Now and Then

My motivation so far

I am writing this in early 2011 while coming to the end of my attempts to find a commercial publisher for All Idealism Gone: Terminal Essays about Ireland and the West 1990-2010. In the latter part of last year I chose and assembled the essays, bound them, and sent a summary presentation of the book with part of it to a succession of publishers; first, Faber and Faber, then seven or eight Irish publishers, then Continuum in London. The last to answer and refuse was Cork University Press; I am awaiting a response from Robin Baird-Smith of Continuum, suggested to me by Jonathan Williams. The recurrent reason given for refusal was, in sum, that ‘it is a bad time for book publishing and in particular for serious work’. I have interpreted this as ‘for serious work that is not history, biography, books on the current fiscal and banking crisis, work of a strictly academic nature (often subsidised), or a book on a single theme as distinct from essays on various themes’. That last has been the predominant form of my writing, but is one which you now normally need to have a big, international name to get published commercially. In the Draft Blurb which I included in my presentation I said that these essays constituted together ‘a book that will be read and consulted for many years to come as a source and record for how things were in the years we have lived through since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima’. I believe that, published together, the twenty-one essays would amount to that, with at least two of them, additionally, offering fresh insights on matters reaching further back in time. At all events, I am philosophical about the matter, accepting that the proposed book may not get published in my lifetime.

Wondering what to write next, I find no theme presenting itself, nothing I feel pressed to write about. Pondering on this fact, I have become aware that in my writing since the start I have been subconsciously following a personal programme and that this is now completed. I have been trying to gain a true understanding that suffices for me of man, Ireland, the Irish, the Irish Revolution, European history and the contemporary West. I believe I have managed to do that, and my conclusions are to be found scattered through my writings, available to my readers in various essays in the 1950s and from Mainly in Wonder (1959) onward. I have also written with the aim of furthering the achievement of the Irish Revolution. By that I understood making the Irish nation a normal nation: democratically self-governing as a whole and in its constituent communities, economically self-sustaining, intellectually self-determining, and culturally self-shaping. I pursued that aim until I realised that the Revolution had irretrievably failed. Not part of that composite programme, but giving me much pleasure, has been a recurrent exploration of plastic art, in particular painting. This has been a by-product of my obsession with seeing, by means of my eyes and my mind, and more particularly with seeing clearly. Somewhere I have written that I have learned more about the nature of things from painting than I have from books.

Totalitarianism and Garret the Good

Irish Political Review, August 2011

In the IPR in July I said that the liberal West (left liberal in ethics, neo-liberal in economics) practises ‘soft totalitarianism’. A reader has asked me: what then is totalitarianism if it can be both hard and soft? Let me interject that, oddly, there is no existing noun corresponding to ‘monarchy’, ‘republic’, etc. to describe a totalitarian state. So I have invented and used elsewhere ‘a totalitarium’ – it has a suitably all-enclosing sound!

The adjective ‘totalitarian’ was first used in the early 1920s by certain Italian writers and by Mussolini when they were describing the proposed Fascist state. In the background, historically, was the largely laissez-faire state of classical liberalism. In contrast to that, the Fascist state would embrace society totally and concern itself totally with the citizens’ lives; that is to say, with every aspect of their lives.

I remember that in Taine’s book on the French ancien régime he mentioned that at some point in eighteenth-century France the peasants in parts of France distant from Paris began to say “the Government” (meaning in Paris) “should do something about” this or that. In other words, rather than looking to their local seigneur to attend to things in their neighbourhood, they recognised the general responsibility of the French State to see to their welfare. Leave aside how much precisely they included in that notion of the government’s responsibility, and how much they excluded. Is it not a fact that today in Ireland, as in other European countries, people have by now come to calling on the Government to attend to a multitude of things; and in fact consider it responsible for almost everything?

Perhaps, then, the Italian Fascist idea of the ‘total’ state was in that respect not too far from what has actually come to be the case, in contemporary western states generally. But Italian Fascism envisaged also that the Italian state would be guided by a secular doctrinal authority, namely, the Fascist Party. As things turned out, it was guided, at least in its laws, by an agreed partnership of the Fascist Party and the Italian Catholic Church; but that was an aberration not only from the Party’s original intention but also from what would come to be the totalitarian norm.

