Who's for Western Values?

This commencement address by Konstantin Kisin came up on my YouTube feed. It's very funny and he makes a lot of good points, but once again I find myself lacking sympathy with the idea of "Western values".

Of course, the Western values that are defended, whenever anyone sets out to defend them, are generally things such as democracy, free speech, the rule of law, meritocracy, and individualism.

And I'm all in favour of those things (albeit some more than others). I have defended democracy time and time again, in the many online debates that arise between conservatives. I'm almost an absolutist when it comes to free speech (although not quite, because I do think it's legitimate to censor obscenity, extreme violence, and some other bad stuff in entertainment).

When it comes to meritocracy and individualism, I'm in favour of both but with much bigger reservations, especially as regards individualism-- which I won't go into here.

My problem with the idea of "Western values" can be summed up in two points:

1) As well as all the good stuff above, Western values surely include many things that are nowhere near as admirable; political correctness itself, consumerism, bureaucracy, desacralization,  hedonism, standardization, atomic individualism....you get the picture.

2) More importantly, I think conservatives should be more concerned with preserving cultures rather than values.

Values are abstractions. We need them, but the human spirit can't live on them. I would argue that the instinct gripping conservatives today (and not just conservatives) is that it's particular things that need to be preserved.

The conservative movement in America has realized that America is not an idea, as the neoconservatives assumed it to be. And the same applies elsewhere. Ideas are important to the life of a nation, but the nation can't be reduced to an abstraction.

What distinguishes a nation is not ideology but culture; language, festivals, food and drink, social customs, music, traditions, sports, dance, etc.

You could preserve your values while losing your culture. For instance, America could preserve its love of freedom while giving up baseball and basketball for soccer and cricket, fully adopting the metric system, becoming as secularized as Europe, having its last rodeo, and becoming drained of everything that makes it culturally American.

In our time, I believe that cultural distinctiveness is in much greater danger than any supposed Western value system.

I care about red lemonade and Jacob's Mikado biscuits more than I care for anything that could be labelled "Irish values". Even though I haven't consumed either of them in years.

"All cultures are not equal" is a bullish slogan that has been adopted by many on the right. It's always uttered as though it's a heresy, but I can't remember ever hearing anyone claiming the opposite. If you google the words "all cultures are equal", you'll get a lot of hits, but it's nearly always in the context of somebody pugnaciously denying it.

I don't think all cultures are equal (whatever that means), but I do think all cultures are precious and equally valid. At least in the sense I'm using "culture" here-- to mean cultural practices like language, music, sports, etc.

If we found a hitherto-uncontacted island where human sacrifice and cannibalism were being practiced, we would certainly want to bring these practices to an end. Does that mean we should want to suppress the language, dress, art, and dance of this people? Surely not.

To sum up...I think Western values are a mixed bag, and I don't think they should be the totem of conservatism. I think we should focus on defending national cultures instead. (As well as defending those rights which are a part of the universal natural law, like the right to life.)

Prayer for the Holy Father

Almighty God, watch over our Holy Father, Pope Francis. Give him healing, comfort, and better health, and many years of life to come. Amen!

My Article on Mary Aikenhead and the Irish Sisters of Charity...

 ...is the cover story of this week's issue of Ireland's Own!

Shocking attack on a Priest in Ballycosgrove

 

Startling reports today of an attack on Fr. Jack Cheevers, parish priest of Ballycosgrove in Tipperary.

An enraged parishioner ran down the aisle and, according to witnesses, "rugby-tackled" the popular priest to the altar, causing him shock and distress.

Fr. Cheevers had just begun his homily. His last words were: "A man woke one morning to find his house surrounded by a flood..."

The Gardaí have decided that a prosecution is not in the public interest.

Fr. Cheevers is said to be unharmed.

Eyewitness Gemma O'Bringlóid said: "Thank God somebody realized the seriousness of the situation and responded immediately." 

When asked "So a third person rushed to the altar?", Gemma looked confused and said: "What do you mean, a third person?"

Full story here.

Happy St. Bridget's Day!

