Exceptionally Exciting

As I've mentioned before, I browse the website TV Tropes a lot. A lotta lot. It might be my favourite way of relaxing, decompressing, kicking back, and so forth. And it has been for at least a decade.

Today, I came across this sentence on TV Tropes: "A San Francisco youth made national news when saw the movie Rocky eighty-one times (and possibly more) during its first-run release in 1976 and 1977. After the twenty-seventh viewing, the theatre started letting him in for free."

I don't know why, but this sort of thing makes the Christmas tree of my imagination light up, flash, and play holiday tunes.

What sort of thing do I mean? Well, anything to do with an exception, an irregular situation, a freebie, an informal arrangement, or an anomaly.

For instance: I once read that the Abbey National Building Society, having a branch very close to the (only ever fictional) address of 221B Baker Street, employed a full-time secretary to answer Sherlock Holmes's mail. And this is true!

For instance: one year in secondary school, when I was about sixteen, a quirk of the timetable meant that we had an English class sandwiched between two physical education classes. So the teacher let us stay in our gym clothes for that class.

For instance: I once went to a takeaway and bought some garlic sauce. Just that. The guy behind the counter threw in a good amount of chips, free of charge and unasked.

For instance: on Liechtenstein's national day, all the citizens are invited to a party in the Prince's castle.

For instance: once, when I was a kid, my school organised a treasure hunt. I remember me and my brothers going into the vegetable shop in the shopping centre to ask about a particular clue. The shopkeeper gave us a mysterious, knowing look, reached under the counter, and handed us an envelope. This completely floored me.

For instance: in the film Wayne's World 2, the protagonist says: "Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs, you were issued with it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide."

Please note, the appeal I'm talking about doesn't just apply to freebies or special privileges. It can go the opposite way, too. It pleases me when someone has a special power or obligation.

I've just discovered, from a quick internet search, that barmen don't really have the right to confiscate someone's car keys. But apparently, businesses did once have the right to cut up your declined credit card. Both ideas appeal to me.

When I was a kid, and I went a long time between haircuts (as I always did), I'd regularly get this taunt from other kids: "The barber has a warrant for your arrest." The idea always charmed me.

In 2003, Coke was banned from being sold in UCD Student's Union shops because of controversies about their operations in Colombia. That was lifted more recently, but now it's banned because the sugar content is too high. It's a bummer that you can't get a Coke in UCD when you want one, but I enjoy the anomaly.

Speaking of Coke, for many years it was forbidden to use the name Pepsi in their corporate headquarters in Atlanta. You had to say "the imitator" instead. (For real. Look it up, if you don't believe me.)

In New Jersey, you can't operate petrol pump yourself-- you have to get a petrol station attendant to do it.

And then there are the anomalies of convention. If children were to knock on your door and demand sweets on 364 days of the year, you'd send them packing. But on Halloween night, it's almost mandatory to indulge them. (Or, as the carol puts it about another season, "Once in a year it is not thought amiss to visit our neighbours and sing out like this...")

Then there are some interesting rules and arrangements in the history of cinema, often done as publicity stunts. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock's rule that nobody would be admitted into Psycho after the film had begun. (Back then, films played on a loop.)

Then there are William Castle's various gimmicks, such as "fright insurance" for the audience.

In the 1967 film Wait Until Dark, the gimmick was that cinemas turned off all their lights (except the EXIT signs) in the final scene, which is set in complete darkness.

Anyway, you either get what I mean now, or you don't. Does anyone share this fascination, or this pleasure? I'd be interested to know that.

Obviously, this goes a long way towards explaining this blog post!

Do you think this is a stupid blog post? It might be, but I bet there's none other like it out there...

A Few Miscellaneous Thoughts on Palm Sunday Mass

And so we come to Holy Week again. The liturgical cycle which is older than almost anything else in our world, and which stretches back way beyond the creation of any of our political or social structures, reaches its annual climax.

I attended Palm Sunday Mass in University Church in Stephen's Green. I attended there out of circumstances. I'm actually not terribly fond of this church. It's beautiful, but that's the problem. I don't like beautiful churches. They have too much snob value. You can call this perverse or wrong-headed, and it probably is, but I'm pretty sure it's not an affectation. I've felt this way too long for it to be an affectation, even a subconscious one. I like plain churches.

