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.

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.)

A new Nostradamus?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Michel Houellebecq (New York Review of Books)

Michel Houellebecq’s novels are not for the morally conscientious, replete as they are with what is euphemistically called “explicit content”. Neither are they safe reading for the snowflakes or the politically correct of this world.

But there is certainly something uncanny about the man’s apparent gift for reading the times we live in, and even giving us advance warning of the times we will be living in. Also, while he’s thoroughly French, he doesn’t give his countrymen an easy time.

The publication of his last novel, Submission, imagined a time – not far from now – wehen a Muslim France elects a Muslim president. On the day of its publication Islamic terrorists went into the offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and slaughtered everyone they could find. People found the coincidence – because that is what it was – a bit unsettling.

M. Houellebecq’s latest work, Sérotonine, is now being seen in France as another piece of semi-prophesy. He began writing it more than two years ago but seems to tell us about the current street protests against President Emmanuel Macron by gilets jaunes (yellow jackets).

Houellebecq and Macron are in fact friends. Whether this puts a strain on their friendship remains to be seen.

An article in The Spectator last week noted Houellebecq’s “willingness to speak his mind in an age of stifling literary conformity. This has earned him the predictable epithet of the ‘enfant terrible’ of French literature.”

“In a recent interview with Harper’s Magazine he didn’t shy away from this reputation. Not only did he dare to suggest that Donald Trump was doing a good job, but he then described the EU as ‘a dumb idea that has gradually turned into a bad dream’. Houellebecq is no Anglophile but he admitted that in voting for Brexit, ‘the British had once again shown themselves to be more courageous than us in the face of empire’.”

We might wonder how Napoleon Barnier might like that?

Disenfranchising the Dissident Irish

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Political Scientist, Dr. David Thunder has been talking to us again on the real problem in Irish political life: disenfranchisement.

The last disenfranchisement of the Catholic Irish took place with the Act of Settlement in 1701 and subsequent penal acts depriving both them and Protestant Dissenters of all sorts of civil rights. That wrong took well over a hundred years to put right. Indeed, in Northern Ireland the British Government only got around to restoring justice at the end of the last century – about 300 years later. This new marginalization , at whose root again is the issue of conscience and faith, is more subtle and therefore harder to combat. Will they be living in this condition for another 100 years?

This loss of rights and privilege of citizenship for faith is nothing new.

“By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king; for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.” (Letter to the Hebrews).

That will be the same path which many doctors, nurses and health workers in Ireland will now also take in the face of abortion legislation which was signed by Ireland’s President last week.

“We have effectively disenfranchised…33% of the population from Irish politics.” On Friday Dr. Thunder discussed how this happened and what we can do about it with Wendy Grace on Spirit FM.

Here is the full 14 mins podcast (you can fastforward to 36:40):

http://podcasts.spiritradio.ie/the-morning-show-friday-21st-december/

Looking back in anger, looking forward in hope

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

There is a special poignancy in our Irish Christmas this year. In some way it links aptly with this no less poignant famous picture of Joseph helping Mary and her unborn child along the road to Bethlehem, just over two thousand years ago.

It is Mary and Joseph on the Way to Bethlehem, from the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

In it, The Guardian newspaper (believe it or not), tells us that we see Mary and Joseph who are on their way to Bethlehem through a rocky landscape. She has climbed down from the donkey, perhaps afraid of riding down such a perilous, ankle-breaking slope. Joseph, grizzled and weary, is helping her along with all his loving kindness, his actions (rather than her physical appearance) suggesting just how pregnant she is. He is doing everything he can, as husband and prospective new father, to protect his little family from hardship and danger.

In Ireland the unborn have now lost the protection of the State. The fatal decision was made by a majority of the Irish people last May. That they did so, many still find very hard to come to terms with. Legislatures, at one remove from the will of the people, pass laws like this – but that a people should directly ask it legislature to do so is in some way harder to comprehend. But comprehend it we must.

The antiphon to the second Psalm, a substantial portion of which constitutes part of the lyrics of Handel’s Messiah, proclaims:

“His kingdom is a kingdom of all ages, and all kings shall serve and obey him. “

These lines challenge us, challenge our faith in the word of God. When I look around me at our crazy world and my apostate nation, I have the temerity to question these words as so much self-delusion. I’m inclined to say, “Really? Serve and obey? Will they really? You must be joking.”

