Self-Questioning, Again

This blog has become the beneficiary of my absence from Facebook. I made a New Year's resolution to stop using that popular social networking site. Unlike most of my New Year's Resolutions, this one has stuck. I have no plans to reactivate my account.

But this means I don't have any outlet for my miscellaneous thoughts, other than my diary, and (sometimes) the real people I encounter every day-- who usually aren't that interested!

Recently I have been filled with self-doubt about my own beliefs, convictions and passions. It's not so much self-doubt about them, in fact, as about my own holding of them.

I've been reading a book called George Orwell and Religion by Michael G. Brennan. It's interesting, because Orwell himself is interesting.

Orwell (although an atheist) had a complex attitude towards religion. His attitude towards Catholicism, on the other hand, was much more straightforward. He hated it. This hatred sometimes led him to say the most ridiculous and prejudiced things imaginable, which is especially surprising coming from someone as (generally) fair-minded and cool-headed as Orwell.

I've noticed that I don't have the slightest resentment towards Orwell for his anti-Catholicism. It seems like something he could hardly help. Don't we all have such pet hates?

The book, however, made me think not just about pet hates, but about irrational attitudes in general. Perhaps, rather than "irrational", I should say "non-rational".

We can very clearly see other people's lack of rationality. For instance, when it comes to Catholicism in Ireland today, it really seems to be the case that, for a huge amount of people, Catholicism just isn't a live option. Many of my contemporaries have spiritual yearnings, but those yearnings will never carry them over the threshold of a Catholic church. There's something standing in their way: a shudder, a blockage, a visceral reaction. They'll explore pretty much any spiritual tradition except the one they grew up with.

I'm not saying this obstacle is impossible to get past, but I suspect that-- for some considerable time-- it's going to stand in the way of a large-scale return to Catholicism in Ireland.

That's by-the-by, though. In this blog post, I wanted to ponder my own irrational impulses. Perhaps it would be entertaining to list some of them, in no particular order.

1) A yearning for special places and times; for the existence of special places and times. To the extent that I would wish for all times and places to be special, pretty much. (I don't think that's a paradox; things can be special in different ways, and there are degrees of specialness.) The intensity with which I feel this is almost impossible to exaggerate and it seems to go back to my earliest days. It's not so much that I want to experience them, as that I want them to be there. (Here, there, and everywhere.)

2) A deep hatred of rationalisation and standardisation, and a corresponding love of irregularity and idiosyncrasy. Allied to this, an intense love of the particular and a hatred of anything that replaces the particular with the abstract or general.

3) A love of the ordinary, and a corresponding coldness to the exclusive, elite, and prestigious. Unlike many conservatives, I don't take any delight in reading about aristocrats and royalty. I don't like stories about millionaires or billionaires. I have no desire to see palaces, or even cathedrals. I don't want to move to some island untouched by modern life (though I'm glad it exists). I'm interested in Tuesday evening in the suburbs; that's my gold standard.

4) Somewhat in contradiction to number three, a strong distaste for ordinary life when it descends to the lowest common denominator, and is unsalted by the sublime. I mean people "just living their lives"; dedicated to the business of getting and spending, home improvements,  clothes, food, private enjoyment, career, holidays, minding their own business. Even though this sort of life would seem to have Scriptural warrant: "Make it your ambition to live a quiet life and attend to your own business", (1 Thessalonians 11).

I'm well aware of everything to be said against this feeling. Isn't there something sublime about human life even in its essentials, like Robinson Crusoe on his island? (Yes.) Should I get to decide whether someone's life is banal? (No.) Given the weight of mortality, sickness, bereavement, and other misfortune hanging over all of us, shouldn't we just be grateful for every person who is reasonably healthy, free in the simplest sense, well-fed, and so on? (Yes, of course.)

And yet...this feeling lingers. I can't even walk through IKEA without feeling depressed. Isn't this part of the reason people complain about consumerism? A sort of closed-in, private existence that reaches towards nothing larger than itself? And yet, how do I know this is true of the crowds in IKEA? Or why shouldn't clothes and food be an avenue to the sublime? Cuisine and dress are fascinating subjects in themselves; one could devote one's entire life to either. I have no satisfying answers for these questions, but my feeling remains.

5) A hunger for what Louis MacNeice famously called "the drunkenness of things being various". It's such a perfect phrase that I don't know how to expand on it.

