the physical not in the sacramental way as an outward sign of inner grace but rather merely there for us to exploit, the parameters of our present predicament were laid down. A return to its catholic past will be necessary for us to get back on track for the 'new heaven and new earth' where true hope lies. 

On the Gannetsway in Co.Clare.