In the Soviet Union in the 1920s there already existed a secular doctrinal authority, the Communist Party, directing the state comprehensively. A similar authority, the Nazi Party, would later exist in Germany, but military defeat after a twelve-year existence prevented it from developing its all-inclusive, supremacist programmme. In our own time in the West an Ameropean collection of states, headed by the US, is guided - tacitly and informally - by the American liberal Correctorate and subordinate liberal correctorates, including that of the European Union located in Brussels.

So I think we can fairly say that a totalitarium is ‘a state, guided by a secular teaching body, which involves itself authoritatively in all aspects of the citizens’ lives’. It is what has been satirically called in Britain ‘the nanny State’ except that the guidance of such a State by a secular doctrinal authority has been omitted from that concept.

A ‘hard’ totalitarium is one that operates partly through persuasion, partly through coercion, with harsh punishment, including execution, for dissent, and in some cases mass murder on ideological or other grounds. A ‘soft’ totalitarium operates mainly through persuasion, a liberal-democratic system, and defamation or effective silencing of dissenters. Further differentiations might of course be made. The authoritative involvement ‘in all aspects of the citizens’ lives’ can vary in degree from ‘in all aspects more or less’ to minute and detailed involvement in everything, including language spoken in public. In our liberal totalitarium, technological advance has enabled such involvement to be more minute and detailed than in any of its predecessors.

Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Communist East Germany and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four combined to establish in the West a notion of totalitarianism that lasted even when it no longer corresponded to any major contemporary reality except China up to the 1970s. After Stalin’s death in 1953, and particularly in the 1970s and 80s, the Soviet Union increasingly developed in the direction of a soft totalitarium. In the years after Gorbachev dissolved it, he became the most hated politician in Russia as people remembered how life was before.

When I spent a month in Minsk in 1993, people told me how good (in their minds) the 1980s had been in that city. President Reagan’s arms race had made Minsk a busy centre of armaments production, and increasing numbers of people were buying cars and more of them than ever were going on trade-union-sponsored summer holidays on the Black Sea.

But the notion had got established in the West that a totalitarian system was by definition the opposite of western liberal democracy. This notion persisted in the last decades of the twentieth century when the development in the West of liberal soft totalitarianism had made that no longer the case. In my IPR article in July I quoted from Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophecy in 1840 of the ultimate future of American liberal democracy. I think his most striking insight came after he had outlined the minutely regulated, conformist, avidly consuming democratic society of the future, and then added:

“I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet and gentle kind that I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom...”

*

A few months ago when The Irish Times and RTĒ were bestowing a secular canonisation on the late Garret FitzGerald, I remembered my only direct contact with him as a politician. It was an incident related to what I have said above about ‘effective silencing of dissent in a liberal democracy’.

I had known Garret in school, in the Jesuit Belvedere College to be precise, where he was a few classes ahead of me and a school prefect. After that, he and I went different ways and I knew of him only as a politician, a journalist and an occasional writer of books. In the 1980s, when he was twice Taoiseach, he launched a “constitutional crusade” to ‘liberalise’ the constitution and laws in the name of ‘pluralism’. That was code for ending the Catholic Church’s determining influence on the laws about such matters as contraceptives and marriage and replacing it with determining left-liberal influence (what he called ‘pluralism’).

Himself a practising Catholic who engaged in theological studies, and strongly anti-Republican, he was useful as a ‘transition liberal’ for the hard-line liberals who would have their way fully from the 1990s onwards. I welcomed and contributed to his New Ireland Forum on the Northern question and regarded his Anglo-Irish Agreement as a useful step forward.

The incident that brought us into fleeting direct contact occurred in 1976-7 when FitzGerald was Minister for Foreign Affairs. At that time I was lecturing in the Politics department of University College Galway and I had written a good deal about the North in the Sunday Press, The Irish Times and in pamphlets. The Irish American Cultural Institute had invited me to lecture to Irish-American groups in 25 locations in the USA on the subject: The Northern Conflict: Irish Proposals for a Solution’. I would be talking mainly about Irish-British joint rule or condominium and Sinn Féin’s four-province federal scheme, for which I was an active consultant and drafter.

