Category: Culture Matters

Endgame?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

This is the way the world ends  

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Unless… Unless what? The problem is, we cannot give a coherent answer to that question. The truth is we seem not to know even how to begin to answer that question. That is, the agencies which try to govern our destinies on this planet, our governments, our academics, our experts, do not know, have not got the slightest idea of what to do to head off that “whimper”.

Ezra Klein, columnist with the New York Times, one of their best, and Jennifer Sciubba, distinguished demographer, began a heavyweight discussion on the columnist’s NYT based The Ezra Klein Show recently. They grappled with a frightening prospect for humanity – nothing less than what looks like the impending collapse of our civilisation.

Klein began, “So, tell me what ‘the total fertility rate’ is?”

Sciubba explained that the total fertility rate is — “let’s just say it’s the average number of children born per woman in her lifetime.” 

Klein then went on to say that when he listens to the conversation about total fertility rates, there are two conversations going on at the same time. One on the left is that it’s way too high. There are too many people. The other conversation is about how critically low it is and that we’re facing “a demographic bust. We’re going to see population collapse. We are a planet growing old, certainly a bunch of countries growing old.” 

They left aside the first conversation and focused on the second. They talked about the consequences of the fact that women have, on average, worldwide, about 2.2 children these days. Sciubba explained that basically, that is the replacement level. But then she said that in this century so far, we are in a global demographic divide. For example, the area in the world where it really is the highest is in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, over five children per woman on average.

But while there’s a divide, she said, the bottom line is that we’re all moving in the same direction. In the second part of the century, that’s really where we’re all going to start converging down at those lower levels. 

Klein then asked her how true the statement was that as countries get richer and more educated, their fertility rate drops. “Partially true” was her answer because there are “huge” examples where that has not been the case. “Huge” as in India. India is already really below replacement level for the whole country.

She cited Paul Ehrlich’s opening to his 1968 book, Population Bomb. He recalled a trip to India. There were people everywhere, people on the streets, people eating, people drinking, people sleeping, people, people, people. “And now, those people have a total fertility rate below replacement level. And India is not a wealthy country.” 

But they agreed that in general if a country has gotten richer, and that country is highly educated, highly literate, it is wealthy, that generally allows you to predict with a high level of certainty that this country is probably going to have a low fertility rate, probably below replacement level.

They were baffled by this “slightly mysterious” (Klein’s phrase) thing at the heart of their conversation. Why is it a demographic fact that when you look around the world, rich countries, more educated countries have fewer children? Why does wealth lead to fewer children?

They then moved from the focus on material well-being and began to talk about human values and the tremendous shift in values and norms across western societies. Sciubba then got personal and almost went to confession:

“And so, I think about my own life. So I have two children. And I have values beyond just wanting those children. Sorry to them if they listen to this. Thank goodness, they probably won’t, till they’re older. I do value my free time. I do value a nice meal at a restaurant. I value time with friends, time with my spouse, et cetera, et cetera. I value my career. And I value time with them the most. But you know what? It does compete for time.” 

Klein agreed but put it a little differently. “As countries become richer and more educated, they become more individualistic. And when you’re more individualistic, and people are making decisions more about their life, their self-expression, their set of choices,… then, children are one choice competing among many.”

They didn’t say this but it comes down to “freedom” of choice, “freedom” for choice. Ultimately it is about how we understand freedom.

So, on a personal level it all seems to come down to the choices people are offered by our society and our economic circumstances. As a society we expect to be able to make our choices freely and at the end of the day it is our personal value system which will guide us – or be a moral imperative for us – in making those choices. That, however, offers no solution to the demographic winter which our world faces.

They then considered the powerful impact of societal cultural values on all this – clearly implying that while people might feel they are acting freely in all the decisions they make, their freedom is much more limited than they think, limited by the norms prevailing in their communities.

They then nuanced their view of how much real freedom they might actually be enjoying.

Klein reflected that if he had told his parents that he was going to have kids at 24, they would wonder what went wrong with birth control. “We’d have been the only ones in our friend group with kids at that point. And so, there is this way in which, yes, there’s a lot of individualism, but the individualism also has very potent cultural grooves, right? You’re supposed to go and get education, and then more education and then more education, and then establish yourself in your career and be financially in a good spot, and of course, be married.

“And by the time you’ve done all that, you might be 30. You might be 32. You might be 36. And even if you wanted to have three or four kids at that point, you do end up running, particularly for women, into a biological clock problem.”

Sciubba drew from this observation the consequence that the total fertility rate for the U.S., writ large, is about 1.6 to 1.7 children per woman. Below replacement level. For the more education the lower it is on average. However she also pointed out that the gap with highly educated and less highly educated is not that big anymore.

They then moved to look at what we might call the global picture and how state policy – or any other agency’s policy – might shift us from a path which many see as a path of self-annihilation.

Is this really something that is amenable to policy change, though? Klein asked. “One of the things that is most striking to me about the data here…is that across many different kinds of societies, including some that have seen this as a crisis for their country for some time — I think here of Japan, I think here of South Korea — the ability to shift this through policy — and people have tried a lot of different things and a lot of different kinds of messaging and tax incentives and this and that — it doesn’t really seem like anything has worked.”

“And in the most extreme cases — again, I think here of South Korea, which I believe is now below total fertility rate of one, so I mean, you’re entering geometric decline — they’ve not been able to turn that around…Some of the extreme cases, like some of these East Asian countries” now see this as a genuine threat?

Klein and Sciubba then go on a virtual tour of the world to find a country which has tackled its demographic decline successfully. Depressingly, nothing seems to work. 

Sweden, which I visited last summer and where I was impressed by the evidence I saw of young families – and was told that Sweden is the best country in Europe in which to have children because of all the benefits offered. But all this is to no avail in bringing their fertility rate to or above replacement level.

