Here. Let me help you. and for free as well. you are getting the general - in this case civilisation - mixed up with the particular - rules of behaviour. You are arguing that just because civilisation has been around for a thousand years (and more), the rules have to have been as well.

That is what I mean by your stunningly naive view of history.

Investion is something you lack. The proof of that is that I´ve have asked you time and again for evidence to back up your claims, and yet all you do is tell me how great you are? That “Sean no.2″ thinks you make valid points? As does “Bill from the USA”?

“succinct and cogent”. What piffle.

Desmond, I asked you for evidence to support your theories, and instead you give us a long list of quotes about how great you are.

you remind me of an episode of Father Ted: the one where the priests are trapped on a plane. There´s only two parachutes and so they have a competition to see who´ll get them. Each priest has to write about why they should get the parachute. One priest, however, doesn´t write anything. Instead he just draws a picture of himself, in the nip, with a dog.

and that´s what you´ve done. I asked you for evidence to support your 1,000 years of frozen meaning in western intellectual, cultural, political, and economic life and thought, and instead you give me a drawing of yourself, in the nip, with a dog.

John Waters is welcome to your “succinct and cogent” points on suicide.

in case you haven´t noticed - I don´t think you actually read what I write - I think your ideas are worthless.

And you can quote me on that.

Exchanges July 2007

Martin writes:

‘Ireland’s Call’ articulates many of the feelings and reactions that I have towards Ireland, western Europe and America. Locally in my own home town, Derry, the latest manifestation of the environment caused by the consumerist society is the dramatic rise in suicides amongst young men. Combine that with the dramatic rise in alcohol related health problems, particularly amongst women of all ages and you can see a day when the public health bodies will not be able to cope with a dysfunctional society. Eventually the carers themselves will succumb to sickness.

I was curious as to whether you thought the emergence of Ireland as a
‘tabula rasa’ is actually a good thing. I believe you see it as an
opportunity for a new start but I feel personally uncomfortable that we
can jettison a ‘past’ so rich in literature, music, heroism and religion
- as these and many other areas of historic Irishness are what give many
of us an identity, something which we should not underestimate.

In the light of the senselessness I see around me I find myself
gravitating more and more to the idea of Christianity (Catholicism in my
case) as the most perfect and compassionate structure and set of
guidelines available - of course many evil people have corrupted the
rules of Christianity and continue to do so, but for me I have yet to
see a secular set of guidelines that can compare. This is not a
fashionable idea in Ireland or western Europe but Christianity will
never be fashionable in a consumerist society as it preaches self
sacrifice over self gratification.

Finally I would like to put forward the idea that perhaps there is an
optimum time or optimum state of affairs which mankind or society could
consider residing in. Like the law of diminishing returns in economics,
there might well be a time when the correct mix of consumerism,
socialism and religion etc. combines to produce a stable, generally
contented and spiritual people and that we don’t always have to progress
maniacally in science, technology, wealth and leisure. Maybe that point
was reached in the post world war society of the 1950s - who knows for
sure. But it is worth considering.

DF replies:

I seized on that initial ‘we’ve thrown away everything, hurray’ quote from Bob Quinn -
which was actually intended by him as bitter irony - to engage in a wake-up experiment in thinking. No, I do not think that the rejection of our past and cultural
heritage is a good thing, however much it may be a fact. Until the early 1990s I was devoted to the completion of the Irish Revolution in the sense of intellectual self-determination and cultural self-shaping. However, the essay is mainly a summary of what I have discovered about the present condition of the West in ten years thinking which began with a breakthrough in Seattle in 1995.

I am a believing Catholic, but my essay leaves open what content the
recivilising of the West will have. I say explicitly that its new, sense-giving hierarchy
of rules must draw on some rules of western (essentially Christian) civilisation,
as well as on some elements of the current mish-mash. What I omitted to say, and
may yet put in, is that any such effort will inevitably run up against -
especially in Europe - a bid by Islam to provide the new framework.

What you say in your last paragraph is an interesting speculation. After
all, Chinese civilisation achieved something like the self-restrained
stability you speak of for a couple of thousand years. Our present western
condition cannot because it is drunk on the limitless pursuit of collective
and individual power – God-like power? - through a combination of increasing wealth
and advancing technology. The Chinese were content to live ‘under Heaven’.

