Living in Bubbles?

It is one of the major thrills of sailing, denied to those who simply start their engine when the wind gets slack, to be in a becalmed boat when a gentle breeze picks up, and the trail of bubbles reappears along the side. One of  my best childhood memories is of peering over the side of a small sailing boat, down into the water gently rippling by, and at a little trail of bubbles appearing beside the bow and being left behind in the wake. Each bubble has its own unique integrity, different from any other, apparently sufficient unto itself; and yet they form a trail, a string, a chain; together they live in the wake until they fade and pop.

Whale-watching in 2005

     Present circumstances are unfortunately just right for the mentality of those who would rather prefer the image of a chain to that of a trail. They get nervous about people who are outside of the box that they are supposed to be in; it is worse when they get to don some kind of uniform, worse still when they wield real political power. How distressing and daft are the stories in the news of people who have crossed oceans in a small boat, only to be told somewhere on arrival that they cannot land!

     You may describe it as a bubble or box, but living in a boat is indeed a bit like living in one. "Isn't it very claustrophobic, shut up in a boat in the ocean!" said one of my adult grandchildren. "But it's all about being in the ocean, and nothing could be less claustrophobic!" I replied. Still, one is couped up in the boat, and moreover, however reluctant one may become to arrive, one does not really belong in the ocean, and we do have to have a destination, or else we are merely adrift until we pop; meanwhile, one needs to understand the sea and the sky, as well as being well organised aboard; our lives are inevitably all part of some system. If we recognised this, we may be able to drop the talk of living in 'bubbles', and think of ourselves as each sailing our own boat, even as we follow the Golden String*? Then again, having just been out in the garden trying to defend my broad beans from the present nasty summer gale, I might think about 'pods' or 'bunches'.

     Anyway, I would like to think that there are plenty of people out there who have been managing to use this extraordinary time of lockdown to consider what they are at and where they are going, and at the same time, where we are. At such times as when we are lucky enough to be relatively free of the usual struggle for survival, we have extra time to examine the framework, structure and purpose of our lives; all too rare an occurrence, it has to be said! 

     This cannot be merely an individual matter; yet we are all too inclined to fall back on ready-made answers, the familiar left or right wing formulae, tribalisms of one kind or another. I would not wish to deprive them of all validity, but it is most important to do some thinking for oneself now and again, and examine our habitual reactions. We must at least seek to understand where the other bunches are coming from, and as Robbie Burns had it, 'to see ourselves as others see us!' As a sailing boat makes progress by virtue of the opposing pressure of wind and water, so a person of catholic disposition makes progress by listening to all sides of an argument, even when disagreeing with them. It has been called 'loving our enemies'.

     Spells of peace and quiet in isolation, quietening the clamour both within and without, are necessary for us to dispose outselves to listen and to hear, dare I say, to pray? We cease to drift as we begin to feel the pressure of the wind, indeed, the Spirit. The land that we are aiming for appears in the empty ocean.... But all too soon, we find ourselves back to trouble and strife!

      In this world, we rarely find ourselves in the blessed zone of equilibrium and sufficiency. In terms of wealth, there is genereally one set of problems 'below' this zone, and another 'above' it. It's the same with the wind for a sailor. In the big picture, having too much money is surely rather like having too much wind, and believe it or not, having too little wind can be every bit as bad as too little money, especially if the sea is disturbed by distant turbulence. In Sherkin we have been living a lovely quiet life recently, but one does feel the turbulence from afar.

     It seems that until lately, the program was relatively simple; that pandemic had to be reined in so that health services would not be overwhelmed and so on. Now we have to raise our gaze and see where we are going. The situation has been more or less stabilised, but the virus is not going to disappear any time soon. If it is anything like colds and 'flus, it will erupt with increased ferocity next winter. People long to 'get back to normality', but that does not seem possible; there is no going back to where we were.

     Yet neither is it easy to imagine how life will work with this virus around. 'Social distancing' seems highly problematic. Can it be seriously intended that, for instance, there should be no more crowding onto buses and trains? How many jobs simply cannot be undertaken while conscienciously keeping 2 m from other people? Not that people are taking it too seriously, from what I see. It could not possibly be done in a fishing boat, for a start! Do we want our lives micro-managed by technocrats anyway? Maybe they just reckon that if they ask for two metres, they may get one, and at least it will not be their fault if it all goes wrong. 

