Tag: politics

HANNAH ARENDT AND THE ‘CRISIS OF OUR TIME’

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Undoubtedly, one of the most important books written in, and left to us from the 20th century was and is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Why? It is a thorough and spellbinding work on the history of the two-century unfolding of that nightmare of butchery and twisted deceit. It is also a deep and penetrating work of political philosophy which serves as a frightening and lasting reminder that humanity is permanently threatened by the destructive seeds from which that cancer grew. She reminds us that it could happen again.

Predictions are of little avail and less consolation, she writes, but goes on to say that there remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government -Totalitarianism.  In 1966 she held that this, as a potentiality and an ever-present danger, is only too likely to stay with us from now on,. Just as other forms of government which came about at different historical moments and rested on different fundamental experiences, have stayed with mankind regardless of temporary defeats – monarchies, and republics, tyrannies, dictatorships and despotism. 

Nearly sixty years later, with the evidence we have of totalitarian tendencies in our public life we are hardly in a position to dispute her assertion. 

Arendt began writing her study of the origins of totalitarianism as early as 1945. One incarnation of that catastrophic horror had just been eliminated at the cost of a terrible war. Another was still exercising the full force of its tyranny, while the third was about to begin its reign of terror in the Far East. The first to be vanquished was that which had spread across Europe from Nazi Germany; the second was Stalin’s Soviet Empire with its multiple puppet satellites in eastern Europe; the third was the People’s Republic of China with its overcooked clones, North Korea and Vietnam. That one is still with us, carefully camouflaging itself in an attempt to make us think that it is not what it really is.

We think of all these aberrations as 20th century phenomena. Arendt’s great and prophetic work shows us, however, that their origins go back through a century and a half of mankind’s confused reading of our world, human society and the many deadly turnings which political thought took over that period. 

Yuval Levin’s  book, The Great Debate, is a  study of the arguments between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine in the 1790s. In it he showed how the critical divergence in western political thought in our own time dates from then. That debate was essentially over the foundations on which the rights of man are based. In many ways it matches Arendt’s own vision of where our 20th century nightmare started. If we want a dramatic symbol for the turning point which led us to the disasters of our time we might take the enthronement of the goddess of reason on the high altar of Notre Dame de Paris. This was the symbolic and fatal moment when Man was declared to be the centre of all things.

I could not hope and would not dare to try to offer a succinct summary of Arendt’s masterpiece, all 600-plus pages of it. The best I can do is explain that In the three parts of her study – the first edition was published in 1950, later revisions in 1966 – the phenomena she holds to account for the world’s greatest catastrophes and the political impasse she saw in the Cold War in the1960s, are antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism which they spawned.

Arendt died 50 years ago (1975). The chilling thing about everything in her work is that she speaks to our world today in so many ways. One of the great evils which she saw in her time and which, in her view, contributed to the despair on which totalitarianism nurtured itself, was loneliness.  She noted that totalitarian regimes fostered the atomisation of individuals in society. Loneliness accompanied this, which along with distrust of others fostered the semi-worship of the all-powerful deadly state systems which the 20th century had to suffer. 

What is one of the tragic human maladies of which 21st century men and women have again become painfully conscious? Loneliness.

She wrote in 1966, reflecting on the deadly attraction of the so-called intelligentsia to this new state system, What’s more disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditional loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular support of totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society. It would be rash indeed to discount, because of artistic vagaries or scholarly naïveté, the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members.

The dominant elites of the past thirty years may not have been consciously totalitarian but the antisemitic mobs which occupied university campuses, or London’s streets over the past two years did not come out of thin air. Do her reflections on the power and influence of the elites of her own time not sound familiar to us relative to the cancellations, no-platforming, silencing and destruction of freedom of speech in our time – not to mention their insane efforts to redefine and obliterate our very understanding of human nature?

Furthermore, she explained, this attraction for the elite is as important a clue to the understanding of totalitarian movements as their more obvious connection with the mob. It indicates the specific atmosphere, the general climate in which the rise of totalitarianism takes place. It should be remembered that the leaders of totalitarian movements and their sympathizers are, so to speak, older than the masses which they organize so that chronologically speaking the masses do not have to wait helplessly for the rise of their own leaders in the midst of a decaying class society of which they are the most outstanding product.

The ultra progressive capture of our academic institutions is now providing the elders of the movement. Over a few decades this is what has generated the mobs of young people who in the past decade have torn apart whole city districts and occupied campuses today.

