Cassandra Voices

Category: Society & Culture

  • Operation Mass Formation

    We need to sing again.
    We need to be Irish.
    We need to socialise.
    We need to be ourselves.

    So said Sarah, professional singer and mother from Ballina, County Tipperary, on the Late Late Show, only a few hours after Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin’s address to the nation and his surprise announcement that most of the Irish State’s Covid-19 restrictions were to be lifted with almost immediate effect.

    The Late Late Show, for the uninitiated, is one of the world’s longest-running talk shows, gracing Irish television screens, courtesy of state broadcaster RTE, every Friday evening since the 1960s.

    Sarah’s comments, coming just after she’d performed a rousing showband style rendition of Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, seemed to capture the official (i.e. state-sanctioned) mood of the nation and prompted host Ryan Tubridy to gush “That is good stuff! Congratulations Sarah!”

    Operation Transformation’s Sarah on the Late Late Show.

    So why was Sarah from Tipperary opening the Late Late Show on this particularly momentous occasion? Sarah, as it turns out, is one of the ‘leaders’ of this year’s iteration of RTE’s diet and fitness show Operation Transformation (or OT as it is known to cult members). A staple of Irish TV since 2008, OT has become, much like the Late Late Show itself, something of a national institution.

    Each year, the programme features five contestants. These are ordinary Irish people who want to lose weight, kick unhealthy habits and get fit. The show refers to these participants as ‘leaders’; the idea being that, through inspirational example, the contestants will ‘lead’ the diet-and-exercise-hesitant Irish public into the promised land of health and fitness.

    The leaders are assisted in their endeavours by a panel of four ‘experts’: a dietician, a personal trainer, a clinical psychologist and a GP, who, between them, design individually tailored diet and fitness plans for each leader. The leaders’ homes and fridges are then kitted out with webcams so that we, the audience, gain an intimate view of their struggles.

    Even better, every Wednesday evening we see how much progress our leaders have made – if any – or to enjoy the veritable bollocking they will receive from the panel of experts. We can also download the OT app  and follow the diet and fitness plans of whichever leader we choose to follow. There are national OT fitness event extravaganzas and ‘partnerships’ with most Irish supermarkets.

    2022 Operation Transformation Contestants.

    As I said, an institution. Supported by another institution: the Irish State. The Department of Health has spent €230,000 sponsoring Operation Transformation, and its logo is prominently displayed throughout the show.

    Sarah is also the first leader whose progress we get to see the following Wednesday. As OT host Kathryn Thomas remarks of Sarah’s performance on The Late Late Show, “You just captured that moment that everybody was feeling! It was a moment of celebration!”

    But while four of our leaders are feeling celebratory and enjoying their state-sanctioned return to freedom, things aren’t looking quite so  rosy for the fifth, salon-owner Kathleen, who, along with her farmer husband Tony, lives on a farm in Carrignavar, County Cork. Terrifyingly, Kathleen and Tony had both tested positive for covid the previous week.

    As Kathleen explains, “One of my main symptoms of covid is that I’ve been completely bored”, while Tony is more philosophical about their predicament, remarking that “Well, I’ve kind of been isolating for the past 40 years anyway.”

    Kathleen and Tony are regulars at their local cattle mart but, because of covid restrictions and lockdowns, they have had to make do with virtual visits on their tablets. This is not an entirely satisfactory alternative, however. As Kathleen notes to Tony of one animal they are considering buying, “She’s a much poorer looking cow on your screen than on mine.” The couple also lament that, in the age of virtual cattle-trading, “The human interaction isn’t there.”

    Cattle Mart.

    OT host Kathryn Thomas uses this as a cue to joke, “But at least one thing wasn’t in short supply in the house….” She’s referring to antigen tests. We are then treated to a montage of Kathleen and Tony shoving nylon-tipped plastic swabs up their nostrils while making squirming faces, all to an R&B soundtrack. This seems to be particularly traumatic for poor Tony, who needs to sit down and have his wife perform the procedure for him each time. And who can blame him?  After all, this is no man flu. This is Covid-19.

    Later, Kathleen has a video call with OT fitness expert Karl Henry, who wants to find out how she’s doing. “I feel great. I feel fine,” she says, “the only thing is the boredom of it all and the isolation of it all. The feeling is (as) if I nearly have leprosy for some reason!” Karl has a good chuckle at Kathleen’s analogy (even though she doesn’t seem to be joking) and assures her she is not the only one feeling this way, stating that, “What you’re going through, people around the county are going through. It’s a really normal thing!”

    Nevertheless, Karl and the other OT experts are taking no chances. When it’s Kathleen’s turn to have her weekly check-in, she has to do it remotely, despite having come out of her required isolation period. “Just to be extra cautious”, she is told.

    Remarking again that “This isolation from the outside world hasn’t sat with me very well”, Kathleen is once more reassured by the experts that her feelings of unease and boredom are nothing to be concerned about, with the show’s GP, Sumi Dunne, telling her “that flat effect…is just a reaction to the circumstances.”

    Kathleen and Tony looking at cows.

    This episode of Operation Transformation is a microcosm of what has been going on, regarding Covid-19, in the rest of the country and indeed the world as a whole: the constant and repetitious normalising of behaviour which only two years ago would have been considered at best neurotic and at worst deeply psychologically problematic.

    Remember when we used to joke about somebody having man flu? That curiously culturally acceptable form of sexism which, according to the Harvard Health Blog, describes “a constitutional character flaw of men who, when felled by a cold or flu, embellish the severity of their symptoms.”

