I am currently reading Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War (Fearghal McGarry, 1999), an intriguing account of the Irish volunteers who fought on both sides of that savage conflict. The author's own sympathies are pretty obvious (as signalled by his use of those loaded terms, "progressive" and "reactionary"), but for the most part he is fair and objective.
The book has set me thinking about what makes somebody a socialist, communist, conservative, fascist, or otherwise. It's probably fair to say that most people-- in terms of world history-- have had their loyalties decided by where and when they were born. (Secularists never tire of making this point about religious belief.) Moments like the Spanish Civil War or the Irish Civil War-- moments where people born in the same country, and even the same background, make radically different choices of allegiance-- seem rather rare in the grand scheme of things.
But they do happen. In the Spanish Civil War, Irishmen-- often Irishmen who had fought side by side in the War of Independence-- fought against each other in a conflict whose savagery and ruthlessness is shocking to read about.
McGarry tries to probe, from the records available to him, the motives of the men who volunteered. But they are rather inscrutable. Indeed, it occurred to me while reading the book that nearly all choices of ideology or belief system are rather inscrutable-- even our own.
I believe that they are, to a great extent, visceral. It is a deep-seated attraction, or a deep-seated aversion, that makes most people partisans of one cause or another, one world-view or another. This is easily seen when people of strongly contrasting beliefs engage in debate. Pretty soon you realise that they could fire salvoes at each other all day long without either conquering the other. Their bases are hidden far, far away from the battlefield. It is often said that "you cannot reason someone out of a position they haven't been reasoned into". True enough; but I think only one in five hundred people are reasoned into any fiercely-held position.
This is true of me as much as anybody else. Not so long ago I came upon this quotation from Malcolm Muggeridge: "I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr Johnson, Blake and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw." That's exactly how I feel. It's not that I'm not intellectually convinced of the truth of my beliefs. But if I lost my faith tomorrow (God forbid), I would not join the ranks of the New Atheists. I would probably crawl into a hole somewhere.
But reading about Irish radicals like Frank Ryan made me remember a time when I was drawn, viscerally and imaginatively, to the radical left. This was in my childhood and my teens. Photographs and posters from the Russian Revolution always appealed to me. I liked the hats and coats that the Russians of that time wore. I liked the graininess of the photographs. I liked the Social Realist style of the posters. I liked the exciting sensation of history being begun again. (Even now the famous words of Lenin at the Second All-Soviet Congress after the Revolution-- "We will now proceed to establish the socialist order"-- gives me a thrill, even though I know Lenin was an evil mass murderer and the Bolshevik Revolution was a disaster of the first magnitude.)
Even as a child, I intuited the whole aesthetic of the Soviet worldview-- its romance of the machine, its prolixity, its rather dour earnestness, its utopianism. It all seemed clean and straight and cool and pleasingly straight-edged. Today, when the idylls and atmospheres that thrill and animate me are almost the very opposite, I can still identify with those who are starry-eyed for radical socialism.
(Not that I was ever a Marxist. When I was in college, I even boycotted the lectures of a particular lecturer because he was some kind of Marxist. At the time, I considered that Marxists had split and therefore retarded the left in the twentieth century. And, although I considered myself a socialist, I had no time at all for the liberalism and political correctness that always seemed to be associated with it. To me, socialism was about restricting working hours and funding libraries and parks and swimming pools.)
The idyll of the modern (or postmodern) "progressive", however-- the idyll of a society where tolerance, for its own sake, is the highest ideal, and where history and spirituality and sexuality are played with in a non-threatening, sandpit environment-- is entirely repulsive to me. I can't even begin to sympathise with the vision of a modern leftist liberal, or a libertarian, or a left-wing nationalist, or a socially liberal conservative, or a feminist. Whenever any of their adherents paint a picture of their good society, I am reminded of the words of Max Beerbohm:
So this is Utopia, is it? Well
I beg your pardon, I thought it was hell.
But thinking about all this makes me even more convinced that Catholics should do all they can, not only to evangelize using the tools of reason and argument, but to excite the imaginations of the unconverted.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Ian O'Doherty is a Particularly Unpleasant Commentator
This is from his latest Irish Independent column (he opens by describing a friend who gave five euro to a Traveller beggar, who then asked for more):
"Although it doesn't beat my best beggar experience – while sitting outside a sidewalk bar in Santa Monica Boulevard a couple of years back, a homeless guy approached and asked for a couple of bucks.