Here are some thoughts that struck me during the Mass:

1) I'm never in the mood for Palm Sunday Mass. Well, I can't remember ever being in the mood for it. Undoubtedly this comes from inadequately living Lent, but it always steals up on me and I think: "Oh God, here we go again, all the standing and palaver". I don't want to think like this, but I do. But then, I'm inevitably moved by the experience.

2) I've long reached the stage where I'm bored by pretty much every homily I hear. Now and again, I will hear a homily that sheds a new light on a familiar reading, but...very rarely. I feel bad about this. I like the idea of homilies, but the reality (nearly always) just makes me fidgety. I especially get impatient at homilies that seem to be no more than a paraphrasing of the Gospel.

I'm also bored by almost all devotional articles and videos. And yet, the Scriptural texts themselves never bore me.

3) Being a member of a congregation always pleases me. I enjoy feeling united with everybody present, feeling like we have become a collective that unites (not negates) age, sex, and temperament. I realize enjoyment is not the point of the liturgy, though. There is something very lovely in everybody standing, kneeling and sitting as one. And little variations in people's individual devotions only accentuates this.

4) Although I do prefer plain churches, today I realized something distinctive about very ornamental churches such as University Church. There is something dream-like about the Masses held in them, at least in my experience. It's as though they occur in a different plane to the life outside them, especially if they are in a city centre. Acoustics play a part in this, too. In some ways, I think the atmosphere of such a church is rather like that of a swimming pool.

Well, there you go. I'm sorry I don't have anything more edifying to say!

A Prayer Request

Yesterday I got the sad news that a long-time reader of this blog had lost his father, suddenly. Please pray for both of them.

Qualities of Propaganda

These are just some observations of my own. I'm not going to get into specifics (see number four). I'm not talking about all propaganda here. I'm talking about the propaganda put out by those whose agenda is dominant in a given society.

1) The Message is pushed unrelentingly, all the time, through every medium.

2) The trivial is catastrophized (when it suits The Message), while serious issues (that don't suit The Message) are trivialized, or even ignored.

3) Anyone who questions The Message is not simply dismissed as being wrong. They are condemned as malicious, ridiculous, or so far off the mark it's perverse.

4) Freedom to disagree is allowed in theory, but restricted or discouraged in practice ("free speech has consequences").

5) Fictional depictions of people who disagree with The Message (usually in a very mild way) inevitably depict them as unlikeable, stupid, backward, embarrassing, and so on-- though perhaps they have some endearing qualities. (If they are really nice, they'll have agreed with The Message by the end credits.)

6) In the case of admired figures who lived before the Message, and whose popularity is too deeply-rooted to be undermined, anything they said contrary to The Message is explained away; "He was a man of his time", etc.

7) Even wishing to debate The Message is portrayed as suspicious, and probably motivated by baleful beliefs.

8) To react angrily against The Message makes you an angry person. Anger which is in agreement with The Message doesn't make you an angry person. Hatred towards The Message makes you hateful. Hatred in agreement with The Message doesn't. Fear about The Message makes you a fear-monger; fear inspired by the Message doesn't.

9) Any reactions against The Message just prove the necessity (and intensification) of The Message.

10) The extent of popular disagreement with The Message can never be acknowledged, except in the face of undeniable evidence (such as a mass demonstration, or a referendum going the wrong way. In the latter case, the concept of "misinformation" can be easily is used to explain it ). All right-thinking people agree with The Message.

A Strange Sadness

I've just finished writing an article about a celebrated Irish priest-- or rather, a priest of Irish descent. I won't say who, as I like to keep it a secret until it's published. But I came away from it feeling rather sad-- or, more accurately, sorry for myself.

This priest had fingers in a lot of different pies, and buckets of energy. Consequently, he had several "bases" where he could stay on his travels. He always seemed to be meeting people for dinner and staying with them.

This is the sort of thing I've always daydreamed about, but never had. Coming close to my fiftieth year, it seems like a failure.

I've long been fascinated by "soft bonds". I'm particularly, for some reason, fascinated by Eamon De Valera's lifelong connection to Blackrock College-- a connection that continued when there was no formal relationship between them, when he was no longer a student or a teacher there. There's a whole book on the subject. John Henry Newman and his Oxford snapdragons are another example. Yeats and Coole Park is another.

I don't have anything like that. I have no mentor, no fire-forged comrades, no alma mater (in any meaningful sense), no old stomping ground, no war stories. No place where everybody knows my name, and they're always glad I came. There are no doors of institutions open to me when I have no particular business there.

