Tag: writing

Allen Tate and the Modern World

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
Allen Tate

Allen Tate was a Southern American novelist, poet and literary critic, active in the first half of the 20th century.  He was well known to the literary establishment of his time – Eliot, Auden, Hemingway and more. For a variety of reasons he is less well known today. There are suggestions that this might be because he converted to Catholicism.

For much of his life he was an atheist but deep down he felt the emptiness underlying his lack of faith. Then, in the 1950s, he converted to Catholicism. This was partly under the influence of Jacques Maritain, his friend at Princeton, where he was for a time Poet in Residence. Maritain was his Godfather. It was a conversion which unsettled the elite WASP establishment of his day.

Marshall McLuhan, a social critic in a slightly later time suggested that his embrace of Rome might equate him with John Henry Newman, making him ‘an American Newman’. Although he died in the faith of Rome his somewhat turbulent way of life bore little resemblance to that of the saintly Newman.

Nevertheless, there were similarities beyond the conversion story. Newman struggled in a very determined way against what he saw as the corrupting liberalism of his day. Tate, particularly after he became a Catholic, battled with corrupting secularism, a deformed child of liberalism, which he saw as an assault on all that was human and divine in our very being.

McLuhan’s great  and gently prophetic legacy to the late 20th and early 21st centuries was his acute analysis of communication media, leaving us with the memorable catch-phrase, ‘the media is the message’. Tate, before him, held the view that modern communication was a dead end devoid of any of the character of communion which made human communication of value in the first place.

In Tate’s reading of where the decay began he brought us back to Descartes’ ground-breaking nonsense,  ‘I think, therefore I am’. This  drove a fatal wedge into the heart of our humanity, splitting our nature in two, separating our body and its power of thinking from our very soul.

René Descartes

Tate held that “When René Descartes’ isolated thought from man’s total being he isolated him from nature, including his own nature; and he divided man against himself.  The battle is now between the dehumanized society of secularism, which imitates Descartes’ mechanized nature, and the eternal society of the communion of the human spirit.” 

In one of his most famous essays Tate addressed the question of what our society had to do to help our culture and our civilisation be everything that it should be and could be. He placed much of the burden of doing that on what he called “the man of letters”  That essay, entitled ‘The Man of Letters in the Modern World’, was published in 1952.

He wrote, “To the question, what should the man of letters be in our time, we should have to find the answer in what we need him to do. He must do first what he has always done: he must recreate for his age the image of man, and he must propagate standards by which other men may test that image, and distinguish the false from the true.”

He might have said, he must be Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and more. But it was not just a question of the great stories and the great characters in literature by whom we grow in our understanding of ourselves. There was something more which faced us in his time with its technological revolution already well under way and governing the means of communication. 

That was then, this is now when the grip of that governance is much stronger and as Anthropic’s boss, Dario Amodei says in relation to Artificial Intelligence, ”is growing exponentially”, when we don’t even know if we are in the middle of an existential crisis or not”

“But,” he said, “ at our own critical moment, when all languages are being debased by the techniques of mass control, the man of letters might do well to conceive his responsibility more narrowly. He has an immediate responsibility, to other men no less than to himself, for the vitality of language. He must distinguish the difference between mere communication…and the rediscovery of the human condition in the living arts. He must discriminate and defend the difference between mass communication, for the control of men, and the knowledge of man which literature offers us for human participation.”

His preoccupation here echoes the words of T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets (Little Gidding) in what is interpreted as a conversation with the ghost of W.B. Yeats:

When I left my body on a distant shore.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

To purify the dialect of the tribe

And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,…

Tate maintained that by these literary arts, one means the arts without which men can live, but without which they cannot live well, or live as men. To keep alive the knowledge of ourselves with which the literary arts continue to enlighten us,  to separate them from other indispensable modes of knowledge, and to define their limits, is the intellectual and thus the social function of the writer. He asserted: “Men in a dehumanized society may communicate, but they cannot live in full communion.” 

