Fifty years ago a politician published a manifesto which, if implemented, would have changed the nature of Irish society, would have defied the ethos of contemporary political culture and would have spared us so much of the misery caused by the recent crisis. (Vincent Browne ‘Remembering when Fine Gael flirted with a left-wing agenda’, Irish Times, February 12th, 2014)
As a young man I was an admirer of the former President of the High Court, Attorney General and architect of Fine Gael’s Just Society, Declan Costello. I was then privileged to engage with him on an informal basis, appearing before him in court on a number of occasions. He was a complex and often divisive figure, and I disagree profoundly with many of his judgments, but there is no doubting the profundity of the intellect.
He was one of the most impressive public speakers I have seen in action. It was a marriage of content and rhetoric abetted by a dry – very dry – sense of humour, albeit his diction was marred by a faintly detectable lisp. He was a remarkably civilized human being – a petite mannequin – whose pristine intellect was ill-suited to the rough and tumble of Irish politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuHZlTBgSSk
Born into a Fine Gael dynasty – as the eldest son of Taoiseach and barrister John A. Costello – he seems to have cut a dash as a young man. According to one story, Jackie Beauvoir (future Kennedy-Onassis) became infatuated with what would have been a slightly frail young man – he recovered from a bout of tuberculosis in his teens – after they met on her visit to Ireland in 1950.
An unlikely match.
I suspect she would not have had to worry about a husband having affairs with the likes of Marilyn Monroe if the match with Declan had borne fruit.
The curse of hereditary connection is a disease that afflicts Ireland. A privileged few families have dominated power and patronage throughout the history of the state, with the GPO in 1916 Rising acting as an Irish Mayfair. W.B. Yeats presciently described his fellow Senators in the 1920s in the following terms: ‘hot and vague, always disturbed always hating something or other … [they] had … signed the death warrant[s] of their dearest friend[s] … Yet their descendants, if they grow rich enough for the travel and leisure that make a finished man, will constitute our ruling class, and date their origin from the Post Office as American families date theirs from the Mayflower.’
Reference to an Irish ruling class recall a remark that Aneurin Bevin made of Anthony Eden that for all his apparent sophistication, he had the unplayable stupidities of his class and type. The charge of stupidity could not be levelled against Declan Costello, who, despite his flaws, sought to remould Ireland along Christian Socialist lines. Sadly, despite being one of the richest countries in Europe, almost three quarters of a million Irish people were still living in poverty in 2019, a figure that seems likely to rise in the months and years to come.
I remember Paddy McEntee once referring to him once as a cold fish. I am not so sure. Dispassionate might be a better description. Anyway I’d be more inclined to trust someone with Declan Costello’s detachment than the kind of avuncular, back-slapping figure that one often encounters in Ireland.
Declan Costello was legendary for his work ethic, which perhaps compensated for an obvious social awkwardness. His practised remoteness even seemed to extend to his fellow judges at social gatherings.
‘Fine Gael: Social Democratic Party’
Declan Costello will always be associated with the authorship of the Just Society document in 1966 that set out the ideals of the Christian Socialist movement which he promoted within the party.
Despite being clearly at variance with the current neo-liberal hegemony this tradition occasionally crops up in debates within Fine Gael. Notably, during the leadership debates in 2017 Simon Coveney implausibly differentiated himself from Leo Varadkar by claiming to represent it.
The documentspeaks of ‘the very wide areas in our society where great poverty exists, poverty which is degrading and capable of remedy, to appalling social conditions.’
And, ‘We are not living in a just society. This fact must be understood and complacency must be dispelled and enthusiasm created to remedy the social injustices in our midst.’
Fine Gael, it was said, sought ‘office to work towards a society in which freedom and equality are not concepts from an academic textbook but are expressed in real and tangible conditions which all our people can enjoy.’
However, in February 1967, having served as T.D. for Dublin North-West, Declan Costello announced his retirement from the rough and tumble of politics. But the ideals of the Just Society were carried on by ideological fellow travellers such as his brother-in-law Alexis FitGerald, Michael Sweetman, Jim Dooge and Garret Fitzgerald.
FitzGerald went on to become an unsatisfactory two-term Taoiseach in the 1980s. During this period a new kind of party crystallised, influenced by the Progressive Democrats, with figures like John Bruton coming to the fore, that adopted a laissez faire approach at variance with the Keynesianism of the previous generation.
Remarkably, the Fine Gael party was on the brink of changing its name to ‘Fine Gael: Social Democratic Party’ at the 1968 Árd Fheis. Apparently the majority in attendance were in favour of the motion but the coup was resisted on a technicality by the old guard.[i]
I was one of those beguiled by that at the time, believing that a right-wing party, such as Fine Gael, could be hijacked by a left agenda and be transformed via a procedural, albeit unintended, ambush. The ambush occurred at a time when Fine Gael felt self-conscious about standing for nothing and offering no alternative to a resurgent Fianna Fáil led by Seán Lemass.
Since then the conservative faction of large farmer and comfortable professionals serving multinational corporations has assumed pre-eminence. The party now led by Leo Varadkar is distinctly neo-liberal, with concessions to individual rights. The pole opposite of Declan Costello’s political credo.
Yet senior members of the party do continue to claim allegiance to the Just Society. The current Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe, who has been elected to the same constituency as Declan Costello seat, claimed in 2017 that he possessed a copy of the document and that ‘he [Leo Varadkar] values the just society as much as I do and places its spirit in a modern, outward-looking and dynamic Ireland.’
Judicial Appointment
Like many of his contemporaries Declan Costello was a devout Catholic, which informed the noblesse oblige of the Just Society. Under Garret Fitzgerald and beyond, however, Fine Gael diverged from Costello’s ideals, embracing a socially liberal approach on issues such as contraception, marriage equality, and finally abortion, but an increasingly non-interventionist approach to the economy. This was anathema to Declan Costello’s moral outlook. His religion foregrounded a Christian Socialism that presaged John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness, but also brought an overly moralistic approach to the private lives of individuals.
Former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.
The conversion of Fine Gael from authoritarian conservatives to social liberals has, however, been cosmetic, even under Garret Fitzgerald. It is clear that a neo-liberal consensus began to emerge in the wake of Fianna Fail’s landslide election victory in 1979, and individual rights gradually took the place of social supports as policy planks.
Declan Costello was appointed a High Court judge in 1977 having served as Attorney General under Liam Cosgrave. Owing to the tribalism bedevilling Irish politics successive Fianna Fail administrations. ignored his undoubted abilities as a jurist, passing him over for appointment to the Supreme Court.
This diminished his opportunities for progressive judicial leadership. Only towards the end of his career was he appointed to the largely administrative position of President of The High Court. But by that stage, frankly, the arteries had hardened and the reforming zeal that marked his earlier life had ebbed away.
Socio-Economic Rights
Costello’s judicial record on socio-economic questions is in marked contrast to his political career. The case of O’Reilly v. Limerick Corporation 1989 ILRM 181 suggests he had caved into a prevailing neo-liberal mindset of laissez faire. He claimed the Courts had no business allocating or redistributing resources, which was, he argued, a matter for the Dáil in Leister House alone.
The plaintiff Travellers sought a properly serviced halting site in order to vindicate their constitutional rights under Articles 40.3 and 41.2. Costello refused to grant it on the basis that such an order would involve:
[T]he imposition by the Court of its view that there has been an unfair distribution of national resources. To arrive at such a conclusion, it would have to make an assessment of the validity of the many competing claims on those resources, the correct priority to be given to them and the financial implications of the plaintiffs’ claim.
This appears to contradict his stated view that the Irish Constitution was informed by natural law, which in the Thomistic tradition encompasses fundamental socio-economic rights. Importantly, he recanted the O’Reilly decision a few years later in the case of O’Brien v Wicklow UDC 1994.
But damage had been done with his introduction of a neat Aristotelian distinction between commutative and distributive justice. This absolves the courts from any role in ensuring that elected representatives maintain basic standards of living – so elegantly articulated in the Just Society and also expressed in Article 45 of the Constitution – which underpins any true republic.
This argument was seized on by the libertarian Adrian Hardiman in the case of Sinnott v. Minister for Education 2001 IESC 63, to dismiss the claims of the intellectually disabled plaintiff to an ongoing education. Since then fundamental rights to housing or a living wage have been dismissed by the courts on grounds of non-justiciability.
Authoritarian Streak
Declan Costello became an enforcer of a dominant Catholic morality that pervaded the country until the 1990s. The disgraceful decision to uphold Eileen Kelly’s sacking from her position as a secondary school teacher after she became pregnant during an extra-marital affair was perhaps a nadir.
On due process he displayed equally authoritarian tendencies. Thus in O’Leary v. Attorney General 1995 1 IR 254 he determined that possession of an incriminating document provided sufficient proof that a person was a member of an illegal organisation. The documents in question amounted to thirty-seven posters of a man holding a rifle, with the words ‘IRA calls the shots’ printed on them. Costello determined that the provision was consistent with the presumption of innocence and benefitted from a presumption of constitutionality.
Growing up in a privileged family, he perhaps assumed that the police force could do little wrong, and counted on their probity in executing public function. One wonders what he would make of the case of Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe, and the dirty tricks campaign against him and others. The litany of Garda abuses is well attested to in Adrian Hardiman’s ferocious dissenting judgment in D.P.P. v J.C. 2015 IESC 31.
Thus, after doing the state some service in displaying authoritarian tendencies Declan Costello saw out his career as an occasionally despotic President of The High Court. I appeared before him in the inception of the Gilligan Litigation, which, in fairness, he handled with even-handedness; at one point booting out a certain barrister of ill-repute, who had appeared unauthorized in private proceedings. It was an intellectual thrill to appear before him.
In my view his most disgraceful, and certainly his most notorious, decision was in Attorney General v. X 1992 1 IR 1. In that case, the facts of which are well known, Costello granted an injunction preventing a fourteen-year-old rape victim from leaving the State for nine months (with the purpose of preventing her from going to the U.K. to obtain an abortion), a decision that was overturned in the Supreme Court, which decided that abortion was permitted where there was a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother, including suicide.
Place in History
Adrian Hardiman.
Alongside Adrian Hardiman, Declan Costello was the finest Irish judge since the halcyon days of judicial activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Alas figures of that calibre are not evident on the judicial benches today. I fear the intellectual decline is irreversible, which represents a threat to decent governance of the state.
We are all products of our time and looking back on history we enjoy the benefit of hindsight. Declan Costello was a great man, with flaws. He had a quiet charm and displayed a courtly graciousness towards others. His brilliant mind was activated by a concern for social justice and, crucially, he possessed a sense of humour.
Within the establishment his intellectual calibre was a form of subversion, meaning he was always the Man Who Would Be King, but never the king. There was nevertheless a certain contradiction between his progressive, even transgressive, instincts as a politician and the reactionary tendencies he displayed as a judge.
The Just Society document stands unsurpassed as one of the last political statements of substance on social reform in Irish history. It displays a coherent vision for a better Ireland that politicians would do well to take off their book shelves today.
[i] Ciara Kelly, ‘Michael Sweetman and the Just Society’, from The Widest Circle: Remembering Michael Sweetman, Edited by Barbara Sweetman-FitzGerald, A&A Farmar, 2011 p.69
The Centre for Ethics in Public Lifeat University College Dublin is inviting questions and reflections on all philosophical aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
What are your thoughts about the crisis? Is our freedom threatened? Should we rethink the welfare system? If different countries are dealing with it better, how do we know which experts to believe? Who, if anyone, should take responsibility for the spread of the virus?
Many of the questions we ask ourselves, and others, are ethical questions: from individual actions in everyday life like: ‘Should I go to the shop to buy non-essential items?’; to public, life-or-death decisions: ‘How should respirators be allocated if there is a shortage?’
We are all probably thinking about what we should do, and what is right. Some of the questions we ask, and the decisions we make on a daily basis, may be so ordinary as to seem morally irrelevant, but it is likely that there is an assessment of values going on.
The new, future-oriented questions, such as, ‘What changes, if any, should I make to my lifestyle after the crisis?’, include our ideas about what a good life ought to be; whether there’s a specific good life for me; or the comparative importance of pleasure and helping others in one’s activities.
Some of the time our moral answers, ideas or actions, are intuitive or spontaneous. At other times we need to reflect more intensely.
That’s where moral philosophy comes in, starting with disentangling the problem, and avoiding superficiality to reveal reveal hidden aspects; or evaluating the more relevant questions and asking what follows from each idea, and so on.
