Cassandra Voices

Author: frankarmstrong

  • Cancer – A Distorted Version of Our Normal Selves

    We have not slain our enemy, the cancer cell, or figuratively torn the limbs from his body … In our adventures we have only seen our monster more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways – ways that reveal a cancer cell to be, like Grendel, a distorted version of our normal selves.
    Harold E. Varmus, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (Stockholm, 1989).

    Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm – substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.
    Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York, 1962)

    Over a decade ago my mother was diagnosed with skin cancer, in the form of a melanoma on her face. At the time this did not seem a big deal, at least once a surgeon had removed the offending growth and performed a successful skin graft. It had been caught early enough to prevent metastasis, or so we thought.

    The ‘scare’ probably shook her more than we recognised. The diagnosis must have realised her worst nightmare after the loss of her own mother, to what seems to have been breast cancer at the age of just fifty.

    Most obviously she became fretful at being exposed to the sun, though by then this would probably have made no difference.

    In hindsight, perhaps she never fully recovered her poise. I suspect an accumulation of worries affected her health, contributing to the later metastasis of the cancer. Revealingly, a recent survey of seventy thousand women, aged seventy or over, showed that an optimistic frame of mind correlated with a reduced risk of cancer, and other fatal diseases. This bolsters Iain McGilchrist’s suggestion that all medicine should be seen as ‘a branch of psychiatry, and psychiatry as a branch of philosophy’.

    Genetic determinism portrays physical bodies as distinct from minds. But this neo-Cartesian view ignores the bewildering complexity of our brains, within which McGilchrist estimates there are more connections ‘than there are particles in the known universe’.

    It should offer solace to those with a genetic history of the disease that minds are exceedingly complex, and malleable, instruments.

    According to Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), ‘the Ancient Roman doctor Galen reserved the most malevolent and disquieting of the four humours for cancer: black bile’. He attributed just one other disease to an excess of this ‘oily, viscuous humour: depression’. Indeed melancholia, the medieval name for ‘depressions’ draws its name from the Greek melan, meaning ‘black’, and khole, meaning ‘bile’; Mukherjee describes how ‘Depression and cancer, the psychic and physical diseases of black bile, were thus intrinsically intertwined.’ Moreover, Andrew Soloman quotes an expert to the effect that anxiety, ‘a response to future lost’, should be regarded as  ‘fraternal twins’ with depression, ‘a response to past lost (quoted in Pollan, 2018, p.389)’.

    Although during the Renaissance Andreas Vesalius (1514-64) established that black bile does not exist, the coupling of the two ailments by Galen, who informed Western medicine for over a millennium, is noteworthy. Contemporary approaches may profitably look backwards, as Mukherjee puts it: ‘Scientists often study the past as obsessively as historians because few other professions depend as acutely on it’.

    That is not to say, of course, that cancer is somehow ‘all in the mind’, but increasing focus on the role of depression or stress, and ways of counteracting these, from spirituality to artistic expression or enjoying the great outdoors, would surely be beneficial.

    II – The Human Genome Project

    Mukherjee argues that cancer ‘is stitched into our genome’: somatic cells, along with the bacteria in our body with which we generally co-exist symbiotically, are in a constant flux of death and renewal, such that most of our cells survive no longer than seven years, before being replaced by new ones.

    As we grow older glitches – entropy – enters into this process of renewal. Mukherjee writes: ‘Oncogenes arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells’. It is usually as if we become jaded by a lifetime’s effort, and errors creep in.

    Predicting the behaviour of these mutations has, however, defied understanding since the ‘War on Cancer’ began in the early 1950s. The outbreak of certain rare forms can be traced to genetic inheritance, but the onset of the vast majority is not preordained.

    Mukherjee argues that ‘the Human Genome Project will profile the normal genome against which cancer’s abnormal genomes can be juxtaposed and contrasted’. However the number of genetic mutations involved in most types runs into three figures.

    At best scientists have been able to glean from genomic evidence that certain individuals do not benefit from particular therapies. But this is not the same as understanding at a cellular level why most cancers appear, and pinpointing the preventative measures which ought to be taken.

    Inescapably, the claims of genomic research arrive through the prism of justifying hefty research grants.

    The author of The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry (2012), Rupert Sheldrake has sought to puncture the optimism of those who believe the Human Genome Project will yield infallible algorithms predicting our future life and health: ‘The optimism that life would be understood if molecular biologists knew the ‘programs’ of an organism gave way to the realisation that there is a huge gap between gene sequences and actual human beings’.

    Mukherjee also acknowledges the great variety of environmental factors, which switch on and on off the genetic mutations which give rise to cancers:

    Our bodies, our cells, our genes are being immersed and re-immersed in a changing flux of molecules – pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses such as radiation and magnetism. Some of these, inevitably, will be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away; our task then is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders.

    Revealingly, in a recent U.S. case a jury awarded DeWayne Johnson €289 million in damages against Monsanto, the manufacturers of Roundup a glyphosate weed killer in compensation for the onset of his cancer.

    Other confounding factors include the emerging field epigenetics, our co-habitation with bacteria – itself in constant evolution – and even altered states of consciousness.

    III – Metastatic Melanoma

    Exposure to the sun’s UV-A and UV-B rays is considered the leading cause of melanomas. The incidence is particularly high among Australians, most of whose ancestors evolved in cool and cloudy Northern European conditions, and, surprisingly, Switzerland, where a fondness for the sunny piste seems to be to blame.

    My mother was not particularly pale-skinned, and nor was she ever a sun-worshipper. I recall her scrupulously applying sunscreen on herself, and her children, on beach holidays. The best guess is the damage stemmed from sunburn as a child or young adult. That her life coincided with a depletion in the ozone layer, which filters UV rays high up in the atmosphere, could also have been a factor. It has even been hypothesised that sunscreen itself contains carcinogenic properties.

    When my mother’s cancer returned three years ago, in the form of tumours on the lung it did not seem such devastating news. The first battle had been won, and why not this? If I had known that a metastatic melanoma is usually considered a death sentence, and that treatments only tend to extend life by a few months, I would have reacted differently.

    I remained bullish in my assessment as, a short time beforehand, she had embraced a wholefood plant-based diet. From the start I was skeptical about the treatment, fearing this could do more harm than good; as the sixteenth century physician Paracelsus put it, ‘every medicine is a poison in disguise’.

    Probably wisely however – though I will never know – I kept my counsel, at least to her, and most of my family. I cannot imagine how I would feel if I had persuaded her to get off the treatment, and she had died soon afterwards.

    However, I recently revisited a passage from Professor T. Colin Campbell’ 2013 book Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition, in which he describes the response of his wife Karen to a metastasised (Stage 3-Advanced) melanoma on her lymph gland. She refused any of the treatment alternatives her oncologist recommended, much to his annoyance.

    Campbell writes perceptively: ‘Cancer patients intensely want to believe in their oncologist, whom they see as holding the key to their recovery’. Despite refusing treatment, including surgery, Karen Campbell, maintaining a wholefood plant-based diet had lived a further eight years by 2013 without ill-effects, and appears to be still alive today. Obviously we cannot extrapolate too much on the basis of one case, but I cannot help asking myself: ‘what if?’.

    My mother was put on one trial treatment, and later a different one, of a form of immuno-therapy, which harnesses the immune system to attack cancer cells. It came as a shock to her system. Some months into it she developed a sore throat and high fever, which eventually required hospitalisation, and an antibiotic drip.

    Living with my parents through much of the long treatment period I was on hand for many of the oncology treatment days, and the debilitating nausea that followed. Her vitality declined precipitously: from being a committed walker, she found it increasingly difficult to go any distance; whether the cancer played a part in this I do not know.

    She managed, nonetheless, to take the odd foreign trip, overcoming her nerves, and became a grandmother to two further grandchildren in that period.

    She lasted almost three years on the treatment, maintaining the plant-based diet throughout – although she did occasionally eat fish after being encouraged to increase her protein intake. According to the consultant she was top of the class on the basis of her scans. He always professed satisfaction at how well she was doing, which did not exactly chime with the increasing levels of nausea she was experiencing. This also required her to take more and more medications, which lowered further her vitality.

    IV – Plant-Based Prevention?

    Disconcertingly, Mukherjee characterises the history of cancer research as, ‘intensely competitive’, and featuring, ‘a grim, nearly athletic, determination’. It seems patient welfare, as opposed to survival, has not always been to the fore, as experts compete for the next breakthrough in extending life, or finding an ever-elusive cure. The same commitment has not, alas, been shown to prevention strategies, which would bring no reward to the pharmaceutical sector that generally funds the research.

    In 2014 a retired Dublin G.P. John Kelly published a book entitled Stop Feeding Your Cancer in which he argued that ‘The minds of cancer specialists were so cluttered with their pharmaceutical and surgical obligations that they were unable to accommodate critical revisionary thinking.’

    Kelly’s account, which has been criticised for cherry-picking data, was inspired by his reading of the same T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study (2005). Campbell, no ethical vegan, conducted experiments on two groups of laboratory rats infected with cancer. The first group were given a diet comprising twenty percent animal protein. They all promptly died, but the second group were given a diet of only five percent animal protein, and all survived.

    Campbell performed these experiments in the Philippines after observing a lower survival rate among affluent cancer patients with diets high in animal products, compared to their impoverished peers on diets low in meat and dairy. In the laboratory Campbell also found vegetable proteins did not promote cancer, even when consumed in large quantities.

    IV Cure or Cause?

    The heartening news at the beginning of this year was that my mother’s tumours had all but disappeared from her lung, but she nevertheless continued to get sicker and sicker.

    Over time her face took on a disturbingly yellowish hue, which was eventually diagnosed as jaundice – in Galenic terms an excess of yellow bile. A good friend who is a G.P. confided to me that the overwhelming likelihood was that this was linked to her cancer.

    Still it was a great shock when the news came through of another tumour blocking her bile duct.

    It required a painful operation, on an already weakened patient, inserting a tube to stanch the flow of bile into the bloodstream. It never worked properly, and she declined painfully from that point, despite my father’s best efforts to master the appendage.

    I cannot help wondering whether, considering the prolonged bouts of nausea, the treatment itself had caused the inflammation which produced the tumour; the history of cancer is replete with examples of ‘cures’ doing more harm than good. For example, many chemotherapy agents are known carcinogens, and listed on the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Group 1 list as such.

    Mukherjee also describes chemotherapists as acting like ‘lunatic cartographers’ who ‘frantically drew and redrew their strategies to annihilate cancer’. My mother went through immuno-therapy, but the basic approach of poisoning the body in order to kill the cancer appears to be the same.

    It also begs the wider question as to whether a prolonged period on a debilitating cancer treatment is a life worth living.

    The absence of preventative cancer programmes in our systems of public health is nothing short of scandalous. The Chicago Tribune acknowledged in 1975 that the idea of ‘preventive medicine is faintly un-American. It means, first, recognizing that the enemy is us’. Where America leads other nations appear to follow.

    In Plato’s idealised Republic, Socrates castigates doctors that prolong the life of patients without curing them. He pays tribute to the carpenter who, after being prescribed a lengthy treatment regimen, replies:

    that he had no leisure time to be ill and that life is no use to him if he has to neglect his work and always be concerned with his illness. After that he’d bid good-bye to his doctor, resume his usual way of life, and either recover his health or, if his body couldn’t withstand the illness, he’d die and escape his troubles.

    There are of course now many procedures that are relatively simple – such as removing skin cancer – but I cannot help feeling, notwithstanding medical advances, that I too would prefer to die on the job rather than go through a debilitating, long-term course of cancer treatment. I prefer the preventative measure of a plant-based diet to reduce my own risk of developing cancer

    V – Depression

    Like many patients after a terminal diagnosis my mother developed symptoms of depression for which she was prescribed medication. She also benefitted greatly from spiritual counselling in the Catholic tradition from a devoted friend.

    She cast away doubts and annoyances with the Church, realising great benefit from simple prayer, during what the philosopher John Moriarty has described as a universal Golgotha experience. This may give Christianity an enduring relevance, despite historic failings.

    Those resistant to religion might consider the effect of psychedelic drugs on terminal cancer sufferers who experience depression. In How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (2018) Michael Pollan reveals how in NYU and Hopkins trials 85% of cancer patients showed ‘clinically significant reductions in standard measures of anxiety and depression that endured for at least six months after the psylocybin sessions’. Fascinatingly, in both trials ‘the intensity of the mystical experience volunteers reported closely correlated with the degree to which their symptoms [of depression] subsided’.

    *******

    There are no simple answers to the questions I have raised in this article, but based on my experience of losing a close relative to cancer, and reading up on the subject, I would argue that we need to alter the paradigm of research, to explore more fully preventative strategies rather than simply addressing the disease after it has emerged.

    Cancer is not all in the mind, and nor does it ever seem likely to be eradicated fully, but that correlation between good health and a sunny disposition is notable. Can general practitioners, in particular, develop ways of lifting our moods – without recourse to medication – while retaining a focus on physical signs of illness? Perhaps we need to train a new kind of physician, with mindfulness at the core of their study.

    Finally, why is it that public health authorities do not display the same commitment to dietary change as is shown towards curbing tobacco smoking? One conclusion that might be drawn is that pharmaceutical companies, and other vested interests, are an obstacle to this coming about.

     

    Jacqueline Armstrong RIP

  • Ancient Irish Sagas

    The following is a short retelling and interpretation of a number of Irish sagas, including two, ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ and ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, from the golden age of Gaelic literature in the early middle ages.

    I – The Second Battle of Moytura

    Cath Maige Tuired  (‘The Second Battle of Moytura’) c. 875 is the centrepiece of the extraordinary Irish Mythological Cycle, relating how the Tuatha Dé (‘god-peoples’) had been oppressed by their enemies the Formorians (Fomoire). It consists of a series of fantastical episodes of enduring interest. We meet a Tuatha Dé exhausted by impossible labours and tributes after the half-Formorian Bres becomes High King of Ireland. He replaces Nuada who had lost his arm and authority in battle.

    We learn that the court physician Diancecht fashions Nuada a prosthetic silver limb in its place. In the meantime, Diancecht’s son Miach begins to heal Nuada’s real severed arm, but the father prefers his own methods and surgically kills his son by removing his brain. Miach is buried by his sister Airmed and from his grave sprout three hundred and sixty-five healing herbs, which she orders in her cloak. Diancecht has other ideas, however, scattering the herbs, each of whose value would remain obscure to humanity.

    In the account of Diancecht’s preference for an artificial arm over Miach’s more complimentary approach, the anonymous poet may be suggesting that the best healing comes from within the body itself, while the scattering of the healing herbs could represent ignorance of the cures freely available in Nature. It also appears that a professional body will seek to preserve its privileged position, in which case this remains a powerful metaphor for the modern pharmaceutical industry. A man with a silver arm presages the contemporary spectre of transhumance, whereby human beings propose to upload their bodies into computers, in fulfillment of René Descartes’s dualistic idea of a homunculus controlling a mechanical body.

    The ‘Second Battle’ parades scenes of Rabelaisian excess, especially involving one character, the Dagda, who undertakes a mission inside the territory of the Formorians. There he meets a distortion of hospitality, whereby he is compelled to consume vast quantities of porridge to a point where is belly is the size of a cauldron. Afterwards he must loosen his bowels before sexual congress with a Formorian princess. In Mark William’s ‘less genteel’ translation: ‘The girl jumped on him and whacked him across the arse, and her curly bush was revealed. At that point the Dagda gained a mistress, and they had sex’. Smutty Irish humour has long antecedents.

    In Jungian terms the Formorians seem to represent the nefarious shadow of the Tuatha Dé, an external, exploitative force that corrupt and indebt the native inhabitants, a narrative familiar to contemporary Ireland. However, the half-Formorian Bres is eventually succeeded by Lug, who is also of mixed parentage. Yet he combines all the highest attributes of the áes dána (skilled people). Lug and Bres differ in that the former’s father is Tuatha Dé and his mother Formorian, while the latter’s ancestry is the reverse.

    This might appear as simply an expression of approval of patriarchal descent. There is however a richer symbolic meaning available if we see a balance in Lug’s mixed ancestry between the thrusting, will-to-power of male energy on his Formorian mother’s side, and the earthier characteristics of the Tuatha Dé, that equate with female love, on his father’s side. He achieves wholeness when, paradoxically, the female characteristics arrive through a dominant male parentage wherein the thrusting Formorian energies are contained (Mf:Fm = Fm). Bres differs in that the ‘male’ Formorian outlook is ascendant as it arrives from a dominant male father, repressing his ‘caring’ Tuatha Dé ‘feminine’ energies (Mm:Ff = Mf).

    Another fascinating scene occurs after the Formorians are vanquished and Lug captures the errant Bres, who pleads for his life by proposing the Tuatha Dé should plant crops four times a year. Lug recognises this as impossible, or unsustainable, and only spares his foe when he reveals how the men of Ireland could operate a plough. According to Mark Williams in his indispensable Ireland’s Immortals: The history of the gods of Irish myth (2017): ‘the Formorians in the saga are characterized by a monstrously exploitative and unnatural relationship to the organic world, in a strange anticipation of contemporary agri-business’. This may be so, but Lug’s character also has a Formorian dimension, that, crucially, is contained positively by his (Fm) parentage. Similarly, in this episode, when Bres’s knowledge is refined from the approach of ploughing the earth four times a year, we find he confers a crucial skill. The relationship between the Tuatha Dé and the Formorians may also have been a commentary on the benefit of accommodating the skills of Norse raiders, then besetting Ireland, who also brought technological advances in agriculture and sailing.

    There are lessons here for a contemporary audience insofar as we need both a thrusting, male, Formorian, energy, to put a plan into action but crucially it is the caring, ‘female’ Tuatha Dé approach that should guide our endeavours. It is the dominance of the Formorian mind that brought us the Atomic bomb.