This gives me something of a schizophrenic attitude to modern, suburban, consumerist life. Sometimes I think advent of television was a disaster, in terms of its effect on society. And yet...I am tremendously interested in television, particularly now that it has its own (bottomless) history. And I feel the same way about most of the phenomena of modern life, such as computer games or the internet.

In all honesty, people today probably have more opportunities than ever to explore specialist interests, form specialist communities, or even make their living in an unusual way. So I can't really wish to go "back to the land", back to a simple agrarian community-- as much as I can see the attraction of that. What we would gain in community and tradition, we would lose in the diversity of life. Would that be a worthwhile trade? I don't think so myself.

There is, however, a sort of diversity which undermines diversity. For instance, shouldn't someone who delights in "the drunkenness of things being various" embrace multiculturalism? Well, maybe, to a certain extent-- to the extent of having a Chinatown, for instance . But it seems clear that, at a certain point (and pretty quickly), multiculturalism actually erodes diversity between countries and regions, and brings more sameness than variety into the world. (Many people have made this point, each apparently arriving at it independently; we really need a snappy formulation to popularise the idea.)

The same principle applies to sex-- even more so, in my view. There is something both primordial and ultimate about the masculine-feminine dichotomy. Attempts to add to it, or to go "beyond" it, only ever diminish and dilute it. That's as much as I'll say about that.

(The last two points I've made, on multiculturalism and sex, are-- I think-- true in themselves, and not examples of irrationalism.)

I could add many more examples of my irrational impulses-- many, many more. But I'll stop there.

My point is-- what validity is there to these impulses, for anyone other than myself? Should I keep them to myself? (I'm not going to, but should I?)

I can think of a couple of reasons they might have merit:

1) Sometimes people feel something in an inchoate way, and lack words to articulate it. I've found this very often myself, particularly when it comes to writers such as G.K. Chesterton. So perhaps I could perform this same service for others.

2) Perhaps it's legitimate to see society as a great battleground of ideas, beliefs, and ideals; everybody brings their own banners and slogans to the battle, and society is all the richer for it-- except for those banners that represent something downright evil. Personally, I like the idea of a great clash and collision of ideas and visions. The idea of a society where everybody agrees on everything is pretty loathsome to me, as it is to most people-- though I rather suspect Catholic integralists and the apostles of political correctness relish it, each in their own way. (But I might be wrong even there. After all, there always seems to be ample scope for debate and disagreement even when there's a large area of consensus.)

If this "ideological battleground" model is legitimate, then I don't have to apologise for advancing my own vision, my own ideals. I can do this in the hope of convincing others, in the hope of discovering allies, or even in the hope that just articulating them adds something to life.

The best format for expressing very personal ideals, "irrational" ideals, is probably poetry. But I can't get anyone to read my poetry, besides one or two friends.

But am I, perhaps, correct to doubt my own ideals (or beliefs, or visions, or dreams) when they are based on such irrational grounds? Should one's beliefs flow from careful reasoning, making every effort to rise above one's own prejudices and passions?

Perhaps. And I think my core beliefs can pass this test. Catholicism seems objectively true to me. As does my belief in democracy, and other things.

But outside those core beliefs, I do have many other attitudes which are frankly irrational-- like the ones I've listed above. I think everybody does. And I think it's important to accept this, and take it into account. What you do with them after that is another question.

Unique Songs

As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, I'm not the biggest music fan in the world. I never had a collection of hundreds of CDs, back when CDs were a thing. I think I had a few dozen at most, and I probably only listened to a few songs from most of them.

I do like music. I get very enthusiastic about particular songs. My taste tends to be pretty middle-of-the-road, for the most part, with now and then a lurch into more niche territory.

As well as the straightforward pleasure of listening to music, I'm quite fascinated by its social and cultural aspects. I mean popular music especially. I like reading about the history of the music charts (especially on this blog), and the place particular songs achieve in the wider culture.

But, in this blog post, I want to write about a particular type of song. I've used the title "unique songs", but that doesn't quite get at it. (After all, every song is unique.) I'm talking about songs with a unique subject matter.

Relative to the totality of songs ever written, I think this is a fairly small subset. Most songs fit into a particular genre, lyrically speaking. (Then there are instrumental songs, which don't apply here at all.) 