Bill writes (from the USA)

Just finished ‘Ireland’s Call’ and find much in it spot on, although I think you are too hopeful on who and how might come to recivilize the West. I think Mark Steyn, (America Alone) and writers like Victor David Hanson (Nuclear Iran?) and Daniel Johnson, (Contra Iran), as well as thinkers such as Bernard Lewis, perceive presciently the Islamification of Europe particularly and North America secondarily.

Islam has all the comprehensive core hierarchical values which you correctly discern as the glue which provides sense and cohesiveness for a civilization ; it has the adherents, the conversion rate and it has the world-wide birthrate which you correctly discern as the suicide pill all of the European nations (and, to only a slightly lesser extent, North America). It has the militant detestation and disdain for the West’s secular mish-mash cobweb of contradictory values which you point out. I think you are the first I’ve read who diagnosed the falling (failing, non-reproducing) birthrate in the West as being due more to a confusion about core values than to a rejection of historical values in favor of the drift of consumerism, and I think you may be on to something by portraying the ennui in that light. I had been thinking about it in terms of self-absorption, selfishness, self-centeredness and a neo-pagan and flabby materialism.

The West is going to have to generate quickly and soon a set of the core, hierarchical values you reference in order to compete ideologically with the Islamists. I don’t personally think the Ipod culture can reinvent itself in time to avoid sharia becoming the dominant set of rules in tomorrow’s Europe.

DF – while he rewrites the last three pars of the website essay to make express references to possible roles of Islam, Christianity or new creeds in recivilising the West - replies:

‘Ireland’s Call’ is an attempt – in the context of my investigation of the western world since Seattle – to ‘bring it all home’ by relating it in some way, even if visionary or only semi-serious, to Ireland as it is now. I take note of what you say about Islam.

The title is the title of a song sung/played at international rugby matches when an ‘Ireland’ team composed of Northern Ireland and Republic players is playing some other country. It is sung/played instead of the British or the Irish national anthem. A banal piece of music with a banal text, it is generally held in abhorrence. So by using ‘Ireland’s Call’ as my essay title, I am giving the familiar words a new content.

Tim writes:

Was reading that provocative article. One cannot but notice an ongoing disintegration of the cultural and societal entity, “nationalist Ireland” as time goes by. You notice it with the young women from privileged addresses speaking to you unselfconsciously in American accents, the now almost universal practice of what used be called “soccer” being called “football”, the shopping trips to New York for Xmas. There is a new emerging entity in internet terms called “the UK and Ireland”.

The sense of history is disjointed and being massaged and manipulated. One sees this clearly in how the story of the First World War is being treated by the state and by mainstream historians. People are also history-wise less well educated. Basically, there is a process of further absorption into the Anglo-American world going on. How far this will go only time will tell. Will the result in the end be more Anglo or more American, or more made of something else, only time will tell.

There is a prevailing delusion (from which some dissent) that this state has become a “normal European country” (or NEC for short). There is EU membership, full employment, great affluence, much immigration and much more. But the economic miracle has to do with multinational companies (mostly American) using this state as a tax haven. They provide 90 percent of exports. Indigenous industry is not well developed, with some noteworthy exceptions… This is not a developed economy in the conventional mould. Ireland, we are told, is the most “globalised” country in the world!

On the back of the new multinational generated prosperity a massive traditional Fianna Fáil boom was generated. Such a boom is characterised by a building boom, matched with increased public spending and an expansion of public service employment, rather like the 1977-1980 boom. Now the orgy of property speculation is turning into a property slump as these things do eventually. As the building boom subsides government revenues will contract severely. There is the longer term threat from the drive towards EU tax harmonisation.

The Irish have tried to escape into a series of delusions about having become an NEC. As these will come unstuck, they will be forced to confront the questions they have been avoiding, the questions Irish nationalism attempted to answer at various earlier times, questions of identity, of governance, of various political relationships, of the meaning of history, of justice, of economic development.

DF replies:

Let me say straight away that the meat and point of that essay is its account of how it is with the western world and why - the summing up of ten years thought and observation since my breakthrough in Seattle. But to ‘bring it all properly home’ I have started and finished with that provocative, attention-catching Irish angle which is pure speculation, an exercise in speculative rhetoric.

When you write ‘One cannot but notice an ongoing disintegration of the cultural and societal entity, “nationalist Ireland”‘, perhaps you see the point of my undermining those who are promoting this disintegration by joining with Bob Quinn in saying ‘Bang! So we have got rid of all that awful Irish stuff. What do we do now?’ It leaves them speechless because their minds are only of the imitative and destructive kind, incapable of intellectual or indeed creative enterprise..