     Before ever the pandemic came along, mediation between individuals and the state was weakening; its technocrats were closing in on all sides.  It seemed to me that the life I led, and on the whole loved, as a fisherman, was becoming impossible, and surely this is true for all sorts of small farmers, artisans and traders; the people I have tended to regard as 'the salt of the Earth', living as St Paul had it 'peaceful and religious lives', or as the Spaniards have it, 'en paz y en la gracia de Diós!' Not of course that this is the first time that the human race has been confronted with impossible situations, existential crises; only perhaps the global scale of things now and technology give it a new edge.

     Would we really want to go back to where we were? Can we tolerate yet more and more wealth being siphoned off to play financial markets, 'invest' in useless things like gold or bitcoin, or waste on arms, or buy property that the owner has no real need of? Environmental pollution out of hand and threatening to destroy the planet? More and more people forced into precarious living? Less and less real job satisfaction and peace? Even solidly productive people denied the possibility of a place of their own to call home? More and more problems of mental health? The individual more and more isolated, in danger of being crushed? Apparently less and less awareness of the presence of God?

     There very evidently needs to be a massive rebalancing and restructuring on the practical level, where the matters of wealth and land must be in play; but can we expect the states to undertake it? Or supranational organisations? NGOs or individuals? Or all of them together? How can it possibly happen? How about the Universal Church lighting the way? Hmmm, how about starting with the practicalities and seeing if some directions of travel might work? After all, when one has been 'lying to' during a storm or a calm in the ocean, one is inclined to head off on whatever course is easiest according to the wind and the waves, so long as it is generally in the right direction!

     The restructuring will entail much more emphasis on empowering small communities as well as the individuals within them. These are not mutually exclusive, but complementary; and not to be understood as undermining the state or international organisations; rather all will be empowered to be more effective in their proper roles. We are back to the Principle of Subsidiarity, upon which the EU is founded, even if it has a long way to go in practising. Particularly in these coronvirus times, national states are inclined to bite off more than they can chew. In the words of Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno,  'the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties - to the great harm of the State itself.' This is before they get around to trying to repay all the money they are borrowing, perish the thought!

     We all like spending a lot more than paying. A favourite trick of politicians and pundits is to magic the paying bit away, to hive it off on someone else. For responsibility to be taken effectively, it has to be located from the start at an appropriate level. There are indeed some problems that can only be addressed on the continental level, more on the national level, and even more on the local and personal levels; having started on the appropriate level, you then need to get the different levels working together. The new communication technology offers possibilities for making this happen that were unimaginable in the past, but we are up against institutionalised structures that are hard to change. To unpick them, we have to start by addressing the situations of the multitudes trapped in disempowerment, while deprived of the basic ingredients of human well-being and dignity, - food, meaningful work, housing, clean air, access to nature and so on.

     So to get back to bubbles, how about redirecting the billions being currently mopped up by the rich and powerful to financing a new kind of society? I would even say, to  picking up a trail that was departed from in England some 500 years ago, when King Henry VIII despoiled that nation's monasteries in order to follow his favourite pastime of making war on his French, Scots and Irish neighbours and to buy the allegiance of his barons. The subsequent establishment of the illusion that this was all for the people's good and general enlightenment was surely one of the greatest propaganda coups  of all time, even as they loosed a tide of beggars on the world!

     No doubt King Henry found great relief from his inner demons by heading off in splendid style to have a go at the French, but there is plenty of English history written to make out that his wars were all about defending his great Reformation from that nasty Pope in Rome.  Ah well, the great British Empire was on the way, and some people have been living on this myth ever since!

     Some of those monasteries had become too rich and powerful for their own good, but the concept that they engendered, of a society focussed on a community that functioned as the local centre for prayer, art, liturgy, learning, education, production and welfare of all kinds, health care and hospitality, where at least work, accomodation and subsistence in a humane and dignified context was guaranteed for all, seems to me one very well worth revisiting! We have a daily reminder of that ruined legacy, a couple of fields away from our cottage here on Sherkin. It is past time to disestablish the bloated industrial cities and put an end at last to the misery and insecurity that goes with them. I'm still dreaming of bubbles, trails, pods, boats, whatever; however we choose to imagine our future lives, we may surely do well to call that legacy to mind!

*Sherkin Abbey.

     *cf 'The Golden String', by Bede Griffiths.

      

Boring!?

A teenage grand-daughter complains that the Coronavirus is ‘boring’, and please can we stop talking about it? One can readily appreciate her point of view; it must be very tiresome for a youthful social butterfly to be confined to quarters, hearing the same old doom and gloom day after day. Even our youngest daughter, who promptly baled out of her job in Blighty at the beginning of the lock-down and made off home to Ireland, where she is lucky enough to have family with plenty of space, takes the line ‘why should she spoil a great chance for a holiday with her little girls by listening to the same old ghastly news?'

