Author: Michael Kirke

Michael Kirke was born in Co. Donegal and attended St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, 1957-1962. In 1966 he graduated from University College Dublin (History and Politics). In 1966 he began working on the editorial desk of The Evening Press in Dublin and in 1968 went to the newsroom of the Irish Press group of newspapers – contributing news and features to the group’s three titles, The Irish Press (morning paper), The Evening Press and The Sunday Press. In 1969 he went to Belfast and covered the initial unravelling of the Unionist hegemony in the province. Later that year he became the group’s education specialist. In 1973 took leave of absence to pursue postgraduate studies in education in Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1976. In 1978 he left journalism and moved into teaching. In 1981 was appointed headmaster of Rockbrook Park School in Dublin (www.rockbrook.ie). In 1994 resigned from that post and moved to live in the West of Ireland (Galway) where he began working part-time in media again. He is now back in Dublin working, among other things, as a freelance writer. His main interests are in political, cultural and educational affairs – as well as issues related to religious faith.

“Unplanned” at the US box office

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

It is now a new pro-life movie and has become a huge box office hit in the US. It is listed at #5 nationwide after bringing in $6.1 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend.

It’s the second movie of its kind to pack out cinema theatres in less than a year, with the movie Gosnell also reaching the top ten in box office sales and soaring to #1 on the Amazon DVD best-seller list.

Unplanned is the inspiring true story of Abby Johnson’s journey of transformation.

As one of the youngest Planned Parenthood clinic directors in the US, she was involved in upwards of 22,000 abortions. Her support for abortion led her to become a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood. That was until the day everything changed for Abby when she came face to face with the horror of what she was doing. Today, she is one of the most ardent and effective pro-life speakers in America.

Watch the trailer.

Mystical flirtation and the decline of civilization

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Civilizations do not crumble in a moment, an hour, or because of an event of one day. Like all decaying things it is a process, in this case driven by the gradual and cumulative effects of mankind’s compromise with the mystery of evil.

It is said that on the 9th of August, 378,  on hearing the news that the barbarous, invading Goths had defeated and overthrown the Roman legions in the battle of Adrianople, leaving the body of the Emperor Valens mutilated on the battlefield,  St. Jerome dropped his pen in despair and abandoned the chronicles in which he was recording the history of mankind from earliest times.

That was then. This is now.

Joan Didion’s The White Album is a short collection of reflective journalism published in 1979. In it she chronicles and observes events in the late sixties and early seventies. Most of what she writes is set against the background of life in California, the vortex around which the helter skelter world of those years revolved. Its title of course suggests that iconic Beatles album of the same non-name. It constitutes a kind of snapshot of that time, in many ways with darker shades than our rose-tinted nostalgia bestows on it.

Popular imagination deludes itself in thinking this hectic and dreamy era was a liberating one. Didion’s ironic observations, written as it unfolded, lay bare much of that illusion.

Her essays reflect the character of the Sixties, hopeful but hopelessly and dangerously naïve. The cultural climate which we saw forming before our eyes in that decade, and the handful of years in the decade that followed, was anything but a harbinger of peace and love for western civilization. Didion, in this book and in her other collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, chronicles the highs and lows of the hopes and follies of those years. From them we can trace a line of descent to the ills and woes of the early 21st century.

Didion writes about the moment when the culture of death, which now has the official stamp of practically every state jurisdiction within what we call the  Civilized Western World slouched out of the Californian desert on August 9, 1969, like the Beast of the Apocalypse. Allowing for calendar reforms, an interesting coincidence of dates in 378 and 1969?

She writes of how people in Los Angles, looking back, believed that the Sixties ended on that date. The tensions which people felt ended; the jitters they were experiencing morphed into some kind of equilibrium – now there seemed to be some explanation of what was going on. But that didn’t help. Things in fact got worse.

That day might not look like more than a symbol for the levels to which our race has sunk in the decades which followed. It can serve as such. But it is more. The forces – diabolical but also driven by hedonistic and corrupt multiple visions of what mankind is – behind that act were also the forces which were being let loose in a benighted military operation in South-East Asia. They were also the forces being let loose at home by the dark, dark reasoning of the American Supreme Court judgment in the case of Roe Vs Wade. That judgment in effect falsely elevated the pursuit of pleasure, the cult of individualism and crass materialism, to the level of a compassionate principle. It has resulted in a blind acceptance of a totally false vision of what human compassion and true freedom are, leading us deeper and deeper into confusion with each decade that passes.

Didion described what those times and that day in August 1969 was like for her – how it was so ordinary and yet strange, how it ended in a nightmare.

“We put Lay Lady Lay (Bob Dylan) on the record player, and Suzanne (Leonard Cohen). We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos. There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, (where she, her husband and their little girl, lived at the time). I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town.

“There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’— this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far’, and that many people were doing it – was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.

“On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed.

“I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

The Cielo Drive murders orchestrated by Charles Manson were a symptom of a wider malaise which had gripped the culture of a generation. This malaise is our sad inheritance from that time.