We also know that this process works well in conversation. After all, the origins of Western philosophy include long dialogues in the public square of Athens. Our public square, these days, has to be virtual.
So we would like to hear your questions and thoughts, and start a conversation.
The Initiative:
The Centre for Ethics in Public Life invites you to send a question, together with 50-100 words explaining why it’s important.
All questions will be displayed on the centre’s website and a philosopher will respond weekly to chosen queries by a video to be published online.
Everyone is welcome to respond to our videos on the CEPL Facebook pages, with a comment or a 1-minute video, and continue the conversation.
In a powerful 1997 essay, Seamus Deane suggested that the twin forces that beset modern Irish writers such as W.B. Yeats and James Joyce were those of Apocalypse and Boredom.[1] Both the culture in which the writers lived and the art-works they produced are marked by phasic interruptions into colonial despondency of revelatory dramas and epiphanies:
In Yeats’s work–plays and essays, we may feel at times that a little boredom might be something of a relief from the constant appropriation of almost everything that happened in his lifetime to a visionary apocalypse in which all that is ‘past, or passing or to come’ flashes up in a conflagration that consumes time and exposes eternity. What I want to suggest here is the natural alliance between Joycean boredom and Yeatsian apocalypse in relation to temporality and therefore to history.[2]
Deane’s proposal reflects something of the deadlock of revisionist and radical criticism in Irish Studies in the 1990s – a political deadlock which has largely passed into desuetude in the post-Good Friday atmosphere. If revisionism proposed a certain constitutional conservatism and was a bit of a bore, the radical cultural critics wielded a language which was apocalyptically difficult to understand in its more post-post-structuralist modes. And what was lost in the debate was something of the craic of ordinary people, and the points of cracked reality in ordinary life which do not succumb easily to academic enquiry.
Methodologically, of course, we find ourselves these days stretched across wide and strange territories of discourse and discipline, and at a very late stage in the drama of literary criticism from Leavis to Baudrillard. Contemporary criticism has a surfeit of entry points and elaborations, resembling a quantum field in its complexity. I could, whilst sticking only to a psychological theme, find many feminist responses to one essay in late Lacan. Or I could argue for yet another return to a missed aspect of a deconstructed Freud. I would prefer though to draw simple and broad brush-strokes which would not incite the total indignation of a casual reader. My psychological terms are broadly popular (the aesthetic terms are more or less commonly known in academia since Bakhtin). And the argument is willingly simple: that ‘Apocalypse and Boredom’ as a binary needs a mediating term (Crack) which turns out to be dizzyingly deconstructive in its implications. Modern scholars cannot either manoeuvre round or simply ignore this post-structuralist facet of a text but must, as Terry Eagleton has suggested, go through theory and out the other side. And wisdom is to be found in many places including the most demotic and the most abstruse. Our common language in the end must be the structures of wisdom, and Derrida has as much a claim to them as does the greatest ‘realist’ of a pub in Grafton Street. [3]
Deane’s broad historical binary can be broadened to include a psychological dimension and also an aesthetic principle for the detailed analysis of culture, society and art. The psychological dimension appropriate to Irish modernism, I shall argue, is manic-depressive in structure. The corresponding aesthetic principle is a principle of carnival-nihilism where the hyphen suggests an affinity with the related manic-depressive psychology. The hyphen should suggest that the prior term in each case (mania, carnival) is not necessarily adjectival but has also an intimate link with its sister terms depression and nihilism. Adding these terms to Deane’s we might produce a more complex matrix for the discussion of Irish modernism for there are fascinating dialogical correspondences between manic, carnivalistic and apocalyptic phenomena, as indeed there are between depressing, nihilistic and boring colonial experiences. In the process of thus broadening the terms of reference, we will discover the emergence of that third term which ironises the solemnities of apocalypse and boredom: the term known to our common culture as crack.
It is a question of corollaries of structure. Manic-depression is episodic and interruptive of quotidian life in the same way that apocalyptic and boring experiences can be said to be episodic diversions from the ‘normal’ functioning of a happy democratic culture. Mania wrecks routine, and depression makes us incapable of routine. The terms carnival and nihilism are not new, but in an internal relationship with each other they form an aesthetic principle which deforms the more staid genre of tragi-comedy which is often taken by older critics to represent an aesthetic ‘norm’ for representing the human condition.[4] Carnival, like mania, achieves a disruption of normal boundaries, hierarchies and empirical states of mind. Depression and nihilism can kill our sense of the value of the ordinary. Christian apocalypse disrupts boundaries (‘ye shall be as gods’), hierarchies (‘I am the Alpha and Omega’) and forms of empiricism ( ‘they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory’). But it is also true that boredom can at its extreme give us an extremely interesting sense of what eternity might be like. In a Derridean sense each of these terms when pushed to its limit can turn into its opposite: there is nothing more boring than an over-long carnival, and nothing more likely to reveal ‘the hidden’ than a night of nihilistic visions.
The dialogical inter-action of these terms furnishes us with both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ opportunities if we imagine the structure thus:
Apocalypse Boredom (Socio-cultural level).
Mania Depression (Psychological level)
Carnival Nihilism (Aesthetic level).
Taken together as a matrix of six terms we can begin to be experimental, and the advantage of adding psychological and aesthetic terms is to furnish us with a complex language for discussing the contingencies of modernist culture: what, for instance, might a manic-nihilism resemble, say in the early Nietzschean plays of W.B. Yeats such as Where there is Nothing? Could we consider the possibility of a carnival of boredom in Joyce’s Dubliners or Brendan Behan’s The Hostage? How might a sense of apocalyptic depression inform Sean O’Casey’s TheSilver Tassie? The terms are reversible, too, and this adds a further level of vocabulary to our exploration of forms: what is the function, for instance, of a depressive carnivalism in the plays of Samuel Beckett, a nihilistic apocalypse at the end of O’Casey’s Purple Dust and a boring mania in the work of Denis Johnston and Spike Milligan? I will now explore some of these terms more categorically and then go on to demonstrate how their presence can best be detected in the work of Sean O’Casey, a writer placed in the ‘minor’ category of modernists behind Joyce and Yeats, but who may come into his majority when seen as the first realist of crack.
In 1921, at the height of European modernism, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described manic depression for the first time as involving ‘a heightened distractibility’, a ‘tendency to diffusiveness’, and ‘a spinning out the circle of ideas stimulated and jumping off to others’. [5] In 1924 the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler concurred and drew a parallel with artistic production:
The thinking of the manic is flighty. He jumps by by-paths from one subject to another, and cannot adhere to anything. With this the ideas run along very easily and involuntarily, even so freely that it may be felt as unpleasant by the patient….
Because of the more rapid flow of ideas, and especially because of the falling off of inhibitions, artistic activities are facilitated even though something worth while is produced only in very mild cases and when the patient is otherwise talented in this direction. The heightened sensibilities naturally have the effect of furthering this.[6]
We should notice the stress here upon the ‘heightened’ sensibility of the maniac for this reminds us of the heightened sensibility required to experience epiphany and revelation. We should also note the ‘falling off of inhibitions’ for this is a feature we will observe in our analysis of carnivalesque activity. The rapid flow and spinning of ideas also reminds us of some of the features we associate with modernist texts such as Ulysses. In short, the phenomenon of mania touches upon both frenetic literary activity and apocalyptic or transformative experience.
Depression.
Seamus Deane refers in his essay to the ‘marks of boredom’ he detects in Joyce, Beckett and Kafka. They include:
– ‘dinginess of physical circumstance and dress’,
– ‘extreme routinization of action and speech’,
– ‘an individual eloquence that derives from consensual banalities’,
Let us contrast this list with a list of depressive symptoms described by Irish psychiatrist Anthony Clare:
‘-Feelings of guilt or worthlessness
– Loss of concentration
– Loss of energy and noticeable tiredness of fatigue
-Suicidal thoughts …
-Agitation or marked slowing down (retardation’).[8]
Sean O’Casey, Image by Reginald Gray.
It is clear from these lists that clinical depression and cultural boredom are intimately related. As we shall see in the work of Sean O’Casey, the subject feels that he has been broken into pieces. It is an experience of extreme boredom as a form of disintegration which results, paradoxically, in a form of apocalyptic fear:
[The depressive] feels solitary, indescribably unhappy, as ‘a creature disinherited of fate’; he is sceptical about God, and with a certain dull submission, which shuts out every comfort and every gleam of light, he drags himself with difficulty from one day to another. Everything has become disagreeable to him; everything wearies him … he thinks he is superfluous in the world, he cannot restrain himself any longer: the thought occurs to him to take his life without his knowing why. He has a feeling as if something had cracked in him, he fears that he may become crazy, insane, paralytic, the end is coming near. (Italics inserted).[9]
Colonial depression is a much more disintegrative experience than the term ‘boredom’ allows. The depressive is opened up to extraordinarily painful inner confusion and despair as he ‘cracks’ under the strain of living a false life. The only redemptive feature of the experience lies in the fact that extreme depression can become a form of revelation of capitalism’s utter inner monotony. The depressive subject can become aware of his extreme oppression through his consciousness of his fractured personal moods. There is , also, as we shall see, something redemptive and ironical about that ‘crack’.
Carnival.
So much has been written about carnival in recent decades that the term has sadly been recuperated as a ‘boring’ academic category. We can crack open the term however when we inflect it with an analysis of its relationship with mania and nihilism. The classic description of the function of carnivalism belongs to Mikhail Bakhtin:
The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival…. All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people.[10]
It is a characteristic feature of mania that the patient demonstrates a ‘loss of inhibitions, particularly sexual and social’ and displays an ‘infectious mood – humorous, jocose, euphoric.’[11] The maniac also enjoys breaking the boundaries of propriety- talking to people familiarly on the street, entering private property without permission, cocking a snook at policemen and authority figures. In a sense, we might think of carnival as a form of collective mania licensed by its social contract. The maniac is stigmatised because of his solitude- his actions are not very different from those of the carnival clown. ‘The basic principle of grotesque or Carnival realism’, writes Michael Bristol, ‘is to represent everything socially and spiritually exalted on the material, bodily level. This includes cursing, abusive and irreverent speech, symbolic and actual thrashing’ and so on.[12] The patient in a manic phase often dresses bizarrely, curses abusively and irreverently, thrashes around and confuses his own body with that of a god. Mania is, in a sense, a one-man carnival.
‘Carnival’, writes Bakhtin, ‘celebrates the shift itself, the very process of replaceability, and not the precise item that is replaced, Carnival is, so to speak, functional and not substantive. It absolutizes nothing, but rather proclaims the joyful relativity of everything.’[13] The maniac, remember, is identified by his infectious mood, flights of ideas, pressurised speech with fast punning and rhyming, loss of judgement and inhibition. The maniac, too, proclaims the joyful relativity of all relationships, concepts and objects. There are clear structural connections, then, between the forms of apocalypse, mania and carnival, and I would suggest that mania is the mediating element between the two apparently unconnected forms of apocalypse and carnivalism. In one grotesque twist, the Christian apocalypse is all about the burning flesh of men, and carnival too (L. carne) concerns the destiny of the flesh. We might indeed view the Last Judgement through one grotesque optic as a kind of carnival of revelation.
Nihilism.
Nihilism is the rationalisation of boredom and depression. It is, as it were, the ideology of melancholy. Where people merely act bored or depressed, as in, say, Joyce’s Dubliners , there is at least hope that some relief might come from the pain of their condition. These characters are not committed ideologically to the notion that life is meaningless but are merely acting out the paralysis of a cycle of colonial history. Nihilism, however, perceives the permanent negation of teleology, divinity and broadly socio-spiritual meaning. It searches for the lethal nothingness at the heart of any project and proclaims this as its secret truth. In conjunction with carnivalism as part of the couplet carnival-nihilism, nihilism acts as a corollary to the depression in manic-depression though with an even greater sense of finality. Where the maniac is reduced, in time, to the horrible vacuousness at the heart of his euphoria, the carnival subject, too, comes to understand that his destruction of all actually existing social forms conceals a secret and permanent nihilism. Carnival cocks a snook at authority but conceals from itself the secret vacuousness of its activity. It is a good thing to place a king’s crown on an ass’s head but it is also a gesture of hatred towards norms. Nihilism is thus the darkest of the six terms with which we are approaching Irish modernism because it emerges from the very heart of parodic action. But, in a final redemptive twist, we shall see that nihilism can be dialogised by the comical. Too much nihilism is, simply, funny, as James Joyce illustrates in his ironic parody of Catholic hell in APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man and as Samuel Beckett discovered in Waiting for Godot. [14] Several pages of doom and gloom can become amusingly intense. As we shudder at the crack of doom, we cannot help but be reminded of the craic.
‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond.’ – James Joyce, 1904
The Crack.
To be cracked can mean, as we have seen, to be depressed to the point of madness, but to ‘have the crack’ can mean the opposite: to be infected with carnivalistic joy. A crack can be a fault-line from which revelation might arise (literally ‘a seismic event’ as Deane has it) or a blow inducing paralysis. [15] It is an ambivalent term which mediates between our six analytical terms thus:
Apocalypse Boredom
Mania Crack Depression
Carnival Nihilism.
Crack is the deconstructive term which mediates the transition from one side of the grid to the other. When apocalypse turns into boredom there must be a point at which a position is neither apocalyptic nor boring and I would suggest that the subject here acts like a manic-depressive. When mania begins to turn into depression the patient feels that he is cracking up in the manner described by Emil Kraepelin:
He has a feeling as if something had cracked in him, he fears that he may become crazy, insane, paralytic, the end is coming near. [16]
A post-apocalyptic culture can feel that the old moulds have been cracked but this can induce a morose fear for the future that can induce an anxious boredom. Contrarily, when a culture experiences the onset of an apocalypse it encounters heightened, euphoric feelings as in the 1916 rebellion where millennial fever gripped sections of the population of Dublin. As it becomes hypomanic society can have an almighty craic before its euphoria reaches its peak of revelation and collapses back into self-hatred and paralysis. Crack is therefore something of a pharmakon. A good night out in Temple Bar can be a ‘cure’ for depression, but the booze leaves us with a poisonous headache. A crack on the head from an Irish Brother can give us a poisonous hatred of authority, but can also cure us of all our idealism. Crack is undecided in its effects: both violent and creative, fun and pain, a break and a mould. It is a very archetype indeed of deconstruction, for what could be more ambivalent than a textual crack: a point where the text roars and collapses, enjoys and splits, surges and cleaves. At the very point where Beckett reaches his cracked vision of futility, we can’t help but begin to crack up. There is no craic where there is no crack. And there is no crack where there is no craic. In fact, the term is not just a pharmakon, but the very possibility of there being a pharmakon because there could not be a limit which could not crack, crack being the condition of its hymenicity.
Crack is a transitive term then but one which cannot sustain itself either as a form or a limit. We crack under pressure but then crack away at a solution. A crack in a cup is a pain but great craic if it causes our landlord to drop tea on his trousers. Ireland itself is cracked along its Ulster border, but the border itself is ‘crackers’. A crack cannot be a thing, by definition: but is certainly something. The crack may be Ninety in the Isle of Man, but the crackdown in the Dublin of 1916 was terrible.
Sean O’Casey and The End of the Beginning.
In the work of Sean O’Casey, nihilism is articulated as it emerges from the scandalous pranks of his exuberantly carnivalesque Dublin slum-dwellers. [17] As his work progresses through the years of modernism and civil war, his vision becomes increasingly bleak, so bleak, in fact that it becomes, in an ironic twist, comical. O’Casey’s work hovers in the space of ambiguity created by the word ‘crack’ which can represent both a fault or interruption in the smoothness of a quotidian continuum and a sense of comical social play (craic). ‘Mr O’Casey’, wrote Samuel Beckett, ‘is the master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense- that he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion.’[18] O’Casey’s wilful destruction of empirical solidities impressed Beckett philosophically (it was entropic) but also because, to use a contemporary phrase, it cracked him up. O’Casey was at his most amusing when he was being nihilistic and achieved his greatest spasms of laughter from his creation of ‘spasms of dislocation’ in the art-work.[19] In his 1934 play The End of the Beginning, two characters, Darry Berrill and Barry Derrill set about the destruction of an Irish country house with great relish and, in the process, wreck themselves:
Darry falls down the chimney … there’ll be a nice panorama of ruin … nothin’ done but damage … I’m after nearly destroyin’ meself! [20]
The country house should be read as symbolic of an emerging De Valeran pastoralism which both O’Casey and Conor Cruise O’Brien took to be a disappointment.[21] ‘Our generation’, wrote O’Brien, ‘grew into the chilling knowledge that we had failed, that our history had turned into rubbish, our past to a “trouble of fools.”‘[22] O’Casey’s country house is an objective correlative of post- Free State Ireland’s paralysis in which his comedic pair stumble blindly about in a void:
Darry (shouting madly). Barry, Barry, come here quick, man! I turned the key of the tap too much, ‘n it slipped out of me hand into a heap of rubbish ‘n I can’t turn off the cock, ‘n I can’t find the key in the dark. (p. 41.)
O’Casey and O’Brien could agree upon the ‘heap of rubbish’ that Irish history had become. Typically, however, O’Casey intensifies the nihilism in the sub-text of the play until its atmosphere becomes apocalyptic:
I can’t do anything … I don’t know what to do …What in the Name of God has happened? … can you do nothin’ right! … God grant that it won’t be the end … Is the clock stopped? For God’s sake, touch nothing … It’s as dark as pitch in there … (pp. 21-30).
At the centre of Free State Ireland, O’Casey surmised, there lay a metaphysical darkness and his play establishes an atmosphere of cosmic doom throughout. Strangely, though the effect of the treatment is comical because his pair of clots are so endearing, reminding us of Laurel and Hardy as they crash into furniture, disappear up and down chimneys and knock cracks in the walls of the de Valeran dream. We cannot tell whether the apocalypse of nihilism is serious or part of the craic. ‘Can’t you find anything?’ asks Darry. ‘I can see nothing’ replies Barry, as the play reaches its climax (p. 24), but again, the effect is amusing in the manner of a cartoon where all the lights go out and we see just the cartoon rabbit’s eyes glowing in the dark. O’Casey is attempting a serious critique of his country’s post-apocalyptic (Easter 1916) boredom, but he discovers that boredom holds a potential energy within it which can explode into epiphanies of entropy, at which point he cannot decide whether to laugh or go mad. His culture is exhausted (‘not a drop left in it, not a single drop! What’re we goin’ to do n– …’) but hysterically explosive: ‘… He lets go of the rope, and runs over to the oil drum. Darry disappears up the chimney‘ (p. 33). For O’Casey, De Valeran Ireland is literally ‘cracked’, deformed in a vortex of nihilism and farce:
He turns and sees that Darry has disappeared.
Lizzie (speaking outside in a voice of horror). The heifer, the heifer!
Darry (calling out). Lizzie, Lizzie!
Lizzie rushes in as Darry falls down the chimney…. (p.33.)
The terms Apocalypse and Boredom are not adequate in their singularity to capture such ambivalencies. Boredom taken too far can rebound as a form of apocalyptic emptiness as in O’Casey’s work from 1923-34 where we encounter darknesses which take us beyond the merely paralytic state of Joyce’s Dubliners towards Beckettian nihilism. Apocalypse, too, can be strangely boring as we can note from my opening quotation where Seamus Deane speaks of the relief that we seek from Yeats’s constant revelations. We must seek mediating terms for the movement between Deane’s twin poles of analysis for, in the end, the terms begin to deconstruct one another. The first step in moving towards a more complex analysis is to introduce more specific psychological and aesthetic terms. The second step is to seek a mediating term for the deconstructive activity of this more complex matrix. In the term ‘crack’ we have a term which mediates the ambiguities of the deconstructive inter-actions of apocalypse, mania and carnival, boredom, depression and nihilism. Yeats and Joyce may have wanted Ireland to aspire to being an Attic culture, but I would wish to install Crack within Seamus Deane’s paradigm to remind us that Ireland was always, already, a very Antic country.[23]
[1] Seamus Deane, ‘Boredom and Apocalypse: A National Paradigm’ in Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1970 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997).
[2] Deane, Strange Country, p. 171. For a discussion of manic-depressive activity in the life of W.B. Yeats, see my ‘”Down Hysterica Passio”: The Mood Structures of W.B. Yeats’, Irish University Review vol. xxviii, no. 2, Autumn/Winter 1998, pp. 272-80.
[4] See, for instance, David Krause, Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work (London, MacMillan, 1960), pp. 86-89 and passim. ‘Carnival’ and ‘nihilism’ should be thought of as standing to the extreme left and right, as it were, of the traditional terms ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’. Where tragi-comedy suggests an organic genre in which its terms are nevertheless discrete, carnival-nihilism should suggest an aesthetic that is in creative contradiction with itself. For further discussion of the principle of carnival-nihilism, see my (unpublished) M. Litt. thesis, Ideology and Dramatic Form in the Plays of Sean O’Casey, 1922-46 (Oxford, Bodleian library, 1994).
[5] Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia , trans. R.M. Barclay, ed. G.M. Robertson (Edinburgh, E&S Livingstone, 1921) in Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York , Simon and Schuster: Free Press, 1994), pp. 107-8. We might consider manic depression to be a ‘modernist’ illness in the way that some writers have conceived schizophrenia to be a ‘post-modern’ illness (see, for example, Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146, pp. 53-92.) Where the schizophrenic patient loses touch with structures of space and time permanently, the manic-depressive experiences episodic disorientation. He is able to recuperate his identity, albeit tentatively, and thus retains a sense of ironic detachment from a self in crisis which a schizophrenic patient cannot since his very sense of self has collapsed into a permanent ‘flow’ of disorder.
[6] Eugen Bleuler, Textbook of Psychiatry, English ed. A.A. Brill (London, Macmillan, 1924) in Jamison, Touched with Fire, p 108. The reader is referred to Jamison, Touched with Fire, pp. 262-3 (Appendix A) for the fuller Diagnostic Criteria of Mania.
[8] Spike Milligan and Anthony Clare, Depression, p. 35.
[9] Emil Kraepelin in Milligan and Clare, Depression, pp. 23-4.
[10] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8, trans., ed., C. Emerson (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 122-3.
[11] Milligan and Clare, Depression, p. 38.
[12] Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York, Methuen, 1985), p. 22.
[13] Bakhtin, Problems, p. 125.
[14] See, for example, James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London, Minerva, 1992), pp.130-40 and Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London, Faber and Faber, 1965), pp.11-15.
[16] Emil Kraepelin in Milligan and Clare, Depression, pp. 23-4.
[17] See, for instance, Sean O’Casey, ‘The Silver Tassie’, Collected Works vol. ii (London, MacMillan, 1967) where a carnivalesque opening of great joy mutates into a despairing nihilism: The sound of a concertina playing in the street outside has been heard, and the noise of a marching crowd…. Shouts are heard– ‘Up the Avondales!‘ ; ‘Up Harry Heegan and the Avondales!’ Then steps are heard coming up the stairs, and first Simon Norton enters, holding the door ceremoniously wide open to allow Harry to enter … carrying a silver cup joyously…. (p. 25).
cf.:
Teddy: Strain as you may, it stretches from the throne of God to the end of the hearth of hell.
Simon. What?
Teddy. The darkness. (p. 89).
[18] Samuel Beckett writing about The End of the Beginning in ‘The Essential and the Incidental’, Thomas Kilroy, ed., Sean O’Casey: Twentieth Century Views (London, MacMillan ,1975), p. 167.
[19] Beckett, ‘The Essential and the Incidental’, p. 168.
[20] Sean O’Casey, ‘The End of the Beginning’, Five One Act Plays (MacMillan, 1990), p. 33. Further references to this play can be found in the text.
[21] This pastoralism would later produce the De Valeran vision of a countryside ‘bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.’ (Eamon De Valera quoted in David Krause, intro., Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (London, MacMillan, 1991), pp. 15-16. In Cock-a-Doodle Dandy , O’Casey developed the point made in The End of the Beginning– that the boredom of pastoralism concealed an apocalyptic force (the cock) which could rip its pretensions apart.
[22] Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘The Embers of Easter’, O.D. Edwards and F. Pyle, ed.s, 1916: The Easter Rising (London, MacMillan, 1968), p. 231.
[23] For an interesting essay on the relationship between antics and melancholy, see Harry Levin, ‘The Antic Disposition’, Hamlet: A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. John Jump (London, MacMillan, 1968), 122-36. The word antic derives etymologically from the Italian antico (antique) which gives the phrase ‘Antic country’ a satisfyingly Yeatsian accent.
Like errant flames from the dying embers of a once great fire, there is much fakery to be found emanating from a previously proud tradition of public intellectualism in the U.K., and elsewhere. The English philosopher John Gray (1948-) is at least not one of the self-help gurus, such as Jordan Peterson, that have gained public attention and earned ample remuneration in the process.