Baltimore Beacon from Sherkin Lighthouse.

But surely it is going to have a huge impact on the world? Can we possibly begin to make any sense of this hugely confusing moment, or begin to see what might lie ahead, and if there is any unlikely chance that we may be able to influence it? As for my dear wife, she invariably finds some job for me whenever I get my head stuck into such little problems. And as for this blog, it started out nearly five years ago as a sailing blog. How did it end up involving all this other stuff, first Brexit and The Ducky, now Coronavirus?

Public concern in the Anglosphere has lurched from blanket coverage of the one mega-story to the other. Now we can see the continuity more and more clearly, and apparently to a quite extraordinary extent in the USA, what with The Ducky shamelessly trying to exploit the frustration of those chaffing at the restrictions of lockdown, as if everybody doesn’t find it difficult.

For any sane society or individual person, obviously it is very difficult to get the right balance between responsibility and prudence with regard to the virus, and ‘opening up’ both their personal lives and that of the economy. For this reason if no other, we need to struggle with the mountain of frequently dodgy information. But then there is evidently a sad need to combat powerful interests who seek political advantage from setting the one against the other, and posing as the champions of freedom. Here again we find the continuity not alone between The Ducky phenomenon and Brexit, but also between them and the present political struggle. It even appears, unbelievably but as only the Americans can manage, the false dichotomy will set the terms of the forthcoming presidential election.

One way or the other, at whatever cost it turns out to be, we shall get through it; but I for one doubt if I shall see a return to my happy, carefree cruising days. Of course, I cannot just blame the pandemic; there was a crisis coming, the dear Anna M, 50 years old and made of wood, was going to need serious money, which I have not got, - a situation which I avoided thinking about as long as I possibly could. Boring? Well yes, and worse; but after all, what was going to happen only spending more and more time in whatever pleasant corners I could find, ‘kicking around waiting to die’ as my father memorably put it at about my own present age!

So come on, the very meaning and direction of our lives is brought inexorably to the fore in this present situation. Whatever else it may be, this can hardly be described as boring! Personally, I intend to at least go down fighting for a new life for the old boat, and in the process to make a little contribution to a new life for the old world. On both counts, a life without oil seems more desirable than ever, - without the noise, fumes, pollution and money that it involves. While we are at it, there are some more aspects of our old way of life which the pandemic highlights as past their time.

For a start, it highlights the danger of the trend to ever bigger cities, invariably the hotspots for this disease; conversely, the advantages of living more scattered and self-sufficient lives in the country. Personally, I voted with my feet on this matter 47 years ago. How fortunate we are now, to live in a beautiful place with plenty of space and a good garden! More especially with contemporary communications, I see no good reason for anyone to live in a city, except perhaps in the spirit of one going to war, for as little time as possible. Still, there will be demand for them, so let our cities be redesigned, with minimal noise and fumes!

Easter Lilies.

There will remain the little problem of making a living; and I for one disagree with those left-wingers of this world, who apparently think that one can simply print unconscionable quantities of the stuff and get away with it, and who also are quite happy to cede almost total control and responsibility to the state. Yet again, however, we should not buy into the opposite. Indeed this crisis is showing up the right-wing nonsense and hypocrisy also, with governments of every stripe tossed into the bottomless pits of debt. At issue between them are perhaps only certain variations as to who is enabled to get their hands on all that dosh, and who will have to make some show of paying it off, though eventually it is bound to be largely discounted, one way or the other. What that will involve is another story!

It is a good time to recall ‘how few the things are, the which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods!’ - as Marcus Aurelius put it long ago. Shelter, heat, food, clothes .... they can all be produced at home in the country, and it is fun to do so, and who would not rather eat fresh, home-grown vegetables, say, than those supermarket ones produced far away in dodgy conditions? But one does still need money for what one cannot produce, and of course there are certain little problems like access to land.... But the revolution in communications has to be a game-changer, enabling one to communicate, cooperate, source and sell products so much more widely and effectively from home. Time I was getting back on track with the Sherkin-Nazaré Alternative Power Project !

More Possible Than Ever!

I always had an interest in monasticism, which was not surprising since one of the salient features of my childhood and youth was visiting my mother’s sister, who was a Carmelite nun, and another the fact that I was educated by Benedictine monks from the age of nine to that of nineteen. This was however to become a cause of regret to my agnostic father, who though perhaps speaking from a temporary exasperation, once said as much. “Those monks” had filled my head with a lot of fancy notions, whereas at the local grammar school I might have been taught to simply “get my foot on the ladder”!