Eoin McKiernan, head of the Institute, wrote to tell me that the Irish consul-general in New York had written to him to say that the Irish Government did not approve of my proposed lecture tour, but that the Institute was not worried. After some time, McKiernan wrote to me again saying that the Irish Embassy in Washington had written to him in similar terms, and that the Institute (which incidentally received some funding from the Government) had decided it would be prudent to withdraw my invitation with much regret.

I was puzzled about why the Irish Government regarded me as a sort of threat to the State. So I wrote to Garret, recalling our shared schooldays, and asking why his Department’s men in the USA had objected to my lecturing. I received an answer from him on Department notepaper which consisted of a few typed lines followed underneath by a couple of lines in his own hand. I forget what the typed part said – something formal and blah-blah-ish. In his own writing underneath Garret had written that I could not expect the Government to approve of me when, in a conversation with its consul-general in Boston, I had described our democratically elected Government as ‘your tyrannous Government’.

I remembered the conversation. It had occurred a year or two previously, in the course of a seminar on Northern Ireland at Amherst College, Massachussets. Representatives of all sides in the North (even Andy Tyrie of the UDA) and in the Republic had attended. Our consul-general in Boston, a lady whose whose surname escapes me, had come to a late-night drinking session of the seminar group. With rhetorical flourish I had no doubt in my conversation with her called her government ‘your tyrannous Government’. It was the time of that Cosgrave government during which, as anyone who lived under it will remember, the Republic came nearer than ever before or since to being a police-state.

I wrote back to Garret pointing out that the democratic Opposition, whether in the Irish or any other parliament, often used derogatory language to describe the government in power – language sometimes even more derogatory than the word ‘tyrannous’. He did not reply.

But what struck me most were two things. First, the surprising pettiness of the grounds on which my lecture tour had been banned – just in case I might say something derogatory about the Government of the day. Second, that, as we had often been told about those totalitarian Communist regimes in the East, there were ‘spies everywhere’, who would report to the authorities any casual disloyal remark made in a private conversation.

*

Finally, here is a useful formula I hit on recently. When an ideology – Catholicism, Communism, consumerist liberalism - is powerful in a country it is powerful - shapes how people think and live - because its message and its rules are (1) endorsed by the rulers; (2) it is preached everywhere; and (3) many believe the preaching. Note: in that order of importance.

Remembering Con Howard
(for a commemorative book), August 27, 2011

It was around the time that he was preaching the gospel of St Brendan the Navigator in the USA that I had to do most closely with Con. He had me and others investigating the location and time of the Viking bridgehead in North America and, simultaneously, studying Brendan’s Imram, written much before that, to identify the route that he and his companions took across the North Atlantic. The point was to identify which part of North America – the Bahamas? New England? – the Irish navigator reached, and to declare him the real discoverer of America. With the news that St Brendan was indeed that, I accompanied Con to lovely Annapolis and to the founding of the American Society of St Brendan with an American naval officer as its President. But one string to his bow on a visit to the USA, or indeed anywhere, was never Con’s style. So I remember, after Annapolis, ascending the steps of the Capitol in Washington with him and entering its hallowed hall. His purpose was to attend a festive gathering of those Representatives and Senators who belonged to the Irish-American caucus of Congress that he had founded some years previously. Indeed, I think that the point of the festive gathering was to celebrate the preannounced visit of their founder and animator. The final act of that ‘business trip’ was a visit in his New York apartment to the art critic Brian O’Doherty (as painter, Patrick Ireland) to discuss the how and when of his presentation of a collection of paintings to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

To speak of Con’s vitality is to be banal. For myself, I remember it particularly in two respects: in the mornings after a late, hard-drinking night when it was obvious from his rapid-fire speech that his brain had spent the night meticulously ordering the next day’s activities; that, and his rapid strides as he moved from one appointment to the next. From our American visit I recall how everywhere we went, he was a figure well-known and enjoyed from previous encounters, his welcome shown in the smiling faces that greeted him. He was a good listener, his concentration on what was being said to him showing in the obvious ticking of his mind as he registered, sifted, and stored for future action. Overall and movingly, I recall him as filled with Ireland and its standing and interests in the world; a man of whom to use the word ‘patriot’ is to understate.