I'm not really talking about friends here. I do have friends, and I'm deeply grateful for them. I'm talking about something different.

Although I've worked in University College Dublin for almost twenty-five years, and value being part of such a permanent institution, I can't really fool myself that I belong there in some deeper sense. Not even the Catholic community on campus-- though I've been going to lunch-time Mass in the church for about fifteen years. I gave a talk to the Newman Society, but it seems to have made zero impression. I suggested a spiritual retreat for staff to one of the chaplains, but after an initial show of enthusiasm, the idea was forgotten about.

Sometimes I like to think of this blog as an institution, but perhaps I am kidding myself.

Doubtless I am overlooking some things (although right now it doesn't seem like it.) I've realized before that my wide-eyed attentiveness to other peoples' stories has often given me unrealistic expectations. It's taken me decades to realize how much people talk themselves up, romanticize, and embellish. Maybe I just have to learn how to do that? And yet...that can't be all of it, can it?

I wonder if other people feel like this? Is it a feature of modern alienation? Is this something other people have, or even feel they lack?

I suppose I have an unfulfilled craving for gemeinschaft rather than gesellschaft.

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

 

Willing the World

An Interesting Paragraph

"It was a melancholy time for my family, too, because my brother James was slowly dying from cancer and I remember, on referendum day, crying all the way in a bumpy bus from Galway to Clifden, in Connemara, thinking of his thin shoulders underneath his jacket as he turned to pour tea. He was an Irish Nationalist who did not care for either side in the abortion referendum. He disliked Holy Joes, or anyone he thought was parading virtue; he also disliked the secularising liberals and smart alecks who he thought were out to destroy Ireland's Gaelic and Catholic heritage. When I woke in Clifden the next morning and heard the result, I knew that James would be gratified; the referendum had been carried by two to one, though the turnout had not been spectacular. It would please James that the secularising liberals had been defeated and that Gaelic Catholic Ireland had spoken; and yet he would also be glad that it had not been too decisive a turnout and that the Holy Joes would have scent cause for triumphalism."

That's a paragraph from Mary Kenny's Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, a book I have read several time. This particular paragraph lodged in my memory, and provides a good entry-point to my theme in this blog post.

It seemed interesting to me that James (RIP) was about to depart from the world, and yet he cared about what kind of Ireland would exist after him. And not even a long view of what Ireland would be like, which somehow seems appropriate to the dying, but a strong preference for what would happen in the short term. He was pleased at the continuation of a very specific status quo.

We all seem to will certain things about the world. Obviously, we have self-interested desires. We want to be prosperous, free, healthy, and many other things. Most of us also have altruistic desires. We hear about people buried under rubble in the news and we want them to get out alive. We buy free range eggs because we don't want hens to suffer unnecessarily. And so on.

What interests me in this blog post is a third category of desires, desires which can't quite be categorised as either self-interested or altruistic. For instance, the desired outcome of Mary Kenny's brother for the referendum, as described above. If abortion was a straightforward moral issue to him, he would have presumably preferred a more emphatic pro-life victory. But he didn't. Even if he did in fact care about the substantive issue, he wanted Ireland to be a certain way; for it to preserve its Catholic Gaelic heritage, but not in such an emphatic way that the Holy Joes would be gloating.

Some Examples

I'm intrigued by this third category of desires, that are neither self-interested nor altruistic. I think we all have very many of them, and I've pondered a lot on their nature.

For instance: every now and again (often in UCD) I see people playing cards in public. This pleases me immensely. It's not that I want to join in. I have no intention of joining in. It's not that I'm altruistically pleased at the enjoyment of the card-players. They might enjoy watching bad television more. If their enjoyment was the point, there are probably thousands of activities that might give them more enjoyment. I'm pleased because I'm glad to see people still playing cards, even though there's nothing tremendously worthy or elevated about card-playing. (Why does it please me? Perhaps it's the aesthetic element of cards, perhaps it's nostalgia, perhaps it's that no electronics are involved, perhaps it's the sense of continuity with the past, perhaps all these things and more...)

Here's another example that just came to mind: trick or treaters. How disappointed would you be if there were no more trick-or-treaters, one Halloween? Even if you curse when the doorbell rings on Halloween night, even if you find the whole thing a nuisance, I think most people would feel some sense of loss if trick-or-treaters just weren't there either anymore, or if they dwindled away to nothing over five or ten years. The trick-or-treaters, in a way, are there as much for the sake of the people giving the sweets as they are for their own sake. Not that the trick-or-treaters themselves are taking this into consideration, but this is why the practice endures.