Another essay in the book illustrates more of this effect. She describes the cult following by young adolescents of the Hell’s Angels movies of the time – where pillage, rape and murder were presented for purposes of entertainment and excitement. Human life was routinely expendable. Didion clearly shows what was at its heart. Her words are full of apprehension about the future.

In a later decade an iconic pop star was to take the name of Manson, much as a Christian or Muslim might take the names of the saints who populate their faiths’ histories. A meaningless gesture? No.

In yet another essay, on the Women’s Movement, she touches on other effects which have flowed from the “mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’”.

The Women’s Movement for her was essentially Marxist, redefining as it did human nature in purely materialistic terms. While on its popular surface it might just look like a reworking of romanticism, it was anything but romantic. Many movements rife with erroneous readings of our human nature do have an up-side. They point to real problems and injustices and move us to correction. This, however does not negate the inherent dangers in their errors. Of the feminism of this movement, she writes:

“Something other than an objection to being ‘discriminated against’ was at work here, something other than an aversion to being “stereotyped” in one’s sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children.”

Or, might we add, forever childless? A “woman’s role” had nothing to do with what “real women” are, want or need. It was all a construction imposed on them. It was the work of their enemy.

 “The transient stab of dread and loss which accompanies menstruation simply never happens: we only thought it happened, because a male chauvinist psychiatrist told us so. No woman need have bad dreams after an abortion: she has only been told she should.”

Feminism, in this reading, was turning the male per se into the enemy – or at best, the heartless manipulator – of his life partner, the female. Out of all this came ultimately the denial and attempted obliteration of the real natural distinctions between male and female which we see all around us today.

Didion foresaw this:

“All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it – that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death – could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.

“One was only told it, and now one is to be reprogrammed, fixed up, rendered again as inviolate and unstained as the ”modern” little girls in the Tampax advertisements.”

The aftershocks and echoes of the event of August 9, 1969, no more than the events of September 9, 2011, or May 25, 2018, when Ireland went the way of Roe Vs. Wade, continue to reverberate around our world – be it in massacres in school classrooms, mosques, Christian churches or synagogues.

The Roman Empire and the civilization which it had embodied struggled on in a decaying state for a another couple of centuries after Adrianople. To St. Jerome the butchered body of Valens was but a powerful symbol of the terrifying truth that a millennium-old civilization was in terminal decline. In those centuries after 378, however, a new light was already shining. That Light, picking up the remnants of that dying culture, cleansed them and revitalised them. Eventually a new civilization emerged, which we now know as the Christian civilization of the High Middle Ages.

If we accept the butchery of August 9, 1969, as a symbol of the sad decline of our own brilliantly scientific and technological – but artistically, philosophically and morally decadent era – to where can we look for a light to lead us out of this darkness? Where else but to that self-same regenerative power which led our forefathers out of their desert?

What then is the lesson we might glean from observing our record of folly and evil? It is that we should call evil what it is and that we resist the temptation to indulge in “mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’”. Christians recognize a Revelation which assists them in this battle. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us wisely:

“Only the light of divine Revelation clarifies the reality of sin and particularly of the sin committed at mankind’s origins. Without the knowledge Revelation gives of God we cannot recognize sin clearly and are tempted to explain it as merely a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness, a mistake, or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure, etc. Only in the knowledge of God’s plan for man can we grasp that sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving one another.”

Edmund Burke may or may not have said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Nevertheless, the idea is right. It is certainly true that unless common sense and decent humanity, both of which are highlighted in Joan Didion’s writing in these times, gets a chance to express itself in this world, and unless more of us pay attention to the timeless truths about ourselves, we are destined to continue down this vortex in which human lives are distorted and destroyed in multiple ways.

Back to Covington High

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial. Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story — including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict. The high school student facing Phillips issued a statement contradicting his account; the bishop in Covington, Ky., apologized for the statement condemning the students; and an investigation conducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos. Subsequent Post coverage, including video, reported these developments: “Viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed”; “Kentucky bishop apologizes to Covington Catholic students, says he expects their exoneration”; “Investigation finds no evidence of ‘racist or offensive statements’ in Mall incident.”

A Jan. 22 correction to the original story reads: Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips said he served in the U.S. Marines but was never deployed to Vietnam.

Garvan Hill reflected on this story on 22 January. You can read that comment here.

Augustine in the 21st Century

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POSTER EARLIER TODAY ON MERCATORNET.COM

CITY OF…?

We live in the age of the “nones”, those who answer “none” when asked by pollsters, “What is your religion?” “Noneism”, I suppose, is their ideology. This kind of nihilism is a dismal competitor to Christianity, but surely it is even more dismal for the multitudes who consider its bleak landscape as the be-all and end-all of existence.

If we were to look across the centuries for an inspiration to shake us out of this fatal delusion, what might we find? There is one who stands out, one who made the journey from nothing to everything after a long and arduous battle. But there is also one in our own time, among our own millennials.

Augustine of Hippo lived the life many in our wretched world are now living. He originally thought that fame, riches and love offered him happiness. But then he saw through this folly. He went to war on behalf of the Truth – and helped mould our understanding of a new alternative City, the City of God.