He went on  to examine what he called  the double retreat from the moral center, of the man of action and the man of letters, that we have completed in our time and suggested an  alternative “which would have at least the virtue of recommending the full participation of the man of letters in the action of society….provided we think of society as the City of Augustine and Dante, where it was possible for men to find in the temporal city the imperfect analogue to the City of God.”

Writers, he argued, must reject secularism – which he identified as the idolatry of substituting  means for ends.  This idolatry had already permeated the culture of the West but  it had not gone so far in Europe as it had  in regimes eastward of Berlin and in Asia which were deliberately committed to the ideology, preferring barbarism to civilisation. However, even the West’s muddled surrender to means over ends had in his view provoked an intolerable psychic crisis expressing itself as a political crisis.

When he wrote this we were, remember, in the middle of the Cold War.

Man, Tate held, is a creature that in the long run has got to believe in order to know, and to know in order to do. For doing without knowing is machine behavior, illiberal and servile routine, the secularism with which man’s specific destiny has no connection.

Ultimately Tate recognises that communion for man must be the road to love for each other. This, however, as an objective is simply beyond us. It is something we can only reach through genuine religion leading to the love of God.

“I am not suggesting,” he wrote, “that we all have an obligation of personal love towards one another. I regret that I must be explicit about this matter. No man, under any political dispensation known to us, has been able to avoid hating other men by deciding that it would be a “good thing” to love them; he loves his neighbor, as well as the man he has never seen, only through the love of God. He that saith that he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. (1. John 2,9).

He continues on this theme by stating that he lays it down as a fact that” this is the only solution.”  We must, he says, “ love one another or die,”  as  Auden wrote more than ten years ago. “I cannot believe that Mr. Auden was telling us that a secularized society cannot exist; it obviously exists. He was telling us that a society which has once been religious cannot, without risk of spiritual death, preceded by the usual agonies, secularize itself, – as totalitarian communism has shown us in Russia’s dismal experience. Tate calls on the man of letters to daily renew his dedication to this task. “I do not know who else may be expected to undertake it.”

“The man of letters has, then, in our time a small but critical service to render to man: a service that will be in the future more effective than it is now, when the cult of the literary man shall have ceased to be an idolatry.”  This cult was for him the cult which was producing so much dismal writing in the 20th century. Men of letters and their followers, were like the parvenu gods and their votaries of decaying Rome, competing  in the dissemination of distraction and novelty. 

But the true province of the man of letters is nothing less (as it is nothing more) than culture itself. The state is the mere operation of society, but culture is the way society lives, the material medium through which men receive the one lost truth which must be perpetually recovered: the truth of what Jacques Maritain calls the “supra-temporal destiny” of man. It is the duty of the man of letters to supervise the culture of language, to which the rest of culture is subordinate, and to warn us when our language is ceasing to forward the ends proper to man. The end of social man is communion in time through love, which is beyond time.

We can find many parallels in our own time with what preoccupied  Tate. Indeed Pope LeoXIV’s stark choice as to whether modern man, with all his technological progress,  was building Babel or Jerusalem seems incipient in the poet-writer’s thoughts throughout this essay. Remember what happened in Babel? Language as we might have known it perished.

More than half a century after Tate wrote this landmark essay, Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter, Dilexit Nos (24 October 2024),quoted in Pope Leo XIV’ Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, echoes his thoughts and preoccupations about the tragedy which ensues when one half of man’s nature, his human heart, his capacity for communion and love is denied:  “If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal  history  is  built  with  the  heart.    At  the  end  of  our  lives,  that  alone  will  matter.”  