Love songs are undoubtedly the biggest category, by a huge margin. And within that category, there are innumerable sub-genres, such as break-up songs.

But even rather quirky themes can give rise to quite a lot of songs. For instance, there are quite a lot of songs that celebrate larger ladies.

There's an interesting list of common song subjects on the ever-entertaining website TV Tropes. Click here, and expand the "Subject Tropes" heading.

To qualify for inclusion in this blog post, songs have to fulfil these three criteria:

1) They have to actually be about something, and not downright cryptic. So songs like "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procul Harum don't qualify.

2) The song has to actually be about its ostensible subject matter. That is, it can't simply take an unusual subject, image, or metaphor as a point of departure. So, for instance, "Please Mr. Postman" wouldn't qualify, even though there aren't many songs about postmen. Because it's not really about a postman. It has a much more conventional subject: the narrator pining for his beloved. Which is fine, but not what I'm writing about now. 

The same principle would disqualify a song such as "YMCA" by the Village People. It's not really about all the things you can do at the Young Men Christian's Association. (Although, according to Wikipedia, its co-writer vehemently insists, to this day, that it really is just about that. Well, never mind; you get the point.)

3) Novelty songs don't qualify. "Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon has a unique subject, but the whole point is that it's zany.

I've only included songs with which I'm fairly familiar, though I don't make that an actual criterion.

So what does qualify? Well, here goes...

1) "Kung Fu Fighting" by Carl Douglas.

I can't think of very many pop or rock songs about martial arts. ("Ninja" by Europe is the only other one that comes to mind.) But this song isn't just about martial arts; it's about a contemporary Kung Fu craze, although it seems from the lyrics to be looking backwards nostalgically. I don't think it counts as a novelty song because it's not ostentatiously silly. True, the Guardian describes it as "the quintessential novelty single", but since when was the Guardian right about anything?

2) "Nothing Ever Happens" by Del Amitri.

I mentioned this song in a recent blog post. Perhaps it gave me the idea for this list.

There must be thousands of songs about being bored, and about particularly boring places (such as "Every Day is Like Sunday" by Morrissey). But are there any other songs which portray our whole way of life as boring and stagnant?

3) "Country House" by Oasis.

The winner of the "Battle of Britpop" between Oasis and Blur in August 1995. I remember it well! It doesn't seem to be especially fondly remembered, but I like it. I think it has clever lyrics.

4) "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles.

This one occurred to me because, rather famously, Paul McCartney actually wrote it in answer to a challenge to write something other than a love song. A challenge from his aunt, as it happens.

5) "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong

This might seem a surprising inclusion, but I'm thinking of how often it's chosen by TV producers to express the sentiment of its title. Are there many other songs simply celebrating the wonderfulness of the world in general? There must be, but I can't think of them.

6) "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie

There are a lot of songs about particular times and places, and probably a lot of songs about Flower Power and hippies. But this seems distinctive because it was written at the moment it was happening. As you can guess, I'm not at all nostalgic for that counterculture, but I do like the song. (It was a favourite of my mother's, incidentally.)

7) "In the Year 2525" by Zager and Evans.

A huge hit about the dehumanising effects of technology, and the dystopian future that may be awaiting us in the distant future. Not many of those about.

8) "Going Back" by Dusty Springfield

There are lots of songs about nostalgia and childhood, but are there any other songs about rediscovering, as an adult, the wisdom of childhood play and games? To Irish people of a particular generation (mine), this song will always be associated with a certain ad for the Electricity Supply Board.

9) "Closer to Fine" by the Indigo Girls.

The chorus was already familiar, but I'd never really listened to this song until my wife played it for me a few years ago. She used to be a big fan of the Indigo Girls. I'd never heard of them. I suppose, if I'm to be heavy about it, this song is a hymn to moral and epistemological relativism. But surely we can get off our high horses long enough to enjoy a playful anthem whose moral is summed up in the refrain: "The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine." 

10) "Escape" by Rupert Holmes (the Pina Colada song).

The old, old story. A guy gets tired of his lady, decides to cheat on her, finds a personal ad in the newspaper, makes a date, and then finds out it's his own lady who placed the ad! And they just laugh about it! It probably happens every day, somewhere.

(I really love the line "Though I'm nobody's poet...". Has the phrase "I'm nobody's X or Y" fallen out of use?)

