Cassandra Voices

Author: David Langwallner

  • Multiculturalism in an Age of Extremes

    I feel that Europe, in its state of degeneracy has passed its own death sentence.
    Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, (1942)

    The Best Lose All Conviction…

    This piece revisits aspects of The Limits of Multiculturalism – a piece I wrote last year warning of a reversion to the 1930s in terms of austerity, extremism and declining intellectual standards. Now in the wake of a pandemic accelerating these trends, this article draws intellectual inspiration from heirs of the Enlightenment, especially Albert Camus, and also Frantz Fanon.

    First published in 1918, and translated into English in 1926, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was perhaps the most influential text of the 1930s.[i] He blamed what he saw as a declining European civilisation on the dilution of a mythical Aryan race – whether Germanic or Anglo Saxon. Spengler influenced Hitler, although he disliked the biological determinism of the Nazis, but still provided an ideological impetus for the extermination of undesirable races in the Holocaust or Shoah.

    In the heady days of the post-Cold War 1990s, when Francis Fukuyama was announcing The End of History and Bill Clinton was feeling your pain, mythical and biological views on race seemed an anachronism, increasingly confined to the dustbin of history. But sadly today a variant on Social Darwinism – underpinning an incipient corporate fascism and acting as the handmaiden to racism in another guise – has found a new suit and tie.

    We face an economic depression that is likely to be of even greater scope than the Great Depression of the 1930s, as various categories of workers are furloughed – the new word du jour – indefinitely, and SMEs are moped up by multinational giants that are assuming Blue Whale proportions, if not their unfortunate plight in nature. This coincides with impending environmental meltdown that could generate further pandemics. Moreover, social isolation over the course of the pandemic is limiting associational ties, adversely affecting the poor and disadvantaged.

    Alongside a long-term intellectual decline in journalism, mainly brought about by the arrival of the Internet which has turned much of it into glorified PR – or churnalism[ii] to adopt Nick Davies’s expression  – with even the global The Guardian now shedding jobs at the height of the pandemic[iii] – and debilitating academic over-specialization, linked to the funding of universities through philanthrocapitalism. In this barren landscape Spengler’s archaic notions thrive.

    Moreover, an age of chaos and uncertainty allows strongmen like Putin, Erdogan and Orban to assert domination. Spengler’s demonization of the other – now reimagined in the silhouette of a contagious disease – is right back in focus. Listen carefully and you will recognise that the Social Darwinism of another age is the rallying cry of neo-liberalism, as an age of cartels and select groups brings exclusion and enforced conformity.

    Given our intellectual and scholastic deficits, it hardly matters that there is zero empirical evidence for the concept of race, as geneticists have worked out that every person on Earth can trace a lineage back to a single common female ancestor, who lived around 200,000 years ago[iv] Spengler may be a bastardised intellectualism but this is irrelevant if it gains traction in the dark recesses of social media.

    ‘Guest Workers’

    The far-right revives the old ghost, but the centre-right – which is in power across most of Europe and claims to oppose racism – has maintain it in societal structures, such as Direct Provision in Ireland. We also ‘welcome’ guest workers – guestarbeiter – from the Global South as students in wealthy countries such as Ireland, but only to the extent they remain useful. Thus, the number of new international students from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) pursuing higher education in Ireland jumped by 45% between 2013 and 2017 according to a recently released study from the European Migration Network to 18,500.[v]

    Yet it doesn’t make a difference to a citizenship or residency application that a person has been resident in Ireland for years on end; while shelling out exorbitant fees to mickey mouse institutions, and ideally housed in a so-called co-living space. In contrast, anyone with an Irish grandfather has an automatic, ‘racial’[vi], entitlement to an Irish passport, and the benefits of citizenship.

    Ireland’s societal drift is not an isolated case, as state authorities around the world use the present crisis to adopt authoritarian methods, either through direct elevation of fascists, or through more sophisticated methods of control playing on innate fears of contagious disease, in cahoots with Internet platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter that increasingly deny freedom of expression.

    There are few safe havens available to migrants any longer, no matter what their status, as seemingly there now exists a permanent state of health emergency[vii] that is likely to be used to exclude ‘undesirable’ entrants. However, at least the pandemic has brought a rupture to an environmentally destructive globalisation that has been working to the benefit of the top 1% for some time.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Western Intellectual Imperialism

    The Meursault Investigation (Other Press 2015) written by the Algerian writer Daoud is a rebuke and a critique of the greatest Algerian, and indeed French, writer of the last century, Albert Camus, in particular his iconic book The Outsider (Hamish Hamilton 1946). Daoud’s criticises Camus’s putative racism or imperialism, or simply a lack of empathy for the murdered Arab. Yet given that the author has been the subject of a religious fatwa in Algeria himself, he is presumably sympathetic to Camus’s rejection of extremism. Daoud’s book concludes with a reflection on an idea that Camus himself would approve of, namely how we should hold on to the precious commodity of truth.

    Daoud’s attribution of racism to Camus for accepting continued French control over Algeria, was also made by Edward Said in his Culture and Imperialism (1993).  Both are wrong. As a Pied Noirs – a member of the French community in Algeria that emigrated to the French mainland after independence – Camus was doubly despised as an outsider. Having himself experienced racism, or at least xenophobia, his texts should remain formative to our understanding of the challenge of multiculturalism.

    It should be stressed that Camus promoted peaceful co-existence between the transplanted French and the native Islamic population, and condemned the torture and death penalty inflicted on the indigenous rebels by the French authorities, memorably depicted in Gillo Pontecovro’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. But he also recognised there was going to be a bloodletting in Algeria in the aftermath of independence arising from extremism.

    Above all Camus was a product of the Enlightenment and the French tradition of letters and reason. Throughout his novels that encompass his native Algeria along with the French Revolutionary period (The Rebel, 1951), we find a distaste for fundamentalism, whether secular or religious. This should be taken to include extreme advocates of multiculturalism that deny the significance of a country’s cultural inheritance, or diminish the value of common values and norms of behaviour in a polity, while assuming that any state can easily absorb an infinite number of new arrivals.

    Today an influential voice, such as Camus’s, is sorely lacking to courageously espouse universal human rights and the rule of law, against the barbarity of relativism.

    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards
    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards

    Edward Said

    In works such as Culture and Imperialism (1994) and Orientalism (1978) Edward Said – who I argue unfairly criticised Camus – emphasises the role of literature in the imperialist project of civilising ‘inferior’ races In his analysis of texts such as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) and Naipaul’s Bend in the River (1979) Said demonstrates how agents of imperialism operate, and how this morphs into murder and subversion, thereby destabilising so-called primitive post-colonial societies.

    In dispassionate fashion, Said also attacks virulent nationalism and an often unstated tribalism – the ideologically indistinguishable Fine Gael and Fianna Fail parties from Ireland are good examples – increasingly evident in our time. He asserts ‘Patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious and racial hatreds can lead to mass destructiveness.’[viii] Said also cites Conor Cruise O’Brien to the effect that imagined communities of identity are hijacked by the petty dictators of state nationalism. I fear we are heading in that direction without the reassertion of universal Enlightenment values.

    Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness (1899) about the deranged Colonel Kurtz is perhaps the classic text of colonialism,. Set in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold’s genocidal regime of plunder, we see how the civilising mission has mutated into barbarism and murder. Francis Ford Copolla would later recycle the tale into an indictment of the American civilising mission in Vietnam, with Marlon Brando playing Kurz, with utterly contrived insanity.

    Colonialism was a variation, or perhaps a precursor, to the theme of Spengler, often caricaturing the lazy and sensual native, set in contrast to the disciplined, and sexually uptight, coloniser. This required and justified the imposition of jackbooted domination to force submission on the shiftless and degenerate other – a necessary psychological tool conditioning the humanity of both sides.

    Yet the coloniser often serves as a role model for the colonised, as we have seen in the unhappy drift of many post-colonial states towards dictatorship around the world; or as Homi Bhabha puts it: ‘Although colonised subjects endeavour to imitate or mimic the behaviour of the coloniser, the mimicry is always imperfect – almost the same but never quite.’[ix] This best explains racially motivated homicide, such as we saw in the brutal murder of the English soldier Lee Rigby, and in the beheading of foreigners by ISIS – almost the same but never quite.

    New Corporate Colonialism

    Frantz Fanon’s provided a profound insight into how colonised peoples – The Wretched of the Earth – are required to pay the debts of the occupying powers. This has been reproduced in our own societies in the form of austerity. The occupying powers are now the corporatocracy, or those with inherited wealth. The only difference from the colonial period is they are no longer all from the same ethnic group. In fact a veneer of diversity is achieved with the promotion of a few specimens with varied pigmentation, and an embrace of safe, politically correct policies that ignores structural racism.

    Nonetheless, allegations of racism are used by the corporate vectors of public opinion in a similar way to gender politics: as a mask for self-advancement and the elimination of competition. But we also see attacks against the left through a conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This was clearly evident in the stitch up of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who failed to grasp how he, a long-time anti-rascist campaigner, could be accused of being racist, and was too nice, or loyal, to comrades who had fallen over the edge into outright expressions of it.

    Vast sectors of the developed world are now easy picking for a corporate colonialism facilitated by transnational law firms, and endorsed by governmental and inter-governmental agencies, including the E.U.. Fanon’s warning echoes across time: ‘The people’s property and the people’s sovereignty are to be stripped from them.’[x]

    Fanon also pointed to how mental illness, neurosis and de-rationalisation are responses to post-colonial subjugation. This is being revisited under conditions of austerity, which the Covid-19 pandemic is accelerating. It perhaps explains why so many on the far-right seem unhinged. In my own professional practice as a London barrister I have seen a decided increase in unreal vantage points, with some people feeling like spectators in a film of their existence.

    So what conclusions can we to draw on multiculturalism from the vantage of post-Brexit-post-Covid-limbo-in-London, and with Euro-wide fascism and racism on the rise, as fixed borders return and semi-permanent exclusion zones are put in place?

    Intimations of Decline

    Historically, pandemics have inflamed existing xenophobia and led to racial scapegoating. When the incomparably more devastating Black Death arrived in Europe in the 14th century, cities and towns shut themselves off from outsiders, assaulting, banishing and killing ‘undesirables’ – mostly Jews. Through a combination of state propaganda and media hysteria the contagion of fear has reached medieval levels. Racism is on the rise across Europe, even in the U.K. where the legal status of non-nationals is increasingly precarious.

    The virus is used as an excuse to mount another attack on beleaguered migrants. Thus the fascist Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, recently announced:

    We are fighting a two-front war: one front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the corona virus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.

    Meanwhile President Trump has called the virus a Chinese conspiracy, or Kung-Flu

    Here I propose three tentative responses, which may not make for easy reading:

    1. The liberal multicultural consensus based on the rule of law, humanism, tolerance, the promotion of excellence irrespective of race, and a measure of affirmative action to compensation for historic discrimination has broken down. In an age of extremes, even some on the left are demonising the diseased other, but intellectually impoverished commentators refuse to recognise the extent of this. Extremism looks set to get worse even in multicultural Britain, particularly if the economic depression accelerates. This requires a reassertion of intellectualism, Enlightenment values, and interdisciplinary exchange.
    2. An open door policy, or really one designed to drive down labour costs, promoted by Angela Merkel and others cannot be maintained. Focus should now shift, if it all possible to addressing the underlying challenges of post-colonial states, especially in Africa, through debt relief and an end to the exploitation driving many conflicts. A New Deal for Africa is required. Italy cannot be expected to accommodate the millions that are seeking refuge there each year under the Dublin Regulation. If the European Union is worth anything, the existing refugee burden has to be shared more equally, and those states such as Hungary that refuse to participate should be sanctioned or excluded from the Union altogether.
    3. The U.K. extradition courts look set to be flooded with the deportation of the undesirable through revivified warrants. Racially motivated crimes and targeting will continue apace and seem likely to be unchecked by functioning state authorities. This demands a response, challenging the nonsense of racism, but in a way that does not consolidate stereotypes, as I fear the Black Lives Matters movement does. Iconoclasm and statue-breaking have a role to play, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Churchill was in many ways a barbarous imperialist but without him Europe would have succumbed to Nazism. There are civilized institutions and literary canons worth upholding.

    It might come as a surprise that I am more optimistic about the U.K. than elsewhere in Europe; even Boris Johnson for all his buffoonery during the pandemic is not a savage by comparison with the Mussolini-lite characters that are increasingly evident in European governments.

    Look familiar?

    Relativism and Human Rights

    The dominant conception of human rights among legal scholars around the world – including David Deng, An Naim, Yash Pah Ghai, Upednra Baxi, and Richard Rorty – is of a universality adapted to the practices and norms of a given society. So if multiculturalism is to regain traction it must acknowledge universal human rights, and not blithely accept archaic tribal practices or religious extremism; yet at the same time we should retain what is enduringly decent in a particular society.

