1989 And All That

I've just finished watching Goodbye Lenin!, the 2003 film about a woman who falls into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and wakes up after the fall of socialism in East Germany. But her loving son, having been told that any excitement will kill her, goes to great lengths to covince her that nothing has changed.

It's a good film and I enjoyed it very much. It made me laugh out loud on several occasions. I didn't like it as much as I liked The Lives of Others, another film about the the last years of East Germany, which was made three years later. But it was still pretty good.

I had a few things to say about it, and once again I'm going to resort to the dubious expedient of a numbered list:

1) It was especially interesting to me because, last year, I read Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer, which is one of the best books I've read in recent years.

2) Marxism is fundamentally evil because it's based on materialism and the denial of the Divine. The fall of communism was a gift from God.

Having said that...

I'm rather drawn to the aesthetic side of Eastern Bloc history-- the classical art, the big banners, the anthems, even the austere prefabricated apartment blocks. Conversely, the tacky Western consumerism that flooded in after the Wall fell hardly seems like something to be celebrated. (And Hoyer's book, sadly, makes it very plain that blue jeans and pop music probably had as much to do with the fall of the GDR as any more spiritual or humanistic ideas of freedom.)

3) Given Ireland's own experience of the 1990 soccer World Cup, it was interesting to see it feature so heavily in this film. West Germany winning the Cup seems (going by the film) to have been almost as important as liberation from communism and national reunification-- or, rather, it blended into the same euphoric mix. That this would have been the case never really occurred to me before, strangely enough.

4) The fall of the Soviet Union seems like a moment of historical clarity, a vindication of everything that is organic and enduring in society-- family, organized religion, nation. There was some discussion on whether East Germany should remain a separate country even after the fall of socialism. But, overwhelmingly, Germans wanted reunification, just as republic after republic of the old USSR demanded independence. And why wouldn't they? The nation is simply a natural institution of mankind. Communism tried to diminish it, and failed. Globalism is trying to destroy it, and encountering a massive resistance that seems to be gaining momentum all the time.

5) One of the reasons I'm so fascinated with this period is because it's always interesting to see how private life is intertwined with public life. Really, I think that's how it should be. Not every period can (or should) be as tumultuous as the fall of communism, but surely human beings are not meant to live in private bubbles of individual experience. Personally I love reading about moments that bring people together-- not in some glurgey "we are all one" way, but in a way that awakens meaningful unity-- or even division! Even, say, a hotly contested election or referendum. Sometimes we can come together by beating each other up. (Presumably anyone with a brain will realize that's a joke, and not to be understood literally.)

Is Anything Too Big or Too Small to be the Theme of a Creative Work?

Many years ago, I was watching a documentary (or a "featurette") about the Lord of the Rings movies. In one interview, Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) said something like: "Ultimately, the story is about friendship."

I remember thinking this was a bit banal. Lord of the Rings has many deep and profound themes. "Friendship" seems a bit too basic to count as one of them.

Similarly, Jack Finney, the author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, once had this reaction to people finding a theme of conformity (or non-conformity) in his novel: "The idea of writing a whole book in order to say that it's not really a good thing for us all to be alike, and that individuality is a good thing, makes me laugh."

Another example. I remember in school, when we were studying The Merchant of Venice, the teacher told us that one of its themes was appearance vs. reality. I can remember thinking: "Well, surely that is a theme of half the plays and books ever written."

I'm not saying any of these reactions are correct. But it's an intriguing question. Can a theme be too basic for an artistic work? Or is it the very greatness of great art that it addresses fundamental themes?

On the other side of the ledger...

One of the things that's often exasperated me about superhero movies-- aside from the fact that there's far too many of them-- is when a critic (or somebody) says something like follows: "This film reinterprets the whole Batman myth."

But what do I care about the Batman myth? If a Batman film aspires to be more than just entertainment, surely it should tackle some theme or themes beyond Batman stories?

Simlarly, when people are praising Dubliners by James Joyce (or some such book), they often said: "It brilliantly captures the Dublin of the Edwardian era."

Again, why should anybody care? This seems more a task for history books than for literature, which surely should have a more enduring relevance.

Or am I wrong? Maybe no theme is too big or small for an artistic work?

A Hobby For Someone

Going to public lectures, book launches, etc. and asking the most stupid questions you can think of.

It would be funny but I don't have enough audacity do it.

I went to a talk on horror fiction many years ago. The first question was: "Where does The Secret Garden fit into this?" Maybe this guy had already instituted this hobby.

(I've always loved horror, and The Secret Garden has been a special story for me since I read it as a kid. But no, I wasn't the guy. And yes, it was a stupid question.)

Free Speech for Everybody

Laura Perrins doesn't agree with right-wingers who lament Jimmy Kimmel's cancellation.

Was Kimmel cancelled? It's not entirely clear. It seems to have been a commerical decision made by the network, based on how many viewers he offended.

At the same time, I don't think conservatives should be celebrating anybody being punished for having an opinion. We certainly shouldn't be engaging in the same "free speech has consequences" argument that progressives have made so long.

("Free speech has consequences" could be used to justify any restriction of free speech.)

Laura's article seems to come close to a philosophy of "to the victor goes the spoils", which doesn't seem very civilized. I agree with most of her articles, but not this one.

I'm not a free speech absolutist (is there even such a thing?). But I'm definitely a free speech maximalist.

Edward Feser is, in my view, more sensible.

Knausgaard and Communion

A little of the way through the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volume novel series, I was on the point of giving up. Not because it was boring me. It wasn't boring me.

No, I was on the point of giving up because I thought: "Am I mad to allocate so much reading time to an epic work by some modern writer when I could be chipping away at my ignorance by reading something more substantial, like history, or Augustine's City of God, or something like that?"

In the end, I decided to keep going because I'm sick of starting things and giving them up.

And it must be said, it's very interesting. Knausgaard is writing about his own life. In the book, one of his friends comments on his ability to write about completely mundane events and make them interesting. He really can.

He's especially good at writing about all the little misadventures and diversions that occur in everyday life. At one point he drops his mobile phone on a train and he thinks it's fallen into the open handbag of a woman standing beside him, who then gets off the train. He doesn't follow her because the doors are about to close--and besides, how can you ask to look in someone's handbag? (You could ask her to have a look, but that doesn't seem to occur to him or anybody else.) Eventually he gets a friend to message the phone, but that leads to further complications...

There are deeper themes in the book, of course. The main theme is the conflict between Knausgaard's consuming urge to write, on one hand, and the demands of ordinary life on the other. Another theme is the disenchantment of human life since the Enlightenment, and there are even jabs at political correctness. (In the second volume, Knausgaard is living in Sweden, and as a Norwegian he thinks it's a crazy society-- but he also mentions that Norwegians in Norway actually look up to the Swedes).