I told him I had no change but I had an unopened bottle of beer on my table (jet lag had kicked and I had about 20 minutes before I fell asleep) and I offered him the bottle of Dos Equis, which to my mind is the finest lager in the world.
His response?
"F**k you man. I don't drink!" And then he stormed off in a huff."
Well, you deserved it, Mr. O'Doherty. Offering alcohol to a homeless person is pretty insolent, maybe even downright disgusting.
This is the same fellow who volunteered with the Saint Vincent de Paul for one night and was offended to see poor people who weren't living in shacks and who had comforts like televisions.
"But when you go into a house to give someone an envelope of cash and you see that they have a bigger wide-screen telly than you yourself own, then you realise that there is no way you can equate these people with genuine, actual poverty."
His particularly simplistic brand of atheism (he makes lots of amusing and original remarks about the Sky Fairy) and free market libertarianism is, I believe, the wave of the future. At least of the immediate future. It's simply the logical progression from the current orthodoxy. Left liberalism is an unstable fusion that can't last for very long.
On the vast amount of occasions when I have given money to beggars, they have been extremely thankful. There were some exceptions, but not many.
I think people like Ian O'Doherty see what they want and expect to see.
"Although it doesn't beat my best beggar experience – while sitting outside a sidewalk bar in Santa Monica Boulevard a couple of years back, a homeless guy approached and asked for a couple of bucks.
I told him I had no change but I had an unopened bottle of beer on my table (jet lag had kicked and I had about 20 minutes before I fell asleep) and I offered him the bottle of Dos Equis, which to my mind is the finest lager in the world.
His response?
"F**k you man. I don't drink!" And then he stormed off in a huff."
Well, you deserved it, Mr. O'Doherty. Offering alcohol to a homeless person is pretty insolent, maybe even downright disgusting.
This is the same fellow who volunteered with the Saint Vincent de Paul for one night and was offended to see poor people who weren't living in shacks and who had comforts like televisions.
"But when you go into a house to give someone an envelope of cash and you see that they have a bigger wide-screen telly than you yourself own, then you realise that there is no way you can equate these people with genuine, actual poverty."
His particularly simplistic brand of atheism (he makes lots of amusing and original remarks about the Sky Fairy) and free market libertarianism is, I believe, the wave of the future. At least of the immediate future. It's simply the logical progression from the current orthodoxy. Left liberalism is an unstable fusion that can't last for very long.
On the vast amount of occasions when I have given money to beggars, they have been extremely thankful. There were some exceptions, but not many.
I think people like Ian O'Doherty see what they want and expect to see.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Is it Terrible...
...that when I hear about China, North Korea or Iran clamping down on the internet and blocking certain internet pages, my immediate reaction is not "Woe, woe for free speech!" but "Hurray, hurray for national sovereignty!".
My immediate reaction, mind. On reflection, I admit that such tight regulation is contrary to freedom of speech, which is precious (but not sacred), and therefore a Bad Thing.
Still, I can't help feeling a certain dread of the borderless, mercurial, irrepressible influence of the internet, and a certain sympathy for authorities that wish to contain it.
My immediate reaction, mind. On reflection, I admit that such tight regulation is contrary to freedom of speech, which is precious (but not sacred), and therefore a Bad Thing.
Still, I can't help feeling a certain dread of the borderless, mercurial, irrepressible influence of the internet, and a certain sympathy for authorities that wish to contain it.
Spiritual Warfare in Ireland
Two young working class intellectuals were sitting behind me in the bus from UCD today. I don't know if they were college students. They agreed that we descended from animals (that's why we still have residual tales), that religion had been invented to keep everything from falling apart and it had worked for a while but it wouldn't work anymore, that it was better not to argue with religious people because that "fuelled their flames" and that, in the end, their argument always came down to "faith", anyway, which was the opposite of reason.
They criticised the British government for appointing a pharmaceutics expert who they then dismissed when they discovered he was in favour of cannabis legalisation. They lamented our society's addiction to the X-Factor and Facebook and loudly proclaimed their preference for books. One of them was reading Jean-Paul Sartre at the moment and getting into existentialism. They quoted the lyrics of "Working Class Hero" by John Lennon.
They were very explicit in considering themselves intellectual rebels and anti-conformists, and in considering the general population to be sedated sheep.