Reflecting on what prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, she argues, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century. 

The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. The ‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes you as in a vise’ appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man’s identity outside all relationships with others. It fits him into the iron band of terror even when he is alone, and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in the extreme situation of solitary confinement. 

She explains how the process works by destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed into solitude and logic into thought are obliterated.

 If this practice is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms. 

But sand storms are not permanent phenomena. They are destructive but temporary. Their danger, she says,  is not that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like tyranny. bears the germs of its own destruction.

The first part of her study deals with the growth of  secular antisemitism. The second part deals with the nature, legacy and corrupting nature of late 19th  and early 20th  century imperialism. In the third part she shows how the combined and intertwining legacy of these two fatal realities morph into the horror of totalitarianism.

The flawed notions of the rights of man which were championed by Tom Paine et al flourished over the nineteenth century. Add to that the plague of antisemitism and imperialism which spawned what she describes as ‘race-thinking’. This in turn undermined the historic model of the nation state and the sense of community which it nourished. The replacement of the old stabilising notion of the nation state generated pan-ethnic consciousness (Germanic, Slav and Russian) which in turn created stateless populations – including Jews – which found no home in those entities. Those entities themselves were partly driven by a desire for conquest and to create new empires. Out of all this emerged classless mobs worshiping a new notion of political power. These became easy fodder to nourish the central and eastern European totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

She makes an interesting observation on how the Mediterranean nations somehow partially escaped the frenzy.

The only countries where to all appearances state idolatry and nation worship were not yet outmoded and where nationalist slogans against the ‘suprastate’ forces were still a serious concern of the people were those Latin-European countries like Italy and, to a lesser degree, Spain and Portugal, which had actually suffered a definite hindrance to their full national development through the power of the Church. It was partly due to this authentic element of belated national development and partly to the wisdom of the Church, which very sagely recognized that Fascism was neither anti-Christian nor totalitarian in principle.

The real seed-bed of totalitarianism was Central and Eastern Europe. In the 1920s and 1930s, after the first World War, the chaos among the displaced populations, the ethnic majorities and the corresponding minorities, produced all sorts of conflicts, requiring the setting of new state boundaries. Ireland’s border predicament was a side show in comparison with what mainland Europe was experiencing. But the growth of race-thinking added more poison to the mix. Europe was awash with masses of stateless people. The League of Nations tried to institute what were called ‘minority treaties’ to establish some kind of human rights for these people. They can only be seen as dismal failures.

Add to this confusion the flawed notion of human rights without any philosophical or anthropological foundation – who has them, and on what basis?  In principle the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. But in practice this abstract notion of humanity guaranteed nothing.

The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. 

Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: ‘Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.’

She concludes that these facts and reflections offer what seems an ironical, bitter, and belated confirmation of the famous arguments with which Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. They appear to buttress his assertion that human rights were an abstraction, that it was much wiser to rely on an entailed inheritance of rights which one transmits to one’s children like life itself, and to claim one’s rights to be the ‘rights of an Englishman’ rather than the inalienable rights of man.” (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France). According to Burke, the rights which we enjoy spring from within the nation, so that neither natural law, nor divine command, nor any concept of mankind such as Robespierre’s ‘human race,’ the sovereign of the earth, are needed as a source of law.  (Robespierre, Speeches. Speech of April 24, 1793.)

She asserts that the pragmatic soundness of Burke’s concept seems to be beyond doubt in the light of our manifold experiences. Not only did loss of national rights in all instances entail the loss of human rights. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. And in view of objective political conditions, it is hard to say how the concepts of man upon which human rights are based – that he is created in the image of God (in the American formula), or that he is the representative of mankind, or that he harbors within himself the sacred demands of natural law (in the French formula) – could have helped to find a solution to the problem.

The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see without Burke’s arguments that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger.

But Arendt is not a pessimist. Her final judgement echoes – but in a more Judaeo-Christian way – the final frames of Stanley Kubrick’s  masterpiece imagining of the future of humanity, 2001: S Space Odyssey, where the ‘star child’ enters the edge of the screen suggesting a new beginning for mankind.
She reminds us that there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est – that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.

“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 )

Waiting for the aftershock

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

An electoral earthquake took place in Europe last week, we are told by media across the world. And in Ireland? A severe tremor perhaps, but it will be the aftershock from that tremor in two years from now that will change the Irish political landscape. It is on its way and the dead hand of historical mythologies which has crippled Irish political life –  for half a century at least – will at last lose its grip. Real political choices will then be open to the Irish electorate once again.