Credibly enough, the psalmist asks rhetorically, “Quare fremuérunt gentes, et pópuli meditáti sunt inánia?” Why this tumult among nations, among peoples this useless murmuring? Indeed the more direct translation, “thinking up inanities” might be better.

Tumult certainly; useless also; even self-negating – all that self-grandising posturing which we call identity politics, signifying nothing; hang-ups over ‘diversity’ to the point where the world is becoming a new Tower of Babel.

And the political classes, left, right and center? They also fit into this picture, personified by the royalty of a former age:

“They arise, the kings of the earth, princes plot against the Lord and his Anointed. They shout, ‘Come, let us break their fetters, come let us cast off their yoke.’”

There is certainly a great deal of that around. How else are we to interpret the abuse piled on those who dare to defend the rights of medical professionals whose consciences are being trampled on by their own elected representatives? For our “rulers” conscience is now a fetter, a yoke to be cast off.

“Carol Nolan TD (a member of the Irish Parliament) has received a lot vitriol abuse from fellow TD’S for opposing the abortion bill,” we were reminded courtesy of Facebook a few weeks ago.

But then comes an even harder bit for the beleaguered remnants of Israel to take on board.

“He who sits in the heavens”, we are told, “ laughs; the Lord is laughing them to scorn. Then shall he speak to them in his anger, and trouble them in his rage. It is I who have set up my king on Zion, my holy mountain.”

But where is he, we ask, as the division bell rings in the Irish parliament and “the kings of the earth”, the “princes”, troop to the lobby to pass death sentence on thousands of unborn children? The estimate is that close to 10000 Irish babies will perish next year under the legislation now passing through the two Houses of Parliament – with only a few brave voices offering resistance.

We look around and see a crumbling civilization. I walk through the campus of a famous university; I pick up a student newspaper – free because it is printed with money from taxpayers, in the name of education. What do I find in it? Very little that is not advocating licentious hedonism. Irony of ironies, this university was dedicated to the Most Blessed Trinity over four hundred years ago. If I were an advocate of “safe spaces” for young people I would certainly not be recommending this university campus, my alma mater, as one of them.

But then, in the midst of all these temptations to doubt the sacred texts, we remember the crumbling of Christ’s cohort of followers. Just four are left at the foot of the Cross, while faithful Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus face up to the powers-that-be and prepare to take him down from the gibbet to lay him in the tomb prepared by one of them. That makes six out of all those who, less than a week before, the were hailing him as the Son of David.

Then we hear the psalmist say with utmost confidence:

“I will announce the decree of the Lord: the Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son. It is I who have begotten you this day. Ask and I shall bequeath you the nations, put the ends of the earth in your possession.’”

And the reckoning?

“‘With a rod of iron you shall break them, shatter them like a potter’s jar.’ Now, O kings, understand; take warning, rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with awe and trembling, pay him with your homage.

Lest he be angry and you perish; for suddenly his anger will blaze.”

Can all that really be balderdash? No. These words have been sung and believed in for more, much more probably, than three thousand years. They have also been scoffed at by kings, princes and peoples who delude themselves with “useless murmuring”. These words have been at the heart of the Christian transformation of the world foretold in the Old Testament and announced in the New. Strip away all that has come to us from these words and we will be left with a nasty and brutal world dominated by superstition and fatalistic myth, ruled by fools who think they can mold human nature into whatever shape they dream up or desire.

The final line of the psalm proclaims, “Blessed are they who put their trust in the Lord.” So, with those words, all doubt melts away – if trust in the Lord is the condition for Blessedness what more is there to say. If we were to value anything in the world over this then we make ourselves nothing more than useless murmurers and lackeys of the “kings of the earth”.

That trust, that Blessedness, will still be as real three thousand years from now, as real as it is today, as real as it was in the souls of Mary and Joseph as they struggled towards Bethlehem with the unborn child who is the saviour of mankind; and as real as it was three thousand years ago – in spite of the world’s Herods, dictators, pseudo-democrats and all the other varieties of rulers it offers us.

Human flourishing, families and where they live

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Location, location, location – a slogan meaning what?

This phrase has been around for a long time. It tells us that what’s around a home remains as important as what’s in the home…

Not true!

Let us make another slogan to help us realise something even more fundamental.