This rather gives the lie to the popular narrative, which asserts that people pay big money sending their children to posh private schools simply in order for them to get ahead in the rat-race, - not that one can deny that there is a huge element of truth in this. It doesn't even matter very much when everyone is convinced that 'the ladder' is going upwards, but when the suspicion gains ground that, on the contrary, it is going in the opposite direction, then one is in trouble. That, in Blighty and the USA, is the difference between the WW2 and the Vietnam war generations. Ladders, after all, must lean on something; if the building turns into a pit, down they must go!

Few private schools are run by monks, but back then in the '60s, I got the feeling that the tension between the monastic aspiration to seek and serve Truth alone, and the worldly requirement to enable young people to ‘get on’, was tearing at the very heart of my alma mater…. You can read all about that if you care to delve into the stuff From the Fractal Frontier back in this blog.

Before ever Christ came on the scene, Plato asserted (in the Republic) ‘that it is impossible at one and the same time to worship money and keep a high standard of honesty among the citizens; one or the other will have to go.’ In words that were apparently attributed to Socrates, he moreover associated democracy with this ‘worship of money’, asking ‘Does not a city change from government by a small class to government by the people through uncontrolled pursuit of wealth as the ultimate object of life?’ 

We might argue that ever since, for the last two and a half millennia, civilisation has been struggling with this issue, and doing its best to have it both ways, equating 'getting on' with being good, virtuous, etc, whenever it was remotely plausible to do so. Even so, we have very often seen the privileged 'guardians of truth' unmistakeably give way to smart 'wide boys', with the result that 'privileged' tends now to be a term of abuse; instead of being proud of it, one is inclined to feel guilty, while notions like noblesse oblige are laughed out of court. It's come to the point where one hardly dares to assert that anything is actually true, for one thereby implies that one has some kind of superior knowledge. 

Is it surprising that we find ourselves in trouble, with political leaders who say anything provided it serves their purposes? It is a tragic fact that the present 'champions of democracy' seem to have failed particularly dismally when the curved ball with Covid-19 written on it came their way; yet without of course being able to foresee it, I have been living with an ever stronger premonition of disaster for years, and I am certainly not alone in that. Whatever way one looked at it, The Bubble was going to pop! There could be no general well-being when the world was so sick.

Where then do we now stand ? It seems we will have to reinvent democracy for a start. Perhaps we might learn from monastic traditions, where democracy has been practised for ages, but not idolised? It is but a method of governing that only works well within a proper ordering of society, with a view to the Trinity of truth, solidarity and the active worship of God. For those who follow Christ, and recall how he (like Socrates) was put to death by popular demand, democracy is anything but an end in itself!

A smother from the East.

Nowadays Fiona and I find ourselves perforce living a quasi monastic kind of life. Undoubtedly we are very privileged, living on our beautiful and so far safe island, but after all we did have to choose to do so, and it has not been easy; yet in most basic and practical ways, it almost seems we might have been preparing for this time for years, what with the new sunroom that I have been slowly and painfully constructing now at last complete, with our communications more or less up to speed, a new fridge and the boat laid up in a safe and cheap place, and in various other little ways. 

Our lives have fallen into a rhythm that could almost be described as delightful except that we miss our family and friends, but then, one cannot be indifferent to all the terrible suffering out there. Yet what's new, except that mass misery and horror seem to be getting ever closer to home?

Our crucified Saviour offers the only hope of living with it! We say our morning prayer with the Church on universalis.com. After breakfast and a morning ‘communication session’, I generally get out to do some physical work, priority at the moment being the construction of a new wood shed. Noon brings that little effort to an end, with Mass online from Glenstal Abbey at 1210. (I thought that was an odd time at first, but find it works very well at the pivot of the day, before lunch.) A read, a snooze, a

Nugget on the beach.

cup of tea, before I head for the garden, and generally going for a walk with Nugget in the evening. Then another look at the computer, supper, phone calls, a game of backgammon, night prayers and bed. The days whistle by.

So where is this going? Might we manage to simply drive all the woe from our heads and hang on to our privileged position? Yet it is a precarious, funny kind of privilege! Here am I, aged 73 with a bit of a heart condition and Fiona struggling to get herself around, with apparently no future and no way out, and the world we are leaving to our grandchildren in a terrible state. I labour away, and most likely will be called away from this lovely spot just when I imagine it is coming right.