    Fanon and Said provided an insight into the destructive effect of post-colonial racism. Under neo-liberalism we now see an overt far-right fascism, but also a structural form under the centre-right, which is overseeing the impoverishment of all but the super-rich, while maintaining a veneer of inclusivity. Now with an economic and environmental meltdown on the horizon it is time to assert universal Enlightenment values, and fairly allocate the resources of the Earth, while leaving room for diversity and even eccentricity.

    Featured Image is of Frantz Fanon 1925-1961.

    [i] Richard Thurlow, ‘Destiny and Doom: Spengler, Hitler and ‘British’ Fascism, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol 15, no. 4, 1981, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0031322X.1981.9969635?needAccess=true&journalCode=rpop20

    [ii] Collins Online Dictionary defines this as: ‘a type of journalism that relies on reusing existing material such as press releases and wire service reports instead of original research, esp as a result of an increased demand for news content’, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/churnalism.

    [iii] Jim Waterson, ‘Guardian announces plans to cut 180 jobs’, July 15th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jul/15/guardian-announces-plans-to-cut-180-jobs

    [iv] Josh Clarke, ‘Are we all descended from a common female ancestor?’ How Stuff Works, https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/female-ancestor.htm

    [v] Untitled, ‘Ireland Number of Non-EEA Students in Higher Education Jumps by 45% Over Five Years’, ICEF Monitor, June 11th, 2019, https://monitor.icef.com/2019/06/ireland-number-of-non-eea-students-in-higher-education-jumps-by-45-over-five-years/

    [vi] Ronan McCrea, ‘Covid-19 laces granting of Irish citizenship with danger’ July 14th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/covid-19-laces-granting-of-irish-citizenship-with-danger-1.4303461

    [vii] Kitty Holland, ‘Restrictions on Travelling Abroad May Last Several Years Expert Warns’, Irish Times, July 12th, 2020. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/covid-19-restrictions-on-travelling-abroad-may-last-several-years-expert-warns-1.4302672?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&fbclid=IwAR0UPREs1c4aZPlKnVL3ZtC5ZUh5nruoD-5m54MUyf-HvVdP31IXcJVvRFE&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fhealth%2Fcovid-19-restrictions-on-travelling-abroad-may-remain-up-to-10-years-expert-warns-1.4302672

    [viii] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p.22

    [ix] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. Routledge, London ; New York, 1994, pp.85-92, https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/mimicry.html

    [x]  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p.152

  • Enforcing Environmental Rights

    Introduction

    However scant the support provided by the legal process, as a lawyer I am drawn to rights-driven considerations. In terms of recent context – blinkered by the present over-reaction – Obama’s climate change initiative has been overturned by Trump, who effectively tore up the Kyoto Accord.

    The internal U.S. solution to climate issues is to endorse such market-driven approaches as ‘Cap and Trade’. For example the Law and Economics movement allows and encourages individual U.S. States to permit, through legislation, permission to purchase the right to pollute. Obviously what happens is that once a corporation’s pollution credit is exhausted in a given State they simply move on. It is, in short, a polluter’s charter.

    A pollution or carbon tax is justified on the basis that it will promote efficiency but little account is taken of the externalisation of environmental meltdown, or on whether it is regressive or not. China’s ongoing disregard for pollution controls and restraints on consumption is well documented. The excuse given is that the U.S. is doing worse. So there seems to be little hope of the Big Two changing course.

    Nonetheless, as we will see, such ‘environmental rights’ as there are can be divided into three distinct categories: environmental procedural rights; the right of environment and the right to environment.

    A Consensus of Crisis

    Discourse on the status of the Blue Planet is varied and complex. On the one hand it is quite clear that it will survive climate chaos even if humankind does not. Gaia, as James Lovelock conceives her, has an infinite capacity for renewal and regeneration. But the scale and imminence of the impending disaster is being carefully manipulated in the vectors of public opinion. Trump, Bannon and others should be indicted for the crime against humanity of ecocide.

    The science is saying – the work of Elizabeth Colbert in particular – that without radical action, within sixty years the remaining wild mammals may be extinct. In these circumstances human extinction is likely to occur by increments.

    Various parts of Earth will be rendered uninhabitable through plant and animal die outs, destroying natural habitats and accelerating ecological meltdown. Raised temperatures will foster further mass migrations, with no clear destination, or pity, emanating from the privileged few, as quarantining of refugees in secluded detention centres becomes the norm.

    Radical inequalities in wealth and assets will diminish life expectancies through poverty and an under-resourced and undermined welfare system. Death on the Instalment Plan, as Louis-Ferdinand Céline put it after the Great Depression awaits for many of us. So in the medium term a mass extinction seems unlikely. More likely there will be significant population culls as a cost-benefit analysis to human life is applied.

    A crucial consideration, flagged in detail by John Gray, is that the top soil on which agriculture rests is being rapidly eroded. Furthermore, of even greater concern perhaps, is that chemical inputs into agriculture are wreaking havoc with natural ecosystems.

    Gray has previously argued in favour of an alliance between moderate conservatism and the green agenda, conserving venerable institutions while enhancing environmental and civic health. This is a variant on sustainable growth or development. Unfortunately, this admirable ideal appears to have little chance of success in the real world of power and money.

    Besides, the post-truth plague has put wind in the sails of climate change denial, as inaccurate and self-serving ideas are peddled by the likes of Michael O’Leary. These are accepted as valid points of view, as part of a misplaced notion of balanced coverage.

    The agenda is clear. The far-right prizes its assets and its riches, and prefers to pillage the Earth, rather than protect the planet.

    Collapsing Glaciers, Arundhati Roy and Indian Precedent

    According to the Geophysical Research Letters the ongoing melting of the glaciers of Antarctica is expected to be exacerbated by the collapse of the greatest canyon on earth: the Denman Glacier. By now the glacier is mostly cut off from the sea due to the level of glacial ice piled inside and atop the ravine.

    As the glacier’s edge continues to retreat down the slope, however, warm ocean currents will pour into the canyon, battering bigger and bigger sections of the glacier and gradually turning the Denman trough into a giant bowl of melt water, with nowhere to go. This scenario could have a runaway feedback loop of melt that ultimately returns all of Denman Glacier’s ice to the sea — risking a nearly 5 feet (1.5 m) rise in the planet’s sea level.

    This could lead to significant migrations from South to North – a mass exodus in fact – as overheating increases, joining the ever prevalent boats arriving in Sicily and elsewhere on the Mediterranean. I fear increasingly draconian measures to control migration and effectively dispose of fellow human beings.

    The developed world is not immune however. The environmental crisis, coupled with inevitable pandemics to come, is likely to precipitates a global financial collapse. The recent Financial Crisis has already brought ‘strong man’ leaders, and an increasingly oppressive jackboot state in so-called democracies.

    Assets need to be preserved, and those who threaten the status quo and the inward rapacious march of unchecked capitalism may be disposed of. As John Gray remarked in a different context: ‘The quickening advance of science and technology in the past few centuries has not gone with any comparable advance in civilization or human rationality.’

    Many human rights organizations reliant on funding and sponsorship from right-wing think tanks are becoming less than eager to confront the hard issues, as the consequences for doing so is a withdrawal of funding. The priorities of the Ford Foundation and others, who fund NGOs, brings a devotion to identity politics rather than the crucial issue of climate change.

    Those therefore, such as the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who challenge rapacious capitalism around the world, or have the temerity to object to its nefarious agenda will be murdered, imprisoned or simply disappeared. This goes hand-in-hand with sectarian repression in India where, ‘people are graded and assessed according to their faith.’

    Naomi Klein has offered a powerful critique in a series of books ever since The Shock Doctrine (2007). The important point to grasp is that the Chicago School approach of enforced shocks and distractions occlude sinister power grabs. The Covid-19 pandemic is a perfect sideshow in this respect for a shake down by large corporations. Over-reaction and mass hysteria about a virus becomes another distraction from a bigger picture of environmental, and social, meltdown.

    In India and beyond, Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neo-liberalism and environmental damage go hand in glove in her Capitalism a Ghost Story (2014).  Since the publication of The God of Small Things (1997) she has channelled her energies into political activism against the growing environmental and economic calamity being perpetrated on her native land, through the depredations of neo-liberalism. It is that political conscience that is the primary interest of her new awareness.

    In Capitalism: a Ghost Story there are all sorts of resonances to her new work of politicized fiction The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness. There is the mass evictions of India’s ‘surplus population.’ The street vendors, rickshaw riders, the small shops and business people, that brought the suicide of 250,000 farmers. This forced displacement, often from rural areas to cities, augments wealth of the one percent of plutocrats who control India. A graveyard, or simply being simply dumped in a river bed, is often the fate of the displaced, or the disappeared.

    It is clear in both books that this is the product of  a society where corruption is endemic. Inequality works to the benefit of monopolistic corporate interests, involving crossover interests of transnational corporations and law firms. Even the NGO sector won’t cut it as Roy saliently points out: ‘charity douses anger with pity.’ It can even silence criticism of neo-liberal atrocities by deflecting attention to ‘safer’ human rights issues such as gender equity.

    Roy has suggested that Covid-19 offers a portal that may allow us to mend the error of our ways. I hope she is right.

    https://vimeo.com/426871719?fbclid=IwAR2MMWAdI_jbI1ASvY78K-XBh-QxPMrgWIUTdjuclsedx-wWv5CHtLP-XEo

    Dissent from Sweden

    This brings us to Greta Thunberg, our only child public intellectual. Aged just sixteen, Time Magazine saw fit to make her its person of the year for 2019. She became famous for not attending school to demonstrate against her government’s inaction over climate change, leading to a spate of copycat demonstrations.

    Her recent short text, available in any decent book store for £2.99, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019), provides a summary of her speeches. She questions, given an imminent mass extinction, whether attending school is a terribly worthwhile idea, and identifies a cathedral solution. This is a brilliant analogy as we need deep structural and integrative thinking, and the leadership of the just and the wise. She might also have noted that serfs and slaves built the cathedrals, just as wage-slaves constructed those great cathedrals of capitalism: the skyscrapers.

    Greta Thunberg sees the world through black and white lenses. Good and evil. This provides a refreshing clarity, demanding action to be taken now, or her generation has no future. She is right insofar as the overwhelming majority of scientists are to be believed.

    Fortunately she is Swedish and retains a comparative freedom to speak her mind, despite the chastisements of Mr. Trump. The writ of neo-liberal justice does not extend to that Nordic country just yet.

    Little wonder also that anarcho-syndicalist groups such as Extinction Rebellion have gained traction when the political process has failed. The dangerous vista of extra-legal tactics, beyond civil disobedience, is on the horizon. The beast is slouching towards Bethlehem.

    Applying Sustainability in Our Daily Lives.

    There are also environmental considerations about the quality of civic life. Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness (2006) argues that the kind of buildings we inhabit and work in make a profound effect on our wellbeing. The poet Kathleen Raine pointed to a sense of homecoming when we encounter cities ‘where in architecture, sculpture and painting, the needs of the spirit are met.’ She attributes a growing alienation in the Britain of the 1960s to the architectural fashion of the time.

    It is self-evident that operating in an aesthetically pleasing home environment will raise the spirits, and yet this idea is often dismissed. Placing people in Bauhaus tower blocks creates battery hens. America is the paradigm of the skyscraper mentality, with Chicago’s Louis Sullivan ‘the father of the skyscraper.’

    I have visited perhaps the seminal modernist or rather brutalist example of sustainable living apartments. Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation (1952) is the perfect expression of his idea of ‘a machine for living in.’ Although wonderful in principle, in application it is a bastardised disaster.

    East elevation of Unité d’habitation Marseille in 2019

    How can you function properly, or think straight, while raising a young family living in an overpriced tenement which chews up most of your salary? Commuting to work compounds the problem, as you spend your spare hours on a train going to and from an ‘open plan’ panopticon of a workplace that generally diminishes your wellbeing. Sedentarism and a lack of exercise will shorten your life span and diminish a capacity to think freely. Failures in Irish urban planning, such as Ballymun Tower Blocks, lay behind the heroin epidemic of the 1980s.

    Yet there is good urban planning that raises the spirit. Paris was a crime and slum invested medieval city until the Baron de Haussmann developed a prototypical grid system, after Napoleon III instructed him to bring air and light to cetnre the city, to unify the different neighbourhoods with boulevards, and to make the city more beautiful. Yet today beyond the city limits, the architectural depredation of les banlieues has engendered the social dislocation and La Haine.