The aim of the Irish Revolution was to make Ireland a Normal European Country in terms of the 1920s. (See my Corkery epigraph to the ‘About Behaving Normally’ essay.) That would have meant an Irish-speaking Ireland, with elite schools where young men were very well educated to serve the Irish state, a cafe society in the capital city where the specific intellectual discourse and debate of Ireland was determined and disseminated through home-published journals and books, universities that dealt learnedly with the world from ancient Egypt on and that had departments of Asian and African studies, a state administrative structure taking account of the native historical divisions of the country, a foreign policy involving associations and alliances with nations of similar historical/cultural background and experience, etc. It can be argued that our Revolution came too late for that enterprise to succeed - given the extreme degree of our colonisation and developments in Europe since World War II.

Tim writes again:

There is more cultural continuity than one might at first appreciate.
Despite drastic change there is much that survives in Ireland as
before, if in a different form. There is the confusion about identity …

There is the (often comic) political culture of clientelism…
Associated with clientilism is a widespread notion that government
contracts, jobs etc., are secured with “pull”, the possession of
some of which is of great importance.

There is the concern with the otherworld, the spiritual, the religious
in a loose sense despite the withdrawal of the exclusive franchise
enjoyed by a multinational Rome based organisation. There is
widespread interest, (especially among females) in angels, spirits, God,
the unknown, in all generations, as far as I can see.

Irish provincialism seems to be undergoing a serious modification. In the early 1980s those young women from Dublin’s southside who now talk with American accents, spoke with something like a north of England working class accent – a fusion of a residual Dublin accent with an acquired “posh” accent and a flavour of television “soaps” like Coronation Street.
.
Ireland, has a problem of “mindlessness”, as you have referred
to it. This word covers a number of diverse phenomena, I would think. The
directionlessness of the disfunctional state, the pedantry of
discourse (for which I hold the Catholic Church partly responsible),
the lack of a real, well established ruling class, the lack of centres
of moral and ideological authority in society (which the Church once
provided) and, last but not least, sheer ignorance. However, considering
the degree of change undergone, people have coped rather well.

No, I do not expect this country to make a great contribution to the
development of civilization anytime soon; too mindless, too smug, too
pedantic, too “clueless”. The evasive ultra banalities of a Bertie Ahern…

Joseph writes:

Curious that your essay steers clear of the implications of de facto creeds - which are not the same as the professed ones. They include the de facto secularism creed that is, arguably, the dominant one, as it feeds off 50 years of Catholic Freefall - in Ireland today. I think that ‘the Irish’ has always been an abstract construct that lets abstract thinkers play games among themselves, with outsiders ignoring them. We are, and always were, a bunch of groups of de facto creed adherents.

Still doing some thinking and writing myself. For some reason the Irish Times seems to have a policy of not publishing my letters. I got much more scope from Gageby, the Northern Protestant, than from Kennedy, the Catholic from my own Tipperary county. But, then, that non-publishing saves me from being distracted by the ephemeral, useless thing that letters-to-editors are. I reckon I have achieved zilch by way of my hundreds of letters over the years.

DF replies:

I don’t know what you mean by saying that the ‘essay steers clear of the de facto secularism which is the West’s dominant creed’. In dealing with the fundamentalist-liberal creed I deal with it. That is the particular form which secularism takes now in the West. It took another form in the communist/socialist Soviet Union and satellites. Secularism simply means a creed which denies or excludes a supernatural dimension.*.

Regarding Douglas Gageby, how I miss that good, intellectually generous man! In all my campaigning in Ireland, but especially regarding the North, individual Protestants, not Catholics, have been my main support. They were more open to new thinking generated in Ireland – as distinct from arriving in Ireland from elsewhere.

Regarding letters to the editor and other forms of written activism, I must say that I have ceased to be an advocate of any radical change of societal behaviour only to get mocked for my failure by the secure establishments, Irish and western, and thereby increase their self-confidence. In all spheres I prefer simply to describe the state of affairs truthfully and therefore subversively and to leave it at that. The hortatory Irish element of my essay is tentative speculation. The essay’s main business is its cool description of how things are and are likely to be in the future in the West.