Religion hasn't featured very much in the foreground, but it's always there in the background. The first volume opens when Knausgaard is a small boy and considers himself a Christian (which seems rather counter-cultural, although later his first girlfriend is a Christian). By the time he's in his teens he calls himself ani-Christian, though there's never much evidence of this.

When his father dies, Knausgaard and his brother (both of whom seem thoroughly secular, as was their father) agree they want a religious funeral, and not some "awful humanist ceremony"--I forget the exact words used, but they were something like that.

In the office where he writes, Knausgaard surrounds himself with bric-a-brac from the pre-modern past, including religious imagery. He reads the Bible.

Then, when his daugher is christened in volume two, he surprises himself and everyone else by taking communion at the ceremony:

The priest was a young woman, we stood around her by the font. Linda held Vanja as her head was moistened with water. Ingrid left when the ceremony was over, the rest of us stayed seated. It was a communion. Joe Olav and his family stood up and knelt before the altar. For some reason I got up and followed suit. Knelt before the altar, had a wafer placed on my tongue, drank the communion wine, was given the blessing, and went back, with mum's, Kjartan's, Yngve's, and Geir's eyes on me, disbelieving to varying degrees. 

Why had I done it?

Had I become a Christian?

I, a fervent anti-Christian from my early teenage years and a materialist in my heart of hearts, had in one second, without any reflection, got my feet, walked up the aisle and knelt in front of the altar. It had been pure impulse. And, meeting those glares, I had no defence. I couldn't say I was a Christian. I looked down, slightly ashamed.

There's more but I'm not going to type it all out.

Scandinavia has long been presented as the model secular society by secularists. It's interesting (and encouraging) to encounter evidence that it remains haunted by God and by Jesus-- which is what a Christian would expect.

As for materialism, it's always seemed to me like a dead-end for all art and literature. What is there left to say?

Is The Establishment Really All-Powerful and All-Seeing?

Probably everybody who reads this blog would agree that there's a recognizable ideological establishment in the Western world. It has a near-stranglehold on many of the institutions of our society and its propaganda is unremitting.

Lots of people seem to agree with this analysis. There's all sorts of different theories on the nature of this elite. Some people even think it's the Illuminati or the Knights Templar  or something like that.

My guess is that it's no single identifiable group, that it's simply a transnational elite who have common sympathies.

Alarmingly, many people seem to think that this elite is almost omniscient and omnipotent; that any apparent reverses it endures (Brexit, for instance) is simply a part of the Grand Plan; and that any apparent opposition to it (Jordan Peterson, for instance) is actually Controlled Opposition.

This theory seems unfalsifiable to me. The concept of the all-powerful, all-seeing elite is so flexible that it could wrap itself around any facts.

It also seems to fly in the face of experience. I've said that the propaganda of this elite is constant. What amazed me is how crude it is, as well.

Time and again we have seen that propaganda backfire. To take the example of Brexit again, "Project Fear" was so crude and alarmist that it couldn't be taken seriously.

Similarly, the sort of ideological propaganda that we're all subject to every day reaches such levels of overkill that it seems impossible that it wouldn't backfire.

I've heard some people argue that this is all a part of the plan. The reaction against it is also part of the plan. That just seems unlikely to me.

Another reason I think the elites can't be infallible is because human beings are too unpredictable. It regularly happens that somebody who's just too rich, too powerful, or too successful for the elites to silence breaks ranks and utters some heresy. Again, I'm sure you can think of many examples.

I don't think fatalism is a healthy attitude, and I don't think it's justified when it comes to this subject.

Ebert's Most Hated

Every few years, I get a good laugh by re-reading this selection of zingers from Roger Ebert's most devastasting movie reviews.

My favourite is definitely this one: "This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels." (It's for a comedy with an obscene name so, if you're curious, you'll have to read the article. Or at least skim it.)

But don't get me wrong, I also appreciate this one: "Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line". (This unfortunate film also won this unenviable accolade from him: "the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time".)

And then there's his verdict on the Spice Girls, the stars of Spice World: "What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names?"

Mind you, I don't agree with all his evaluations. The Dukes of Hazzard is one of my favourite films, although I seem to be alone in my enthusiasm for it. (Even the cast disparaged it.) Halloween III isn't one of my favourite horror films, but it's definitely in the second division (to a great extent on the strength of that incredibly creepy jingle that plays in a sinister advertisement, "Three more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween..")

I watched all the Resident Evil films that had been made up to 2018 over the Christmas of that year, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. They're goofy, but fun. I saw Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo in the cinema and found it endearingly stupid. I laughed several times.

I thought The Village (and its twist) deserved much better than to be featured on this list, and The Usual Suspect is good by any standards.

Still, his put-downs are a hoot.

To find out what happened when Ebert ran into someone who'd been on the receiving end of one of these reviews-- probably the worst of them, in fact-- read here. It's both funny and heartwarming.

Real and Imagined Social Decline

There are, in my view, two mistaken attitudes to social decline:

1) There is nothing new under the sun. People have been lamenting social and cultural decline since the dawn of man, but nothing ever really changes.

2) Everything is declining all the time. Almost every example of change can be held up as a sign of broader social and cultural decline.

My suggestion is this: there are real examples of social and cultural decline, but dragging everything into this narrative makes it impossible to talk about it seriously. If we fall into a pattern of reflexive curmudgeonliness, nobody need take anything we say about actual social and cultural decline seriously.

A few of my recent blog posts have been along this theme. For instance, in this blog post on language change, and in this blog post on criticisms of social media (including the common claim that attention spans are shortening). I'm playing the sceptic in those posts.

However, I definitely believe there are real examples of social and cultural decline. For instance (and this will surprise nobody who's ever read this blog), the decline of poetry.

When I talk about the decline of poetry, I'm often presented with the argument that music lyrics are the poetry of today. So the successors of Yeats and Tennyson are actually Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Eminem.

I don't think this argument works. I'm not denying that the lyrics of popular music can often attain the level of poetry. I think they can. But only in flashes, here and there.

On the whole, there's no comparison. There's nothing like the same level of depth, nuance, and seriousness involved. Nor is there the same level of coherence. A poem by any great classical poet flows from beginning to end. Even the best popular music lyrics tend to be simply a series of phrases strung together. 

(I've noticed that many of the more well-read rock musicians were influenced by Dylan Thomas, a classical poet who did write in this montage style. Bob Dylan took his stage name from him. William Blake also tends to popular with rockers, partly for the same reason.) 

Besides, there were always popular songs and people always quoted them, but they once lived alongside classical poetry.

But I don't want to go any further down that bunny trail.

Here's something I've noticed about laments of social decline. Liberals and progressives seem to indulge in them at least as much as conservatives. Very often it points to a contradiction in their own thought which they seem reluctant to face. 

For instance, they'll (quite rightly) lament the sexualization of advertising or pop culture, but they won't relate this to the 1960's sexual revolution, or to the decline of Christian ethics. (Again, their panacea seems to be socialism; don't blame the sexual revolution, blame capitalism!)

