I haven't
been updating Irish Papist much recently, as you can see, but I'm regularly
surprised by how many people actually tell me they read it-- people I didn't
suspect read it. Facebook has
been the outlet for my ideas in more recent times, along with the Irish Catholic Forum which is, I think, an admirable venue for important discussion. Recently
there has been a discussion on Irish national identity, which was the subject
of my last post. A contributor who goes by the name 'Irishconfederate' had this to say (you have to scroll half-way down the page to get to him, but all the
other stuff is interesting too): Consequently,
I believe that the only option available to us is the constitutional one: I
mean the creation of a new set of civic and economic institutions which, with
its attendant socio-political philosophy and ethical values, would bond the
nation and distinguish it from Britain and America.
Irishconfederate
is also an admirer of the Irish Catholic writer Desmond Fennell, who has some
very distinctive views, such as a longstanding belief that Ireland should be
governed as a federation of smaller units, like Switzerland or America. He
believes a flowering of local identity is necessary to revitalize our culture.
There is much back and forth (all very civilized and genial, which is one of
the great virtues of this forum) between himself and other contributors,
including me, on this topic. The Napoleon of Notting Hill was mentioned, and
not by me!
As readers
of this blog may remember, I am a strong believer in local and regional
identity myself, but this discussion made me realise that, for me, national
identity needs to be the ground of local identity, and takes precedence. Here
is how I put it in my last post:
I'm
completely on board with devolution in principle, and with local revival and
identity, but for my part I am an old-fashioned nationalist who sees local
identity as subsidiary to national identity. It would be interesting to hear
Hibernicus's argument that national cultures derive from local cultures (I'm
not saying there are no such arguments, I'm saying I'm genuinely interested to
hear them).
This is an
interesting discussion because it is making me examine my own suppositions. Why
does local identity seem subsidiary to national identity, to me? I think it's
because the very virtues of local identity are also its shortcomings. It would
be great if everybody was involved in their local community and knew the place
and the people very well, but I feel cultural identity does have to be bigger
than that-- the air you breathe, the backdrop of your existence. It has to be
'meta', to some extent, to include places you haven't been and people you have
never met, to evoke the atmosphere of the sublime. Ulysses returning to Ithaca
is certainly coming home in a special sense, but the Greeks who went to Troy
with him were his wider culture.
Desmond
Fennell himself even hints of this when he uses the phrase 'a representative
community' to describe a nation. Local communities are not going to have
airports and world-class poets and universities and hospitals and all the
things that are part of national life; they will always seem more partial and
fragmentary, part of a whole, than a nation. (But, once again, I'm not at all
opposed to the project of decentralisation of media and government.)
I also
dislike the waste of abandoned projects which don't have to be abandoned. I
agree that modern nationalism was a secular and Protestant invention, but I
don't have a problem with that. Generations put a huge amount of effort into
the project of 'traditional' Irish nationalism, and great gains were made. It
seems to dishonour that, in my view, if we decide that old-fashioned
nationalism was on the wrong path, especially if there is no compelling reason
to do so. I am for reviving that project, which has demonstrated that it can
galvanise tens of thousands of people (or more).
So, in
brief; I am all in favour of strengthening and promoting local identities, but
within the umbrella of cultural nationalism rather than as an alternative to
it. If it is done as 'the next thing', yet another form of revisionism, I am
even against it. You cannot preserve or create traditions by continually
starting again.
***I want to
say very clearly, though, that 'old-fashioned nationalism' for me does not
include a territorial claim on Northern Ireland, or promotion of the use of
violence for political purposes. My nationalism is cultural and social, rather
than political. I denounce the Provisional IRA and their offshoots with all my
heart. To paraphrase Isaac Asimov-- twenty-six counties is room enough.****
Having made
that clear, I was very pleased with that line: "You cannot preserve or
create traditions by continually starting again".
Regarding my
efforts to improve my knowledge of the Irish language I mentioned in my last
post, they are ongoing. I have now read twelve Irish language books (novels and
essays) in a row and I'm on my thirteenth. I am still very, very far from
proficiency or anything like it. My reading comprehension has improved and my vocabulary has
increased somewhat. I read the reading at the Irish language Mass on Sunday. I think it
went pretty well. However, I haven't even begun to work on my grammar. This is the great sticking point with me and I'm hoping that, the more I read, the more grammatical intuition I will absorb.
One
interesting by-product of trying to acquire or improve a second language is
that you find yourself thinking more about how you use your first language--
for instance, you borrow foreign words without a moment's hesitation, you
create compound words and neologisms, you use sentence fragments when writing,
you play with language very spontaneously. Of course, you have to learn the
rules before you can break them like that, but the artificiality of that
situation becomes very apparent very soon. (I have been writing my diary in
pidgin Irish.)
Heidegger
famously said that language is the house of being, and some other crazy
philosopher said that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. I
am becoming more aware of living in an Anglophone world, something that was
invisible to me until now. My horror club watched a German-language film on
Sunday, and I found myself musing on how silly it is to take English as the
'natural' or the 'given'-- but that's what I did. These are interesting thoughts to me, as I have
always felt very at home in 'the Anglosphere'. But we don't have to develop an
antipathy towards something to realise-- to really realise-- that it is
something specific and not just given. "What should they know of England,
who only England know?" wrote Kipling. Certainly the loss of Latin has
made our intellectual and cultural horizons much smaller, and this is something
that I'm just going to have to live with in my own case.
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