If we want to change the world, to change our society and our culture, to evangelise and re-Christianize it we might think that our politics is where we should begin, or even our Church.

No, it is not – and this is where our new slogan comes in

Family, family, family.

We must think family, we must do family, we must – and this is what falls to all of us and is possible for all of us – help families wherever we can.

Something flagged for me in In First Things this week fleshes out this priority even more.

John Cuddeback argues that a flourishing society starts with flourishing households:

“One can be part of a family without being part of its household. This distinction is important if we are to understand and renew family life…Not long ago, the household was a context of daily life. The arts that provided for the material needs of human life were largely home arts, practiced, developed, and passed on within the four walls, or at least in the immediate ambit of the home. Food, clothing, shelter, as well as nonessential items that gave some embellishment to life, were commonly the fruit of the work of household members, often produced with an eye for beauty as well as utility. This carried into the industrial era. For decades, Singer sold sewing machines to housewives, who bought patterns and made their own clothes. Men built backyard toolsheds. Grandparents put up raspberry jams in Mason jars.

“The household involves more than just work. Porch times, lawn times, and by-the-fire times punctuated the more serious endeavors, and were often occasions of leisurely work, too, such as carving, fine needlework, and other hobbies. Meals called for setting aside work, as of course did prayer. These habits were times of mutual presence. To a great extent, family life meant being with at least some other members of the household for most of the day.

“Recounting these things, once taken for granted, highlights how remote a household is from the home life of today. Even those who intentionally seek to have a “traditional” family life, in fact, often lack the ability to comprehend the reality of a household that is not simply ‘traditional,’ but ancient and profoundly human. They set out to start a family in a virtual vacuum. The husband and father ­usually sallies forth to a remote job, and the wife and mother attempts to manage the day-to-day work of child-rearing—a project the real nature of which is elusive—while wondering what place she too might have ‘out there.’ Intangible pressures on parents and children seem inexorably to draw their attention and their time to activities outside of the home. Junior gets taken to soccer practice. Mom goes to a spin class.

“A renewal of family life will require a renewal of the household, especially as a place of shared work and a center of shared experience and belonging. We are missing out on truly human living because we fail to live together.”

Read the rest.

Terrence Malick and the Passion of Franz Jägerstätter

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters6 Comments

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August Diehl as Franz Jägerstätter and Valerie Pachner as Franziska Jägerstätter

Ireland, indeed all countries in the world plagued with errant secularism, is in the throes of a battle over the issue of freedom of conscience for its citizens. Now, the great film director and auteur, Terrence Malick, is about to raise the stakes for the protagonists in this war.

If Robert Bolt and Fred Zinnemann did it for the rights of conscience in the Public Square with A Man For All Seasons in the middle of the last century, Malick is going to do it for our time. While Bolt and Zinneman nuanced their treatment of St. Thomas More’s faith and convictions with an emphasis on human character, Malick’s subject takes the issue to full frontal level on behalf of the law of God.

The Irish secularist parliament is currently passing legislation permitting the termination of pregnancy – which really means the termination of innocent human lives. This legislation was wilfully sanctioned by two thirds of the Irish electorate in a clear Yes and No referendum last May. A suggestion that practising Catholics who ticked Yes on the ballot paper might have something on their consciences afterwards was much mocked in the weeks that followed. If they dare to reflect on the hero of Malick’s new film they may be inclined to mock less. Their decision last May and the legislation now being built on it, will not only terminate lives but will require countless medical professionals – doctors, nurses, hospital staff and more – to cooperate in each of those killings in violation of their consciences.

Malick’s new film, Radegund, chronicles the life of a martyr of the twentieth century who was executed by guillotine in 1943 for refusing to take the life of another and refusing to accept as just, a government which had made unjust and inhumane laws.

The film takes its name from the small Austrian village of Sankt Radegund. It was the birthplace of Franz Jägerstätter, who was executed at Brandenburg Prison in 1943. The choice by Malick of this subject for his tenth film in 45 years is, one might suspect, to round off his exhaustive exploration through all his work of the struggles of men and women on this earth in their pursuit of happiness.

franz_j_gerst_tter-jaegerst_portraet_quadr
Franz Jägerstätter

Of all his heroes – or anti-heroes – Franz Jägerstätter is the one who by the authority of the Roman Catholic Church can be said definitively to have achieved just that. He was beatified on ‎26 October 2007, Linz, Austria by ‎Pope Benedict.