11) "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty

One of my favourite songs of all time. Funnily enough, given the whole idea of this list, this one shares a theme with the very next entry: songs about somebody becoming disillusioned with a city they once romanticised. But it's a pretty small sub-genre, right?

12) "The Last Morning" by Dr. Hook

See above. Also one of my favourite songs of all time.

13) "Living Next Door to Alice" by Smokie

OK, this is a love song, but the situation described in it seems pretty distinctive.

14) "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits

I include this one a little bit tentatively. Perhaps there is a whole genre of songs about small-time bands, written by big-time bands. I can think of at least one another example: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", by a popular Liverpudlian quartet. But I'll throw it in, just in case I'm wrong.

15) "Get a Job" by the Silhouettes.

I'm sure many people have been pestered by their loved ones to go get a job, but I'm not sure there are any other songs about it. Dib-dib-dib-dib-dib-dib! It reminds me that Trading Places (it plays over its closing credits) seemed to be constantly on the TV back in my childhood, along with the rather similarly-themed Brewster's Millions.

16) "The Village Green Preservation Society" by The Kinks

"We are the Village Green Preservation Society, God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety, we are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society, God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties."

This one might, arguably, run foul of my first criterion, since it's somewhat cryptic. What organisation is this, with so many different titles and remits? But it's clearly a hymn to traditional England, not conceived in a high Elgarian way, more the England of the common man. And I can't think of any other song like this.

There are actually a few songs on the album this was taken from, The Kinks are the Village Green Appreciation Society, which could make this list. Especially "People Take Pictures of Each Other", a wistful and melancholy meditation on the fact that...people take pictures of each other. "People take pictures of the summer, just in case someone thought they had missed it..."

17) "Stories for Boys" by U2.

Literally a song about stories (and other entertainments) for boys. One would expect such a subject to receive a nostalgic, mellow treatment. Instead, it's a straightforward hard rock song, which is intriguing.

Well, those are my nominations. Do you have any to add, dear reader? I would love to hear them. Longtime (or short-time) lurkers, here is your invitation to join in!

A Snowglobey Kind of Comment

Some dude who calls himself "An Cruinneog Sneachta" (which translates as "The Snow Globe", if I'm not wrong) left an interesting comment on this article "The Cause of Ireland is the Cause Against Labour", from the e-journal Meon.

I don't regularly read Meon. Someone sent me the link.

I think An Cruinneog Sneachta makes a good point. He also has a pretty cool name. I presume it's same guy (or gal?) who wrote this article, and this one.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Once again, I'm going to post Eamon De Valera's famous St. Patrick's Day speech of 1943. It has rather outlived its critics at this stage, since even liberals have got tired of bashing it. But it's certainly a counter-cultural vision for all that.

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.

The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.

With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland – happy, vigorous, spiritual – that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved.

Here's a good article by Conor Fitzgerald on the subject. (The previous sentence is a link, though it doesn't look like it on my screen.)

What's generally forgotten is that the speech was mostly about the Irish language; the famous part of it is just the beginning.

Happy St. Patrick's Day for all my readers. I spend a lot of time wondering why we have festivals. Almost everybody seems drawn to celebrate them, and they're inherently social; you need other people for them. Not just your family and friends, but strangers.

Some reasons I think we have festivals:

1) For fun and merry-making.

2) To emphasise community bonds, the existence of a community.

3) For continuity through time.

4) As landmarks in quotidian time; "I saw him last a little before St. Patrick's Day", etc.

5) For religious reasons, of course; to have sacred times and places.

Any other suggestions?

Some Thoughts on the End of History

I'm currently reading The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. It's one of those books that are frequently cited but (I imagine) much less frequently read. Certainly I've known about it for decades, and I've often name-dropped it. But I'd never actually picked it up and looked inside, until now.

The book became a standard reference because it captured a particular mood in a particular moment; that is, the end of the Cold War and the feeling that this was it, that history had more or less reached its natural stopping point. Of course, life would go on, and things would still happen, but the defeat of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberal democracy was the end of serious competition between ideologies. Capitalism and liberal democracy would eventually triumph all over the world, even if it took a long time.

As with most famous books that come to stand for a particular argument, The End of History has been rather unfairly treated. It's not at all a triumphalist book. Fukuyama is very well aware of the drawbacks of liberal democracy and modern capitalism. Nor is it as strident or definitive as it's been portrayed. The author is quite tentative in his predictions. At least, that's my impression so far.