    Camille Pissaro, Avenue de l’Opera

    In Ireland Mary Robinson spearheaded an attempt to preserve the Viking Wood Quay settlement many decades ago, which was an early intimation of her ongoing attempts to raise global conscience, and force environmental regulation and climate change awareness in Ireland.

    It should be noted that great businessmen – which is not entirely an oxymoronic idea – think long-term and in terms of fundamentals of life. Benevolent capitalists, such as the Adriano Olivetti and John Cadbury, had regard to the quality of life of workers and housed them appropriately, endowing long obsolete privileges such as pensions and benefits.

    We need to discover an ecologically harmonious way of living rather than simply eco-friendly consumer choices, such as one discovers in a fabulous recent book called, Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way.

    Imperfect Legal Solutions

    As indicated, in procedural legal terms the broad notion of ‘environmental rights’ can be divided into three distinct categories: environmental procedural rights; the right of environment and the right to environment.

    Environmental procedural rights include those associated with rights of participation in decision-making, access to information and the ability to access justice, such as is expressed in the Aarhus Convention under European Union Law. But any consultative processes and public hearings are irrelevant if outcomes are pre-determined.

    The right of environment is perhaps the most radical, envisaging as it does a value in the environment beyond mere human benefit. Such an approach assumes that the environment should be held as a good on its own merits, and protected as such. The argument is based on the position that it is arbitrary to restrict justice and rights exclusively to inter-human relationships and to tolerate a situation in which interested parties are deprived of essential values in the distributive process on the basis of morally irrelevant factors – such as their not being human.

    Finally, there is the right to environment. This was first given international expression in the Stockholm Declaration, Principle 1 of which stated that ‘[m]an has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being …’

    The right to environment is conceptualized as a right pertaining to each individual – the environment is valued not on its own merits, but in light of its importance for human existence. The exact description of the right has been framed in various ways. A range of adjectives have been used: decent, healthful, natural, pure, clean, ecologically-balanced, safe (see International Environmental Law and Policy for the 21st Century, Pring and Nanda). Throughout the literature, a common theme is that of ensuring human health is not put at risk by environmental degradation. Obviously, this approach is open to the criticism that it is entirely anthropocentric.

    So do we assess the environment as a benefit to us as humans or as an intrinsic good in and of itself? I would argue in favour of the latter approach. But legal case law and rights are toothless fairies if there is no political will to implement them.

    Coda

    So legislative and constitutional protections exist and lobbying continues apace. This seems destined to fail, although I have not given up hope. In the present circumstances – portals or otherwise – as creatures of bounded rationality, with limited time, what we can do in our own lives is at least try and do as little harm as possible.

  • Declan Costello and the Decline of the Just Society

    Fifty years ago a politician published a manifesto which, if implemented, would have changed the nature of Irish society, would have defied the ethos of contemporary political culture and would have spared us so much of the misery caused by the recent crisis.
    (Vincent Browne ‘Remembering when Fine Gael flirted with a left-wing agenda’, Irish Times, February 12th, 2014)

    As a young man I was an admirer of the former President of the High Court, Attorney General and architect of Fine Gael’s Just Society, Declan Costello. I was then privileged to engage with him on an informal basis, appearing before him in court on a number of occasions. He was a complex and often divisive figure, and I disagree profoundly with many of his judgments, but there is no doubting the profundity of the intellect.

    He was one of the most impressive public speakers I have seen in action. It was a marriage of content and rhetoric abetted by a dry – very dry – sense of humour, albeit his diction was marred by a faintly detectable lisp. He was a remarkably civilized human being – a petite mannequin – whose pristine intellect was ill-suited to the rough and tumble of Irish politics.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuHZlTBgSSk

    Born into a Fine Gael dynasty – as the eldest son of Taoiseach and barrister John A. Costello – he seems to have cut a dash as a young man. According to one story, Jackie Beauvoir (future Kennedy-Onassis) became infatuated with what would have been a slightly frail young man – he recovered from a bout of tuberculosis in his teens – after they met on her visit to Ireland in 1950.

    An unlikely match.

    I suspect she would not have had to worry about a husband having affairs with the likes of Marilyn Monroe if the match with Declan had borne fruit.

    The curse of hereditary connection is a disease that afflicts Ireland. A privileged few families have dominated power and patronage throughout the history of the state, with the GPO in 1916 Rising acting as an Irish Mayfair. W.B. Yeats presciently described his fellow Senators in the 1920s in the following terms: ‘hot and vague, always disturbed always hating something or other … [they] had … signed the death warrant[s] of their dearest friend[s] … Yet their descendants, if they grow rich enough for the travel and leisure that make a finished man, will constitute our ruling class, and date their origin from the Post Office as American families date theirs from the Mayflower.’

    Reference to an Irish ruling class recall a remark that Aneurin Bevin made of Anthony Eden that for all his apparent sophistication, he had the unplayable stupidities of his class and type. The charge of stupidity could not be levelled against Declan Costello, who, despite his flaws, sought to remould Ireland along Christian Socialist lines. Sadly, despite being one of the richest countries in Europe, almost three quarters of a million Irish people were still living in poverty in 2019, a figure that seems likely to rise in the months and years to come.

    I remember Paddy McEntee once referring to him once as a cold fish. I am not so sure. Dispassionate might be a better description. Anyway I’d be more inclined to trust someone with Declan Costello’s detachment than the kind of avuncular, back-slapping figure that one often encounters in Ireland.

    Declan Costello was legendary for his work ethic, which perhaps compensated for an obvious social awkwardness. His practised remoteness even seemed to extend to his fellow judges at social gatherings.

    ‘Fine Gael: Social Democratic Party’

    Declan Costello will always be associated with the authorship of the Just Society document in 1966 that set out the ideals of the Christian Socialist movement which he promoted within the party.

    Despite being clearly at variance with the current neo-liberal hegemony this tradition occasionally crops up in debates within Fine Gael. Notably, during the leadership debates in 2017 Simon Coveney implausibly differentiated himself from Leo Varadkar by claiming to represent it.

    The document speaks of ‘the very wide areas in our society where great poverty exists, poverty which is degrading and capable of remedy, to appalling social conditions.’

    And, ‘We are not living in a just society. This fact must be understood and complacency must be dispelled and enthusiasm created to remedy the social injustices in our midst.’

    Fine Gael, it was said, sought ‘office to work towards a society in which freedom and equality are not concepts from an academic textbook but are expressed in real and tangible conditions which all our people can enjoy.’

    However, in February 1967, having served as T.D. for Dublin North-West, Declan Costello announced his retirement from the rough and tumble of politics. But the ideals of the Just Society were carried on by ideological fellow travellers such as his brother-in-law Alexis FitGerald, Michael Sweetman, Jim Dooge and Garret Fitzgerald.

    FitzGerald went on to become an unsatisfactory two-term Taoiseach in the 1980s. During this period a new kind of party crystallised, influenced by the Progressive Democrats, with figures like John Bruton coming to the fore, that adopted a laissez faire approach at variance with the Keynesianism of the previous generation.

    Remarkably, the Fine Gael party was on the brink of changing its name to ‘Fine Gael: Social Democratic Party’ at the 1968 Árd Fheis. Apparently the majority in attendance were in favour of the motion but the coup was resisted on a technicality by the old guard.[i]

    Looking back on the period Vincent Browne recently recalled:

    I was one of those beguiled by that at the time, believing that a right-wing party, such as Fine Gael, could be hijacked by a left agenda and be transformed via a procedural, albeit unintended, ambush. The ambush occurred at a time when Fine Gael felt self-conscious about standing for nothing and offering no alternative to a resurgent Fianna Fáil led by Seán Lemass.

    Since then the conservative faction of large farmer and comfortable professionals serving multinational corporations has assumed pre-eminence. The party now led by Leo Varadkar is distinctly neo-liberal, with concessions to individual rights. The pole opposite of Declan Costello’s political credo.

    Yet senior members of the party do continue to claim allegiance to the Just Society. The current Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe, who has been elected to the same constituency as Declan Costello seat, claimed in 2017 that he possessed a copy of the document and that ‘he [Leo Varadkar] values the just society as much as I do and places its spirit in a modern, outward-looking and dynamic Ireland.’

    Judicial Appointment

    Like many of his contemporaries Declan Costello was a devout Catholic, which informed the noblesse oblige of the Just Society. Under Garret Fitzgerald and beyond, however, Fine Gael diverged from Costello’s ideals, embracing a socially liberal approach on issues such as contraception, marriage equality, and finally abortion, but an increasingly non-interventionist approach to the economy. This was anathema to Declan Costello’s moral outlook. His religion foregrounded a Christian Socialism that presaged John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness, but also brought an overly moralistic approach to the private lives of individuals.

    Former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

    The conversion of Fine Gael from authoritarian conservatives to social liberals has, however, been cosmetic, even under Garret Fitzgerald. It is clear that a neo-liberal consensus began to emerge in the wake of Fianna Fail’s landslide election victory in 1979, and individual rights gradually took the place of social supports as policy planks.

    Declan Costello was appointed a High Court judge in 1977 having served as Attorney General under Liam Cosgrave. Owing to the tribalism bedevilling Irish politics successive Fianna Fail administrations. ignored his undoubted abilities as a jurist, passing him over for appointment to the Supreme Court.

    This diminished his opportunities for progressive judicial leadership. Only towards the end of his career was he appointed to the largely administrative position of President of The High Court. But by that stage, frankly, the arteries had hardened and the reforming zeal that marked his earlier life had ebbed away.

    Socio-Economic Rights

    Costello’s judicial record on socio-economic questions is in marked contrast to his political career. The case of O’Reilly v. Limerick Corporation 1989 ILRM 181 suggests he had caved into a prevailing neo-liberal mindset of laissez faire. He claimed the Courts had no business allocating or redistributing resources, which was, he argued, a matter for the Dáil in Leister House alone.

    The plaintiff Travellers sought a properly serviced halting site in order to vindicate their constitutional rights under Articles 40.3 and 41.2. Costello refused to grant it on the basis that such an order would involve:

    [T]he imposition by the Court of its view that there has been an unfair distribution of national resources. To arrive at such a conclusion, it would have to make an assessment of the validity of the many competing claims on those resources, the correct priority to be given to them and the financial implications of the plaintiffs’ claim.

    This appears to contradict his stated view that the Irish Constitution was informed by natural law, which in the Thomistic tradition encompasses fundamental socio-economic rights. Importantly, he recanted the O’Reilly decision a few years later in the case of O’Brien v Wicklow UDC 1994.

    But damage had been done with his introduction of a neat Aristotelian distinction between commutative and distributive justice. This absolves the courts from any role in ensuring that elected representatives maintain basic standards of living – so elegantly articulated in the Just Society and also expressed in Article 45 of the Constitution – which underpins any true republic.

    This argument was seized on by the libertarian Adrian Hardiman in the case of Sinnott v. Minister for Education 2001 IESC 63, to dismiss the claims of the intellectually disabled plaintiff to an ongoing education. Since then fundamental rights to housing or a living wage have been dismissed by the courts on grounds of non-justiciability.

    Authoritarian Streak

    Declan Costello became an enforcer of a dominant Catholic morality that pervaded the country until the 1990s. The disgraceful decision to uphold Eileen Kelly’s sacking from her position as a secondary school teacher after she became pregnant during an extra-marital affair was perhaps a nadir.

    On due process he displayed equally authoritarian tendencies. Thus in O’Leary v. Attorney General 1995 1 IR 254 he determined that possession of an incriminating document provided sufficient proof that a person was a member of an illegal organisation. The documents in question amounted to thirty-seven posters of a man holding a rifle, with the words ‘IRA calls the shots’ printed on them. Costello determined that the provision was consistent with the presumption of innocence and benefitted from a presumption of constitutionality.

    Growing up in a privileged family, he perhaps assumed that the police force could do little wrong, and counted on their probity in executing public function. One wonders what he would make of the case of Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe, and the dirty tricks campaign against him and others. The litany of Garda abuses is well attested to in Adrian Hardiman’s ferocious dissenting judgment in D.P.P. v J.C. 2015 IESC 31.

    Thus, after doing the state some service in displaying authoritarian tendencies Declan Costello saw out his career as an occasionally despotic President of The High Court. I appeared before him in the inception of the Gilligan Litigation, which, in fairness, he handled with even-handedness; at one point booting out a certain barrister of ill-repute, who had appeared unauthorized in private proceedings. It was an intellectual thrill to appear before him.

    In my view his most disgraceful, and certainly his most notorious, decision was in Attorney General v. X 1992 1 IR 1. In that case, the facts of which are well known, Costello granted an injunction preventing a fourteen-year-old rape victim from leaving the State for nine months (with the purpose of preventing her from going to the U.K. to obtain an abortion), a decision that was overturned in the Supreme Court, which decided that abortion was permitted where there was a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother, including suicide.

