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/