The demographic “engineers” are trying to raise fertility rates to replacement level and trying to create what Sciubba describes as this nice stovepipe age structure. In this you get a steady number of people being born, aging into the workforce and aging out, without any scramble to build kindergartens or scramble to pay for Social Security.

Dream on.

The conclusion of their virtual tour is that we really don’t have societies that hang out there at replacement level. Once they tend to fall below it, they tend to stay there. 

Klein asks how do you get a population, if you’re a state, to have fertility rates that go back up above replacement level? “Well, you can strip away individual rights.” He hastens to add that he is not advocating this. Some totalitarian regimes tried and one succeeded monstrously – that of Nicolai Ceausescu in communist Romania. “So, no,” he concludes, “we do not really have examples where a society goes way below and then comes back up to above replacement level and hangs out there, and everyone is happy.”

No one thinks that the Ceausescu road is the one we will be travelling! But what road will we be traveling? Neither Klein nor Sciubba, with the best will in the world, really have any suggestions.  It appears that the modern world, in its modernity or postmodernity incarnations, as regards this impending threat is just stumped? 

In Part II of this article, next week, we will look at Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal work, After Virtue, which traces false ideas which have colonised our culture and are conceivably at the root of this predicament.

Parts I and II will appear in the print and online summer editions (May and June/July) of Position Papers Review.

A Howling Emptiness

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Is this a metaphor for the narcissistic destruction of our civilisation ?

A website, Hyperallergic, suggests that one of the fastest-growing threats to museum collections may not be, as some members of the public think, climate protesters wielding canned foods, but a scourge of selfie-takers backing into paintings and other objects. It seems many visitors are increasingly more interested in strutting vaingloriously before a masterpiece than in having an ecstatic art experience. Art insurers are worried about this and are looking at ways to tighten up policies and  promote more rigorous protections.

A few years ago a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge smashed a few precious Chinese vases to smithereens because he tripped on his shoelace as he descended the stairwell where they were on display. That was very unfortunate – and very embarrassing for the untidy individual – but it was a once-off hazard which taught the museum a thing or two about risky displays.

“It strikes us as something that’s becoming a growing trend,” Robert Read, head of Fine Art and Private clients at the Hiscox insurance company, told Hyperallergic. “We’re not going to change the whole way we underwrite, but it’s something that’s becoming concerning for museums and other public spaces, as well.” There was a confirmed selfie-related incident in 2017 that broke a Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculpture in one of the artist’s notoriously selfie-friendly Infinity Mirrors rooms. 

But the more chilling dimension of all this is the reminder of how our narcissistic enslavement to electronic devices and the ancillary objects that go with them now seems to be corrupting the sensitivity which should leave us in awe of great art.

Walter Benjamin is famous for, among other things, the statement that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” His Marxist reading of history has, of course, to be read judiciously.  But there is no doubt that our fallen nature has mixed barbarism with the legacies of our culture and civilisation for millennia. However, the greatest danger we face today is that the documents of our civilisation are being confined for safe keeping to the vaults of our brutalist buildings, at best, and at worst to the rubbish dump by the growing phalanxes of woke narcissists.

Ignorance of history, blindness to truth and beauty are among the greatest afflictions of our age. Marilynne Robinson observed, in an essay in her collection,The Death of Adam:

“We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf – it is so very guilty, after all. Such attention as we give to it is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent.” In many of the judgments which we pass on the events and characters which we disapprove of in the past, she finds clear evidence of our collective eagerness to disparage, without knowledge or information, just to be rewarded with the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.”

Narcissism is at the heart of this malaise.

Sam Vaknin is an Israeli born psychologist and a pioneering expert on the study of narcissism. He is Professor of Psychology at the Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies and is author of the bestselling book Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited.

Narcissism is on the rise, he writes. He maintains that our civilization is elevating the self into the highest object of love and that a new strain of narcissism is morphing into a religion which threatens to consume not just narcissists, but everything else around them. He argues “that unless we tame and control our narcissism, the consequences for our culture could be devastating.”

Somewhat alarmingly, Vaknin argues that our civilisation rewards narcissism and veers towards it. The allure of this strange religion is growing exponentially, in his view. “It is beginning to be widely and counterfactually glamorized – even in academe – as a positive adaptation. Counterfactually because narcissism ineluctably and invariably devolves into self-defeat and self-destruction. 

The salutary mythological tale of Narcissus, we should remember, suffered that same fate.

Vaknin sees narcissism essentially as an illness which develops as a set of complex defences against childhood abuse and trauma in all its forms. By abuse he means not only “classical” maltreatment, but also idolizing the child, smothering it, parentifying it, or instrumentalizing it, all essentially forms of child abuse.

As the subject of these abuses, “The child forms a paracosm, a dream world, ruled over by an imaginary friend who is everything the child is not: omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, brilliant, and omnipresent. In short: a godhead or divinity. The child worships this newfound ally and therefore makes a human sacrifice to this Moloch: he offers his true self.”

Narcissism then becomes the celebration, elevation, and glorification of a superior absence, a howling emptiness, the all-devouring void of a black hole with a galaxy of internal objects swirling around it, Vaknin writes.

Many, and probably even most, grow out of this into normal adolescence and adulthood and willingly and effectively face the world. Most learn to develop an understanding of other people and cease to see themselves as the be-all and the end-all of existence. However, the problem now is that a growing number do not and have begun to wield influence and even power in our society.

Narcissism as a collective force, he maintains, is aggressive, intolerant and exploitative. It is a death cult. It elevates objects above people. In a society of spectacle, a society of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, everyone is rendered a commodity. Materialism and consumerism are manifestations of narcissism as is malignant, ostentatious individualism.

Vaknin is apocalyptic about the risks narcissism poses for our civilisation. Left unbridled and unconstrained and elevated ideologically, – which so many of its manifestations increasingly are in our culture and politics – it can bring about Armageddon in more than one way. The rise of narcissism is inexorable, he feels. For him It is comparable to climate change and to the shift in gender roles in terms of its potential to destroy the human race as we know it.