But really, everybody seems to indulge in laments of social decline, all the time. Very often they have to do with everyday irritants like manners, customer service, etc.

Sometimes there are familiar laments that are entirely justified. For instance, inflation. The old codger nostalgically remembering everything he could do with a fiver, and still have change, has been a comic figure for decades. But he's been right all along. Inflation has continually skyrocketed for generations now.

Then there are other laments where I'm not so sure. For instance, the decline of small business in the face of big business. Chesterton was writing about this in the early twentieth century and it's seemed to be a constant refrain for decades. It's a perpetual theme in movies and TV. But small businesses haven't disappeared. Small shops haven't disappeared. It doesn't even seem to me like they've especially declined since my childhood.

And then there's the fact that people rarely seem to dwell on social and cultural improvements.

Here's an example. Many years ago, knowing my interest in movie posters, somebody bought me two books about them (and full of examples of them). One was about movie posters from the 1940s, the other was about movie posters from the 1980s. It took only a cursory flick through both of them to see that the movie posters from the eighties were clearly superior to the movie posters from the forties. The 1940s posters were all very boring, unimaginative compositions involving a few star faces and the title of the film. There was nothing like the famous image of ET passing over the moon on a bicycle. Or the little girl sitting beside a glowing screen, her arms outstretched, on the poster for Poltergeist.

Even when it comes to my biggest anxiety about social and cultural change-- the dread of cultural homogenization-- I'm not entirely sure it's really happening, considered as a whole. Is it simply the case that there have been recurrent waves of homogenization followed by fragmentation? Why do we have so many languages descended from Latin? How did La Téne culture become so widespread in an era long before modern communicatons? And what about counter-currents such as the recent revival of the Cornish language?

Now all has been heard, here is the conclusion of the matter: I think we should be slower and more tentative to make claims of social and cultural decline, without falling into the "nothing new under the sun" fallacy.

Places

Here's a very interesting post from Professor Bruce Charlton, "Meaningful Places Are Objectively Real to Me-- But Why?".

As I said in a comment, I wish he had elaborated more on why they're meaningful.

It's got me thinking about place. Well, I was thinking about it already, but it got me thinking about it more.

This post is just going to be about my own experiences and thoughts of place so it may not be of interest to anybody at all.

Here are some of my thoughts and experiences on place, in a numbered list:

1) I have a catastrophically bad sense of direction and geography. When I tell people this they generally think I'm exaggerating. It's worse than you would imagine. I don't even know Dublin well and I've lived here all my life. I don't even know Dublin city centre well. I can get from one place to another, of course, once I've done it a few times, but I can't mentally map the route (or describe it, without actually memorizing the description). It's like the password that you can tap in without thinking, but you can't remember when you have to think about it.

As for geography, I can now place all the counties on a map of Ireland (most of the time), and I'm pretty good at identifying the states of America and countries of Europe. But that's from taking internet quizzes repeatedly, over a period of years. And I still need to refresh that knowledge regularly or I'll forget.

2) I had absolutely no interest in geography or places as a kid, and even into my twenties. I developed an ego-protecting contempt for geography. I considered travel bores to be the worst of all bores (and I'm still inclined to think this). I didn't leave Ireland until I was twenty-seven. And this attitude still remains with me, pre-reflectively. For instance, I have a terrible habit of filtering geographical information out of whatever I'm reading, or whatever somebody is saying to me.

3) In spite of all this, over the years (decades) the idea of place has become fascinating to me. Especially this thought: that this place (wherever I am) is a unique place, different from any other. Even if it's totally unremarkable. Somehow, the thought of the uniqeness of a totally unremarkable place (like an industrial park or a dormitory suburb) is very exciting to me. The word "here" is exciting to me.

4) The indeterminacy of the term "place" excites me, too. What is a place? China is a place. Luton is a place. The Home Counties are a place. The Giant's Causeway is a place. The Rolling Donut on Dublin's O'Connell Street is a place.

I don't know why this excites me so much. I like everything that defies definition, that makes the world seem shimmering and eternally elusive.

I especially likes the way different ways of mapping the world cut across each other, for instance, old forms of demarcation like baronies and townlands which still have a sort of lingering existence.

5) Places are never really distinctive enough for my craving. I honestly wish every street and village had its own flag. When I went to Hull, I was seriously upset that there were more Yeats books than Larkin books in the local Waterstones.

6) Contrariwise, my innate loyalty to the ordinary (God knows where I got it from) has given me a sort of disdain for the picturesque. Disdain is too strong a word-- I'm happy the picturesque exists. I'm very happy it's there-- but it's not for me. It seems like cheating, too easy, even a kind of escapism. I need to find meaning and sustenance in the ordinary.

Of course, it's hard to really draw a clear distinction between the ordinary and the picturesque. Is Punxsatawney, the sleepy little town in Groundhog Day, picturesque? Or is it ordinary? I suppose it's both, but it's the sort of picturesque that doesn't seem like giving up on the ordinary. It's small town picturesque. There are lots of small towns.

7) As for particular places, that's such a big subject it would require a new post. I tried to write about Dublin a while back and I found it quite a strain, albeit an enjoyable one.

G.K. Chesterton on the English People in Politics

"You have seen English people perhaps for a moment in omnibuses, in streets on Saturday nights, in third-class carriages, or even in Bank Holiday waggonettes. You have not yet seen the English people in politics. It has not yet entered politics. Liberals do not represent it; Tories do not represent it; Labour Members, on the whole, represent it rather less than Tories or Liberals. When it enters politics it will bring with it a trail of all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as against hospitals), superstitions (as about funerals), a thirst for respectability passing that of the middle classes, a faith in the family which will knock to pieces half the Socialism of Europe. If ever that people enters politics it will sweep away most of our revolutionists as mere pedants."

As quoted in Maisie Ward's biography. Originally from the introduction to a book called From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks MP, by George Haw. Chesterton wrote a lot of introductions...

Midnight

On New Year's Day of 2025, I got a new watch in Lidl. It was part of my New Year's resolutions. I wanted to spend less time looking at screens, and thought having a watch would remove one excuse to keep checking my phone. It cost ten euro, and I never expected it to keep ticking along as long as it has.

As you can see from the blurry photo above, my watch had a bit of a mishap recently. The number twelve has fallen from its place at the top of the dial. One of the digits is trapped at the centre of the dial, another is stuck to the glass. I have no idea how this happened, but it was only a couple of days ago. It hasn't affected the watch's mechanism so far.

Strangely enough, I had already been thinking about the word "midnight" before this happened. Spooky, right?

"Midnight" has a strange glamour to it. Considered objectively, it's no big deal. It's simply the moment when one calendar day is succeeded by another. 

But the word can always be counted on to deliver something of a frisson, which means it often appears in the titles of songs, films and other works.

Midnight suggests all sorts of things; spookiness, danger, solemnity, pensiveness, anticipation...