We do not find in Gray’s work the resigned intellectual play-acting evident in many books randomly grappling with our universe, and which provide the kind of quotable flourishes that play well at north London dinner parties. He is the doyenne and most garlanded of U.K. intellectuals today and so demands engagement.
Gray is no worshiper at the alter of the Enlightenment or the humanist tradition. He does not believe it provides us with the coping mechanisms for our current challenges. Ultimately, he has little faith in the ability of civilization, or rationality, to overcome the barbarism of a liberal experiment riveted by self-contradiction.
In short, he sees, both historically and now, the extent to which human irrationality governs actions. Thus he is decidedly anti-utopian, an empiricist and pragmatist. He holds out little hope for the realisation of lofty objectives, such as we find among technological evangelists or Bible-belt Christians. This is a theme he explores in some detail in his book Black Mass [2007].
In fact, all forms of demonist eschatology, chiliasm or end of day’s nonsense is parsed thoroughly in the text, from religious fundamentalism to neo-conservativism, to Marxism and Nazism. Quite correctly he identifies Tony Blair as a neo-conservative.
Thin Veneer
One suspects Gray would endorse Lon Fuller’s remark in a different context about legality and civility providing a thin veneer of civilization if the underlying culture is barbaric. This covering is growing thinner by the day I would argue.
And yet – although he may beg to differ – he displays a residual fractured humanism, and embraces certain conservative values. In effect, he is a Tory of the old school, with modest liberal leanings; the sort of person who, although he writes for the New Statesman, would equally happily associate with Tory grandees. His Disraeli-esque conservatism is one I would share some common ground with.
He has thus embarked on a voyage of passage from an earlier more doctrinaire, Thatcherite conservatism. He no longer venerates a laissez faire approach to the economy, and seems to have recognised that that approach went seriously awry. He is a fellow-traveller in a way with Jonathan Sumption, who has also arrived at a modified conservatism on his own intellectual pilgrimage.
Rather than seismic shifts – in that very British way – Gray argues that change should arrive incrementally, with allowance for the exercise of individual responsibility.
He also argues for a bridge between conservatism and the green or environmental agenda. He expresses a desire to create a Burkean ‘community of souls’, preserving that which is good and noble. But this seems a forlorn hope given how the Antarctica icebergs are on the brink of collapse, and international accords are torn apart with a pandemic upon us.
Covid-19
In a recent article for The New Statesman John Gray argued that the Covid-19 pandemic is a turning point in history, which will bring lasting changes to human behaviour. This will see online interaction rather than face-to-face communication becoming the norm, and a Hobbesian state becoming ever more intrusive, and with people increasingly accepting of this.[i]
In his view the populace will submit to the imposition of increased control, permitting a gradual and imperceptible erosion of civil liberties.
In effect we may be seeing the arrival of a new society of unfreedom, and the arrival of a technological serfdom evident in China, where Bentham’s Panopticon is writ large. But also in Western countries we are seeing surveillance from private and public bodies covering all of society.
One advantage, however, of the ‘Great Pause, of quarantine, as he points out, is that it could lead to a recalibration of ideas and fresh thinking. In silence new thinking may occur. But in order for this to happen we must escape from the distraction of what Frank Armstrong describes as the ‘Doomsday Machines’: the smart phones that prevent us from realising our true selves.
As Fernando Pessoa put it: ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’ It is certainly time for reflection but the path that lies ahead is shrouded in uncertainty.’[ii]
Gaia Hypothesis
John Gray is a convert to James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating organism which maintains the conditions for life on the planet. It is a word he invokes regularly, and without exclusively focusing on humans.
Indeed, Gray appears to have a uniformly negative view of human nature and human beings. In his seminal text Straw Dogs (2004) we are depicted as rapacious, destructive and transhumanist. I suspect he is even more of this view now. Yet he clings on to a belief in decency and the exercise of personal responsibility, and liberally urges for peaceful co-existence to prevail.
As a Green Conservative and an opponent of neo-liberalism, he cautions against what Greta Thunberg described as the fairy tale of growth-without-end, and recognises how this is destroying the planet, and making human lives impossible. The pursuit of profit for its own sake of profit has led human activities to spiral out of control.
While I warm to his Gaian sympathies, there are more disturbing aspects to his ideas that I take issue with. He appears to venerate a Malthusian liquidation or winnowing of the human population in the aforementioned New Statesman article. If there are too many of us I wonder does he regard himself as expendable and surplus to requirements?
In fairness it is ultimately a point about human progress having to be off set against scarcity. Yet it is easy to be sanguine – or even blasé – about meltdown when you sit atop the academic food chain. Stoical acceptance of human absurdity is not what is needed right now. It is a time for action after reflection.
Gray may have glimpsed the gorgon’s head of the dangers we confront, but seems to shrink from urging the radical responses required. I suspect donnish privilege has softened the attack and brought a modus vivendi with these circumstances. After all, his own life has been a success by most measures, so he can at least take refuge in haughty disapproval, or at least he could prior to the Corona-pocalypse.
But of course, in the interests of fairness, his prescience should be noted in pointing out that dwindling planetary resources, and wealth inequalities, are undermining what we cherish, and accelerating Malthusian dynamics.
Any invocation of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) nonetheless reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s indispensable ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729). Swift responds to the genesis of the ideas that Malthus would go on to articulate with withering satire, expressed with deadpan seriousness: he promotes the consumption of babies as a way of solving the problem of over-population.
Gray walks the same Swiftian line – though without quite the panache – in an essay on torture in which he mocks liberal values. Tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek, he argues torture potentially promotes human rights:
Self-evidently, there can be no right to attack basic human rights. therefore, once the proper legal procedures are in place, torturing terrorists cannot violate their rights. in fact in a truly liberal society, terrorists have an inalienable right to be tortured.[iii]
Religious Fundamentalism
I share Gray’s contempt for religious fundamentalism. He does not display the dogmatic atheism or extremism of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, but allows for Christian worship in a tolerant way, and merely warns against barbarism, and end-of-day’s eschatological chiliasm.
Yet the solution in his new book of jettisoning both the sweet poetry of Genesis and secular humanism engenders in Seven Types of Atheism(2018) a rather denatured Arcadian spirituality, which is neither flesh nor fowl or even a guide to a more meaningful existence for the varied lives he believes we should lead.
It’s almost an intellectual Flake commercial, which tastes like religion never tasted before; although it should be acknowledged that he is resolutely anti-consumerist, and critical of the manufacture of insatiable desires. At one level he is arguing for makeshift true grit or graft to cope with unbounded irrationality. We must, he suggests, develop new patterns of living to cope with the new disorders and challenges we face.
Intellectual flake commercial.
He says anyone can live in a variety of ways, and I suppose we all do need to slow down and embrace both distraction and silence. But I believe the finality of total silence is always to be resisted – ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light…’
The Good Life
There are many ways, Gray contends, of living well. Differing types of the good life, but he is insufficiently specific as to what these are.
With the changing world of work, and a lack of employment prospects for many, one suspects he has an overly optimistic understanding that whatever fulfils someone is what they ought to be doing, which is all well and good, but that doesn’t necessarily put supper on the table. I fear most of us will have to find different survival strategies to cope with our disposability in a world that cares for us less and less.
John Gray is reliably sceptical of junk science that is now crashing into us in ceaseless waves, most recently with Donald Trump’s proposal to inject disinfectant to prevent Covid-19.
A useful example Gray has provided is in the recrudescence of phrenology, where criminal patterns of future behaviour are derived from skull sizes, which feeds into racial stereotypes. Our criminal justice system, in allowing bad character admissions, has dangerous preludes of pre-crime and conviction by demonization.
It will take a brave leader, of men or opinion, in future to insist on civilized values. John Gray has intimated, and I agree, they will not matter.
In his esteem for silence to avoid distraction and enhance contemplation Gray comes across like the effete aristocrat in Turgenev’s Father and Sons, as the Bolsheviks steadily take control. But at least The New Statesman provide him with a platform, and the books continue to sell to a dwindling educated public.
Featured Image: Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, National Gallery, London.
[i] John Gray, ‘Why this crisis is a turning point in history’, New Statesman, April 1st, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/04/why-crisis-turning-point-history
[ii] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, The Serpent’s Tail, London, 2017, p.107
[iii] John Gray, Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, Penguin, London, p.222
He distinguishes between private concerns and socio-economic rights; with the latter more urgent than ever during this period of crisis. By comparison, he says, privacy considerations are not essential: ‘the most important human rights are food, shelter and housing.’
Langwallner also addresses the increasingly blurred lines between our real and virtual selves asking: ‘once we have de-humanised social interaction how are we really to know one another?’
He reckons people are over-reacting, ‘in a state of shock,’ and losing all sense of proportion: ‘Yes it is a crisis, but it is a hyper-inflated, neo-liberal world pandemonium that has taken place and the danger is that you lose sight of the bigger picture.’
He fears, ‘they’ll bail out the bankers, but small businesses will be screwed,’ and asks, ‘will the Germans finally step up to the plate?’
Langwallner traces many of our current problems to a technocratic style of governance that has overtaken many institutions, such as the European Union. He says: ‘I don’t like textbook people – they are useless and shouldn’t be in decision-making positions.’
‘What the press should pay attention to,’ he says, is the melting of the largest glacier in Antarctica which could raise ocean levels by five feet.’
As regards the threat of the virus, he reckons more people will die from mental illnesses, as a collective de-humanization occurs. Yet he reserves hope that Boris Johnson’s brush with death could engender a more compassionate conservatism. He hopes that within Britain there is enough of a social democratic consensus, but isn’t so hopeful about Ireland.
Langwallner also revisits his stern criticism of post-modern philosophy which is helping extremists get into power. Neo-liberalism has failed as an idea he says: ‘we require a Keynesian New Deal and prohibition of vulture funds, as well as the introduction of basic income.’
As regards the forthcoming U.S. Presidential election he urges Americans to support Joe Biden against Trump for the sake of a global consensus on climate change.
Coronavirus is like the symptom of an underlying disease. It is the toxic combination of ecocide and neo-liberalism … If you are very rich you can self-isolate, but most of us have to interact with the public
He closes out with a call for people with an interdisciplinary approach to take control, the abandonment of neo-liberalism, and a radical response to climate change. ‘There is hope, but there is real danger.’
No picture of the modern world is complete without a Marxist analysis. The fundamental point – even for anyone who is not a fellow traveller – is that a materialist analysis of capitalism’s inherent instability is essentially correct, and now more relevant than ever.
The problem has always been around how a post-capitalist society emerges without savage bloodletting and numbing totalitarianism. The bearded figure scribbling away in the British Museum would no doubt have been horrified by the barbarous regimes – from Lenin to Kim Jong-Il – that have laid claim to his legacy.
Slavoj Žižek is perhaps the best known representative and synthesiser of contemporary Marxist theory. Anyone who has viewed his films The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2009) or The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2012) can only marvel at how this middle-aged, slovenly Slovenian Marxist is taken so seriously. Despite the spittle that pours involuntarily out of his mouth as he expostulates, it seems his ideas are judged on merit; albeit a somewhat comedic appearance has probably made him seem less of a ‘danger’ – especially when set against a straight-backed sparring partner such as Jordan Peterson – and ‘Ted-Talkily’ acceptable.
Žižek is a complex political thinker, noted for his observations on ideology. Yet his writing is dense, often impenetrable, and even, at times, frankly nonsensical. Sadly, the content can be obscure, and the ideas often wildly over-stated, though recent books have seen him curb this tendency, leading to greater traction. With age he has mellowed, or at least he has become far more coherent in his critique of the late capitalism disaster movie unfolding before our eyes.
His thought processes are, nevertheless, eminently contestable. Former Irish President Mary McAleese – who lectured me – always despised recklessness, as do I, but in a different sense. It is intellectual recklessness I hold in low regard. Žižek is full of it, at least in terms of his wilder statements calling for insurrection.
Žižek argues that the widespread belief that our world is post-ideological is an ‘arch-ideological’ fantasy. Today, he asserts, ideology entails what people impute to others, whether left or right.
This demonization of others, and the exclusion of outsiders, is indeed very much to the fore in his recent writings, and in our end of day’s capitalist order. Tribalism, nationalism and the targeting of non-nationals and immigrants is an endemic feature of our time.