Are we really in as perilous a state as Vaknin envisages? There is no doubt that the critical institutions which maintain our civilisation – academe, media of communication, government  and even christian churches – are worryingly infiltrated by this pathological blindness. However, so many of these corrupting and anti-human ideologies in the past have carried within themselves the seeds of their own destruction, that there are surely grounds for hope that this one will also consume itself. The destructive forces unleashed by the French Revolution, wrecking as they did fundamental human institutions of church and state,  appalled Edmund Burke. Sadly he did not live to see that monster devouring itself or the ultimate taming of its remnants following over two decades of murderous war. Marxist communism ultimately imploded under the sheer weight of its own anti-human prescriptions. Narcissism, pathologically slippery as it is, will hopefully be eventually rendered harmless by human resilience and the antibody of common sense. Our race has a costly but good record in dealing with the multiple existential threats which it has had to deal with throughout our history.

(This article will appear in the April edition of Position Papers.)

Mephistopheles at Large?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
Kit Harington, as Marlowe’s anti-hero Doctor Faustus 

Do we live in the best of times or do we live in the worst of times?

Ross Douthat of the New York Times seems to think we stand somewhere in between and has been mulling over the direction in which we might be heading.

His mulling is mainly in an American context but his spectrum encompasses the wider Western world as well. Ireland, as an offshore island for the driving forces of corporate America, is certainly not difficult to include in his exploratory analysis of the watershed our western civilisation now seems to straddle.

In some recent writing – in his weekly NYT column and his newsletter for subscribers – he admits to no more than “dabbling” in a peculiar kind of optimism about the American future, arguing that if we can avoid various forms of self-destruction over the next decade or two, we might find ourselves in a better position than almost any peer or rival — as an ageing world’s last bastion of dynamism and growth.

But he admits that dynamism and growth are a far cry from what ultimately matters or what can give any guarantee of even a semblance of human happiness.

Rod Dreher is an apostle preaching a more pessimistic vision of the direction in which he sees us currently hurtling. He is proposing a more radical and demanding solution to a decaying world than Douthat: cut yourself off from all that corrupts you in modernity – because it is irredeemable. Abandon it.

No matter how comfortable and cultured we might feel in this present dispensation, Dreher argues that if the human spirit is denied what it takes to fulfil the deepest longings of the soul: a sense of cosmic purpose beyond mere individualism, and common values beyond the whims and aspirations of the self, it will remain lost in a wilderness.

Douthat is a more optimistic apostle. He seems to suggest that we have a different kind of choice. His optimism rests on his reading of the history of mankind, right back to the Garden of Eden. In a certain way the choice before us is the same fatal choice which confronted Adam and Eve. Do we make a pact with Satan, as they attempted to do, or do we draw all the benefits we can from the second chance given to us and them by the Creator after their Fall?

Douthat reminds us how the serpent gave Eve and Adam some sort of forbidden knowledge, “yes – but it’s before that Fall, not afterward, that God tells humanity to fill the Earth and subdue it, and when Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden that mission carries on, just freighted with more suffering and pain.”

The great temptation confronting the modern world, Douthat suggests, is the temptation succumbed to by the legendary Doctor Faustus, who made a pact with Mephistopheles to gain the whole world and lost his soul in the process.

Douthat identifies a line of tension that runs through a lot of his own writing.

I’m a Catholic writer who often criticizes the decadence of the late modern world and urges it to rediscover dynamism and ambition. But if techno-capitalist ambitions are fundamentally Faustian, should a Catholic observer (or anyone else with similar commitments) really wish for them to rise again? In the Bible, after all, Promethean dreams are not always treated kindly. It’s the serpent who promises forbidden knowledge, the bloody-handed Cain who founds the first city (Genesis 4:17-18), the builders of Babel who are scattered to the winds. Maybe the Promethean spirit in America needs to be exorcised, not revived.

Douthat is looking for a way in which serious conservative or convinced religious believers can welcome a new American century not defined by the spirit of the famous doctor, whose impulse was to bargain for power with the very devil?

Douthat gently takes issue with some who would consider Christianity to be a religion exclusively concerned with bearing suffering in the present for the sake of the hereafter. In fact, he says, the dynamism of Christian cultures has usually reflected the working-through of the tensions between that conception of the faith and the equally powerful conception of Christianity as a religion of repair, reform, healing even revolution. He sees in the fabric of both the Old and New Testaments a weaving of this tension reflecting both a fallen world to be patiently endured and a fertile world that can be mastered and transformed.

The first murderer builds the first metropolis, yes, but the history of God’s people centers on Jerusalem, the holy city; the Bible culminates in a transformed and redeemed cosmopolis, not a return to a purely pastoral Eden. God lets Israel suffer invasions because of its unfaithfulness, he scatters his chosen people and sends them into exile – but in the rare moments when the Israelites have faithful leaders, faithful kings, they prosper in worldly as well as supernatural terms.

He reminds us that Jesus treats suffering, his own and that of others, as part of God’s unfolding plan, a cup to be drunk deeply no matter how strong the urge to let it pass. But then he also heals the sick and suffering everywhere he goes, rewards people seeking healing who take extraordinary steps to reach him, and sends his disciples out to heal more people.

Then there is the history of the Christian Church and its interface with the world of human culture and development.

Followers of Christ went into the desert and lived on pillars and built monasteries and accepted violent death in every form. But they also built and developed and invented, forging the medieval and early modern forms of civilization that carried us forward into the scientific and industrial revolutions that made our own global civilization possible.

He does take note of a certain doom-laden Catholic account of this dynamic modern history (which tracks with certain doom-laden left-wing accounts of modern industrial capitalism) in which the last few hundred years of technological breakthroughs and rising life expectancies and soaring skyscrapers are just one long Faustian bargain, carrying us toward the same self-destructive endpoint as the architects of Babel.