Is The Practice of Reading Doomed?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

Since this article was published on Michael Kirke’s Substack several weeks ago, surveys and reports continue to frighten us about the decrease in reading in nearly all segments of our population. Last year Britain’s National Literacy Trust reported that just 1 in 3 (32.7%) children and young people aged 8 to 18 said that they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2025. This marks a 36% decrease in reading enjoyment levels sincethe Trust started asking about this in 2005. The latest, in the past few days reported that children’s reading has decreased, while not dramatically, at least going in the wrong direction. A few days ago The Irish Times reported that the percentage of children who said they never read for fun was just 11 per cent in those aged between five and 12-years-old.

Harry Potter was supposed to have solved this problem. With a wave of his magic wand he seemed to have lured millions of young and not so young away from their smart devices and back to reading books. He hadn’t. Reading books, books in the hand, is once again a minority pursuit. 

We may worry about Large Language Models, LLMs, or Artificial Intelligence, as it is inaccurately called, and the unknowable destructive consequences we fear  it may bring in its wake. But AI is maybe just the last piece of a jigsaw which has already been composed and is already wreaking havoc on our civilisation.  And not only on our inherited values but on some of the fundamental characteristics which our culture has engrained in our human nature

In what is being described as one of the most important essays The Atlantic, the century-old and fabled American magazine, has published in recent years, one of its staff writers, Rose Horowitch asserts, in a study entitled, ‘The End of Reading’: “mass literacy may turn out to have been a relatively brief episode in human history rather than the permanent condition many assumed it would become.” 

Her argument is more than just an assertion that “people read fewer books.” She is asking whether, in what she identifies as a ‘post literate society’, an entire way of thinking is disappearing.

Her essay could indeed be taken as a companion piece to Pope Leo XIV’s magisterial recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Her essay is very long but it is not quite as long as that document. However, it spells out in more alarming detail the rubicon which our civilisation may already have crossed, bringing to and end our republic of letters as Julius Caesar set in train the events which ended the Roman Republic.

Horowitch begins with Ptolemy’s Library of Alexandria as a symbol of civilization’s faith in written knowledge. He scoured the world for books and founded this library. She reminds us that reading is not an instinct but a learned cognitive technology. human beings evolved to speak; writing has existed for only a tiny fraction of our history. Literacy therefore requires continual cultural support. Failing to get that support, Alexandria’s library perished.

This is important because it means literacy can also decline and even disappear.

There is now strong evidence that Americans today read substantially fewer books than previous generations. Evidence about the rest of the world is mixed. The overall picture is complicated by the vast expansion of media forms – electronic and audible media have had a huge impact on physical book reading.

Surveys show that fewer people are making reading a central, habitual part of their leisure; nevertheless, many of those who still read continue to read deeply. The transformative  reality has been the substantial change from a print-centred hard-copy reading culture to a much more fragmented culture of print, e-books and audio—and, more fundamentally, a culture in which the book has to compete for attention with an unprecedented range of immediately available alternatives.

Interestingly Ireland may be an outlier in all this. A recent international consumer study found that 91% of Irish respondents had read a book during the previous year, compared with 85% across the 19 countries surveyed; 81% had bought a book. That makes Ireland rather different from the more pessimistic picture sometimes painted of the anglophone world. Perhaps the fact that per capita, Irish writers have won more Nobel Prizes for literature than any other country in the world has something to do with this.

One of Horowitch’s observations is that Americans probably consume more words than ever—emails, texts, captions, posts—but almost none of this requires sustained concentration. The issue is not the quantity of text but its character. Her main worry is that our practice of deep reading has diminished and in this she sees a threat to our very way of thinking, to our capacity to think clearly, imaginatively and even logically.

One might observe the reality of what passes for human dialogue in social media as an example of this degeneration. In the process of bringing about this disturbing change she does not argue that television or the internet have been the villains. Rather, the omnipresent electronic gadgets in our pockets, smartphones, are the real Trojan horses, with the powerful forces they unleash from their bellies.