For a subject to adhere to an ideology he argues, he must have been presented with it, and accepted it as true and right – such that anyone sensible should believe in it. In a seminal text, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) Žižek claims that ideology has not disappeared, but has come into its own, and because of its success, it has been dismissed as non-existent. Or should it be that ideology has been internalised?
Ideological Disidentification
Žižek also puts forward the idea of ‘ideological cynicism.’ Ideology today is not as it was for the proletariat for ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it.’ He disagrees that for ideology to be effective it has to effectively brainwash people, as Marx contended in his famous religion being the opium of the people assessment; rather Žižek contends that a successful ideology always permits a critical distance towards that ideology – this he terms ‘ideological disidentification’; saying: ‘I know well that (for example) Bob Hawke / Bill Clinton / the Party / the market do not always act justly, but I still act as though I did not know that this is the case.’
Or perhaps it should be said that behaviour has been modified or controlled, and widespread passivity makes it is irrelevant what we do in a spectator democracy. In effect, we are irrelevant to changing any of this, as the supporters of Bernie Sanders are finding out.
Žižek points to a ‘big O other’, who legitimates control through ‘God’ or ‘the Party’. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, (1989) he argues that such important or rallying political terms are ‘master signifiers,’ even though they are ‘signifiers without a signified’, i.e. words which do not refer to any clear and distinct concept or demonstrable object. Thus, they induce control and a false sense of belonging, but are meaningless.
This claim of Žižek’s is related to two other ideas:
That subjects are always divided between their conscious and unconscious beliefs towards political authority;
That subjects do not know what their beliefs are that leaves them open to domination and control.
Jouissance
Žižek further contends, following the critical theorist Louis Althusser, that ideology is embedded in our everyday lives. In particular, he uses the term jouissance to describe transgressive pleasure that we derive from the master signifiers, such as ‘nation’ or ‘people,’ through cultural products as sports, music, alcohol, drugs, festivals, or films.
Another central idea in Žižek’s initial political philosophy is that any regime only secure a sense of collective identity if their governing ideologies afford subjects an understanding of how these relate to what exceeds, supplements or challenges its identity. Or, in layman’s terms, bread and circuses is the glue that binds identities – ‘Football’s Coming Home’ to quote Baddiel and Skinner.
Žižek adopts the term ‘ideological fantasy’ for the deepest framework of belief that structures how political subjects, and/or a political community, come to terms with what exceeds its norms and boundaries. He identifies Law with the Freudian ego ideal.
But Žižek argues that, in order to be effective, a regime’s explicit Laws must also harbour and conceal a darker underside – a set of more or less unspoken rules which, far from simply repressing jouissance, implicate subjects in a guilty enjoyment in repression itself, which Žižek likens to the ‘pleasure in pain’ associated with the experience of Kant’s sublime.
Žižek’s final position about the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies is that these belief-inspiring objects represent the many ways in which the subject misrecognises its own active capacity to challenge existing laws, and to found new laws altogether.
He repeatedly argues that the most uncanny or abysmal aspect of the world today is the subject’s own active subjectivity – explaining his repeated citation of the Eastern saying ‘Thou Art That’. It is, finally, the singularity of the subject’s own active agency that leads to subjects’ recourse to fantasies concerning the sublime objects of their regime’s ideologies.
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight
Žižek’s technical term for the process whereby we recognise how the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies are, like Marx’s commodities, fetishised objects – concealing from subjects their own political agency – is ‘traversing of the fantasy.’
Traversing the fantasy, for Žižek, is the political subject’s deepest form of self-recognition, and the basis for his own radical political position, or defence of the possibility of such positions.
Žižek also references Alain Badiou, who argues for an elevation or an insurrection. Žižek also seeks a form of Jacobin army, the intellectual irresponsibility of which needs to be emphasised. Even if these ideas are metaphorical the extremism provides ample ammunition to right-wing critics, who argue he condones or even approves of terrorist methods.
Sadly, in more recent times, the Marxist left has been self-sabotaging, and the cause of its own downfall. They have also had their good arguments stolen and mangled by the right.
Yet it seems that radical Marxists are at last growing up and that the post-modernist wing is grappling with its self-contradicting, and implicit approval, of a valueless universe.
In his recent book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (2016) Žižek distils many of the abstruse elements of his ideas into manageable and helpful commentaries that have a broader base of appeal. The ethical political order, notwithstanding Habermasean attempts at a reconstituted normalization, have collapsed, he argues.
Freedom of choice is an illusion in a world of disinformation, plummeting educational standards, short-terms contracts, imposed services and privatization. Any alleged freedom we have arrives in a narrow spectrum of choices, subtly imposed upon us through social influencers and technological nudges controlling choices. Or as John Gray put it in The Soul of The Marionette (2015) ‘we are forced to live as if we are free.’
Žižek and others have demonstrated the sinister developments within late capitalism. Including how a rent for profit model means most of us on low salaries serve undeserving sponsors, leading many into the informal market or the black market by violence or the violence of regulation – as David Graeber explores in his epochal work Debt: the First 5000 Years (2015).
Other disturbing trends are in evidence, Roberto Saviona in Zero, Zero, Zero (2015) through a sustained analysis of drug cartels, shows how the corporate model of Mafiosi loyalty has been exported into law firms. The lines between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism are thus blurred to a point of near non-existence.
The ‘woke’ left cannot escape blame for failing to identify the socio-economic issues that really count in peoples lives. Pseudo-feminism plays a class game, marginalizing lower class men as harassers and even demonizing migrants. Indulgence of victimhood has created the abuse excuse.
The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon
Žižek is quite critical of the great post-colonial Marxist Frantz Fanon and his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth (1961). But Fanon was surely right in identifying a colonial order wherein, ‘the people’s property and the people’s sovereignty are to be stripped from them.’ The Untermensch were obliged to pay the debts of the occupying powers, which is now the international model of austerity.
Žižek argues that our society of depoliticized and compliant sheep invite disaster. He references the film Blade Runner (1980), which is a useful cultural trope as the older replicants – baby boomers – now need to let go of their accumulated wealth and power. Generation X are at least conscious of false memory syndrome or implanted hopes, and some have the wherewithal to do something about it and no longer settle for being victims. So despite the victim excuse, Fanon and Žižek have much in common in their analysis.
The reality is that the analysis of Fanon is now in place across the world. The elite or the corporatocracy are a gang, and what amounts to a mafia is running the planet like a colony.
So the slovenly Slovenian has hit the zeitgeist, and now interacts with more common sense than was evident in his wilder pronouncements of the past. But unfortunately it appears as if the lunatics have already taken over the asylum, and to an increasingly docile audience what he is saying will appear mad, a point that his appearance would appear to affirm.
Or at the very least his ideas will be packaged by Facebook, so he plays a bit part in the drift or acceleration into the abyss that we must resist.
In December 1899 Honolulu-based physicians attributed two deaths to bubonic plague, and a local paper duly announced that the ‘scourge of the Orient’ had arrived.[i] Within months a first plague fatality was reported in continental U.S. as Chinese-American Chick Gin (Wing Chung Ging or Wong Chut King depending on the transliteration) succumbed to the disease in San Francisco. The cause of death was based on a classic plague symptom of swelling around the groin, but was disputed even after rudimentary bacterial analysis. Regardless, political and health authorities were already taking actions that resonate today.
Fearing the economic impact of a dreaded disease, the state governor denied the existence of plague altogether, accusing his own health officials of propagating rumours and ‘injurious opinions’ detrimental to the ‘great and healthful city.’[ii] Conversely, successive quarantines had already been imposed on San Francisco’s Chinatown, excluding non-Asian homes and businesses despite their proximity. Enforced by barbed wire and a heavy police presence, the blockade led to dwindling food supplies and a steep rise in costs. An experimental vaccine with severe side effects, developed in 1897 by bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine, was made obligatory for any Chinese (and Japanese) wanting to leave the city.
In 1900, Honolulu’s Chinatown was set on fire to in a misdirected effort to control Bubonic plague.
Unsurprisingly, the turn-of-the-century scapegoating of East Asians in California did not occur in a vacuum. Anti-Chinese prejudice had already been formalized in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning their immigration for undermining the ‘dignity and wage scale of American workers.’[iii] There were, likewise, widespread perceptions of the Chinese as carriers of disease. If Europeans had been imperilled by the ‘barbaric hordes of Asia’, germs represented ‘a peaceful invasion more dangerous than a warlike attack.’[iv] And while dogma of the day suggested limited danger to the West due to advances in health and civilization, extreme measures might be necessary with plague. In such cases Russia’s ‘heroic methods’ in its Chinese colonies were helpfully referenced, as firing squads for the infected ‘saved trouble and other people’s lives.’[v]
An 1886 advertisement for ‘Magic Washer’ detergent: ‘The Chinese Must Go’.
Old Wine, New Bottle
Associating disease with marginalized groups, minorities and others has hardly been an exclusively American experience. And by today’s standards, persecution over illness is not necessarily as crude, but neither can toxic discourse or indeed violence be excluded. The arrival of a new coronavirus in December 2019 is a case in point. The linking of its presumed place of origin in Wuhan with East Asians generally, and Chinese in particular, did not take long to manifest itself as multiple accounts of discrimination emerged. In Western countries this played on traditional racial tropes such as sordid animal markets and uncleanliness. Reflecting an entirely different experience, namely apprehension over Chinese influence, regional reaction was also alarmist. Both say as much about perceptions of mainland China as of the disease itself.
There is no shortage of recent examples that demonstrate medical scapegoating around a novel or poorly understood disease. In 2010, the lynching of voodoo priests in Haiti originated with rumours of pout kolera (magic cholera powder) deliberately poisoning the water supply. The choice of target was partially reflected in the complex history of voodoo practitioners and the Haitian State. At times associated with resistance to foreign occupation, at others integrated into the personality cults of Haiti’s twentieth century dictatorships, notably that of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. Confusion over the origins of the cholera epidemic ‘fed on feelings of insecurity and fear’, in turn fuelling stigmatization and violence.[vi] More sustained anger eventually shifted towards the unwitting culprits, negligent United Nations peacekeepers that had contaminated the Artibonite river with cholera-infected faeces.
Vodou ceremony, Jacmel, Haiti, 2002. Image: ‘Doron’.
A corollary of medical scapegoating is fear and misinformation. Fundamental weaknesses in the Pakistani health sector, combined with accusations of a fake Hepatitis B campaign orchestrated to locate and kill Osama Bin Laden, has reinforced suspicions of polio vaccinations. With rumours of polio vaccines being either harmful or simply a front for intelligence gathering, health workers have since borne the brunt of attacks by armed groups.[vii] Misunderstandings and distortions around Ebola, both in West Africa in 2014 and more recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo have led directly to the deaths of medical staff. In the latter case, mistrust over the response is rampant, provoked in part by ‘community resentment’ over the focus on Ebola while ignoring underlying problems in the country.[viii]
The targeting of health workers as somehow responsible for bringing illness into a community, and thus the cause or at least the visible manifestation of a terrifying epidemic, is an extreme example of the need to apportion blame. But if sickness has historically been portrayed as a punishment for sin, socially excluded groups and minorities have proven most vulnerable. Whether linked to mortality or fear of the unknown, context is key to understanding the long history of how those on the margins of society have been scapegoated. Much as nineteenth century descriptions of Chinese immigrants as ‘walking time bombs of infection’ cannot be separated from pervasive Sinophobia, the frequent panic associated with novel or misunderstood illness has tended to reinforce pre-existing stereotypes.[ix]
From Tragedy to Farce
The fate of Chick Gin aside, apportioning individual responsibility for epidemics is unusual in that it is difficult to prove. ‘Typhoid Mary’ is likely the most infamous example as she came to be seen as ‘synonymous with the health menace posed by the foreign-born.’[x] An Irish immigrant cook, Mary Mallon was a so-called healthy carrier of typhoid bacteria, unintentionally instigating outbreaks amongst her wealthy employers in New York until she was eventually tracked down in 1906. Vilified in the papers as a ‘walking typhoid fever factory’ or a ‘human culture tube’,[xi] Mallon would end her days in forced isolation.
‘Typhoid’ Mary Mallon in hospital.
On a more grandiose scale, Canadian air steward Gaëtan Dugas was posthumously declared ‘Patient Zero’, accused of intentionally infecting his partners with HIV and provoking the spread of AIDS in North America.[xii] Although later disproved, the fear and exclusion of the five ‘H’s – homosexuals, heroin addicts, haemophiliacs, hookers and Haitians – remained commonplace in the 1980s.