I keep a spreadsheet of all the movies I watch, and all the movies I can remember ever having watched. (Pretty nerdy, I know.) It currently lists 1346 films, but the word "midnight" only returned two hits; one for Midnight Sting (1992), the other for Midnight Sky (2020), neither of them films that have lingered in my memory. (Indeed, I can't remember anything at all about the latter.)

There are lots of well-known films with the word "midnight" in the title, even though I haven't seen any of them: Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Express, Midnight in Paris, Chimes at Midnight.

(I love the phrase "chimes at midnight". It comes, as you probably know, from Shakespeare: "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow". Meaning: we've lived it up.)

There used to be a fast-food restaurant in Dublin called Midnight Express, though I think it changed its name recently. (I've often wondered if naming a business after an artistic work has any copyright implications.)

There must be tonnes of folklore about midnight, although the only snippet that comes to mind is Cinderella having to leave the ball by midnight-- and in all honesty, I'm not even too clear about that. I don't want to look any of it up, because right now I'm interested in the popular associations that hang around the word "midnight", and I don't think most people would know any more of the folkore than I do.

I can think of at least one book I've read with "midnight" in the title. Four Past Midnight was actually the first Stephen King book I ever read. As you can probably guess, it's a collection of four stories. One of them, "The Sun Dog", actually spooked me. (It features a camera which takes inexplicable images of a scary dog coming closer and closer.) I started reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie but gave it up after a few pages. (The children of the title are Indians born at the moment of Indian independence.)

I've always loved the title Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, though I have no idea what the book is about.

The word "midnight" must feature extensively in poetry, I'm sure. But the only instance I can think of right now is the first line of "The Raven" by Poe: "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.."

Similarly, I'm sure there are hundreds of songs with the word "midnight" in the title. In fact, there are lots of articles listing them, like this one. My favourite is Midnight Confessions by the Grass Roots, which I came across on the excellent Jackie Brown soundtrack.

There's a sense of magic about midnight, I think it's fair to say. (Or at least, potential magic.) In this regard, I always recall a memory from my last year in primary school. My class were competing in a drama competition and we were staying in Ennis overnight. I can remember us sitting in the lobby of a hotel (although we weren't actually staying in the hotel). I made a reference to tomorrow, and another kid said: "It is tomorrow". So it was obviously past midnight. I was very impressed by this remark and I still think about it all these years later. I guess midnight is a "liminal space", a concept that has been much discussed in recent times.

I think we all have a sense of anxiety about disenchantment these days. And by "these days", I mean ever since the beginning of modernity. We are frightened of time and space becoming simply a grid, a contiuum. And we reach out for times and places that seem to have a soul of their own, an enchantment. It's nice to think that one of them comes every twenty-four hours.

(I timed the publication of this post for exactly midnight, but it shows as four p.m. I can't explain that! The obvious explanation is that Blogger, the platform I use, operates from a different timezone, but how would it be such a difference?)

Politics and the Irish Language

(The title of this blog post is a nod to Orwell's famous essay "Politics and the English Language", which I just happened to flick past while browsing a collection of his essays. I couldn't resist the coincidence.)

There are posters up all over Dublin for an upcoming protest in favour of the Irish language. They have given the protest the title "Cearta", which means "rights".

Here we see the thumbprint of the left once again. It's always about rights, it's always about government intervention, and it's always about more public money.

Personally I am entirely sympathetic to the preservation (and revival) of the Irish language, and I'm also sympathetic to increased public funding and to the compulsory use of Irish in various contexts, such as education.

But without increasing a public appetite for the revival of the Irish language, no level of government support will ever be enough. And it's hard to see what arguments could be used  to encourage people to speak Irish, considering anti-nationalism has become so engrained in modern Irish discourse.

And here we come to an interesting aspect of this campaign. Its website gives a list of ten problems, and here is number nine in its own words: "Over 50,000 students in secondary school are exempt from learning Irish and there is no plan at all to address this (the Department of Education has even made a point of saying that the upcoming 2 year Action Plan for the Irish language in English medium schools won’t deal with exemptions)".

The website avoids saying why so many exemptions have been given, but Dr. Matt Treacy spells it out in an article on the indispensable Gript.ie.

Personally I feel somewhat vindicated. I have been saying for many years that multiculturalism and the revival of the Irish language were going to come into conflict at some point. How can we have a "rainbow Republic" and still give special priority to one language over others-- a language, moreoever, that is now much more of a minority language than many others spoken here on a daily basis?

As far as I can tell, most immigrants to Ireland are very positive about the Irish language (and Irish culture in general) Many want to learn Irish. But, as always when it comes to this topic, it's the sheer weight of numbers that counts. All those new arrivals have their own roots and heritage, which they will naturally want to keep alive. It's asking a lot to co-opt them into a language revival that was already struggling (to put it mildly) before they arrived.

What's extraordinary is how the Irish liberal left refused to see this problem. Nearly all Irish language enthusiasts are from the liberal left persuasion and nearly all of them are pro-multiculturalism. And this has been the case for a long time. Either they couldn't accept that these two aspirations might conflict, or they reassured themselves with that old standby: Increased government funding (and eventually, the abolition of captalism) will resolve all contradictions. 

Incidentally, this is nearly always the line I'm given when I present liberal-lefties with some cultural or social tension to which their own policies are contributing: it's a purely artificial tension created by capitalism, sometimes even a deliberate effort by the Powers That Be to create division. All aspirations will be compatible once we get rid of poverty, or private property, or whatever it is they want to abolish-- which is never entirely clear.

European and American Conservatism

It's commonplace (and, I think, correct) to draw a distinction between European and American conservatism.

European conservatism is based on age-old traditions, slowly evolving institutions, and unwritten customs. It's like a web that has grown over centuries.

American conservatism is based on the Constitution. It's an irony of history that American conservatives are essentially revolutionaries in that they are loyal to the principles of the American Revolution.

You could say that European conservatism prefers the organic and piecemeal, while American conservatism appeals to the abstract and a priori.

I've always considered myself much more of a European conservative. But recently I've found myself changing my mind.

European institutions seem incapable of resisting the encroachment of the liberal left. It's very hard to think of any European institution that has not been captured by political correctness to some degree (and usually to a great degree). The liberal left doesn't have any time for gentleman's agreements.

The State is the major example. I've never been an anti-government type of person, but the ever-increasing reach of the State, and especially its ability to impose an ideology, seems relentless on this side of the Altlantic. It continues even in the face of economic privatizations and what's often called "neoliberalism". (The ruling elite is quite happy to work through HR departments and employment law.)

So I have switched. I've become much more of an American conservative and a believer in the principles of the American Revolution and the Constitution, which I've long suspected to have been divinely inspired (although that's just my own tentative theory and not essential to my argument here.)

Freedom of speech is under intense, concerted attack on both sides of the Atlantic. But the First Amendment makes all the difference in the world on one side of it.