Infinite novelty has always been a distracting force undermining our studied creativity by generating a kind of chaos in our minds. Add to that the temptation through which these devices urge us to immediate gratification. On top of this we have algorithmic optimisation which generates a flood of constant interruption. While Meta and Co. have refused to accept responsibility for this in the case of their young consumers, they have nevertheless agreed – more or less – to pay $17 billion dollars in compensation for the damage US courts declare that they have done. That figure may be just a fraction of what they, YouTube, TikTock and other players will end up paying across the world.

Horowitch herself still enjoys novels once immersed in them, but getting over the initial barrier has become much harder because the discipline of attention has been corrupted by so many competing agents.

Horowitch also looks at all this in an educational context, ranging from early learning to the pinnacle of third level. A college professor assigned Bleak House as a text to students, asking for a precis of its opening paragraphs. The professor was presented with absolute gobledegook, probably with what we now call slop. Metaphors, other literary devices, nuances, were all garbled showing a dreadful incapacity to move beyond a nakedly literal reading.

Professors are reporting that students struggle to finish assigned books, prefer summaries of great books, expect lectures to replace reading, regard reading itself as an unnecessarily inefficient method of acquiring information. One professor says students increasingly feel that assigning a book is deliberately making knowledge harder to obtain. For Horowitch that observation is especially striking because it suggests a different conception of education. The goal shifts from forming a mind to simply delivering information.

Horowitch sees the arrival of AI as potentially worsening the problem. If AI reliably summarizes books, articles and arguments, many people may conclude there is little reason to read originals. AI can be a help to understanding complex and deep texts but the inevitable path of least resistance may trump all that. Ironically, she thinks, the technology most capable of generating text may reduce the number of humans who actually engage with it deeply. 

But for Horowitch this is not just a matter of losing the pleasure of reading great and meaningful  literature. It is about something which will have – and already has – and impact on the way we live our lives together and promote human flourishing. Look again at Magnifica Humanitas for a detailed and wisdom-filled reflection on this.

Anthony Trollope’s  late novel, The Way we Live Now is a rich piece of nineteenth century literature but it is also a critique of the degeneration of the society of his time and the corruption of values which utilitarianism and the industrial revolution brought in their wake. It predates Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum which addressed the same problem on a more theological and sociological level.

As we alluded to earlier, our technological prowess seems to be killing our capacity for  logical argument, respect for evidence, capacity to handle nuance and any appreciation of the value of delaying judgement. Our post-literate society instead, above all, values performance, celebrity and personality, putting emotional immediacy before reflection.

Horowitch  suggests that politics inevitably changes when citizens no longer habitually read extended arguments. In her view we live in a dangerous time. If literacy declines, civilization itself changes—not because books are morally superior, but because they cultivate a distinctive mode of thought. The danger is not simply that people know less, but that they lose the mental habits that only extended reading reliably develops.

On my bookshelves sits one of my moat valued texts. It is the late Professor Denis Donoghue’s exploration of reading as an enriching human pursuit. Its title is The Practice of Reading. We must do all we can to ensure that never becomes a meaningless phrase.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey  – and Homer before him – reminded us of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. The obliteration of the Library of Alexandria was the prelude to the collapse of the classical world. In the intervening centuries until now we have had a number of close shaves, not least the scourge of secularism and its pseudo-religious offspring, wokism.  We should be aware that we take our civilisation for granted at our peril.

Ending or Beginning – Choices We Make

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Richard John Neuhaus, founder and editor of First Things magazine, once wrote that there are writers whom you read because you have been told you must read them. Having done so, he said that they then become part of your history, along with foreign countries you have visited or great music you have heard. It was all part of the never-ending process called learning, “and a very good thing it is.” But then, he added, there are writers who catch you up short. “They are personally disruptive; intellectually and spiritually disruptive. They cannot be fitted into anything so smoothly incremental as a ‘process’. Their claims demand a decision, and contingent upon that decision is a change of disposition toward a host of questions. The thought cannot be resisted: ‘If he’s right about this, then I have to rethink an awful lot that follows from this’.”