    Place in History

    Adrian Hardiman.

    Alongside Adrian Hardiman, Declan Costello was the finest Irish judge since the halcyon days of judicial activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Alas figures of that calibre are not evident on the judicial benches today. I fear the intellectual decline is irreversible, which represents a threat to decent governance of the state.

    We are all products of our time and looking back on history we enjoy the benefit of hindsight. Declan Costello was a great man, with flaws. He had a quiet charm and displayed a courtly graciousness towards others. His brilliant mind was activated by a concern for social justice and, crucially, he possessed a sense of humour.

    Within the establishment his intellectual calibre was a form of subversion, meaning he was always the Man Who Would Be King, but never the king. There was nevertheless a certain contradiction between his progressive, even transgressive, instincts as a politician and the reactionary tendencies he displayed as a judge.

    The Just Society document stands unsurpassed as one of the last political statements of substance on social reform in Irish history. It displays a coherent vision for a better Ireland that politicians would do well to take off their book shelves today.

    [i] Ciara Kelly, ‘Michael Sweetman and the Just Society’, from The Widest Circle: Remembering Michael Sweetman, Edited by Barbara Sweetman-FitzGerald, A&A Farmar, 2011 p.69

  • John Gray: the UK’s Leading Public Intellectual

    Like errant flames from the dying embers of a once great fire, there is much fakery to be found emanating from a previously proud tradition of public intellectualism in the U.K., and elsewhere. The English philosopher John Gray (1948-) is at least not one of the self-help gurus, such as Jordan Peterson, that have gained public attention and earned ample remuneration in the process.

    We do not find in Gray’s work the resigned intellectual play-acting evident in many books randomly grappling with our universe, and which provide the kind of quotable flourishes that play well at north London dinner parties. He is the doyenne and most garlanded of U.K. intellectuals today and so demands engagement.

    Gray is no worshiper at the alter of the Enlightenment or the humanist tradition. He does not believe it provides us with the coping mechanisms for our current challenges. Ultimately, he has little faith in the ability of civilization, or rationality, to overcome the barbarism of a liberal experiment riveted by self-contradiction.

    In short, he sees, both historically and now, the extent to which human irrationality governs actions. Thus he is decidedly anti-utopian, an empiricist and pragmatist. He holds out little hope for the realisation of lofty objectives, such as we find among technological evangelists or Bible-belt Christians. This is a theme he explores in some detail in his book Black Mass [2007].

    In fact, all forms of demonist eschatology, chiliasm or end of day’s nonsense is parsed thoroughly in the text, from religious fundamentalism to neo-conservativism, to Marxism and Nazism. Quite correctly he identifies Tony Blair as a neo-conservative.

    Thin Veneer

    One suspects Gray would endorse Lon Fuller’s remark in a different context about legality and civility providing a thin veneer of civilization if the underlying culture is barbaric. This covering is growing thinner by the day I would argue.

    And yet – although he may beg to differ – he displays a residual fractured humanism, and embraces certain conservative values. In effect, he is a Tory of the old school, with modest liberal leanings; the sort of person who, although he writes for the New Statesman, would equally happily associate with Tory grandees. His Disraeli-esque conservatism is one I would share some common ground with.

    He has thus embarked on a voyage of passage from an earlier more doctrinaire, Thatcherite conservatism. He no longer venerates a laissez faire approach to the economy, and seems to have recognised that that approach went seriously awry. He is a fellow-traveller in a way with Jonathan Sumption, who has also arrived at a modified conservatism on his own intellectual pilgrimage.

    Rather than seismic shifts – in that very British way – Gray argues that change should arrive incrementally, with allowance for the exercise of individual responsibility.

    He also argues for a bridge between conservatism and the green or environmental agenda. He expresses a desire to create a Burkean ‘community of souls’, preserving that which is good and noble. But this seems a forlorn hope given how the Antarctica icebergs are on the brink of collapse, and international accords are torn apart with a pandemic upon us.

    Covid-19

    In a recent article for The New Statesman John Gray argued that the Covid-19 pandemic is a turning point in history, which will bring lasting changes to human behaviour. This will see online interaction rather than face-to-face communication becoming the norm, and a Hobbesian state becoming ever more intrusive, and with people increasingly accepting of this.[i]

    In his view the populace will submit to the imposition of increased control, permitting a gradual and imperceptible erosion of civil liberties.

    In effect we may be seeing the arrival of a new society of unfreedom, and the arrival of a technological serfdom evident in China, where Bentham’s Panopticon is writ large. But also in Western countries we are seeing surveillance from private and public bodies covering all of society.

    China: technological serfdom. Image: Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    One advantage, however, of the ‘Great Pause, of quarantine, as he points out, is that it could lead to a recalibration of ideas and fresh thinking. In silence new thinking may occur. But in order for this to happen we must escape from the distraction of what Frank Armstrong describes as the ‘Doomsday Machines’: the smart phones that prevent us from realising our true selves.

    As Fernando Pessoa put it: ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’ It is certainly time for reflection but the path that lies ahead is shrouded in uncertainty.’[ii]

    Gaia Hypothesis

    John Gray is a convert to James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating organism which maintains the conditions for life on the planet. It is a word he invokes regularly, and without exclusively focusing on humans.

    Indeed, Gray appears to have a uniformly negative view of human nature and human beings. In his seminal text Straw Dogs (2004) we are depicted as rapacious, destructive and transhumanist. I suspect he is even more of this view now. Yet he clings on to a belief in decency and the exercise of personal responsibility, and liberally urges for peaceful co-existence to prevail.

    As a Green Conservative and an opponent of neo-liberalism, he cautions against what Greta Thunberg described as the fairy tale of growth-without-end, and recognises how this is destroying the planet, and making human lives impossible. The pursuit of profit for its own sake of profit has led human activities to spiral out of control.

    Our planet on the brink. Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Malthusian

    While I warm to his Gaian sympathies, there are more disturbing aspects to his ideas that I take issue with. He appears to venerate a Malthusian liquidation or winnowing of the human population in the aforementioned New Statesman article. If there are too many of us I wonder does he regard himself as expendable and surplus to requirements?

    In fairness it is ultimately a point about human progress having to be off set against scarcity. Yet it is easy to be sanguine – or even blasé – about meltdown when you sit atop the academic food chain. Stoical acceptance of human absurdity is not what is needed right now. It is a time for action after reflection.

    Gray may have glimpsed the gorgon’s head of the dangers we confront, but seems to shrink from urging the radical responses required. I suspect donnish privilege has softened the attack and brought a modus vivendi with these circumstances. After all, his own life has been a success by most measures, so he can at least take refuge in haughty disapproval, or at least he could prior to the Corona-pocalypse.

    But of course, in the interests of fairness, his prescience should be noted in pointing out that dwindling planetary resources, and wealth inequalities, are undermining what we cherish, and accelerating Malthusian dynamics.

    Any invocation of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) nonetheless reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s indispensable ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729). Swift responds to the genesis of the ideas that Malthus would go on to articulate with withering satire, expressed with deadpan seriousness: he promotes the consumption of babies as a way of solving the problem of over-population.

    Gray walks the same Swiftian line – though without quite the panache – in an essay on torture in which he mocks liberal values. Tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek, he argues torture potentially promotes human rights:

    Self-evidently, there can be no right to attack basic human rights. therefore, once the proper legal procedures are in place, torturing terrorists cannot violate their rights. in fact in a truly liberal society, terrorists have an inalienable right to be tortured.[iii]

    Religious Fundamentalism

    I share Gray’s contempt for religious fundamentalism. He does not display the dogmatic atheism or extremism of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, but allows for Christian worship in a tolerant way, and merely warns against barbarism, and end-of-day’s eschatological chiliasm.

    Yet the solution in his new book of jettisoning both the sweet poetry of Genesis and secular humanism engenders in Seven Types of Atheism (2018) a rather denatured Arcadian spirituality, which is neither flesh nor fowl or even a guide to a more meaningful existence for the varied lives he believes we should lead.

    It’s almost an intellectual Flake commercial, which tastes like religion never tasted before; although it should be acknowledged that he is resolutely anti-consumerist, and critical of the manufacture of insatiable desires. At one level he is arguing for makeshift true grit or graft to cope with unbounded irrationality. We must, he suggests, develop new patterns of living to cope with the new disorders and challenges we face.

    Intellectual flake commercial.

    He says anyone can live in a variety of ways, and I suppose we all do need to slow down and embrace both distraction and silence. But I believe the finality of total silence is always to be resisted – ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light…’

    The Good Life

    There are many ways, Gray contends, of living well. Differing types of the good life, but he is insufficiently specific as to what these are.

    With the changing world of work, and a lack of employment prospects for many, one suspects he has an overly optimistic understanding that whatever fulfils someone is what they ought to be doing, which is all well and good, but that doesn’t necessarily put supper on the table. I fear most of us will have to find different survival strategies to cope with our disposability in a world that cares for us less and less.

    John Gray is reliably sceptical of junk science that is now crashing into us in ceaseless waves, most recently with Donald Trump’s proposal to inject disinfectant to prevent Covid-19.

    Phrenology.

    A useful example Gray has provided is in the recrudescence of phrenology, where criminal patterns of future behaviour are derived from skull sizes, which feeds into racial stereotypes. Our criminal justice system, in allowing bad character admissions, has dangerous preludes of pre-crime and conviction by demonization.

    It will take a brave leader, of men or opinion, in future to insist on civilized values. John Gray has intimated, and I agree, they will not matter.

    In his esteem for silence to avoid distraction and enhance contemplation Gray comes across like the effete aristocrat in Turgenev’s Father and Sons, as the Bolsheviks steadily take control. But at least The New Statesman provide him with a platform, and the books continue to sell to a dwindling educated public.

    Featured Image: Joseph Wright’s  An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, National Gallery, London.

    [i] John Gray, ‘Why this crisis is a turning point in history’, New Statesman, April 1st, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/04/why-crisis-turning-point-history

    [ii] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, The Serpent’s Tail, London, 2017, p.107

    [iii] John Gray, Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, Penguin, London, p.222

  • Jonathan Sumption on Law and Politics

    In his recent book, Trials of the State Law and the Decline of Politics, (Profile Books) 2019 Jonathan Sumption argues for judicial deference to the Separation of Powers between the legislative, executive and judiciary branches, warning about the politicization of the latter. He argues that courts have assumed too much power, negating the political process, and that the domain of human rights has become rudderless.

    Keith Joseph

    Recently, in light of the Coronovirus pandemic, he has sagely warned about the endurance of restrictions on basic liberties in an interview on BBC Radio 4 at the end of March, where he decried: ‘A hysterical slide into a police state. A shameful police force intruding with scant regard to common sense or tradition. An irrational overreaction driven by fear.’ Perhaps this former adviser to the Conservative M.P. and Cabinet Minister Sir Keith Joseph – a formative influence on Thatcherism – is on the road to a more conciliatory Damascus?

    Of course there is a liberal consistency in his approach, in that he does complains in his book about the disproportionate interference by the British State into our private lives. 

    Now, with police officers restricting movement and enforcing self-isolation – curbing a natural inclination towards sociability among human beings – he pointedly decries an appalling vista. In the land where the cause of liberty is taken seriously, and the faerie queen resides, we find the genesis of transhumanism, alongside unchecked executive authority. 

    Sumption’s faith in a representative democracy, which has been undermined in recent times, is touching, but out of step with the perils we face. 

    Quoting the American realist Judge Hand, he points out that a society where basic civility has been all but lost cannot be saved by judicial interventions, let alone politicians. As someone with Thatcherite sympathies he must surely recognise that the neo-liberal order is in collapse all around him. An unfettered free market has brought division and cartelization that is not equipped to deal with the demands of a major crisis. 

    Alas, human dignity is difficult to preserve when you are left to wait on a trolley in a hospital corridor with an undignified death on the horizon. These are the kind of human rights Sumption has never really deigned to address.

    Magna Carta

    I recently paid a visit to Runnymede – in the halcyon days when one was allowed to roam free – the site in 1215 of the signing of Magna Carta (the Great Charter). It is the cornerstone of UK constitutionalism, and the closest to a foundational, written document, albeit the rights and privileges it confers are limited to the nobility of the time. 

    Noticeably, apart from in the gift shop, the text in its complete form is not evident. But one part of the text, Clause 39 is everywhere; on the fabulous exhibit ‘The Jurors’; on one of the chairs, of which more later; in the actual memorial itself in truncated form; and in the recent ‘Writ in Water’ sculpture, where it emerges like a primeval incandescent blob from out of the water. It reads

    No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way ruined, nor will we go against him or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

    It is the genesis of due process and the rule of law; a tradition now under grave threat, just as Sumption warns, with fundamental human rights no longer applying under a state of emergency.