If the “Benedict Option” – reading it as a way of bringing Christ to a darkened world rather than misreading it as sealing us off from its wretchedness in isolating cocoons – offers a way for the modern family under siege, the Augustinian option is more personal and more attainable. It is a choice which will become a reality with the immediate assent of the subject under the influence of grace in the moment of conversion. It speaks to the anguish of our time, the anguish driving our suicide rates, our divorce rates, our hedonism and all the maladies driven by a meaningless existence. He found a world as dysfunctional as ours. But with his response, he went on to become a pillar of Christendom. In our time, another saint, Josemaría Escrivá, wrote words which summed up the truth which they embodied and wherein still lies the key to our redemption, “These world crises are crises of saints.”

Manichaeism, which beguiled Augustine as a worldly young man, is as dismal as Noneism. It could be compared to many of the lifestyle vapourings which pass for religion in our time – New Age, Scientology, moral relativism and so on. The brilliant Augustine saw in these doctrines a philosophy untainted by faith. He hoped to find a scientific explanation of nature and escape from a God who set a standard of goodness. But he was tortured by the origin of evil. Augustine and his Manichean companions explained it away just as we explain sin away, by denying the freedom on which personal responsibility is based.

But all that changed with his conversion to Christianity. To appreciate the meaning of Augustine’s life and the power of his message one has to read his Confessions. It is one of the greatest literary achievements of Western culture. There is one passage which poses the questions which we need to answer if we are to come to a redemptive understanding of the Truth. It shows that loving all the goods that come to us from God is not incompatible with loving God Himself, but is in fact the purest way to love God. It is this:

Read the full post to MercatorNet here:

Democracy and despotism of the majority

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

As political predictions go it took a good deal longer to unfold than he may have expected, but it rings a great deal truer than much of the pundtitry of our time.

Have we at last entered an age when our masters can in fact do that which we were warned to fear most – those who can destroy not only the body but also the soul, and I’m not referring to the speculations of Donald Tusk about the eternal destiny of his adversaries in the Battle of Brexit. It is a fearful prospect.

Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has refined the arts of despotism… The excesses of monarchical power had devised a variety of physical means of oppression: the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind…

Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.

These were words written nearly 200 years ago. They described an anticipated tyranny whose seed was seen in the very structure of the evolving democracy of the United States of America. For a number of reasons – geographical, institutional and cultural – that seed did not germinate or flower in the lifetime of the author of those words. Nor did it flower in the lifetime of many of the subsequent generations – until now. 

In the past several decades, with the shrinking of the world and the spread of democracy, what Alexis de Tocqueville feared might happen to the fledgling democratic polity of the United States is now to be feared across much of the globe. Indeed it may no longer be just a fear. It may be our lived experience.

This lived experience is already a reality in the United States and is preoccupying any number of thinkers in that country who are contemplating the unfolding of many of the dangers feared by de Tocqueville. Among them are Yuval Levin in The Fractured Republic, and Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed  (Yale University Press, 2018). On this side of the Atlantic, Douglas Murray engaged with the same issues in The Strange Death of Europe.

In Levin’s view the late 1960s and the bulk of the 1970s constituted the darkest, most ominous time in America’s post-war path-—it was the moment when we could no longer deny that something fundamental was changing and that, in some profound way, America seemed to be coming apart under the pressure of “the forces of individualism, decentralization, deconsolidation, fracture, and diffusion.”

Levin is not a pessimist. Neither is Deneen, who argues that the flawed foundations of liberalism have led us into a dangerous cul de sac. This unsustainable politics has provoked a reaction which has brought us into a culture war – bordering on a “cold” civil war – which is going to get worse before it gets better. Both see a hard time ahead.

What is truly remarkable is that de Tocqueville foresaw this nearly two centuries ago, foresaw it happening at the moment which mankind abandoned that understanding of itself which identified human solidarity as the key to a politics of peace and prosperity. While he was fascinated by the great good he saw in the democratic politics of America in the 1830s, it did not blind him to a certain paradox he perceived in the system.

De Tocqueville, grappling with that paradox, wrote in Democracy in America that he held it to be “an impious and an execrable maxim that, politically speaking, a people has a right to do whatsoever it pleases”, even though he still asserted that all authority resides in the will of the majority. What de Tocqueville feared – and what we now have stalking the body politic of numerous nations across the world – was the tyranny which the apparently simple and benign concept of majority rule seemed to forebode.

We now identify these as populist movements – and they occupy all sectors of the political spectrum, all equally threatening to our freedoms. What do they all have in common? They are movements riding, with passionate intensity, on waves of emotion and prejudice. They have abandoned the principles of justice and have replaced them with the principles of power and majority rule. They simply neither accept nor recognise that majority rule is no more than a technique by which we organise government, not a principle of justice. They are technocrats, not democrats. They are those who consider themselves not to be populists but to be “on the right side of history” while their opponents are the populists.