However, I am not depressed. Far from it, in fact; perhaps I was never better; and I shall be even happier if I feel that the world is at last actually making the Great Transition, and we have made a little contribution to it; that the world is at last waking up to the threats and the possibilities of a new era. Surely we will finally put behind us silly notions like 'there is no such thing as society', - but can we avoid too the opposite, totalitarian danger?

I am more convinced than ever that small communities, not in isolation, but in dynamic relationship with other communities and also with Nature, are the way to go. Their members will balance prayer, physical and mental work. In their mutual dependency, encounter and solidarity, a new space will open for truth seeking; they will rediscover transcendent reality, as people do when facing challenges together, even while they will become increasingly self-sufficient. They will be thoroughly orientated to sustainability, yet undismayed by all the disasters of this world; they will become convinced of the transcendent reality of love and its final victory. They will discover and worship the Lord and Master of it all, and celebrate their redemption!

It is a vision I and many others have had for years, many centuries in fact, but all too often felt ourselves struggling in vain to realise. 'new worlds, i suggest, are born and not made', said e.e.cummings. A bit of both, I rather think, but it does now feel more possible than ever!

‘The Triumph of Liberty and Peace over Tyranny’.

Primroses for the confined

“I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody.” -
Mr Johnson at the press conference where he had announced his Government’s ‘Coronavirus Action Plan’ on 3rd March. 

You can watch him saying it here. A week later, on Saturday 8th March, he was at Twickers for the England v Wales rugby game, setting an example of ignoring the coronavirus for the Cheltenham Festival to follow 3 days later. ‘There is growing concern at the decision to run the four-day Festival, which attracted more than 250,000 people, after a number of attendees reported symptoms consistent with the virus’ reports The Guardian.*  At his press conference on 12th March, Mr Johnson claimed that “We’ve done what can be done to contain this disease and this has bought us valuable time.” It's worth recalling that this was nearly 2 months after the World Health Organisation labelled Covid-19 as a “public health emergency of international concern”. Is the British Government really that incompetant?

With Mr Johnson himself in intensive care as I write, one does not want to be hard on him, and we hear the call from Dr Ghebreyesus' of the WHO for people not to use the virus to score political points, but reality does not fit into convenient compartments. This pandemic raises profound political and economic questions. Mr Johnson is but an extreme example, but he got where he is with a thumping majority. We all need to realise more clearly than ever just how very dangerous our lazy disregard for reality is. Is there any hope that a close encounter with death might precipitate a change, in the UK Prime Minister himself, and more importantly, right across our civilisation?

Two long months ago, in all his glory with his shiny new majority, Mr Johnson set out his vision for Brexit Britain. It is worth having another read of his speech* in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. He began by referring to Thornhill’s painted ceiling overhead, which he even touted as England’s answer to Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel! He explained that it is entitled ‘The Triumph of Liberty and Peace over Tyranny’. 300 years later, this slogan seems to have degenerated into ‘the triumph of ideology and the feel-good factor over reality’!

The “gorgeous and slightly bonkers symbolic scene that captures the spirit of the United Kingdom in the early 18th century”, which spoke of the “supreme national self-confidence” which our hero was claiming to be reincarnating, set the tone for the rest of his appalling speech. I have been asking myself for years what it might take to dethrone such an entrenched and pervasive, though thoroughly warped, narrative? Now all of a sudden, the question is becoming immediate and very urgent, as events lay bare the destructive perversity of that narrative at this particular time. That Mr Johnson was so engaged in promoting his Brexit fantasies, at the very time when he was failing dismally to prepare for the pandemic crisis, speaks volumes. The feckless failures to heed the warnings in both cases are certainly of a piece.

Turning to the Brexit issue, that a proper new agreement with the EU might be thrashed out by the end of June is of course out of the question. Does this suit the likes of Mr Raab, who apparently relishes the prospect of crashing out with no deal at the end of this year?  Does their penchant for self-harm know no bounds? The harm that Brexit has done, and which will only become a lot worse when and if the ‘cliff-edge’ event unfolds in its full glory, has been endlessly flagged by experts on all sides. ‘Fake news’, said Johnson and the Ducky, just as they did subsequently about the pandemic. Do we let them away with their lies?

Is Mr Johnson really determined to inflict another completely unnecessary disaster on top of the current one?  The exasperating thing about him is that he is intelligent enough to know, in some corner of his mind at least, that this is plain ‘bonkers’; the frightening thing about Raab is that he appears to have no such doubts. If Johnson were to go down, where would that leave us?  But leaving this aside, and after all we have to pray for the man’s recovery, is there any chance that a close encounter with death might cause him to review his record in this case?