Much like the five ‘H’s, easier to trace is the scapegoating of entire groups, the archetypal example almost certainly being the pogroms and massacres inflicted on European Jews during the Black Death. Rumours of an ‘anti-Christian international conspiracy’ fit snugly with long-standing antisemitism, particularly when mortality rates among Jews were seen as inexplicably low (the fact that sensible hygiene laws laid out in the book of Leviticus had been employed was entirely ignored). Initially directed at medieval lepers and vagrants, Jews came to be accused of poisoning wells, eventually resulting in the extermination of entire communities.[xiii] Six hundred years later hygiene control of typhus, a lice-borne pathogen, became an element of Nazi propaganda intended to justify the mass murder of human carriers during the Holocaust.[xiv]
Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium).
The transatlantic journey of yellow fever holds particular irony in the history of racial stereotyping over disease. The mosquito-borne virus’s first documented appearance in the New World was in 1647 Barbados. Even if thoroughly misunderstood at the time, much like malaria there was an assumption that black Africans were immune to the disease, all the more so as white Europeans were so highly susceptible (in reality this was largely due to early exposure during childhood). This immunity in turn became one of the justifications on which the Atlantic slave system was built. Brutal conditions on the sugar plantations and corresponding high mortality rates ensured continued new arrivals, often with the same immunity, all the while reinforcing the original racial stereotype. It was only as slavery was gradually abolished in the nineteenth century, a period coinciding with multiple outbreaks of yellow fever in the American South, that former slaves were themselves accused of spreading the disease.[xv]
Skibbereen, west Cork, in 1847 by James Mahony.
Cholera likewise has a special place in the history of medical scapegoating and became highly politicized. Despite having long circulated locally on the Indian subcontinent, it only emerged on the global stage in the early nineteenth century, an appearance closely intertwined with colonial trade policies. As the bacteria must be ingested through contaminated water or food, the poorest and most deprived urban areas proved most vulnerable. And given the profile of its victims, the spread of cholera inevitably took on class connotations that shifted smoothly towards immigrants, even as disease transmission came to be better understood. The Irish migratory experience was strongly marked by outbreaks of cholera, with higher mortality rates used as ‘corroboration that they were carriers of the disease’ rather than a reflection of widespread discrimination and impoverishment.[xvi]
The link between poverty and disease was particularly apparent with venereal disease, more specifically syphilis (and gonorrhoea with which it was often confused). Referred to at times as the ‘secret plague’ given the strong underreporting, symptoms had been recognizable since the late fifteenth century. And while there had long been a feminized connotation as per responsibility, hence the expression ‘one night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury’, apportioning syphilitic blame took on far more sinister connotations through the later association with underprivileged women. Various incarnations of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1860s Britain essentially allowed the arrest and forced treatment of prostitutes in an attempt to limit venereal disease in the military, and subsequently the broader population.[xvii]
The emergence of syphilis also provoked an unusual example of xenophobic scapegoating, essentially a bizarre etymological battle that took on global proportions. As the disease spread throughout Europe and beyond, rivals were duly named responsible. For the French it was the Neapolitan disease, the Italians vice versa; the Russians blamed the Poles; the Dutch turned towards the Spanish; in Japan it emerged as the ‘Chinese ulcer’; while the Turks were less discerning, simply referring to the Christian disease.[xviii] The 1918 influenza pandemic likewise went through multiple national incarnations before settling on the familiar Spanish flu, a reference to the neutral country that first reported the disease. Both examples border on the farcical and if there are lessons to be learned, at least as far as 1918 is concerned, it is rather the impact of censorship and misinformation in controlling a pandemic.[xix]
Lessons Unlearned
Being reminded of past madness has a purpose, especially as we have a nasty habit of repeating our errors. Our understandable fear of disease sadly has often revealed our basest instincts, further stigmatizing the most vulnerable and endangering the health of all. Barbaric reflexes are never far from the surface. The emergence of a new pandemic has provoked ugly reactions very much reminiscent of the past, and counterproductive to controlling both the disease and the corresponding panic. While there are no rules to the patterns of hate linked to epidemics, just as increased social cohesiveness is also a potential consequence, the choice of scapegoating targets is not random. Facile demonization of the ‘foreign’ remains a perpetual risk, and disease a convenient pretext.
As for Chick Gin, he was merely the first of many plague fatalities in 1900 San Francisco. Over the next eight years at least one-hundred-and-seventy-two others would perish, both Chinese and non-Chinese.
[ix] Quote taken from testimony to Congress in 1876 over the state of Chinese immigration, Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, Arno Press: New York, 1969 (original 1909), p. 106.
[xi] ‘Woman ‘Typhoid Factory’ Held a Prisoner’, The Evening World, New York, 1 April 1907.
[xii] Charlie Campbell, Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People, Duckworth Overlook: London, 2011, p. 161.
[xiii] John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An intimate History of the Black Death, Harper: London, 2006, pp. 232, 248.
[xiv] Samuel K. Cohn, Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S., Historical journal (Cambridge, England), 2012 November 1; 85(230): 535-555.
[xv] Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism, Yale University Press: London, 1999, pp. 245-246.
[xvi] Philip Alcabes, Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu, Public Affairs: New York, 2009, pp. 74-75, 77.
I first heard the story of Gene Shepherd after receiving a 46th rejection slip for my novel.
Shepherd was a New York radio presenter who broadcast regularly for twenty-two years. What interested me about him was that he created a best-selling book which did not exist.
Because he thought disc jockeys were just an extension of the music industry, Shepherd played no music on his show – except the occasional tune by himself on a kazoo or a nose harp; otherwise he talked non-stop from midnight to 4.30 every morning. He had 50,000 loyal listeners for whom he first invented the term ‘night persons’: insomniacs, airline pilots, night watchmen, burglars, lovers and those who lived their lives while their fellow New Yorkers slept.
One night he told his listeners that they had a great advantage over daytime people: they thought for themselves. He argued that daytime people’s lives and tastes were dictated by rigid work schedules and especially by arbitrary consumer guides called lists: the ten best-dressed women; the twenty richest men; the thirty best songs; the fifty best novels.
‘How many of you’, he asked, ‘ever voted for the Academy Awards? Who actually decides these things? Who makes up these lists?’ His concern had begun in a bookshop when the assistant haughtily told him that the book he had requested, a minor classic, did not exist because it was not on her publisher list.
The Conspiracy
One Summer night in 1956 Shepherd invited his listeners to conspire with him in inventing a book which actually did not exist. After several nights of listeners phone calls he opted for the suitably tempting title, I, Libertine, by an imaginary author, F. R. Ewing, and an imaginary publisher, Excelsior Press, which, for prestige, they would describe as an imprint of the ‘Cambridge University Press’.
Over the next few nights he distilled his listeners’ ideas for background material to the book and its author. The writer would be called Frederick Ronald Ewing, British, of course. His CV would include a spell as a Lieutenant Commander in the North Atlantic fleet, a BBC radio broadcaster, a regular contributor to the London Observer and he would now be a settled civil servant in Rhodesia.
He also must have a charming wife named Marjorie, a horsewoman from the north country. The imaginary book, I, Libertine, would be described as the first volume of a trilogy on the subject of 18th century Erotica.
Besieging Bookshops
Shepherd now urged his listeners to descend on their local bookshop over the following days and ask for the non-existent book. The results were hilarious.
The New York bookshops were besieged by Shepherd’s conspirators who reported their experiences on air. Shepherd had predicted that the first caller to a shop would be dismissed, that the second would be told the book was on order; but that a third inquiry would result in telephone calls to distributors who would then besiege Publishers Weekly. It all happened exactly as he had predicted.
One listener reported on a snooty bookshop assistant, the kind, he said, who gave the impression that he might himself be Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer. The assistant had the habit of dropping remarks like ‘Proust never really matured’ or ‘Joyce, a bit overrated don’t you think?’ When the customer asked, however, for the non-existent Fred Ewing’s I, Libertine, the same assistant brightened up: ‘Ah, Ewing’, he said, ‘it’s about time the public discovered him’.
Going Global
Airline pilots listening on shortwave got the joke and brought word of the imaginary book to Paris, London, Rome, even to Honolulu bookshops. Soon everybody was talking about I, Libertine.
Gene Shepherd and his listeners kept the intrigue going for eight weeks. One student reported that his end-of-term thesis on Frederik R. Ewing’s equally non-existent pre-war BBC Radio 3 broadcasts on the History of Literature had been awarded a B plus.
The student’s examiner had written in red ink ‘Superb research!’ The student mournfully told Shepherd on air: ‘Maybe my whole education’s been phoney. Now I think maybe even Chaucer didn’t exist.’
Another listener rang to say she mentioned the book at her bridge club. Three ladies claimed to have read it, two of them disliking it very much.
A fundamentalist church in Boston actually banned the book.
A New York gossip columnist, Errol Wilson, wrote: ‘Had lunch to-day with Freddie Ewing and his wife just before they set sail for India. Freddie said he was surprised at the popularity of his book’
Finally, the inevitable: the New York Times Literary supplement carried a review of the non-existent book. As a result I, Libertine appeared on the nationwide best-seller list and Gene Shepherd’s project was complete.
But he was now getting nervous. What if the President of the U.S.A. referred to the non-existent book – this was, after all, the paranoid fifties. Might Shepherd be hauled before The House Un-American Activities Committee, for making an ass of the Commander-in-Chief?
House Un-American Activities Committee.
Busted
When a journalist rang in to tell Shepherd that he too was a ‘night person’, that he knew the whole story and suggested that it might be time to reveal the deception Shepherd jumped at the chance.
The Wall Street Journal carried the entire bizarre story on its front page. It was reproduced word for word across the world – even in Pravda, the official Soviet news agency.
Shepherd was inundated with phone inquiries from newspapers in six countries. But in America the story was spun very carefully. ‘Radio DJ deceives the public’ was the usual headline. This, as Shepherd protested, was untrue. His entire listenership had simply demonstrated how hype and PR could manipulate the public. But his was an unpalatable message in the self-proclaimed home of individualism.
The story ended not too badly. Before the expose, a paperback publisher named Ballantine had asked the Wall Street journalist for help in tracking down Ewing with a view to buying the paperback rights to the non-existent book.
Shepherd joined them one day for lunch and the journalist introduced the broadcaster as the real Frederick Ronald Ewing. Ballantine was astonished but retained his focus. He said: ‘Of course, you will now have to write the book’ And in six weeks the broadcaster and the journalist did so. The real book became a bestseller and they gave the proceeds to charity.
Moneybutton
However Gene Shepherd had long been resented by the advertisers on his radio show – he tended to make fun of the commercials with the introduction ‘Here comes the moneybutton’ – and they gradually sidelined him into doing hour-long broadcasts.
No longer was total freedom of the airwaves available to him. He ended his career presenting his show on college campus radio while he churned out books, for one of which he invented the slogan: ‘In God we Trust – the rest pay cash’. Gene Shepherd died in 2002.
I now await my own novel’s 47th rejection slip, but thanks to Gene Shepherd I care a little less whether it comes or not.
Hardly a week goes by without someone asking me about my connection to Christopher Hitchens. Such enquiries are clearly predicated on our common concerns. I suspect at one level my own modest bohemianism and libertarianism has invited comparison. Although we share an unbridled enthusiasm for talking Hitchens was, however, also a great listener, something I am struggling to get better at.
I had a brief encounter with the man himself one enchanting and admittedly drunken evening. Being then youthful I was somewhat dazzled by his presence, yet more so when the bill for the wine and cognac arrived.
I found Christopher Hitchens almost preternaturally eloquent, even when plastered. Industrial quantities of booze only seemed to inspire him to new heights, as it does many artists. Nonetheless, he was fortunate to have the constitution of an ox – a unique case and liver to boot. Predictably, it was the cigarettes that killed him in the end.
Despite a dreadful personal lifestyle in conventional terms, his achievements and outputs – to use a terms whose origin in economics he would have despised – as the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over thirty books, were nothing short of phenomenal. Lifestyle excesses did not undermine his craft or genius.
Non-compromised Intellect
As a man of letters, Hitchens is the last in the line of a Belle Époque tradition requiring a confidence trick that Voltaire, George Orwell, Gore Vidal, Albert Camusand, truthfully, few others have pulled off. These were all men who operated in a space of utter independence and autonomy; as journalists not beholden to anyone; as non-compromised intellects, projecting intelligences greater than any academic-for-hire.