    Nowadays, the whole world seems to be suffering from man flu. The only difference is that, with a case of Covid-19, you don’t even need any symptoms to embellish; all you need is a positive antigen or lateral flow test, items which have become as much a staple of our weekly supermarket trips as a sliced pan, two litres of milk and a six-pack of cheese and onion crisps.

    As Kathleen herself said, “I had absolutely none of the symptoms of covid, but at the same time I was aware that I had it because obviously I tested positive. So I was even watching my heart rate increasing, and saying ‘ok, I won’t go too far or even push my body at all’.”

    A man embellishing flu symptoms.

    There are several more occasions in the episode when Kathleen refers to the abnormality of the situation she finds herself in and how uncomfortable she feels being isolated from other people. Yet, every time her concerns are brushed off by the experts (including, as mentioned, a clinical psychologist and a doctor) who tell her that this is “normal” or that the majority of people in the country are also experiencing something very similar.

    When people like me (and by that I simply mean anyone who questions the status quo on covid) talk of the mainstream media, for the most part we are referring to the news media. But of course the flagrant bias and  propaganda doesn’t stop there. It has infiltrated all forms of media: it’s there in the soap operas we follow, the chat shows, televised sporting events, health and lifestyle programmes, children’s television, social media platforms, social media influencers, and so on ad nauseum.

    As others have pointed out, television programmes and social media do not simply provide entertainment, they also greatly influence our ideas about the world and provide a model for our attitudes and behaviour: certain individuals and their actions are presented approvingly and in a positive light, while others are presented negatively, with disapproval. Some behaviours and opinions are shown to be typical, normal and to be emulated, while others are shown to be strange, problematic and to be avoided. As such, TV shows and social media provide a powerful example of what is acceptable in a society and what is not. And far from simply reflecting reality, these forms of media are instrumental in the building and shaping of it.

    If you are somebody who has questioned the mainstream narrative about covid, you’ll no doubt be aware of Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet and his theory of mass formation. This compelling theory is a useful tool for analysing our current situation. If you are  unfamiliar with it, I recommend looking at this video in which Professor Desmet explains the idea himself.

    In a nutshell, mass formation describes the process whereby a large part of the population subconsciously disengages its rational and critical faculties in order to participate in a form of groupthink, the focus of which is usually one small point or issue. Mass formation is a phenomenon that typically occurs in the emergence of totalitarianism. It can occur spontaneously, as in Nazi Germany, or be intentionally created by the state, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Mass formation can only take place when four very specific conditions are met.

    These are as follows: a substantial number of people in the population have to feel socially isolated; a substantial number of people have to feel an essential lack of meaning in their lives; a substantial number of people have to experience what he calls “free-floating anxiety” (in other words, anxiety or stress which is not connected to a mental representation – feeling anxious but not knowing why) and finally, a large percentage of the population has to experience free-floating frustration and aggression.

    Professor Mattias Desmet.

    The four conditions were already in place, in Desmet’s opinion, when the pandemic was first announced by the WHO back in March 2020. According to one study published before the pandemic in The American Sociological Review, 25% of Americans reported they didn’t have a single close friend. A Gallup poll, which included participants from a number of industrialised countries, found that nearly 50% of those questioned stated they didn’t have a single meaningful relationship and that they only connected to other people through the internet or through technology. As Desmet asserts, “A connection through the internet doesn’t make you resonate in the same way with other people.”

    This isolation or lack of social bond leads into the second condition: a feeling that life is generally meaningless or senseless. In his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber states that 50% of people reported that their job was ’not at all meaningful’.” A Gallup poll from 2012, which included people from 142 countries, shows that 63% of respondents, in Desmet’s words, “admitted to being so disengaged at work that they were sleepwalking through their day, putting time but not passion into their work.”

    This combination of social isolation and the impression that life has no  meaning produces a kind of anxiety which is “free floating.” Unlike a phobia, which pinpoints a specific object of fear (for example spiders or confined spaces), free floating anxiety is not connected to anything tangible. Feeling anxiety without understanding its cause produces profound “psychological discontent.” Desmet notes that each year in Belgium 300 million doses of antidepressants are administered to a population of only 11 million people. This doesn’t even take into account antipsychotics, sleeping tablets or anxiety medication. Indeed, the World Health Organisation has reported that one in five people have an actual anxiety disorder.

    The fourth condition, what Desmet calls “free-floating frustration and aggression”, is a result of the isolation, lack of meaning and consequent anxiety. Furthemore, it is extremely problematic because people simply don’t understand what is causing them to feel aggression or frustration.

    When these four conditions are in place, all that is needed for mass formation to occur is for the mainstream media to produce a narrative which highlights “an object of anxiety” (in this case, a virus) and to simultaneously provide a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety (lockdowns, masks, vaccination, etc.).

    For Desmet, identifying the object of anxiety and participating in a strategy to deal with it gives people both a sense of control and, perhaps more significantly, a sense of connection. And it is this feeling of strong solidarity and connection which enables, “an extraordinary willingness…to participate in the strategy…no matter how absurd the measures or the narrative becomes.”

    We now live in a world of absurd contradictions: governments and media assert repeatedly that Covid-19 vaccines are effective, yet many more people have contracted and spread the virus since getting the jab than before the vaccine rollout. We were told that masks and social distancing would curb the spread of Covid-19 but have never been offered unequivocal evidence to that effect. And, of course, the biggest fraud of all: the idea of asymptomatic spread. It is now a commonly held belief that a perfectly healthy individual who feels well and has no symptoms of any illness is a danger to others. Consequently, they must be cordoned off and isolated from the rest of society in order to be approved of or accepted by that same society.