*(DF says: I think I could have defined secularism a shade more accurately – perhaps ‘excludes in practice a supernatural dimension’!)

Joseph writes again:

I agree that “Secularism simply means a creed which denies or excludes a supernatural dimension”. The trouble is, without being explicit, all media writers must de facto abide by that creed. That includes the new crop of Catholic writers - Breda O’Brien, David Quinn, Ronan Mullan, and so on. Our media - led by RTE - have peddled the secularism creed, de facto and by default, since the 1950s. We who write and broadcast have all been sucked into it.

The trouble, having made that diagnosis, is that sucking in can only be countered by writing and talking that allows for the supernatural dimension. As our media cannot allow for that, neither can it allow for writers and broadcasters who allow for it. We who wish to do so are reduced to spectator roles or rather ineffective pamphleteering or blogging outside the mainstream.

Seàn writes:

Arising from your new book ‘About Behaving Normally’ and some of your other books, I have a question. with regard to The Postwestern Condition and the Sense Problem.

Do you think that societies with some organised meaning - with no sense problem - behave better than societies that have a sense problem? or am I missing the meaning of your argument? I teach a Study of Peace course at Saor-Ollscoil for mature students.

DF replies:

About the Sense Problem, as you call it. First, in what I have written about
this in various places, I am making no ‘argument’ apart from what I write. So I have not
argued anything about whether, morally speaking, a society perceiving sense
in its life - i.e. a civilisation - ‘behaves better’ or worse than a society
not perceiving sense.

Living in a time of oppressive moralising, I avoid moral judgments
as much as I can. So you raise an interesting question which I have not
considered. And to answer it I would need to judge whether civilisations,
from Babylon on, have ‘behaved better’ than societies - typically those
between one civilisation and another - which do not perceive sense in their
collective life. And as you see, that’s a very difficult question to answer
and which I shrink from answering now.

I have not really thought about qualitative differences of any kind between
societies with or without perceptible sense, apart from suggesting that in
those ‘without’ there is a high degree of psychic or spiritual suffering and
in those ‘with’, very much less. But now that you make me think, I would
add that those with perceptible sense are marked by high cultural creativity -
intellectual, artistic, etc - and the others not. But leave that with me.

In ‘Ireland’s Call’ I have given my fullest statement hitherto - a sort of
summing up - on this senselessness question in our times. I have
since done minor revisions on it. Ignore, for the present argument, the
first two pars and the last ones, where I provocatively and speculatively
relate the central argument to Ireland and the Irish. That serves as an
attention-catching device for the Irish public - to which I have returned,
physically, after ten years in Italy!

Seàn No.2 writes:

One thing surprised me in ‘Ireland’s Call.’ You do not mention the Church or Christianity as a possible source for the recivilising of the West which you think will come about. Have you despaired of the Church? It seems to me that the Catholic Church is probably the only global organization capable of resisting what you (correctly) call the Correctorate and of providing an alternative, personalistic, vision for the future. The popular reaction to John Paul II is a witness to that. And the gentle but profound thought of Benedict XVI is providing us with the intellectual foundations for such a future.
I am in favour of promoting Christianity even in secularised Europe. It is
true that our elites are hostile to it especially in its Catholic form but that doesn’t mean we should simply fold our arms and give up the fight. I note that in there are numerous Christian intellectuals in the US (not just the religious right) who are challenging the prevailing secularist orthodoxy.

DF replies:

I deliberately leave open the form which the recivilising will take. I don’t want advocacy of a particular formula to distract from my main argument that the present condition is not a civilisation and that a recivilising is necessary. I expressly say that the values and rules of the new civilisation could draw on some elements from western (i.e Christian) civilisation and from the current mish-mash. I omit to say, and will add it, that in Europe Islam will be a strong contender. I am sure that Christianity will continue to be a strong presence in the world, but WHERE it will be the core element in a future civilisation I don’t know - perhaps China, on the analogy of ancient Rome! The West has used it to form a great civilisation. Whether it will use it again, I don’t know.
_____________________________________________________________________

DF adds: A review I did recently of Joe Cleary’s Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (The Irish Book Review, Spring 2007) - or rather, the second, critical part of it - is relevant to this discussion.

And the quote provided by Conor also mentions this crux incident occurring around the time of World War II.

“In a process that began at the end of World War II, and that continued for the rest of the twentieth century, the West effectively rejected many essential rules of European ( alias western) civilisation and thus its defining core.