De Tocqueville saw it this way:

A general law—which bears the name of Justice—has been made and sanctioned, not only by a majority of this or that people, but by a majority of mankind. The rights of every people are consequently confined within the limits of what is just.

When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right which the majority has of commanding, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind. It has been asserted that a people can never entirely outstep the boundaries of justice and of reason in those affairs which are more peculiarly its own, and that consequently, full power may fearlessly be given to the majority by which it is represented. But this language is that of a slave.

Majority rule is a dangerous Leviathan in a society where relativism has resulted in Justice being denied as a universal principle. For that reason he is of the opinion that while in practical terms one social power must always be made to predominate over the others, liberty is endangered when the vehemence of this power is unchecked because it is the inalienable will of the people.

Unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing; human beings are not competent to exercise it with discretion, and God alone can be omnipotent, because His wisdom and His justice are always equal to His power. But no power upon earth is so worthy of honor for itself, or of reverential obedience to the rights which it represents, that I would consent to admit its uncontrolled and all-predominant authority. When I see that the right and the means of absolute command are conferred on a people or upon a king, upon an aristocracy or a democracy, a monarchy or a republic, I recognize the germ of tyranny…

But it is his observations on the power of public opinion, in league with the tyrannies he foresees, that he most prescient and worrying.

Even in his day he saw public opinion in the United States as being far more influential than in Europe. In America, he argues, “as long as the majority is still undecided, discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, a submissive silence is observed, and the friends, as well as the opponents, of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety.”

I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America. In any constitutional state in Europe every sort of religious and political theory may be advocated and propagated abroad… But in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those of the United States, there is but one sole authority, one single element of strength and of success, with nothing beyond it.

Is he exaggerating here? Even if he was in terms of what prevailed in his own time, it is certainly not an exaggeration for our time. The Republic of Ireland might be taken as a sample of what the prevailing democracy now offers the dissenter. A two thirds electoral majority effectively legalized abortion there last year. Immediately the defeated minority was jeered at and told by the victorious majority, “It’s over.”  Months later, a public representative, one of those who defended to right to life  of the nation’s pre-born children, was shouted at in the street, “Ha, you lost”.

The reality is, the dangerous reality is, that power exercised in this way, as was done by the Democratic Party’s populist regime under the Obama administrations, produces a populist counter response and gives us the Presidency of Donald Trump.

De Tocqueville foresaw this kind of culture crippling freedom of thought and speech. He argues that within the barriers set by public opinion, the opinion of the majority, an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them.

Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before he published his opinions he imagined that he held them in common with many others; but no sooner has he declared them openly than he is loudly censured by his overbearing opponents, whilst those who think without having the courage to speak, like him, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence, as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth.

He imagines this new sovereign power, this new Leviathan, saying to its subjects,

You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but if such be your determination, you are henceforth an alien among your people… Your fellow-creatures will shun you like an impure being, and those who are most persuaded of your innocence will abandon you too, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence comparably worse than death.”

How real all this now seems for the defeated and politically marginalized “losers” of Ireland’s battles for life and natural marriage? They are experiencing life as envisaged by Adrian Vermeule, Professor of Constitutional Law in Harvard Business School, when he summed up in First Things,the forms that “death” is now taking in the heart of our liberal democracies:

Progressive liberalism has its own cruel sacraments—especially the shaming and, where possible, legal punishment of the intolerant or illiberal—and its own liturgy, the Festival of Reason, the ever-repeated overcoming of the darkness of reaction. Because the celebration of the festival essentially requires, as part of its liturgical script, a reactionary enemy to be overcome, liberalism ceaselessly and restlessly searches out new villains to play their assigned part. Thus the boundaries of progressive demands for conformity are structurally unstable, fluid, and ever shifting, not merely contingently so—there can be no lasting peace. Yesterday the frontier was divorce, contraception, and abortion; then it became same-sex marriage; today it is transgenderism; tomorrow it may be polygamy, consensual adult incest, or who knows what?

De Tocqueville concluded that monarchical institutions of the past had thrown odium upon despotism. Let us beware, he said, lest democratic republics should restore oppression, and should render it – despotism – less odious and less degrading in the eyes of the many, by making it still more onerous to the few.

Have we disregarded his warning, to our cost?

“You can check out…but you can never leave”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters3 Comments

I’m sure this has been noticed before, but it’s still worth reminding ourselves of it: Hotel Europe – “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.

And it looks like Donald Tusk is the head porter.

President of the European Council Donald Tusk: “I’ve been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to Donald Tusk after his remarks: “They’ll give you terrible trouble”.

It will be nothing like he trouble they have cooked up for the British. The bureaucrats ruling Europe have no intention of accepting the sovereign will of the British people – regardless of what plan they might have made. How could you plan for dealing with so implacable and determined an adversary as that?

What a nightmare! Let’s hope UK can be the exception the proves this rule. Bye, bye sovereignty for rest of us.

I was very glad, during the referendum campaign, that I did not have the privilege of voting. I do not think I would have had the courage to vote ‘leave’. Whether that was rooted in prudent caution or craven cowardice, I’m not sure.