    For me, one of the most fascinating elements of Desmet’s theory is how he describes the nature of the social bond that emerges during mass formation. As he says, “this is never a social bond between individuals. It is always a social bond between an individual and the collective.” Furthermore, the longer the mass formation continues, the more “a radically paranoid atmosphere” is established which “destroys the connection between individuals.”

    So when Kathleen from Operation Transformation talks about being bored and missing social contact with other people, she is talking about the personal relationships she has with other individuals, whether that be family, friends, colleagues or acquaintances. However, a positive antigen test demands that she must sacrifice these personal connections in order to maintain and participate in the much larger (and faceless) relationship she now has with society as a whole. And the thing that most defines that relationship is to virtue signal, in the most public way possible, that you are keeping others safe by adhering to government guidelines, no matter how absurd or illogical those guidelines may be.

    Imagine if, only two years ago, someone you knew told you they had just got a flu shot in order to protect, not just themselves, but you and everyone else from influenza. Or that they were spending 50 to 60 euro a week to test themselves and their family on a daily basis for colds or flu, despite feeling perfectly healthy. Or that, if one of those tests gave a positive result, they would not go into work for 5-10 days and isolate themselves in their home, completely avoiding contact with the outside world. You would have thought your hypochondriac friend had finally lost the plot, and maybe even suggested they get some psychiatric help for that Howard Hughes-style obsessive compulsive disorder.

    Antigen testing.

    In fact, Desmet suggests that many of the Covid-19 measures put in place by governments around the world “are without pragmatic meaning” and function in a ritualistic way, demanding “a sacrifice from the individual; a sacrifice through which the individual shows that the collective is more important” than his or her own interests. Moreover, “people, without knowing it, will continue to buy into the narrative just because, as a social being, there is nothing more painful than to be profoundly and thoroughly socially isolated.”

    And what would the point of a sacrifice be if it were not acknowledged or rewarded in some way? Kathleen’s isolation because of a positive antigen test result is applauded by the experts on the show. Her reward is the public acknowledgment of that sacrifice: she has willingly done everything within her power to keep others safe, despite having absolutely no symptoms of any illness.

    Operation Transformation has a huge following in Ireland and it is very clear from watching only a few episodes that one of its main attractions is the sense of belonging and acceptance that both participants and the audience gain from taking part in or following the show. One woman, who planned to get involved in the Operation Transformation 5k run in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, went as far as to remark, “I don’t feel like Mrs Nobody anymore, and I’d encourage anybody not to feel like that.”

    Unsurprisingly, considering it is sponsored by the Department of Health and broadcast on RTE, there is an implicit acceptance by Operation Transformation that the State’s removal of our fundamental rights was absolutely necessary, that in doing so the State kept us all safe, and that the reestablishment of some of these rights is something for which we should be grateful. Another talking head on the show, Frank Greally of Athletics Ireland, says, of the recent OT 5k (the first OT event of this nature in nearly two years), that “when you join in something (like this) and participate, it’s an outpouring of gratitude” and that “we’re back on freedom road again!”

    So what does being “back on freedom road again” look like in the weeks since Michael Martin’s surprise announcement? When you use public transport or go into a supermarket, most people are still wearing a mask. Many school children continue to be masked up, sitting in freezing classrooms with open windows in the middle of winter. Mentally handicapped adults are still wearing facemasks in their day centres. The elderly in care homes, despite being triple-jabbed, can be locked down at a moment’s notice as soon as any resident or member of staff tests positive for covid. Tens of thousands of people just like Kathleen continue to test themselves on a daily basis.

    More worryingly, the State has doubled down on its campaign to vaccinate children despite acknowledged dangers. Other parents, just like this man, will suffer the horror of their child having a heart attack, and then be told by so-called medical experts that it had nothing to do with the experimental gene therapy that was administered shortly beforehand. Furthermore, unconstitutional and draconian legislation that was put in place back in March 2020 remains on the statute book. Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, could decide (using statutory instruments that do not require legislative oversight) to reinstate all restrictions, or add a few more, just as quickly as he removed them.

    In recent weeks, there’s also been a state and media pivot. The object of anxiety has shifted with breathtaking rapidity from Covid-19 to war in the Ukraine. And the strategy to deal with this new anxiety is to virtue signal your unconditional support for Ukraine and unquestioningly condemn everything Russian.

    The shift in narrative has been seamless. Just as the world’s media, in lockstep, uncritically presented Covid-19 as a simple morality tale, they now do the same with the Ukraine crisis. And the public appears, once more, to be lapping it up.

    The yellow and blue of Covid-19 public health advertising has given way to the yellow and blue of Ukraine’s national colours. Significant buildings in most European cities are now lit up yellow and blue, and you see the Ukrainian flag everywhere. In Dublin, a member of the public, to much applause, deliberately drove his lorry through the gate of the Russian embassy; soon afterwards, local councillors announced their intention to change the name of the street in which the embassy is located from Orwell Road to Free Ukraine Road.

    Protestors outside the Russian embassy in Dubln.

    At the centre of this new object of anxiety is evil incarnate Vladimir Putin and his dastardly plan to destroy Ukraine, and democracy more generally. In less than a week the number of Irish households offering accommodation to Ukrainian refugees has leapt from 5,000 to 14,500, with the State pledging that Ireland will offer sanctuary to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing their country. That’s nearly a 2% increase in population for a country already facing a housing crisis and spiralling homelessness.