    II – The Wooing of Étaín

    Tochmarc Étaín (‘The Wooing of Étaín’) c.800-1000 is a colourful tale of romantic intrigues and magical spells, featuring perhaps the greatest femme fatale in Irish literature. Based on recurring shape-shifting, we find hints of belief in metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls – preceding Christianity. Only fully translated in 1930, Irish Revivalists such as W.B. Yeats were besotted by the intrigues. Here the Tuatha Dé are reduced from the giants of the ‘Second Battle’ to ethereal síde, ‘faeries’, living in síd mounds, familiar in folklore today.

    When Midir of the Tuatha Dé demands that Aengus his foster son gives him the most beautiful woman in Ireland in compensation for the infliction of an accidental injury trouble begins. She is Étaín, who Aengus ‘earns’ by performing a series of tasks for her father, the high king of Ireland. Aengus then presents her to Midir, who, however, already has a wife in Fúamnach. She does not take kindly to the new arrival, eventually turning her into a giant bluebottle with a magic spell. Even in this altered state Midir finds fulfilment in her company, and the divine Calliphora vomitoria performs various miracles along the way. Furious, Fúamnach summons great winds to drive Midir’s buzzing consort away. Eventually, exhausted, she falls into the drinking vessel of a woman who swallows her and becomes pregnant, reproducing Étaín 1,002 years after her original birth.

    The beauty is then married off to another high king of Ireland Eochu. Unfortunately his brother Ailill, upon setting eyes on her, falls hopelessly in love, and starts to waste away. Ailill confesses his feelings to her whereupon the blood returns to his cheeks. In order to cure him fully the obliging Étaín assents to an amorous exchange, but insists, for the sake of propriety, this should not take place under the king’s roof. In the meantime, the apparently immortal Midir puts Ailill to sleep and assumes his form, revealing to Étaín their ancient love when they finally meet. She agrees to give it another go, but only if Eochu agrees to sell her. Naturally he refuses, only for Midir to win her from him in a game of chess after bluffing for the first two rounds. Still Eochu refuses to give up his wife, defending Tara, the seat of the Irish high king, with all his men. Undeterred, Midir miraculously appears inside Tara where the lovers embrace and transmogrify into swans that escape through the skylight together. In response Eochu orders his men to dig up every síd mound in the country. At this stage Midir plays a trick on him by returning a replica of Étaín, who, it transpires, is actually Eochu’s daughter, Étaín having been pregnant with her.

    Eochu’s fate is in an interesting inversion of the Oedipus myth, and echoes Jung’s understanding of the collective unconscious whereby ignorance and unawareness carry the greatest offence. As van der Post puts it: ‘in Greek myth, legend and art, the villain is always the ignorance where it serves as representative of inner unawareness.’ In this tale the folly lies in denying the expression of love, especially when the Tuatha Dé are involved. Nevertheless Étaín is a moral exemplar bound by social conventions reflected in her refusal to dishonour Eochu’s home with Ailill whose recovery reflects the benefit of giving vent to passions. Also, Étaín only agrees to return to Midir if Eochu consents. Having lost Étaín in chess he welches on the bet and is punished by unconsciously committing the taboo of incest. The enduring image is of two swans, who in nature mate for life, joyfully escaping. The idea of beauty inhabiting the generally disparaged bluebottle attests to a joyful relationship with Nature. As the Eesha-Upanishad says: ‘Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.’

    III – A Change in Attitude

    From 900 there is a shift in the name of the Túatha Dé, crystallizing as Túatha Dé Danann, ‘the Peoples of the Goddess Danu’ in about 1200 which Williams suggests may have been ‘a deliberate attempt at inducing mental estrangement’. In the later middle ages we find pseudo-histories such as ‘The Book of Invasions’ (Lebor Gabála Érenn) c.1150 which tells the story of Ireland and its various waves of settlers and invaders from the time of Noah’s Flood to the era of the Gaels or ‘Milesians’, meaning the ethnic Irish themselves. Here the Tuatha Dé are stripped of godlike qualities and are instead imagined as a race of pagan necromancers preceding the Gaels. Historicising the Tuatha Dé also winnowed the creative possibilities available to poets, and Irish language literature thereafter fails to scale the earlier heights. The Tuatha Dé become darker presences usually associated with human failings.

    Suspicion extends to their bewitching music. In one episode of the ‘The Colloquy of the Elders’ (Accalam na Senórach) c.1220 the character of St. Patrick expresses these reservations: ‘Good it was,’ said Patrick, ‘were it not indeed for the magical melody of the síde in it.’ Yet their creative presence is still acknowledged in traditional Irish music: the word for session is derived from síde.

    ‘The Tragic Death of the Children of Lir’ (Oidheadh Chloinne Lir) c.1450 is a tale familiar around the world. The story involves a wicked step-mother Aoife whose magic transforms Lir’s two sets of twins from his first wife into swans. Forced to endure what is portrayed as an unhappy fate their resolve is strengthened by one of them, Fionnghuala, who seems to have an inner knowledge of Christian revelation. Eventually they meet a saintly monk called Mochaomhóg who baptises them, whereupon the spell is broken and they become aged human beings who die and ascend to heaven. It is worthwhile comparing this to the ‘Wooing of Étaín’, where shape-shifting into swans is an affirmative escape into Nature.

    But according to Laurens van der Post:

    the bird always and everywhere from Stone-Age man to Stravinsky has been the image of the inspiration, the unthinkable thought which enters our selves like a bird unsolicited out of the blue, it was for Jung … one of the signs of confirmation from nature that sustain the spirit in its search for enlightenment and emancipation from the floating world of appearances.

    In ‘The Tragic Death of the Children of Lir’ a censorious cage is placed over the bird of imaginative possibilities, which fitted neatly with the domineering Catholicism of independent Ireland. The worth of life as a swan is rejected, as a dissipated human form is preferred, as long as salvation is available from the one true Apostolic Church.

    ‘The Tragic Deaths of Children of Tuireann’ (Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann) c.1500 returns to the subject-matter of the ‘Second Battle of Moytura’, but at this point internal rivalry bedevils the Tuatha Dé, leading to the murder of Cian, the father of Lug, by the sons of Tuireann. The sons attempt to bury Cian’s mangled remains six times but each time the Earth rejects his body, illustrating Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious where nature itself rises up against a nefarious deed. This idea is also found in Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin (1868) where a murdered husband haunts the landscape of those responsible for the deed, his wife and her lover who are driven to commit suicide together.

    Lug intuits that the sons are responsible for the deed and succeeds in gaining a commitment for them to pay éric, the legal compensation for homicide. Unsurprisingly the sons meet a sorry fate in their quests to satisfy this, but perhaps more interesting is the depiction of the Tuatha Dé as an enfeebled race incapable of contending with the Formorians. The illusion to the fractious politics of that period is obvious, and as Gaelic Irish culture crumbled after the Tudor conquest and subsequent plantations the vibrancy of the side diminished in parallel, until their resuscitation, ironically mainly via descendants of the conquerors, during the Irish Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

  • An Irish Poet Attains Greatness

    I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O’Siadhail’s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter a paradise of compromise, love and engagement, whilst crisscrossing the disabling specialisms that bedevil our time.

    Inspired in particular by Dante Alighieri’s thirteenth century journey through heaven, hell and purgatory in The Divine Comedy, O’Siadhail introduces us to men especially, and women, who have shaped, and distorted, our modernity. The Italian poet himself is channelled, offering to guide O’Siadhail’s journey through hell to ‘heaven’s vertigo’, ‘And summing up an era work the seam / Between the modern world and its aftermath’.

    T.S Eliot’s influence also lurks in the poem’s title – an allusion to his The Four Quartets – which, O’Siadhail writes in the introduction, ‘feels it needed a fifth part’, as it ‘never really gets to the joy and let-go of an imagined heaven’. The influence of that American poet is held in check, as this literary shark, ‘demands an absolute / To order seas of doubt which rage inside’.

    Moral absolutists are, without fail, scorned in O’Siadhail’s schema. The heaven which he glimpses is never fixed, but in play, and informed by the principle of uncertainty. Similarly, utopia, ‘no place’, is a term frequently used to denigrate those theorists whose intellectual pride obscures a vision of an elusive paradise.

    O’Siadhail’s muses are numerous, but ‘Madame Jazz’, an earlier incarnation, acts as a Virgil-like sidekick throughout.

    Although each sacred book’s a lip-read score,
    Improvising there is always more;
    You jazz on what’s our own and our rapport.

    Each solo and ensemble of a piece,
    Grooves and tempos shifting without cease,
    We flourish in a syncopated peace.

    In all our imperfections we advance,
    Trusting in creation’s free-willed chance;
    Sweet Madam Jazz, in you we are the dance.

    Her gyrations allow O’Siadhail to fix on a horizon in constant, though not immediately apparent, motion.

    In the final section, we also encounter Dante’s Beatrice, who perhaps best captures the rupture which O’Siadhail’s work seeks to heal:

    You mortals down below can fail to see
    how marvels coded in the universe
    reflect the face of God’s infinity.

    Too graceless, too constrained, you still immerse
    yourselves in steps and miss out on the dance –
    the scientists and poets don’t converse

    or celebrate each quantum of advance,
    discovering a heaven’s cameo
    in God, the gambler’s mix of love and chance.

    Laurens van der Post wrote: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call “religion”, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’ O’Siadhail’s work may help restore a moral compass to the great scientific adventures, which have brought mastery over planet Earth, but often with unintended, or unacknowledged, costs. Religious, including many poets, in turn, might no longer see themselves as being in opposition to science, but in fruitful communication with its inherent mysteries.

    II – The badger and the fox.

    In the first quintet, Making, we meet a host of writers, musicians and artists, who are assigned in haikus (or ‘saikus’ – a neologism) an animal or plant spirit. These are followed by carefully crafted sonnets, combining narrative accounts and artists’ voices, channelled through O’Siadhail. He rhapsodises on the achievements of many, but there are stinging observations on the artistic limitations, or myopia, of others.

    Thus, William Wordsworth’s legacy is tainted by a failure to generate the epics he had dreamed of, his Prelude represents: ‘All Foothills to the peaks you never reached’; while Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Youth’s promise’ was diminished ’in opium’s malaise’.

    That arch-worrier Franz Kafka is consigned to a ‘sleepless hell’, as O’Siadhail condemns him for feeding ‘… the wizened dreams of minds withdrawn / Your nightmare’s broken trust denying dawn.’ While Pablo Picasso has become, ‘A famous for being famous millionaire’, unhinged by fortune and acclaim.

    For others there is reverence, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for never deviating from a desire ‘to stanch life’s sufferings’, and having, ‘No truck with any cause but moral truth’. In his compassion we find a ‘glimpse of paradise’.

    Classical composers including Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gustav Mahler and J. S. Bach are also celebrated, but Richard Wagner, ‘a lone wolf’, is condemned for mustering dark nationalistic forces. Elsewhere, O’Siadhail’s George Frederic Handel conveys the sublime balance of his oeuvre.

    I only want to hold the music’s line
    A flighty psyche focused on its goal
    So every voice can shine but not outshine,
    From all the woven parts create the whole.

    Painters are less evident among these shades, but his description of Francisco Goya’s ‘Third of May’ ’merits retelling:

    Where fusiliers have turned their nameless back
    And bend to execute their point blank prey;
    My lamp of pity lights the victim’s face.

    The ‘Third of May’, by Francisco Goya.

    Irish readers will be intrigued by his encounters in our literary pantheon. Suitably, W.B. Yeats is depicted as a badger, ‘the churning digger / With its nose close to the ground’. O’Siadhail hails him as ‘the archpriest of sound’, and, unusually, integrates and adapts many of his lines, such as ‘Old lecher with a love on every wing’, from the still smouldering Tower.

    But there is a stern rebuke for his promotion of eugenics: ‘scorning base-born products of base beds’, and unwillingness to look beyond a fantastical world that is, ‘dead and gone … That perfect past your mind’s own cul de sac’. Instead O’Siadhail urges: ‘Retrieve best thoughts once shed and then move on’.

    Characterised as a badger, W.B. Yeats.

    O’Siadhail is similarly conflicted over James Joyce’s legacy, admitting to loving a language ‘burbling up in play’. From one great linguists to another, O’Siadhail tells him he is as good a reader as, ‘you’ll get to understand your punning riverrun’, but counters, ‘I know the charge of words, and yet and yet’.

    He wonders if his fellow Jesuit-educated writer’s works hold, ‘a microscope that is too small in scale’, and whether, ‘in the end does anything take flight’. This might come as a relief to those who have baulked at Finnegans Wake’s circumlocutions.

    O’Siadhail is suspicious of a character ‘so proud and so obsessed’, for whom others are ‘walk on parts in your world’s play’. He scorns the, ‘dreamlike doodling of an introvert’. But there is high praise indeed for Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, including a playful pun of his own:

    Still once at least, though in a woman’s voice,
    I didn’t pun or try to be opaque
    But spoke my shortest playful work of praise
    And yes, in Molly’s yes I did reJoyce.

    The other two Irish writers we meet are Patrick Kavanagh, ‘A kamikaze trusting in God’s wind’, who, ‘In hungry times’, paid the price’, for being a ‘peeping Tom who lusts for paradise’; along with praise for Brian Friel’s ‘impish wit’.

    Notably absent are Seamus Heaney (who has perhaps been canonized prematurely?), and Samuel Beckett. Elsewhere O’Siadhail has criticised the interiority of Modernists, who refused to take responsibility ‘for shaping a wider meaning’. He continues:

    Apart from the risk of solipsism and plain self-indulgence, there is the risk of turning poetry into a kind of private piety, which ends up marginalising poetry or branding it as some kind of academic pursuit not appropriate to the ordinary reader of books.

    Refreshingly, however all-encompassing his themes, O’Siadhail’s language is never self-indulgent, and always endeavours to inform.

    III – ‘The Dismal Science’

    O’Siadhail tells the story of the making and undoing of our modernity by theorists and movers and shakers, as he seeks to reshape our current approaches. The self-imposed constraints of metre, and often rhyme, bring a pleasant economy of expression.

    O’Siadhail’s ambition to tell the story of our time in The Five Quintet recalls the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which draws together the mythologies that informed an understanding of the ancient world  in order to forge a new consciousness. Here the Classical titans give way to seminal figures such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, J. M. Keynes, Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen, along with men of commerce, who are today often vemerated as heroes.

    The bargain struck, the business done,
    The dealer’s will and drive for wealth,
    Our new concern with number one.

    One self-interested specimen on display is Ireland’s own Michael Fingleton:

    Still bent on short-term deals to boost
    A bottom line. A bonus-gained,
    Already on your way to ruin
    All caution to the winds – who cares?
    Ambitious tiger burning bright
    And brazen in your riot-run
    You do not know the dust you’ll bite.

    It seems unlikely O’Siadhail sought legal advice on the potential for defamation in this section. It would certainly make for quite a trial to find the poet in the dock against the disgraced banker. A defence of justification should be available for the following lines:

    Small loaners find you’ll go to law
    To take your pound of flesh to pay
    What’s owed; for bigger borrowers
    You bend or buck to make the rules,
    Indulge whatever debts occur.

    There is a nuanced treatment of Adam Smith’s contribution to economic theory. Laissez faire, permits ‘the hidden hand’ to operate, leading to competition which generates efficiencies, but which at all times requires vigilance against ‘crafty dealers’ in league, ‘to fix a price and profit by intrigue’.

    O’Siadhail’s ‘modern mind’ cannot understand, however, Smith’s failure to rail against children being harnessed in black holes ‘Deep down in Durham’s shafts and pits’. He also points to the irony of merchants, ‘Whose mean rapacity you taunt’, adopting Smith as their first forebear.

    O’Siadhail has interesting reflections on Robert Malthus, who may yet be vindicated in his prediction that food production capacity will not keep pace with the demand of a growing population:

    Your thesis bites so near the bone.
    Malthusian views now haunt our thoughts;
    These times will know a darker tone.

    Is this the onset of a devastating Climate Change he is referring to?

    O’Siadhail is conflicted in his appreciation of Karl Marx, hailing him as a visionary who foresees ‘as no one else had seen’, that four hundred billionaires would hold just half our wealth, alongside the ‘constant gyres of boom and bust’, apparent in late capitalism.

    Karl Marx, ‘a know-all coldness’.

    But according to O’Siadhail, the Communism that Marx imagines contains a core failing evident in its designer, ‘a know-all coldness at your core’. Indeed, being a ‘know-all’ is an oft-repeated barb, leading to the delusion of utopia. This point is central to O’Siadhail’s diagnosis of what has brewed many of our present troubles. Thus Marx is condemned for failing to conceive of compromise, ‘Where conflicts would be reconciled’.

    We also meet J.M. Keynes who learns by listening to his peers, and is thus lionised as a ‘Soft changer, saint of step by step’, who recognises how, often, only government stimuli will lift an economy out of the doldrums:

    The system does not cure itself;
    So maybe it needs money lent
    To make it flow and multiply

    Far less favourable is O’Siadhail’s assessment of Milton Friedman, another ‘know-all’, whose rigour ‘will room no doubt / Your mind demands all black and white’. While acknowledging he served up some neglected thoughts, O’Siadhail chides him for using Keynes’s ‘one defect’ – of failing to appreciate the significance of monetary supply – to justify opposition to all state interference with the ‘hidden hand’.

    Instead we find: ‘Free flow finance gives quick-fix gains / But blows up bubbles that must burst’, where, ‘The wily then are winners all’. O’Siadhail plumbs for the Scandinavian laws: ‘Where weak need not go to the wall’.

    One Scandinavian theorist we meet is Thorstein Veblen, who reveals an acute understanding of why workers are not always sympathetic to Marxist ideas.

    Society does not cohere in hate–
    All workers really want to emulate
    Their boss – the weak are would-be rich at heart;
    If Marx had not been wrong and me not right
    The poor would tear society apart.

    O’Siadhail sees a need for more than Marxist materialism to meet the challenge of inequality. The height of wisdom arrives from a woman, and ‘cub economist’, Kathryn Tanner, who finds in the ‘love-dream born of Bethlehem’ the possibility of mending the distortions of the market place.

    Tanner, through O’Siadhail, says:

    Is this utopian, I hear you ask,
    A heaven here on earth, a hopeless task,
    Another revolution run roughshod?
    O no! It’s here and now we must uphold
    The common right of all to gifts of God.