The tremor which Ireland felt last weekend brought its casualties and there was little mourning for them. The deputy prime minister (Taniste), Eamon Gilmore,  bit the dust and resigned as leader of his left-wing party. The electorate’s preferences swung wildly towards independent politicians and it was clear that they were not to worried about the kind of independents they chose – it was a matter of anyone but the political establishment in power.

Why all this happened and what we may expect in the future was well analysed by Professor Ray Kinsella in one of the country’s daily newspapers yesterday.

“Voters observed, up close and personal, what happens to individual TDs of real ability and principle when they voted with their conscience on the Coalition’s Abortion Act. It sent a message: this Government will not tolerate individuals who think for themselves and dissent from ‘The Party Line’. This message was further reinforced by the Coalition’s effort to consolidate political control by abolishing the quasi-independent Seanad. It is not so easy to push around Independents and threaten grown-up legislators with the Party Whip system.

“Voters observed that Fine Gael abandoned its foundational values, based on supporting families and fairness, while the Labour Party ditched the ethos of solidarity with working people struggling to make ends meet. Voters could not understand how Labour would enact the procession of cuts and charges on families and the self-employed. What they also saw was how both parties acquiesced in a deeply flawed ‘adjustment process’ that delivered a reduction in the fiscal deficit but at a terrible cost, including an ongoing debt burden that will stifle growth for the next two generations.”

In this hard-hitting article in the Cork-based Irish Examiner, Kinsella, Professor of Banking and Finance in the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, UCD analyses the Irish election results.

Voters observed that Fine Gael abandoned its foundational values, based on supporting families and fairness, while Labour ditched the ethos of solidarity with working people

The outcome of the local council and EU Parliament elections demonstrated just how far the Coalition partners had become detached from the day-to-day experiences of families and, also, from their own foundational values.

The immediate response to the results equally showed how little they have learned. The Labour Party stated that: “The Irish people have sent the Government and the Labour Party a message…” Really?

Does the Government really need to be sent a message about what has been happening to living standards and to public services across the country: the scale of emigration, the dreadful legacy of long-term unemployment and the impact of cutbacks in healthcare and education?

The old stock alibis won’t work:

‘We’ve taken the hard decisions’. No. They were the wrong decisions.

‘We didn’t communicate our policies’ — well, the six austerity budgets gave the Coalition plenty of scope to ‘communicate’.

‘The country was bankrupt’ — so you put more than $17bn from the National Pension Reserve Fund into a malign ‘bailout’, skewed towards the interests of those who contributed to the crisis in the first place.

The medical card shambles is, as the feature in the Irish Examiner last Friday demonstrated, a potent symbol of the insensitivity of policy and the arbitrary manner in which cards have been removed. What makes this worse is the ‘retrospective spin’ by government — featured in that same article — as the medical card debacle continued to unfold.

The medical card shambles was a flawed and arbitrary process, based on ‘Management by Press Release’, long after the damage had been done. It was a metaphor for the wider health system. It was a pity more attention wasn’t paid to the press release of the heads of four Dublin hospitals, who publicly warned about the threat to patient safety, of what was happening, and continues to happen, in hospitals around the country.

And these pressures have been driven by the troika.

Voters have observed the deference to overseas interests who contributed to the banking crisis, against the background of the escalating number of orders for repossession of Irish homes.

The acquiescence by the Coalition in ‘troikanomics’ — a blinkered and short-sighted strategy criticised many times in this column — is the reason for their rejection by the electorate. It is at the heart of the breakdown in public trust in mainstream party politics. Instead, voters have turned to Sinn Féin and to Independents.

The political system itself is skewed in favour of established parties, making it very difficult for new entrants with fresh ideas.

The result of this is that shifts in the percentage support for these parties do not necessarily reflect anything other than a lesser dislike of one, compared with the other. Hence the relative performance of the two members — Labour compared with Fine Gael — of the Coalition.

It would be a great mistake to dismiss the increased support for Independents as simply a ‘protest vote’. The contribution of Independents, such as the late Tony Gregory, to value-based community politics can hardly be overstated.

Long serving and hard-working MEPs stood for re-election this time around. The growth in support for Independents is not alone a reaction against hegemony of the ‘old politics’ which young adults, in particular, do not understand — because they have no way of knowing what they stand for, other than power.

It is, more importantly, a statement about the loss of trust in mainstream politics.

