So the Bill Is Coming In!

What an autumn we are facing! Especially here in Ireland, as we find ourselves once more in severe danger of being the cockpit of Europe. All the good political progress of the last thirty years is in danger of being undone. With excessive complacency, we assumed things would only get better. Now Brexit is bringing to light multiple fractures in the culture that I grew up in, which transcend Brexit itself. 

     It has long been commonplace to regard England as a particularly class-ridden society, albeit one that is adept in putting a respectable face on the now drastically aggravated chasm between rich and poor. Less noticed are related fissures between, for instance, the immediate physical facts of life and those who live their lives largely concerned with them on one hand, and the abstract world that the well-to-do mainly inhabit on the other, which is dominated by wealth rather than mere money.

      While feeling oppressed as I grew up by the class divisions that infest England, I was threatened with complete paralysis or breakdown as a young man by the fractures in my own personality, notably between that abstract world in which I was largely educated and the physical one which both enchanted and exasperated  me. Sailing the sea, both as a yachtsman and a fisherman, greatly helped me to establish some kind of sane balance between them. So it is that I only allowed this blog somewhat reluctantly to be drawn into the Brexit maelstrom, and then have tried to always relate my comments to the physical circumstances of my life. I hope my views are not unduly influenced by the fact that my boat and sailing days are under severe threat!

     The maelstrom is certainly real enough, and it is about a

lot more than Brexit. It is as real as the autumn gales here in Sherkin, sweeping destructively over this garden with which Fiona and I try to make a little prayer together each year, and likely to bring a similar wave of destruction to this country of Ireland.  It is true that the declines of our plants go hand in hand with their fruition, and we may enjoy the fruits for the rest of winter before the cycle starts again; yet the decline remains painful and to be combatted, like old age.  

     It is likely that Ireland would be even more grievously affected by a 'no deal' Brexit than England. Aside from the estimated 8% reduction in GDP, amidst all the disruption of so many vital supply chains, the border is a political and cultural fault line with unparalled potential for nasty eruptions. Anyway it is an outstanding reality of the modern world that no one 'people' can shape their course without impact on their neighbours, any more than a skipper can sail on his way without paying attention to other sea-farers.

     To most Brexiteers no doubt this image does not stand. For the wealthy minority that fancy themselves as world-treading buccaneers, evidently it would depend what you mean by 'paying attention'; no doubt a predator pays attention to its prey. But one suspects that the greater majority of Brexiteers would prefer the image of retreating into their island fortress and pulling up the drawbridge. If they get their way, it will be interesting to see how the tension between them plays out; amazing as is the ability of the present British Prime Minister to pull the wool over people's eyes, I find it very hard to believe he and his spurious invocations of 'the people' can prosper for long.

     Unlike Clement Attlee, father of the NHS, the buccaneers of this world do not of course really respect their crews; they regard them as so dim that they can find a way to manipulate them. They count on their ability to play on their susceptibilities, fears and passions. Such truths are becoming clearer by the day. A healthy ship's company will indeed have good empathy between the officers and crew, with commonly accepted goals, and moreover it will be accepted that the officers are necessary because while the crew actually mans the ship, someone has to be guiding it. This calls for a kind of effort distinct from actually doing the hard work. All sorts of information has to be gathered from far and wide before important decisions are made. It would of course be madness to expect the crew to make those decisions. 

     This is all the more true with the ship of state, and is why the likes of Clement Attlee was so emphatically opposed to the 'use of a device so alien to all our traditions and so beloved of fascist dictators'. It needs to be recognised that referenda have no place in a parliamentary democracy. We may furthermore ring our hands at the failure of our democratic officers to bear their responsibilities, but there are other fashionable notions that will have to be firmly renounced if things are to change for the better.

       Good leaders need to be somehow schooled in an holistic way. The posh schools may have largely failed to educate people beyond their personal and class egoism, but the alternatives are mainly geared to the labour market, as are the so-called universities. Specialization may be good for the honing of particular skills, but if a person's horizon is limited to one field of vision, they cannot make good officers; and yes, some kind of an officer class is necessary in the real world, where people have to fight battles and vile weather, while it should of course be open to recruitment from the lower deck. It will be dangerous if the officers lose touch with the crew, where anyway some individuals are likely to be much wider awake than the officers. I consider that the Catholic Church has been noticeably successful in this respect, as one would hope since the Most High founded her in the flesh of a humble man, and in spite of her many abuses of power. There are very many examples of humble men achieving the highest offices, including that of Pope.