To mark the day, here's an interesting blog post by one of my colleagues in UCD.

https://ucdculturalheritagecollections.com/2025/01/23/a-crown-of-lighted-candles/

I had somehow never heard of "Biddy Boys" before, but I already want to revive them.

St. Bridget's Day has become a much bigger phenomenon in Ireland recently, especially with the introduction of the bank holiday. This is a wonderful thing. It's true that contemporary Ireland has big difficulties with celebrating a Christian saint, so it does it's best to repackage her as a pagan goddess or some kind of feminist symbol. What the heck. I've always been inclined to think that any festival is better than no festival, unless it's celebrating pure evil. The theme of this year's "Brigit Festival" is "celebrating women", and I can certainly get behind that, even if I might celebrate women differently (that is, celebrating their femininity and their glorious differences from men, as well as all their achievements in arts, culture, science, and so on).

My favourite poem that mentions St. Bridget's Day is this wonderful translation by Frank O'Connor of a famous old Gaelic poem by Anthony Raftery, "the last of the wandering bards". O'Connor's version has a marvellous vernal gusto it, that seems to mirror the return of life to the winter-wearied world. Of course, St. Bridget's Day is traditionally the first day of spring in Ireland.

As with all my favourite poems, lines from this one frequently come into my mind unbidden. Generally, it's the very first words "Now with St. Bride's Day the days will go longer", and I think of it whenever I hope things are on the up in some way or other.

"I give you my word that the heart in my rises" is a wonderful line, and there's an immense poignancy in the phrase: "Could I but stand in the heart of my people". I'm increasingly of the view that "nationalism" is a stupid and even objectional word. It's like having a formal term for the social philosophy that people should wear clothes, or that children should be innocent, or that human beings should occasionally laugh. To be a member of a people has been so much the universal experience of humankind that it was a very crafty and nasty trick to claim that this idea first came into currency among German intellectuals in the nineteenth century. (Yes, the poet is talking about his local people here, rather than his nation, but we tend to have concentric circles of "peoples". Globalism and international wants to eliminate them all.)

Anyway, here it is. I could only find the Frank O'Connor version in one place on the internet, and there were some significant differences from how I remembered it. I've "corrected" it to my own recollection of it, unapologetically. The poetry of the place-names in it is also very beautiful.

Now with the springtime the days will grow longer,

And after St. Bride’s day my sail I’ll let go,

I'll put my mind to it and never will linger 

Till I find myself back in the County Mayo

'Tis in Claremorris I’ll stop the first evening,

And at Balla beneath it I’ll first take the floor;

I’ll go to Kiltimagh and have a month’s peace there, 

And that’s not two miles from Ballinamore. 

I give you my word that the heart in me rises 

As when the wind rises and all the mists go, 

Thinking of Carra and Gallen beneath it, 

Scahaveela and all the wide plains of Mayo; 

Killeadan’s the village where everything pleases, 

Of berries and all kinds of fruit there's no lack, 

And could I but stand in the heart of my people 

Old age would drop from me and youth would come back.

My own poem on St. Bridgit is one of my better efforts and got some traction last year.

A Biblical Parallel in Dracula?

 I've been re-reading Dracula, the original novel by Bram Stoker, which unleased the unkillable Count on an endless spree through literature, cinema, theatre, and every other form of culture imaginable.

I'm rather excited to notice a Biblical parallel which has, I think, eluded everyone so far. (At least, I can't find any reference to it on the internet, and surely everything is on the internet.)

In this passage, Professor Van Helsing is beginning to suggest to his protegé and fellow Man of Science, Dr. John Seward, that something vampiric may be at work in the strange events they have experienced.

He subjects Dr. Seward to a series of rhetorical questions:

There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and ‘Old Parr’ one hundred and sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men’s blood in her poor veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more day, we could have save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps? Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them, and then—and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?”