What kind of a world do you want? What kind of a society do you want? This question is thrown around rather nonchalantly, and responses tend to focus on ideals or principles: a world where everybody can develop their talents to the fullest, a world where nobody is discriminated against unjustly, and so on. I just googled the phrase and one of the first hits I got was: "I want a world where everything is welcome, everything is valid, everything is acknowledged, embraced, and accepted."

That's a noble vision (maybe), but I would suggest that the world that any of us really want is much more specific than this. It would be a long list of particulars which would be considerably bulkier than a telephone directory, most likely. And most of it would be things we haven't even thought about before, but-- if we did think about them-- we would agree they are part of the world as we would have it.

A Walk in the Park

These considerations bring me to this question: what do we will about the world? I could write this blog post without bringing up this phrase of "willing the world" (though I'd need a different title), and it might be easier, since I'm finding it hard to put it into words. But it's really the kernel of the matter, in my view.

I think we are all willing a particular version of the world all the time. The aggregation of all those ideals makes a composite, a collective ideal. This might not correspond to the actual concrete way things are, although surely it shapes it significantly. But it does become a reality of its own-- a sort of mental model of how the world should be, including contradictions and tensions.

But what do I mean by "willing"? Well, here's an example.

Imagine you are walking through a city park one weekday morning. You see an old man and his grandson (presumably) feeding the ducks. Seeing this pleases you. If you were to choose the world down to its smallest detail, you would make sure to find a place for people feeding ducks.

On one of the benches, a teenage Goth girl is reading some absurdly pretentious book, like Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. You think the whole Goth phenomenon is rather silly, but at the same time, you can't help feeling it adds something to the world. It seems fitting that a certain number of young people should become Goths. Besides, you're glad to see anybody reading a physical book and not just staring at their phone. And therefore, we can say that you will this young Goth's activity and current activity.

Then you look up, and you see a billboard just outside the park. It's for a washing powder. It's very gaudy and brash and vapid. The grinning faces on it are ludicrously happy about the whiteness of their whites. The triviality bothers you. You will it not to exist.

I could go on describing the various things in the park, but let's take a step back and look at the situation itself.

For instance, the weather. Let's say it's a bit colder than you would like and that it's beginning to drizzle a little. You wish the weather was a little nicer right now, but you don't will it. You don't will a world where the weather was always nice, because that seems to be a negation of the very concept of weather. (Although maybe some people would will this, or perhaps, just will that the country they live in would have a different climate to the one it does.)

But let's go even more basic. Let's look at the whole existence of public places. I think nearly everybody wills the existence of public places, common areas. I can find floods of articles online about this. So walking through the park you might be willing the existence of this park as a public space, if you come to think of it.

Going Deeper

Or you could go even more basic. Everybody is in the park because they want to be. "We live in a free society", as people like to say. (I love that phrase.) Everyone who is in the park might also, conceivably, be working as slave labour somewhere, or just imprisoned. Most of us will  be glad about this, presumably.

And you could get ever more basic, right down to the fabric of reality itself; time, space, embodiment, consciousness.

Ultimately we reach existence itself, the irreducible fact of existence.

How energetically do we will existence itself? I'm of the mind that we should all will it as energetically as G.K. Chesterton: "There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude."

Strangely enough, some people are enthusiastic (even passionate) about particular aspects of existence, but rather half-hearted or even averse to existence itself. This is baffling to me.

Willing and Social Philosophy

How does all this make a difference to anything? Well, first of all, I would say it makes a difference to one's own mental life. The more things in the world you can affirm, or will, the happier you're likely to be. (I'm not saying that people should will things just for the sake of being a Pollyanna. I'm just making the simple observation that if you are more at odds with your environment than otherwise, you're less likely to be happy. It might be the case that you should be at odds with your environment, nonetheless.)

I think it also makes a difference when it comes to social philosophy.

Since the Second World War, I'd imagine the most popular social philosophy has been "live and let live". There's a lot to be said for that philosophy, and it's especially attractive against a history of religious wars and totalitarian states.

But it's always seemed like a very cold philosophy to me, and I suspect it generates a great deal of alienation.