But with every day that passes, as I see the bloody-minded arrogance of the European establishment trying to thwart the democratic process, I pray harder and harder that the British will stay the course and vindicate their sovereignty. It will not only be bad for Britain if they fail. It will also be bad for Europe, an enterprise which began based on the highest principles of political morality. It will be debased to the status of a shoddy tyranny.

‘Network’ still gives us a sobering message for our time

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment


“I’m mad as hell and I wont take it anymore!”

Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet, in partnership as film writer and film director, have left us with one truly amazing piece of cinematic art. It is an extraordinary legacy. Their work together on the film, Network, back in the 1970s – it was adapted as a stage play for the National Theatre in London two years ago – is still almost beyond belief. Almost, but not quite. It is still terrifyingly prescient and terrifyingly real. It is not just a work of art. It is a sobering message for our time.

The film’s genesis was the response of the two me to the frustrations they experienced while trying to write and produce drama for American television in the late sixties and early seventies. The dumbing down of the medium – which to them had shown great artistic and cultural promise in its early days – began in those years. With Network they attempted to show us what the endgame was going to be.

They assembled a cast of superb actors – the late Peter Finch and William Holden, along with Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall, to name but four of the total ensemble  – to fill out this vision of the slide of the medium into crass commercialism and a vehicle for the transmission of imbecilic mindless fodder to pass as entertainment for the masses.

But what is astounding about this work is not just that it put the medium of television under the microscope and predicted where it would be at a point of time in the future. It showed us what this abused artefact of our inventiveness was going to do to our society and what would happen to the individuals, real people, in our society who surrender themselves to this shallow and superficial culture. What they saw happening to the limited information technology available in that age, we can now extrapolate to everything it makes available to us in our age.

Network is a grim satire on our frightening capacity to tear our humanity to shreds – while laughing, applauding and cheering ourselves all the way to the slough of despond. The film is funny but it is an uncomfortable laugh. Satire is like that. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is outrageous, and Gulliver’s Travels is funny – a story told to children but with a deeper meaning for adults. Both satires are too close to the bone to enjoy with abandonment. But one difference between Swift’s satire and that of Network is that mankind, to some extent, learned a lesson from Swift. Sadly, we do not seem to have learned anything from Network.

Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network is often regarded as his masterpiece, and has been hailed as “the kind of literate, darkly funny and breathtakingly prescient material that prompts many to claim it as the greatest screenplay of the 20th century.”

Chayefsky was an early writer for television but eventually abandoned it, “decrying the lack of interest the networks demonstrated toward quality programming”. Network was his attempt to bring it to its senses. In itself it is a masterpiece. As a lesson, it failed – so far.  Among the dreadful things it predicted was the advent of reality television by over twenty years and the “dehumanization of modern life” that this appalling genre perpetrates.

Nicholas Barber, writing for the BBC back in 2016 on the fortieth anniversary of the film’s release said that Network was Chayefsky and Lumet’s furious howl of protest about the decline of the industry, and the world. “It was a triumphant black comedy, winning four Oscars, being nominated for two more, and going on to be held in ever higher acclaim. In 2006, the Writers Guilds of America chose Chayefsky’s screenplay as one of the 10 best in cinema history.”

At the time of its release Chayefsky and Lumet’s bleak view of television’s crassness and irresponsibility was considered outrageous. Looking at it now we see it differently. We ask ourselves why, when we were warned about this, did we still let it happen? Barber says that we now realise that even its wildest flights of fancy it no longer seem outrageous at all. “The film was so accurate in its predictions that its most far-fetched satirical conceits have become so familiar as to be almost quaint.”

The plot opens with a film noir type narrator telling us about Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a veteran news anchor-man on the UBS (fictional) network who has just been given two-weeks’ notice because his ratings are falling. He confides to his friend that he has  decided to take revenge by shooting himself dead on his final show. He backs off from that, but has now got the attention of millions and launches into a diatribe about the world we live in and what the people in charge have been doing to it. On air he asks everyone watching to get up, go to their windows and shout “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” All of New York does so and for the next few hours, across the time zones of the continent, all of America follows suit.

His ratings soar and he becomes “the mad prophet of the airwaves”. The stock of UBS soars as well and it becomes the darling of corporate global business. News now becomes entertainment and the networks all madly rush to the bottom of the barrel – on the strength of the ravings of an unfortunate human being who has now lost his mind. But what do they care they are all making barrels of money?

But his friend, Max Schumacher (William Holden),  president of the station’s news division, is appalled that Howard’s mental state is being exploited. He is having and affair with a callous and ambitious producer, Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway), and it is through the vehicle of this relationship that Chayefsky exposes the dehumanizing effect of a life lived on these terms. She is so poisoned by the values of her world that she is incapable of any real love or affection. The only positive outcome is that Schumacher, awakening to the realities of that whole sordid world and the monsters it has created, goes back to his wife and family asking for forgiveness.

“Seen a quarter-century later,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2000, “it is like prophecy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation?” 