Speeches of his such as that one at Greenwich are such a dollop of b******t that it would take a book to answer them, so I shall just offer a few ‘steers’, since according to Mr Raab, this seems to be the way the U.K. is being run these days.

1)Lesson one from the pandemic:- the human race constitutes a single entity, but despite this totality, physical propinquity counts for a great deal, while the cohesion of this body is only a work in hand, and suffers from a constant tendency to break down.

2)We still do not know how the health crisis will pan out, let alone the economic one. In terms of health, enhanced European cooperation could certainly have improved things, helping to raise the awareness both of scientists and governments (especially the British one) in a more timely fashion; in terms of the economy, it will be indispensible. In the face of the opposition of the Ducky and the UK, this will however be only harder. To claim that somehow the UK will make a bigger contribution by means of a futile attempt to relaunch the British Empire (Commonwealth+free trade area) than by taking its place in Europe is, again, downright bonkers.

3)‘Free Trade’ indeed constitutes a most important facet of the global economy; at Greenwich Johnson said - “It was fantastic at the recent Africa summit to see how many wanted to turn that great family of nations (the Commonwealth) into a free trade zone, even if we have to begin with clumps and groups”. So the Commonwealth is ‘a family of nations’ while Europe is not, and the work is only just beginning half a century after Europe? Which body is more likely to help the world up its game in relation to the threats we face? Any statements that I have come across on the matter from Commonwealth leaders were to the effect that they would much rather relate to a Britain within Europe than one trying to resurrect the British Empire, and as for Ireland and indeed Scotland...!

4) The notion that ‘freedom’ equates with the absence of constraints and laws is spurious, in trade or any other sense. How free were the pirates and buccaneers of 1707? Perhaps Mr Johnson would like to have been one of them, but in fact the particular ‘explosion of global trade’, which he celebrated and professed to champion anew in that ‘charter for Brexit’ of his, was underpinned by the British Empire.  For all the self-identification with those romantic buccaneers, it seems probable that actually he would rather situate himself safely within the Establishment, and would have been, like so many insiders, quite incapable of perceiving how very unfree most of the Empire’s subjects/victims were.

Along with bringing on the end of formal empires, the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century finally generated two huge, as it happens highly pertinent, steps forward: public health services like the NHS in Britain, and the European Union. This century we have two massive economic shocks of a different kind.

Time to be reading books again!

What benign developments may they yet finally produce? What lessons can we already begin to learn?

*https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020

Clear Sky on the Gannetsway.

The stars have never seemed brighter than on these last couple of nights, and the blue of the sky by day is all the better for the absence of vapour trails. The Earth seems to taking a big, deep breath. While life goes on fine here for Fiona and me, one cannot fail to be affected by the trauma that is going on in the world. 

From the point of view of gannetswaysailing, it is hard to talk of anything other than the Big C, and also hard to imagine that I might have anything useful to add to the tsunami of words being expended on it; yet I think it is worth sharing an aspect of the business that greatly fascinates me.

From the sixties up until this moment, the one dominant idea in Western culture has been that of personal autonomy. As my generation looked back on the past, we were united in being more or less horrified above all at the way such autonomy had been sacrificed on the altars of the usual suspects, duty, patriotism, religion etc, which now however appeared to have been, more often than not, foolish and misguided, besides being used on all sides for nefarious purposes. 

This did not of course prevent us from finding all sorts of other gods to worship; pop music, sport, all the panoply of consumerist trophies, indeed even science tended to become a kind of cult. It has been interesting to watch 'the science' about the pandemic turning out to vary with differing ideological mentalities. One favourite trick of cults is to persuade us that in their case we are in fact enlightened rebels. When push comes to shove, we are mostly afraid of taking personal responsibility, but we are adept at finding ways to disguise this fact from ourselves, and also anxious to disguise our anxiety and insecurity both from ourselves and others.

When Western people talk about the shock of loosing jobs or businesses, I guess that it is the loss of the sense of autonomy and of dignity which they derive from them, rather than rational fear about money and survival, however critical this may be,  which is the more deeply distressing. It is noticeable that people with a strong sense of being in control, and who have not suffered too much major trauma in their lives, are all the more likely to have difficulty accepting that constant of growth which we call 'crisis'. 

Does one react with yet more frantic efforts to 'get ahead', as if anyone can really get ahead on a chronically sick planet, or does one take what is for many a wonderful opportunity to take a step back from the rat-race and take a good look at our fundamental values and reasons for living? Of course I consider that the latter course is the way to go; but how does one get there, in the midst of confusion and bewilderment, and the ripping up of the rails upon which we were just lately clacking along quite nicely? It may help to start by recognising that we had not much business to be 'clacking along nicely', considering what our way of life has involved for so many other people, but also for our own inner selves. 