Romano Guardini (1885–1968) is such a writer, he said. He did not mention Guardini’s nearly exact contemporary, Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965). He was another such. Guardini wrote toward the end of what was probably his most startling work, The End of the Modern World, that his purpose was “to declare a truth when its ‘hour’ has come.” Nearly thirty years earlier T. S. Eliot very controversially began to engage with the same purpose in a process which led him from the apparently very dark place which some find in The Waste Land to his conversion to Christianity and beyond.

Both these great figures of the twentieth century are frequently depicted as conservative opponents of modernity who invoke a curse on all its ways and all its pomps. Conservatives they certainly were because their great cause was Truth and the truth embodied in the essence and traditions of Christianity. Ironically, Eliot, with the publication of The Waste Land, which his earlier poems, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady, were harbingers, is identified as one of the fathers of modernist literature. He was radical, but it is a misreading of his work to interpret it as a destruction of the cultural heritage of the past.

Some readers find Guardini’s The End of the Modern World polemical. Neuhaus says that “polemics are sometimes necessary to catch attention and clear the air of cant, but Guardini is up to much more than polemics. He is proposing a different way of discovering one’s ‘location’ in the world, a different way of standing before history and finally before God.” Eliot was not polemical, but in many ways he was on the same journey as Guardini: devoutly Christian and fastidious and fearless in seeking a restoration in the Western world of its Christian heritage. Indeed, like Guardini, he saw such a restoration—particularly in the face of the horrors unleashed in World War II—as the only hope for our civilisation.

In 1943 Eliot had written in a Portuguese journal that “no European literature, I am convinced, can long flourish in isolation from the others”; instead, “the ultimate unity of Europe cannot come through identity of political organisation, but from the unity of the Christian Faith.” Lecturing and reading for the British Council in Germany in late 1949, he toured Hamburg, Berlin, Hanover, Göttingen, Münster, Bonn, Cologne, Heidelberg, and Munich. He spoke about the unity of European culture. Throughout, he emphasised that “the culture of every people arises from their religion”, and stressed the cultural bonds forming “the organism of Europe”.

Guardini’s reflections on ‘Power and Responsibility’ are strangely prescient for our own age. That is the title of part two of The End of the Modern World, written in the 1950s, as the Cold War burgeoned. He wrote: “Aside from a few constitutional optimists and those reassured by a fixed ideology, the people we meet everywhere today are marked by a profound anxiety. This is directed primarily at concrete political-historical possibilities, but reaches beyond them to the fundamental question: Is man still a match for his own works? During the course of the last century (as in the last 100 years), man has developed a measure of power far exceeding any previous dreams. This power has largely objectified itself in scientific insights and forms of work that give rise to constant new problems; in political structures that look toward the future; in technical patterns which seem to press ahead, propelled by their own dynamism; finally, and above all, in the spiritual-intellectual attitudes of man himself, attitudes with a logic of their own. The anxiety we mentioned questions whether man is capable of handling all this in such a way that he can endure with honour in fruitfulness and joy; and it tends to answer, no. Man as he is today no longer can meet such demands. His works and their effects have outstripped him, making themselves independent. They have acquired meta-human, cosmic, not to say demonic, characteristics which man can no longer assimilate or direct.”

Did Guardini see any way of avoiding this deep malaise and its catastrophic consequences? He offered this: One of the main decisions which future man will have to make, he said, will have to be based on the realisation that man is determined by the spirit—and not confuse the spirit with “nature”, in either its romantic or scientific senses. He held that the spirit lives and acts neither by historical nor by metaphysical necessity, but of its own impulse. It is free. It draws its ultimate life and health from its right relation to the true and the good, a relation which it is also free to deny or destroy. “Man does not belong exclusively to the world; rather he stands on its borders, at once in the world yet outside it, integrated into it yet simultaneously dealing with it because he is related directly to God. Not to the ‘Spirit of the Age’, not to the ‘All-Mysterious One’, not to any First Cause—but to the sovereign Lord, Creator of all being, who called man into existence and sustains him in that vocation, who gave the world into his keeping, and who will demand an account of what he has done with it.”