He doesn’t think this account really works: “There has been so much growth and vitality for Christianity within the long era of scientific and technological progress, so many surprising rebirths for different forms of Christian faith, and an underappreciated relationship between dynamism in the secular order and revival in the religious realm that if you’re any kind of providentialist you have to see a version of technological modernity as part of God’s unfolding plan.” He cites Kendrick Oliver’s  To Touch the Face of God, a study of  “The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975”, affirming his view.

He is not saying that there isn’t also a version that tends to corruption, dehumanization and ultimately our destruction. He agrees with Dreher and other pessimists that you can see that darkness visible along some of the tech frontiers that our society is currently exploring, and in those futurist worldviews that imagine humanity superseded or replaced.

But in American history he sees plenty of evidence of ambitious, developmentalist, exploration-oriented visions which seek humane forms of economic growth, the wise use of new technologies, a moral discernment about scientific achievements but not the rejection of their fruits: “However attenuated and fragmented, those impulses still exist – more so, I would say, in our country than in any rival power or alternative cultural redoubt – and I think they still offer the best chance to battle the chronic illness of decadence without bargaining our humanity away.”

In the context of all this we might leave the last word to Romano Guardini, writing more than eighty years ago – in a book published in German just before the cataclysm of World War II. He was much preoccupied with the modern world and the advance of technology, both with the good in it and with those aspects which seemed to threaten our very humanity. He wrote:

One day the Antichrist will come: a human being who introduces an order of things in which rebellion against God will attain its ultimate power. He will be filled with enlightenment and strength. The ultimate aim of all aims will be to prove that existence without Christ is possible – no, that Christ is the enemy of existence, which can be fully realized only when all Christian values have been destroyed. His arguments will be so impressive, supported by means of such tremendous power – violent and diplomatic, material and intellectual – that to reject them will result in almost insurmountable scandal, and everyone whose eyes are not opened by grace will be lost.

When he wrote those words that Antichrist had already arrived on his continent in two incarnations, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Both were defeated but their progenitor, Mephistopheles, is still as present as ever. Guardini assures us, in the depths of his Christian faith, that no matter how often he returns he will never prevail over those living in the grace of God, those to whom it will be clear what the Christian essence really is: that which stems not from the world, but from the heart of God; victory of grace over the world; redemption of the world, for her true essence is not to be found in herself, but in God, from whom she has received it. When God becomes all in all, the world will burst into flower.

The way of resistance to and correction of evil – implicitly Douthat’s way – seems to offer us a better future than the way of abandonment and flight from the world suggested by the pessimistic option. All time, in Guardini’s reading of our life in the world, is not of the world but “from the heart of God”. Therefore, we live in the best of times.

First published in the March edition of Position Papers Review

The Journey of T. S. Eliot

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Part Two

In the heart of Périgueux’s historic district, stands Saint-Front Cathedral

In August 1919 Eliot was still battling with the ideas and the form that would become The Waste Land. In that month he went, with Ezra Pound, on a walking tour of Provence. At one point they separated, Pound leaving to meet his wife. At this stage Eliot made what Matthew Hollis describes in his 2022 book on The Waste Land as a “his defining visit to Périgueux cathedral”. Hollis continues by saying that no account of what happened there is available but that “what is known is that what took place at the cathedral would be a turning point in Eliot’s life”.

The cathedral was dedicated to the legendary St Front, sent by St Peter to preach in the lands of Aquitaine. It was its later history which moved Eliot in some way, perhaps through the example of the powerful convictions of the protagonists of a later story. Provence and Aquitaine became battlegrounds in which Christianity had to confront two separate heresies in different ages, Arianism in one age and Albigensianism in another. 

Bishop Paternus had been deposed as the Bishop of Périgueux in 361 AD for preaching Arianism, the heresy which held that Jesus was not truly the Son of God, and unequal to Him. Paternus, was fiercely punished by St Hilary of Poitiers, known as the “Hammer of Arians”. Hilary proclaimed that to deny the Trinity was not only folly, but  a heresy. In substance Hilary said: To undertake such a thing is to embark upon the boundless, to dare the incomprehensible; to attempt to speak of God with more refinement than He has provided us with; it is enough that He has given His nature through the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. “Whatever is sought over and above this is beyond the meaning of words, beyond the limits of perception, beyond the embrace of understanding.”

Hilary was writing in the fourth century but his  language would resonate in Eliot in the twentieth. Eliot now found himself rudderless. It would be more than twenty years until his belief in the Blessed Trinity would flower definitively in Four Quartets. But in the early 1920s he still had many miles to travel. Nevertheless, these early Christian struggles shattered what was left of Eliot’s Unitarian foundations. 

Hollis writes:

In Périgueux, that summer, Eliot was a son separated from the love of a father in death and in life, and had yet to find the guidance of a holy spirit with which his joining of the Church of England in 1927 would allow him to commune. In the chronicles of the building before him, and in his walking conversations with Pound, Eliot could trace the accounts of martyrs and heretics alike who had gone into exile – or gone into the fire – for their convictions or their sins, people who had found a measure to live by and even to die for, who had found a family of higher calling. What had Eliot to offer compared to such commitment? Not the “one great tragedy” of the war in which he was denied a part. Not the daily negotiations at the bank for a treaty that he considered immoral and unjust, and altogether “a bad peace”. Not the wedding vows, taken before God, that seemed to him to have turned to ashes in his hands. He found he had no ideological framework from which to respond. The Unitarianism of his childhood seemed to him a poor man’s fuddle: a culture of humanitarianism, of ethical mind games rather than a passionate adherence to Incarnation, Heaven and Hell… And in the absence of a religious conviction, his writing simply could not bear the weight: regarded merely for its satire and wit, it had yet to find the ground from which to respond to the intensity of the emotions he was experiencing.

