Tag: writing

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.