T. S. Eliot’s position, not long after he published The Waste Land (1922), was much the same. Cleanth Brooks, American literary scholar and critic, in his analysis of The Waste Land offers a reading of the poem which is more optimistic than that of some other critics, including that of the great, if sometimes controversial, Cambridge literary scholar, F. R. Leavis. Brooks cites the last line of Canto 26 of Dante’s Purgatorio, in which Dante meets the poet Arnaut Daniel, who warns him in his own language, Sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor (In due time be heedful of my pain). The passage from which Eliot took this quotation was of extraordinary importance to the poet.

Before Arnaut leaps back into the refining fire of Purgatory with joy he says: “I am Arnaut who weep and singing; contrite I see my past folly, and joyful I see before me the way I hope for. Now I pray you by that virtue which guides you to the summit of the stair, at times be mindful of my pain.” The protagonist of The Waste Land is the gloomy mythological figure, Tiresias, and he is bemoaning his disinheritance, being robbed of tradition in this modern world, now in decay. But the protagonist of the poem is not its author, and its author reveals a more hopeful view of the future.

Brooks says he cannot accept Mr Leavis’ interpretation of the passage, “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me,” as meaning that the poem “exhibits no progression.” If secularisation has destroyed, or is likely to destroy, modern civilization—“London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down”—the poet suggests a resolution in his question, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” The Scriptural allusions in The Waste Land are remarkable. Notably one which is interpreted as referring to Christ’s accompaniment of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, with all the hope embodied in that passage of the New Testament—regardless of Eliot’s note which connects it to an account of Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition:

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?

There is hope for our civilisation. Perhaps distant, but still there is hope. Guardini offers us the same—if we can but correct our ways. Brooks asks us to consider, in this context, the last sentences of Eliot’s ‘Thoughts After Lambeth’ (1930): “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail. But we must be very patient awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the darkness before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.” By this time Eliot had converted to Christianity and had attached himself to a very devout Anglo-Catholic tradition within the Church of England.

By 1948 Eliot had come a long way. At the presentation of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm on 10 December of that year, Anders Österling, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, spoke of him as a poet who “from an extremely exclusive and consciously isolated position” had “gradually come to exercise a very far-reaching influence”. His verse and prose had “a capacity to cut into the consciousness of our generation with the sharpness of a diamond”. Österling ended by pointing out that “Exactly twenty-five years ago, there stood where you are now standing another famous poet who wrote in the English tongue, William Butler Yeats.”

Undoubtedly, Romano Guardini and T. S. Eliot are two towering figures in twentieth-century religious culture, Eliot the more publicly known of the two. Their struggles to restore the Christian values of our civilisation still resonate in our new century. We can only hope that their prophetic and ultimately optimistic visions of our future world will still be realised.

Fr. Walter Macken

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

I lost a friend of more than six decades last week – although lost is the wrong word, for he has gone to a far less troubled world. He was also more than a friend – he was a guide, confidant and often even a confessor.

 His name was Fr. Walter Macken, son of the well-known Irish novelist and playwright, Walter Macken, whose hugely popular historical fiction were international bestsellers in the second half of the twentieth century and are still in print today. He died on May 21.

Fr. Macken was a priest of the prelature of Opus Dei. He spent most of his life in Ireland working as a chaplain in university residences in Dublin and Galway and in Rockbrook Park School in Dublin.

He was born in London  on 10 April, 1938, to where his parents had emigrated a short time before. His mother Margaret (Peggy) was a member of the Kenny family of Galway, daughter of  Tom Kenny, editor of the Connacht Tribune.

In the summer of 1939, when war seemed imminent, the family returned to Galway with their new-born son. Walter senior, already writing and interested in theatre, got a job in the Taibhdhearc as an actor, director and producer.