    On that subject, in the famous Radbruch Formula (Radbruchsche Formal) the great German jurist argued that where statute law is incompatible with the rule of law to an intolerable degree, and where it negates the principle of equality, which is central to justice, it could be disregarded. In 1946 he wrote:

    [P]reference is given to the positive law, duly enacted and secured by state power as it is, even where it is unjust and fails to benefit the people unless it conflicts with justice reaches so intolerable a level that a statute becomes in effect false law and must therefore yield to justice where there is not even an attempt at justice, where equality the core of justice is deliberately betrayed in the issuance of positive law then the statute is not merely false law it lacks completely the very nature of law.

    Even an arch-Anglo Saxon empiricist such as Sumption now seems to see clearly a return to the embedded draconian legislation of yesteryear; yet as a Justice of the Supreme Court, until 2018, Sumption was not one to use rights-driven considerations to qualify or strike down legislation. He would never have been the Lord Atkin of the last public emergency during World War II, whose famous dissenting judgment in Liversidge v. Anderson (1941) is worth recalling:

    In England, amidst the clash of arms, the laws are not silent. They may be changed, but they speak the same language in war as in peace. It has always been one of the pillars of freedom, one of the principles of liberty for which on recent authority we are now fighting, that the judges are no respecters of persons, and stand between the subject and any attempted encroachments on his liberty by the executive, alert to see that any coercive action is justified in law.

    The Disappeared

    The film by the great Chilean director Guzman Nostalgia for the Light (2010) is part of his continuing exhumation of the nefarious legacy of Pinochet. It is largely devoted to the plight of numerous Chileans searching the desert for the bones of their children, often scattered over great distances, near the camps where Pinochet interned his victims. One particularly poignant scene features an elderly woman finding different bones of her son in different locations, which she proudly exhibits. 

    In Runnymede the disappeared are represented on the deeply affecting mosaic patterns of a chair. Yet the Thatcherism which Sumption contributed to endorsed Pinochet’s rule. Now Milton Friedman’s shock doctrine, visited on Chile after its emergency, may be used against a land more accustomed to moderation. You reap what you sow Lord Sumption. 

    Lord Sumption

    Parts of Sumption’s book, and his more recent pronouncements, demonstrate the dread sense of foreboding of a wise elder, and he serves the public good by speaking out.

    One senses, with his keen sense of history, that he thinks also that neither court nor politicians are going to solve any of this; that it is the beginning of a reversion to a medieval standard of justice, prior to Magna Carta. This humble Fool senses that deep down the noble King Lear-Lord Sumption is revealing less than he has demonstrated.

  • Review Bob Dylan’s – ‘Murder Most Foul’

    I have been to four of Bob Dylan’s concerts in various places around the world, and bar one where Ronnie Wood lightened the misery in Kilkenny, they were uniformly awful. He persists in reinterpreting and mangling his great songs, and hardly engages with the audience.

    It begs the question: why does he persist with the Never Ending Tour? Perversity possibly? Boredom? What else can I do? I might as well stick to my guns and my art? Nothing else to do?

    The opening paragraphs of this article are of course an irrelevance. He is not a performer in the mould of Springsteen, nor has he really ever been, apart from the tours in the 1960s, with what became The Band and a brief shine of light in the 1970s with The Rolling Thunder Review, where he had ample support. So what. It is irrelevant to his legacy. He is the greatest creative artist of the twentieth century and we are lucky to still have him with us.

    He is also one of the great cultural commentators of our time, and has been for an unprecedented fifty years, except for a period in the 1980s when he seemed to be going to seed. But the wake up call of a near-death experience (form histoplasmosis) has led, since Time Out of Mind in 1997, to an unprecedented bout of creativity.

    Yet since Tempest (2012), apart from a typically immersive and at times brilliant mining of the Great American songbook (all five albums worth) – a bit like the late Picasso turning to the great works of the high Renaissance and tearing them to figurative pieces –  there has been no sign of new material. It would seem strangely fitting if the man who, as Steve Earle puts it, invented the job of singer-songwriter were to see out the autumn of his years crooning along to the same Brill Building standards that he had once made seem so trite.

    Now with a unique sense of zeitgeist opportunism, Dylan has released a new seventeen minute-long song, ostensibly about the murder of John F. Kennedy, but which is also a travelogue through American cultural history, with Prince Hamlet and the great, deranged 1960s American DJ, Wolfman Jack, as our guide.

    A minefield and a summation. In a sense he quite clearly thinks that the killing of Kennedy was committed by the alt-right and the Texan Hunt family, and that the murder indirectly got us to the point of despair in politics where we have arrived. But his new song, Murder Most Foul, is so much more than a mere ‘protest song’, another genre that Dylan briefly defined before discarding in his early twenties.

    Set to Dylan’s own gentle, rippling piano, and accompanied by minimal bowed bass, violin and occasional flourishes of percussion, the performance has echoes of his surrealist masterpiece from the early 1980s, ‘Angelina’, as well as the epic ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie’ (1962); more of a recitation than song.

    Judging by the subtle arrangement and the mellow tone of Dylan’s voice – closer to that heard on the recent Sinatra ballads records than the ravaged croak on display on Tempest – it seems safe to say that it was recorded, presumably in one take, between recent concert performances.

    As the piece slowly builds in intensity, Dylan moves from the horror of Kennedy’s death, through The British Invasion and on to Woodstock and Altamont, from the Age of Aquarius to the Age of the Antichrist, before finally offering some hope in dark times through the things he knows and loves best.

    Wolfman Jack in 1979.

    Conjuring the incantatory spirit of his old friend and admirer, Allen Ginsberg, Dylan rhapsodises ‘Oh Wolfman, Oh Wolfman, Oh Wolfman, Howl!’, imploring the DJ to play everything from ‘Art Pepper, Thelonious Monk,/ Charley Parker and all that junk’ to Fleetwood Mac, from Buster Keaton to The Who, from Warren Zevon to Queen, from Beethoven to Civil War hymns. Dylan’s playlist is a litany of popular culture, fragments shored against ruin.

    Nobel Prize for Literature

    Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature was thoroughly deserved. Yet no one saw it coming. Witness the somewhat shell-shocked reaction in Stockholm.

    Predictably, the great bard of Duluth evaded the glare of publicity, almost sparking an international incident by not responding to the award. Given the great and indeed meditative creative artist he is, I suspect he felt he was undeserving and could not compete with Hemingway and the others he references in a moving acceptance speech, which demonstrated an innate modesty as well as an acute understanding of the American canon.

    I believe his greatness lies in a total lack pretentious. To see him accept the Congressional Medal of Honor from Obama was to witness a wayward little boy seemingly wondering why everybody appreciated him so much. You can also see his pride in being an American; a proper American. There is also an obvious disapproval of how these flickering political shadows interfere in such a great life. Yet an inner dignity too, and truthfully a man who deserved it and knows it.

    Early Days

    Dylan is a spokesman for the Baby Boomer, Woodstock generation. The great soothsayer of the 1960s who knew that change was coming, and that a new generation would not submit to the will of their elders any longer. Yet we find a concern with the growing materialism, obvious from the outset in destroying the goodness in America. This is evident in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (1965) with the diplomat carrying his chattel woman on his arm like a Siamese cat.

    There are also the early political songs such as ‘Masters of War’ (1963), responding to the potential of a nuclear apocalypse, and sense of outrage at the treatment of African-Americans in ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ (1963).

    His civil liberty credentials and intellectual engagement by this stage, circa 1963, are clearly evident.  But other political songs came later. There is the true raging in Desire of ‘Hurricane’ (1975), which is the great theme song of the Innocence Project, although Ruben Carter may not have been entirely innocent.

    But in its grasp of Americana the song is cinematic in scope and sweep.

    Pistol shots ring out in the bar room night…

    An innocent man in a living hell.

    But one time he coulda been the champion of the world.

    So enough has been said of his support of the Civil Rights movement, his hatred of superficiality censure, and his highlighting of injustice more generally.

    Finding God

    And then he embraces God after a hiatus with a motor cycle. This led to an enforced absence and some inconclusive albums. Yet the songs are full of dread of a mighty reckoning coming, such as ‘A Slow Train Coming’ (1979). A deadly reckoning. And that we all have to serve somebody. Pay our dues or penance.

    This is not the embrasure of Republican religious fundamentalism, but the lack of values in a godless universe that he clearly despises.

    The indirection of middle age, before the health scare has now been replaced with an autumnal clarity from perhaps the last great humanist artist. There is a clarity of precise observation, just as the light appears to be dimming in society more widely.

    ‘Not Dark Yet’ (1997) is one of his finest songs. It is Beckett-like in its profundity. There is a sense of closure, indicating it is not dark yet, but we are getting there. There is an uplift of hope and determination that one must go on. It is not dark, but it’s getting there.

    There is hardly a person on this planet that has seen more of it, and who has so much understanding of what Isaiah Berlin called ‘the speckled timber of humanity.’ Over the past decade he has mainly responded with a creative silence that speaks volumes.

    Tempest (2012) is a flawed masterpiece. The much-derided song about John Lennon is intended to convey that an age of optimism has passed.

    Full of utter unbridled fury, and set to a classic Muddy Waters riff, ‘Early Roman Kings’ is a splenetic howl of rage at all that has gone wrong:

    They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers,
    They buy and they sell,
    They destroyed your city,
    They’ll destroy you as well,
    They’re lecherous and treacherous,
    Hell-bent for leather,
    Each of ’em bigger
    Than all men put together,
    Sluggers and muggers,
    Wearing fancy gold rings,
    All the women goin’ crazy
    For the early Roman kings

    Dylan’s classic Middle American decency and his sense that all has fallen apart has been coming for a while.

    New Track

    Out of the blue and out of this lasting silence. I sense Dylan is not winding down at all. Perhaps, like Rembrandt and Ozu, he is just approaching his very best work in the late Autumn.

    Though the shooting match is all over, he perhaps senses limited opportunities are left to make a difference or to intervene. But this disturbing, strangely beautiful song is like an interruption of his work routines. He realises it is now or never for the summation of the great American bard. Finally he has to condense the American tradition of genius, and say how political evil is destroying it.

    In judicial terms, it is a summing up.  Of a world gone wrong.

    The slow train has arrived and it is dark. Not dark perhaps yet but closer than you think.
    The fool in King Lear has spoken to the world leadership and the assessment is unsparing.
    The day that they killed him, someone said to me, “Son
    The age of the Antichrist has only begun.”
    Air Force one coming in through the gate
    Johnson sworn in at 2:38
    Let me know when you decide to thrown in the towel
    It is what it is, and it’s murder most foul
    What’s new, pussycat? What’d I say?
    I said the soul of a nation been torn away
    And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay
    And that it’s 36 hours past Judgment Day.

    This article contains contributions from Dr Francis Leneghan.

  • It is Time for a Renewed Deal

    U.S. President (1932-45) Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born into one of the most aristocratic families in America. A distant cousin, Teddy, had even been elected President. In his youth FDR, as he became known, was a bon vivant and ladies’ man, who strayed from Eleanor, his saintly but formidable wife. This blue blood seemed an unlikely person to buck the entire system of U.S. capitalism. He remains a hate-figure for U.S. Conservatives to this day.

    Any account of his life should include the enormous personal tragedy of incapacitation from polio. He could not walk, a disability which may have broadened an empathy for others’ suffering. He was elected President in 1932 on a platform to provide a New Deal to the American people after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression. The destitution of the American people is movingly depicted in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), where a group of ‘Okies’, led by Tom Joad, are ruined by dustbowl conditions, and the calling in of loans by ruthless bankers, and in E.Y. Yip Harpburg’s Broadway Musical Brother Can You Spare Me a Dime (1930). Even brokers were forced to eat from soup kitchens, as erstwhile respectable folk were reduced to ‘hobos.’

    A bull market of speculation collapsed after an unregulated free market had built mountains of sand out of folly and greed. The dominant economic philosophy of laissez faire brought light touch regulation and government passivity, as with our present, similarly hegemonic, neo-liberalism. The view then, as today, was that government had no business interfering in private transactions and that wealth, growth and efficiency are best achieved through the operation of an Invisible Hand. The banking crash from 2007 has had similar deleterious social consequences.

    FDR in 1933.