“Good God, Professor!” I said, starting up. “Do you mean to tell me that Lucy was bitten by such a bat; and that such a thing is here in London in the nineteenth century?” He waved his hand for silence, and went on:—

“Can you tell me why the tortoise lives more long than generations of men; why the elephant goes on and on till he have seen dynasties; and why the parrot never die only of bite of cat or dog or other complaint? Can you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are some few who live on always if they be permit; that there are men and women who cannot die? We all know—because science has vouched for the fact—that there have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of years, shut in one so small hole that only hold him since the youth of the world. Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?”

This, to me, seems clearly inspired by the Book of...

Well, reader, what do you think? Which Book?

(I've just discovered that I'm not, alas, the first to notice this parallel. Well, it was too good to be true. It's still interesting, though.)

Thoughts on this Blog

I've always hated it when anybody claims to be very busy. It seems self-important and pompous. If you're busy, you don't have to tell everybody how busy you are. After all, we all have the same amount of time in the day, and we're all doing something with it.

So I won't say I've been very busy recently. I have, however, been preoccupied with other things than this blog for the last month or so.

Today was actually the first day I had time to contemplate writing a proper blog post. The longer I contemplated, however, the harder I found it to think of something adequate to write.

There's no shortage of subjects, really. Life is a dizzying kaleidoscope. It would be easy enough to pick a subject at near-random and set my keyboard clacking.

But I was trying to think of a subject that's important to me, and that might be important to other people.

Every time one occurred to me, I thought of a previous blog post (or many blog posts) that I'd written on that topic previously. Everybody has themes that exercise them. If you're a painter, or a poet, or a musician, you can revisit those themes endlessly, since artistic expression has the power to make the old (or the timeless) ever-new. But it's not really the same with the essayist (and a blogger is essentially an essayist). The essayist risks becoming a bore.

One remedy to this might be to write more feature-style, informational articles. Like the articles I wrote for my short-lived Traditions Traditions Traditions! blog. This requires time for research, though.

I'm actually quite proud of this blog. It's been going since 2011, which I think makes it something of an institution, and I'm all in favour of institutions. More than that, it's proof that I have, in some small way (and I'm under no illusions as regards to its smallness), fought the good fight and raised my banner on behalf of precious things.

In some ways, I think I've been ahead of the curve. Organized religion was very much on the defensive when I started blogging. Today, the New Atheism is a fading memory, and we have a whole wave of high-profile conversions to Christianity. One assumes that something similar is happening with ordinary people, except you don't hear about it. Meanwhile, the debate between atheists, agnostics and believers has become much more respectful and friendly than it was in the days of New Atheist sloganeering.

(Even on a purely personal and anecdotal level, I've seen the congregations in the UCD church becoming more reverential and traditional over the last few years. A mostly-student congregation that now regularly features several young women in mantillas, and usually one or two babies, is quite remarkable.)

Similarly, the pitiful thing that called itself "conservatism" back in 2011 (the era of Mitt Romney and David Cameron) has almost been laughed out of existence. In 2012, I wrote this trio of blog posts explaining why I was a traditionalist conservative. I think it's fair to say that conservatism today is much closer to my own vision than the sort of conservatism that was ascendant fifteen years ago. Indeed, you could even say society itself has moved much closer to my vision. Tradition and character are back, baby!

(Ireland remains an outlier. But then, we are always several decades behind.)

On the debit side, my campaigns for the revival of traditional poetry have been completely fruitless. I can't get anyone to care about poetry-- proper poetry. People listen respectfully, agree, and then go on ignoring it. Conservatives are every bit as indifferent as liberals. I see no imminent prospect of this changing.

Added to that, this blog has shown no sign of growing its audience. I'm grateful to the few people who comment, but I have no evidence of new regular readers. I've become aware that blogs themselves are going out of fashion. Which to me is just another reason to keep soldiering on. My archive is now quite extensive, but I rarely even get new comments on the old posts. I'd always harboured the fond hope that more people might discover this bIog through coming across this or that article that interested them (there are well over two thousand), but it doesn't seem to have happened. I find this discouraging.

I was delighted, however, that this blog received a lovely tribute on the excellent Some Definite Service blog, which I venture to call a sister blog to this one.

The blog will continue, one way or another. I'll just have to mull over what direction it should take. I am grateful for everybody who reads it.