At the beginning of your essay you quote yourself when you say:

“The contemporary West is built, not on Auschwitz and Treblinka to which we have said ‘No’, but on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to which we have said ‘Yes.’
The Postwestern Condition: Between Chaos and Civilisation, p. 79”

And again, early on in your essay you say:

“Faced with the situation brought about by the demolition of that civilisation on both sides of the Atlantic during the last sixty odd years, and the pressing need of westerners for an equivalent replacement, our comparative advantage is evident.”

Is it possible to divine from this that you believe that the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki precipitated the ‘demolition of that civilisation’?

If so, why didn’t you say so at the beginning? If it was a simple before and after situation we wouldn’t have needed all this who-ha.

Desmond you remind me of the character De Selby who featured as the thinker of preposterous philosophies in Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman. I’m very reluctant to speculate where you were when you wrote the essay (I don’t want to make it personal, we are after all talking about ideas and an undisciplined use of history) but I’d like to think that you wrote it in the pub.

I say that because it would allow me to expound the following logical argument, also taken from Flann O’Brien. Desmond, if you think (without developing the argument I might add) that civilization was simply and cleanly demolished with the dropping of the bombs on Japan at the end of World War II then your syllogism is fallacious, based as it on a licensed premises.

Which may be facetious, but at least it isn’t as ridiculous as your essay.

Historians do not just take words from documents a thousand years ago and link them to words today. history and meaning are all about context. you are talking about a cosmology 1,000 years ago, which you then say - apart from some “ancillary” and “circumstantial” changes, remained the same. you even date when the breakdown in these rules occured, 1922.

That means, no changes in concepts of time, distance, place, community, law, religion, belief, family, politics, etc, even though the languages used 1,000 years ago are gone. We do not speak the same languages today, nor do we have the same terms of references (or signifiers/signified) in order to arrive at meaning.

We do not see distance the same way. We do not see simple thoughts like “the world” or “village” the same way. And you think you can use our words like pornography and unborn and educated about the year 1,000AD?

you are basing your arguments on the belief that meaning stays the same, even though not entire languages have died and new ones arisen, with new grammars and new concepts.

Language is not just used to express philosophical concepts - there are philosophical concepts hot-wired into the very structure of language itself.

And yet, in your argument, none of this affects meaning, because you’re got some (as yet unnamed documents) which you say show 1,000 years of frozen meaning - broken only by 1922 and the rise of the “new deal” in America.

The following quote is from your own essay.

“In a process that began at the end of World War II, and that continued for the rest of the twentieth century, the West effectively rejected many essential rules of European ( alias western) civilisation and thus its defining core. Constructed from around the year 1000 in western Europe by Latin, Germanic and Celtic Christians, out of values and rules that had been tried and sifted for centuries previously, that civilisation had crossed the Atlantic and other seas and had lasted almost a thousand years. It ended when the West’s democratic rulers led by those of the USA, and in close collaboration with business corporations, rejected most of the civilisation’s core and introduced new rules in place of the rejected ones.”

It is not a case of your methodology being flawed, it is altogether entirely useless, because you have no idea of the importance of context to credible historical research.

and yet, you then take this stunningly naive approach to historical research and use it to explain suicide in Ireland?

Simply terrible.

I’m not suggesting I’m right; but your argument rests on logic of the kind that goes; A (of which I disapprove) happened at time T1; B (malign social fact) happens at time T2; therefore A causes B. (so does mine, actually, but perhaps with a little more plausability based on what we know of the world rather that what we hope for it)

1. Suicide has increased tenfold in Ireland since the 1960s. What is the MAIN factor leading to the suicides now occurring in Ireland?
2. Why has that causative factor increased tenfold since the 1960s?
3. Why are the great majority of suicides by males?

In my essay, I give very incidentally - the essay is not about suicide - answers to 1. and 2.
To 1, the senseless framework for living which is presented by the new and currently dominant rules for living (these, like all such rules, are made up of dos, don’ts and do-as-you-likes).
To 2, because that presented senselessness has been increasing since the 1960s and hitting new generations head on.
As to question 3, I now add the answer ‘because men tend to assess the life presented to them predominantly with their minds (hence being more offended by the lack of sense), while women tend to assess it predominantly with their feelings (a different method of assessment).

I have not yet encountered better answers to questions 1,2 and 3, but would be interested to encounter them.