St Brigid and the Radical Centre.

It is St Brigid's day in the evening,- a sodden Sherkin lies under a heavy pall of cloud and rain, the sullen Atlantic heaves grumpily beyond a washed out and deserted Horseshoe Bay,- yet the sun is getting stronger, whether we can see it or not. In the garden the daffodils are pushing up strongly and the bushes are abudding. Some day very soon, the sun will come out, - and I shall be tipped into the Spring work..., 

     Meanwhile, this is the kind of evening when we must live on our dreams. Not the airy optimism  of a Boris Johnson promising his country that Brexit would bring 'a bright new future', or the Ducky talking up his disastrous presidency while promising 'the best is yet to come'; nor even the liberal version of airy optimism, which seems to imagine that the 'deplorables' will just go away, for in the words of the Guardian columnist and Berkeley professor Robert Reich,  'There’s no “center” between the reality-based world and theirs.... There is no middle ground between lies and facts. There is no halfway point between civil discourse and violence. There is no midrange between democracy and fascism.'  In spite of all the Ducky has said, does Reich imagine that all those millions of his supporters are about to 'see the light' or that they will simply be cowed into submission?

     'Speaking truth means responding to the world as it is and denouncing the poisonous deceptions engulfing the right.... It means protecting and advancing science....' avers Professor Reich. Granted that there are times when such people simply have to be faced down, nonetheless Professor Reich is on dodgy ground, for the whole difficulty and challenge of intellectual life is precisely that lies and facts do not in reality fall into such tidy distinction as he imagines, and violence may indeed lurk beneath the rhetoric of democracy. One might have expected anyone who witnessed the wars in Vietnam and Iraq to have realised that, and how about the French Revolution, that might be said to have put the democratic bandwagon on the road? Note also the element of 'scientific fundamentalism' at work here, which is frequently to be found on the political left. in spite of the apotheosis that it reached in Marxism and communist Russia. 

     Also in the Guardian, we find Dr Charlotte Summers of Cambridge University singing from a not dissimilar hymn sheet. In an article urging us to trust 'the Covid vaccine'*, she informs us that 'As a scientist, I firmly believe that scientific progress will provide the exit strategy from this pandemic.'  Sorry, but such words are far from reassuring to the likes of me. I thought Science was supposed to be strictly a matter of what one definitely can see, of evidence rather than of faith? Let it not so dazzle us that we have no perception of the much greater realities that we cannot see. She is welcome to her 'firm belief', but it's a pity she wouldn't take a leaf out of St Paul's book - 'If we could see God, we would not need to believe in Him'. 

     Or out of Pope Francis' for that matter, who addressed theologians at the Gregorian Pontifical University (10th April 2014) in these terms:- 'Philosophy and theology enable us to acquire the convictions that structure and strengthen intelligence and enlighten will; but all this is fruitful only if it is done with an open mind and on one’s knees. The theologian who is satisfied with his complete and conclusive thought is mediocre. A good theologian and philosopher is open, or incomplete in thought, always open to the ‘maius’ of God and of the truth, always in development. And the theologian who does not pray or does not adore God ends up sinking into the most repugnant narcissism.' 

     So here is the nubb of it,- theology remains the queen of sciences, and when scientists do not adore God, they become very dangerous. To an extent, one might say that if they only just respect Nature, it is a start, though far from adequate, as one can see by looking at the state of the world after a couple of centuries of 'scientific progress'.  Science may indeed be fine; the hard evidence, the technology and the insights that it can provide are sometimes invaluable, but elevated into a god, it is highly dangerous. 

     Thank God there are a few politicians about nowadays who understand this. Joe Biden seems to be there, and Ursula von der Leyen, who under attack for the cautious approach she and the European Commission are taking to the vaccine roll-out, said - "I remind you that a vaccine is the injection of an active biological substance into a healthy body. We are talking about mass vaccination here, it is a gigantic responsibility.” 

     Hereabouts is the answer to Professor Reich's question, -'How can Biden possibly be a “centrist” in this new political world?' This is how,- 'with an open mind and on his knees', and this is the way we should all be proceeding, and the only way to achieve steady conviction and direction. Are we really in 'a new political world' anyway? Only in that the exceptional period that the Americans term as 'normalcy' does seem to have come to an end. Pandemics, demagogues, along with disasters of all kinds, have frequently strutted the world stage, only somehow for most of my lifetime, we managed to think of them as relegated to other God-forsaken parts of the world or to the past, all because of that wonderful thing called Progress. 

     It has to be admitted that it was a fun time for those fortunate enough to be in a position to enjoy it. I myself was delighted to get the chance to swan around in sailing boats out of it now and again, but we must admit that it boiled down too often to complacent consumerism and  insouciant hedonism, which did not make people very happy. Though we knew about climate change and the ruination of so many natural systems for years, we blithely carried on living beyond the Planet's means as if it were someone else's problem. No more!

     This is the context in which we must find a way forward, though I do not imagine it will be achieved by any system of 'command and control', which will  no doubt be attempted, for it will not be easy. Governments need to work by identifying, encouraging and supporting the initiatives of those trying to develop constructive ways of coping. 

     If we simply depend on vaccines to 'get back to normal', we shall be sadly disappointed! Yet coping mechanisms like online working and living in bubbles are very likely pointing the way ahead. Let us hope that with some great leaders in place from the Radical Centre for a change, and stripped of much illusion by the pandemic, we will rise to the challenge of finding sustainable ways of living, which by the way, is the only real way to put horrors such as abortion behind us.

     So I come back to the kind of dreams that I have been dreaming for about half a century, of a new flowering of sustainable and prayerful community living, in respect of and in harmony with Nature, in an ancient tradition that in this part of the world goes back to the likes of St Brigid and St Columcille.  I was dreaming a lot about it even in the wheel-houses of little fishing boats, such as the Eiscir Riada here, second from the left, tied alongside Teelin pier in the early '80s. 

photo by Bill Vial.

     I was trying to find a way of living from the sea that would endure, but it wasn't to be. Those fancy Danish nets of mine on the pier caught plenty of cod, though the Rosses men who stuck with lead rope  rather than rings on the soles of the nets did better again. They got through more gear, and faster, but then they mostly had somewhat bigger boats, and were also used to fishing miles of salmon and crawfish nets. We all had to chase from one boom to the next, till booms became very hard to come by!

     Some day I hope, probably when I am gone, there will once again be thriving communities along the West coast of Europe, with fishing as a staple. They will have to carefully work together, in a spirit of husbandry rather than competition, for which online connectivity will be vital. I imagine they will reinvent sail power, while they will use electric motors powered mainly by hydrogen fuel cells. They will partly produce their own hydrogen on board, but ashore it will be produced  using wind and sun, along with all kinds of food, by small farmers who will sell it in much the same way as they used to sell churns of milk. The distribution of hydrogen will be big business for vessels large and small, using both sails and hydrogen to get around....            

*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/03/the-covid-vaccine-trust-safe-works-political