    This is perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Christianity of this world’, grounded in earthly challenges, rather than lofty metaphysics. One might also discern the influence of his intellectual brother-in-arms the theologian David Ford.

    IV – The Art of the Possible

    The next section, entitled Steering, meditates on good governance. O’Siadhail decries the fantasists of left and right, while bemoaning ‘tweedle dee’ and ‘tweedle dum’ politics, such as we find in Ireland. He warns: ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy.’

    O’Siadhail’s continues to inveigh against ‘know-all’ attitudes, warning the reader to guard against the real sympathies of utopians.

    Fear ideas that outreach the heart,
    Chilled compassion of the ideologue.
    What purports to pity broken lives
    Often hides a know-all arrogance
    That wants to own the future and the past,
    So refuses, starting from the now.
    Greedy for the perfect all create
    Hells of blood and soil and golden age.

    Readers might be intrigued by his descriptions of Margaret Thatcher, ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’, as an autocrat. Her parvenus attitude reflects Thorstein Veblen’s earlier insights into the aspirational, “would be rich”, working class:

    Some who shin the tall and greasy pole
    Carry in their bones a sympathy,
    Want to spare all comers such a climb;
    Others vaunt their courage and condemn
    Weakness they had fought to overcome,
    See all frailness as a threat to power.

    Margaret Thatcher: tearing apart society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.

    In O’Siadhail’s account Thatcher is prompted by Keith Joseph, ‘To rethink all in Milton Friedman’s words’. This leads to the tearing of society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.

    There is also an intriguing description of the arch-networker, Jean Monnet, one of the original architects of the European Community. O’Siadhail traces the current fraying of the Union right back to the failure of Monnet and others to conjure, beyond simply commerce and trade, a European identity, based on ‘deeper bonds and ties’.

    Perhaps writing in the wake of the Greek and Irish bailouts, O’Siadhail seems wary of ‘Brussels’ one-fits-all’ approach:

    Starred blue flag so dutifully raised,
    Still not fluttering in our chambered hearts
    Heaven is no timeless superstate.

    In Canto 5 of this section, ‘A Beckoned Dream’, O’Siadhail reveals a political paradise comprising of William Ewart Gladstone, who accepted Irish Home Rule, Mahatma Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold, the ‘United Nations’ guiding star of peace’, Nelson Mandela and, less convincingly, former Irish President Mary McAleese, who is commended for building sectarian bridges among ‘Ghosts of Europe’s once religious wars.’

    I found this choice puzzling as McAleese was more of a figurehead as Irish President, and did less to interrogate the rising tide of inequality in Ireland than her successor Michael D. Higgins. Moreover, McAleese was an electoral candidate (in the 1987 General Election) for Fianna Fail under the corrupt leadership of Charles Haughey, who also tactically rejected the reconciliatory Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and her Presidential candidature came during the tenure of another tainted figure in Bertie Ahern.

    I would prefer to have seen greater emphasis on environmental responsibility in this cockpit, as humanity stares down the barrel of self-inflicted ecological collapse. Perhaps some will be frustrated by the idea that political change cannot arrive more quickly than in ‘Fractions less imperfect than before’, considering the challenges that now press against us, but his emphasis on the value of dialogue is surely correct: ‘Gaze-to-gaze in our humanity / Enmity we can thaw … ’

    V – God and Science

    The two final cantos Finding and Meaning, covering Science and Philosophy, might stretch most readers more than the first three; although O’Siadhail never succumbs to drawing too liberally from his rich pallet of languages and knowledge. It will be intriguing to encounter scientific responses to his account of the great leaps forward in our understanding of the universe.

    Following his rejection of the fixity of political utopias, O’Siadhail sees a cosmos born of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, as opposed to a ‘knotty crossword yielded clue by clue’ that is capable of completion. Here we encounter a God that plays dice.

    In Meaning, O’Siadhail continues to riff (in Dante’s own terza rima) on the unknowableness of the divine:

    Allow our God a purpose not our own
    and here outside a timeless roundelay
    we dance within our fragile ecozone

    Here we meet the shades of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and a sneering Friedrich Nietzsche, who is condemned for a lack of compassion, and an unwillingness to compromise, yet:

    Despite his detached mind’s strange solitaire,
    for all mad Nietzche’s overreaching claims,
    his genius shows how humans overbear;

    Next come Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre – dismissed as a ‘a braggadocio of angst that sinks / to vanish in the nothingness of hell’ – Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricouer, Said Nursi, and Jean Vanier, who wonders ‘What if the weak become our first concern / what if such love decides our balance sheet’.

    Vanier also offers encouragement to the poet:

    this poem may be a slow fuse to guide
    the moments in our psyches which allow
    an amplitude, a deeper second sight.

    Then Hannah Arendt again condemns:

    Utopians who weave their gossamer
    ideal never see the here and now;
    for such far sight the present blur,

    We also meet O’Siadhail’s first wife, who died some years ago after a long illness:

    In your compassion, Bríd, I think I grow
    and understand how only love can heal;
    I learn to feel what others undergo.

    Finally, there is a dreamy vision of Paradise in which O’Siadhail travels along a path between two parallel rows of trees each ‘interwoven with its counterpart’, ‘in curves of paradox which shape the light’.

    VI – Poetic Futures

    O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets synthesises many of the great intellectual questions of our time. In so doing O’Siadhail fits Robert Graves’s description of a poet as, ‘the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that.’ O’Siadhail keeps asking the big questions, having refused the easy chair of academia, where poetry often becomes an obscure word game, and a private members’s club. Authentic poetry may still be difficult, but this arises from considering profound questions.

    The length of The Five Quintets also poses the question as to whether long form, epic, poetry may come back into vogue.

    Previously, the Canadian literary critic Northrope Frye argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s essay ‘The Poetic Principle’, published posthumously in 1850, had a ‘tremendous influence on future poetry’. Poe proposed that a long poem was a contradiction in terms, and that all existing long poems of genuine quality consisted of moments of intense poetic experience, ‘stuck together with a connective tissue of narrative or argument which was really versified prose.’

    Frye regarded this as preposterous, but a preference for brevity, which may mask a lack of ambition or vision, is still apparent.

    May we revisit a Romantic Age to recover long form poetry, when poets, such as Coleridge and Shelley, were participants in scientific debates? Indeed the word science was only coined in the 1830s. Since then it has become the preserve of specialists.

    The master poet. Image (c) Julia Hembree Smith.

    I was a little disappointed not to meet the shade of Shelley, who had less than thirty years to impart his genius. Perhaps O’Siadhail shrank from the apparent violence of his near namesake’s earlier pronouncements on the ‘necessity’ of atheism and the revolutionary sentiments of much of his early verse, but over the course of his short life his outlook mellowed.

    Just as Shelley’s challenged vested interests, similarly I suspect The Five Quintets will make some readers distinctly uncomfortable: first, it exposes gaping holes in most of our appreciation of the wonders of human thought and creation; secondly, it challenges the social and economic structures we live under; thirdly, it dismisses the delusional quick-fixes of utopians; finally, he challenges a prevalent view that religion and science are irreconcilable.

    I also anticipate that the poem will only be given the credit it deserves in Ireland once it has received the imprimatur of international critics.

  • A Sanctuary away from Ireland’s Cow Herds

    W.B. Yeats’s poem, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ retains an appeal more than a century after its publication in 1899. Musicians in particular – from Christy Moore to Mike Scott – have been drawn to its magical imagery and measured cadences.

    One cruel New Years’s morning a few years ago its opening lines: ‘I went out to the hazel wood, / Because a fire was in my head’, popped into my head after romantic hopes had been dashed the night before. I realised a dose of Nature was the only conceivable cure.

    Like Yeats, most of us feel overwhelmed by our racing thoughts at times. Then the sanctuary of a forest or running water can still the mind. Nothing ever feels quite so bad in a beautiful natural setting.

    We may also draw lessons there, as in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, where Duke Frederik finds ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’.

    But what if, instead of a resplendent Nature, we encounter a degraded landscape and poisoned waterways? What message burns into our souls if the hazel woods are reduced to cow fields or sitka spruce plantations, where birdsong is no longer heard?

    Even in Yeats’s time there were few of the virgin forests, which once covered the entire island. As Frank Mitchell puts it:

    It is hard for us to picture the majesty and silence of these primeval woods, which stretched from Ireland far across northern Europe. We are accustomed to an almost treeless countryside, and if we can find anywhere some scraps of ‘native’ woodland, we are disappointed by the quality of the trees(1).

    And the picture is getting worse, with increasing use of chemicals, and intensification of agriculture: the Slow Death of Irish Nature.

    Irish agriculture is neither efficient, timeless, nor equitable. It remains afloat because of European subsidies, holding in perma-frost a system designed to satisfy the appetites of the British Empire, enriching a small number of large farmers and industry barons especially, while most farms teeter on the brink.

    Structural deficiencies are skillfully concealed from the Irish people by obsequious, and often corrupt, politicians, a desultory education system, and a compliant media. Only the prospect of hundreds of millions in fines for failure to reduce runaway Greenhouse Gas Emissions may save the land from further despoliation; but even one mitigation strategy, of planting monoculture plantations, is eroding biodiversity further.

    The exploitation of Ireland’s Nature goes hand in hand with the exploitation of millions of domesticated animals and human beings.

    Karl Marx highlighted a disturbed metabolic interaction between human society and the environment under a capitalist system, which he termed metabolic rift. The intensification of agriculture depletes nutrients from soils, which Marx viewed as analogous, and kindred with the exploitation of labour, leading to an alienation from Nature.

    ­II – The Great Hunger

    To my knowledge Ireland (North and South) is the only substantial region in the world with a lower population today than in the 1840s. The population peaked at almost 8.5 million, and has only reached 6.5 million today – a considerable rise on the 1950s, when it had dipped below three million in the South.

    The steady decline was intimately connected to a shift away from a predominantly mixed agriculture, with an emphasis on tillage and subsistence, to a system based almost exclusively on generating livestock for the Imperial British market.

    The catalyst was the Great Famine 1845-1850, although the move away from tillage was also a product of Britain finding cheaper sources of grain after the Napoleonic Wars. Remarkably, according to Amartyra Sen: ‘In no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of the people killed … as large as in the Irish famine of the 1840s(2)’.

    The Great Famine was devastating to the three million depending, almost exclusively, on the potato for nourishment. By the eve of the disaster that vulnerable cohort of cottiers and subtenants occupied just one million acres, representing a mere five percent of the of the total acreage of land suitable for agriculture(3).

    With twenty million acres available to produce the population’s food, even with the worst conceivable crop failures, an abundance of food could have been grown to feed the entire population. But the market demanded cattle ‘on-the-hoof’, exported live to England, and other livestock products. The land was not the patrimony of the people, but a generally absent landlord class.

    To produce and trade commodities for the Empire required a substantial comprador class, who profited from the shift. Famine survivors took advantage of the land clearances as Kerby A. Miller writes:

    an unknown but surely very large proportion of Famine sufferers were not evicted by Protestant landlords but by Catholic strong and middling farmers, who drove off their subtenants and cottiers, and dismissed their labourers and servants, both to save themselves from ruin and to consolidate their own properties(4).

    Abandoned cottage, County Sligo.

    Strong farmers and merchants formed the backbone of the political movements which agitated for possession of the land, and ultimately Irish independence. But tenant ownership and national sovereignty did not reverse the agricultural transition of the post-Famine era. This system depended on low labour inputs for profitability, ensuring a rapid flow of emigration throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

    Revealingly, when works were undertaken on the substantial farmhouse where my father grew up in Sligo the slates on the roof were dated to the 1840s. It is disturbing to consider a prosperous farmer building his homestead there off the back of wealth from lands seized from smallholders. Joe Lee imagines the effects across much of the country:

    They will have seen corpses, if not in their own dwellings, then on the roads and in the ditches. Many are likely to have felt a degree of guilt, of the type that often afflicts survivors of tragedies, not only of the Holocaust, but of events like earthquakes, and mining catastrophes … A sense of guilt can simmer below the surface to perhaps breakout in uncontrollable and, to uncomprehending outside observers, in apparently inexplicable ways(5).

    The Irish nation still lives with an echo of this survivor guilt, that has expressed itself in ways we do not yet fully comprehend. One such may have been a distortion of sexuality amidst extreme piety; another perhaps, a loathing for the land itself, still expressed in a ruthless exploitation that often seems wanton in its disregard.

    III – Irish Farming Today

    Teagasc’s recent National Farm Survey for 2017 revealed there were 84,599 farms in Ireland, with an average of income of €31,374. Of these 15,639 were dairy farms with an average income of €86,115. There were a mere 7,387 tillage farms (many growing feedstuffs for livestock), with an average income of €37,158. The remainder – three quarters of all farms – were (dry) cattle and sheep farms, with an average income under €15,000. Indeed, thirty-five-per cent turned a profit of less than €10,000.

    According to the report (on p.5): ‘In general, farm income continues to be highly reliant on direct payments. In 2017 the average total payment received was €17,672 per farm, this accounted for 75% of average farm income.’

    Remarkably, on an average dry cattle or sheep farm over 100% of ‘income’ derived from direct payments (subsidisation), while almost €20,000 of an average dairy farm’s substantial earnings, came from subsidies. It is a truly dysfunctional system.

    Seventy-five percent of Irish farms would go out of business overnight under a free market, while a small number of already wealthy farmers receive subsidisation totalling approximately €300 million.

    The government has committed to expanding agricultural production, particularly the dairy sector, under a report entitled, without irony, FoodWise 2025. However, a 2018 Teagasc report admits that these aspirations will ‘provide a significant challenge to meeting emissions targets, particularly as agriculture comprises one-third of national emissions and 44% of the non-Emission Trading Sectors (non-ETS).’

    Revealingly the image chosen by the authors of the plan does not reveal a single tree or bush.

    A growing proportion of Ireland’s agricultural products (including the thousands of animals shipped abroad in appalling conditions) are exported to non-EU states, including undemocratic regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. The powdered milk market is of particular importance, with Ireland the second leading exporter to China, after New Zealand. Exclusive Breastfeeding is recommended by the WHO for babies up to six months of age.

    Ireland grows little of its own food, relying on exports for the majority of fruit and vegetables the latter of which, remarkably, form less than 1% of overall energy intake, a deficiency linked, in all likelihood, to the obesity pandemic(6).

    Contrary to the portrayal of Ireland as ‘the Food Ireland’, the country is actually a net importer of food calories, making us vulnerable to food ‘shocks’, including major storm events – such as the recent ‘Beast from the East’, when supermarkets supply chains failed. Yet Ireland’s temperate climate is suited to year-round cultivation of a wide variety of crops.

    The beef industry has been subject to a succession of scandals over decades, including what amounted to a government bail out for Goodman International in the early 1990s. More recently we saw horse meat being substituted for beef. The industry has enriched a small number of barons, especially Larry Goodman who had an estimated net worth, along with his spouse, of €706 million in 2015. It would take the average dry cattle farmer, on €15,000 per annum, 47,000 years to accumulate that fortune. The disparities in wealth in Irish farming are probably greater now than ever.

    The main farming organisation, the IFA advocates on behalf of an increasingly obsolete system, where food prices for consumers are so high that Tesco’s executives reportedly referred to the country as Treasure Island; while ruining the environment, and leaving most farms on the brink of collapse.

    In 2015 that organisation was rocked by revelations that general secretary, Pat Smith, had received pay and perks worth some €1m for 2013 and 2014. For good measure, his payoff amounted to €2m. Just as eye-watering for ordinary farmers was how then IFA president, Eddie Downey was receiving almost €200,000 annually, some eight times the average farmer’s income at the time.

    Most disturbingly, however, is the extent to which the state projects a green image for Irish farming, using taxpayers money, through the Origin Green advertising campaign, which the Irish Wildlife Trust has described as a sham.

    As part of a global insectaggedon, pesticide use has continued to climb in Ireland, posing grave dangers to essential pollinators. A third of Irish bee species could soon be extinct. According to Professor John Breen Irish grasslands are useless for bees: ‘Intensification of our farming is the key issue,’ he says. ‘It has taken a toll.’

    Meanwhile half of Ireland’s waterways are now polluted, mainly by farm run-offs.

    The long-term prognosis for Irish agriculture is extremely bad. The system cannot endure indefinitely. We are leaching the soil of nutrients, and contributing significantly to Climate Change, while exploiting the understandable desire of farm families to stay on their land.

    Exploitation of the landscape of Ireland goes hand in hand with the exploitation of most farmers, confirming Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. Farmers should instead be supported to restore biodiversity, and grow crops, primarily for local consumption, both of which would be long term investments in the health of the population.

    IV – Returning to the Source

    ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ is an imaginative vision for Ireland, reinvented as a glimmering girl. Yeats was singing a nation into being. But he would later bemoan the death of Romantic Ireland, as a rising class of Strong Farmers and their heirs, whose sons entered business and the professions, fumbled in greasy tills, adding the half pence to the pence, and prayer to shivering prayer.

    The 1916 Rising claimed the land of Ireland to be the patrimony of the people, but the interest of individual property owners has long held sway, under a 1937 Constitution that has been interpreted to favour the wealthy, as opposed to the common good.

    It was on one memorable journey, which I took during my early twenties, that I woke up to the damage being done to our environment.

    The morning after the night before, I felt overwhelmed by Dublin life, and determined to proceed by foot to find a sanctuary away from the city. I would find a spot to camp, removed from the banter, bright lights and braggadocio.

    I proceeded south through drab suburbs punctuated by ugly strip malls, attesting to poor planning in the city’s hinterland. I crossed a wide and ominous motorway under construction that became the M50, and proceeded to climb hills beyond the city limits; an endeavour increasingly fraught on roads lacking footpaths.

    As cars shot by spewing noise, pollution and anger, I chose to proceed off-piste. After scaling fences and passing through a few deserted cow fields, I  encountered ugly groves of immature spruces being fattened, like turkeys, for the satisfaction of a North American Christmas fantasy.

    Eventually the terrain grew sparser, boggier and less fenced-in. At last I met a variety of deciduous trees; the spectacle a sprawling magnificence of autumnal colours as my legs wearied under the strain of my pack.