I had to say something. But-- dear reader-- have you noticed that, when people give accounts of their debates and arguments and exchanges, they inevitably turn out to have made devastating epigrams that leave their opponents speechless?
I don't want to fall into that trap. Doubtless I was a coward for waiting until I rose to get up off the bus. I didn't want a long, unpleasant exchange. Doubtless I mumbled and seemed like an embittered nutter. Maybe the few other people at the back of the bus thought I was worse than the two would-be radicals.
But what I said was: "I've listened to you for twenty minutes now, and I know you think you're free thinkers. But you've just parrotted every intellectual fashion of the last thirty or forty years. There's nothing anti-establishment about that. So keep thinking." I'm pretty sure that's close to what I said, because I had been rehearsing it in my head for fifteen minutes or so.
The two working class heroes stared at me resentfully and muttered something like "Yeah, whatever"-- which is probably what I would do if a stranger berated me in public.
I went downstairs, hoped to goodness we weren't getting off at the same stop because I didn't want a protracted verbal exchange, and eventually disembarked.
I had left work an hour early to make it to the pro-life rally in Molesworth Street. I was surprised and pleased to see how many people were there-- somebody from the platform guessed it was seven to ten thousand. Many were old. Some were young. There were a lot of families. There were also a lot of religious banners. I wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad thing.
This is only the second rally I've ever attended-- the first, some years ago, was one to protest the building of a motorway close by the Hill of Tara. I feel awkward at rallies and marches and demonstrations. I'm not really one for holding placards or chanting or whooping. But I stood and listened and applauded for twenty minutes or so, before heading off. I just wanted to be there.
I thought I was going to Advent Eucharistic adoration in Ballymun's Holy Spirit Church, but when I reached it the lights were off. I must have got the wrong night.
So I went home and switched on the computer. The pro-life rally featured pretty low down RTE's news stories. A much higher place was given to the story of a woman who is seeking ther right to die by assisted suicide. "Terminally Ill Woman Wants to Die With Dignity", was the headline. She is in the final stages of MS and is taking a case to the High Court.
"When you have to be showered, toileted and fed you start to feel like a nobody," she said.
Anyone has to feel a great deal of sympathy with someone in a case like this. But it seems to me that the implication of her statement is that anybody who has to be showered, toileted and fed is right to feel like a nobody-- that life is only worth living if you can fend for yourself and live an independent life. And how further do you take this principle? Will somebody who is not economically producitive be judged unworthy of life? Will the lonely and depressed, and everybody who is going through a bleak period in their lives, win societal approval for deciding to end it all?
One evening in Ireland, at the start of Advent in 2012.
"For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places." Ephesians 6:12
They criticised the British government for appointing a pharmaceutics expert who they then dismissed when they discovered he was in favour of cannabis legalisation. They lamented our society's addiction to the X-Factor and Facebook and loudly proclaimed their preference for books. One of them was reading Jean-Paul Sartre at the moment and getting into existentialism. They quoted the lyrics of "Working Class Hero" by John Lennon.
They were very explicit in considering themselves intellectual rebels and anti-conformists, and in considering the general population to be sedated sheep.
I had to say something. But-- dear reader-- have you noticed that, when people give accounts of their debates and arguments and exchanges, they inevitably turn out to have made devastating epigrams that leave their opponents speechless?
I don't want to fall into that trap. Doubtless I was a coward for waiting until I rose to get up off the bus. I didn't want a long, unpleasant exchange. Doubtless I mumbled and seemed like an embittered nutter. Maybe the few other people at the back of the bus thought I was worse than the two would-be radicals.
But what I said was: "I've listened to you for twenty minutes now, and I know you think you're free thinkers. But you've just parrotted every intellectual fashion of the last thirty or forty years. There's nothing anti-establishment about that. So keep thinking." I'm pretty sure that's close to what I said, because I had been rehearsing it in my head for fifteen minutes or so.
The two working class heroes stared at me resentfully and muttered something like "Yeah, whatever"-- which is probably what I would do if a stranger berated me in public.
I went downstairs, hoped to goodness we weren't getting off at the same stop because I didn't want a protracted verbal exchange, and eventually disembarked.
I had left work an hour early to make it to the pro-life rally in Molesworth Street. I was surprised and pleased to see how many people were there-- somebody from the platform guessed it was seven to ten thousand. Many were old. Some were young. There were a lot of families. There were also a lot of religious banners. I wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad thing.