But I can understand why Fukuyama became a name to bandy about. Although I can just about remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was very conscious of "an "end of history" atmosphere when I was growing up. I didn't particularly think of it in terms of the end of the Cold War, but it was still an atmosphere I absorbed through my pores. It was best conveyed by a top ten hit in 1990 that I can remember very vividly, and whose lyrics seemed entirely accurate to me. The song was "Nothing Ever Happens" by Del Amitri, and its lyrics began thus:

Post office clerks put up signs saying "Position Closed"
And secretaries turn off typewriters and put on their coats
And janitors padlock the gates for security guards to patrol
And bachelors phone up their friends for a drink while the married ones turn on a chat show
And they'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow

"Gentlemen time please, you know we can't serve anymore".
Now the traffic lights change to stop, when there's nothing to go.
And by five o'clock everything's dead and every third car is a cab
And ignorant people sleep in their beds like the doped white mice in the college lab.

This is exactly what the eighties in Ireland felt like to me. (Yes, the song was released in 1990-- in between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union-- but I remembered it as an eighties song.) 

But what, in my young mind, was I comparing modern banality against? A few different things, I think. 

The Lord of the Rings was one of them. Tolkien captivated me with a vision of high romance, a pre-industrial idyll. I read the book at a very young age, and although I didn't quite understand everything that was happening in it, I certainly absorbed the atmosphere, the aesthetic.

Probably more importantly, I contrasted modern banality against the legacy of Irish cultural nationalism, which I imbibed through my family, my Irish language school, and various other sources. This offered me a whole different set of atmospheres and associations: the timeless world of mythology, thatched-roof cottages and rocky Western islands, country fairs and wandering bards and rollicking ceilidhs, and all that sort of thing. Very far from the society conjured by Del Amitri.

And this sense of banality wasn't confined to the eighties. All through my childhood, teens, and adulthood I was dogged by this sense of aftermath, or perhaps of anti-climax. In one poem, I complained that: "Time is an air-conditioned office now, and history an infinite replay." (The sense that cultural history has come to a standstill is now very common. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and plenty of other sources that you can discover with a quick internet search.)

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fukuyama's End of History wasn't just the victory of liberal democracy (which doesn't seem like a bad thing in itself). It was, rather, the victory of worldwide consumerism. And what's worse, consumerism itself seems to have stagnated at a certain point, regurgitating the styles and pop culture of the past.

Interestingly, Fukuyama doesn't think that consumerism (or a desire for a Western standard of living) is what drives the expansion of liberal democracy. A robust market economy, he argues, is perfectly compatible with authoritarian societies-- and this seems clear from the recent history of China.

No, Fukuyama argues that the rise of democracy relies on another motive, one which he draws from ancient Greek philosophy and calls "Thymos".

"Thymos" is often translated "spiritedness", and it encompasses various different emotions we can name in English: a sense of one's own dignity, or the dignity of one's own community; honour; a sense of outrage at injustices against oneself, one's community, or even other people; and so on. Thymos leads people to take risks and make sacrifices which would make no sense if we were entirely ruled by rational self-interest. "It is only thymotic man...who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers", says Fukuyama.

Fukuyama relates thymos to the desire for recognition-- the desire for recognition of oneself as a human being with rights and dignity, but also the desire for one's community to be recognized and respected.

And here I'll bring in a film that I watched recently-- I just finished watching it last night, actually.

The film is Hunger (2008). It's a dramatization of the 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, a strike that led to the death of ten hunger strikers. As a caption at the end of the film informs us, there were considerably more prison officers murdered by the IRA in the same time period. (I should mention here that I have absolutely no sympathy for the IRA terrorist campaign. In fact, I regard it with utter revulsion. But Hunger strives to concentrate on the human element of the hunger strikes, and to avoid taking sides.)

Hunger is a gruelling film to watch. Not only are we shown the main character's physical deterioration as he starves himself to death, but the movie lingers on the grim details of the prisoners' lives: excrement-smeared walls (as they refused to "slop out"), cavity searches, beatings, and other horrific spectacles. (Incidentally, I can't imagine Patrick Pearse or Eamon De Valera smearing excrement on their cell walls under any kind of provocation.)