Eliot now felt alone. Pound was a kind of Confucian and this meant nothing to Eliot. “There are moments,” wrote Eliot in 1935, “perhaps not known to everyone, when a man may be nearly crushed by the terrible awareness of his isolation from every other human being.” But this religious anxiety filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness, turned out in fact to be cathartic, his dark night of the soul.

Hollis interprets it this way: “a dispossession was also an exorcism: a word to describe the purging of demons, as applied by the Catholic Church from as early as its second century: it is a removal of the bad by the good. But that wasn’t exactly what Eliot had said. A dispossession not of the dead but by the dead:  not an action undertaken by him, but one done to him.”

He was now experiencing intimations of Purgatory, something alien to the theology of Unitarianism but surely something which might have remained in his subconscious from Annie Dunn’s prayers for the souls she believed to be in that place for a time. Hollis comments:

What transfixed Eliot in this moment was not heaven and hell, but purgatory, the temporary suffering or expiation for the purpose of spiritual cleansing. “In purgatory the torment of flame is deliberately and consciously accepted by the penitent,” Eliot wrote in his 1929 Dante. He made his own translation of the moment in the Purgatorio in which Dante is approached by souls from the  flames: “Then certain of them made towards me, so far as they could, but ever watchful not to come so far that they should not be in the fire. The souls in purgatory suffer “because they wish to suffer, for purgation”, he wrote, because they wish to be in the fire, because “in their suffering is hope”. 

Dante and Virgil encountering souls in Purgatory

In such a moment of isolation, Hollis notes, Eliot would write in years to come, he felt only pity for the man who found himself alone, as he had, “alone with himself and his meanness and futility, alone without God”. Even later he wrote that to be without the company of God is to be abandoned to the wilderness, to an endless seesaw between anarchy and tyranny: “a seesaw which in the secular world, I believe, has no end”. 

Eliot’s The Waste Land  was, in a way, a journey through Purgatory. Indeed its power to this day may ultimately rest on its character as a grim but hopeful reminder of this supernatural reality believed in by Christians and Jewish people. The Scriptural basis for the Christian belief in Purgatory is the instruction of Judas Maccabeus to his soldiers to pray for the souls of their dead companions.

The three last words of The Waste Land, one word repeated three times in fact, are Shantih shantih shantih. Eliot’s note on this tells us that repeated as here, they are a formal ending to an Upanishad. He adds a translation, “The peace which passeth understanding”, but says that this is “a feeble translation of the content of this word.”

Eliot’s great poem was soon recognised as a masterpiece of the modern world. Eliot took a few more years to reach his shantih in the Christian faith. He did reach it and from that vantage gave English literature more than one magnificent literary work which reflected the spirit of his now Christian soul.

The Journey of Thomas Stearns Eliot

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Part One

A cold coming he had of it. First there was the sterile unitarian background of his family in St. Louis. Then there was the rejection by his first love, Emily Hale – even though they became life-long epistolary confidants. Next there was the half-exile in England and the family rancour which his tragic marriage to Vivienne Haig-Wood provoked. Add to all that, living through the terrible war which he had to watch from the sidelines, combined with its aftermath when all the hopes of humanity were painfully drained from European civilisation for decades.

All this fed into his tortured soul and helped produce his most famous – if not his greatest – masterpiece, The Waste Land, in 1922. Within that complicated and mysterious work, however, are early glimpses of a soul emerging from the grim panorama of an apparently decaying and hopeless world. In it intimations can already be felt of the journey he had already unconsciously embarked upon:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

Of course no reader of Eliot’s poetry – or, he would hold, any genuine poetry – should dare to say what he meant by any given assembly of lines. But that does not mean that they did not mean something.

There is an account of a reading in Oxford in 1929 of the very difficult poem, Ash Wednesday, a kind of confession of faith at the time of his conversion, in which a polite student asked him ‘Please, sir, what do you mean by the line: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree” . Eliot looked at him – I hope kindly – and said: ‘I mean, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree.” In 1948 Eliot said of poetry,“A poem does not say something, it is something”.

Matthew Hollis in his magnificent book on The Waste Land, published in 2022, quotes Eliot as saying “…that in the construction of the poem (and here he paused to spell out precisely what he meant by construction: what he called ‘the mental operation of writing it’) there had been no appearance of an ‘intellectual generalisation’, only mood, variation and associative memory. That may have been keeping his powder dry, but in doing so he rehearsed an increasingly familiar position that no reader should look to an author for meaning, whether or not it stands for a civilisation in decline. ‘It may certainly be what the poem “means”,’ he commented, ‘so long as that is not identified with what the author is supposed to have consciously meant when he wrote it.’  Meaning, in other words, lies at the discretion of the reader”.

Using that discretion is one of the great joys of reading great poetry. It is also one of the keys to revealing the truth which unfolds in our ears, before our eyes and in our hearts through the images, intimations and moods which make up the totality of a poetic work.

But what we glean about Eliot’s journey – and of course we are talking of his journey to the Christian faith – is to be found in more than his verse. Hard facts are not wanting.

We know, for example, that Eliot, in his examination of the legacies of our past, had given much thought to the role of tradition in the religions of the world. Robert Crawford, in the first volume of his biography of the poet, Young Eliot, which takes us up to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, noted:

He had been thinking more widely, too, about tradition and theology. To innovate, he argued, required consciousness of tradition, even if only to avoid repeating what had been accomplished already. Yet ‘Tradition’ with a capital ‘T’ could be a mere repository of unexamined practices. Strikingly, when reflecting on contemporary poetry in late 1917, he had suggested that ‘for an authoritative condemnation of theories attaching extreme importance to tradition as a criterion of truth, readers should consult a nineteenth-century papal encyclical… Tom’s commitment to avant-garde work by Joyce and Wyndham Lewis accompanied his reading of Catholic theologically-minded philosophers including Father John Rickaby, Cardinal Joseph Mercier (whose Manual of Modem Scholastic Philosophy was published in English in 1917) and Father Peter Coffey on interpretation of the tradition of ‘modern Catholic thought’. Tom belonged to no church. Yet, visiting Anglo-Catholic City churches in his lunch hours, he was conscious of Catholicism as ‘the only Church which can even pretend to maintain a philosophy of its own, a philosophy, as we are increasingly aware, which is succeeding in establishing a claim to be taken quite seriously’.