    FDR adopted the then heretical advice of the economist John Maynard Keynes that to save capitalism it was necessary for the government to intervene in the market. He set up national agencies and support structures for aid and assistance. It was a bailout to protect the poor and disenfranchised, not the rich. His New Deal was in the national interest, not to protect vested interests. The Supreme Court initially blocked the legislation, insisting it had no business varying contracts. In response, an exasperated Roosevelt informed the judges that if they did not approve his legislation he would appoint new ones, which led to a change of heart. This became known among wags as ‘the switch in time that saved nine.’

    The assumption of liberty of contract is that anyone is free to enter into a bargain under whatever terms they choose, but once the deal is struck they are bound by their word. But this is based on the pretence that the market is a level playing field. Many sign on the dotted line without fully understanding the implications, or do so under duress.

    Roosevelt may at times have displayed an ambivalence towards democracy, but he favoured those at the bottom of the social ladder, as he recognised that democracy had been sabotaged by vested interests. Just like today, transnational corporations and law firms were dictating to governments. He revived the U.S. economy through a Keynesian stimulus as government expenditure raised aggregate demand. This brought investment to help ordinary people, not the infliction of wanton cruelty in the form of perma-austerity that runs contrary to even capitalist logic. The best evidence is that a mixed economy, combining private enterprise and public initiative, with social safety nets and support for small enterprise, is a model that works best for society as a whole. Keynes was right then, and still is, but over time his approach went out of fashion.

    John Maynard Keynes in 1933.

    In late 1970’s Britain in particular, the excesses of socialism were becoming obvious, with the three-day-working-week, refuse on the streets, and the stranglehold of government by the Unions. In circumstances where initiative was stifled, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan championed the old doctrine of unregulated markets, conveniently referred to as neo-liberalism. The ideological underpinning came from the Austrian Friedrich Hayek and the Chicago School under Milton Friedman.

    The curious assumption was that wealth would trickle like manna from heaven down from rich to poor under free market conditions. Instead we got the 1980s yuppies like Donald Trump, accumulating vast fortunes. Over time we have seen a dismantling of the Welfare State; the removal of social protections and safety nets. Today the richest 1% are on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030, with the rest of our existences increasingly precarious. The distinction between working class and middle class is being eroded as we revisit a medieval pyramid of barons and serfs. Yet, ironically, Hayek actually described socialism as the new serfdom. But old-fashioned Marxist class divisions no longer make sense.

    The unprecedented banking collapse after 2007 led to bail-outs being awarded to those who were responsible, and the infliction of austerity on the wretched of the earth. This led Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stieglitz to point to a socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Yet those countries which adopted Keynesian approaches – including nationalisation of banks – such as Iceland, have been vindicated by stabilisation and recovery.

    Ireland achieved the worst of all possible ends. It established a bad bank NAMA, which cut deals with failed property speculators and lawyers and the congeries of the corrupt. As the IMF and Europe imposed austerity on the defenceless masses, those responsible were bailed-out and their debts cancelled. The fraudulent banks had made money on misrepresentations, providing negligent lending advice about the value of stocks, investments and credit ratings. This caused the economy to overheat and generated a property bubble that many had pointed to. Now institutions continue to foreclose against the poor and defenceless, as sanctity of contract is insisted on. The perversion of the system it that the richer you are, the more easily you can cut a deal; the logic of a bank too big to fail.

    The neo-liberal recasting of homo sapiens into homo economicus, also initiates a new form of Social Darwinism, permitting the survival of the most ruthless in a dog eat god universe. We have seen a slippage in standards, where the young are habituated to lying, having witnessed the deceit of those in high office. Lines between fact, semi-fact, lies and deceptions have been blurred. Even in the courts of law fabricated cases have reached pandemic proportions. This has also led to increasingly vicious tactics against those who demure: like a plague, the corruption of banks has spread to other private agencies and even state institutions; where whistleblowers are systematically undermined. In a distorted world, the mugshots of heroes of our time now feature in rogues’ galleries of subversion. The indicted include human rights lawyers, public-interest journalists, and anyone in public life with a shred of a social conscience.

    It is an increasingly divisive ‘them’ and ‘us’ social setting, where the poor, the migrant, the displaced, the activist, and the public intellectual, are marginalised and destroyed in increments. Targeted assassination by the state is now evident across Europe, and not just under Mr Putin. Our corporate suzerains lead political discourse towards safe issues around individual entitlements. Suddenly the political class are all in favour of gay marriage, gender equality and decriminalising someone for puffing on a joint. But what about more fundamental rights intrinsic to sustaining human life, such as health care, housing and social support?

    Around the world courts are evicting and rendering homeless surplus populations, and in India dumping them on the streets. Housing, either buying or renting, is increasingly unaffordable, diminishing the prospect of human flourishing. Now crucially also, the privatisation of health care has led to life or death becoming a matter of affordability not a right or entitlement. There are other sinister ramifications. Those teachers, academics or professionals in badly paid but socially worthwhile occupations must toe the line, or are fired for exposing corruption. Survivors sing for their supper, while in journalism the phrase he who pays the piper calls the tune is increasingly apt.

    The wise sensei or village elder is no longer looked up to, but instead the old are being asked to quietly await their death. Intelligence and achievement have to be costed and channelled into wealth producing activities. You are not seen as a man if you do not have the mentality of the hunter.  Short-termism both in contracts and outlooks has brought reactive decision-making, wherein people are desensitised to the suffering of others. These depredations being heaped on society are deliberate. The Shock Doctrine pioneered in Chile and Indonesia by neo-liberals in the 1970s have been visited on Ireland and Greece, and elsewhere. It brings cuts in funding to socially useful public agencies, such as libraries, which are being gradually eliminated. There have also been huge cuts to legal aid, imperilling the ability of the innocent to defend themselves against criminal charges.

    It is clear that we require a Renewed Deal, bringing Keynesian stabilisation measures, including support for small businesses, social safety nets and the shutting down of corporate tax avoidance. The E.U. must desist from imposing austerity under the guise of the Growth and Stability Pact, and reinforce regulatory protection of labour rights and the environment, resisting the lobbying of giant corporations. Courts in Ireland should also recognise a basic human right to housing, including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as healthcare. So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a Renewed Deal to the world.

    Codicil

    I write this as the Coronavirus pandemic sweeps through the world, with governmental intervention and support in the Keynesian sense right back on the table, particularly in the U.K. But there is appearance and there is reality; smoke and mirrors.

    My concern is with the Malthusian ideas emanating from an ongoing devotion to the tenets of neo-liberalism, and also that social distancing and other precautionary measures will accentuate pre-existing social atomization, and amplify a lack of care and concern for one another.

    Emergency measures could also empower authoritarian elements within States, undermining cherished civil liberties.

    My fear is that any Renewed Deal and stimulus to avoid economic meltdown under the politicians currently in power in the U.K. and Ireland will be selectively targeted, with many if not most of an over populated planet permitted to wither away by increments. We cannot have another Bailout to preserve the assets of those at the top of a latter-day feudal pyramid.

  • Public Intellectual Series: Slavoj Žižek

    No picture of the modern world is complete without a Marxist analysis. The fundamental point – even for anyone who is not a fellow traveller – is that a materialist analysis of capitalism’s inherent instability is essentially correct, and now more relevant than ever.

    The problem has always been around how a post-capitalist society emerges without savage bloodletting and numbing totalitarianism. The bearded figure scribbling away in the British Museum would no doubt have been horrified by the barbarous regimes – from Lenin to Kim Jong-Il – that have laid claim to his legacy.

    Slavoj Žižek is perhaps the best known representative and synthesiser of contemporary Marxist theory. Anyone who has viewed his films The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2009) or The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2012) can only marvel at how this middle-aged, slovenly Slovenian Marxist is taken so seriously. Despite the spittle that pours involuntarily out of his mouth as he expostulates, it seems his ideas are judged on merit; albeit a somewhat comedic appearance has probably made him seem less of a ‘danger’ – especially when set against a straight-backed sparring partner such as Jordan Peterson – and ‘Ted-Talkily’ acceptable.

    Žižek is a complex political thinker, noted for his observations on ideology. Yet his writing is dense, often impenetrable, and even, at times, frankly nonsensical. Sadly, the content can be obscure, and the ideas often wildly over-stated, though recent books have seen him curb this tendency, leading to greater traction. With age he has mellowed, or at least he has become far more coherent in his critique of the late capitalism disaster movie unfolding before our eyes.

    His thought processes are, nevertheless, eminently contestable. Former Irish President Mary McAleese – who lectured me – always despised recklessness, as do I, but in a different sense. It is intellectual recklessness I hold in low regard. Žižek is full of it, at least in terms of his wilder statements calling for insurrection.

    Žižek argues that the widespread belief that our world is post-ideological is an ‘arch-ideological’ fantasy. Today, he asserts, ideology entails what people impute to others, whether left or right.

    This demonization of others, and the exclusion of outsiders, is indeed very much to the fore in his recent writings, and in our end of day’s capitalist order. Tribalism, nationalism and the targeting of non-nationals and immigrants is an endemic feature of our time.

    For a subject to adhere to an ideology he argues, he must have been presented with it, and accepted it as true and right – such that anyone sensible should believe in it. In a seminal text, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) Žižek claims that ideology has not disappeared, but has come into its own, and because of its success, it has been dismissed as non-existent. Or should it be that ideology has been internalised?

    Ideological Disidentification

    Žižek also puts forward the idea of ‘ideological cynicism.’ Ideology today is not as it was for the proletariat for ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it.’ He disagrees that for ideology to be effective it has to effectively brainwash people, as Marx contended in his famous religion being the opium of the people assessment; rather Žižek contends that a successful ideology always permits a critical distance towards that ideology – this he terms ‘ideological disidentification’; saying: ‘I know well that (for example) Bob Hawke / Bill Clinton / the Party / the market do not always act justly, but I still act as though I did not know that this is the case.’

    Or perhaps it should be said that behaviour has been modified or controlled, and widespread passivity makes it is irrelevant what we do in a spectator democracy. In effect, we are irrelevant to changing any of this, as the supporters of Bernie Sanders are finding out.

    Žižek points to a ‘big O other’, who legitimates control through ‘God’ or ‘the Party’. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, (1989) he argues that such important or rallying political terms are ‘master signifiers,’ even though they are ‘signifiers without a signified’, i.e. words which do not refer to any clear and distinct concept or demonstrable object. Thus, they induce control and a false sense of belonging, but are meaningless.

    This claim of Žižek’s is related to two other ideas:

    1. That subjects are always divided between their conscious and unconscious beliefs towards political authority;
    2. That subjects do not know what their beliefs are that leaves them open to domination and control.

    Jouissance

    Žižek further contends, following the critical theorist Louis Althusser, that ideology is embedded in our everyday lives. In particular, he uses the term jouissance to describe transgressive pleasure that we derive from the master signifiers, such as ‘nation’ or ‘people,’ through cultural products as sports, music, alcohol,  drugs, festivals, or films.

    Another central idea in Žižek’s initial political philosophy is that any regime only secure a sense of collective identity if their governing ideologies afford subjects an understanding of how these relate to what exceeds, supplements or challenges its identity. Or, in layman’s terms, bread and circuses is the glue that binds identities – ‘Football’s Coming Home’ to quote Baddiel and Skinner.

    Žižek adopts the term ‘ideological fantasy’ for the deepest framework of belief that structures how political subjects, and/or a political community, come to terms with what exceeds its norms and boundaries. He identifies Law with the Freudian ego ideal.

    But Žižek argues that, in order to be effective, a regime’s explicit Laws must also harbour and conceal a darker underside – a set of more or less unspoken rules which, far from simply repressing jouissance, implicate subjects in a guilty enjoyment in repression itself, which Žižek likens to the ‘pleasure in pain’ associated with the experience of Kant’s sublime.

    Žižek’s final position about the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies is that these belief-inspiring objects represent the many ways in which the subject misrecognises its own active capacity to challenge existing laws, and to found new laws altogether.

    He repeatedly argues that the most uncanny or abysmal aspect of the world today is the subject’s own active subjectivity – explaining his repeated citation of the Eastern saying ‘Thou Art That’. It is, finally, the singularity of the subject’s own active agency that leads to subjects’ recourse to fantasies concerning the sublime objects of their regime’s ideologies.

    Like a Thief in Broad Daylight

    Žižek’s technical term for the process whereby we recognise how the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies are, like Marx’s commodities,  fetishised objects – concealing from subjects their own political agency – is ‘traversing of the fantasy.’

    Traversing the fantasy, for Žižek, is the political subject’s deepest form of self-recognition, and the basis for his own radical political position, or defence of the possibility of such positions.

    Žižek also references Alain Badiou, who argues for an elevation or an insurrection. Žižek also seeks a form of Jacobin army, the intellectual irresponsibility of which needs to be emphasised. Even if these ideas are metaphorical the extremism provides ample ammunition to right-wing critics, who argue he condones or even approves of terrorist methods.