    I began to collect firewood as I proceeded, soon gathering a sufficient quantity for my purposes. At last I reached the source of the River Dodder, a tributary of the Liffey, which passes within a hundred metres of my family home. Unconsciously, I was reaching back into my own origins, and I felt a spring in my step.

    As the light declined, waves of midgies brought crass irritation to my reveries, but soon the sun had disappeared altogether, and smoke from the fire deterred my tormenters. I prepared a meal consisting primarily of potatoes – the food of our impoverished ancestors –that I wrapped in tinfoil and cooked in the ashes of the fire.

    All about was a glorious silence, and the stars, usually masked by urban light, appeared as a hidden script that I had failed to notice. At last I felt at home.

     

    (1)  Frank Mitchell, Reading the Irish Landscape, (Dublin, 1990), p.89.
    (2) Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: the Delusion of Destiny, (New York, 2006), p.105.
    (3) Raymond Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production (), p.85.
    (4) Kerby Miller, ‘Emigration to North America in the era of the Great Famine’, in Crawley, Smyth and Murphy, Atlas of the Great Famine ( p.221.
    (5) Joseph Lee, ‘The Famine as History’, in O Grada, Famine 150: commemorative lecture series, (Dublin, 1997) p.168-9
    (6)  Colin Sage, Tara Kenny Connecting agri-export productivism, sustainability and domestic food security via the metabolic rift: The case of the Republic of Ireland (2017), p.19
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245226351730006X

  • RTÉ Says: ‘Stars’ In Their Own Cars

    One trail runs dry, but a scent hangs in the air. Pursuant to Stephen Court’s Drivetime article for Cassandra Voices deconstructing the Irish media’s – including RTÉ ’s – relationship with the motor car sector, I lodged a Freedom of Information (FOI) request with the national broadcaster.

    I sought records of payments, or payments-in-kind, from car dealership to leading RTÉ stars, approved by RTÉ ’s management since January 1st, 2017 under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance.

    RTÉ’s FOI officer responded on June 6th to say there was no record of any such payments or payments-in-kind.

    So can we be sure that RTÉ ’s ‘star’ personalities are appropriately objective in their reporting on transport issues?

    Unfortunately not, as an FOI is a request for records containing information, rather than the information itself. According to a recent judgment (quoted by RTÉ’s FOI Officer): ‘If the record does not exist the body concerned is not required to create records to provide the information sought’ (Case 170505, Ms X and Louth County Council).

    In other words, the FOI officer is under no obligation to dig for information on behalf of an applicant if the question posed misses records containing the targeted information; albeit an officer must take reasonable steps to comply with a request, which usually takes thirty days.

    There is ample evidence of a permissive culture among RTÉ management towards employees’ earnings from third party sources. This was revealed in another FOI application I took earlier this year, unrelated to enquiries into the motor sector. But RTÉ’s officer chose to withhold details of who received what from whom – for reasons of commercial sensitivity.

    As long as the national broadcaster does not provide a publicly accessible register of all transactions between employees (including so-called ‘external employees’ who avail of tax breaks available to companies) with third parties, as the BBC does, then suspicion lingers.

    At the very least the national broadcaster should reveal the text of the Personal and Public Activities Guidance, which regulates employee’s third party relationships.

    Any media organisation in receipt of a disproportionate proportion of its advertisement revenue from a particular sector is exposed to a charge of bias, which may operate in subtle ways.

    II – Bring Cyclists to Justice

    A recent example of what appears to be ‘Groupthink’ in the national broadcaster came from the unlikely source of Olivia O’Leary on – you guessed it – her weekly Drivetime column on June 19th.

    Drivetime’s website adopts the incendiary title: ‘Olivia O’Leary on Cyclists: ‘It’s time we called in the law and fought for our footpaths’. It is a case of ‘we’, the ‘normal’ people, presumably motorists, ranged against ‘them’, that strange species of two-wheeled fanatics, invading ‘our’ footpaths. The title invites confrontation beyond legal enforcement.

    The column itself is more balanced than the title suggests, but contains serious lapses of judgment. O’Leary said she was in favour of banning cars from between the canals and acknowledged that ‘cars destroy a city’, but then proceeded to lambaste the behaviour of cyclists in Dublin’s city centre.

    She limits her complaint to a certain type of (male) cyclist on a Dublin bike ‘thundering along’ footpaths, but that nuance is lost in the following statement:

    But, you know, there is one thing that private cars, for all their faults, usually do not do. They do not drive down the middle of the footpath, scattering pedestrians left and right. Cyclists, on the other hand, do this all the time.

    O’Leary also, remarkably, jokes about using an umbrella to unseat any cyclist who engages in ‘Panzer tank stuff’, before adding that she would not actually recommend this. Ha ha ha. Hopefully some hot head has not had ideas put in his head.

    This seems particularly insensitive, to put it kindly, considering how that very week in June ten people including three pedestrians had been killed by motor vehicles. Two were hit-and-runs. Unlike those killers, O’Leary missed the real culprits.

    Moreover, as Cian Ginty points out in a column for Irishcycle.com, a simple Google search yields examples of pedestrians on footpaths being killed by motorists.

    O’Leary is relating her personal experiences as a pedestrian in Dublin, which is fair enough, and of course there are lunatics out there. But what she fails to acknowledge is that friction between pedestrians and cyclists is largely a product of the deficient cycling infrastructure in the capital.

    Mounting the footpath in Dublin’s centre is often a safety measure in a crush of buses, taxis and private cars. Most cyclists will then glide at the pace of the average pram, and give right of way to pedestrians, some of whom, nonetheless, will take the opportunity to scream into the cyclist’s ear.

    O’Leary should have known better than to target cyclists for long failures in urban planning. She also ought to be pissed off with how the Drivetime producers have distorted her column.

    III – Motor Mouths

    Transparency in terms of external payments and gifts is especially important where, as Stephen Court’s article illustrates, there is a record of high profile figures – including Ryan Tubridy and others – apparently receiving free cars from dealerships, and also where numerous programmes from Drivetime to Liveline are sponsored by car companies, who also dominate commercial breaks.

    If a presenter’s salary is linked to the advertising revenue his or her programme attracts this could be seen as an indirect payment, which might inhibit the expression of views unsympathetic to the sponsor. At the very least large scale advertising by any sector creates an objective bias, i.e. an appearance of bias, even without direct evidence.

    No doubt these are existential questions for a state broadcaster, whose business model relies on advertising revenues of €151.5 last year, along with TV €186.1 million in licence fees.

    One of the reasons I say that we have to have our numbers up [is] because it only works when the numbers are up.
    Joe Duffy, Irish Times, Saturday, December 9th, 2017.

    Is a widespread devotion to ratings really a pursuit of advertising revenue? With RTÉ consistently losing money (€5.6 million last year), it is time to cut its cloth, and focus on its primary public service: the delivery of news and current affairs at a remove from vested interests.

    This should involve an end to exorbitant salaries. The country is awash with aspiring journalists, most of whom would happily work on an average RTÉ salary of €70,000 per annum.

    The BBC manages to perform this role satisfactorily in the UK, while allowing commerical competitors. The population might be more willingly pay their TV licenses if the broadcaster delivered a better service. The country has among the highest evasion rates in Europe.

    It is time to kill the radio star on the national broadcaster.

    IV – A Broader Malaise

    The extent of payments from external sources to RTÉ’s household names was revealed in another FOI application I took earlier this year. But the officer refused to divulge precise details, claiming this could be advantageous to competitors, might result in financial loss to contractors, and potentially ‘prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations in respect of future engagements with independent contractors’.

    I saw details of payments by third parties to Ryan Tubridy, Ray D’Arcy, Miriam O’Callaghan, Damien O’Reilly, Marty Morrissey, Claire Byrne, Bryan Dobson, Sean O’Rourke, Joe Duffy, Philip Boucher-Hayes, Joe Duffy, Kathryn Thomas, Mary Wilson and Marian Finucane

    The officer responded that for 2017, ‘the total number of requests to engage in external ventures that RTÉ received was 122. Of that number, 114 were approved and 8 were refused. Of those granted, 97 were independent contractor requests and 1 was a RTÉ employee request. Of those refused, 7 were independent contractor requests and 17 were RTÉ employee requests.’

    That the vast majority of requests were approved in 2017, particularly to independent contractors, shows the organisation takes a liberal view on potential conflicts of interest. Indeed, it is a matter of public record that management approved a payment by Origin Green/Bord Bia to Damien O’Reilly last year despite an obvious conflict of interest.

    RTÉ’s Damien O’Reilly.

    RTÉ claimed the majority of payments were for ‘non-commercial events, and mostly in support of charitable or other not-for-profit organisations’. In the absence of further details, however, it is impossible to verify this claim. It begs the question: if the work is harmless, or even benign, why did they withhold the information? Bord Bia is a not-for-profit semi-state body, but there was still a conflict of interest for RTÉ’s main agricultural correspondent to be receiving money from that organisation.

    We cannot now tell whether any of the third parties have connections to the motor car industry in Ireland. And even if an organisation is charitable, or not-for-profit, this does not imply neutrality on contentious issue.

    The claim that divulging information would “prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations” suggests the likes of Ryan Tubridy – who has been outspoken in his criticism of cyclists –  could be lost to commercial competitors if damaging information enters the public domain.

    That contention may be questioned, in the case of Tubridy at least. After moonlighting with the BBC in 2016 Tubridy admitted he found connecting with UK listeners difficult, while leaving for Newstalk or TV3 would represent a career regression.

    Most of RTÉ ’s household names found fame, and fortune, through extended exposure on RTÉ. The failure of Pat Kenny to draw a substantial number of his former listeners away from the station, when he departed for Newstalk, indicates most people are in the habit of tuning into the state broadcaster, rather than the radio ‘star’.

    V – A Tool of the Sector

    The state broadcaster is certainly not alone in the Irish media in its reliance on advertising from the motor car industry, and the objective bias this brings. Our ‘paper of record’, the Irish Times, seems to do little investigative work into subject-matters impinging on its leading advertisers; and while generally virtue-signalling in its approval of cycling, has also contributed to negative stereotyping.

    One such portrayal came from Fintan O’Toole in 2013. O’Toole, whose father was a bus driver, as he has reminded his readers, does not drive. But seemingly that does not extend to sympathy for cycling. During National Bike Week in 2013 he wrote, tongue-in-cheek, that cyclists were the ‘spawn of the devil’, no doubt to the guffaws of his colleagues on the editorial floor.

    But the article was actually a genuine indictment of the behaviour of cyclists, who are portrayed as casually mounting footpath and endangering pedestrians, even where they have been provided with their own lanes.

    As with Olivia O’Leary, O’Toole posited a false dichotomy between pedestrians and cyclists, ‘us’ and  ‘them’, which ignores how the problem is not with either form of locomotion, but the utter dominance of the motor car in Ireland’s urban areas.

    Many of Dublin’s cycle lanes are defective: the track might be potholed, or simply a part of the road that is coloured red, a simulacrum of a real cycle lane without a protective curb, where parking is often permitted outside rush hour.

    O’Toole recently wrote an article criticising plans to remove motorized traffic from College Green, a measure which would also be advantageous to cyclists. O’Toole’s argument was that this would work to the detriment of mostly working class bus passengers. Cycling is not mentioned once in the article.

    College Green c.1890.

    The implication is that cycling is not a realistic mode of transport for the working class, but instead the preserve of middle class, lycra-clad, fitness enthusiasts, which is certainly not the case in cities where the bike is king. O’Toole is right insofar as he draws attention to the poor provision of public transport in Dublin, and to emphasise the continued importance of the bus.

    But rather than abandoning plans for a plan that would make the centre of the city more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists, a better outcome would be investment in quality bus corridors and the introduction of radial routes.

    *******

    With a climate comparable to Copenhagen’s and Amsterdam’s, Dublin is regarded as the Great Bike Hope of Emerging Bicycle Cities. But the media, from state broadcaster to the national ‘paper of record’ have failed to drive home that message, and few politicians, beyond the Green Party, have consistently campaigned on behalf of cycling, which should be a viable and healthy alternative for most healthy urbans residents.

    A deficient cycling infrastructure is another blot on the copy book of a country ranked second worst in Europe for tackling Climate Change, and which confronts an obesity pandemic.

    The national broadcaster might insulate itself from claims of objective bias by not treating news and current affairs as cash cows. Then we might be offered better reporting on important issues, such as reforming a sclerotic transport infrastructure. And if RTÉ’s ‘stars’ reckon they are not being paid well enough, they should be told to get on their bikes.

  • The Origins of Poetic Creation

    We can only imagine how poetry entered human consciousness. I intuit that its emergence was linked to the first use of fire, that most seminal of technologies, whose devouring mysteries transfix us with a spirit that endows our own.

    I see one among a band awakening from a dream, and entering a trance. She incants a tale of the fire’s origin, her words embodied in physical expression, which inspires the band to adapt the tools to summon the first, intentional spark.

    In the flickering light that ensues the poet appears to shift shape. She is a streak of light morphing into the appearance of other animals of the forest. Her words are not common speech, but arrive in measured cadences, uncannily familiar to a mesmerised audience.

    The tale she recounts, though fantastical, resonates with commonplace experiences and includes practical insights. As the narrative arcs to a point of heightened tension the poet breaks the spell with a joke, seizing the assembly with laughter, but a few remain silent.

    Transfixed by the incendiary words, the band begins to chant; eventually a chorus chimes, integrating non-verbal melodies. Next a rhythm is struck, then a communal dance previously employed to intimidate a long extinct primeval beast, still lurking in our nightmares.

    For a moment the forest itself is convulsed by these energies. Afterwards, or even coinciding with this, a visual representation of the performance is crafted. It is kept as a sacred object for subsequent rites.

    Out of this poetic source I see four springs generating story, song, dance, and visual art. These intertwine and will eventually merge into an oceanic consciousness. The continuity between words, music and dance is apparent, while the symbol is not only the origin of painting and sculpture, but also of the word, ‘made flesh’, in script, which over time migrates from pictographic representation to alphabets, rejoining and completing its journey along the great river of poetry.

    The spoken word is an animating spirit and crucial catalyst joining language to a musical faculty. The written word records and even amplifies this. Only later does abstract, disembodied reasoning in the form of philosophy arrive.

    Musical Language

    According to Walter Ong: ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness’. The Greeks were not the first to develop it, but improved on earlier models by representing vowels for the first time, making literacy far easier to achieve.

    Through this the Greeks derived great technical and intellectual benefits, but it brought the danger of abstraction, and a distancing from Nature. Socrates, a confirmed townsman, claimed he had nothing to learn from fields and trees, but only men.

    In writing we encounter the dominance of the written word itself, a logo-centrism, which finds us in the narrow purview of the left hemisphere of the brain.

    But according to Iain McGilchrist the origins of language lie ‘in the empathic communication medium of music and the right hemisphere, where it is deeply connected with the body.’ There is no conflict he says between this belief, and the idea language developed out of gesture: ‘Music is deeply gestural in nature: dance and the body are everywhere implied in it.’ He continues: ‘To the extent that the origins of language lie in music, they lie in a certain sort of gesture, that of dance: social non-purposive (useless).’

    The origin of language, therefore, should not be seen in pure utilitarian terms.

    “Useless” play in language is the stirring of poetry, but a creation that is the catalyst of Art, which acts as a form of revelation, where metaphor, according to McGilchrist, ‘links language to life’. The absence of utility in poetry is therefore superficial. It is a creative spark, bringing perception at new vantages, and sight through different lenses. Art is the resolution of the image.

    Human communication is not uniquely ingenious, but we display a particular ability to measure speech in song and poetry – a mathematical sensibility in communication.

    According to McGilchrist, what distinguishes our music is that ‘no other creature begins to synchronise the rhythm, or blend the pitch, of its utterances with that of its fellows, in the way that human singing does instinctively’. It would appear that we gravitate to a musical order that was established in the West by Pythagoras, who divined that a musical note produced by a string of fixed tension could be converted into its octave if the length of the string was reduced in half, and its fifth when reduced by two thirds.

    Unlike ourselves, most bird species have a syrinx in their throats, allowing two notes to be sung simultaneously, as they exhale and inhale. But birdsong, however bewitching, is unmeasured. The dawn chorus is an unintentional unity, representing disconnected currents emanating from the varying concerns of often competing species; harmonious only as the voice of one Nature, spiritus mundi, or Gaia.

    At its lofty height, poetry combines the order of music with profound questioning and metaphorical vision. This is a mysterious hallmark of humanity.

    Grammars of Creation

    Artistic beauty in its ideal, unrealisable, state is the expression of the diffuse and infinitely complex voices within Nature’s harmony. What we consider aesthetically pleasing derives from an ascetic order in music that finds an analogy in all artistic forms. The spark is poetry.

    Poetry is the lute through which the voice of Nature sounds. But the instrument may be misshapen, perhaps through misuse. More tragic is when the pitch of beauty is too high for an audiences to hear.

    What is poetic has a dual nature: generative and disruptive. Just as in Nature Heraclitus envisaged a fire of renewal, so poetry devours and renews. Philosophy may define beauty, including justice, at any point in time, but this is primarily exegesis rather than creation. Thus Yeats argued ‘whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent’.

    Nature demands that plants and animals of diffuse species assist one another, but we appear to be alone in imaginatively standing outside our immediate frame, situating ourselves in the lives of others through fictions, as we see first in cave paintings.

    The paintings in Chauvet Cave in France were begun approximately thirty thousand years ago.

    To convey such imaginings required novel linguistic constructions. George Steiner points to a grammar of creation in the use of a future tense, allowing us ‘to discuss possible events on the day after one’s funeral or in stellar space a million years hence’.

    This, he says, looks to be specific to homo sapiens, as do ‘the use of subjunctive and of counter-factual modes’, which are kindred to future tenses. Steiner intuits that these emerged at the end of the Ice Age to discuss food storage. He links this to the discovery of animal breeding and agriculture.

    But I see a capacity for inter-subjectivity, including a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, arriving earlier: in the symbolic language of poetry, rather than to facilitate practical exchange. To chart this grammatical genesis I turn to Rene Girard’s idea of the scapegoat, which, he argued, emerged as a means of settling differences arising out of competition acquisition of scarce resources.