Thomas Stearns was the seventh and last child of Charlotte and Henry (Hal) Eliot. She was forty- three when he was born. Matthew Hollis recounts how his upbringing was entrusted to Annie Dunn, a nursemaid of Irish parents from Co. Cork, who heated the bath water for Eliot each morning, and whose affectionate presence in the house warmed the space in the young boy’s life that his mother left vacant. It was Annie, said Eliot later, who was his earliest influence, and the household figure to whom he was greatly attached. She took him to school, and sometimes to pray in the small Catholic Church of Immaculate Conception which she attended. There he would delight in the colourful statues, the bright paper flowers and glowing lights. It was with Annie that he had his first conversations about the presence of God. To a young boy of six and seven, her religion was the vivid entertainment that his family’s Unitarianism was not. ‘I was devoted to her,’ he recalled.

Who can measure influence, especially at so young an age? But all truth is not measurable to us and it would be foolish to rule out the influence of Annie on the intimations of mortality – and immortality – revealed later by Eliot. When he showed Gerontion, his pre-Waste Land poem about old age and death to his sceptical friend Ezra Pound, he is also reported to have revealed something of his ongoing wrestling with religion: ‘I am afraid of the life after death,’ he told his friend. A religious anxiety worried him, filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness.

Eliot, without apology, ‘borrowed’ from others and from tradition for his own art.

About Gerontion he wrote to Pound: “But I can show you in the thing I enclose how I have borrowed  from half a dozen sources.” Among the borrowings to which he referred was The Dream of Gerontius, a poem by John Henry Newman written in 1865 after his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The poem was set to music in 1900 in a magnificent choral work by Edward Elgar. Newman’s poem follows a life through to death into reawakening before God.

Eliot’s pre Waste Land years were full of influences which laid the foundations not only for his great poem but also for that moment when he discovered that he was “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods”. But to reach that point his journey had to take him through The Waste Land.

(Posted on Position Papers,  in In Passing)

Part Two next Friday

“Atheism was the centre from which ran out all the mischiefs and villainies” of the French Revolution

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

EDMUND BURKE AND THE WAR ON THE ORIGINS OF SECULARISM – Part Two

The Goddess of Reason enthroned by the revolutionaries on the High Altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

Edmund Burke’s battles with what he saw as the malign interpretations in early Protestantism of mankind’s relations with the Creator is the focus of this second part of our reflections on the early life of this great Irishman.

Edmund Burke can be seen as an early warrior in the crucial confrontation of our civilisation with the degenerating phenomenon of secularism. Richard Bourke’s splendid book Edmund Burke: Empire and Revolution  has a much wider focus and constitutes what was   described by the late Seamus Deane, himself a Burke scholar, as “the finest of all books on Edmund Burke”. I hope I can be forgiven for a degree of paraphrasing of Professor Bourke’s words in what follows.

The Catholic influences in Burke’s life are not over-emphasised by Professor Bourke. Nevertheless they were very real and cannot but be taken into account in any assessment of his overall grasp of the Christian faith. The backdrop of the Penal Laws to his life and the lives of many in his wider family, and to his Catholic friends and associates, inevitably had a bearing on what he could write and say. 

The author tells us that Burke’s sister, Juliana, married Patrick William French, a member of a prominent Catholic family from Galway. Burke himself was to marry Jane Nugent, daughter of the Catholic physician Christopher Nugent, based in Bath, whose son is also known to have married a Nagle from Ballyduff. Burke remained on intimate terms throughout his life with Richard Hennessy, the Irish Catholic brandy merchant, whose family had intermarried for generations with the Nagles. His “strong and affectionate memory” of Cork families like the Barretts and the Roches is similarly evident in much of his correspondence.  

We are told how Burke’s intimacy with his Nagle relations first developed during the five years  or so that he spent in the Blackwater Valley, beginning around 1737. Having received his earliest education from his mother and subsequently from assorted instructors, Burke was sent to reside with the Nagles in Ballyduff. He went to school in nearby Monanimy Castle, where he was first taught Latin by a Mr. O’Halloran, the village schoolmaster.  

O’Halloran’s influence shows in Burke’s familiarity with Virgil. In a letter of that time he quotes the classical Master’s tribute paid in the Georgics to “the pathways of the stars and the heavens, the various lapses of the sun and the various labours of the moon”. In a letter to his lifelong friend from his school days, Richard Shackleton, revealing a Christian sense of wonder, he wrote:

“What grander Idea can the mind of man form to itself than a prodigious, glorious, and firy globe hanging in the midst of an infinite and boundless space surrounded with bodies of whom our earth is scarcely any thing in comparison . . . held tight to their respective orbits. . . by the force of the Creator’s Almighty arm.”

In a debate in Trinity in 1749, talking about the Sermon on the Mount, he spoke of how the Christian religion marked an advance on heathen morality by educating the feelings of the heart, perhaps sensing the same idea embraced in John Henry Newman’s wonderful phrase, “heart speaks unto heart”.

Burke’s friend, Richard Shackleton, was a committed Quaker coming from that famous Ballitore family whose school Edmund attended before Trinity, also in the company of Richard. The author notes how Burke was aware of the “Different Roads” towards Christian truth which both he and his friend earnestly pursued, and reflected on the “melancholy” fact that there existed “Diversities of Sects and opinions among us.” He lamented the reality of Christian disunity.  