He was born on 20 May 1907, to his unmarried mother, Rosalia Huber, and to Franz Bachmeier, who was killed during World War I. After the death of his natural father, Rosalia married Heinrich Jägerstätter, who adopted Franz and gave the boy his surname of Jägerstätter in 1917.

Franz received a basic education in his village’s one-room schoolhouse – Radegund still has a population of a little over 500 souls. Rosalia’s father helped with his education and the boy became an avid reader – but not in any way a “saintly” child or teenager. He was the first in his village to own a motorcycle and he flaunted it to great effect – winning the hearts of the local girls, with not very moral consequences.

However, things changed when in 1936 he married a young girl in the village. She was part of the gift of graces which God gave him and which would eventually flower in his martyrdom. They went to Rome for their honeymoon and there a kind of conversion took place under the influence of what he saw in both the city and in his young wife’s simple piety and devotion.

He returned to his small farm – left to them by step-father – and worked as hard as any small farmer must. They had three little daughters and he took on the job as sacristan in the local church to help add to their small income. He now went to Mass and Holy Communion every day that he could. The character and depth of his piety could be sensed from his resolve to refuse the customary offering for his services at funerals. He preferred the merits from the spiritual and corporal works of mercy over any remuneration.

Then came the Nazis, the annexation of Austria by Germany, the Anschluss, and war. In the gathering storm of the mid to late 1930s, while much of Austria was beginning to follow the tide of Nazism, Franz became ever more rooted in his Catholic faith and placed his complete trust in God. He began thinking deeply about obedience to legitimate authority and obedience to God, about mortal life and eternal life and about Jesus’ suffering and Passion.

Franz was in no way political nor part of any resistance movement, but in 1938 he was the only local citizen to vote against the Anschluss, because his conscience prevailed over the path of least resistance.

When war broke out and the Nazi grip on Austria became vice-like, Franz was called up for military service and sworn in on 17 June 1940. His resistance to active service on the field of battle for conscientious reasons was known and for a period and with the help of some officials he managed to serve while still working his farm.

He had, however, by now become convinced that any participation in the war was a serious sin and decided that any future call-up had to be met with his refusal to fight. “It is very sad”, he wrote, “to hear again and again from Catholics that this war waged by Germany is perhaps not so unjust because it will wipe out Bolshevism…. But now a question: what are they fighting in this Country – Bolshevism or the Russian People?

“When our Catholic missionaries went to a pagan country to make them Christians, did they advance with machine guns and bombs in order to convert and improve them?… If adversaries wage war on another nation, they have usually invaded the country not to improve people or even perhaps to give them something, but usually to get something for themselves…. If we were merely fighting Bolshevism, these other things – minerals, oil wells or good farmland – would not be a factor”.

Jägerstätter was at peace with himself despite his witnessing the masses’ capitulation to Hitler. Mesmerized by the National Socialist propaganda machine, many people knelt when Hitler made his entrance into Vienna. Catholic Churches were forced to fly the swastika flag and subjected to other abusive laws.

The Battle of Stalingrad lasted from 23 August 1942 until 2 February 1943. It was the largest confrontation of World War II and decimated the Wehrmacht. The debacle increased demand for soldiers in the field and in February 1943 Franz was called up again for military service. He presented himself at the induction centre on 1 March 1943 and announced his refusal to fight.

He was held in custody at Linz in March and April, transferred to Berlin-Tegel in May and subject to trial on 6 July 1943 when he was condemned to death for sedition. The prison chaplain was struck by the man’s tranquil character. On being offered the New Testament, he replied: “I am completely bound in inner union with the Lord, and any reading would only interrupt my communication with my God”.

After his sentence one last attempt was made to get him to relent – for his protest was an embarrassment even in that murderous regime. His wife and parish priest were brought to the prison to dissuade him. The techniques of persecutors never change. Thomas More faced the same challenge to his faith.

On 9 August, before being executed, Franz wrote: “If I must write… with my hands in chains, I find that much better than if my will were in chains. Neither prison nor chains nor sentence of death can rob a man of the Faith and his free will. God gives so much strength that it is possible to bear any suffering…. People worry about the obligations of conscience as they concern my wife and children.

“But I cannot believe that, just because one has a wife and children, a man is free to offend God”.