This is only the second rally I've ever attended-- the first, some years ago, was one to protest the building of a motorway close by the Hill of Tara. I feel awkward at rallies and marches and demonstrations. I'm not really one for holding placards or chanting or whooping. But I stood and listened and applauded for twenty minutes or so, before heading off. I just wanted to be there.
I thought I was going to Advent Eucharistic adoration in Ballymun's Holy Spirit Church, but when I reached it the lights were off. I must have got the wrong night.
So I went home and switched on the computer. The pro-life rally featured pretty low down RTE's news stories. A much higher place was given to the story of a woman who is seeking ther right to die by assisted suicide. "Terminally Ill Woman Wants to Die With Dignity", was the headline. She is in the final stages of MS and is taking a case to the High Court.
"When you have to be showered, toileted and fed you start to feel like a nobody," she said.
Anyone has to feel a great deal of sympathy with someone in a case like this. But it seems to me that the implication of her statement is that anybody who has to be showered, toileted and fed is right to feel like a nobody-- that life is only worth living if you can fend for yourself and live an independent life. And how further do you take this principle? Will somebody who is not economically producitive be judged unworthy of life? Will the lonely and depressed, and everybody who is going through a bleak period in their lives, win societal approval for deciding to end it all?
One evening in Ireland, at the start of Advent in 2012.
"For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places." Ephesians 6:12
How Old is Old?
Ever since I turned thirty, I had it in my head that thirty-five was the Ultima Thule of youth. And the years from thirty-five to forty, while not exactly middle age, were at least a kind of twilight zone. I also resolved that I would forswear the "long, lingering look behind" once I reached that age, that I would square my shoulders and take it in the spirit of A.E. Housman's verse:
The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.
So when I turned thirty-five this year, I sighed and decided to get on with it without any desperate clinging onto youth.
Still, I'm rather pleased that in the last month or so I've had quite a spate of people calling me "young man".
The first was a female guard at the security check in the airport at Richmond, Virginia. My flight back to Ireland (via Philadelphia) with US Airways had been cancelled and they'd put me on a Delta flight to JFK Airport instead. I don't know whether Delta's security is more stringent, or whether it was the fact that I was flying to New York rather than Philadelphia, but the security seemed tighter. There was a sniffer dog, for one thing, who spent an uncomfortably long time investigating me.
(Speaking of age, I also noticed a sign which informed travellers over the age of 65-- or was it 75?-- that they were exempted from having to take their shoes off to get through security. That's the kind of ageism that might lead a senior citizen to terrorism, just to make a point.)
In any case, when my turn came, the rather severe-looking black lady ushered me through with "Go ahead, young man", which tickled me pink.
A few hours later, and on another continent, I was ordering a hot chocolate in the Tolka House in Glasnevin, where I was reading The Irish Catholic at my leisure. The pleasant barman there has made a habit of saying "You're a gentleman" when he finishes serving me. (I seem to get this quite a bit, from barmen and barbers and taxi-drivers. I think my social awkwardness translates as a kind of stiff gentility.) But this time he added "There you go, young man", which once again made me feel that it was perhaps earlier than I thought.
The last occasion was on Sunday, and there is quite a story attached to it. If you were in Dublin on Sunday you know it was a miserable, drizzly day. But drizzly as it was, I suddenly felt restless and inclined to a long walk, while listening to music on my MP3 player. I walked from Ballymun to Phibsborough, then turned right (for the sake of taking a route I had never taken before)and walked all the way to the Phoenix park. Then I turned around and began to walk back.
Somewhere along this route-- I won't say where, because one of the ladies in question specifically asked me not to identify the house-- I passed a house where two old ladies were standing at the gate, one of them holding a bicycle. I had my music playing, but I saw they were trying to catch my attention, so I removed the headphones.
They asked me if I could walk with them to the house and stand there as they had a look inside. That's all they wanted me to do.
They were excited and talking over each other, so it took a few moments for me to make out exactly what the story was. It seemed that the house (which belonged to one of the women) had been broken into and trashed by Romanian gypsies. (I merely report what I was told.) The two women were simply checking on it and they were both very nervous.
I stood at the door as the woman turned on her flashlight and pointed it through the (smashed) window. I couldn't make out very much inside, but it was obvious that the place had been completely ransacked. To use the conventional expression, it looked as though a bomb had hit it.