    Sadly, in more recent times, the Marxist left has been self-sabotaging, and the cause of its own downfall. They have also had their good arguments stolen and mangled by the right.

    Yet it seems that radical Marxists are at last growing up and that the post-modernist wing is grappling with its self-contradicting, and implicit approval, of a valueless universe.

    In his recent book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (2016) Žižek distils many of the abstruse elements of his ideas into manageable and helpful commentaries that have a broader base of appeal. The ethical political order, notwithstanding Habermasean attempts at a reconstituted normalization, have collapsed, he argues.

    Freedom of choice is an illusion in a world of disinformation, plummeting educational standards, short-terms contracts, imposed services and privatization. Any alleged freedom we have arrives in a narrow spectrum of choices, subtly imposed upon us through social influencers and technological nudges controlling choices. Or as John Gray put it in The Soul of The Marionette (2015) ‘we are forced to live as if we are free.’

    Žižek and others have demonstrated the sinister developments within late capitalism. Including how a rent for profit model means most of us on low salaries serve undeserving sponsors, leading many into the informal market or the black market by violence or the violence of regulation – as David Graeber explores in his epochal work Debt: the First 5000 Years (2015).

    Other disturbing trends are in evidence, Roberto Saviona in Zero, Zero, Zero (2015) through a sustained analysis of drug cartels, shows how the corporate model of Mafiosi loyalty has been exported into law firms. The lines between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism are thus blurred to a point of near non-existence.

    The ‘woke’ left cannot escape blame for failing to identify the socio-economic issues that really count in peoples lives. Pseudo-feminism plays a class game, marginalizing lower class men as harassers and even demonizing migrants. Indulgence of victimhood has created the abuse excuse.

    The Wretched of the Earth

    Frantz Fanon

    Žižek is quite critical of the great post-colonial Marxist Frantz Fanon and his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth (1961). But Fanon was surely right in identifying a colonial order wherein, ‘the people’s property and the people’s sovereignty are to be stripped from them.’ The Untermensch were obliged to pay the debts of the occupying powers, which is now the international model of austerity.

    Žižek argues that our society of depoliticized and compliant sheep invite disaster. He references the film Blade Runner (1980), which is a useful cultural trope as the older replicants – baby boomers – now need to let go of their accumulated wealth and power. Generation X are at least conscious of false memory syndrome or implanted hopes, and some have the wherewithal to do something about it and no longer settle for being victims. So despite the victim excuse, Fanon and Žižek have much in common in their analysis.

    The reality is that the analysis of Fanon is now in place across the world. The elite or the corporatocracy are a gang, and what amounts to a mafia is running the planet like a colony.

    So the slovenly Slovenian has hit the zeitgeist, and now interacts with more common sense than was evident in his wilder pronouncements of the past. But unfortunately it appears as if the lunatics have already taken over the asylum, and to an increasingly docile audience what he is saying will appear mad, a point that his appearance would appear to affirm.

    Or at the very least his ideas will be packaged by Facebook, so he plays a bit part in the drift or acceleration into the abyss that we must resist.

  • Meeting Samuel Beckett’s Genius in Person and his Plays

    Undeniably, Ireland has produced some of the finest creative writers in the history of the English language. From the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) through to Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who ultimately abandoned English in favour of French, a body of work has expressed a contradictory national character.

    A recurring theme in Irish writing has been what a therapist would refer to as abreaction – the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion. Thus, the drama of colonisation and sectarian division enthralled a global audience, at a remove from what is often the painful direct experience of a dysfunctional state and troubled society.

    On the other hand, we have seen little in the way of philosophical wisdom in Irish letters, apart from George Berkeley (1685-1753), and Edmund Burke (1729-1797) at a stretch. So Ireland must make do with imaginative writers as intellectuals: our novelists of departure, and poets of abstraction.

    I had the good fortune to encounter in the flesh arguably the last in the line of towering figures, Samuel Beckett, in a café in Montparnasse, Paris in 1982.

    Ireland had just won rugby’s Triple Crown in what was then called the Five Nations, before succumbing to the French team at the Parc de Princes, and Beckett was primarily inclined to banter about rugby and cricket with his countrymen. It must be stressed that he was a charmingly convivial person, and while austere, decidedly good company; even when pressed to do so he sedulously avoided discussion of his own work, preferring to muse on the artistic contributions of others.

    That slightly detached dignity, captured in John Minehan’s award-winning photograph was exactly as I found him. A kind and decent man, who concealed a madness arising out of intense creativity. A burning gaze alone revealed the creative fire that raged inside.

    The Last Modernist

    Beckett was the last of the great Modernists. His crucible and training ground was the Paris of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, as well as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a great pity that Beckett never had the chance to meet the author of The Great Gatsby – that great work exploring the vacuity of capitalist aspirations. Fitzgerald matched him for pithiness, although he lacked the same profundity.

    Those were heady days on the Seine, albeit Beckett was late to the party. He acted as a sort of amanuensis to Joyce, assisting him, in a way that is still unclear, in the completion of Finnegans Wake (1939). At one level he seems to have operated like a staff nurse, or what today we call a carer, leading Joyce – who was almost blind by that stage – to his final statement of total incomprehensibility, or brilliance, depending on your viewpoint.

    Photographic portrait of Samuel Beckett as a young man.

    Yet Joyce’s torrent of words – full of richness and fecundity – the psychobabble of tongues and the fiddling with language, had a depressing effect on Beckett aesthetically. It is widely agreed that the latter’s early works, such as Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), and Murphy (1938), did not scale the heights of his post-World War II masterpieces.

    Similarly, I would argue the polyglot innovation found in Joyce’s final work is a form of literary escapism of limited relevance in this dark age of casino capitalism. Linguistic accuracy in marshaling facts is what I prize most highly, and Beckett delivered powerfully in this regard.

    Beckett laconically described the relationship between the two literary titans in the following terms: ‘James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyser, trying to leave out as much as I can.’[i]

    Irish Bluffers

    In my experience the Irish often display a tendency towards loquacity and linguistic chicanery. Unfortunately this provides scope for bluffers and often brings a resistance to facing up to the truth. Too often we take refuge in the deliberate self-deceptions of lyricism, or display a love of rhetoric and bombast that permits falsities.

    As Seamus Heaney puts it in the poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ (1975):

    O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
    Of open minds as open as a trap,

    Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

    Having said that Joyce in his early work, particularly Dubliners, captures some of the spoofing that is still a feature of life in the city, particularly evident politics, where the theatrical pseudo-debaters of hucksterdom are out in force.

    Perhaps if we Irish were better listeners, and concentrated on using language with greater precision, we would not have dug ourselves, collectively and individually, into the awful hole we found ourselves in when the Banks crashed in 2007.

    Uncharacteristically as an Irishman, Beckett is famous for the compression of language, which may explain his departure into French. Not a word is wasted in his writing; but like Joyce, words are sometimes re-invented or used in novel ways. Thus Beckett mangles and distorts language, stripping it to the bone to devastating effect, yet generally enhancing our understanding of it.

    I cannot say I have enjoyed reading all of his oeuvre. The later works, particularly the plays, are heading towards the extinction of language itself, and offer an unsparingly bleak take on both art and human communication. I should add that all of this was in marked a contrast to the chatty and open person I encountered in Montparnasse.

    However, the quartet of plays, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapps Last Tape and Happy Days bear the unmistakable hallmark of genius, a commendation that should also apply to All That Fall, a play for radio memorably dramatized by Michael Gambon in 2013.

    In my view the only playwrights his equal over the course of the twentieth century have been Eugene O’Neill for his A Long Day’s Journey into Night (which is also an exercise in Irish psychosis); Arthur Miller with Death of a Salesman and The Crucible; and perhaps David Mamet for Glengarry Glenn Ross; as well as the best of Bertolt Brecht. Indeed, Brecht was the only twentieth century dramatist of comparable stature, and even then he falls short in my view.

    I would argue the only real modern rival – and that excludes the Bard of Avon –  to Beckett’s Godot or Endgame is his near Irish contemporary Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Surviving an Irish upbringing is never easy. It is perhaps no coincidence that Wilde died a broken man in Paris having endured imprisonment in Reading Gaol – immortalized in verse – his downfall coinciding with the Importance of Being Earnest becoming the toast of London.

    Beckett preserved his genius to the end through an intelligent exile, the default option for Irish creatives and intellectuals. Yeats died in France. Beckett and Wilde in Paris. Joyce in Zurich. Most Irish writers get out Hibernia – ‘the land of winter’ which the Romans chose to steer clear of – if they can.

    In my experience the Irish can be a deeply malicious lot. Anything goes and always has. Our downfall, collectively as a nation, lies in the art of cutting tall poppies down to size, and destroying national heroes. Thus the great nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) was driven to an early grave for an affair out of wedlock with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea.

    Charles Stewart Parnell, driven to an early grave.

    Not all artists, it should be emphasised, lack wisdom and judgment. Beckett aged gracefully and is now buried in modest Parisian grave, where he is treated as a French writer and a hero of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, where he demonstrated true courage.

    The Novels

    Moving on to the novels of Beckett, including the famous, or infamous, post-War trilogy of novels: Molloy (1951); Malone meurt (1951), Malone Dies (1958); L’innommable (1953), The Unnamable (1960). It is here we see a gradual dismantling and delimiting of language. In my view by the time of The Unnameable the artifice has gone too far and the conceit frankly tiresome.

    My favourite novel, suffused with humanity, is Company (1980), which was part of an Indian summer of later works. Company, and indeed Worst Ward How (1983), also demonstrate the compression of language of the greater plays, as well as a playful sense of humour, something he is often unfairly accused of lacking.

    Company is a lyrical and profound statement of his childhood in Leopardstown. Coincidentally, I was born just up the road from Beckett’s childhood home – not two hundred yards away – although not to the same conditions of privilege.

    The compression of language at times in the novels is aphoristic and the statements on the human condition act like gelignite in their exactitude: ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on,’ from The Unnameable, and in the and in the 1983 story Worstward Ho – ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

    There is an effortless font of ridicule in this. Woody Allen would have a field day, as he did in his essay on Irish writers.

    In Our Times

    I am not a literary critic and do not pretend to be one, so I am appropriating Beckett’s legacy for my own purposes.

    It is clear to me that in our post-truth universe we require searing honesty rather than linguistic chicanery of a sort that provides us with ‘known unknowns,’ associated with the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. We need to concentrate on that which matters, which is the truth, forensically researched and conveyed with precise language – and barbed if necessary – thereby providing an accurate portrayal of the human condition and the challenges we confront.

    The extent to which Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou, the great Marxists or post-Marxists of our age, quote Beckett is revealing, although less surprising in the case of the latter given he is French. They quote Beckett to couple both absurdity and engagement, and to demonstrate the effective use of language.

    Thus every lawyer committed to the truth, particularly a criminal defence lawyer, would do well to read and absorb Beckett in order to focus precisely on what is chosen to be said and, equally importantly, left unsaid. Beckett also helps us to recognise the nuances and tropes of language.

    Moreover, a close reading of Beckett embeds a faculty for detecting bullshit: contained in his works you will find an unstinting focus on the essentials to human life.

    What do you mean when you say this? What do you mean by what you say you mean? What do you mean by what you say or said or said then? Why did you do what you did? Who are you, and what do you say you have done?

    Cross examination techniques are of course a poor excuse for a Beckettian aphorisms, but the importance of a literary appreciation in a lawyer should not be underestimated.

    Samuel Beckett in 1977.

    Swift Return

    Other great Irish writers besides the Modernists are also relevant to our present dark age, Jonathan Swift above all else. The Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral received a disappointing sinecure after a controversial career as a journalist in London, where in carrying out his duties he alienated a large amount of influential people. The culmination of his rage arrives at the end of his life in the totemic work: ‘A Modest Proposal’.

    The conceit of that piece, based on acute recognition of the Malthusian capitalism operating at the time, and contempt for absentee landlords, is that rather than letting the poor die in increments it would make ‘economic sense’ to eat their babies whole. This was the ultimate cost benefit analysis approach to law and economics, still evident in our dangerously commoditized world.

    Finally, another Irish Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats is also relevant in this regard, not for the Romantic murmuring of Innisfree, nor the more insightful political poems surveying the grubby inception of the state – ‘And add the halfpence to the pence. / And prayer to shivering prayer’ – but for the mystical poems from 1919 onwards, with their anticipation and exploration of the totalitarianism on the horizon.

    Thus in ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) Yeats anticipates a world of immoderate extremism that has returned to haunts us.