The 1981 hunger strikes were a classic case of what Fukuyama calls thymos, and indeed a classic case of the struggle for recognition. The hunger strikers were seeking recognition as political prisoners, while the British insisted on treating them as ordinary criminals. This struggled centred on apparently trivial matters such as the right to wear civilian clothes (rather than prison clothes) and the right not to do prison work.

And this, to me, illustrates very well the futility and pointlessness of the Northern Irish "Troubles", and indeed the futility and pointlessness of identity politics in the West today.

At their heart, the Northern Irish Troubles seemed like a conflict between two tribes who were barely distinguishable, and who were becoming more like each other all the time. They looked the same, spoke the same, and (for the most part) had the same way of life.

Hunger tends to emphasize this sameness, especially since it mostly minimizes dialogue and concentrates on the nitty-gritty of bodies, spaces, and procedures. 

Catholicism is shown as a negligible factor in the life of the prisoners. One scene shows the celebration of Mass in the prison, but only one prisoner pays any attention to the priest-- the others are loudly chatting and fraternizing. 

The dramatic centre of the entire film is an extended debate between the protagonist and a visiting priest on the ethics of the hunger strike. But the debate is conducted in entirely secular terms, and any reference to religion are more or less ironic. As for the Irish language, we hear one prisoner try to speak to another in Gaelic, but his cell-mate has no idea what he's talking about.

All of this very much fits with my own impression of Sinn Féin supporters and Northern Irish republicans, growing up. For all they invoked the 1916 Rising, they were a million miles from the Irish nationalism of Pearse and De Valera. They seemed determinedly anti-romantic and hard-headed. They wore jeans, cursed, told smutty jokes, immersed themselves in pop culture, and basically lived like any other member of Western consumer society. If they spoke some Gaelic or sang Irish folk ballads, it was only as a tribal badge. Cultural revival wasn't even an aspiration; "Brits Out" was the aspiration-- apparently an end in itself.

The same applied to Catholicism-- that, too, was a tribal badge, and almost certainly didn't extend to going to Mass or listening to the Church about divorce, abortion, or artificial contraception.

And that logic seems to have worked itself out fully today. Sinn Féin now support the European Union and globalization, are gung-ho for secularization, and have leaders who hardly even pretend to speak Irish anymore. 

These days, Northern Ireland has signage in Gaelic and Ulster Scots-- the product of long and bitter political battles-- while everybody carries on speaking in English. (Arlene Foster once claimed that more people speak Polish than Irish in Northern Ireland. I'm sure she was right. It's true of the Republic, as well.)

I think this is typical of identity politics everywhere. We have ever more demands for recognition from "communities" of every sort, while the great blender of consumer culture keeps crushing us all into one homogenous mush.

This is why I think nationalists (and groups of every sort) should stop fretting about recognition and representation, and start fretting about reality. Does it really matter if some Hollywood romantic comedy indulges in Paddywhackery or "stage Irishness"? Does it really matter if somebody calls Bono British? Does it, ultimately, really matter whether there is a United Ireland, if there's no real difference between Ireland and the rest of the world anyway?

I don't care about a nationalism focused on national prestige, or the respect of other people, or even independence as an end in itself. To me, nationalism is mostly about the preservation of distinctiveness. Why? Because it makes the world richer and more interesting. One's nation doesn't have to be any better than any other nation, from this point of view. In fact, it could be the crummiest nation in the world and it would still be worth preserving.

If thymos has a role in Ireland today, perhaps we should use it to resist a much more insidious foe than the Black and Tans or the B-Specials: consumer culture, globalization, and the loss of anything that made Ireland (or anywhere else) worth fighting for in the first place.

(I also believe that nationalism and liberal democracy are perfectly compatible, and I'm in favour of both. Here is an excellent critique of Fukuyama's rather sniffy attitude towards any nationalism other than the anoydne civic nationalism that progressives love to imagine but that barely seems to exist in the real world.)

Five Reasons I Hate Blog Posts That are Numbered Lists

1) They are blatant clickbait, which is lame and pathetic in itself.

2) Their pretensions to be definitive and authoritative are nearly always spurious.

3) Why five instead of four? Why ten instead of eleven? 

4) Most of the time they could just as well be written in the form of a non-list post.

5) I don't have a fifth reason.

Ash Wednesday is Serious Business