Barber in 2016 agreed that was a fair question. “A further 16 years later, though, it’s tempting to ask whether Chayefsky was imagining today’s podcasters, or even today’s shock-jock politicians, who sway voters by “articulating the popular rage” in terms no more sophisticated than Howard’s.  Add to that mix the trolls infecting cyberspace on any or all of the social media platforms we live with.

We have every reason to ask ourselves today whether the driving forces behind the multi-billion dollar online communication ventures which dominate our culture have any sense of a duty of care for children whose deaths we read about almost daily and which are connected with the facilities they have launched into our world.

The Daily Telegraph reported on one such tragedy over a week ago. We were told that little Molly Russell was such a “caring soul” that she did not want to burden her parents with the depression she likened to a storm bearing down on her. Instead, the 14-year-old retreated to a terrifying online world algorithmically tailored to encourage her darkest thoughts.

As far as her loving family could see, Molly was happy and doing well: she was a keen rider and sailor and had just landed the lead role in her school’s forthcoming production of Fantastic Mr Fox. But Ian Russell, her father, now believes that in private she was being assailed by graphic images of self-harm and suicide on the social media sites Instagram and Pinterest.

Can we not work out some policies and practical approaches which will allow us to benefit from the great potential which modern technology gives us to do good in the world, without having to experience the evil fictionally suffered by Howard Beale in the 1970s to the palpable evil suffered by so many in our own time?

(‘Network’ is now streaming on Netflix)

The hunger-for-hustle epidemic raging through a generation

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Posted earlier today to MercatorNet.com: ‘Rise and Grind’: on the pathology of work.

I read a book many years ago entitled On the Theology of Work. It impressed me. I might go further and say that it was part of a process which set me on a road in which my vision of life and its purpose led me to a very good place.

However, now, in the 21st century, it seems that another book is called for. We still need that earlier book but more urgently we seem to need a book entitled “On the Pathology of Work”.

A cri de coeur came from Erin Griffith writing in the New York Times last weekend about a rather frightening world of work apparently unfolding before us now. She described a new culture of work and the workplace, “obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape. ‘Rise and Grind’ is both the theme of a Nike ad campaign and the title of a book by a ‘Shark Tank’ shark.”

This new culture glorifies ambition not just as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle, an end in itself.

Life for the younger generation immersed in this culture, she explains, is just about ambition, grit and hustle – everything of value about work comes from this striving. It is a culture in which work is about engaging in “a sweat session that sends your endorphins coursing … a vision which “expands your way of thinking.”

Work for its disciples never really stops and they don’t want it to stop because it is the source of their rapture.

When these people take exercise it is only to ensure that they can continue to get their highs on the job; if they take time off to relax with music it is a necessary evil – because if they don’t they might underperform in the job.

The evangelists of this new culture don’t say this, but in fact their model of work is a drug on which you get high and the more you engage with it on this level, the more you need to. It is a one-way ticket to “workaholism”.

Is this not just one other symptom of our age falling victim to excess?

Read the full post here.


“Shall I at least set my lands in order?” Easier said than done

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians is a worrying book. It places before us a picture which tells us that all is not well in the British political system. Our own everyday observation makes it clear, however, that the malaise in that system is one which is mirrored in many if not most western democracies. Nor is it just the rise of what we rather lazily call “populism” which is at the heart of what is troubling us. That is just a symptom of the deeper problem infecting our political souls.

This book was written by Isabel Hardman and published late last year – the fruit of more than two years research carried out largely in the heart of the mother of parliaments. Hardman is a political journalist and the assistant editor of The Spectator. She has written for The Observer and currently writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph. In 2015, she was named Journalist of the Year at the Political Studies Association.  

Essentially, the concerns she raises about our electoral choices stem from the breakdown of that vital connection between the governed and the governing. This crucial element in the structure of a functioning political system has been damaged to the degree that it is no longer fit for purpose. The challenge which Hardman lays before us now is that of finding a solution to this rift.

It is a good book, descriptive and anecdotal rather than severely analytical. Despite its provocative title, it is a very balanced and honest examination of the workings of British parliamentary democracy, a kind of limited version of de Tocqueville’s 19th century masterpiece, Democracy in America.

On the basis of what she has observed over those years watching the system at work – or not at work – we can surmise about what needs to happen.

On the one hand the elected governors have to be wise enough and willing enough to address both the deficiencies in the system and the personal inertia which for decades – if not for the best part of a century – has prevented them from doing so to date. On the other hand, the governed have also to be wiser and more willing to appreciate the very nature and limitations of the system they expect to serve their common good. As a consequence they must demand integrity and better leadership from their politicians. They must also be reasonable and not demand that their representatives combine fixing their parish pumps along with legislating wisely and well.

Hardman accepts, by and large, the basic good intentions of those who present themselves for election as public representatives. The picture she presents us with is one of men and women struggling with conflicting demands on their time, conflicting loyalties, and conflicting responsibilities. These are men and women whose first responsibility is to legislate wisely and well but who end up neglecting that in the pursuit of other ends: power in government; trying to satisfy the demands their constituents make on them for things that have nothing to do with legislation or government, trapped by the awareness that failing to satisfy those demands may mean the end of their parliamentary careers. On top of all this is the debilitating culture of what is now called the “bubble” effect.