     A common sense of purpose is essential in overcoming the alienation of the crew. Here we come to perhaps the most important unfashionable realisation:- religion is not a voluntary extra. It is indeed the ground of humanity's most spectacular successes and failures alike, rather like gardens, but if you try to write it out of the picture, it will only pop up in another form. Surely it is the void left by the decline of the languages of meaning with which people grew up that drives contemporary mayhem and madness. However, spilt religion is no substitute for the real thing. The sad fact is that the British officer class have not succeeded in realising, let alone communicating, a common sense of purpose, to replace the British Empire and inspire commitment to the European Project, along with, let us say, the transition to a just and sustainable society. Why, according to the Tory goddess Mrs Thatcher, 'there is no such thing as society'!

     You can only sustain such illusions when things are going reasonably well. They tried to fall back on a mere promise of greater individual wealth and security to motivate the crew, but clearly this does not stand up when it comes to addressing our present predicaments. Mr Nigel Farage has it that 'the father of Brexit' was King Henry VIII. I maintain that to really find a good way forward, the English need to start by recognising that the two related events, of King Hal's Reformation and the Referendum to leave the EU, were frankly mistaken; and even if you say there was something inevitable about them and all that happened in between, meaning in particular the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution, these projects were severely and radically flawed too.  Does it really take the Irish to point this out? The bill is coming in now! 

     

     

The Middle Way

There is a little strip of gravelly sand between rocks down on the shore in front of our cottage. It faces south and when the tide is out provides a glorious suntrap, on the very rare occasions when I get to take advantage of it. But even then I am conscious of Spain across that sea to the south; I also find myself frequently conscious of St Michael's Way, the mysterious line that originates on Mount Carmel where the prophet Elijah called down the fire of Yahweh, flies to the Northwest by Delphi in Greece, and on by way of various special sites associated with St Michael, up through Italy and France to Mont St Michel, Mount St Michael in Cornwall and finally by Sherkin to Skellig Michael in Kerry.

     Paris and London, Rome and Jerusalem, probably most great cities are inclined sometimes at least to think of themselves as the Centre of the World. Since I conceive of the world in dynamic rather than static terms, I consider an arrow to be a more appropriate image than a point, if one is to seriously envisage this Centre; and a Centre of some kind there needs to be, if we are to conceive of some kind of united humanity. However the transition from a static concept of 'The Central' to a dynamic one is perhaps the essence of our contemporary crisis, because such 'Central' images that we have inherited tend to be stuck in a 'static' mind-set. In this context, and it may be nothing but my fanciful conceit, I have found myself conceiving of this St Michael's Line as a powerful physical emanation of the flaming central arrow of human consciousness, from the Holy Land by way of Greece and Rome and on to where the summer sun sets on old Europe.

     I say that the old business of a Centre that can 'hold', and which our Irish poet Yeats averred not to be holding, has tended to assume a somewhat anaemic complexion too much of the time because our understanding of it is still moored in the static concepts of the past. 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity'. With English politics stubbornly installed at the forefront of our minds these days, it seems more critical than ever that the political Centre pulls itself together and finally finds its voice. There has to be more to it than the ususal 'bread and butter' stuff, but here is a voice that dare not speak its name, for fear of being called arrogant, imperialistic etc. It is however the one and only voice that can genuinely rise to the challenges, for instance, of climate change, of keeping the world safe from nuclear weapons, of developing the stable economic and social conditions necessary for humanity to flourish, of motivating us to overcome our differences and do the great deeds that we are at last being forced to recognise as essential to humanity's very survival.

     Even as I lie on that strip of sand, feet to the South, I am vaguely aware of America over to my right, and China away to my left. America may be fixated on the individual, and China on the collective, while of course in fact neither can do without the other and so they more or less cancel each other out and neither of them provide a satisfactory narrative of what human life is about. We may wonder at them and their great achievements, but I for one cannot admire either of them as a polis or wish us in Europe to emulate their societies. The question is, how can our tired old Europe hold the balance; and so we come back to this business of the Centre. I will no doubt stand accused of a blinkered arrogance, but  I do believe that it's as true nowadays as when Teilhard de Chardin said it that Europe cannot escape the responsibility of bearing the spearhead of human consciousness; the question is, how do we recover the strength and dynamism necessary to do so?

     Most of the time the wisest of us are only very faintly aware of all that is involved in sustaining our individual existance. We delude ourselves if we think politicians or anyone else is really capable of being in control; this perhaps is the reason why intelligent and balanced people have a tendency not to take politics seriously and to consider politicians most likely to be dodgy chancers with delusions of grandeur. Meanwhile we can find ourselves assuming that 'the Centre' is a boring place where everyone is trying to see everyone else's point of view and getting nothing done; full of intellectual, wishy-washy types, 'losers' as the Ducky would call them. So it is exciting to see in London politicians of the Centre showing real conviction lately and doing bold things. For myself, I cannot even vote for them, but they are making a difference even for us here in Sherkin; I would like to send them my good wishes and my prayers.