Franz Jägerstätter, would not bow his head to evil. No mercy was shown. He was laid on the platform of the guillotine, facing the blade and without a blindfold.

This is the man whom Terrence Malick has now chosen to portray for us, a reminder that no matter what the season, as Franz Jägerstätter explained to his interrogators who tried to probe and probe why he was taking the path he had chosen, the grace of God is sufficient for every man and the ultimate cause of his salvation.

Malick, an auteur who probes consciousness and consciences like no other filmmaker of our time, is a worthy successor to his great influences, both of whom left us with masterpieces on the life of an earlier martyr for conscience , Carl Theodor Dreyer with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and more recently Robert Bresson with The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962).

The film is scheduled for release in Germany before the end of the year. Worldwide release will follow soon after.

Ireland leading the world in conformism and groupthink

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

In today’s Irish Times we have a reading of what is really behind the latest referendum programmed for its people by the Government there – a destruction of culture and freedom under a specious campaign to give voice to any and every blasphemy.

David Thunder writes:

“Progressive” victories in Ireland have been secured by converting our public square into a training camp in conformism and groupthink that would be the envy of a fascist state.

Read his article here.

Stranger Things and the stench of totalitarianism

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Michel de Certeau

In past ages the powers controlling our great institutions of Church and State were much less tolerant of free speech and free interpretations of influential texts in our culture. Censorship was a routine instrument of government. Our freedoms now are more respected. Or are they?

As one cultural critic (Michel de Certeau) has observed, “Today, it is the socio-political mechanisms of the schools, the press or television that isolate the text controlled by the teacher or the producer from its readers.” He died in 1986 so did not live to see or feel the impact of social media as a controlling mechanism for the herding of human beings. Nor did he see the frightening denial of free speech now spreading like cancerous cells under the banner of liberal democracy.

Just think of the controls exercised by the bullying trolls on Twitter – at one end of the scale. Then consider the selective management by the mainstream media of the public narrative on the political and social issues of our time.

A potent example of the former was recounted recently by The New York Times. It was a sad story of the fate of a woman in Missouri who had the temerity to dream of trying to make her beloved Democratic Party a safe place for a pro-life advocate like herself to play a part in her State’s and her Nation’s politics.

Joan Berry, a Democrat from the day she heard John F. Kennedy campaigning in her state back in 1959, this summer successfully secured a clause in her Party’s platform which told pro-life citizens that there was a place for them in their midst. It wasn’t easy but when it went to a vote at a meeting of the State’s Democratic Committee, it passed by 32 votes to 25.

Joan went home from that meeting feeling she had struck a blow for an open society, for democratic politics and for the Party to which she had dedicated her political life. She and her husband went off for a quiet weekend in the country. Then her daughter rang her. “Mom”‘ she said, “You better stay there for awhile. There is uproar on Facebook and Twitter about what you did.” Pro-choice Missouri was outraged and what they were prepared to say and threaten to do to poor Joan – and those 32 members of the Party who went along with her proposal was, well, unprintable.

To cut a long and sad story of one public-spirited elder stateswoman short, the Party Committee was reconvened and promptly rejected Joan’s proposal. Joan Berry hadn’t even asked the Party to reconsider its position on the life issue. She just wanted her Party to be a forum where free speech was tolerated.

Cereau, however, saw an escape hatch for those beleaguered by what is nothing less than the tyrannical forces of dominant and domineering public opinion. He pointed out that “behind the theatrical décor of this new orthodoxy is hidden…the silent, transgressive, ironic or poetic activity of readers (or television viewers) who maintain their reserve in private and without the knowledge of the masters.”

Art to the rescue.

When I first saw Matt and Ross Duffer‘s runaway Netflix success, Stranger Things, last year I wondered if I might not be drawing some consolation of this type from the experience. I wondered if this phenomenally successful piece of entertainment – some will say hokum – might not also be offering all of us an allegory for our time. We live in an era when alien forces baffle us and seem surround us on all sides.

I cannot read the minds of the Duffer brothers. But the truth is that what we read, hear and see in the artifacts of our civilization depends not only on the genius of the creators of those works. It is also often determined by our own experiences and by the power, character and developed state of our own creative imaginations.