    ‘Man is not naturally a carnivore’, Girard writes, ‘human hunting should not be thought of in terms of animal predation.’ He argues that animal domestication arose out of the use of animals in sacrifice, not as food: ‘What impelled men to hunt was the search for a reconciliatory victim’.

    After mining anthropological literature he found a ‘common denominator’ of a ‘collective murder’ of a scapegoat, attributed to animals or men. To conceive of this reconciliatory victim required a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, enabling the band to channel their grievances away from self-annihilation.

    When an animal victim is chosen instead of a human and ritually slaughtered the smoke rising from the sacrifice is seen to appease the gods. Thus, in the Odyssey after Odysseus returns in disguise to Ithaca, he shares a meal with his loyal servant Eumeaus who performs the necessary rites of sacrifice:

    The swineherd, soul of virtue, did not forget the gods.
    He began the rite by plucking tufts from the porkers’ head,
    threw them into the fire and prayed to all the powers,
    “Bring him home, our wise Odysseus, home at last!”
    Then raising himself full-length, with an oak log
    he’d left unsplit he clubbed and stunned the beast
    and it gasped out its life …
    The men slashed its throat, singed the carcass,
    quickly quartered it all, and then the swineherd,
    cutting first strips for the gods from every limb,
    spread them across the thighs, wrapped in sleek fat,
    and sprinkling barley over them, flung them on the fire

    In Christianity this culminates in the ‘lamb of good that takes away the sins of the world.’ The language of these fictions, therefore, appears to originate in symbolic representation, which is a hallmark of poetry.

    These new grammars imparted a capacity for planning, and an understanding of natural cycles, which can lead to the outlook of the suzerain: the ‘keeper or overlord’ personified by Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, who says: ‘Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent’.

    But it also engenders empathy with other life forms, which recalls the Isha Upanishad: ‘Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.’

    McGilchrist writes: ‘I believe that the great achievement of human kind is not to have perfected utility through banding together to form groups, but to have learnt through our faculty for inter-subjective experience, and our related ability to imitate, to transcend utility altogether.’ That is the essence of true poetry.

    Poetry and Justice

    Art often awakes sensitivity to injustice indirectly, as the eighteenth century Swiss philosopher Johan Sulzer observed:

    Wisdom knows about everything that man ought to be; it points the path to perfection and happiness which is related to it. But it cannot give strength to go down that often arduous path. The fine arts make the path smooth and adorn it with flowers which by their delightful scent, irresistibly entice the wanderer to continue on his way.

    A shift in sensibility created by exposure to the beauty of Art operates unpredictably on ethical choices as, unlike a rational choice, shifts in sentiment rarely involve a decisive, eureka moment, when an argument is settled.

    Rather, encountering beauty may lead to impulsive moral decisions based on heightened sensitivity, as where a person refrains from eating meat, when it does not ‘feel’ right.

    Encountering a crowning achievement in music or poetry may awaken action in an apparently unrelated domain. Great music, and other Art, stills the mind, and engenders benevolence.

    In divine rapture the poet builds a mythology out of imaginative materials located in Nature, and in the process incubates conventions and laws: ‘the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ wrote Percy Shelley.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822.

    Firm moral convictions may bring a poet into conflict with temporal power, and demagogues appropriate and distort mythologies. The false poet, and prophet, appeals to the vanity of a sovereign.

    A poet may feel compelled, nonetheless, to compromise with a patron – even a tyrant – to allow their work to reach fruition. In Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ the artist mocks a haughty ruler before posterity:

    I met a traveller from an antique land,
    Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

    A true poet’s opposition to political power is, however, based on principle, not an anarchic reflex, and he may support a wise and just regime. For example, Dante favoured the Holy Roman Empire, as he saw a strong transnational authority as necessary to maintain peace in the Italian peninsula. A contemporary poet could support the notion of a European Community, or the United Nations, for similar reasons.

    Poetry remains a vital commodity in any culture, foregrounding and guiding other artistic endeavours, channelling empathy, and forging justice. Defining its nature is elusive, and perhaps futile, but it is apparent that philosophers are increasingly drawn to its revelation.

    It is not restricted to composition of metrical verse: any writer aspires to it. Alasdair MacIntyre writes: ‘Knowing how to go on and to go further in the use of the expressions of a language is that part of the ability of every language-user which is poetic. The poet by profession merely has the ability to a preeminent degree’.

    Shelley saw poetry in metrical verse as being its ‘imperial form’, but recognised its presence elsewhere. ‘The parts of a composition may’ even be poetical, ‘without the composition as a whole being poetical’, he said. Poetry inhabits the best prose as a flow that carries a listener into the vision of the writer.

    Poetry is perhaps best defined by what it is not, which is the everyday speech often imitated in novels and plays. It aspires to originality and even prophecy, as Aristotle says: ‘it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen’.

    It has an essential orality. Thus Yeats wrote: ‘Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover by beloved.’

    The Sacred Spring

    Poetic language need not be extravagant, but the true poet is never entirely in control of composition. Thus Socrates complained that a man cannot accede ‘to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses.’ This seeming loss of consciousness in a deep flow state may lead to extravagant language, but this is unintentional.

    Kathleen Raine points to the lofty style that distinguishes poetry from regular speech. She notes how Jung, who generally disliked high-flown speech, found that when what he called ‘mana, daemons, gods or the unconscious speaks in words its utterances are in a high style, hieratic, often archaic, grandiose, removed as it is possible to be from the speech of that common man the everyday self’.

    Raine identifies this with a primal poetic impulse she encountered in the composition of folk songs: ‘The singing of the ballad was by no means in common speech. It was extremely slow, dignified and highly mannered’. She concludes that: ‘It is a mark of imaginative inspiration and content to write in a high and mannered style, removed from common speech; as it is of the absence of imaginative participation to write either in a conversational tone or to write in a deliberately vulgar idiom.’

    Raine further opines that: ‘What was written for the sake of easy comprehension is precisely that part of poetry which becomes incomprehensible within a few years.’ This we find in the lyrics of most contemporary popular music, which sounds dated almost at the point of release.

    On the other hand, today we see a widespread trend whereby difficulty is equated with quality. This may originate in contemporary economic structures, where many professional poets survive on government grants, and as academic specialists. Linguistic obscurity may be a cynical calculation, which contributes to a widespread, and tragic, alienation from poetry.

    It appears to have a meaning and form internal to itself, beyond any individual poet. Jahan Ramazani observed, ‘time and again’, how poems, ‘reasserted themselves as poems even in the moments of seeming to fuse with their others.’

    Similarly, when Dadaists and Russian futurists tried to fabricate new languages they found their imagined syntaxes led back to established moulds. Any poet travels a path overlaid with uncountable footprints guiding their course. The poem knows where it wishes to travel in the anticipatory stillness of creation. The great challenge in today’s digital fog is to encounter this tranquillity.

    Poetry in Language

    Many poets agree that composition is an ongoing revelation, conventionally attributed to the muse. But in the discussion of poetry there is perhaps too great an emphasis on individual genius, although the individual experience cannot be discounted.

    We find in creation a dialectic between individual expression and the treasures hidden in all languages. The linguist Edward Sapir suggests that it is intrinsic to language every one of which ‘is itself a collective art of expression.’ He asserts that ‘An artist utilises the native esthetic resources of his speech. He may be thankful if the given palette of colours is rich, if the springboard is light. But he deserves no special credit for felicities that are the language’s own.’

    Similarly Marcel Duchamp wrote: ‘Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ‘readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage.’ The poet, however, renews and recasts these materials, sometimes bringing new colours to the palette, and reviving the use of others.

    In some cases we find a mingling of tongues as new words enter languages in neologisms, as in Shakespeare’s heroic contribution to the English language. But this process is fraught with the risk of contrivance. Great poets are not necessarily polyglots, though they often are.

    The expression of poetry should not be seen as an evolutionary display of verbal plumage, although troubadours will always seek to enchant. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke firmly rejects meretricious verse. ‘Young man’ he warns:

    it’s not about love, when your voice
    forces open your mouth – learn to forget

    your sudden outburst. That will run out.
    True singing is a different breath. A breath
    around nothing. A breeze in the god. A wind.

    Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926.

    The mythos of poetry is an intuitive response to life’s challenges, unconnected to the logos of philosophy, or scientific observation.

    Its wisdom adds layers to a mystery lying beyond direct inquisition. ‘The abstract is not life’, Yeats wrote on his deathbed, ‘and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence’.

    The poet is never in control of the process of composition, and eminent authorities such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Milton have attributed inspiration to their dreams.

    Charles Simic criticizes: the assumption … that the poet knows beforehand what he or she wishes to say and that the writing of the poem is the search for the most effective means of gussying up these ideas: if this were correct, poetry would simply repeat what had been said and thought before.’

    Untuning the Sky

    William Dryden, the first Poet Laureate, proposed in his Essay of Dramaticke Poesie that, ‘if natural causes be more known now than in the time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poesy and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive still nearer to perfection’. Rather than affirming an alternative role for poetry, he was suggesting it should be informed by natural philosophy, as science was referred to until the 1830s.

    In fact George Steiner observes a contrary trend: ‘Where the sciences, pure and applied, wherever mathematics came to map, to energize, to expand human experience and possibilities, the retreat from the word proved correlative and ineluctable.’

    The greatest poetry looks beyond the real world of immediate perception and reinvents it, travelling at a different pace to the often linear progression of a philosophical argument. Thus the work of hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago may be compared with, and often exceeds in quality, the best available today.

    The poetic vision arises from a sensitivity that sees the tears of a sycamore tree, as opposed to its biological classification. Nontheless, the greatest scientists – such as Alexander van Humboldt – have been animated by poetry, and poets, of course, do learn from science.

    There are signs of stultifying premeditation as opposed to poetic vision, in Dyrden’s Grand Chorus to ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’ (1687), signalling the Final Judgement.

    So when the last and dreadful hour
    This crumbling pageant shall devour,
    The trumpet shall be heard on high,
    The dead shall live, the living die,
    And music shall untune the sky.

    The idea of music, which is the expression of harmony, signalling the end of days is troubling, and almost paradoxical. Samuel Johnson described this image as ‘so awful in itself, that it can owe little to poetry; and I could wish the antithesis of music untuning had found some other place’.

    *******

    A poet can be foolish, even sinister, without this undermining the aesthetic appeal of her work. Poetic ability does not equate with individual moral virtue. Posterity excuses the obnoxious behaviour and statements that are not intrinsic to the poetry itself, assuming Art to rise above the mundane, and that its beauty will engender justice.

    Artistic censorship is a grave danger for any society, but in an era of free speech we may be facing greater dangers still, as George Steiner warns: ‘The patronage of the mass media and the free market, the distributive opportunism of mass consumption, could be more damaging to art and to thought than have been the censorious regimes of the past’.

  • History’s Dead Hand on the Middle East

    Last month’s opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem served to re-ignite Palestinian rage against what many there regard as a latter-day ‘Crusader’ state, a term with particular resonance in that region.

    Krak des Chevaliers, Crusader Castle, Syria. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    No other city juxtaposes such piety and passion as Jerusalem. It is sacred to the three great monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and located close to the birthplace of civilisation itself. All the dominant empires of the Mediterranean and western Asia have battled for possession of this strategic gateway to three continents, and on it goes.

    With Europe enjoying a long, and increasingly complacent, holiday from its bloody history, and with the U.S. finding itself in ‘united states of amnesia’, the past is often forgotten; but in the Middle East – a heavily-laden term itself – a symbolic inheritance smoulders and crackles.

    Thus, when Islamic State, or Daesh, burst into Iraqi and Syrian politics and declared a short-lived Caliphate in 2014, they claimed they were destroying the despised Sykes-Picot border. These ‘lines in the sand’ (somewhat altered after the war) demarcating post-colonial states were the product of a secret alliance between the Allied Powers to carve up the Ottoman Empire in 1916, against the claims of Arab nationalists.

    The reason this latest gesture of U.S. support for the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu – and nod to a domestic Christian fundamentalist audience – is a cause of such outrage lies in the profound meaning attached to the ancient city, which, ironically, derives its name from a Bronze Age ‘pagan’ deity Shalem; the preceding ‘Jeru; is a corruption of the Sumerian word ‘yeru’, for ‘settlement’ or ‘cornerstone’.

    For Jews it is an historic capital, and site of the First and Second Temples, of which only the Wailing Wall survives after its destruction during the Great Jewish Revolt against Roman Rule (66-73 CE). The city also has profound associations with Christianity, as the site of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ; furthermore among the Evangelical Rapture movement it is believed that the rebuilding by the Jews of their Temple will anticipate the Second Coming, which explains the devotion of many U.S. Republicans to the cause of Israel.

    Islam is also deeply-embedded in the city. Many Biblical traditions contained within Judaism and Christianity were accepted by Muhammad in the Qur’an, although he explicitly denies the doctrine of the trinity (though, surprisingly, not the virgin birth) in verse 171 of the 4th Sura: Do not say, ‘Three’. Stop. It is better for you, Allah is but one God. He is far above having a son. This doctrine of tawhid or ‘oneness’ is crucial to any understanding of Islam, especially the Sunni variant.

    Above all the Muslim presence in Jerusalem is located in the shimmering Dome of the Rock completed by Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik in 691 CE on the site of the Second Temple after the Islamic conquest in 638 CE.

    The Dome of the Rock. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    In the The Crucible of Islam G. W. Bowersock points to a Qur’anic verse inscribed on the north door of the structure in which Muhammad condemns polytheism. This was a charge that could be leveled against Christians with the trinity in mind. Bowersock argues this did not augur well for future sectarian relations: ‘Abd al-Malik’s Dome of the Rock arose on ground that was shared by the great monotheisms, but it proclaimed only one of them and offered no path to coexistence with the other two(1)’.

    This lapidary statement of intent contrasts with the relative benignity of the lightning conquest by the followers of Muhammad of a great empire stretching from the Iberian peninsula to Persia. As Bowersock puts it: ‘Archaeological evidence which has been cultivated for this period in recent years confirm the lack of any substantive impact of the Muslims on local populations.’

    Adherents of other monotheistic religions in that region simply had to pay jiza – a head tax – and a tax on land known as kharaj. Despite their initial opposition, and alliance with the Sassanid Empire in Persia, Jews were far better treated under their Islamic lords than their co-religious under ‘Christian’ rulers in Europe. Those who appeal to history in the Middle East, on all sides, tend to be selective in their recollections.

    II ‘Middle’ or ‘Near’ East?

    The term ‘Near East’ was coined at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, while the expression the ‘Middle East’ was used for the area that intervened between the ‘Near’ and ‘Far’ ‘East’. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire, however, the ‘Middle East’ migrated westward and came to include the ‘Arab’ states that had emerged from the Ottoman Empire. This, in turn, heralded the emergence of ‘Central Asia’ to describe what had been the ‘Middle East’.

    This has given rise to the argument, advanced in particular by Edward Said, that the term should be expunged from use. Said was reacting to an enduring European discourse used to justify imperialism, often treating the region as a special case requiring tutelage.

    According to a contemporary ‘Orientalist’ Bernard Lewis (d.2018): ‘The Middle East as an area of study for scholars in the western world presents peculiar problems different from those of most other areas. It is different than a situation in which we study a part of our own society. That I think is self-evident.’

    Western imperialism did not cease with the end of the British and French mandates in Iraq, Jordan, Syrian and Lebanon whose borders are the legacy of Sykes-Picot. The presence of vast oil reserves has given rise to constant meddling. David Frum, formerly a speech writer of George W. Bush, who coined the phrase ‘axis of evil’, records that Bernard Lewis was invited to the White House in November, 2001, ‘to explain his views’.

    Frum approvingly noticed ‘a marked up copy of one of Bernard Lewis’s articles in the clutch of papers the president held(2).’ The extent to which archaic Orientalist opinions retain their appeal, and more importantly a propaganda value, emphasising a distinction between ‘democratic’ West, and ‘tyrannical’ East, lends credence to Said’s thesis that: ‘the vindication of Orientalism was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness, its usefulness, its authority(3).’

    Does the term the Middle East to describe a great swathe of territory from Morocco to Iran retain any usefulness therefore? Nikki Keddie argues the term retains an explanatory usefulness for ‘an uneasy but still adapted blend of pastoral nomadism and settled life’ in the region(4).

    This has roots in the ideas of the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun’s who pointed to a perpetual conflict between badu (nomadism) and hadar (urbanites) in the region. He claimed the superior ‘asabiyya (group solidarity) of the badu brought successive victories against hadar. However, after a number of generations this ‘asabiyya is corrupted by the more luxurious of life in the city, and the cycle continues(5). Even today one can see certain of these dynamics playing out in conflicts from Syria and Iraq.

    Palmyra, Syria. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    Today, the term the Middle East approximates with the region subjected to the first wave of Muslim conquest (the Iberian peninsula apart), and arguably that legacy is still evident. This is not, however, to equate the region with the ‘Islamic World’, or more vaguely ‘Islamic government’, since ‘Muslims in power’ took on varying forms in places such as in India during the Mogul Empire, where it was the minority creed.

    Nazih Ayubi argues that the jizya and kharaj taxes imposed by the original ‘Islamic’ state were the basis of a ‘tributary’ mode of production, involving wealth being extracted by the politically and socially superior from the politically and socially inferior. This survived into the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922), under whom all land was owned by the state, and where until the seventeenth century, armies were composed of slaves requisitioned from the populace(6).

    European colonisation, especially after World War I, dragged much of the region into the world economy, sweeping away political structures in the process, but underlying cultures endured, and the architectural inheritance of the region serves as an important reminder.

    Thus, the shared historical experience of much of the Middle East, under the original ‘Islamic State’ and especially the Ottoman Empire, in combination with enduring nomadic social structures suggests a regional congruence. Colonialism had a significant impact, and distorted borders, but the region is also a product of a far longer history, which encroaches heavily on the present.

    III Israel’s Iron Wall

    Contrary to the image of a technologically-advanced, forward-looking society, the ghosts of history also exert a magnetic pull on Israeli society.

