Myself and Irish Intellectual Limitation
December 2011
In the first part of my essay ‘On thinking in Ireland’ I have dealt with the general and official bias against creative thought in Ireland. But that is only one side of the story. The other side is the self-limitation of Irish intellectuals who believe that while, for thinkers of other nationalities, the world is their oyster, for them, being Irish, it is not. And along with this self-limiting belief goes another: namely, that if an Irish thinker, acting naturally and normally, thinks independently about some aspect of the world broader than, or apart from, Ireland, and publishes that thought at some length in Ireland, it is not proper for other Irish thinkers to engage with it unless London or New York has permitted them by pronouncing on it first. I have dealt with this phenomenon in a general manner in my book About Being Normal in Abnormal Circumstances (Belfast, Athol Books, 2007), but must return to it here with specific instances.
Let’s call me, for the sake of argument, Jim Maguire. Maguire had received a good education, Classical and otherwise, in Dublin. He had obtained an MA in Modern History, had travelled far afield, spoke several foreign languages, and for his published works up to 1990 was awarded Doctor of Letters by the National University of Ireland.
From his student days he had the habit of looking independently at human affairs in his own country and elsewhere and writing interpretations of these realities which differed (inevitably) from those that were publicly prevalent. His immediate object in so doing was to see things clearly (he considered this a good in itself) and to enable others to do the same. If it was a case of some problematic situation which seemed soluble, he had the additional aim of facilitating its solution by replacing perceptions and language which obscured the problem with a depiction of its real nature.
In the 1960s-70s, Maguire’s main themes were the Irish Revolution (the 50th anniversary of 1916 occurred in 1966); the Irish Catholic Church (the Second Vatican Council took place in the 60s); contemporary painting in Dublin; the Gaeltacht and, related to it, the Irish language revival; the Northern Ireland question; and, finally, the decentralisation of Irish government to regions and districts, along with, occasionally, the Europe of Regions project. With regard to almost all of these (the pan-European project excepted), his writings encountered varying degrees of engagement—pro, con and contributory, North and South—from other Irish intellectuals lay and clerical, from politicians, and from journalists in the various media.
Maguire’s year in avant-garde Sweden (1960-61) had caused him to regard the emerging condition and future of the West as problematic. Abandoning the conventional understanding of this matter that he had unthinkingly espoused, he was at a loss for a new vision of the West’s recent and present reality. In his book Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle against Provinciality in the Modern World (written mainly in the Conamara Gaeltact, published in 1985 by Ward River Press), there were, among many other things, some gropings towards an understanding. But it was not until a holiday in the USA in 1994 that he obtained the understanding he had been subconsciously seeking; or rather, the core of it. This was that the West had rejected European civilisation and was involved in a post-European construct.
First, during a year spent in Seattle, then in a lecture to a small group in Galway University, an editorially mishandled essay in Studies, and a book Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima and the Beginning of Postwestern Civilisation self-published in Dublin in 1996 by Sanas, Maguire explored and expanded this idea. Moving to Italy in 1997 he continued this work in The Postwestern Condition; Between Chaos and Civilisation (London, Minerva, 1999). Broadly aware of what was being written about the contemporary West by Alisdair Macintyre, John Gray, Francis Fukuyama, Claudio Magris and others such, he was also aware that his interpretation was the one that departed most radically from the prevalent moulds of perception.
Having explored European history to find how the West’s post-European system had emerged, in October 2002 he delivered the result in the Distinguished Lectures series at the American University of Rome. That paper, entitled ‘The West’s Campaign for Mastery of the World’, was published in the following year in the Irish Political Review and, shortly after, in Cutting to the Point: Essays and Objections 1994-2003 (Dublin, The Liffey Press). In that same year Maguire launched a website whose heading announced (as it still announces) ‘the Post-European Condition of the West’ as its general theme.
While still in Italy, and after his return to Ireland in 2007, Maguire had been working on an essay, continually revised, which summarised his main thesis and progressively expanded it. Appearing regularly on his website, it was also published under varying titles in Ireland’s Eye (Mullingar, Sept., Oct. 2007); Church and State (Cork, 2nd and 3rd Quarters 2008); and in Ireland After the End of Western Civilisation (Athol Books, 2009); In those years it was, moreover, delivered (at his suggestion) as a lecture to two Irish university-student History societies and (by invitation) to the Irish-Polish Society. Its most recent publication on paper was in Village magazine (Dublin, Nov. 2010), where it assumed its definitive title: ‘The Staggered End of Western Civilisation’.
Throughout this entire period (1996-2011), the only feedback to his post-European thesis that Maguire received from his Irish environment were occasional brief book reviews in Books Ireland and brief messages from casual viewers via his website. Irish intellectuals, academics, and the relevant sections of the mass media did not engage with it at any stage. Nor did there emerge from among Irish thinkers any alternative independent interpretation of the contemporary West. Understandably therefore, in this context, the essays on particular elements of the contemporary West—feminism, the position of the Jews, the West’s liberal-democratic version of totalitarianism—which Maguire included in successive books of essays were also ignored.
From Maguire’s effort in the Italian years to understand how the contemporary West had emerged out of its European past, a small book on European history in general had emerged: The Revision of European History (Athol Books, 2003). While removing the ideological structuring of the European narrative that occurred in the 18th-19th centuries, it proposed a realistic narrative and periodisation from the 11th century on. In the course of writing it the author corresponded with three professional historians in Oxford, Cambridge and Berlin respectively.
No Irish historian had written a history of Europe or even of England, nor prior to Maguire a revision of the standard European story. So it would have been natural for some Irish historian to react publicly or privately to Maguire’s audacity. But, in the same mould as the general Irish non-reaction to his well-aired thesis on the contemporary West, that did not occur.
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Maguire has suggested to me that I record the above experience of an Irish intellectual who in the latter part of the first century of Irish political independence stepped out of line. Those intellectuals who died for, or survived to launch, that independence intended it to be the independence of a normal nation, and that it would therefore constitute in the world, among other things, a national metropolis of mind. Maguire believes that, having offered his thinking compatriots the makings of such a metropolitan condition and found no takers, his experience might well provide a useful anecdote to some future historian of Irish intellectual culture in these times.