America has an infratructure of Christian colleges, conservative think tanks, and religious organisations which seem impervious to the entryism of the liberal left. Europe has nothing like the American religious right and their network of organisations. And no, I don't think that's a good thing, I think that's a bad thing.

In Europe, libraries, schools and universities are mostly organs of the ruling ideology. In America they have to deal with pesky things like elected school boards and library boards. And so on.

America is the only country in the world that was set up with the explicit intention of limiting the power of government, and maximising individual freedom. I don't particularly value freedom for its own sake. But I do value it as a way to protect families, communities, churches, and institutions from a ruling ideology. Ironically, American freedom does more to protect the Burkean "little platoons" than European conservatism can.

I'm the biggest sentimentalist in the world when it comes to institutions, especially venerable institutions. But I think it's reached the point where European conservatives (and all who are opposed to political correctness) need to become pretty ruthless towards all human institutions. Hopefully the voters of the UK will be ruthless towards the Tories (and, of course, Labour) at the next election. Ultimately principles matter far more than institutions.

Don't fantasize about reviving monarchies and aristocracies. They'd almost certainly be woke, anyway. (As long ago as 1910, G.K. Chesterton saw this: "The simple key to the power of our upper classes is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is called Progress.")

I'm sure I'm still enough of a European conservative to exasperate some of the more radical anti-government Republicans. But I feel I've made a significant switch.

A Pinch of Incense

One thing that often strikes me about the modern-day religion of political correctness: just like the worship of the Roman Emperors, it requires very little actual commitment. Just a pinch of incense at the shrine.

For instance, if you are a member of one of the supposed oppressor groups, you don't actually have to live any differently in order to expiate your supposed guilt. All that's required is to make the right ritual professions at the right time. You have to profess guilt and shame, but that's really all you have to do.

For instance, it's often been noted that people who lament their own group's overrepresentation in leadership roles never seem to willingly vacate those roles, in order to make room for a member of an oppressed group.

I sometimes think this is why politically-correct people get exasperated at those who refuse to play along. I imagine them thinking: don't you realize how easy it is to play along? Why are you being such fools? 

A Good Passage from Karl Ove Knausgaard

I'm onto volume two of Karl Ove Knausgaard's excellent series of autobiographical novels, My Struggle. (As I've said previously, the title's echo of a more famous work seems to be deliberate and ironic.) 

It's really excellent, and I'm surprised I'm enjoying it so much, because I mostly don't like modern literature (to put it mildly). I generally find it pretentious and banal.

Anyway, when volume two begins Knausgaard (a Norwegian) is living in Sweden with his wife and young children, and finds himself musing on the eternal question of heredity vs. environment:

When I was growing up I was taught to look for the explanation of all human qualities, actions and phenomena in the environment in which they originated... Such an attitude can at first sight seem humanistic, inasmuch as it is intimately bound up with the notion that all people are equal, but upon closer examination it could just as well be an expression of a mechanistic attitude to man, who, born empty, allows his life to be shaped by his surroundings.

...Out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with a new materialism, but it never struck them [his parents' generation] that the same attitude could lie behind the demolition of old parts of town to make way for roads and car parks, which naturally the intellectual left opposed, and perhaps it has not been possible to be aware of this until now, when the link between the idea of equality and capitalism, the welfare state and liberalism, Marxist materialism and the consumer society is obvious because the biggest equality creator of all is money, it levels all differences, and if your character and your fate are entities that can be shaped, money is the most natural shaper, and this gives way to the fascinating phenomenon whereby crowds of people assert their individuality and originality by shopping in an identitical way, while those who once ushered all this in with their affirmation of equality, their emphasis on material values and belief in change, are now inveighing against their handiwork, which they believe the enemy created...

Although Knausgaard goes on to add that "like all simple reasoning this is not true either", I think he's pretty much right.

(These kind of political or historical reflections have not been very common in the novel so far, but I anticipate they'll get more frequent as it goes along, from what I've read about it. So far it's been more about the protagonist's individual lived experience.)

A Word for Today

Scofflaw. Never heard that one before!

Read about its meaning and origin here!

Boring Criticisms of Social Media

I haven't been on Facebook or Twitter since the end of 2024. Well, whoop-de-doo for me. I mostly left for petty reasons. I only mention it in case it gives my case here a little bit more "cred".

Basically, I get tired of hearing boring criticisms of social media and I'm very sceptical of them.

I'm not banging the drum for social media. I'm just jaded from hearing the same criticisms over and over, and always with an air of something profound and insightful being said.

So here we go...

1) People use social media to present a false image of their lives.

True. But how is this different from any other aspect of human life? As Dr. Gregory House says, "Everybody lies". There was a time when Irish people would stay away from Mass because they didn't have good enough clothes, and we all know about the "good room" that was only used for visitors. Putting on a show seems to be a perennial human behaviour. 

It took me a long, long time-- well into my forties-- to realize just how extensively people play up their achievements and experiences. I was very naive.

Someone who didn't put on a show (to some extent at least) would probably be treated as a weirdo and avoided.

You could say all these false images are coming at you thicker and faster on social media than they ever did before. Maybe. Is it so different from channel-hoping or flicking through glossy magazines?

2) Social media is polarising.

I notice the mainstream media only object to polarisation when there are two poles (or more, so to speak). They are perfectly happy to whip up intense emotions when it's on the right side. (For instance, fostering animosity to the Catholic Church.)

What's wrong with polarisation, anyway? I think a healthy society should have clashing ideologies and intense debate. Conformism is much more dangerous. (And that's what we have in Ireland.)

If you ask me, the internet's biggest virtue is that it makes it very difficult to suppress dissent.

3) Social media dumbs down public discourse and shortens attention spans.

Please. I can't remember a time when people weren't complaining about "soundbites". It was a constant refrain when political spin-doctors like Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell first came on the scene, in the late nineties. It only takes a glance at history to realize there were always soundbites in politics. "Homes fit for heroes", "Up Dev", "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right", etc. etc. You might argue these were slogans, but really, what's the difference?

Before that the "shortening attention span" claim was made about video games and channel-hopping.

I don't buy for a second that attention spans are shortening. Netflix bingeing has become a very familiar phenomenon, and the public appettite for massive multi-volume literary works such as A Song of Ice and Fire seeems instiable. Also, movies are actually getting longer.

On the other hand, just look at some television from the early days of the medium. It was mostly pretty vapid stuff. I think it was even more vapid than it is today. (But more wholesome, too. I watched an episode of Mr. Ed the other day and keenly felt the loss of wholesomeness in entertainment since those days.)

4) People crave dopamine hits from "likes", views, etc.

Again, what's different? When have people not been approval junkies? You could argue that social media accelarates this tendency. Perhaps it does, but I think this can be overstated.

What frustrated me about social media, personally, was that (in my view) a thoughtful and substantial post would get so little engagement compared to something more trivial or polemical. But again...is that anything new?

There are legitimate criticisms of social media and I don't think society would be any worse off if social media just disappeared tomorrow morning.