    The conduct of the Israeli authorities reflect the ideology of the Likud Party, now led by Netanyahu, which has been the dominant political force in Israel since its foundation in 1977 under Menachem Begin.

    The Arab-Israeli wars which greeted the foundation of Israel in 1948 (known as al-nakba – the catastrophe – to Palestinians) brought a succession of Israeli victories, especially the 1967 Six-Day War which effectively neutralised Gamal Abdel Nasser, the erstwhile champion of Arab Nationalism.

    Their ascendancy in the region was affirmed by the demise of the Soviet Union, and establishment of the U.S., Israel’s Cold War patron, as lone Superpower. The Palestinian case was further weakened by PLO support for Iraq before the first Gulf War in 1991, and the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

    But despite accords with neighbouring Egypt and Jordan, Israel faces perpetual conflict as most Arabs have a fixed view on her as a colonial, oppressive presence in the region. Only continued autocratic rule in Egypt and Jordan (maintained by vast U.S. ‘development’ aid) keeps these sentiments in check.

    The Israeli electorate has consistently favoured leaders unwilling to countenance concessions, and the expansion of settlements is a fixed policy. Withdrawal from Gaza in 2006 was a strategic realisation that it was untenable to maintain 10,000 settlers inside a grossly over-populated strip of land containing over a million and a half Palestinians. Better to focus on shoring up the fertile parts of the West Bank, and Jerusalem.

    To explain Israeli intransigence it is necessary to explore the basis of Likud ideology, which can be traced to three principle sources: first, the writings of Ze’ev Jabotinsky; second, the experience of the Holocaust; and third, the emergence of religious Zionism after 1967.

    Zev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky.

    Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a Russian born Jew, is generally viewed as the spiritual founder of the Israeli Right. In 1923 he wrote an influential article entitled ‘On the Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)’ in which he asserted that a ‘voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable now or in the foreseeable future’, since, every indigenous people ‘will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the dangers of foreign settlement.’

    In response to resistance Jabotinsky advocated ‘an iron wall’ of military might which ‘they [the Arabs] will be powerless to break down.’ Only then ‘will they have given up all hope of getting rid of the alien settlers. Only then will extremist groups with their slogan ‘No, never’ lose their influence, and only then will their influence be transferred to more moderate groups.’ At that point he envisaged limited political rights being granted.

    Jabotinsky’s metaphorical “iron wall” was given literal expression by Ariel Sharon’s construction of a ‘security fence’ in 2003 cutting through the West Bank, although the anticipated acquiescence of the Palestinians, in Hamas at least, has not materialised.

    The second major influence on Likud, and Israeli society in general, is the trauma of the Holocaust experience. The collective memory of passivity in the face of genocide mandates a policy of fierce reprisal in response to the taking of Jewish life. Restraint is characterised as appeasement.

    In his book A Place Among the Nations (New York, 1993) Benjamin Netanyahu dwelt on the lessons of appeasement of Nazi Germany, and the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. Arabs are likened to Nazi Germany, Palestinians to the Sudeten Germans, and Israel to the small democracy of Czechoslovakia, the victim of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler.

    This Holocaust motif was also harnessed by opponents of Yitzhak Rabin after he signed up to the Oslo Accords in 1991. Inside the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) two Likud deputies proceeded to open black umbrellas comparing Rabin’s deal to Chamberlain’s Munich capitulation, while effigies of Rabin dressed in SS uniform were set alight at right wing demonstrations.

    The ferocity of Israel’s response to Hamas, however, works against the moderate leadership that Jabotinsky’s model requires. Likud policy exceeds the methodology of the ‘iron wall’, and perpetuates conflict.

    The last major influence on Likud is religious Zionism, especially that generated by the optimism of the 1967 victory. Those enormous territorial gains were interpreted as a sign of divine favour, and settlement of the land became a religious imperative.

    Its force was demonstrated by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, which effectively de-railed the Oslo Peace Process. Rabin’s killer was a young extremist by the name of Yigal Amir. During his trial Amir told the court that according to halacha (Jewish law), a Jew who gives his land to the enemy and endangers the life of other Jews must be killed.

    IV The Wahhabi Formula

    Alongside uncritical support of Israel, the other plank of U.S. Middle Eastern policy has been a long-standing alliance with the Al-Saud family, who gave their name to the country of Saudi Arabia in 1932. As Guardians of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina to which all Muslims are called on to make a pilgrimage hajj at least once in their lifetime, the hand of history lies heavily. The ruling family have used a Wahhabi blueprint to project their power both internationally and domestically

    The writings of Muhammad Abdel Al-Wahhab (1703-1792), a religious scholar brought up in the strict Hanabali school, repudiate unorthodox practices such as saint veneration. This was common among the Shi’a (faction), which had broken with the dominant Sunni – faithful custodians of Muslim practice (sunna) – after the murder of the fourth caliph Ali in 661 CE.

    Al-Wahhab exalted the doctrine of tawhid: ‘God’s uniqueness as omnipotent lord of creation and his uniqueness as deserving worship and the absolute devotion of his servants’, which is reflected in the inscription on the Dome of the Rock.

    In 1744 Al-Wahhab entered into an accord with the tribal lord Muhammad Al-Saud. The politico-religious alliance generated vast conquests in Arabia as previously warring tribes were once again united under the banner of Islam. In exchange for ideological justification and recruits for the conquests, shari’a, religious law, as interpreted by the ulama, the religious scholars, was imposed on the territories.

    In his writings Al-Wahhab emphasised that obedience to rulers is obligatory even if the ruler should be oppressive. The commands of the ruler (the imam – ‘commander of the faithful’) should only be ignored if he contradicts the rules of religion.

    The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia adopted this Wahhabist formula once again at the beginning of the twentieth century, but a shift in the balance of power has seen the temporal authorities, bolstered by oil wealth, largely dictate to the ulama. This led Helen Lackner Lackner to opine that ‘the fiction of Wahhabism which has lost its real roots with the destruction of the age old desert culture can only be maintained by an intellectual petrification.(7)’

    However, by the 1970s Islam had become according to Kostiner and Teitelbaum ‘a two edged political instrument – as the kingdom’s primary medium of self-legitimisation, and as the main venue of protest for opposition elements.’ Given how formal political protest, in the shape of political parties, had never been tolerated, unsurprisingly, opposition emerged from the religious milieu, culminating, arguably, in Osama bin Laden and Al-Queda.

    State application of Wahhabism also leaves the Shi’a as a persecuted minority (5-10% of the overall Saudi population) perpetually at odds with the regime, and subject to repression.

    Mohammed bin Salman with U.S. President Donald Trump, March, 2017.

    Just as history imprisons the Israeli government in their tyrannical treatment of the Palestinians, similarly Saudi Arabia is bound by its inheritance. The current Crown Prince, thirty-two-year-old Mohammed bin Salman, courts Western approval by granting women the right to drive, but has done nothing to alter the male guardianship system, where male relatives or husbands have control over almost all aspects of women’s lives.

    More meaningful is Saudi participation in the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars, which serve as bloody proxies for internal contradictions. The age-old conflict with Persia/Iran is, similarly, linked to a battle to preserve conformity in the country itself.

    V Monotheism v Polytheism

    No one cause explains the complex origins of conflict in the Middle East. Moreover, arguably violence is inherent in the human condition, and those of us living within the relatively peaceful confines of Europe and America are perhaps living through a golden age of relative peace. Nonetheless, it is apparent that the wars of the Middle East have boiled with almost unmatched intensity since the end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1922.

    Oil wealth and vast military arsenals have played a role, as does the proximity to Europe which bequeaths embroilment in destructive alliances. But a society that had been so dominated by the instructors of a monotheistic faith now appears devoid of leadership, while the other two that emerged in the region also claim dominion. It seems in the nature of each one to suggest that the other is intolerable, despite the obvious similarities.

    For centuries the Ottoman Empire imposed an orthodoxy that brought relative tranquility, but this was predicated on exploitation by social superiors. The popular appeal of Arab nationalism faded with Nasser, and failed to alter the social structures to forge genuinely fair societies. Political Islam appeared as ‘the answer’ in the late 1970s, but it has often been the only avenue for the expression of discontents, and contains within its inheritance repressive tendencies towards competing belief systems, including atheism.

    Palmyra, Syria. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    In 2015 the world looked on in horror as so-called Islamic State set about destroying the remains of the Hellenic city of Palmyra, which I had the pleasure to visit in 2003. One may have assumed it was vandalism on a grand scale, but its destruction appears to have flown from the doctrine of tawhid. The disorder of the present was viewed through the prism of pre-Islamic Arabia, as Bowersock explains:

    The tribes, clans and gods of Arabia at this time worked to the advantage of external powers. It was precisely this diversity and disunity that would be a threat to Muhammad when he first began to receive his revelation from Gabriel and would be resolved only as the Islamic movement gathered strength(8).

    No rival could be allowed to stand before submission (Islam) to one God.

    One of the pantheon of gods worshipped at Palmyra is called Allat (earlier known as Ailat). She is often depicted as a consort of another pagan god Allah, whose name Muslims appropriated for the one God of Islam. A Jungian analysis would suggest a symbolic severance from the eternal feminine, which gives rise to enduring conflict; the vehemence directed at the so-called Satanic Verses, purportedly featuring a dialogue between Muhammad and that deity, are revealing.

    Jewish monotheism is not only characterised by one god but also by one people deserving of God’s intercession, which could explain the single-minded attitude of Israel towards the rest of the world. Nor has the idea of a tripartite Christian deity diluted a singular conviction legitimating the destructive colonisation of most of the planet, in the name of God. All of the monotheistic faiths are characterised by a disjunction with the feminine, and perhaps Nature itself.

    Aqaba, Jordan. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    The wounds of the Middle East continue to fester, with no end in sight to the conflicts in Israel, Syria and Yemen. Religion continues to play a divisive role and forgotten are the days of the first Islamic Empire when individual conscience appears to have been respected, at least beyond Arabia. One fears that calamities will continue until a radical reappraisal of our religious traditions occur.

    Frank Armstrong completed a Masters in Islamic Societies and Cultures in the School of Oriental Studies (SOAS) in 2004, and lived for a period in the Middle East.

    Feature Image: Kevin Fox, all rights reserved.

    (1) G. W. Bowersock The Crucible of Islam (London, 2015), p.158

    (2) David Frum, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, (New York, 2003) p.171-175

    (3) Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), p.128

    (4) Nikki R. Keddie, ‘Is the a Middle East’ International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 4 (1973) p.269

    (5) Nazih Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State: State Politics and Society in the Middle East, (London 1995) p.30

    (6) Ibid, p. 39

    (7) Helen Lackner, A House Built on Sand – A Political Economy of Saudi Arabia, London, 1978 p.217

    (8) G. W. Bowersock The Crucible of Islam (London, 2015), p.158

  • Drinking from the Waters of Prevention in Public Health

    The Lancet’s recent editorial, ‘Austerity in Spain: time to loosen the grip’, argues that low government expenditure was ‘undermining the principle of universal coverage’ in that country. They point to pensioners devoting a substantial proportion of their incomes to medicines, and warn of excessive delays in elective surgeries being carried out. Detrimental effects are particularly evident among socially marginalised groups, such as migrants, they contend.

    Yet in spite of these privations the authors note that life expectancy in Spain had reached 83 years in 2015, up from 79·3 years in 2000, the highest, on average, of any EU country. Unconvincingly, they assume the repercussions ‘of the financial crises are not necessarily all detrimental: ‘increases in healthy behaviours (eg, cycling, walking) and reductions in risky activities (eg, consumption of alcohol or tobacco) might occur’.

    It is a common misconception that increasing health expenditure in any Western society will bring about a rise in life expectancy. In fact, there are rapidly diminishing returns on investment. Primary care, especially in maternity services and pediatrics (including selective use of antibiotics, and vaccination), certainly minimises premature deaths, but most healthcare addresses the symptoms rather than acting on the lifestyle triggers of the diseases that are now the greatest cause of mortality (and morbidity) in the Western world.

    This reflects the Tudor-Hart Inverse Care Law, which states: ‘The availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served. This … operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced.’ In other words, efficiency declines as expenditure increases, and the freer the health market the worse the outcomes.

    The two main causes of mortality in the Western world are cardiovascular disease and cancer. An early diagnosis may indeed nip a problem in the bud, but does not address the social and environmental drivers of these maladies. The hospital experience itself may even be unhealthy, as an expansive 2014 Swiss cost-benefit analysis of Mammogram services suggests. One in five of the cancers detected with mammography and treated was not a threat to the woman’s health, and did not require treatment such as chemotherapy, surgery or radiation.

    In fact, the adverse effect of medical treatment is one of the leading causes of death in most developed countries: especially the high-spending United States, where in 2000 Dr. Barbara Starfield estimated:

    • 12,000 deaths/year from unnecessary surgeries.
    • 7,000 deaths/year from medication errors in hospitals.
    • 20,000 deaths/year from other errors in hospitals.
    • 80,000 deaths/year from nosocomial infections in hospitals.
    • 106,000 deaths/year from nonerror, adverse effects of medications.

    More recently in 2016, a John Hopkins team calculated that 250,000 deaths were caused by medical errors each year, making iatrogenic illness the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after cardiovascular disease and cancer. This serves as a particular warning to those countries converging with U.S. norms, where health care is largely left to market forces.

    Yet health discourse continues to promote the scientific holy grail of the wonder cure, even for ailments intimately related to lifestyles and environmental factors. This approach may be traced to a Romantic era of science at the end of the eighteenth century, and has profound implication for government funding of health services.

    Moreover, when a person is afflicted with serious a disease the demand for a cure becomes a matter of life and death. Most of us will do anything in our power to survive, crying from the rooftops if necessary. A healthy person, on the other hand, is generally oblivious or uninterested in why they remain hale and hearty. Stories focusing on the affordability of medicines or failures in health services have far greater news currency than the multifarious reasons why one society is less prone to disease than another.

    A rational health system would continue to pursue medicinal breakthroughs, in collaboration with but not at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, but place greater emphasis on addressing the complex aetiology of pathologies, in particular lifestyle and other factors that give rise to cancers and cardiovascular diseases.

    II Lifestyle Factors

    The advancement of lifestyle change, as opposed to dispensing medicines, would also require a cultural shift among the medical community, which could have revolutionary ramifications for society.

    By and large doctors are trained to intervene against clearly defined pathologies, mainly through medication, and have less training in ‘soft’ psychological skills, which might alter self-destructive behaviours at source. Psychiatry, psychology’s close relative, is a specialised branch of medicine, overwhelming devoted to treating mental illness rather than providing guidance to society at large. Moreover, the complexity of lifestyle factors often renders research data unsatisfactory, with findings easily dismissed as conjecture or mere correlation.

    Nonetheless, in a research paper this year entitled: ‘Impact of Healthy Lifestyle Factors on Life Expectancies in the US Population‘ researchers attempted to show that countering a range of unhealthy conditions including being a smoking, maintaining a high body mass index, taking little or no exercise, and consuming a poor diet and alcohol to excess, could significantly increase life expectancy:

    The United States is one of the wealthiest nations worldwide, but Americans have a shorter life expectancy compared with residents of almost all other high-income countries, ranking 31st in the world for life expectancy at birth in 2015.3 In 2014, with a total health expenditure per capita of $9402,4 the United States was ranked first in the world for health expenditure as a percent of gross domestic product (17.1%). However, the US healthcare system has focused primarily on drug discoveries and disease treatment rather than prevention. Chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer are the commonest and costliest of all health problems but are largely preventable.

    It is notable that the U.S. spends the highest proportion of its GDP on healthcare in the world, yet witnesses poor outcomes relative to other developed nations. This reflects the Tudor-Hart Inverse Care Law, which Obama’s Patient Care and Affordable Care Act (so-called Obamacare) redresses. Ironically, this is being whittled away by the Trump administration, who enjoyed support in the Presidential election from states where more than four out of five of those who rely on Obamacare reside.

    Aside from insufficient access to Primary Care, the U.S.’s disease burden also arises from addictions to junk foods, drugs and cars. Medications or surgery do little to confront the obesity pandemic, or drug dependencies, including the opiate crisis which killed more than 33,000 thousand in 2015.

    Rather than ramping up access to healthcare the authors instead recommend adherence to a ‘low-risk lifestyles, which could:

    prolong life expectancy at age 50 years by 14.0 and 12.2 years in female and male US adults compared with individuals without any of the low-risk lifestyle factors. Our findings suggest that the gap in life expectancy between the United States and other developed countries could be narrowed by improving lifestyle factors.

    The logic of this emphasis is consistent with the explanation of the authors of The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Floud et al., Cambridge, 2011) for why average life expectancies have risen across the world over the past three centuries.

    Crucial breakthroughs in raising global life expectancy arrived first in England in the late eighteenth century with government intervention in the grain market, which stabilised prices, thereby averting periodic famines. The average age at death climbed more dramatically once clean drinking water became available at the end of the nineteenth.

    An important consequence of early-nineteenth-century urbanisation had been ‘the deterioration of the quality and quantity of the water supply(1)’. Drinking water only improved after substantial state-funded infrastructural investment in the 1890s. Thereafter, a range of water-born diseases like diarrhea, cholera and dysentery ceased to trouble the population to anywhere near the same extent.

    The authors make a significant claim:

    it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of scientific medicine when one considers that much of the decline in the mortality associated with infectious diseases predated the introduction of effective medical measures to deal with it(2).

    They acknowledge that drugs like insulin, penicillin and prontosil as well as the mass immunizations of the post Second World War era made a difference, but maintain that adequate nutrition and clean water were the main determinants which overcame the infectious diseases which had carried off most of the population until that point.

    III Smoking and Obesity

    Today the drivers of disease in developed countries are manifold, but one factor often overlooked is the stress of living in perpetual income insecurity. This goes some way towards explaining why it tends to be the poor who make unwholesome food choices, especially favouring refined sugar, and continuing to smoke in spite of vivid health warnings.

    Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes the ubiquity of smoking as a clear index of the state of civilisation: ‘If smoking is defined as an ersatz act which absorbs the increasing nervousness of civilized man, affecting the body’s chemistry as well as motor function, then this penetration of our culture by smoking demonstrates to what depth the culture is permeated by nervousness.(3)’

    Moreover, the medical writer Kurt Pohlisch describes how: ‘In the act of smoking the nervously restless hand fixes on a purpose.’ He continues: ‘Smoking creates both a feeling of activity in leisure and one of leisure in the midst of activity … In terms of motoricity, pharmacology and sense psychology, smoking creates a cheerful mood, highly varied nuances of physical feelings, an agreeable stimulation with which to perform intellectual work, a pleasant sense of calm, a state of contentedness, satisfaction [and] easy cordiality.(4)’

    Consequently, a substantial minority continue to smoke, despite constant and graphic advice to quit. What the campaigns against smoking fail to recognise is the role played by smoking – and the use of other drugs – in relieving the stress of living in perpetual income insecurity.

    Smoking: ‘activity in leisure and one of leisure in the midst of activity’.

    Similarly, sections of societies living under free market conditions are prone to unhealthy dietary patterns. Avner Offer asserts: ‘Among affluent societies, the highest prevalence of obesity is to be found in countries most strongly committed to market-liberal policy norms.’ He argues: ‘if stress generates obesity, then welfare states protect against stress, and are likely to have lower states of obesity.’

    He says: ‘it is appropriate to think of the rise of obesity as an eruption, and to look for another eruption to explain it’. He identifies this as the emergence of the New Right in the late 1970s, and the market-liberal regimes that subsequently carried out their economic and social programmes in the main English-speaking countries, and elsewhere.

    He argues ‘the economic benefits of flexible and open market liberalism, such as they are, may be offset by costs to personal welfare and public health, which are rarely taken into account’, citing the example of the UK where adult obesity has tripled since 1980. An obesogenic environment was actually largely in place by the 1970s: car-use and television-watching were well established, and food was already sugary, cheap and plentiful before Margaret Thatcher came to power. The same stress-inducing conditions emerged in the United States under Ronald Reagan.

    Increased stress levels, especially fueled by employment uncertainty affect dietary choices: ‘Physiologically, stress leads individuals to prefer fatty and sweet foods, and frequently to consume more calories, exacerbating weight gain, especially in the form of risky abdominal fat.’ The idea of a link between insecurity, stress and obesity is supported by the ‘social gradient’ of obesity’: it is most prevalent among those at the bottom of the social ladder.

    Illuminatingly, in the month after September 11th, sales of snack foods increased by more than 12% across the United States as paranoia, verging on hysteria, swept through the country. Overall: ‘among rich nations, the USA and Great Britain have experienced the greatest income inequality since 1980 and the greatest increase in the prevalence of obesity(3)’.

    Peter Whybrow connects these responses to our early evolution. He argues that stress causes the lizard core of our brains to release dopamine, a hormone connected to pleasure, after consuming fatty and sweet food.

    He paints a lurid picture: ‘In the presence of continuous psychosocial shocks, a complex work environment, repeated deadlines, a difficult marriage – the alarm bells are continuously ringing and the stress response is continuously in play. In consequences, the body is maintained in a high state of psychological arousal, where the vulnerability to chronic illness is increased, with obesity as no exception.(4)’

    IV The Miracle Cure

    Richard Holmes argues that several crucial misconceptions crystallized around the idea of science at the start of the nineteenth century, aspects of which continue to confound our understanding of public health.

    There emerged at that point, ‘the dazzling idea of the solitary scientific ‘genius’, thirsting and reckless for knowledge, for its own sake and perhaps at any cost’. This is closely connected with the idea of the ‘Eureka’ moment: ‘the intuitive inspired instant of invention or discovery, for which no amount of preparation or preliminary analysis can really compare(5).’

    Western medicine perpetuates what is essentially a mythology of invention, assuming genius will produce a wonder cure for diseases such as cancer; just as Edward Jenner developed the idea of vaccination for small pox by infecting a young farm boy with the disease after first giving him a dose of cowpox. He had learnt from local folklore that milk maids who developed that mild condition never contracted the deadly pox.

    The chronic conditions we confront are not, however, susceptible to silver bullet breakthroughs in the form of drug interventions or vaccination. Medications may extend lives but generally fail to eliminate the diseases or address underlying causes. Nonetheless, the media is transfixed by tantalising cures lying on the horizon.

    One notable exception is the long-standing campaign against smoking, but as indicated, governments fail to recognise why people refuse to give up. Meanwhile, we see desultory efforts to warn against or tax consumption of ‘pure, white and deadly’ refined sugar, or red and processed meat, categorised as possible and probable carcinogens by the WHO. Likewise the transport infrastructure of most developed countries is designed primarily for motor cars, leading to a serious lack of physical activity.

    In the past doctors displayed greater awareness of the lifestyle factors that lead to disease, including the health benefits, or otherwise, derived from staple foodstuffs.

    By the seventeenth century bread was a vital element in the diet of most Parisians, who, on average, ate a remarkable one kilo-and-a-half per day. At that the time the perceived adulteration of bread with ‘barm’ or yeast, as opposed to the traditional sourdough ‘levain’ method, produced a medical controversy, leading to the formation of an expert medical panel.

    In condemning the use of yeast, the leading medical expert Gui Patin stated:

    To say, as those who defend it do, that they have not seen anyone drop over sick or dead from eating this bread is not a good way to clear it of the faults with which it has been charged. It is like sugar refined with lime or alum, or heavily salted, peppered and sliced meats, or wines in which one tosses lime or fish glue, or other things bad in themselves which men concerned about their health avoid, even if none of these things causes death or threatens one’s health on the day it is ingested(6).

    In spite of his advice the Paris parliament maintained a policy of laissez faire. The preference of bakeries for yeast is explained by it acting faster than levain. Since the arrival of the Chorleywood Process we have reached a point where most bread is no more than a junk food, which is surely a significant, slow-burning cause of disease. Indeed, the quality of a country’s bread may be an overlooked comparative indicator of its overall health.

    The early nineteenth century radical doctor Thomas Beddoes defined the philanthropic doctor as ‘one who is humane in his conduct not so much from sudden impulses of passion as from a settled conviction of the miserly prevailing among mankind(7)’. Many doctors today display these qualities, but are often ground down by a system which processes disease. As specialisation increases compassion declines, with the body reduced to its composite parts. The pharmaceutical industry also increasingly distorts priorities, even in ostensibly publicly funded systems of healthcare.

    As his career drew to a close, Beddoes made a number of simple proposals for raising public health: he suggested that all wives should be provided (free of charge) with anatomy lectures, washing machines (steam-powered), fresh vegetables and pressure cookers(8). These proposals would not be out of place today.

    The emphasis of public health should shift to the general practitioner, whose role could be more educative (lessons in anatomy that Beddoes speaks of) than prescriptive, and the idea of general physician perhaps revived.

    V The Wide Angle

    ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ is the centrepiece of a ninth century Irish mythological cycle. It consists of a series of fantastical episodes of enduring interest. One such is the story of Nuada who loses his arm and authority in battle. We learn that the court physician Diancecht fashions him a prosthetic silver limb in its place.

    In the meantime, Diancecht’s son Miach begins to heal Nuada’s real severed arm, but the father prefers his own methods and surgically kills his son by removing his brain. Miach is buried by his sister Airmed and from his grave sprout three hundred and sixty-five healing herbs, which she orders in her cloak. Diancecht has other ideas, however, scattering the herbs, each of whose value would remain obscure.

    The possibilities of Miach’s more complimentary approach, rather than Diancecht’s artificial limb, suggests that healing may come from within the body itself, while the scattering of the healing herbs represents ignorance of the cures available in Nature.

    Diancecht wish to preserve the dominance of his profession might serve as a metaphor for the approach of the pharmaceutical industry. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma (London, 2012), in particular, has drawn attention to serious corruption in that industry. But medication will remain all-important as long as disease, not health, is the focus of public policy.

    Human beings cannot expect to live forever, but serious reductions can be made to the burden of disease. We can address drug addictions, the quality of food and increase physical activity, but stress and low-level depression, lead to unhealthy lifestyle choices. If you take your meal in a car, as is the case with up to twenty per cent of those consumed in the U.S., it is more than a nutritional issue.

    The culture of Spain is notable for its conviviality, although one could overstate how mealtimes are not rushed affairs, or that work can always be done manana. Nonetheless, the siesta is still respected, and the life-affirming fiesta an important dimension of civic life. However, the recent economic crisis, and current political turn, may be eroding aspects of this way of life. Moreover, the Mediterranean diet is no longer followed, and obesity increasingly apparent.

    Notably, the generation in Spain enjoying such longevity today spent most of their working lives in a political system that protected industry from foreign competition, and, especially after the Socialists came to power at the end of Franco’s dictatorship, lived under a welfare state.

    The generation at work in Spain today, or not as the case with so many, are subject to greater uncertainties in life than their parents, with potentially long-term health consequences. Indeed across Europe life expectancies have actually gone into decline for the first time since records began. This may reflect the stress induced by increasing income insecurity and inequality  in the era of the euro.

    Altering any culture is slow work, but a rational view of public health should recognise a cultural dimension to most infirmities. A breakthrough in public health could be to see all medicine ‘as a branch of psychiatry, and psychiatry as a branch of philosophy’, as Iain McGilchrist put it.

    We may also return to a more general appreciation of our reality that animated the first generation of scientists, including polymaths such as Alexander von Humboldt who wrote: ‘In this great chain of causes and effects no single fact can be considered in isolation.’

     

    (1) Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge, 2011), p.173

    (2) Ibid, p.178

    (3) Wolfgang Shivelbusch Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York, 1992) pp.96-111

    (4) Ibid, pp.96-111

    (5) Avner Offer, R ‘Time Urgency, Sleep Loss, and Obesity’ in Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey, and Stanley Ulijaszek, Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies (London, 2012) pp.129-141

    (5) Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008) p. xvii

    (6) Madeleine Ferrieres Sacred Cow Mad Cow (Translated by Jody Gladding) (New York, 2006), p.188

    (7) Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008) p.286

    (8) Ibid, p.302

  • Venezuela Sinks in the ‘Excrement of the Devil’

    It is as if anyone writing about Venezuela must pass through the red channel, for all have something to declare. The competing narratives of Left and Right offer ideologically-tainted accounts, often saying more about any commentator’s domestic politics than Venezuela’s predicament. But even diehard supporters of the country’s charismatic former President Hugo Chávez cannot deny that Venezuela is now facing a humanitarian disaster under his incumbent successor Nicolás Maduro, with a refugee crisis in train, and rampant inflation amid reports that nearly nine in ten of the population have difficulty purchasing food, while three out of four have lost weight – an average of nineteen pounds in 2017 alone.[i]

    I determined to find out for myself what has happened to a country that was a beacon of hope for the Left. Thus far, my main interaction with Venezuelans has been as a teacher to those wealthy enough to study in private colleges in the U.K.. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I cannot think of any one of them who displayed affection for the country’s charismatic former President Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, having held the presidency, with one brief interruption, since 1999. Chávez built a political movement out of marginalised sections of that society, which sought to use the country’s fabulous oil wealth to develop a socialist state. With Cuba’s Fidel Castro as a father figure, he reprised his countryman Simón Bolívar’s ultimately vain pursuit of Latin American unity.

    Naturally, I arrive at an analysis of Venezuela with my own set of assumptions, such as that oil wealth, which depends on little toil or ingenuity, corrupts all but the most ordered of societies (like Norway); and that central to the U.S.’s long-standing Monroe Doctrine – claiming Central and South America as a U.S. ‘sphere’ of influence – has been the development of a comprador class of go-betweens, often working to the detriment of their own societies. I endeavour to avoid doctrinaire assumptions, however, as I am aware how apparently socialist regimes often breed apparatchiks, who plunder the resources of the state and commit human rights abuses. Indeed, Antonio Gramsci, the great Marxist Italian political theorist, recognised that ‘(t)he prevalence of the bureaucratic in the State indicates that the leading group is saturated, that it is turning into a narrow clique which tends to perpetuate its selfish privileges by controlling or even stifling the birth of oppositional forces.’[ii]

    A trip to Cuba in my twenties disabused me of the notion that Caribbean Socialism brought any kind of utopia. The level of prostitution at the time was staggering: as European males we were accosted by women who were clearly desperate for money, rather than for us. Moreover, notwithstanding the reputation of its health services, we found anecdotal evidence of Cubans being unable to afford basic medicines. Also, major cities were in an advanced state of dilapidation, which can be charming for tourists but less enchanting in a tropical storm. Much of that poverty can be attributed to the American embargo at the time, but equally Uncle Sam could be used as an excuse for petty corruption and repression. Nonetheless, what Cuba has achieved in terms of life expectancy and a low-input agriculture compares favourably with most of the failing post-colonial states in the same region, all of which share a legacy of genocide against native communities, slave plantations and attendant ecological destruction, along with over two centuries of self-motivated U.S. interference.

    Venezuela shares much of this inheritance with its Caribbean neighbours, but its history since the early twentieth century bears the influence of another salient feature: oil. Venezuela has greater reserves even than Saudia Arabia, making it ripe for investment, and outside interference. Oil exerts a profound effect on the entire social fabric. According to Miguel Tinker Salas: ‘Like a lubricant coating the various parts of an internal combustion engine, oil literally permeates every aspect of Venezuelan society in ways that are not apparent to an outsider.’[iii]

    While acknowledging that any commentary arrives via individual bias, we tend to place more trust in the dispassionate analysis of august publications such as The New York Review of Books. After reading its March 8 – 21, 2018 edition, however, my confidence was somewhat shaken. I am referring to the article by Enrique Krauze on Venezuela entitled ‘Hell of a Fiesta’ which appeared on the front cover. Krauze states that between 2013 and 2017 the country’s GDP fell more precipitously than that of the U.S. during the Great Depression, or in Russia after the end of Communism, but he omits to emphasise that in that period the price of oil, overwhelmingly Venezuela’s main export, more than halved in price. Krauze is building a case, and by giving such prominence to his article The New York Review of Books appears to be endorsing his stance.

    Krauze points to the serious current humanitarian crisis brought on by government mismanagement – which appears largely indisputable – as well as evidence of repressive measures taken to curb dissent, all of which cohere with Gramsci’s account of a bureaucratic state at saturation point. But to say: ‘The full responsibility lies with the Chávez and Maduro regime … which for fifteen years had a windfall of petroleum resources comparable only to those of the major Middle Eastern producers and yet wasted that income recklessly’, accords no relevance to the legacy of Venezuela’s troubled history, and ignores entirely the progress that had been made in alleviating poverty.

    For Krauze Venezuelan history appears to have begun at about the point the historian Francis Fukuyama made the outlandish claim that history had come to an end.[iv] Krauze’s critique recalls the great U.S. writer Gore Vidal’s description of a ‘United States of Amnesia’, where the past is wilfully forgotten. Vidal identified striking similarities in media accounts of ‘democratic’ elections in post-invasion Iraq, and the coverage of events in Vietnam forty years earlier. An editorial in The New York Times in 1967 might have appeared in response to that later conflagration:

    U.S. encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83 percent turnout despite Vietcong terror… A successful election has long been seen as the keystone to President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.[v]

    There exists a similar suspended reality to U.S. coverage of Venezuela, heightened by the presence of the key strategic asset of oil. Crucial to U.S. success has been the projection of ‘soft’ power, especially of a middle class wedded to U.S. consumer lifestyles. Advocates of U.S.-led globalisation, such as Krauze, trumpet the need for ‘free’ elections, and ignore gross inequalities. If human rights abuses are committed by regimes supportive of the U.S., these tend to be forgotten, or absolved as ‘a son-of-a-bitch but our son-of-a-bitch’.

    Krauze is a Mexican public intellectual, and apparently a liberal, a term that means very little any more. He has advocated privatising the extraction of oil in his home country, for reasons of efficiency, and in pursuit of shale oil and gas[vi]. In an article in 2015 he described Chávez’s attempt to emulate Cuba politically as an ‘an inexcusable choice.’[vii] But considering the dire poverty and inequality in Venezuela when Chávez came to power, describing his socialist policies, which would not be out of place in Norway, as “inexcusable” seems rather an extreme assertion. Krauze conveniently overlooks how by the end of his tenure Chávez had cut poverty in half and reduced extreme poverty by more than seventy percent.[viii]

    Little now remains of Venezuela’s indigenous civilisations. As is the case across the Americas, the native population was almost wiped out by a combination of conquest, enslavement and contagious diseases. Perhaps the most stirring cinematic depiction of that period is Werner’s Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre Wrath of God, starring Klaus Kinsky as a deranged conquistador in search of El Dorado – a land of gold that has given way to ‘Oil Dorado’.

    The origin of the name of the country is subject to controversy. The best indication is that the explorer Amerigo Vespucci (whose own name survives in two continents) was reminded of Venice by the thatched palm-covered residences erected on wooden poles over lakes by the native Arawak people. Later the humanitarian writer Barolomé de las Casas is credited with using the term ‘little Venice’ on a map he sketched after visiting the area. By 1528, the name ‘Venezuela’ had appeared on another map used by the Spanish Crown.[ix]

    With the native population all but wiped out, creole settlers chose to import African slaves to work on their plantations, especially chocolate and coffee. Slavery was carried over into a state, which first declared independence in 1811, with lasting repercussions. Venezuela’s most famous revolutionary son was El Libertador, Simón Bolívar (1783-1830). His Irish aide-de-camp Daniel Florence O’Leary noted in his memoirs that Bolívar’s ‘imperious and impatient temperament would never tolerate the smallest delay in the execution of an order.’[x] Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1989 novel The General in his Labyrinth paints a picture of an exiled leader driven to the edge of reason by the enormity of his ambition to reform the post-colonial society he inhabited. According to Tinker Salas: ‘the wars of independence may have resulted in a rupture with Spain, but they did not produce a social revolution that altered pre-existing class relations or redistributed wealth.’[xi] Ultimately Bolívar would despair: ‘I blush to say this: independence is the only benefit we have acquired, to the detriment of all the rest’, but his legacy of attempting to bring unity to the region remains an intoxicating elixir to his heirs.