The Westminster Bubble, she tells us, was first identified in the late 1990s. It was a description of the tight community of politicians, researchers, think tanks and journalists around Parliament. “It has gained increasingly negative connotations as an insular community in which insignificant things seem enormous and the things that matter to everyone else are ignored. Bubble members are out of touch with the rest of the world, and their lack of understanding of the people they purport to represent leads them to make serious mistakes on a regular basis.”

Whether or not that perception is accurate, it is held by a large proportion of the population and feeds the distrust with which so many now harbour about the assemblies of their representatives in many jurisdictions, including Ireland.

MPs are the least trusted professional group, surveys tell us – below estate agents, bankers and journalists – with just 21 per cent of Britons saying they’d trust an MP to tell the truth. The public don’t like politics as a line of work generally, but they also tell pollsters that the quality of the politicians is the feature they dislike the most.

A YouGov poll Hardman commissioned for her book asked those who wouldn’t even consider standing for Parliament what put them off. Worryingly, 41 per cent of them said, ‘I don’t like politicians and the way politics works’, and 16 per cent said, ‘none of the main political parties reflects my views’. 

This is, to an extent, a form of disenfranchisement. If 16 per cent is bad, think of the 30 plus percent of the Irish who now consider themselves disenfranchised. Over 90 per cent of Irish legislators passed an extremely liberal abortion law (they deny that it is extreme, of course) with the effect that the 33 percent who clearly opposed abortion in a referendum last year now consider that they have no effective representation in parliament.

In the Irish context two major factors have produced this chronic dysfunction in that country’s political life.

The first is the fatal three-way nexus which characterizes politics there. The system is essentially one where a group of, at best, marginally trusted parliamentarians, locked into a rigid party system, represents the people. In her book Hardman does a great job of describing how the “necessary evil” – de Tocqueville’s term – of the party system militates against genuine choice in the British system. It is even more limiting in Ireland.

That group is assisted in the work of government by a cadre of elite public servants – particularly in departments with a brief for social policy – seriously infected with the left-leaning ideology dominating the Irish universities in which they were educated. This elite has been perpetuating itself in that ideological image for decades. Both these elements in turn are manipulated by a media establishment of the same essential colour. This part of the machine cheerleads when things are going according to its ideological principles. When they veer off course pressure is applied to bring them back by seeking to mold public opinion to the desired shape. This is done partly by the cultivation of a range of pressure groups driven by the self-same secular liberal principles.

This latter was the political force which radically changed public opinion to bring about two big referendum majorities opening the door to gay marriage and abortion on demand in Ireland over the past few years.

The second factor behind this effective disenfranchisement is effectively the child of the first – the collapse of trust in anything said by any of the people in power within this nexus. Surveys of this trust factor don’t exist in Ireland – suggesting perhaps the extent of control which the protagonists in this story have over the narrative about themselves.

Almost twenty years ago the late David Foster Wallace summed up what he saw as a major factor behind the killing of political interest among the young in America. Guess what? It was distrust. Things have moved on inexorably since then but there is little doubt but that what America is now experiencing politically is the direct descendant of what Wallace drew attention to.

Wallace was commissioned by Rolling Stone to cover Senator John McCain in the primaries for the US election of 2000. At that time McCain was the face of honesty in politics and as such seemed to electrify youth with a promise of integrity. Eventually his campaign was snuffed out by the power-brokers, but before that happened Wallace explained McCain’s appeal in terms of his commitment to telling the truth. McCain often finished his rallies with this refrain:

 “I’m going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don’t agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth.”

Wallace did not think it was that simple. “But you have to wonder,” he wrote. “Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well, it’s obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They’re cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy. McCain’s résumé and candor, in other words, promise not empathy with voters’ pain but relief from it. Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts. We learn this at like age four —- it’s grownups’ first explanation to us of why it’s bad to lie (“How would you like it if. . . ?”).

And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks — that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if experience seems to teach that everything you’re supposed to believe in is really just a game based on lies. Young Voters have been taught well and thoroughly. You may not personally remember Vietnam or Watergate, but it’s a good bet you remember “No new taxes” and “Out of the loop” and “No direct knowledge of any impropriety at this time” and “Did not inhale” and “Did not have sex with that Ms. Lewinsky” and etc. etc.

It’s painful to believe that the would-be “public servants” you’re forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they’ve just got to believe you’re an idiot.

Is this true of the culture of Irish political life today? It surely is, when, to get elected, the man who has driven Ireland’s abortion law through parliament assured the pro-life movement that he was pro-life. Irish mainstream media simply turns a blind eye to this deceit. To Ireland’s pro-life community, the campaigning columnists in the Irish Times, Irish Independent and Irish Examiner are very reluctant to report anything negative about the politicians who are pursuing the secular liberal agenda which they themselves have so close to their hearts.