What really bothers me is the way people produce these cliches as if they were wonderful insights that haven't been said a million times already.

Or people who say with affected bewilderment: "I don't understand social media", like they want some kind of a prize for it. Grrr!

I guess this is all the comedy of humanity and I should regard it with affectionate indulgence. But then, can my undue irritation be a part of the comedy of humanity, too?

I Hate Political Correctness.

I hate political correctness.

I hate defences of political correctness.

I hate the false equivalence of political correctness with some imaginary opposite extreme.

I hate the suggestion that political correctness is something that mostly happens on university campuses and in quirky places like Seattle.

I hate the term "political correctness gone mad", since political correctness is already mad.

I hate attemps to justify political correctness with ironic, knowing humour.

I hate the equation of political correctness with good manners and courtesy. People's careers and lives have rarely been destroyed because of a lapse in good manners or courtesy. (The British TV chef Fanny Cradock was a rare exception.) Nor do conventions of good manners and courtesy change overnight, arbitrarily.

I hate the pretence that political correctness has been an organic evolution rather than a series of sudden changes imposed (mostly) from above.

I hate the pretence that there's a "political correctness of the right". Yes, there are sacred cows on the right, but the right doesn't have the power to impose those on people in general, outside their own (generally beleagured) institutions. Even when the right is in government in any given country, the left is in permanent control of education, the public sector, the entertainment industry, etc. There's no symmetry here.

I could go on and on, but I won't.

Too Much Tolerance Kills Conversation

Just a thought. It's very dull to have a conversation with somebody who's too tolerant. There has to be some resistance to make conversation interesting. If everything comes down to "live and let live" and "each to his own"...well...there isn't really much to say, except for exchanging information.

The opposite is also bad, of course. But I'm not sure it's equally bad. I think I'd rather have lunch with a fanatic than with a soggy liberal.

The joy of conversation is to enter into a topic. I've noticed that conversation in our consumerist, pluralist society tends to simply flit from subject to subject-- since there's nothing much to say about any of them. Once you've compared notes, where do you go?

The intiial idea of a liberal society was that the search for truth (and meaning, I suppose) was so important that everybody had to make that journey for themselves. And I agree with this. I think it comports with human dignity. (Which is not to say that we can't have a Christian character to our institutions; I think we should. Nobody is oppressed by having to listen to a prayer being said, or by having a Christmas crib in a public building. But the long history of religious and political persecution shows that forcing people to believe or not believe anything is always a bad idea.)

I also think the search and the journey has a value, even a sublimity, of its own.

But that's not to say we can't try to persuade each other. In fact, I want people to try to persuade each otther. Society should be a hubbub of religious, political, and cultural debate. That was the whole point of an open society. (Everybody should read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.)  It doesn't mean you should be a pain in the face about pushing your beliefs on people.

The stage magiciaIn and atheist Penn Teller put it well, in this much-quoted rhetorical question: "How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?"

And even if you don't believe in everlasting life, or the matter at hand isn't religion, why wouldn't you want to argue for your vision of a good society?

The times in history that I'm drawn to are the ones where ideas and debates were thick in the air-- such as the Gaelic Revival and the Irish Revolution in Ireland, or the late nineteenth century in Russia, or the nineteen-thirties in Britain.

But even if you're talking about something non-ideological, such as cinema or architecture, "whatever floats your boat" doesn't float the boat of human interaction very far.

Of course, we have the worst of both worlds today-- where a supposed pluralism is unspokenly dominated by an utterly intolerant secular-globalist progressivism.

(An afterthought: I've always been baffled when the term "bore" is applied to somebody who has an obsessive interest in a subject and won't shut up about it. That might be irritating, to be sure. But give me that kind of "bore" any day ahead of the the more usual sort of bore-- somebody who has no consuming interests or passions, and who really has no conversation beyond general knowledge and received opinion.)

I Don't Care About Spoilers (Much)

Am I unusual for not caring very much about "spoilers" in movies and books? 

I've never felt that a movie is "spoiled" because you know what's going to happen. If that was the case, rewatching a movie (or re-reading a book) would be a diminished experience, whereas it's generally an enhanced experience (if it's worth watching in the first place).

If I know I'm going to watch a film in the very near future, or if I'm trying to decide whether I should, then I will avoid reading plot summaries. Usually.

But if it's simply a film I might see in the future, I don't go to any such efforts.

I've frequently found myself having conversations of this kind:

"And then his face is all burnt by acid and he disappears for years and...well, I won't tell you what happens in case you want to watch it some day."

"No, it's fine, tell me." (My immediate curiosity is piqued.)

"No! You might watch it some day."

I can't help thinking that surprises and twists are the cheapest tools in the storyteller's toolbox. Necessary, but far less important than dialogue and characterization and the stuff that never ceases to please.

Is My Hunger for a Roman Fleuve Going to be Satisfied?

"Roman fleueve" means "river novel" in French, and a roman fleuve is a long story that is serialized over several novels.

I've always liked the idea of a roman fleuve. It seems potentially very satisfying.

I tried reading the most famous of them all, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust, about fifteen years ago. I really couldn't get into it, it was very heavy, with lots of long descriptive passages (which I hate). To be honest, I didn't even get through the first volume.

Like everybody, I'd heard about the famous scene involving the tea-cake at the start, where the taste of a tea-cake dipped in tea brings back memories of the narrator's life, and initaties the reminiscences. The description of this scene really seems to speak to everybody; it's the sort of thing nobody forgets once they've heard it described. We're all fascinated by memory, I think.

Around the same time, I read most of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. The catalyst event in this roman fleuve is the narrator watching snow falling into a brazier, which is also a very appealing image. The title is also tremendously evocative.

The idea of an entire story, a very long story, which is all part of the same reverie (in some way) greatly pleases me. I'm not sure why. The idea pleases me in the same way that the atmosphere of "In My Life" by the Beatles pleases me. Or the title of Maurice Baring's memoirs, Puppet Show of Memory. (Baring was a friend of Chesterton and Belloc, a writer and a Catholic convert.)

Sad to say, though, I was disappointed by A Dance to the Music of Time. I gave up about halfway through, or maybe even further. I found it a bit too light and humorous and not what I was looking for. Proust was too heavy, and Powell was too light. (Interestingly, Philip Larkin read the book towards the end of his life, and told Powell in a letter that his only complaint was that it wasn't long enough.)

I've also read some very long multi-volume series in genre fiction. Lord of the Rings, of course, a couple of times. I've read most of Robert Jordan's colossal Wheel of Time series, although rather ridiculously I flagged towards the very end and gave up. The same applies to The Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

The Stand by Stephen King is a single-volume work but it still has an epic character, both because of its length (I read it in its longer "uncut" version) and because of its subject matter. (A deadly plague leads to the collapse of American civilization, and the survivors form two camps-- one good, one evil.) King was consciously trying to write an American Lord of the Rings, and I think he succeeded to a great extent.

