Wednesday, February 26, 2025

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.

Saturday, February 22, 2025

Who's for Western Values?

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, February 21, 2025

Prayer for the Holy Father

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



Sunday, February 16, 2025

Shocking attack on a Priest in Ballycosgrove

 

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

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

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

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

Fr. Cheevers is said to be unharmed.

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

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

Full story here.

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Happy St. Bridget's Day!

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Now with the springtime the days will grow longer,
And after St. Bride’s day my sail I’ll let go,
I'll put my mind to it and never will linger 
Till I find myself back in the County Mayo
'Tis in Claremorris I’ll stop the first evening,
And at Balla beneath it I’ll first take the floor;
I’ll go to Kiltimagh and have a month’s peace there, 
And that’s not two miles from Ballinamore. 

I give you my word that the heart in me rises 
As when the wind rises and all the mists go, 
Thinking of Carra and Gallen beneath it, 
Scahaveela and all the wide plains of Mayo; 
Killeadan’s the village where everything pleases, 
Of berries and all kinds of fruit there's no lack, 
And could I but stand in the heart of my people 
Old age would drop from me and youth would come back.

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