Voters observed, up close and personal, what happens to individual TDs of real ability and principle when they voted with their conscience on the Coalition’s Abortion Act. It sent a message: this Government will not tolerate individuals who think for themselves and dissent from ‘The Party Line’. This message was further reinforced by the Coalition’s effort to consolidate political control by abolishing the quasi-independent Seanad. It is not so easy to push around Independents and threaten grown-up legislators with the Party Whip system.

oters observed that Fine Gael abandoned its foundational values, based on supporting families and fairness, while the Labour Party ditched the ethos of solidarity with working people struggling to make ends meet. Voters could not understand how Labour would enact the procession of cuts and charges on families and the self-employed. What they also saw was how both parties acquiesced in a deeply flawed ‘adjustment process’ that delivered a reduction in the fiscal deficit but at a terrible cost, including an ongoing debt burden that will stifle growth for the next two generations.

It is two years until the next scheduled General Election.

This is too long for people numbed by austerity and a ‘recovery’ about which they read but have not experienced. It is hardly long enough for a Coalition that is in office but has lost any claim to legitimacy to truly re-engage with their foundational values.

There are three priorities for whatever new political consensus emerges from the radically different political landscape.

Firstly, demand from the eurozone establishment a €60bn debt write-off. There is broad consensus among international economists that such a write off is justified and appropriate. Peter Mathews TD, perhaps Fine Gael’s most qualified and professionally experienced banking expert, has continually made this point. But, of course, he was expelled from his party (and from the Banking Inquiry) for having a mind of his own.

The Coalition simply hasn’t got the debt-write off message. It is now too divided and jaded — too cosy with ‘our friends and partners’ in the eurozone — to deliver the demand for a write-off with any conviction. Independents and Sinn Féin are unlikely to be similarly inhibited.

The second is this: both Fine Gael and Labour have been willing, in the interest of power, to ditch their traditional values. At a time when the focus of Government should have been on the economy, they engaged in a damaging, divisive and wholly unnecessary campaign to legislate for abortion on the X case. For anyone who actually took the trouble to read the ECJ judgement on the ABC cases — or who listened to the informed views of the medical and psychiatric evidence — this was an exercise in ideological ‘power broking’ and one that the country could ill-afford.

Their proper responsibility was to support families, struggling with the consequences of six regressive austerity budgets and cutbacks in services and supports that hit primarily those on the outside — including single parents and the homeless.

Later in this year the Coalition will be at the same crack; pushing the same ideology and pressing for changes in the Constitutional status of marriage and the natural rights of children to a mother and a father. This would be bizarre to traditional Fine Gael.

In fact, the fundamental freedoms that every citizen have are not the gift of governments; they are the result of the courage of individuals from outside of the establishment, people like Raymond Crotty, Patricia McKenna, Mark McCrystal, and Kathy Synott; individuals who were brave enough to go to the Supreme Court to vindicate these freedoms and to hold government to account, over and over again.

This should encourage ‘new democrats’ because the research shows that the integrity of public institutions is fundamental to growth and development.

The third challenge for the emerging political forces is to get their head around how best to adapt the Irish economy to an external environment that is heavy with risk.

The EU, and particularly the eurozone, is mired in financial repression. Forecasts for growth continually fall short of outcomes.

Any momentum rests on the assertion two years ago by Mario Draghi that the ECB would ‘do what it takes’ — when, in fact, Mr Draghi had no mandate to make such a pledge.

In the markets, sovereign spreads have declined — but it will take something more than an adventurous pledge to sustain economies mired in sovereign debt There are also significant risks, including political risks and a ‘liquidity trap’ stymieing monetary policy.

The Coalition’s post-bailout strategy, published earlier this year, is simply not robust to these challenges. That is why securing debt write-off is absolutely central in the new political consensus.

In the run-up to 2016 (if the Coalition lasts that long) an emerging values-based ‘new coalition’, to counter the old failed orthodoxy, may have to be built.

Such a grouping is now likely to comprise of Sinn Féin, a ‘new’ Fianna Fáil — and a much stronger and more assertive group of Independent TDs.

They should begin their dialogue with the eurozone establishment by declaring that they would like our country back.

Meanwhile, Cora Sherlock of the Irish Pro Life Campaign writes on LifeNews.com that Fine Gael’s losses a direct result of betraying pro-lifers on abortion.

As the dust settles from Ireland’s European and Local elections, it’s a good opportunity to examine what the results mean from the pro-life perspective.  While there is always the temptation to overstate the political implications for a single issue, the results of recent days have far-reaching consequences for the life issue.

Read what she says here.