The lady (after taking some minutes to work up her courage) finally opened the door and stepped in. Perhaps I should have done that for her, but I didn't like the idea of stepping into a house that had been broken into and perhaps becoming the brunt of an accusation myself, though the ladies were perfectly pleasant. Then she locked up again and they went on their way.
All this took about twenty minutes, since the ladies were anxious to tell me every detail of the story. They told me the gypsies had broken into the house several times, that some of them had gone to jail but that others hadn't turned up for the court summons, that they wanted to take possession rather than merely burgle the place. They told me a house opposite had suffered the same fate, and six in a row not far off from it. They told me old people were living in terror and the gardai wouldn't do anything about it.
One of the ladies told me she would happily pay a gang to shoot the miscreants in the head and drop them in the canal. She said this several times.
It took me some time to take my leave, they were so eager to thank me and to tell me their story. The lady who owned the house was especially eager to convince me not to believe the politically correct whitewashing of incidents such as this one.
"I know you're young", she said. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-five", I said.
"That's young", she said.
So there you go. It's official. For another year at least.
The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.
So when I turned thirty-five this year, I sighed and decided to get on with it without any desperate clinging onto youth.
Still, I'm rather pleased that in the last month or so I've had quite a spate of people calling me "young man".
The first was a female guard at the security check in the airport at Richmond, Virginia. My flight back to Ireland (via Philadelphia) with US Airways had been cancelled and they'd put me on a Delta flight to JFK Airport instead. I don't know whether Delta's security is more stringent, or whether it was the fact that I was flying to New York rather than Philadelphia, but the security seemed tighter. There was a sniffer dog, for one thing, who spent an uncomfortably long time investigating me.
(Speaking of age, I also noticed a sign which informed travellers over the age of 65-- or was it 75?-- that they were exempted from having to take their shoes off to get through security. That's the kind of ageism that might lead a senior citizen to terrorism, just to make a point.)
In any case, when my turn came, the rather severe-looking black lady ushered me through with "Go ahead, young man", which tickled me pink.
A few hours later, and on another continent, I was ordering a hot chocolate in the Tolka House in Glasnevin, where I was reading The Irish Catholic at my leisure. The pleasant barman there has made a habit of saying "You're a gentleman" when he finishes serving me. (I seem to get this quite a bit, from barmen and barbers and taxi-drivers. I think my social awkwardness translates as a kind of stiff gentility.) But this time he added "There you go, young man", which once again made me feel that it was perhaps earlier than I thought.
The last occasion was on Sunday, and there is quite a story attached to it. If you were in Dublin on Sunday you know it was a miserable, drizzly day. But drizzly as it was, I suddenly felt restless and inclined to a long walk, while listening to music on my MP3 player. I walked from Ballymun to Phibsborough, then turned right (for the sake of taking a route I had never taken before)and walked all the way to the Phoenix park. Then I turned around and began to walk back.
Somewhere along this route-- I won't say where, because one of the ladies in question specifically asked me not to identify the house-- I passed a house where two old ladies were standing at the gate, one of them holding a bicycle. I had my music playing, but I saw they were trying to catch my attention, so I removed the headphones.
They asked me if I could walk with them to the house and stand there as they had a look inside. That's all they wanted me to do.
They were excited and talking over each other, so it took a few moments for me to make out exactly what the story was. It seemed that the house (which belonged to one of the women) had been broken into and trashed by Romanian gypsies. (I merely report what I was told.) The two women were simply checking on it and they were both very nervous.
I stood at the door as the woman turned on her flashlight and pointed it through the (smashed) window. I couldn't make out very much inside, but it was obvious that the place had been completely ransacked. To use the conventional expression, it looked as though a bomb had hit it.
The lady (after taking some minutes to work up her courage) finally opened the door and stepped in. Perhaps I should have done that for her, but I didn't like the idea of stepping into a house that had been broken into and perhaps becoming the brunt of an accusation myself, though the ladies were perfectly pleasant. Then she locked up again and they went on their way.
All this took about twenty minutes, since the ladies were anxious to tell me every detail of the story. They told me the gypsies had broken into the house several times, that some of them had gone to jail but that others hadn't turned up for the court summons, that they wanted to take possession rather than merely burgle the place. They told me a house opposite had suffered the same fate, and six in a row not far off from it. They told me old people were living in terror and the gardai wouldn't do anything about it.