'Horseman, pass by!' From his grave, the poet Yeats admonishes the strong and confident horseman not to bother with him and his poetry. The horseman hates to admit that actually everything we have is gifted to us, and the fact that we have come as far as we have is one long string of miracles. Some of the best memories that I have of cruising are those of conversations with other sailors, especially the poorer ones, who are generally lurching from one crisis to another, interspersed with little moments of bliss that are all the more beautiful for that! In one such conversation, I referred to the fact that we certainly did not make ourselves. My interlocutor replied that if we didn't, at least our parents did; he simply could not admit that our lives stem from and refer to some kind of transcendent reality, call it Evolution, Nature, God or what you will!

Well, now is the time to rediscover that, whether we like it or not, the human race and indeed the planet are all in some sense a single organism, and successful living is a matter of being able to accept and relate positively to this fact. Such has been the true religious quest of humanity. I might further urge you to consider that the only possible way for a person to find true autonomy and fulfillment is within relationships of love, and frankly there is only one possible candidate who might enable such a relationship, when it comes to respecting personal autonomy while also accepting our place within a single entity on the cosmic scale! 

Happy Patrick's Day.

Happy St Patrick's Day, all of you.!

     Some of you might be feeling blue, with the usual fun and games subdued, many of us deprived of our usual supports, and even the weather conspiring with its lowering grey sky and driven mist; but let us bear in mind the great mystery of Spring, with life upwelling in the spare and blasted trees. 

     This pandemic has taken us all by surprise, yet in a way it should not have done, and I want to suggest that the way to hope and joy is not a matter of trying to ignore the miseries that come our way. Personally, I have had a sense of forboding, not to say dread, ever since I started to think - about 55 years ago. Living with it has often been difficult, but happily it has left Fiona and I in a good place right now, so far virtually unaffected in our beautiful island home.

     For myself, the Dread started with fear of nuclear holocast, the Cuban missile crisis being seminal, followed by the assassination of, in particular, President Kennedy, who held out hopes of finding a better way. There seem to be grounds for believing that he was killed because of his decision to pull out of Vietnam. Whatever about that, that war caused the likes of myself to finally lose faith in what is loosely called 'Western Imperialism'. Bob Dylan was there to tell the oldies to get out of the way, while we built a new world. Pity it didn't work out too well! Has the Ducky to stand as the ultimate representative of our generation?

     I have to say that I have been in some ways agreeably surprised at how resilient our civilisation has proved to be, while at the same time revolted by the determination on so many sides not to admit and face up to the very many signs that we have been on an unsustainable course. Must I mention the usual suspects - global warming, ocean acidification, horrendous pollution, bio-diversity loss, 'insect Armageddon'? This is before one comes to such matters as the explosion of debt, the vast expenditure on weapons of mass destruction, the extreme disparities of wealth, the refugee crisis, the difficulties of finding good and honest work or even a sense of truth, and the breakdown of religion, marriage and family.

     You may be asking, why bother with this litany of woes, darkening our minds with the thought of them, and anyway why should we associate all these  woes with each other, and with the coronavirus? There is no easy answer to this question,  but might we not agree that any solutions to any of them individually will have much in common with the rest? While we have based our society on the attempt to divide things up into relatively manageable compartments, wisdom comes of tuning into the underlying unity and coherence of it all. Evils are legion; their answer is One.

     I found that both sailing and fishing helped me to live with fear and the sense of dread, being such elemental exemplars of the wondrous combination of peril and opportunity that is on offer. Art and literature may also help, but what is indispensable in the end is a relationship with God, which alone can pull reality together for us. Indeed such a relationship consists precisely of this pulling together. What's more, God is active and indeed relentless in promoting it, and here lies our fullfilment and salvation.

     This is a great opportunity to rediscover the Great

Aileen by Fionnuala

Pullertogether, so that in our response to the pandemic, hopefully we will discover a whole new solidarity, a new willingness and ability and urgency in addressing all those other evils that beset us, and more especially our grandchildren, in the hope of 'a new Heaven and a new Earth'. Yes, it will come. It's even surer than Spring! St Patrick, father of Spring, keep praying for us.

  

Bad Faith in No.10.