Walter Og, as he was known in the family, began his schooling in Scoil Fhursa on St. Mary’s Road, Salthill. After a time, however, in 1947, the family – which now included Walter Og’s younger brother, Ultan, – moved to Dublin. There Walter senior got a job as an actor with the Abbey Theatre. Later, after a further spell back in Galway, he became the Director of the Abbey.

While the family lived in Dublin in the late 1940s and early 1950s Walter Og attended Catholic University School and Belvedere College. When they moved back to Galway he attended the Jesuit’s St. Ignatius College and did his Leaving Certificate there. He was a member of the trophy-winning rowing team of the school in those years.

A school friend of those years was Oliver Powell whose family ran the landmark Four Corners store in Shop Street. Powell had already joined Opus Dei at that stage and through his encouragement Wally Og did so as well. His parents were very happy with what they and he saw as a response to a vocation to give his life to God in Opus Dei.

After his Leaving Cert Walter went to University College Dublin for a short time but in 1958 went to Rome to study philosophy in the pontifical Lateran University. After completing his degree there he went to study and work as a journalist in the University of Navarra in Pamplona in Spain.

Then, in the early ‘sixties, the founder of Opus Dei, Msgr. Escriva de Balaguer, now St Josemaria – with whom he had been on intimate terms since his time in Rome – asked him if he would be happy and willing to receive holy orders and serve as a priest in Opus Dei. Without any hesitation he said ‘Yes’. He was ordained in 1962 and after a further short time in Barcelona, he came to London and worked there for a year. He then moved back to Ireland and for the rest of his  life worked pastorally in student centres, schools, providing spiritual accompaniment to souls, giving retreats and teaching.

Fr. Walter had a very engaging personality, was a gifted raconteur, a gifted linguist, musician and sportsman. In mid-life he even ran the Dublin marathon – but did not claim to have broken any records.

He will be sadly missed by his many friends and by all those whom he helped throughout his long and fruitful life.

His death occurred peacefully on the afternoon of May 21 in the care of the sisters and staff of Our Lady’s Manor in Dalkey, Dublin.

Technology, well-being and our future world

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

It is difficult to pick up a serious newspaper or magazine, or tune in to a serious podcast today, without finding another essay where someone is worrying about modern technology’s dire impact on our mental health, our political life and our literacy. 

Thomas Edsall mused at length in The New York Times (October 14) on ‘The rise of the Smartphone and the Fall of Western Democracy’. He drew on the research and arguments of, among others, Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge.

Haidt is  a social psychologist at New York University;  Twenge, is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University.  Their extensive and rigorous research shows that there is a clear correlation — and perhaps a causal relationship — between the rise of smartphones and an abrupt escalation of teenage anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies, especially among girls growing up in liberal families.

Haidt has launched an international movement to ban smartphones in schools. There have been a number of American and European studies showing that doing so leads to improvements in student performance and behaviour. However, in April 2025 the often contrarian British medical journal The Lancet questioned the evidence supporting these school policies. Some might say, ‘It would, wouldn’t it’.

But that’s just about the smartphone and its power to distract and confuse children.

Edsall also sees a new and major player threatening us all – the growing use of artificial intelligence. In September, Derek Thompson, co-author with Ezra Klein of the book Abundance, expanded and revised concerns about all this in an essay that originally ran in The Argument, an online magazine. “We can”, he wrote, “already see how technology is affecting our capacity to think deeply right now. And I am much more concerned about the decline of thinking people than I am about the rise of thinking machines.”

Thompson argued that students’ use of A.I. is leading to “the demise of writing,” which matters because writing is an act of thinking. This is as true for professionals as it is for students. In “Writing Is Thinking,” an editorial in Nature, the authors argued that “outsourcing the entire writing process to L.L.M.s (Large Language Models) deprives scientists of the important work of understanding what they’ve discovered and why it matters.”