    But if you dare question any of this, then just like those that dared to question the covid narrative, you will be roundly condemned and ridiculed. Any form of critical thinking will have you branded, once again, as some kind of far-right, bigoted, conspiracy nutjob.

    All of Ukraine’s well-documented human rights abuses in the Donbas, and the distubing presence of neo-Nazi militia groups in that country’s armed forces, have not just been forgiven, but have, in fact, been whitewashed by the new media narrative. And despite his severely limited political experience, former comedian and current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been hailed as the new Churchill.

    Operation Transformation has become Operation Mass Formation, and this most recent manipulation of public opinion over the Ukraine crisis shows that we are still in the thick of a very problematic and unyielding kind of groupthink.

    So yes, Sarah from Operation Transformation, it may well be the case that Irish people need to sing and dance again, socialise and be themselves, but it was never the business or prerogative of the State to tell us that we couldn’t, and no matter what nonsense the government has come out with about ‘covid bonuses’ and ‘dividends’ for our obedience, it is certainly not their business to tell us that we can now.

    Until all the legislation that underpins the mandates is repealed, and until we make sure that such measures can never be inflicted on the population again, we are deluding ourselves if we think we are free. The current mono-narrative being presented to the public about war in Ukraine should be a red flag to us all that we no longer live in functioning democracies.

  • The Importance of Public Debate

    At a recent debate organised by the English-Speaking Union (ESU) at its HQ, Dartmouth House in London, we considered whether the British government’s response to Covid placed too great a priority on security rather than liberty. Naturally I took the liberty side of the argument.

    I expressed the fear that such a public forum as the ESU had convened could represent an interregnum, or lull in the storm, but hope springs eternal.

    A central hallmark of a democracy is freedom of speech. In terms of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, Anthony Lewis argued free speech should act as a search engine for the truth. Ronald Dworkin argued that free speech is a condition for legitimate government, and a counterweight to hysteria and unreason. Stephen Sedley, an eminent English judge, called it the lifeblood of a democracy. Freedom of speech also opens government and private enterprise to intense scrutiny. Above all, it encourages diversity and tolerance.

    Christopher Hitchens.

    Right to Ridicule

    It is not for the faint of heart. Christopher Hitchens remarked that freedom to speak inoffensively is meaningless, while Dworkin insisted on a right to ridicule.

    The overarching argument for speech rights was expressed beautifully in extremis by Hitchens when he said, ‘if you disagree with me that is your prerogative, so stand in line while I, rhetorically, kick your ass.’

    Conflict is resolved best through argument with the truth sacrosanct, ideally via open-ended public debate.

    This should not merely be rhetoric, but include arguments of substance. And the ESU provides, or can provide, that forum. Perhaps uniquely so. Indeed, it was heartening to encounter a multi-generational debate that included insightful youthful interventions.

    In retrospect, Hitchens represents the tail end of a tradition beginning with his hero Thomas Paine, mediated through his other great hero George Orwell, and culminating in him through a rich tapestry of public intellectuals and journalists, who fundamentally believed the pen to be mightier than the sword: that speech and words matter.

    Alas today speech has degenerated in the popular press into public titillation and gossip. It is also noticeable that the great traditions of investigative journalism, evident during the golden era of the Washington Post under Katherine Graham and The Times under Harold Evans, is in serious decline. Today most investigative journalism is a sham. The intellectual culture of the press has been degraded beyond belief.

    Social media is now a form of speech-driven pornography, where legitimate and illegitimate expressions of speech are proving impossible to disentangle. Character assassination and casual defamation have become the order of the day. The Internet may be a force of liberation in some respects, but also permits public display of ever more bizarre and outlandish commentaries. Mark Zuckerberg has unleashed a Promethean conflagration that remains untamed.

    Today’s emphasis on brevity and soundbites in politics conceals how the truth often requires explanation, as it is often nuanced.

    Aneurin Bevan talking to a patient at Park Hospital, Manchester, the day the NHS came into being in 1948.

    Like paying a visit to Woolworths…

    Aneurin Bevan, as good an orator as Churchill, once remarked that listening to a speech from Labour leader Clement Atlee was like paying a visit to Woolworths: ‘everything was in its place, but nothing was above the value of sixpence.’ To be convincing speech should have the necessary brio to rouse an audience.

    From Jeremy Bentham’s Speech Acts, Jürgen Habermas, develops the crucial idea of Ideal Speech or Communicative Action. This is an idea that speech should be formal, and not tainted by an unthinking recourse to ideology. He also suggests that such dialogue in the tradition of the Enlightenment salon will provide technical outcomes that are also morally purposeful.

    In Communicative Action he wrote: ‘Speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals based on a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit worthy.’

    It succeeds:

    insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behaviour. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilise the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.

    Although not all speech should have to be taken seriously, it is important that a forum such as Dartmouth House is maintained for popular shibboleths to be dismantled in public debate.

    George Orwell.

    Doublespeak

    So, propaganda should not be taken seriously, nor modes of advertising, without close and detailed inspection. The opinions of many putative experts fall under the same category. Certainly, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

    The use of language – however cloaked in notional expertise – to undermine freedoms is a very worrying development. The employment by officialdom of complex legal discourse and manipulation of language may represent the onset of what George Orwell referred to as ‘doublespeak’. This can be exposed in civilised public debate in a neutral forum.

    A certain degree of puff and blow will always be found among business-people. Advertising lubricates the wheels of commerce, but when almost non-existent standards permit multinational corporate entities, including the pharmaceutical sector, to fabricate, falsify and frankly lie, thus precipitating financial and environmental collapse, this may represent a return to the dark ages.