The Stand is more like a life experience than a book. I've thought about reading it again, but it's quite a commitment. (Actually, on my thirtieth birthday, I watched the 1994 TV miniseries on DVD; it seemed a suitably big marker for a big birthday.)

But genre novels don't really satisfy my hunger for a roman fleuve. I want something about real life, modern life. Something from the point of view of a single narrator.

Anyway, I've started reading a roman fleuve called My Struggle (I think the title is ironic), by a Norwegian called Karl Ove Knausgaard. There are six volumes of it and it's 1.3 million words long. It was published between 2009 and 2011. I came across a reference to it on TV Tropes (a website to which I'm addicted) and it intrigued me. It's an autobiographical novel and apparently various people in the author's real life are not wild about its candour.

The series has been a massive hit in Norway, and abroad, but nobody I've mentioned it to has heard of it. Even very bookish types.

I'm a hundred and fifty pages into the first volume and it's very promising so far. No unreasonably protracted descriptive passages. The characters are recognisable people. And the flights of introspection, and angst, aren't too self-indulgent. So far.

Knausgaard is a standard-issue lefty, as far as I can see, and one interview I skimmed had him make the usual critical references to Brexit and the Big Bad Wolf in Washington. I understand that it gets more political later. So far it has been pretty apolitical. Religion doesn't feature much so far. There's a sort of prologue at the beginning which shows us the narrator as a small boy, and it's mentioned that he's a Christian (much to his father's disapproval). By the time the main narrative of the first volume begins, he describes himself as an anti-Christian, although with the suggestion that this is just youthful posturing. At the point I've reached now, he's fallen madly in love with a classmate who's a Christian, even though her parents are not. But none of this is treated as central to the plot and nobody seems to get at all het up about religion.

I think I'm drawn to the idea of a roman fleuve because I'm fascinated by the texture of life, its overflowingness. The different flavours of different days and different stretches of time. It's the "in-betweeny" moments that appeal to me the most. I liked this description of the first day of the year, after a rather epic New Year's Eve party sequence, in which the protagonist in a friend's house watching The Guns of Navarone on video casette:

"Oh, this is fun", Trygve said as the first frames from the film appeared on the screen. Outside, everything was still, as only winter can be. And even though the sky was overcast and grey, the light over the countryside shimmered and was perfectly white. I remember thinking all I wanted to do was to sit right there, in a newly built house, in a circle of light in the middle of the forest and be as stupid as I liked."

We have the first five volumes in my library. I've requested the sixth to be bought. I can get it on inter-library loan, in any case.

Maybe I'll lose interest long before that.Or maybe this will finally be the roman fleuve I've been yearning for!

"How Was Your Day?": Some Thoughts on Language Change.

I've just heard a radio presenter say: "I hope your Sunday afternoon is going great!"

It might be irrational, but this usage has always made me cringe. It's encountered more often in the phrase: "How was your day?".

I can't remember people saying this when I was a kid, back in eighties Ireland. But I might be wrong about this.

It strikes me as objectionally individualist, relativist, and consumerist. It's not my day, after all. It's everybody's day.

But maybe this is a stupid objection. After all, everybody experiences time differently.

And my reaction isn't even consistent, because I like phrases such as "He had a good war", or "She had a chequered seventies".

Being a double-sided contrarian, I'm often irritated by conservatives' attitude to language change. It seems unthinking and indiscriminate. Just because liberals love to say language has always changed...doesn't mean that language hasn't always changed. Obviously, it has.

If you read twentieth-century manuals of English usage such as Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage or Gower's Plain Words (and I recommend them both), you'll realise that there were lots of fairly recent controversies about language usage which are now completely forgotten, even among linguistic conservatives. The fustiest purist doesn't hesitate to use "contact" as a verb, these days.

So...can we agree language change isn't bad in itself?

But then, what sort of changes and innovations in language are bad?

Well, one battle that I'll fight to my dying day is the battle over "disinterested". It doesn't (at least in its traditional use) mean indifferent. It means not having a personal stake in a question-- having no dog in the fight, to use one of my favourite Americans idioms.

"Disinterested" seems like a good word to preserve (in its original meaning) because it means something very specific. It's elegant. To lose it would be to narrow the range of the language.

Similarly, "fulsome" doesn't mean lavish. It means insincere. I think that battle is lost, though.

This principle can be taken too far. My father used to object to the term "decimate" to mean anything but the literal "killing one in ten". That seems too specific to be useful.

Similarly, he didn't like "iconic" being used to mean anything but "pertaining to icons". I can't sympathise with this, either. "Iconic" in the sense it's generally used today seems like a legitimate extension.

Surely new words and expressions should be judged on an individual basis? I quite like some "valley girl" phrases, such as "my bad" (to mean...well, you know exactly what it means, don't pretend you don't). It's vivid and snappy. What's wrong with that? I also like "awesome" as a term of approval. It's Chestertonian, whether or not GKC would have approved of it.

Recently, I've heard people (mostly on YouTube philosophy and theology channels) using the verb "steelman", meaning to set up the strongest possible version of an opponent's argument-- the opposite of attacking a straw man. I like this too.

One thing I don't like is the torrent of acronyms which has afflicted the language, and which I suspect began in WWII, though the computer revolution probably greatly accelerated it. Admittedly, some of the newer acronyms can be funny, such as "FAFO" (fiddle around and find out).

It makes me wonder why some phrases become acronyms and some don't. Why did the personal computer become a PC, while the mobile phone never became an MP (or the cellphone a CP)?

Another example of language change that I dislike, and that I think most people would dislike (if they think about it), is when national or regional usages are replaced by those of another country, or most likely from the globalizing media. I hate hearing Irish people say "cheers" (for thank you), just as I lament the replacement of "help the Halloween party" with "trick or treat!".

I don't know whether this is reflective of an underlying trend of globalization, or whether national/regional terms just come and go. Irish slang words (like "jammers" for "crowded") have come into being in my own lifetime. On the other hand, there was a generation of Irish people who used certain Americanisms (imported from cowboy and hardboiled detective films) which you'd never hear today. I remember, as a kid, hearing a middle-aged man say a kite was "bust" instead of broken-- a usage that had already passed out of common use in Ireland, at that time.

If I had to choose my single least favourite development in modern English, I would definitely choose the ubiquity of the word "sh---" in colloquial usage, and sometimes even in formal usage. (More than twenty years ago, I heard a college lecturer tell his class to "get their sh-- together". Admittedly, he was a "cool" lecturer.) "I have to focus on my own sh--", "That's some heavy sh---", "This is some cool sh---". What does it say about us, that we compare almost everything to excrement all the time? 

I'm afraid I'm sexist enough to be especially bothered when I hear this usage from the lips of a lady. (Women used to hold men to higher standards of politeness and decorum. It was a charming convention that men didn't curse with ladies present. Not that I think anyone should ever curse.)