What Alice in Wonderland, Animal Farm or Lord of the Rings says to us is not only what their authors’ intended to say but it may also be elaborated and enriched for us by what our own thoughts, sensibilities and experience of life bring to the creative table. We interpret great works of literature not only in the context of the time of their creators. We often, and with great benefit, read and interpret these works in the context of our own times our own problems and our own versions of the human condition.

Part of my fascination with Stranger Things was precisely because it seemed to say more about us, our time and our condition than a great deal of the general fare that is offered to us as entertainment.

In an interview in which the Duffers are asked about what seemed to be the universal truth they were trying to convey in the series, Matt Duffer commented that today “On television there’s been this huge avalanche of shows with antiheroes. A lot of our characters are good-hearted people. And they have a lot of compassion.” His brother Ross added that in Stranger Things, “Even when there’s darkness, people leave the show feeling a bit of hope there.… It’s about these friends that are there for each other no matter what, that there’s this mom (Winona Ryder) that’s there for her son no matter what. And to us there’s something both universal, and hopeful, about that.… That’s where we wanted to go.”

Yes, but I think their story resonates even deeper than that. The darkness he talks about is really dark. Indeed it is as dark as the hell of Paradise Lost or in Tolkien’s land of Mordor in Lord of the Rings. This is the “upside-down world” of the plot, intimately and terrifyingly known to the little girl, “Eleven”, and into which characters stray and in which some lose their lives, others lose their minds and which, throughout the series, encroaches on the real world. Its hidden forces are seeking to infiltrate and possess our world for their own grotesque and malign purposes.

On the surface these are natural forces manipulated by humans. Netflix, in its promotional material, speaks of supernatural powers at work. But in fact what we are shown is the work of vile power-hungry people and their mal-functioning experiments. The preternatural evil may emanate from the Father of Lies but, if it does, it happens like most of the evil in the world – through the medium of mankind.

Back in the 1950s we had the Red Scare. This in its turn spawned the monster of McCarthyism. We look back on that now and see it all as so much paranoia. McCarthyism revolted us and was essentially an instrument as capable of perpetrating injustice as what it railed against.

More effective antidotes of the age were the fables and fictions which countered the threat – ranging from those of Orwell, Huxley and others, to the productions of Hollywood’s own fable-factory – like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), one of the greatest science-fiction films of all time. It captures better than any other film the fears of that era. It did not say who the body snatchers were. It did not need to. It played into the real fears of the age.

So, if the Duffer Brothers are warning us about a threat to our civilization wrapped up in a piece of ‘eighties nostalgia with echoes of E.T. and The Goonies, what might it be? I can’t say what it is for them, but I know what it is for me.

The dystopia of Stranger Things may be read as a metaphor for many things: a world wrecked by man-made climate change; a world destroyed by the genetic manipulation of our food supply; a world mirroring that in which Planned Parenthood trades the body parts of human babies it aborts “for the good of humanity”. It may also be a warning that the nonsense of gender ideology and the attempted manipulation of our biological selves are destroying the very essence of our humanity. Take your pick.

In the series we have a compelling juxtaposition of the murdering evil men and women working in a grotesque human engineering facility with the semi-innocent adults and handful of “dungeons and dragons” besotted twelve-year-old kids of a sleepy Midwest town.

Can they be compared with the gullible victims of transgender activism whom we read about – individuals who are seeking reversals of surgical mutilation by professionals in the grip of a gender-bending political ideology? Echoes of all this in Stranger Things are loud and clear.

Let us return to Michel de Certeau.

Joan Berry gets bullied and bludgeoned by the Democratic Party in Missouri because she wants freedom for people to talk about their conviction that unborn children are human beings. Students on campuses around the western world put “no-platform” bans on serious thinkers who question the orthodoxies of our time and even seek the removal of academic staff who do the same. Gender-bending ideologues scream about inequality and repression of individuality when anyone tries to object to their manipulation of human nature to suit their whims.

Speaking truth about our times in plain language can be dangerous. When this becomes the norm in our culture we, thankfully, can turn to works of imagination to search for the truth and to reach a kind of wisdom. Through them we can perhaps talk more meaningfully to each other and come to wisdom more effectively than by any other means. And we can do so with no little joy – until the world once again becomes a safe place in which to speak freely.

I don’t know what creative channel of communication might now be open to pro-life Democrats in Missouri to enable their voices to be heard in the Party again. If they cannot find one then undeniably what is coming from this “upside down world” is an undeniable stench of totalitarianism.