    Sadly, mainstream political debate has disintegrated. Notably, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton engaged in a travesty of a public debate before the US Presidential election of 2016. It was more like a staged reality TV show. Its nearest equivalent was the format of a farcical game show, such as the Jerry Springer Show.

    Thus politics has become part of the entertainment industry. Despite his Classical education, Boris Johnson invokes Peppa Pig before business leaders.

    So, an unconditional respect for freedom of speech should be offset by an understanding that certain speech does not warrant protection. Nonsense is best resolved by forensic debate – cutting through crap in common parlance.

    Surveillance Capitalism

    The criminalisation of unpopular opinion is a worrying feature of our times, and it is ‘subversives’ such as Julian Assange – along with those who dared to hold a referendum in Catalonia – that are accused, prosecuted, and convicted of treason. It is these dissidents that need protection.

    Under the Facebook and Google dispensation people become products to be profiled and mined, a point made brilliantly in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

    Moreover, political correctness has also led to the intensification of extremism. I would argue that this includes attempts by the transgender lobby to ban esteemed academics from the airwaves or campuses. ‘No platforming’ undermines public debate, as do unsubstantiated complaints to academic authorities that lead to the removal of a radical professor.

    So, when in Georgetown University certain radical professors indicated they were far from unhappy at the death of the arch conservative Judge Scalia, their conservative colleagues sought their removal on the basis that the ‘snowflake’ generation of easily upset students would be offended at the disrespect.

    We must maintain a right to protest, engage in civil disobedience and crucially – in an increasingly controlled and technocratic age – the right to offer truth-bearing, fearless and independent criticism.

    KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s.

    The Limits of Freedom of Expression

    Speech has its outer limits, where there is a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action. This tension is explored in Snyder v Phelps, where a fundamentalist Christian group demonstrated outside a gay serviceman’s funeral.

    Upholding speech rights, the Court concluded that:

    Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.

    Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

    Moreover, in Brandenburg v Ohio 359 U.S 44, the Court went so far as to protect even racial abuse at a Ku Klux Klan ‘rally’ held at a farm in Hamilton County.

    One film showed twelve hooded figures, some of whom carried firearms. They were gathered around a large wooden cross, which they burned. No one was present other than the participants and the newsmen who made the film. Most of the words uttered during the scene were incomprehensible when the film was projected, but scattered phrases could be understood that were derogatory of African-Americans and, in one instance of Jews.

    The Supreme Court concluded that this was speech protected under the First Amendment on the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation, except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

    In contrast, the ECHR will not protect either racist speech or Holocaust denial. And even the ESU may feel the Americans went too far.

    But the detailed US decisions show how far the US courts are prepared to travel to protect speech. It is an important point that it is the speech we most dislike and most disagree with that needs the most protection.

    Village stocks in Bramhall, England c. 1900.

    Enemies of the People

    Whistle-blower legislation protects those who want to expose official corruption and protects speech. However, as I have found, the spectre of criminal prosecution under Official Secret’s legislation is always a suspensive and possible threat. Anyone blowing the whistle must evaluate the risk of prosecution, including the almost inevitable consequence of job loss and ostracism.

    Henrik Ibsen’s Enemies of the People – perhaps uniquely in his oeuvre – was overtly political. The premise is simple: a prominent and well-connected local engineer whose brother is the town mayor is asked to conduct a survey of the waters of the town. The town in question has become famous as a spa resort attracting a great deal of tourism, but when he tests the waters, he finds that they are polluted and informs the town and indeed his brother.

    It is the reaction to this that is interesting. Rather than lauding him and complimenting him for his finely attuned sense of ethics and correct analysis, they turn on him with ever-increasing ferocity. A storm of hatred is unleashed.

    He will destroy the local economy. Their livelihoods will be affected. The industry of the town will be negated. He is shunned, ostracised, victimised. His family is torn apart, and he becomes an ‘Enemy of the People’. The mob descend in all their unfettered glory. Sound familiar?

    Thus, we must protect freedom of speech as it vitalises a democracy, but we must also recognise the rules of civic discourse.

    Yet I fear that a great tradition of oracy, public communication, rationalist discourse and generalist interest is in decline: usurped by the purveyors of false information, false speech acts and blandishments.

    If the English-Speaking Union can revitalise the young with a passion for genuine public communication, it will be performing a great service, training a new generation of professionals in the essential and transferable skills of advocacy, public communication and, above all, respect for the truth.

    Feature Image: Presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon for the 1960 election in the United States.

    The English-Speaking Union (ESU) is an international charity and membership organisation underpinned by Royal Charter working to give all young people – regardless of background – the speaking and listening skills and the cross-cultural understanding to enable them to thrive.  

    Our programmes are underpinned by over 100 years’ expertise in the field of debate and public speaking delivery, policy and research. 

    Founded in 1918 by the author and journalist Sir Evelyn Wrench, the ESU brings together and empowers people of all cultures and nationalities by building confidence and shaping communication skills, so that individuals can realise their full potential.  In our 36 branches in England and Wales and 54 international branches, the ESU carries out a variety of activities such as: competitions, debating, public speaking and student exchange programmes, teacher training, classroom outreach, research and scholarships. All of these encourage the effective use of the English language around the world.

    To find out more about our work, please go to: https://www.esu.org/ and so consider joining the ESU: https://www.esu.org/support-our-work/become-a-member/.  Please contact Matthew Christmas, Head of Engagement, if you would like to know more or to volunteer with us: matthew.christmas@esu.org.