In his book A Mouthful of Air, Anthony Burgess admitted his own distate for the increasing use of "sh--" as a stand-in for almost almost anything. His theory was that the people who throw the "sh--" word around don't actually think of excrement when they use it; the word has become completely divorced from the thing, for them. But it still put him in mind of excrement every time, and made him gag.

I have the same reaction as Burgess. Every time someone uses the word, it makes me think of the substance. And it reinforces my general belief that society is increasingly going to sh--.

If You Lived Through the Eighties, You Might Get This Joke

Why is it wrong to criticize Imelda Marcos?

Because you shouldn't criticize anybody till you've walked a mile in their shoes.

(And if you don't get it, go here.)

I made up this joke! I make up a lot of jokes. Well, it's more that they occur to me, than that I actively make them up.

Who Started the Polarization?

Every time you hear someone lamenting political polarization, I suggest you ask yourself: who actually started it?

Who introduced the idea that people are wicked simply for having opinions?

That such opinions were not to be taken seriously on their own merits, but understood as the expression of irrational feelings, or of defending one's supposed privileges?

It seems to me that "polarization" only became bad when the pushback took on a momentum of its own.

All through the seventies, eighties, nineties, and possibly the early noughties and beyond, "radical" was a compliment. Because radicalism was mostly on the favoured side. Wholesale questioning of the institutions and traditions of society was simply a sign that you were an intelligent, idealistic person.

Suddenly there is a radicalism on the other side-- a wholesale questioning of the wholesale questioning, as it were-- and that's bad, bad, bad...

A Good Article in the Catholic Herald

I look at the website of the Catholic Herald every day. A lot of their stuff is behind a paywall, but not all of it. I read the free articles.

(My recent post poking fun at the Latin Mass obsession of the conservative Catholic media was mostly prompted by the Catholic Herald. Every single day they seem to have another Latin Mass-related article, even if it really has nothing new to report. But it was also prompted by the Raymond Arroyo show on EWTN, and half of the Catholic YouTubers I follow, or half-follow.)

Anyway, today there is a very interesting article on the CH's website: "Return of the Word: why the young are turning back to God at remarkable speed".

Yes, there have been a lot of these articles (thank God), but this one is especially interesting.

Before I look at it, I think we're all a bit wary about polls and statistics. How much do they really tell you? How much do the findings of any survey rely on the questions and definitions used? And even aside from whatever caution we should use when approaching statistics, we should be rather wary about hyping this sort of news too much. It might always be a blip. 

Having said all that, it's definitely welcome after so many years of polls and survey going in the opposite direction.

But to the article. Here's a good passage: "From the first postwar generation, the Baby Boomers, through Gen X to Millennials, Western children were largely educated, ruled and raised by adults who had progressively abandoned real belief in the Christian God and strict religious observance. Alongside this was frequently a naïve insistence that their doing so would usher in a utopia of heightened rationality, free from “downer” superstition and cruelty. I believe Gen Z are the first to realise what has resulted is in fact the opposite.

"All our recent forebears have instead achieved widespread family dysfunction, divorce, slavery to sexual appetite, corruption in society, and the rapid undoing of one of the most incredible 2,000-year civilisational inheritances."

Well, I don't think anyone reading this blog will disagree with any of that, or fail to recognize it.

I think "strict religious observance" might be a key term there. Even most of those who were well-disposed towards religion, over the last sixty years or so, didn't seem to think religious observance was very important. It brings to mind G.K. Chesterton's description of his wife-to-be: "She actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it."

The idea seemed to have been that you could have the spirit of religion without the form, the trappings. But the spirit always seems to evaporate pretty quickly without the form.

One thing that surprises me, though, is that the Nordic, Scandinavian, and Baltic countries have been heavily secularised for many decades now-- as far as I can tell-- and this reaction doesn't seem to have occurred among young people there, in all that time. Again, as far as I can tell.

(The article, which I was able to access earlier, suddenly seems to be paywalled...so I'll end my commentaray there, I guess.

How Certain People Respond When I Ask Them If They've Seen a Particular TV Programme

A Coffee Table Book on Traditions

I have lots of ideas for books that I know I'm never going to write.

One is a coffee table book on traditions, which would probably just be called Traditions, or maybe Encyclopedia of Traditions.

It would be pretty much a book version of my short-lived blog Traditions Traditions Traditions!

It would be a lavishly-illustrated volume with sections on:

• National Traditions
• Local Traditions
• University Traditions (both within universities in general, and in particular third-level institutions)
• Professional Traditions (like the "stork pin" a 9/11 dispatcher gets when he or she helps with the delivery of a child over the phone)
• Sports traditions
• Religious traditions
• Cinema traditions
• Internet traditions

And so on.

It would probably kick off with some kind of essay about tradition, psychological theories and so forth. But nothing too intense.

I'm surprised that no such book as this seems to exist already. Books on tradition are usually about either the concept of tradition or particular sorts of tradition.

When tradition is discussed, what's surprising (to me) is that nobody seems to want to discuss the subject on its simplest level. There are brilliant essays like "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T.S. Eliot, that analyse the concept in a profound way. But what about the simple meaning of tradition-- the one that we all tend to mean when we use the word "tradition"?

Like putting up Christmas trees, barber's shops having white and red poles outside, people hanging fuzzy dice in their cars, actors calling Macbeth "the Scottish play", fortune cookies, Valentine's cards, soccer crowds performing Mexican waves, bingo announcers saying "two fat ladies", cinemas having red seats, the audience standing up for the Hallelujah chorus of The Messiah...that kind of thing.

I suppose, in my view, the simplest definition of tradition is: something we do because it's been done before, for the sake of a tradition. Something we do more or less unthinkingly because it's a tradition (like shaking hands or sitting on chairs) isn't what I mean.

It's fascinating to me. Not just fascinating, but delightful.

I always want to know about peoples' family and personal traditions. I've worked in University College Dublin for almost twenty-five years and I regularly feel ashamed that I've never seriously tried to create a new tradition there. (Sometimes I've thought of randomly opening and closing an umbrella by the lake every day. Yeah, that's stupid.)

This blog has its own traditions, of course. Chiefly: changing its background colours with the liturgical season, posting "The Burning Babe" by Robert Southwell every Christmas, and including random pictures of Dirk Benedict. (Maybe I should go back to using pictures all the time, for the sake of that tradition...) I can't think of any others.

When I was in my early teens, I had an ultra-specific tradition: I would buy a packet of barbecue beef flavoured Hula Hoops on my walk home from school, put the first one in my mouth, and keep it that way all the way from the shop to a traffic light a block away.

I've always had the idea that you can measure the vibrancy of any institution by the number and strength of its traditions. 

A friend once bought me the book Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake as a birthday present because she knew of my love for traditions. But I didn't like the treatment of tradition in that book at all; it's shown to be oppressive and stultifying. I'm no longer friends with that person as she became increasingly woke and angry. Perhaps the book choice was an early indication?

If you have any interesting personal, family, work, or other traditions, please tell me!