It feels to me rather as it did to W.H.Auden in 1939*, when he found himself ‘Uncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade.’  It becomes clearer by the day that P.M.Johnson negotiated his Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, and in particular its Irish Protocol, in bad faith. He made clear his cavalier disregard for its provisions promptly enough, saying at the outset - ‘“There’s no question of there being checks on goods going NI/GB or GB/NI”. On his visit to Northern Ireland in November last year, he promised business leaders there would be “No forms, no checks, no barriers of any kind” attached to trade across the Irish Sea under the new regime. Numerous statements from the EU side, and not a few from the British, have made it clear that this is false.

     Normal accountability has been shut down, by the simple expedient of not allowing ministers to face hard questions; those radio and television programs on which such questions are generally asked have been boycotted. Access to briefings for troublesome political correspondents is denied. Indeed Mr Johnson was also supposed to have purged troublesome Tories from party and government, but has already fired or lost three key ministers - Northern Ireland Secretary, Attorney General and Chancellor of the Exchequer - who were evidently insufficiently compliant.

     Meanwhile Mr Johnson’s new chief negotiator, Mr David Frost, was supposed to put some kind of respectable intellectual case for all this, at his recent speech to the Université Libre de Bruxelles. According to The Spectator’s print-out, he kicked off with this:- ‘So in 1790 Edmund Burke, one of my country’s great political philosophers, wrote a pamphlet that is justly famous, in the UK, in any case, called ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’. And my title echoes that tonight. It is not just history, that work is highly relevant today and indeed lots of modern British conservative politicians who would consider themselves to be intellectual heirs of Burke.’

     Pity his English is so bad for an intellectual heir of Burke’s, who could indeed write good English; then of course he was not English, but an Anglo-Irishman born in Dublin, to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother (like myself, I may add, though I travelled in the opposite direction, from England to Ireland). The references to him come thick and fast:-

‘The state, to Burke, was more of an organic creation, entwined with custom, of tradition and spirit.

‘I think in Britain the EU’s institutions, to be honest, never felt like that. They were more abstract, they were more technocratic, they were more disconnected from or indeed actively hostile to national feeling. So in a country like Britain where institutions just evolved and where governance is pretty deep-rooted in historical precedent, it was always going to feel a bit unnatural to a lot of people to be governed by an organisation whose institutions seemed created by design not than by evolution, and which vested authority outside the country elsewhere.’

     Where does one begin? Auden again:- ‘All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie’. For a start, the notion that the United Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland in the 18th century were ‘an organic creation, entwined with custom, of tradition and spirit’ is of course absurd. No wonder Burke bailed out of Ireland, to live in the affluent metropolitan bubble of London. Anyway, if he were honest, he would have to go back before the Reformation to find an England that was indeed anything like ‘an organic creation of tradition and spirit’. Auden again:-  ‘Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole offence/ From Luther until now/ That has driven a culture mad’.

     In fact England was spiritually part of Europe since long before nation states were even thought of, but in the Ireland of Burke’s day, the Catholics were a dispossessed people, who were not even permitted an education. Meanwhile, in both Britain and Ireland, the bulk of the people were beginning a long slide into destitution and squalor, even while the few were reaping massive profits from slavery and exploitation.

     So ‘institutions just evolved’ in Britain, did they? Tell that to the slaves transported from Africa to toil in the colonial plantations, or to the Irish and the Scots, or to King Charles I, or the representatives of the old Church who were hanged, drawn and quartered, or even the heirs of the kind of 18th century idyll envisioned by our friend Mr Frost, whose world was brutally shattered by the wars of the 20th century. How does the man think he can get away with such tripe? Anyway, can he really expect us to take his boss seriously as an old-world conservative?

     Yet there are a few lessons that he might have learnt from Burke, such as that ‘Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.’  In truth it is the European Union that has been doing the evolving for the last 50 years, and it remains an ongoing project. It should be unnecessary to repeat, with the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight, that we face huge threats; another saying of Burke’s is relevant:- ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.’  We should also bear in mind that ‘Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.’

     It is very difficult to unite good men, even if any such are to be found! In truth, if the European project is to have any future, it will have to be more mindful of its roots and real friends; one might look up the Catholic social doctrine of subsidiarity for a start. We will also have to learn again how our sins may be forgiven. Nonetheless, to quote Auden’s poem for the last time, ‘We must love one another or die!’

Burke thought that with the French Revolution ‘the glory of Europe was extinguished forever.’  Little did he know how much worse things could get! Nowadays a generation has grown up for whom the World Wars, the Holocaust, and the whole disaster which generated the modern European movement, are ancient history. They often appear to think that the peace and prosperity which they have enjoyed for the last half century in Europe can be taken for granted. They are wrong. We can only hope that they will not have to find this out in an even harder way than their forebears!

*'September 1, 1939'