    Dartmouth House, in the heart of Mayfair, is our International Headquarters and, as Covid recedes, we are delighted to be re-starting our regular public debates where we encourage civil discussion and informed debate where all ages can get involved. 

    The next Dartmouth House Debate is on Monday 09 May 2022 at 1830 hrs to debate the motion that “This House believes that cryptocurrency and NFTs are a hyped-up fad.” 

    We hope that will want to find out more and get involved with the ESU.

  • What is Freedom?

    Last week, the Russia-Ukraine-NATO tensions reached a crescendo when Russia decided to recognize both Luhansk and Donetsk as independent states. Shortly after that, Putin proceeded to launch a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine.

    The day the news broke I felt great sadness.

    You see, although I’ve never been to either Russia or Ukraine, I have met a great deal of Ukrainians and Russians on my travels and I have a great many friends in that region of the world. Through them, I have been able to learn about both countries’ culture, language, history and incredible natural beauty. It is that personal connection I have to the people that brought me great pain when learning of Russia’s invasion.

    What we often forget is that no matter what geopolitical games are being played at the highest levels, it is the innocent civilians on the ground who are most affected by war. People’s lives are disrupted, families are torn apart and, yes, people die. Whether “enemies”, “allies”, civilians or military personnel, people die. That is the nature of war.

    As I sat down at my desk, struggling to concentrate on the work in front of me, I began to think of my friends in Ukraine who have endured so much over the last few years. I began to think of the young men, guns and ammunition in hand, ready to risk their lives for their country, ready to die at the request of their leaders. And I began to ponder the true significance of this war and how it relates to the overarching globalist agenda.

    This led me to contemplate the nature of freedom and what it means to be free.

    Most people would agree that there is another war being waged on virtually all humanity and that is the war on freedom. The problem is that you could ask ten different people to define “freedom” and receive ten different answers.

    The yogi would say that freedom is not something to be attained, rather, it is our natural state. Freedom, for the yogi, is the very nature of the Self, something that can never be taken away. The problem is that it’s veiled by ignorance. For the yogi, spiritual practice is a way to remove such ignorance, and shatter the illusion that we are not free.

    The monotheist would disagree with the yogi, claiming that freedom comes when evil has been defeated, and that siding with God is the first step to nullifying such evil. This dualistic position sees “evil” as originating from some greater power. Therefore, devotion to God is the only path to complete freedom.

    At this point, the Buddhist might decide to chime in, arguing that, in fact, there is no independent self and therefore there is nothing that can attain “freedom”, and no “god” that can grant it. Rather, he might say, we should focus our efforts on removing suffering and aligning our actions and thoughts with the teachings of the Noble Eightfold Path (the Buddha himself taught that we should identify the nutriments that feed our suffering and make an effort to remove them).

    The lawyer might define freedom as the absence of legal and political restraints; he may see freedom as a right that enables one to be exempt from the arbitrary exercise of authority in the performance of certain actions.

    The philosopher, on the other hand, might see freedom as being synonymous with free will – the ability to make spontaneous choices that are not predetermined or fixed by nature in some way. And he may question whether such a thing even exists at all.

    Do you see the problem?

    Fighting for freedom is difficult when everyone has a different take on what freedom is and what it means for the individual.

    So how should we go about answering the question “What is freedom?”

    It seems to me that when tackling such a philosophical question, we must start by defining what we are talking about. When we speak of being free, are we talking about being free from some unpleasant reality or some inconvenient truth? Or are we talking about total and utter freedom?

    Most of us want to be free from pain, free from unhappy experiences and negative emotions while still clinging to our ideologies, beliefs and identities. But therein lies a problem, for, “freedom” implies the absence of any defining boundaries, including those created by our own psychological sentiments.

    Therefore, we can’t probe the nature of freedom without asking the fundamental question: do we really want to be free? It would appear that being free from something is different to being completely free.

    Freedom, by its very definition, requires no ideology, revelation, stimulus or special knowledge. Perhaps we could describe freedom as an inalienable right, bestowed unto each of us by virtue of being born into this world. Thought about in this way, freedom becomes our source of power.

    Striving to be free from something is a reaction to an unpleasant situation, such as an authoritarian leader, a debilitating illness, a toxic relationship or a war. Dare I say, this desire is built into us. It’s part of our evolutionary makeup, it’s a survival mechanism. Being free from negative influences brings temporary relief, which is good in itself, but it’s not freedom.

    Therefore freedom cannot come from reacting to your environment. That is instinct, that is self-preservation, even desperation. Freedom, it stands to reason, must come from action that is entirely self-initiatory, without deliberation or cerebration.

    Krishnamurti in the early 1920s.

    In a previous essay, I wrote about the conversations between philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and quantum theorist David Bohm, two men who thought an awful lot about the concept of freedom. I will lean on their insights once again here to help us probe deeper into the nature of freedom and how it relates to the mind. Here is a short extract from one of their many enlightening conversations (emphasis added)[1]:

    K: I have been watching for many years people attempting to become free from certain things. This is the root of it, you understand? This psychological accumulation which becomes psychological knowledge. And so it divides, and all kinds of things happen around it and within it. And yet the mind refuses to let go.

    DB: Yes.

    K: Why? Is that because there is safety or security in it?

    DB: That is part of it, but I think in some way that knowledge has taken on the significance of the absolute, instead of being relative.

    K: I understand all that, but you are not answering my question. I am an ordinary man, I realize all this, and the limited significance of knowledge at different levels, but deeper down inside one, this accumulated knowledge is very destructive.