Hitchens himself was a generalist and synthesiser, a man of substance, far removed from the letter writer to a newspaper dismissed as a crank by those who control the message and form the opinions in our dumbed-down zeitgeist.
He played a role for which there is no job description, as it really does not exist, for he himself defined it through sheer force of will. Self-selected and self-ordained, he was truly a law unto himself.
It helped that the power brokers adored his transgressive presence. Walking on the wild side, he was a unique, larger than life character. Albeit toadying up to the powerful ultimately mars his legacy.
He was fortunate to receive the adulation of Americans, and of course he panhandled to them. They loved to debate with this antichrist of an atheist.
Perhaps they believed such a troubled human being seemed ripe for religious conversion, which of course he never succumbed to. In fact, the very religious doctor who supervised his dying days was anxious for a death bed conversion that never came, all of which is splendidly documented in his book Mortality (2012).
He might not like the comparison, but it seems to me that like many sincerely committed religious people he held an innocent faith that public debate matters: that serious argument around fundamental questions counts, and continues to shape public opinion.
Support for Invasion of Iraq
Hitchens’s blinkered support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on hatred of religion in all its forms, and Islam in particular. He thus stands complicit by proxy in endorsing U.S. terrorism.
Hitchens failed to acknowledge that the US was acting as a terror state. When President Bush’s chief legal advisor Alberto Gonzalez described the Geneva Convention to be ‘quaint’ and ‘obsolete’[i] it opened to the door to the torture carried out in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Guantanamo Bay.
Having said that at least Hitchens had the good grace to undergo the torture of waterboarding himself under controlled conditions, that he wrote about in a famous Vanity Fair article, declaring ‘Believe Me, It’s Torture.’[ii]
I happen to share Hitchens’s hatred of extreme religious fundamentalism and jihadi terror tactics, but am not oblivious to their origins, and the even greater danger posed by the maniacs on the far-right of the Republican Party in the U.S.: that triage of evil, Post-Truth, moral relativism and religious fundamentalism that Noam Chomsky has pointed to.
U.S. Republican extremists, unlike anarchists or deluded and fragmented Islamic jihadists possess true wealth and power, making them really frightening.
Moreover, on account of his British upbringing Hitchens was not exposed to the Catholic fundamentalism I have encountered, which is in some respects the worst, and certainly the pettiest, of all.
Attack on Bill Clinton
There is much to be said in favour of Christopher Hitchens. He was after all, the great Satan to the religious right, predicting, along with Richard Dawkins, the rise of religious fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic. He saw it all coming.
Indeed, Clinton was the beginning of the end. Bubba is like a fractured image of Trump and Steve Bannon and precursor to their redneck populism. With his forensic mind, Hitchens knew a spin merchant when he saw one.
Bill Clinton with Donald Trump c.2000.
Hitchens recognised Clinton as a Populist vulgarian, and ultimately a betrayer and subverter of the liberal cause. He could see that Clinton’s lack of spine, principle and integrity would allow the Neo-Cons to undermine the liberalism he claimed to stand for.
Clinton is a hillbilly product of an educational system prioritising policy wonking. Today we see far too much emphasis on graft and data retention along with carefully managed communication, which is the obverse of true argumentation. Thus discussion and debate is confined within ever-narrowing parameters.
Hitchens’s commitment to the Enlightenment values of reason and truth unquestionably dictated an intense dislike of the purveyors of Post-Truth nonsense.
Hitchens was not, however, as critical of U.S. neo-liberalism as he ought to have been, and his departure from Marxism led to obsequiousness towards the establishment. This ideology, or ‘false consciousness’ in Marxist terms, is laying waste to the world and Hitchens should have seen it coming.
Perhaps the cognitive dissonance, can be explained in material terms by this intellectual Marxist being on the neo-liberal payroll. He was where the money was, representing the opposing, other times supportive, viewpoints on Fox News. Yet he remained danger to all comers, a white knuckle ride on an unruly horse.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
In a sense Hitchens was intellectually mediocre, not unlike Jordan Peterson in that he pandered to the corporate market. The neo-liberal banqueted intellectual, who keeps it safe and ted-talky. Anything can be resolved by one market under god. Well no it cannot.
Thus, by side-tracking to Islam, supporting the Bushman wars and demonising Clinton he perversely and indirectly served Republican interests. His Marxism twisted and bent like a tattered cover effectively brought endorsement of U.S-led neo-liberalism.
Hitchens had an opulent and luxurious lifestyle, and I believe it blurred his judgment. Money can corrupt anyone. Indeed, a character in Martin Amis’s book Money (1984) was ostensibly based on him.
He liked to be indulged, flattered and entertained, and craved an audience too much. The scoop was all important. A neediness to be the centre of public attention was an obviously failing.
Hichens’s unscrupulous lifestyle, alcoholism and opportunism, some say, is also fictionally documented in Tom Wolfe’s iconic 1980s novel The Bonfire of The Vanities (1987). The fictional character that emerges is far from sympathetic.
That is not say he was not mostly correct in his arguments. We should judge the ideas rather than the man, who must have been difficult to live with.
Above all, Christopher Hitchens maintained the idea of public intellectualism, and was a champion of any cause he firmly believed in. He was like a successful Ignatius F O’ Reilly railing against a Confederacy of Dunces (1980), operating in what Gore Vidal termed ‘The Republic of Amnesia.’
Interestingly, Vidal anointed him as his successor and dauphin. But perhaps unsurprisingly they had a falling out, given there is little of the austere Brahmin in Christopher Hitchens.
Though he might bridle at the suggestion, Hichens is more like the smooth-talking William F. Buckley, the architect of U.S. neo-liberalism, at least in personality terms. A fractiousness and emotional incompatibility between Buckley and Vidal is also easy to detect in Best of Enemies, a recent documentary about their famous debates and interchanges during the 1968 U.S. Presidential Election.
Gore Vidal, 2009. Image: David Shankbone
A One-Off
Hitchens’s sheer force of personality and will is unlikely to be seen again any time soon. Even his enemies would concede he was a one-off, a public entertainer of such colour and intellect that he was guaranteed to give a performance, and unlike in Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist (1922), the public never tired of it.
But the heroic lifestyle, involving so much booze, and stage fright no doubt, killed him prematurely. We can, however, draw a few lessons from his intellectual legacy.
First, to be vigilant to public discourse being hijacked by spin merchants, quacks, false expertise and imbeciles that we now seem to be buying wholesale.
Secondly, to listen carefully to those who speak consequentially and even cause the necessary offence. These kind of people are being obliterated or subsumed by mindless internet chatter, and sound bites. As Hitchens famously said: ‘My own opinion is enough for me and I claim the right to defend it against anybody, anywhere and if you do not like it stand in line while I kick your ass.
Thirdly, to recognise that our moral compass of truth is being lost to a religous fundamentalism that appears to be winning.
Fourthly, we must question the pillars of society just as Hitchens interrogated the roles of Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, to devastating effect.
His book on Mother Theresa is in fact incendiary. The title the Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995) is a pun of true genius containing a veiled attack on Catholic attitudes towards sexuality, and so called charity.
Hitchens fillets her to show how the ostensible compassion and charity was really a mask for leaving people to die in appalling conditions, without adequate support mechanisms or proper treatment; in short demonstrating that she was a hypocrite.
Master of the Polemic
Excessively religious people like to be seen to be good as opposed to doing good. Tokenism holds sway. Many devoutly religious people I knew were all in favour of the Innocence ProjectI founded in Ireland; that is as long as it did not interfere with their interests, and of course funding was out of the question.
Hitchens was the acknowledged master of the polemic, and revived the tradition of the public essay. In this sense his easily digested and short books – beautifully written, precise and pungent – are not just in the line of his great hero George Orwell, but owe a debt also to the tradition of 18th century Anglo-Irish letters, encapsulated by figures such as Jonathan Swift or William Hazlitt.
His work could also be profoundly serious, at which point he ceased to be just a polemicist. His public education text on The Rights of Man (2006), juxtaposing Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke is a perfect summary of the values of the constitutional Enlightenment. It condenses a lot of learning and is far better than many large treatises on the subject that go unread and unremembered.
I sense that he appealed to his contemporary audience as a generalist confronting legions of specialists. His ranging intellect contrasted with the products of an educational system that no longer permits all-rounders. When he engaged in his ideal forum of public debate he simply knew too much, and was too articulate with a ready supply of historical and literary allusions that dumbfounded his critics, putting the political spinmeisters on the back foot.
He achieved glory by unconventional methods, to put it mildly, and it must have astounded him that a third class degree, admittedly from Balliol in Oxford University, brought him so far. He bucked the specialist trend.
One Man Show
I wonder whether such a ribald, Rabelaisian figure of jollity and deadly accuracy could gain traction with an audience today. Where would his footholds to glory lie? His unruly lifestyle in these censorious times would probably ensure that he never got past first base.
At one level it was all a kind of performance. A one man show that went on and on. The clown prince. But what a show it was.
What his opponents lacked, and he possessed in spades, was depth and interdisciplinary context, and above all else a genius for sharp communication and barbed wit. He used words to nuclear effect and with antennae raised to the fraudulence and hypocrisy of our times.
He is sadly missed, for our real foes of Post-Truth, moral relativism and the repudiation of Enlightenment values hold a vice-like grip over public consciousness.
I suspect he was also a little big man, a voice that just had to be heard. Perhaps his oversized personality was a compensation for social maladjustment, and even Asperger Syndrome or similar. Like Oscar in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) he banged on for the sake of the marginalised and those classified as deviant.
It was the transposition of his erudition and learning in a practical sense to the issues of his time that also defined him. Given the context in which he operated, his life was a minor miracle. A last popular gasp of learning and context that gained traction and a mass audience.
He once said that our lives only have meaning to the extent that we give them meaning, which is not to condone his attitude towards the women or the booze.
There was a craving for middle class acceptance for which he had to overcome an inherent vulgarity and crassness. America suited him as a pundit and pugilist of an anti-intellectual vulgarity, who could speak at their level. Being of a kind, he recognised the flaws in Clinton.
He was never quite an English gentleman. Never officer material.
In America he was one step, in savvy terms, above the vulgarity around him but still appealed at a frat-boy level. For in the kingdom of the blind man the one eyed man is king.
They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.
John Milton, ‘An Apology for Smectymnuus with the Reason of Church-Government’ (1642)
Unfortunately I just missed out on meeting one of the totemic figures of our time in Noam Chomsky. In 1997, as a Boston-based Harvard student, I was taken to visit an unprepossessing office inside an apartment block, only to find the veteran M.I.T. professor and author had left the building.
What remains to be said about the darling of the radical anti-imperialist left?
In my previous account of Michel Foucault, I touched on Chomsky’s revulsion towards post-modernism and moral relativism, and his acute anticipation of the post-truth zeitgeist. He was the first I think to point out that Jacques-the-lad-poseurs such as Derrida and Lacan were saying little of substance, and what they were holding forth on was nonsense on stilts.
Chomsky anticipated how post-modernist mumbo-jumbo would be appropriated by neo-conservatives to sow a culture of disinformation. Perhaps a scientific background in formal linguistics armed him with the rigour to cut through the morass. He has frequently spoken of his dislike of deceit, and adherence to Cartesian common sense.
Chomsky shares with George Orwell – another of our public intellectual subject-matters – a commitment to the truth and an almost mystic-like perception of how propaganda operates. This leads him into a degree of bemusement at popular culture that may come across as elitist. But he understands how a spectator democracy and a free-fall in journalistic standards has lead to Populist demagogues.
Manufacturing Consent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuwmWnphqII
The effectiveness of political propaganda is managed by hegemonic media and other vectors of public opinion, which undermine democracy and promote a corporatocracy. This brought us Donald Trump rather than Bernie Sanders.
It is what Chomsky has termed Manufacturing Consent, borrowing a term from Walter Lippmann, whose Public Opinion (1921), argued for democratic control through a specialised class or cool observers to control the agendas, manipulating public opinion by means of clever illusions and simplification.
Chomsky borrows this insight to demonstrate how the media works through diversion and dumbing down. Popular energy is dissipated and voters infantilised.
Interestingly, a recent highly critical account by Chris Knight called Decoding Chomsky (2016) points out that for much if not all of his career Chomsky’s science, eminently debatable, has been totally disconnected from his political engagement.
From the outset of his career he has effectively relied on the promotion and funding of the military industrial complex, through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).
Why? Well it seems they quite like the idea of an anti-establishment token radical on their payroll. It gives them a degree of legitimacy, at least as long as his voice is not heard too widely. Indeed, in other countries he might be regarded as a class traitor.