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    he falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    So notwithstanding a tendency towards bluffing and linguistic chicanery, Irish writers have much to offer. Above all Beckett. He reminds us to be precise and exact with our words, while anticipating the age of extremes we have entered – a dark age of neo-liberal meltdown and capitalist excess, with fascism rearing its ugly head again.

    Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy

    [i] Mel Gussow, ‘BECKETT AT 75- AN APPRAISAL’, New York Times, April 19th, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/19/theater/beckett-at-75-an-appraisal.html

  • The Public Intellectual Series: Christopher Hitchens

    Hardly a week goes by without someone asking me about my connection to Christopher Hitchens. Such enquiries are clearly predicated on our common concerns. I suspect at one level my own modest bohemianism and libertarianism has invited comparison. Although we share an unbridled enthusiasm for talking Hitchens was, however, also a great listener, something I am struggling to get better at.

    I had a brief encounter with the man himself one enchanting and admittedly drunken evening. Being then youthful I was somewhat dazzled by his presence, yet more so when the bill for the wine and cognac arrived.

    I found Christopher Hitchens almost preternaturally eloquent, even when plastered. Industrial quantities of booze only seemed to inspire him to new heights, as it does many artists. Nonetheless, he was fortunate to have the constitution of an ox – a unique case and liver to boot. Predictably, it was the cigarettes that killed him in the end.

    Despite a dreadful personal lifestyle in conventional terms, his achievements and outputs – to use a terms whose origin in economics he would have despised – as the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over thirty books, were nothing short of phenomenal. Lifestyle excesses did not undermine his craft or genius.

    Non-compromised Intellect

    As a man of letters, Hitchens is the last in the line of a Belle Époque tradition requiring a confidence trick that Voltaire, George Orwell, Gore Vidal, Albert Camus and, truthfully, few others have pulled off. These were all men who operated in a space of utter independence and autonomy; as journalists not beholden to anyone; as non-compromised intellects, projecting intelligences greater than any academic-for-hire.

    Hitchens himself was a generalist and synthesiser, a man of substance, far removed from the letter writer to a newspaper dismissed as a crank by those who control the message and form the opinions in our dumbed-down zeitgeist.

    He played a role for which there is no job description, as it really does not exist, for he himself defined it through sheer force of will. Self-selected and self-ordained, he was truly a law unto himself.

    It helped that the power brokers adored his transgressive presence. Walking on the wild side, he was a unique, larger than life character. Albeit toadying up to the powerful ultimately mars his legacy.

    He was fortunate to receive the adulation of Americans, and of course he panhandled to them. They loved to debate with this antichrist of an atheist.

    Perhaps they believed such a troubled human being seemed ripe for religious conversion, which of course he never succumbed to. In fact, the very religious doctor who supervised his dying days was anxious for a death bed conversion that never came, all of which is splendidly documented in his book Mortality (2012).

    He might not like the comparison, but it seems to me that like many sincerely committed religious people he held an innocent faith that public debate matters: that serious argument around fundamental questions counts, and continues to shape public opinion.

    Support for Invasion of Iraq

    Hitchens’s blinkered support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on hatred of religion in all its forms, and Islam in particular. He thus stands complicit by proxy in endorsing U.S. terrorism.

    Hitchens failed to acknowledge that the US was acting as a terror state. When President Bush’s chief legal advisor Alberto Gonzalez described the Geneva Convention to be ‘quaint’ and ‘obsolete’[i] it opened to the door to the torture carried out in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

    Guantanamo Bay.

    Having said that at least Hitchens had the good grace to undergo the torture of waterboarding himself under controlled conditions, that he wrote about in a famous Vanity Fair article, declaring ‘Believe Me, It’s Torture.’[ii]

    I happen to share Hitchens’s hatred of extreme religious fundamentalism and jihadi terror tactics, but am not oblivious to their origins, and the even greater danger posed by the maniacs on the far-right of the Republican Party in the U.S.: that triage of evil, Post-Truth, moral relativism and religious fundamentalism that Noam Chomsky has pointed to.

    U.S. Republican extremists, unlike anarchists or deluded and fragmented Islamic jihadists possess true wealth and power, making them really frightening.

    Moreover, on account of his British upbringing Hitchens was not exposed to the Catholic fundamentalism I have encountered, which is in some respects the worst, and certainly the pettiest, of all.

    Attack on Bill Clinton

    There is much to be said in favour of Christopher Hitchens. He was after all, the great Satan to the religious right, predicting, along with Richard Dawkins, the rise of religious fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic. He saw it all coming.

    He also saw our Post-Truth tendencies coming into being, most pertinently in his diatribe against Bill Clinton, No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (1999).

    Indeed, Clinton was the beginning of the end. Bubba is like a fractured image of Trump and Steve Bannon and precursor to their redneck populism. With his forensic mind, Hitchens knew a spin merchant when he saw one.

    Bill Clinton with Donald Trump c.2000.

    Hitchens recognised Clinton as a Populist vulgarian, and ultimately a betrayer and subverter of the liberal cause. He could see that Clinton’s lack of spine, principle and integrity would allow the Neo-Cons to undermine the liberalism he claimed to stand for.

    Clinton is a hillbilly product of an educational system prioritising policy wonking. Today we see far too much emphasis on graft and data retention along with carefully managed communication, which is the obverse of true argumentation. Thus discussion and debate is confined within ever-narrowing parameters.

    Hitchens’s commitment to the Enlightenment values of reason and truth unquestionably dictated an intense dislike of the purveyors of Post-Truth nonsense.

    Hitchens was not, however, as critical of U.S. neo-liberalism as he ought to have been, and his departure from Marxism led to obsequiousness towards the establishment. This ideology, or ‘false consciousness’ in Marxist terms, is laying waste to the world and Hitchens should have seen it coming.

    Perhaps the cognitive dissonance, can be explained in material terms by this intellectual Marxist being on the neo-liberal payroll. He was where the money was, representing the opposing, other times supportive, viewpoints on Fox News. Yet he remained danger to all comers, a white knuckle ride on an unruly horse.

    The Bonfire of the Vanities

    In a sense Hitchens was intellectually mediocre, not unlike Jordan Peterson in that he pandered to the corporate market. The neo-liberal banqueted intellectual, who keeps it safe and ted-talky. Anything can be resolved by one market under god. Well no it cannot.

    Thus, by side-tracking to Islam, supporting the Bushman wars and demonising Clinton he perversely and indirectly served Republican interests. His Marxism twisted and bent like a tattered cover effectively brought endorsement of U.S-led neo-liberalism.

    Hitchens had an opulent and luxurious lifestyle, and I believe it blurred his judgment. Money can corrupt anyone. Indeed, a character in Martin Amis’s book Money (1984) was ostensibly based on him.

    He liked to be indulged, flattered and entertained, and craved an audience too much. The scoop was all important. A neediness to be the centre of public attention was an obviously failing.

    Hichens’s unscrupulous lifestyle, alcoholism and opportunism, some say, is also fictionally documented in Tom Wolfe’s iconic 1980s novel The Bonfire of The Vanities (1987). The fictional character that emerges is far from sympathetic.

    That is not say he was not mostly correct in his arguments. We should judge the ideas rather than the man, who must have been difficult to live with.

    Above all, Christopher Hitchens maintained the idea of public intellectualism, and was a champion of any cause he firmly believed in. He was like a successful Ignatius F O’ Reilly railing against a Confederacy of Dunces (1980), operating in what Gore Vidal termed ‘The Republic of Amnesia.’

    Interestingly, Vidal anointed him as his successor and dauphin. But perhaps unsurprisingly they had a falling out, given there is little of the austere Brahmin in Christopher Hitchens.

    Though he might bridle at the suggestion, Hichens is more like the smooth-talking William F. Buckley, the architect of U.S. neo-liberalism, at least in personality terms. A fractiousness and emotional incompatibility between Buckley and Vidal is also easy to detect in Best of Enemies, a recent documentary about their famous debates and interchanges during the 1968 U.S. Presidential Election.

    Gore Vidal, 2009. Image: David Shankbone

    A One-Off

    Hitchens’s sheer force of personality and will is unlikely to be seen again any time soon. Even his enemies would concede he was a one-off, a public entertainer of such colour and intellect that he was guaranteed to give a performance, and unlike in Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist (1922), the public never tired of it.

    But the heroic lifestyle, involving so much booze, and stage fright no doubt, killed him prematurely. We can, however, draw a few lessons from his intellectual legacy.

    First, to be vigilant to public discourse being hijacked by spin merchants, quacks, false expertise and imbeciles that we now seem to be buying wholesale.

    Secondly, to listen carefully to those who speak consequentially and even cause the necessary offence. These kind of people are being obliterated or subsumed by mindless internet chatter, and sound bites. As Hitchens famously said: ‘My own opinion is enough for me and I claim the right to defend it against anybody, anywhere and if you do not like it stand in line while I kick your ass.

    Thirdly, to recognise that our moral compass of truth is being lost to a religous fundamentalism that appears to be winning.

    Fourthly, we must question the pillars of society just as Hitchens interrogated the roles of Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, to devastating effect.

    His book on Mother Theresa is in fact incendiary. The title the Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995) is a pun of true genius containing a veiled attack on Catholic attitudes towards sexuality, and so called charity.

    Hitchens fillets her to show how the ostensible compassion and charity was really a mask for leaving people to die in appalling conditions, without adequate support mechanisms or proper treatment; in short demonstrating that she was a hypocrite.

    Master of the Polemic

    Excessively religious people like to be seen to be good as opposed to doing good. Tokenism holds sway. Many devoutly religious people I knew were all in favour of the Innocence Project I founded in Ireland; that is as long as it did not interfere with their interests, and of course funding was out of the question.

    Hitchens was the acknowledged master of the polemic, and revived the tradition of the public essay. In this sense his easily digested and short books – beautifully written, precise and pungent – are not just in the line of his great hero George Orwell, but owe a debt also to the tradition of 18th century Anglo-Irish letters, encapsulated by figures such as Jonathan Swift or William Hazlitt.

    His work could also be profoundly serious, at which point he ceased to be just a polemicist. His public education text on The Rights of Man (2006), juxtaposing Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke is a perfect summary of the values of the constitutional Enlightenment. It condenses a lot of learning and is far better than many large treatises on the subject that go unread and unremembered.

    I sense that he appealed to his contemporary audience as a generalist confronting legions of specialists. His ranging intellect contrasted with the products of an educational system that no longer permits all-rounders. When he engaged in his ideal forum of public debate he simply knew too much, and was too articulate with a ready supply of historical and literary allusions that dumbfounded his critics, putting the political spinmeisters on the back foot.

    He achieved glory by unconventional methods, to put it mildly, and it must have astounded him that a third class degree, admittedly from Balliol in Oxford University, brought him so far. He bucked the specialist trend.

    One Man Show

    I wonder whether such a ribald, Rabelaisian figure of jollity and deadly accuracy could gain traction with an audience today. Where would his footholds to glory lie? His unruly lifestyle in these censorious times would probably ensure that he never got past first base.

    At one level it was all a kind of performance. A one man show that went on and on. The clown prince. But what a show it was.

    What his opponents lacked, and he possessed in spades, was depth and interdisciplinary context, and above all else a genius for sharp communication and barbed wit. He used words to nuclear effect and with antennae raised to the fraudulence and hypocrisy of our times.

    He is sadly missed, for our real foes of Post-Truth, moral relativism and the repudiation of Enlightenment values hold a vice-like grip over public consciousness.

    I suspect he was also a little big man, a voice that just had to be heard. Perhaps his oversized personality was a compensation for social maladjustment, and even Asperger Syndrome or similar. Like Oscar in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) he banged on for the sake of the marginalised and those classified as deviant.

    It was the transposition of his erudition and learning in a practical sense to the issues of his time that also defined him. Given the context in which he operated, his life was a minor miracle. A last popular gasp of learning and context that gained traction and a mass audience.

    He once said that our lives only have meaning to the extent that we give them meaning, which is not to condone his attitude towards the women or the booze.

    There was a craving for middle class acceptance for which he had to overcome an inherent vulgarity and crassness. America suited him as a pundit and pugilist of an anti-intellectual vulgarity, who could speak at their level. Being of a kind, he recognised the flaws in Clinton.

    He was never quite an English gentleman. Never officer material.

    In America he was one step, in savvy terms, above the vulgarity around him but still appealed at a frat-boy level. For in the kingdom of the blind man the one eyed man is king.

    [i] Roland Watson, ‘Geneva accords quaint and obsolete, legal aide told Bush’, The Times, March 19th, 2004,  https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/geneva-accords-quaint-and-obsolete-legal-aide-told-bush-q2dqw8f3pz9

    [ii] Christopher Hitchens, ‘Believe Me, It’s Torture, Vanity Fair, August, 2008, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/08/hitchens200808