    DB: The knowledge deceives the mind, so that the person is not normally aware that it is destructive. Once this process gets started, the mind is not in a state where it is able to look at it because it is avoiding the question. There is a tremendous defensive mechanism or escape from looking at the whole issue.

    K: Why?

    DB: Because it seems that something extremely precious might be at stake.

    K: One is strangely intelligent, capable or skilled in other directions but here, where the root is of all this trouble, why don’t we comprehend what is happening? What prevents the mind from doing this?

    DB: Once importance has been given to knowledge, there is a mechanical process that resists intelligence.

    At the beginning of their exchange, Krishnamurti makes the observation that knowledge itself can block us from attaining freedom (he goes so far as to call it “destructive”). Why? Because it distracts, it fragments, it fractures.

    Knowledge, which is nothing more than information, can influence our thinking and manipulate our actions. That is the entire premise of psychological warfare.

    Bohm’s next statement is supremely important, “I think that knowledge has taken on the significance of the absolute instead of being relative”. Bohm notes that knowledge is given too much stake in modern society, an incredible statement for a physicist to make. But he is right, knowledge is seen as a vehicle for greater and greater achievement. Knowledge fuels technology, progress, and material gain.

    Looking deeply at our present world, it’s clear that we do not live in a society that is conducive to freedom. Knowledge, which is binding, is put above freedom. Knowledge is “sold” to us as a way of getting a good job, progressing up the corporate ladder, earning a higher salary and effecting lasting change in the world.

    But knowledge does not bring freedom because knowledge can be controlled, twisted, contrived and manipulated.

    Krishnamurti, too, was critical of this quest for knowledge and condemned competitive education systems for engendering fear. He also noted that knowledge was necessary for accumulating memory, which forms the basis for thought.

    While Krishnamurti recognized the necessity of thought (and therefore knowledge) at certain levels, he was very clear that when thought begins to project itself psychologically as the future or the past, this creates fear which in turn dulls the mind, leading to inaction.

    And as we discovered, attaining freedom requires action (even the Yogi would somewhat agree with us on this point, as he would remind us that spiritual practice is necessary for lifting the veil of ignorance).

    Krishnamurti then asks Bohm why people cannot see the tremendous destructive potential of knowledge. According to Bohm, the answer is simple: because knowledge deceives.

    Again, think about psychological warfare, think about how knowledge causes people to do things that undermine their own physical and mental health. Think about how knowledge can compel people to follow bloodthirsty tyrants, how it can compel people to kill their neighbouring brothers and sisters.

    Bohm goes on to state that within the mind is a strong defensive mechanism, which often leads one to neglect the potentially destructive nature of one’s accumulated beliefs. Bohm’s insights ring true, for, as we have seen, all throughout history people have been willing to sacrifice everything in defence of their chosen ideology. The nature of the mind is such that it always wants to be right.

    Perhaps this defensive mechanism is driven by fear – the same fear that causes people to deny unwanted realities (or brand them as “conspiracy theories”).

    When Krishnamurti asks Bohm why this is, he responds, “Because it seems that something extremely precious might be at stake”. Perhaps it is this seemingly “extremely precious” thing that becomes a shackle, preventing one from being completely and utterly free. And perhaps this seemingly “extremely precious” thing is our conditioning, our programming, our political allegiances, our self-identity.

    Krishnamurti then asks why, as human beings, we can be so skilled and capable in so many areas and yet hopelessly clueless when it comes to discerning the destructive potential of our own psychological accumulations.

    Bohm’s answer is thought-provoking. He says the importance we give to knowledge initiates a mechanical process that resists intelligence. Mechanical processes are machine-like, devoid of emotion, devoid of deep insight and most importantly, reactionary.

    But it’s Bohm’s use of the word “intelligence” here that is most interesting. After all, Bohm always chose his words extremely carefully. He was not one to use a word without being absolutely clear about its meaning.

    As it turns out, the origin of the word ‘intelligence’ is the Latin ‘intelligere’ which means ‘to read between’. In other words, intelligence refers to one’s strength of discernment, one’s ability to “read between the lines”.

    Is it the cultivation of intelligence that leads to freedom? Perhaps.

    If we take that to be so, then it stands to reason that freedom is a state of mind – one free from the boundaries of belief, ideology and fear.k

    Freedom is the ability to doubt and question everything without any form of dependence, conformity, authority or tradition.

    Feature Image: Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Lieutenant D.H. Lackey on February 22, 1956, when she was arrested again, along with 73 other people, after a grand jury indicted 113 African Americans for organizing the Montgomery bus boycott.

    References

    [1] Jiddu Krishnamurti & David Bohm. The Ending of Time. Chapter 11: “The Ending of Psychological Knowledge”

  • A Fairy Tale of Dún Laoghaire 2

    I knew the game was up when my mother told me that Santy had given her a list. I had heard about his many imitators and knew they were just benign North Pole ambassadors who lacked his Arctic magic.

    I met one of them once in Lee’s on the main street of Dun Laoghaire, in a family sized camper tent with a strip of silver tinsel stretched around the entrance. His cotton wool beard dangling on an ear-itching elastic band as his nicotine coloured fingers rummaged in a plastic laundry basket that was loaded with presents. There were two baskets, one dark blue for boys and one pale blue for girls.