    The ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery was not abolished in Venezuela until 1854, and leaves an enduring legacy, as elsewhere, of exclusion, racism and sense of entitlement among elites. In 1918 ‘non-white’ immigration was prohibited, while Europeans continued to be encouraged to settle in the country. There were no segregation laws, however, and miscegenation was common. In 1944 the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco coined the term café con leche to describe the Venezuelan racial makeup.[xii] Nevertheless, Hugo Chávez was subjected to racist taunts over the course of his rule.

    Social exclusion and the low education levels of so much of the population meant democracy in Venezuela could not take root throughout most of the twentieth century. The first peaceful handover of power by one regime to another only occurred in the 1960s. Gramsci believed that ‘democracy by definition cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can be skilled, it must mean that every citizen can ‘govern’ and that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this.’[xiii] Likewise, any understanding of Venezuelan democratisation must recognise that the low level of development in the country has created disorders that ‘free’ elections do little to cure. What is more, mere technical education is insufficient to incubate the capacity of any Venezuelan citizen, in theory, to govern.

    After tapping into oil wealth, Norwegians drew on the austere historical experience of a homogenous society on the polar frontier of human habitation, and a ‘Protestant’ work ethic including a strong educational tradition, to develop an egalitarian democracy. Norwegians believed themselves to be the equal of one another, permitting, abstractly at least, any Norwegian to govern another. Venezuela, on the other hand, after the discovery of oil, was saddled with hierarchies of wealth and race, and a tropical climate, which makes labour challenging. Equipping the poor with technical skills, as Chávez’s government sought to achieve, did not instil a capacity to govern. Moreover, mutual trust evaporated in the class war which at times he appeared to foment. True democratisation is a process that usually takes decades, or even centuries, to engender a stable and representative political system. The material improvements Chávez brought to the lives of the poor could only be a precursor to the real adjustments, in education in particular, that any society requires in order to develop harmonious governance.

    Looking back, the exploitation of oil, which began in earnest in the 1920s, created a stratum of society susceptible to the corruption associated with unearned wealth, allowing US oil companies to get along with the job of extracting the black gold. The windfall led to the country becoming a net food importer by the 1930s,[xiv] which served to diminish food sovereignty, reflected in the high prices of staples today. Especially after World War II, radical, including Communist, ideas filtered through to the Venezuelan people, leading to periodic outbreaks of violence. In response oil companies formed an ‘Industrial Security Council’ to coordinate security with the American embassy and its military attachés. Tinker Salas claims that the Pentagon was behind a coup d’etat in 1948.[xv]

    Awareness was growing among the wider populace of the incredible wealth the country possessed, and that this was not being devoted to the betterment of the population at large. On the international front, Venezuela was one of the founding members of OPEC in 1960, and domestically pressure mounted on the government to nationalise reserves. U.S. attitudes to the country are epitomised by a Newsweek cover from 1964 entitled ‘The Promise and the Threat’, featuring an image of President Rául Leoni with Fidel Castro looming behind him.

    In 1976 one of the chief Venezuelan architects of OPEC, Pérez Alfonzo, published a collection of essays entitled Hundiéndonos en el excremento del diablo, ‘We are sinking in the excrement of the devil’, which concluded that after nationalisation ‘el petróleo es nuestro, lo demás lo importamos’ ‘the oil is ours, everything else we import.’[xvi] He revealed an intuitive understanding of what economists call ‘the natural curse’, or ‘the paradox of plenty’, which diminishes self-reliance and entrepreneurship. That same year the government finally nationalised the industry. The U.S. companies were not entirely displeased, however, as the law allowed for contracts with foreign firms. Venezuela had become a classic rentier state which derived all or a substantial portion of its national revenues from the ‘rent’ of indigenous resources to external clients. A two-tier society endured, with the higher echelon embracing a U.S. consumer culture. A particular feature of this was a veneration of female beauty, indicative of a society where women are treated as ‘luxury mammals’, to use Gramsci’s description of the wives and daughters of American industrialists between the wars.[xvii]

    A proliferation in beauty pageants yielded seven Miss Universe and six Miss World crowns on the international stage, and transformed an ideal of female beauty into a national obsession. This stimulated demand for cosmetic products, exploited by organisers of the pageants who distributed a wide range of beauty treatments, and brought a thriving industry in plastic surgery. The ideal of beauty that was promoted was distinctly white European.

    In 1999 the country was subjected to a series of mudslides, the Vargas Tragedy, that witnessed the deaths of between fifteen and thirty thousand people. The uncertainty around the number of fatalities is indicative of a lack of concern for those living in shanty towns on the part of the governing elite. Successive governments had permitted houses to be built in unsuitable locations before the ‘natural’ disaster took place.

    Thus, the phenomenon of Hugo Chávez cannot be abstracted from Venezuelan history as Krautze in his New York Review article suggests. As a post-colonial society, Venezuela brought a host of problems into the twentieth century, especially the social exclusion of the bulk of the population and a toxicity in ‘race’ relations. The challenge of development in a tropical environment also cannot be discounted.

    Over decades of oil wealth, Venezuelan elites had failed to distribute the nation’s resources effectively, a pattern seen throughout the developing world. In these circumstances, for a left-wing populist such as Hugo Chávez to emerge was predictable, if not inevitable, but many of his aspirations can be lauded. During 2002 poverty gripped 49.6% of the population, with 32% destitute. This had fallen to 27.8% and 10.7% respectively, by 2010.[xviii] Chávez’s period in office as president between 1999 and 2013 incontrovertibly brought substantial improvements to the lives of the poor. Whatever about the methods employed, or the current crisis under his successor Nicolás Maduro, the achievements of that period cannot be ignored.

    A constitution promulgated in 2000 established access to education, housing, health and food as inalienable rights guaranteed by the state. The standing of women and indigenous communities was also raised, while special status was bestowed on the environment, with the state committed to guard against ecological degradation. Such aspirations would not appear out of place in the constitution of a mature democracy.

    Chávez’s rule was far from exemplary, however, as corruption became rife, but the continued intransigence of the wealthiest stratum destabilised the country to a point where a coup d’état was launched in 2002. The U.S. government, if not involved, was clearly supportive. Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer claimed that Chávez had brought the coup on himself, while, perhaps more surprisingly, an editorial the day afterwards in The New York Times read, without irony: ‘with yesterday’s removal of President Chávez Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.’[xix] Chávez survived the coup after a popular uprising, which underlined his appeal among the most marginalised in that society. Tinker Salas discounts the view that this was based purely on client-patron relations, and suggests that national pride, left-wing policies, his African heritage and a general loss of faith in the political process all played their part.

    According to Tinker Salas, Chávez’s death highlighted the strengths, but also the limits, of ‘an all-powerful hyper-presidentialism expected to resolve the country’s deep-seated problems.’[xx] His successor Nicolás Maduro is not of the same calibre. His survival, having emerged victorious in the May 2018 election, whose validity is contested, depends on the extent to which he can continue to mobilise the support of the poorer sections of society. As regards Venezuela’s long-term possibilities one can only hope that more is done to heal a corrosive addiction to oil revenue – “the excrement of the devil” –  which has bred corruption and complacency since its discovery. Venezuelans would do well to learn from how Cuba survived oil shortages at the end of the Cold War, especially when its agriculture was denied access to petro-chemicals.

    Moreover, the status of Venezuelan women as “luxury mammals”, dependent on beauty for their status, is a clear pathology. As Gramsci points out: ‘Until women can attain not only a genuine independence in relation to men but also a new way of conceiving themselves and their role in sexual relations, the sexual question will remain full of unhealthy characteristics.’[xxi] Finally, coverage of the country has often tended to highlight poverty and violence, but Venezuelans often have a happier disposition than is evident among people living in stable democracies. This point is affirmed in successive polls, and accords with my own dealings with Venezuelans.

    *******

    In The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London, Fourth Estate, 2005), Robert Fisk describes the role of the journalist as being to write the first draft of history. This ought to be the case, but the reality is that the market now demands obsessive focus on a self-perpetuating news cycle, which Benedict Anderson characterised as the ‘obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing.’[xxii] The slower pace of the journalist-historian who carefully interrogates sources to develop evidence is increasingly rare. Today, a figure of Fisk’s type, writing independently from a conflict zone, which he knows intimately, for decades, is, if not extinct, then highly anomalous. The new reporters are often unprofessional bystanders who live stream events on camera phones, while the digital medium we increasingly rely on lends itself to distraction and manipulation. Now the ideology of a newspaper or broadcaster often trumps integrity. During his long career, Fisk witnessed the extent to which news could be manipulated to justify military invasions: the “United States of Amnesia” at work. The justification for any humanitarian intervention remains elusive as international institutions fragment, but once the cost-benefit analysis is complete, it could be Venezuela’s turn for the ‘tough love’ of the West.

    [i] Centre on Foreign Relations, ‘A Venezuelan Refugee Crisis’, Contingency Planning Memorandum No. 33, February 15th, 2018. https://www.cfr.org/report/venezuelan-refugee-crisis, accessed 14/11/18.

    [ii] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith, London Lawrence & Wishart, 2003, p.189.

    [iii] Miguel Tinker Salas, Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, p.3.

    [iv] Francis Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992.

    [v] Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation, p.55, London, Little, Brown, 2006.

    [vi] Enrique Krauze, ‘Mexico’s Theology of Oil’, New York Times, October 31st, 2013.

    [vii] Enrique Krauze, ‘Rough Seas for Venezuela’, New York Times, February 15th, 2015.

    [viii] Mark Weisbrot, ‘Venezuelans Will Vote with Their Wallets’, New York Times, June 20th, 2016.

    [ix] Tinker Salas, 2015, pp.18-19.

    [x] J. B. Trend, Bolívar and the Independence of Spanish America, New York, Macmillan, 1948, p.225.

    [xi] Tinker Salas, 2015, p.39.

    [xii] Ibid, p.79.

    [xiii] Gramsci, 2003, p.40.

    [xiv] Tinker Salas, 2015, p.66.

    [xv] Ibid, p.85.

    [xvi] Ibid, p.104.

    [xvii] Gramsci, 2003, p.306.

    [xviii] Tinker Salas, 2015, p.192.

    [xix] Editorial, ‘Hugo Chavez Departs’, New York Times, April 13th, 2002.

    [xx] Tinker Salas, 2015, p.217

    [xxi] Gramsci, 2003, p.296

    [xxii]  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, Verso, 2006, p. 34.

  • What Lies Behind Ireland’s Abortion Referendum

    Is it cynical to suggest that Ireland’s ruling Fine Gael party is using the referendum to repeal the eighth amendment to the Constitution – which equates the life of a pregnant mother with the unborn – to deflect criticism from its hands-off approach to governance? One of the worst housing crises in the history of the state, a failing two-tier health system and a shameful environmental record all recede from view amidst the commotion.

    The end result will come at little cost, either way, to a government, some of whom, including the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, have expressed contradictory views on the subject. That lack of enthusiasm is apparent from the Fine Gael party’s decision not to put up posters to support a ‘yes’ vote. Win or lose, the government will say: ‘we have listened to the will of the people’.

    Leo Varadkar’s belated conversion to abortion rights might also reflect an appreciation of the makeover his predecessor Enda Kenny received after coming out in favour of gay marriage in the Marriage Equality Referendum of 2015. Keeping debate focused on the private lives of individuals, rather than the performance of state institutions, appears to be an excellent political strategy in twenty-first century Ireland.

    Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney’s own volte-face from principled opposition to acceptance of a need for reform also bears an imprint of political calculation. Such flip-flopping is not surprising considering he once claimed that what he knew about the science of climate change sent shivers down his spine, before displaying no scruples about expanding Ireland’s dairy sector while Minister for Agriculture.

    Since arriving as the dominant centre-right party after the Economic Crash of 2008, Fine Gael has steered a course between a traditional rural power base, and an urban middle class that lost faith in its predecessor Fianna Fail, as the establishment’s self-fulfilling ‘natural party of government’.

    Fine Gael is now in a ‘confidence and supply’ parliamentary alliance with its erstwhile foe, which has moved to the left after recovering a social conscience; Fianna Fail’s is on a familiar ideological journey for one of Ireland’s crooked, main political parties, for whom commitment to social equality generally depends on distance from power.

    The government’s continued policy of agricultural expansion, despite the sector generating one third of all national emissions, keeps the farming industry on side, while a propertied metropolitan bourgeoisie benefits from low taxation on their assets, especially property. This formula is doused with liberal doses of virtue-signalling ‘tolerance’, personified in the half-Indian and gay Taoiseach Leo Varadkar himself.

    Varadkar unapologetically courts a thrusting middle class constituency. His tenure as Minister for Social Welfare saw him take out advertisements against ‘welfare cheats‘; as Minister for Health he effectively endorsed a two-tier health system in boasting publicly that he had taken out private health insurance; while as Minister for Transport, to the undoubted delighted of the motor car lobby, he dismissed rail transport as being for ‘romantics’. But an increasing class divide may be an unacknowledged factor in the forthcoming plebiscite.

    Taoiseach Leo Varadkar

    The referendum pits conservative, rural Ireland against the generally liberal, Dublin metropolis. But opposition to abortion may be a proxy for the insecurity felt by those living in dying small towns removed from the capital, or renters impoverished by another explosion in property prices. Holding a Pro Life position might be a transgressive reaction to the perceived success of elites, who appear ‘shameless’ in their exultant sexuality. The sight of bright young women wearing the popular black jumper emblazoned with the word Repeal could only serve to stiffen the resolve of resentful opponents.

    The long-standing failure of the state to develop a functioning transport system has brought the isolation of car dependency across Ireland, and small businesses fail as multinationals dominate the retail landscape. Distance from the fruits of Ireland’s uneven recovery explains a simmering resentment among the ‘silent majority’, as much as the residual influence of the Catholic Church. It’s a tale of two countries, where those who take their dinner in the middle of the day do not sit down with urban brunchers.

    The run on bread and other staple foodstuffs before the onset of the ‘Beast from the East’ snow storm in late February betrayed a deep sense of unease among the population. It assumed that neither the state nor the wider community could be relied on, leaving the individual to bowl alone.

    The issue of abortion in Ireland is now a full-blown fiasco, stemming from the eighth amendment to the constitution in 1983, which proved unconscionable once it encountered social realities. Enshrining the life of an unborn as equal to a mother’s is a fine-sounding principle until you meet a suicidal minor impregnated through rape, who sees an abortion as the only way out of her predicament.

    The Supreme Court in the 1992 X Case met such circumstances and overturned the High Court’s earlier decision to detain the young girl in the state. The court overlooked the provision’s explicit statement on equality of consideration, treating it as inconsistent with natural justice.

    This led to further constitutional referenda guaranteeing a right to travel, and to information on abortion legally available elsewhere: ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’, which exported the problem to another jurisdiction.

    Also in the wake of the judgment, some conservatives claimed Ireland had among the most liberal abortion regimes in the world, as there was no theoretical limits on abortions in the event of a threat to the life of the mother.

    The issue simmered along for another two decades with thousands of women taking the trip across to the UK in that time. It took the death of Indian woman Savita Halappanavar in 2012 from a septic miscarriage after having her request for an abortion turned down in an Irish hospital to re-ignite the debate.

    The Protection of Life in Pregnancy Act 2013 legislated for the decision in the X Case, but far from closing down discussion it preserved the ambiguity around what constitutes a threat to the life of the mother sufficient to justify an abortion. Finally this year, Varadkar’s government accepted the recommendations of a Citizens’ Assembly and a parliamentary committee, and announced the referendum to repeal the provision, to allow for the state to legislate for terminations on demand. It’s been a slow burn ever since.

    It is unclear whether the number of those seeking abortions will actually increase if it is available on demand in Ireland. That is not to say the ethics of the matter are irrelevant – as some suggest who seek to portray it as simply a medical question – or that the associated cost of travel and medical care are unimportant, but the context is relevant.

    Just as the marriage equality referendum was not as much about gay marriage per se but about attitudes towards homosexuality, this referendum also concerns respecting the right of women to choose. To describe abortion as ‘a licence to kill‘ is a grave affront to the thousands of Irish women who have already had abortions.

    Unfortunately the issue is now so divisive that meaningful discussion hardly occurs around what right, if any, the unborn should enjoys subject to the countervailing right of a woman to her bodily integrity.

    This referendum could be Ireland’s Brexit or Trump moment, when the forces of reaction stand up and are counted against a complacent liberal elite. Yet only by progressives engaging constructively with the arguments of their opponents, and understanding the origins of so much of their ire can a toxic political chasm be bridged. Unfortunately with each side adopting Machiavellian marketing strategies, any recognition of opposing arguments becomes impossible.

    There are serious ethical questions to be addressed around the genetic profiling of the unborn, and to describe ‘No’ voters as simply misogynists does not advance the discussion at all. It is a culture war that serves the interests of the government, and a press which sells opposing sides in print, claiming this to be in the interest of balance.

    On one point at least, the ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ campaigns should agree: no woman should feel obliged by economic circumstances to terminate a pregnancy. We should focus on building a more caring society for the living, where women are offered adequate support by the state in rearing their children.

    A simple alteration to the constitution that would instantly compel any governments to pay heed to the material welfare of all Irish citizens would be to make Article 45 containing ‘The Directive Principles on Social Policy’ cognizable by the courts. As it stand socio-economic rights, such as a right to housing, are not provided for under the Irish constitution. The article is merely for the consideration of the Oireachtas, which is as good as worthless.

    Unfortunately there is fat chance the ‘natural party of government’, whichever one that is, will sponsor a referendum to make a basic standard of living in Ireland a constitutional right, which would be an incentive to motherhood.

    The eighth amendment brought a toxic ingredient into the constitution that proved unworkable once confronted by the social realities of rape and medical necessity. It concedes nothing to a woman’s right to bodily integrity, especially if she is in dire financial straits, treating her as a passive incubator. It must go. Let us then consider the origins of the discontent, and address socio-economic causes.

    Frank Armstrong is the content editor of Cassandra Voices. An archive of his writing is available on www.frankarmstrong.ie