The philosophy of "you do you" has strengthened in Ireland with the ebbing of Catholicism and Irish nationalism. Today, most people would probably say that a person's choices are their own business, provided they don't hurt anybody else and that they are a good citizen.

And yet, personally, I prefer a world where everybody does have an opinion when it comes to everybody else's choices.

Take, for instance, the time between the foundation of the Irish Free State and the social revolution of the sixties and seventies.

What was expected of you? Well, I think it's fair to say that every baptized Catholic in Ireland was expected to go to Mass every Sunday, to pray, and to follow the teachings of the Catholic Church. To do so was seen as admirable, and not to do so was seen as negligent.

It's easy (give our current dispositions) to see the downside of this. But isn't there any upside, too? What you did actually mattered, way beyond just being a good worker or a good citizen.

"I will not make windows into men's souls", said Queen Elizabeth I, when she wasn't persecuting Catholics. It's an admirable sentiment in many ways. But who wants to live in a windowless cell?

What I've already said about Catholicism also applies to Irish nationalism. Nationalism sees human being as an asset. They embody the life of the nation. Nationalist governments generally want to encourage baby-making.

When Irish nationalism was the governing social philosophy of Ireland, Irish people were called upon to learn the Irish language, to revive traditional Irish music and sports, to give their children Irish names, to holiday in Connemara, and so forth. Obviously, this wasn't a perpetual campaign being dinned into everybody's ears all the time, but it was always there in the background.

I sense this atmosphere most of all in evocations of the West of Ireland at this time. A painting or a photograph of the Aran Islands or the Burren wasn't just a picturesque image. It was an ideal, a symbol. The geography itself was willed.

Today, learning and using the Irish language is still seen as a good thing, but it's no longer seen as a duty. The same applies to all the other manifestation of Irish nationalism I mentioned.

But, but, but...

I can imagine someone arguing: "But this is all fine as long as you approve of the governing philosophy, as you approve of Catholicism and nationalism. But what if it's a social philosophy of which you disapprove? What if it's leftism and political correctness?

Even in that case, and without ever wanting to celebrate evil, my own preference is for a society that wants something from-- besides my taxes and my vote and my obedience.

This is what I wrote in a blog post from 2017: "I must acknowledge that I also like the whole idea of a paternalistic society. Despite having some libertarian leanings when it comes to free speech and other issues, I'm not at all in sympathy with the libertarian temperament, still less the anarchist temperament. I want society to have hierarchy, expectations, obligations, privileges, roles-- I don't want the shared life of society to consist simply of housekeeping. I want it to be much more than that. I want it to be more like the life of a family."

I push back against political correctness with all my strength, but I'd rather have something to push against than just nothing, a void.

I was very taken with a particular moment in the excellent German film The Lives of Others, when a dissident writer finds himself talking to an ex-Stasi officer after the fall of communism. The ex-Stasi officer says: "But what's this I hear? You've not written since the Wall fell? That's not good. After all our country invested in you. Although I understand you, Dreyman. What is there to write about in this new Germany? Nothing to believe in, nothing to rebel against...
Life was good in our little Republic. Many people only realize that now."

The Stasi officer is not a good guy in the film, but he has a point. Indeed, search for "end of history malaise" on the internet and you'll get quite a lot of hits. We'd won the Cold War, but what now?

An Image to Finish With

This has been such an unusual blog post, I'm not sure how to end it, just as I'm not sure if the reader has any idea what I'm talking about-- or even if I'm making any sense. (The Irish playwright Hugh Leonard recorded this saying of his father's: "What are you talking about, or do you know what you're talking about?")

But here's an image from my own life experience to finish up on.

It's of Ballymun Shopping Centre (since demolished), back in the early nineties. It was sometime near Halloween. There was a nip in the air and a gloom in the early evening, both of which I tend to find galvanising. I think I was about fourteen or fifteen.

I was looking in the window of Miss Mary's, one of the centre's newsagents. I was specifically looking at the boxes of AirFix model airplanes, a hobby I had recently developed (and which was very much a passing thing). I was also enjoying the Halloween display in the shop window.

Although I'm not musical, the best comparison for what I felt at that moment (or, more likely, when I remembered the moment) is a musical chord. Everything harmonised; the shop window, the time of year, the atmosphere of Halloween, my own presence. For perhaps the first time, I didn't feel at odds with my environment. My imagination, somehow, had absorbed it all and invested it with meaning. I willed it.