For Burke, the author notes, toleration among Christians was a mark of piety, although his attitude to infidels was another matter. His hostility to atheists would reach a crescendo in the 1790s in connection with the French Revolution: “Atheism,” he said, “was the centre from which ran out all their mischiefs and villainies.” Beginning in the 1790s, he vociferously denounced the “enlightened” ideals of the Revolution. His intention was to ridicule the presumptuousness of natural reason and the pretensions of moral philosophies based on hostility to organised religion. 

The shadow of the “wars of religion” of the 17th century, not to mention the Irish rebellion of 1641 and the Cromwellian aftermath loomed large over the thinkers of the early 18th century. For many, religion was a malign force and they looked for ways to remove that malignity. For others that was a false road to peace and simply reflected a total misunderstanding of what the Christian religion was about.

Professor Bourke explains: While toleration… seemed to him a basic ingredient of the Christian message, he thought the dogmatism of sceptical deists promoted persecution. It was a common refrain among polemical deists that religion was a source of bigotry, leading inexorably to sectarian prejudice and strife. Burke accepted  Bishop Berkeley’s inversion of this formula:

“Christianity was a morally emollient system of belief. Religion was commonly a pretext of animosity, but never its fundamental cause…the identification of blind fury with religious piety by sceptics was the product of a pernicious brand of fanaticism.”

In formulating his approach to reconciling the worlds of faith and reason he argued that eighteenth century irreligion replicated the same tendency and could only provoke more conflict. The deist project to realise the “freedom of philosophy” nurtured an uncritical belief in the oracles of  reason. With this certainty came contempt for the utility of social habit, and disregard for the natural moral sentiments of mankind. 

Burke saw no alternative but to take on the radical sceptics and deists who were hell-bent on not only denuding religion of all meaning and value, but on destroying civilisation in the process. One of the targets of the sceptics was the destruction of the idea of mystery in religion and the elevation of pure reason as the only source in which mankind could find the answer to the meaning of life.

Burke argued, according to Professor Bourke, that while the foolish might expect that they could penetrate metaphysical secrets, the wise were struck with awe in contemplating the operations of the universe. Burke settled on this perspective after an extensive study of theology. In the process he came to doubt the powers of pure reason. This did not imply a rejection of the utility of rational inquiry. It meant instead that Burke accepted the limitations on human knowledge.

Burke’s weapon of choice was a polemical and satirical tract entitled A Vindication of Natural Society in which he attempts to expose the limits of deism. To some it was confusing, missing the satirical thrust of the work – because it is not at all a “vindication”. It is an attack on religious scepticism as publicised by men like John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal and Viscount Bolingbroke. 

From it, if read accurately, Professor Bourke says that Burke emerges as a figure keen to credit natural sentiment and convinced of the ongoing bearing of divine providence on human life. The immortality of the soul and promise of an afterlife were essential  to his conception of providential theodicy.

He saw the work of those authors as a pernicious attempt to barbarise and denature man. In their different ways, Thomas Hobbes, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Collins and Bernard Mandeville had variously contributed to this process. In their hands, the ancient schools of philosophy had been resuscitated and debauched in the service of a dogmatic assault upon religion. 

For Burke the style of reasoning of these writers dismantled the foundation of all belief. Its influence would lead to the elimination of Christianity as well as to the destruction of society in general. 

In the 1750s, Burke challenged the deists’ denial of providence which he saw as something driven by a determination to annihilate mystery. In the process this threatened to dissolve all confidence in society, and everything that supported benign credulity and civilisation.  

One of them had declared “Where the mystery begins, religion ends.”

For Burke mystery could be credited in the absence of demonstration on the basis of reasonable faith. The idea of reasonable faith implied degrees of probability extending from moral certainty to extreme implausibility. For him, Christian revelation, while not a mathematical certainty, nonetheless commanded our assent. Although the content of scripture was often miraculous in nature, its credibility could not reasonably be doubted.  

Edmund Burke’s political thinking, his un-ideological and common sense approach to the way we can best organise the business of statecraft, is now at the heart of the thinking of many who are opposing the dying but still poisonous progressive liberalism that has infected our public squares.

But much of Burke’s clear-sighted analysis of the attacks on religion in his time – and what, prophetically, that to which he saw them leading – can still also be of use to us in our ongoing conflict with the secularist movement of our time with all its crazy progeny. 

(First published in print and online in Position Papers)

Next Week: The Journey of Thomas Stearns Eliot – Part One

EDMUND BURKE AND THE WAR ON THE ORIGINS OF SECULARISM

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Part One

The forward march of secularism may seem to be a relentless one. It is. But we should also observe that it is a pointless one. A march to nowhere. Secularism and its deformed progeny, the so-called secularist world, have been well analyzed in its roots and progress by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory and others in recent years. There is no question but that it has been a destructive force in our civilization, masquerading as benign progress. Taylor and Gregory note its origins in the corruption of the Christian faith dating back to the Reformation and beyond.

But it is not a triumphant force and champions of Christianity have been opposing it for centuries with their robust allegiance to its dual enemies, faith and reason, ever since it appeared among us in either its nascent or full-blooded incarnation.

For both Taylor and Gregory the gradual flowering of this weed emerged with what Taylor terms the disenchantment of religion following the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of the illusion that reason alone had all the answers. In its most viral form religion itself, for Protestant “influencers,” became a solely rational thing and faith, if it did not satisfactorily answer all the questionings of reason, was but a fanciful thing.

But the voices which have resisted the removal of the element of enchantment from religious consciousness over the centuries have not been vanquished and never were. They were there when the first sceptical utterances began to emerge in the seventeenth century and then reached something of a crescendo in the eighteenth, morphing into deism and outright atheism. In the nineteenth century the great John Henry Newman exposed the inevitable consequences of the liberal mindset of his age, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries his thought has proved an important part of the foundation of the powerful encyclicals of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI defending the truth about mankind and our destiny.