Why does all this matter? Thompson argued it’s the patience to read long and complex texts, to hold conflicting ideas in our heads and enjoy their dissonance, to engage in hand-to-hand combat at the sentence level within a piece of writing — and to value these things at a time when valuing them is a choice, because video entertainment is replacing reading and ChatGPT essays are replacing writing. “As A.I. becomes abundant, there is a clear and present threat that deep human thinking will become scarce,” he said.

The Free Press has also weighed in on this issue. 

In a special feature on what the editors call ‘The Dawn of the Postliterate Society’ they remind us that It’s no secret that young people today are desperate for meaning. A recent report found that 58 percent of young adults experienced little or no sense of purpose in their lives over the past month. Some attribute this to social media. Others, to a lack of religion.

In an essay in the same online publication, James Marriott of The Times (London) explains why the stakes couldn’t be higher. Our liberal democracy, he writes, was built by widespread literacy—the same widespread literacy that is now being dismantled by screens. Unless we start reading again, he says, our civilisation may not survive.

In another article in The Times, Marriott quotes the great American journalist, chronicler of the wild ‘Sixties’, Joan Didion, writing “I write to find out what I’m thinking”.

Marriott says that for anybody whose job involves writing, the evidence is clear: those who don’t read or who outsource their essays to AI lose the facility for complex thought. “Not reading or writing would be unthinkable”

He cites a paper published earlier this summer by scientists at MIT which restates Didion’s thesis with less elegance but with more empirical rigour. The researchers used wearable brain scanners to measure the cognitive activity of a group of students who used AI to help them write their essays and a group who did the work themselves. The AI-assisted writers ‘consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels’ compared with those who wrote their own essays. They needed to write in order to think.

But is anyone fighting back? According to, again, the indomitable Free Press, someone is. Enter Shilo Brooks, former Princeton professor and the host of Old School, a new Free Press podcast dedicated to the notion that there is one simple way to bring America’s lost generation home: via reading. “When a man is starved for love, work, purpose, money, or vitality,” Shilo explains, “a novel wrestling with these themes can be metabolized as energy for the heart.” 

Good for Professor Brooks – and good for us all. But Gerald Howard, in another New York Times essay wonders if literary fiction – the fiction which tells us the truth about ourselves – despite its resilience since the very beginning of literature with ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ and the epics of Homer is not now threatened by “the structural and cultural headwinds of our time.” 

We mean those we have just explored and our thinking world is now agonising about.

“Is this genre  now in danger of extinction from,” he asks, “a declining attention span, a disappearing audience of people educated enough to understand and appreciate it, or a near-future technological onslaught (see: novels written by A.I. entities)? The sense of a possible ending is palpable.”

Nevertheless, Howard, a retired practitioner at the coalface of publishing, is an optimist and he illustrates how great literature has had to struggle against the odds for centuries. Literature is fragile, he admits. “It serves no obvious purpose. It does not feed us or clothe us or, unless you get very lucky, enrich us. But literature is also as close to immortal as any cultural endeavour of humankind has ever been.” 

Moby-Dick, he points out, “the novel that is America’s clearest contribution to world literature, was so misunderstood and reviled upon its 1851 publication that it destroyed Herman Melville’s career. He had to take up work for the rest of his life as a customs inspector on the New York docks, and his obituary in this paper (the NYT) referred to “Mobie Dick.” It was only after his death and the novel’s rediscovery in the early 20th century that it was recognized for the masterpiece it is.”

“In the mid-1940s every one of William Faulkner’s 20 published works was either out of print or very difficult to find. Faulkner had to grind out screenplays for Hollywood studios to make a living.”

Then he won the Nobel Prize and hasn’t been out of print since.

Think of The Great Gatsby, written and forgotten about until it was distributed free to America’s GIs in the Second World War. It now competes with Moby Dick for the title of  The Great American Novel. 

Technology will do great good for the human race. It will probably also do great harm. But we believe that the human spirit is indomitable and so long as it is we can hope that the great works of literature and great works to come will prevail.