One of the ladies told me she would happily pay a gang to shoot the miscreants in the head and drop them in the canal. She said this several times.
It took me some time to take my leave, they were so eager to thank me and to tell me their story. The lady who owned the house was especially eager to convince me not to believe the politically correct whitewashing of incidents such as this one.
"I know you're young", she said. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-five", I said.
"That's young", she said.
So there you go. It's official. For another year at least.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Two Comedians
Some hilarious comedy from Ricky Gervais and Richard Dawkins. Unfortunately they don't realise they are being funny.
At one point, the comedian that isn't Richard Dawkins claims that you can't win an argument with a religious believer because their best argument is "it's just faith".
I have never, ever heard a religious believer make this "argument", as far as I can remember-- except today, when I watched a clip from the Bill Maher film Religulous, in which a man dressed as Jesus makes this very claim.
Other highlights:
Richard Dawkins claims that the world is more amazing and wonderful if it is all a meaningless accident.
The two Richards agree that determinism doesn't matter as long as you feel like you have free will. I thought we were the ones who were supposed to believe in comforting illusions?
The comedian that isn't Richard Dawkins, in attempting to rebut the argument that life is too wonderful to be an accident, quotes the famous parable of the atheist wisdom writer Douglas Adams, in which a puddle thinks there must be a deity because he is so snug and happy where he is. But the fact that puddles don't, actually, think anything should tip him off to the fallacy of this argument.
They also agree that Hitler was a Catholic, and that Stalin didn't do the bad things he did because he was an atheist. I'm sorry, boys, but dialectical materialism and its lack of a belief in absolute standards of justice were absolutely based upon atheism. Also, the persecutions of religion in the USSR (funnily enough, Stalin wasn't as bad as Lenin and Kruschev in this regard) entirely flowed from their militant atheism.
It's good to listen to religion-bashers now and again. It buoys up one's faith.
At one point, the comedian that isn't Richard Dawkins claims that you can't win an argument with a religious believer because their best argument is "it's just faith".
I have never, ever heard a religious believer make this "argument", as far as I can remember-- except today, when I watched a clip from the Bill Maher film Religulous, in which a man dressed as Jesus makes this very claim.
Other highlights:
Richard Dawkins claims that the world is more amazing and wonderful if it is all a meaningless accident.
The two Richards agree that determinism doesn't matter as long as you feel like you have free will. I thought we were the ones who were supposed to believe in comforting illusions?
The comedian that isn't Richard Dawkins, in attempting to rebut the argument that life is too wonderful to be an accident, quotes the famous parable of the atheist wisdom writer Douglas Adams, in which a puddle thinks there must be a deity because he is so snug and happy where he is. But the fact that puddles don't, actually, think anything should tip him off to the fallacy of this argument.
They also agree that Hitler was a Catholic, and that Stalin didn't do the bad things he did because he was an atheist. I'm sorry, boys, but dialectical materialism and its lack of a belief in absolute standards of justice were absolutely based upon atheism. Also, the persecutions of religion in the USSR (funnily enough, Stalin wasn't as bad as Lenin and Kruschev in this regard) entirely flowed from their militant atheism.
It's good to listen to religion-bashers now and again. It buoys up one's faith.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Listening to the RTE radio show "The Business" Just a Moment Ago...
...three convictions sprang into my brain.
1) There is nothing wrong with trade and commerce. Marxists and quasi-Marxists and all those who attribute the root of all ills to "capitalism" or "consumerism" are (I think) totally off the mark. In a free society, goods and services will inevitably change hands for an agreed price.
Nor is there anything intrinsically mean or squalid about it. There is a romance and poetry to shops and markets and places of business. There is something in the human psyche that cries out for work, for some serious activity to get your teeth into-- and this urge can't be satisfied just by voluntary activity, no matter how much we love that voluntary acitivity. No matter how much we love painting watercolours or writing philosophical tracts or making flower arrangements, and even though this might be way more satisfying and meaningful to us than our "day jobs", sooner or later we languish without some task that we can't just take up and leave down as we wish.
2) Although there is nothing wrong with trade and commerce, there is something wrong with a society whose main activity is trade and commerce. Buying and selling should not be the central drama of human existence. Fields of human life such as politics, sports, the arts, and childhood should enjoy a certain detachment from the fray of buying and selling. Theatres named after private companies or soccer players sold for millions of pounds are symptoms that our society is over-commercialized. So are colour supplements in newspapers whose articles are all more or less a form of advertising. So are cartoons that exist to make children buy actions figures and dolls.