From the secular world itself, in the twentieth century, the voices of G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and many more spoke up for the truth of Christianity, exposing once again the folly of men who say in their heart, “there is no God.” Ross Douthat of the New York Times very recently drew our attention to a reality that secularist triumphalism wants to ignore:

Yet for Christianity, the modern era is actually two stories intertwined: a story of conflict and failure and disappointment for many Christian institutions, their division and their weakness in the face of other powers, woven together with the story of the Christian religion’s resilience and global spread. Whether or not liberal modernity represents a “metaphysical catastrophe” (to pluck a phrase from one of its eloquent religious critics), it has created a world civilization in which the Gospel has been preached in the far corners of the planet; in which there are today, according to one study, 2.6 billion Christians; in which, amid a long-running crisis for Western Catholicism, more young Catholics attended the just-completed World Youth Day in Portugal than inhabited all of medieval Rome and Paris and London put together.

Back at the beginning of what Brad Gregory calls the “unintended reformation,” the very existence of Christian faith in the anglophone world was, either intentionally or unintentionally, under attack from thinkers nurtured in Protestantism – Bacon, Hobbes, Locke. Later, and more virulent, in the seventeenth century, came Bernard Mandeville, Viscount Bolingbroke, David Hume, and a host of others displaying various brands of scepticism, deism, and atheism. But there were voices of opposition, and among these one of the most powerful was Edmund Burke’s. Burke is probably the Irishman in history who has had the greatest influence on mankind’s efforts to organise the world in a civilised way for the betterment of humanity. The only competitors I can think of would be the Irish missionaries of the early Middle Ages – people like Saints Columbanus, Gall, Columba, Killian, and others who brought Northern Europe back from the brink of barbarism.

But just as it is impossible to engage with the modern literary world without knowing and understanding something of the work of James Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, so it is impossible to engage with the great political debates of our time without knowing Edmund Burke and the influence he has had on political thought over the past 250 years. Burke is best known for the four great causes he espoused on behalf of mankind throughout his political career. These were firstly his search for justice for the people of the Indian subcontinent, victims of the East India Company operating under the protective umbrella of the British Empire. Secondly, there was his futile effort to try to rein in the folly of the British monarch and parliament in their trampling on the civil rights of the citizens of New England. Thirdly, there was his constant effort to ameliorate the lot of Catholics in Ireland and Britain, persecuted as they were by the Penal Laws passed by the English parliament in the early 1700s. Finally there was his resistance to the influence of the revolutionary forces unleashed in France in 1789 which he saw as a force which could destroy all religion and as a consequence the wellbeing of humanity itself.

But to understand Burke and everything he stood for we have to go back to his early years and the first great cause he undertook – his defence of religion, faith, and reason in the face of the enemies we have referred to earlier. This phase of Burke’s life has rarely been examined in much detail. Those four great causes have overshadowed the early part of his life. Yet it is crucial in understanding the man and everything for which he stood.

In 2015, as I think never before, Burke’s early years in Ireland, even his childhood and adolescence, his time in Trinity College Dublin, his move to London to study law, his early writings, and his preoccupations with religion and philosophy, were masterfully dealt with by Professor Richard Bourke in his book, Edmund Burke: Empire and Revolution. Bourke covers this ground exhaustively. However, as his title suggests, the main focus of the work, just short of a thousand pages, is Burke’s more global preoccupation.

Not only, however, is his life and thinking in those years of interest in the context of what Conor Cruise O’Brien referred to as “The Great Melody,” the title of his biography of Burke. They also represent a fifth great cause to which Burke vehemently lent his not inconsiderable powers of persuasion – the cause of religion.  Burke was intensely conscious mankind’s dependence on religion for the future of our civilisation, threatened by what we now see were the poison seeds of secularism.

Professor Bourke, with great subtlety, sets Burke’s Protestant faith in the context of the Penal Laws: his father’s pragmatic conversion, his mother’s under-the-radar Catholicism; his close relations with his mother’s up-front Catholic family, the Nagels of Ballyduff in Cork with whom Edmund lived and was schooled during some of his childhood years; his schooling up to the age of fifteen in the Shackleton Quaker school in Ballitore; his years in Trinity where he developed his debating skills and his theological sensibilities which became the armour and armament for his battles with the skeptics, deists, and atheists of his time; finally, his early years in London studying law.

In part two of this article we will look at how Professor Bourke explores those early years and how Edmund Burke confronted what he saw as the malign interpretations of mankind’s relations with the Creator in early Protestantism.

Part 2, THE DELUSION OF ‘SECULARISM TRIUMPHANT’, next Friday.

(Posted on Position Papers on )

A conversation resumes – because hope springs eternal…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

I have been encouraged to return to my efforts to make some conversation on my trusty blog, Garvan Hill. I have not been silent but I have neglected posting to GH. Health issues can be a conversation-stopper in more ways than one. Medical professionals have been paying more attention to me over the past year and as you may know, that means consuming large chunks of available time. I am resolving now not to let them take any more from Garvan Hill. Don’t be concerned. I’m well and I’m grateful for all their attention – because they are keeping me well!

As I said, I’ve not been idle and have kept up writing a monthly In Passing column for Position Papers. I had just neglected to post the content of those columns to my loyal readers via Garvan Hill.

This is the service which I now hope to resume, beginning this week with the first of two pieces on that great and noble Irishman, Edmund Burke. Burke’s image – his statue at the entrance to Dublin University on College Green – has been gracing the masthead of Garvan Hill for a few years. On either side of the entrance to Trinity College stand two larger than life (I think) statues of two of its 18th century graduates, one of Burke and the other of his friend, the gentle Oliver Goldsmith.

Please do not be hesitant about engaging with me in this effort to make conversation. Life is more interesting when you are not just talking to your self. I try to put links to Garvan Hill on Facebook, X (formerly called Twitter), LinkedIn and other platforms.

‘Looking forward to hearing from you.

Michael