Disenfranchisement may be a technical term denoting the formal removal of voting rights but the name of what has happened is not the important thing – “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” – and not having anyone to vote for, whatever you call it, smells just as rotten as anything that ever polluted a body politic. A combination of three malign forces have succeeded in consigning one third of the Irish population, commensurate by and large with that section of the population which takes seriously its commitment to the moral principles of the Christian Faith, to the margins of political life – for now. Something must be done to cut the Gordian knot in the tummy of the Irish body politic.

The woes of the British political system depicted in Isabel Hardman’s book do not make strange reading for the Irish looking at their own parliament, essentially a child of that Westminster mother. They are all too familiar – just an Irish version of the same rot.

A troubled and troubling country

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment
What is in a smile?

It was all over the internet at the weekend: a short video of boys from a Kentucky Catholic high school, in Washington for the annual March for Life, mocking a peaceful Native American elder from an Indigenous People’s March. Their ringleader stood smirking at the man while other boys gathered around chanting to drown out the elder’s speech and drumming. They were wearing MAGA hats, which tells you everything – doesn’t it?

No, it doesn’t, as a two hour video of the same incident later showed. But reaction to the original snippets does tell you something, wrote one (Catholic) mother in The Atlantic on Monday.

Admitting that her own initial reaction got it wrong, – she was one of many, indeed multitudes, for that is the scale we are dealing with on the internet – Julie Irwin Zimmerman described the whole thing as a political Rorschach test, that psychological test where you are shown inkblot images on a piece of paper and are asked to describe what you see. The popular understanding of it is that it reveals a person’s unconscious thoughts, motives, or desires.

Substitute the video story for the inkblot, Zimmerman suggested, “tell me how you first reacted, and I can probably tell where you live, who you voted for in 2016, and your general take on a list of other issues — but it shouldn’t be.”

Yet this is the depth of unreason to which political, indeed not just political but general civilized discourse has now descended, and not only in America.

When more video of the confrontation – it cannot be called anything else – was shown it was not clear who was confronting whom. But there was now a big enough question mark over it all to make some of the outraged begin to backtrack. There was no real evidence that the boys said or did anything that was hostile.

According to a statement issued by the student at the centre of the controversy, Nick Sandmann, the students were also victims of harassment by the indigenous group’s protest, and they had tried to defuse the situation by singing school spirit songs over their chants.

Sandmann said the encounter between himself and Nathan Phillips, the Omaha elder, was “a misunderstood moment taken out of context.” He claimed that he was utterly confused by the man who had confronted him on the assumption that because he was wearing that particular cap, he was a die-hard supporter of Donald Trump.

Phillips, meanwhile, maintained that he and his companions felt threatened by the confrontation with the students, most of whom were white.

Argument over the video evidence continued in Rorschach mode. But media scholar Ian Bogost in a piece for The Atlantic drew the sanest conclusion:we should just “Stop Trusting Viral Videos”.

Well, good luck with that. The video hits your screen and where you are on that Rorschach scale will determine the rest. You don’t ask yourself is this viral – because that proves nothing about what you have just seen. Really principled media people – how many of them are there? – will have rules about checking sources, but that takes no account of what happens when the virus is raging through the body politic.

A great deal of the interpretation of the visual in this case hangs on the smile of young Nick Sandmann as he stands face to face with Nathan Philips.

Bogost offers the opinion that the actual intentions and motivations of Sandmann and his colleagues seem vital to any account of what took place. “But not only can we never really know what those were, they also don’t matter once the original video has been shot and shared. That short clip shows a young man with a smirk, wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat, appearing to stare down a Native elder: Simply describing the scene, at this political and cultural moment, suggests a racist threat.”

That opinion really shows us the problem at the heart of this truly appalling state in which we find ourselves.

The problem is the breakdown of trust. Of course, there are many things which we may never really know about each other. But to deal with that lack of knowledge we have the quality of trust. Abandon our readiness to trust each other and take offence at careless words and ambiguous looks, and we compound the deficiencies in our capacity to know to a terrifying degree.

One man’s smile may be another man’s smirk – but to categorically call what you see on Sandmann’s face a smirk betrays naked prejudice. That smile could mean many things – nervous fear, a desire to be a friend, bewilderment. And the general appearance of the group of boys? Have any of the outraged ever been in the presence of a group of raucous schoolboys? These look perfectly normal. They are not the picture of mature refinement – but what group of boys on a day out ever are?

Without trust, as this episode demonstrates, identity politics rushes in to fill the vacuum. Should we not begin by simply seeing one American disagreeing with another. Why should racism have anything to do with it? It might, but is that conclusion just another consequence of the inherent prejudice of the viewer? Simply reflect on the motive which brought these boys all the way from Kentucky to Washington – to vindicate and defend the right to life of unborn children of every race on the planet, of every shade of skin.

America is not alone in experiencing such ill-founded social eruptions. We must believe that we can do something about it, but will we?

(This is the revised version of this article which was published this morning – January 23 – on MercatorNet.com under the heading What really happened between some Catholic schoolboys and a Native American elder? The original was published on this blog on Tuesday evening.)