Though there is nothing ignoble about commerce, I do think there should be a limit to how seriously it should be taken. A grown man should not appear on television or in the print media saying, with a straight face, something like: "I'm passionate about giving customers the very best mobile phone converage", or "I never stop looking for ways to improve the shopping experience". Really? You have a few brief years on Earth, surrounded by all the mysteries and wonders and dramas of human existence, and you can really and truly waste your passion on such matters? Surely there is a point, in business, at which good enough should be good enough, and any additional care or dedication is filched from more important parts of our lives-- our from more important parts of our employees' or customers' lives, or from society's life.
3) This does not mean we should start looking around for some way to make wholesale changes to the way our society is run. Wholesale changes to the way society is run usually lead to war, famine, disaster and untold misery. In fact, I think the most important thing we can do is simply be aware of this excess of buying and selling. Man should have a sense of dissatisfaction with a hyper-commercialized society even if there seems nothing practicable to be done about it.
Every time there is a recession we hear the usual cries, intoxicated with vindication, that the goose of "capitalism" is cooked and that it will only be a little while now before the whole thing falls apart. Remarkably, "capitalism" always seems to get back on its feet.
I don't think we should be fretting about "capitalism", which is here to stay (unless, maybe, technological advances make it obsolete at some stage). We should be more worried about what sort of capitalism we bring about (to the extent that we have any control over it, which isn't always very much), and our collective and individual attitude towards "capitalism".
That's what came into my head. Maybe I'm wrong. But that's how it seems to me.
1) There is nothing wrong with trade and commerce. Marxists and quasi-Marxists and all those who attribute the root of all ills to "capitalism" or "consumerism" are (I think) totally off the mark. In a free society, goods and services will inevitably change hands for an agreed price.
Nor is there anything intrinsically mean or squalid about it. There is a romance and poetry to shops and markets and places of business. There is something in the human psyche that cries out for work, for some serious activity to get your teeth into-- and this urge can't be satisfied just by voluntary activity, no matter how much we love that voluntary acitivity. No matter how much we love painting watercolours or writing philosophical tracts or making flower arrangements, and even though this might be way more satisfying and meaningful to us than our "day jobs", sooner or later we languish without some task that we can't just take up and leave down as we wish.
2) Although there is nothing wrong with trade and commerce, there is something wrong with a society whose main activity is trade and commerce. Buying and selling should not be the central drama of human existence. Fields of human life such as politics, sports, the arts, and childhood should enjoy a certain detachment from the fray of buying and selling. Theatres named after private companies or soccer players sold for millions of pounds are symptoms that our society is over-commercialized. So are colour supplements in newspapers whose articles are all more or less a form of advertising. So are cartoons that exist to make children buy actions figures and dolls.
Though there is nothing ignoble about commerce, I do think there should be a limit to how seriously it should be taken. A grown man should not appear on television or in the print media saying, with a straight face, something like: "I'm passionate about giving customers the very best mobile phone converage", or "I never stop looking for ways to improve the shopping experience". Really? You have a few brief years on Earth, surrounded by all the mysteries and wonders and dramas of human existence, and you can really and truly waste your passion on such matters? Surely there is a point, in business, at which good enough should be good enough, and any additional care or dedication is filched from more important parts of our lives-- our from more important parts of our employees' or customers' lives, or from society's life.
3) This does not mean we should start looking around for some way to make wholesale changes to the way our society is run. Wholesale changes to the way society is run usually lead to war, famine, disaster and untold misery. In fact, I think the most important thing we can do is simply be aware of this excess of buying and selling. Man should have a sense of dissatisfaction with a hyper-commercialized society even if there seems nothing practicable to be done about it.
Every time there is a recession we hear the usual cries, intoxicated with vindication, that the goose of "capitalism" is cooked and that it will only be a little while now before the whole thing falls apart. Remarkably, "capitalism" always seems to get back on its feet.
I don't think we should be fretting about "capitalism", which is here to stay (unless, maybe, technological advances make it obsolete at some stage). We should be more worried about what sort of capitalism we bring about (to the extent that we have any control over it, which isn't always very much), and our collective and individual attitude towards "capitalism".
That's what came into my head. Maybe I'm wrong. But that's how it seems to me.
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