Moreover, his ground breaking hypothesis of human beings possessing an innate syntactical language of deep structure, contrary to the claims of behaviourism assisted the Pentagon in an ultimately fruitless search for a computer encoded Esperanto. They were seeking a common dumbed down language that could be used for commercial and corporate purposes: a precursor to the patois of social media perhaps.
It is important to recall that as an American academic he has had to navigate a snake pit of careerist in order to make his mark. One should recognise the constraints of working within a uniformly commercial culture that encompasses the universities.
Knight maintains that psychologically his ab initio common-language-from-nowhere linguistic theory, and advocacy, promoted isolation, and led to a form of cognitive dissonance that influenced his political beliefs. In effect, Knight alleges, he became a neurotic at odds with the rest of society. The accusation thus is one of hypocrisy, or like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, he has been living an alternative life.
A Picture of Dorian Gray
Knight also maintains that when his critics maul his ideas on linguistics he reverts to ad hominem tactics, dogmatism, with counter evidence dismissed in favour of his own mystical vision, which is precisely the kind of self-evident-genius-argument I despise.
So I am certainly not fully persuaded by his linguistic theories but convinced indeed, unlike Knight, that the institutional support has brought him unique intellectual influence and responsibility – perhaps manipulated for his own ends – but for the good of humanity: as Chomsky is a principled man.
The Public Intellectual
One of his very early pieces, much modified, is brilliantly written on a theme close to my heart: the responsibility of the public intellectual.
Chomsky draws a clear distinction between the ever more prevalent academics who sing for their suppers, and parrot for promotion, and those who take the difficult path of what Albert Camus would call engagement.
Today, value-orientated intellectuals are likely to be dismissed as troublemakers in our short term universe of disposability. The generalist is lost in the mix.
Chomsky in fact is very conscious of how, ever since Jimmy Carter, right-wing, Christian conservatives in America have warned against the radicalisation of the young, and are now hell bent on purging radical thinkers from citadels of learning.
The universities and the media engage in self-censorship to suit corporate paymasters. The polite-paper-paradigm meets with incredulity at the nuclear explosion of true dissidence. I discovered this under martial law-like conditions when giving a Rule of Law paper in Trinity College Dublin. On offering robust opinions I was told there would be no circulation of the paper, and another invitation was unlikely.
In Manufacturing Consent (1988), Chomsky demonstrates how market forces and the neo-liberal agenda compel colleges and the media to select topics within defined parameters. This restricts debate and brings the nonsense of ‘balanced’ coverage, and the filtering of information with an over-emphasis on tone. Appropriate tone. Authorities fear upsetting corporate sponsors, leading to the rule of political correctness by the banal.
More to the point, Chomsky is attuned to the independent stance of public intellectualism, which we have all but lost.
Henry Kissinger
Chomsky has also written about Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, a dangerous war criminal still in our midst, and how he exterminated or was complicit in the extermination of East Timor, which was absorbed into Indonesia during the American-backed Suharto dictatorship, with tremendous loss of life and Crimes Against Humanity.
Still in our midst. Henry Kissinger.
In the documentary Manufacturing Consent, like George Orwell, Chomsky is attentive to the misuse of language to justify atrocities. Thus in East Timor the invasion was code-named Operation Clean Sweep. More sotto voce language distortions to justify ethnic-cleansing, itself a term sanitising Genocide that only came into being during the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s.
The book Manufacturing Consent sets out clearly how American foreign policy, from Vietnam to the Bush wars, moulded the message and demonised the Other. Even if we are wrong we are right, and embedded reporters will exonerate any wrongdoing. If, like the claims of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq, the truth is damaging, we ignore it.
Thus a world is divided into worthy and unworthy, with the lenses of the powerful never turned on themselves. Enemies are reduced to vermin to be exterminated, and democratically elected socialists like Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 are, if necessary, removed from office. That’s because democratic socialism is contrary to American values. Better to have a son of a bitch, so long as he’s our son of a bitch. If our boys are engaged in terrorism, it is not really terrorism. If we murder vast numbers of civilians it is hardly Genocide.
As Chomsky reminds us, democracy has to be subverted to purge the average citizen of consciousness, and the critical faculties necessary for it to function.
‘Socialism is contrary to American values.’
Hegemony and Survival
Another crucial text, Hegemony and Survival(2003) demonstrates how the elite regard democracy as, in effect, a spectator democracy. To paraphrase Alexander Hamilton, the ordinary person must be deemed irresponsible and kept within strict confines. He should not be allowed to vote in his interests, or even consider them.
From Vietnam to the present day U.S. Imperialism has dismissed unworthy races. Those who are not a part of the twenty percent who control the planet are to be excluded and disempowered. A culture of dissent is expurgated.
In Hegemony and Survival he sees clearly the beginning of what Stieglitz called The Great Divide (2017), and development of a lunatic neo-liberal hegemony. That divide now has led to the destruction of the middle class, and the cartelisation of wealth into ever decreasing hands
The corporations control the press, leading to self-interested non-reportage by job preservers, reporting beyond the neo-liberal straightjacket is not permitted. The Irish Times in Dublin is a totemic exemplar of the decline of independent media.
As he mentions in his book on propaganda Media Control (2002) state propaganda is used and supported by the educated classes in order to exclude those less fortunate from the discussion. The responsible people, which Yannis Varoufakis would call the Adults in the Room, exclude the herd from infecting their decision-making. Thus people are atomised, segregated and alone. Scholarship becomes conformist and lies beget and compound lies. Scholars who show an independence of spirit are de-frocked.
That which the media excludes is dictated by corporate ownership and advertising paymasters, bringing stories that focus on less central issues, or infomercials masquerading as news.
Thus the thinking public á la Cambridge Analytica is fed disinformation, dictating and influencing popular misconceptions, problems and prejudices.
Ten facts about media control
Chomsky summarises the ten facts of media control which I further synopsis:.
Distraction: compel the public to focus on irrelevance and chatter in our Brave New World. Overload them with nonsense. Press control from Murdoch to social media augments this.
Generate Problems that do not exist and do not need solving: Bail out the banks to enforce fiscal stabilisation and impose austerity on those who have no responsibility for the mess. Reinforce the message, TINA (there is no alternative) but fiscal stabilisation.
Gradualism: Brexit is likely to lead to the slow death of the NHS. First deny it to non-nationals, then to the socialists… Once the British public is conditioned to the idea, pull the plug out altogether and fully privatise.
It will be better in the long run if you take your medicine now. The short sharp shock of austerity. No it will not.
Kill people’s critical faculties and infantalise them. The Greeks and Irish are merely children anyway. Appropriate adults in the room, in the form of the IMF, have arrived to tell you what to do.
Appeal to Emotion, frenzy, hysteria and not rationality. Thus our world is being torn apart by mob orators pulling at the heartstrings.
Disinform and create a sideshow. The public are being fattened up by bread and seduced by circuses of the absurd, causing us to lose sight of the real point.
Pander to bland consumerism. Assure people constantly that they have never had it so good. Brexit will create unlimited prosperity. Drug people with disinformation like soma from A Brave New World.
If we have acted criminally and are powerful then it is your fault and your responsibility. You are derelict because we are criminals, but we never acknowledge that.
Play the person not the ideas. Then if the person is troublesome go after their relationship structure, or just make them disappear.
Chomsky cuts against the salon culture of the Enlightenment, championed by Jürgen Habermas. The challenge lies in counteracting the disconnected memes and silo bubbles of self-interest that the world’s elite direct at us.
Data retention
Orwell’s idea of double speak from Nineteen-Eighty-Four dovetails with Chomsky’s significant observation that it is much more important to have less data, but to have greater understanding or indeed comprehension of what we do hold on to.
That requirement for nuance, judgement and perspective is dissipating rapidly. We are addicted to useless information and data retention, not comprehension or understanding. We are now bombarded with a deluge of superfluous information by social media. More to the point the useless data and bricolage condition our judgment, as it must in order to survive.
How many now join up the dots as Chomsky has and bring them into common sense utterance in simple plain speech and with social engagement? Very few. Very few from the academic community at least. Chomsky is right that the time servers and corporate drones of academia are deliberately or intellectually missing the Big Picture.
One point he has not addressed is how the current neo-liberal rewarping of human identity is creating social atomisation and political disconnection. We are now so embroiled in what we do that we hardly ever question it or fully understand the machine behind it. We no longer have time to consider what we are doing.
Chomsky quotes Robert McNamara in Manufacturing Consent to the effect that all the power brokers are interested in is quiescent serfs dedicated to personal wealth maximisation, not a culture of dissent.
McNamara, a brilliant but non-deviant character, was an ultra-competitive and narrow-minded technocrat which made him complicit in the carpet bombing of Tokyo and the Vietnam war. He even acknowledges that had he been on the losing side he could have been prosecuted for war crimes. If only McNamara had slightly wilder college days.
So the masses are duped by propaganda and caught by a Social Darwinist cult that Chomsky despises. Paradoxically, Chomsky is himself a survivor in that world, and has had to make his compromises, as we all do. ‘You’re going to have to serve somebody,’ as Bob Dylan sang.
Optimism Over Despair
Nonetheless, as Chomsky argues in his new book, we need Optimism Over Despair (2017), perhaps a social-democratic New Deal, checking unbridled capitalism.
As creatures of bounded rationality in an increasingly over-specialised world the Big Picture is a luxury perhaps, reserved for a corporate- and military-funded former M.I.T. Professor. He now operates from a salubrious post-retirement position in Arizona – the greatest quality of life retirement home in America – which is not to be in the least dismissive of Chomsky’s staggering achievements.
Chomsky rightly regards the U.S. as a terror state that acts without restraint, while accusing others of the same crimes. Thus the labels of terrorism and counter-terrorism conceal a multitude of agendas and doublespeak, while permitting the basest acts.
I am unconvinced by the evidence for a common nascent language of universal and deep structure. Chomsky has never explained adequately the idea of recursion, a kind of infinity of deep structure, and thus the linguistic ideas appear counter-intuitive and perhaps fundamentally incorrect. But I claim no expertise in this domain. Nonetheless, I cling to the belief that there is a common universal of pragmatic compunction, though varying in context and time.
Of course none of that is to gainsay or contradict the clear speech of his inter-subjective and all-encompassing journalism and political tracts, for which he deserves great praise.
Responding to Chomsky
Here I summarise the injunctions I have gleaned from Chomsky’s work:
Think independently and do not buy into the mass media consensus. Remain acutely vigilant to doublespeak technobabble. Hearing euphemisms such as ‘politically impossible,’ ‘fiscal stabilisation,’ ‘military intelligence’ or ‘known unknowns’ should sound off alarm bells.
Question how implausible nonsense is considerable acceptable, and campaign, if at all possible, for freedom and justice.
Assert the importance of historical memory, as Milan Kundera emphasised. In laughter all evil is compacted as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. If we fail to remember, we’re sure to repeat the same obscenities.
Oppose fascism in all its current incarnations, including corporate fascism. Do not sympathise with your captors or enemies.
Recognise true hypocrisy for what it is. The hypocrite is someone who applies to others standards they refuse to apply to themselves, of which American foreign policy is a paradigmatic case. Remain flexible and non-puritanical however.
Understand that the definition of terrorism is manufactured by a terrorist corporate and state elite. Just as the French tortured in Algeria, the Americans did the same in Guantanamo Bay. Yet both claimed the high moral ground. Terrorism is only what they do to us.
Resist the rise of moral relativism, which is part of a triage of evil (joining post-truth and neo-liberalism) that Chomsky identifies in the U.S. Republican Party, which he has singled out as the most dangerous political organisation on Planet Earth.
Acknowledge how the cost-benefit analysis of neo-liberalism is turning us into homo economicus, making us lose compassion for one another, besides generating environmental catastrophes.
Embrace the educational tools necessary to defend oneself, and develop communities of resistance within rapidly atomising societies.
Interrogation carried out in Guantanamo Bay.
*******
Perhaps the most disturbing idea that comes through in Knight’s book about Chomsky does not apply to him directly, but relates to how the political ground has moved so far to the right that Richard Nixon, who supported environmental initiatives, Keynesian economics and state-funded medicine, might now be labelled a Communist.
If Chomsky manipulated the corporatocracy to achieve and advocate his political views I would tend to applaud rather than condemn him. To penetrate the orifices of the establishment and to subvert from within is surely a great achievement in itself. It’s always better to be pissing out than pissing in, for as long as you can anyway.