    He sounded just like the driver of the 7A bus who brought me home from school every day. “Ah, son have ye been a good lad?” It was like First Confession all over again except with different costumes and just like my first time in the confession box armed with a few well-rehearsed sins, I told him that apart from puncturing my neighbour’s bike I had been a good boy. He coughed and scratched the stubble under his beard. “Ah, you’re a decent lad, a fine fella….” He was a little unsteady in the deck chair where he was sitting and I was afraid he might fall over and injure himself. That wouldn’t do, not with it so close to Christmas; there was lot of work to be done yet. That’s how Santy was in Lee’s. Or was he one of the ambassadors? I couldn’t tell. Whoever it was, he seemed very anxious to leave George’s St as soon as he could and get back to The North Pole. This was the busiest time of year and every hour spent here in Lee’s was time lost from directing operations in his snow drifted toy factory, far from Dun Laoghaire. All of that cold and blizzard white frightened me, I imagined the North Pole as a television screen of swirling frozen static, with no button anywhere that could ever switch it off.

    Why had he ended out living in such a desolate place? Something eerie hovered around Santy. Who was he really? Had he done some terrible thing? He spent his life making toys in the world’s most inhospitable place. Was he trying to say sorry for something? And who were the elves? The only dwarf I’d ever seen for real was the one who sold newspapers outside Glasthule church on Sundays. He frightened me; I’d take my mother’s hand and cling to it like a gold ringed shield as we walked inside. My mind chalked up questions. How had a team of news-paper-men ended out working with Santy? How had they met?

    Then one night, a few days before Christmas, a dream came to me that put me right about so many things. There were seven other dwarfs I’d heard of before; the ones who lived with Snow White. I always liked that story but felt it ended very unfairly for them, with all their joy taken away from them by a tall Prince on horse. Each time I read it, I hoped that she would stay with them, that she would explain to the Prince that he’d have to find another story but she always rode off with him, leaving them behind, unhappily ever after.

    In the warm cinemascope of my pillow, I saw the seven of them trekking towards the world’s darkest corners and everywhere they went they wept for losing her and cursed themselves for being short.  Their tears froze when they fell to the ground. Everywhere they went to forget their sadness; they’d leave behind acres of ice and snow, a dark white continent of loss that spread out behind them like a cape that would never be big enough to conceal their seven tiny broken hearts.  And that was how I learnt that The North Pole had come to be.

    Trailing far behind them I saw a man, who looked like a drawing from a story book, swaying in the cold and losing his balance on huge grey mirrors of ice. He was weeping too and cursing what he had done years before. He had let go of a rope that dangled deep down into a well. Children used to speed up and down the well, like a thrill ride, collecting pebbles down below but one day he, the village well man, had let go of the rope, his trembling hands not sure of themselves and two children were drowned. I learnt at age eight that the saddest people wander the furthest.

    And so the world’s saddest tall person and the shortest tearful seven met each other and started on this strange enterprise together. Santy was forever lamenting what he’d done and the dwarves learned to forget just a little, the young woman who’d once danced through their days, as they helped him build his toys in the cold.

    I was always relieved when a dream put me at ease and whispered some new part of an old truth to me. I’d add it to the old truth and for a moment my mind would ring clear as bell with fresh understanding. It was as if I saw further and more clearly how things really were. I kept these truths, the old and the new, like nuggets, deep in my story pockets, to help me along my way.

    When I was leaving the tent in Lee’s he handed me a package from one of the baskets. I pointed at him and asked him, “Santy, did you really once work at a well? I know how The North Pole was born.”

    “Am I well? Sure, Santy is always well, off with ye now”

    My mother pulled impatiently at the hood of my duffel coat.

    “Ah, what are you saying to the man, Billy…?”

    She had said it, “The Man.”

    So he was not Santy, he was “a man”

    I knew that Santy wept most days for what he had done.

    I tore my package open and saw that he had mistaken me for a girl; a string of plastic pearls, a tiny mirror and a comb.

    I went home, put on my necklace and waited for the real Father Sadness to come.

    Feature Image: O’Connell Street, Dublin, Christmas Tree, Lord Mayor Ben Briscoe, Santa Claus, Dublin Photographic Archive, 1988.

  • The Empty Unconscious

    Banality is the byword of mass consumerism

    There’s a piece of public art that for a year or more languished on the edges of Union Square in Manhattan, before moving to a more innocuous location in Midtown.

    It’s a piece of bronze and laser cut steel in the form of a thick-waisted businessman, peering up into the sky. The statue, by Jim Rennert, is called, “Think Big.” This rotund figure struck me as a bizarre but predictable contrast with Union Square itself, site of labor protests, political demonstrations, and various working class events over the past century and a half.

    Then, on its cusp, a fattened, besuited, becalmed, moronic middle-manager stands, gazing into the clouds wonderingly. The figure itself looks like the Everyman of modern capital, depicted in the altruistic framing of business propaganda: a harmless, innocent, well-intentioned, exceedingly milquetoast middle-aged man of the people who does his earnest best to help his genteel corporation make a tidy profit, and drawing his modest share of the revenues to support his family. What could be wrong with that?

    Aside from the stomach-churning inanity of it, the statue has elided every conceivable aspect of its form that might imply or evince the raging class war between workers and suit-wearing corporate servants, themselves alighted like parasites on the broad husk of the Big Capital. A class war that is blood-soaked and pitiless.

    Yet our statue goes to great lengths to present the antithesis: the anodyne complacency of the humming mid-century office space, a hive of drones doing their daily duty. It is truly nondenominational, reflecting the most catholic of images, the most generic.

    “Think Big is a sculpture that serves to inspire everyone who works hard every day to achieve their dreams and goals. The towering businessman gazes upward at the Manhattan skyline, contemplating the possibilities that lay within his vast surroundings and reminding us that if we “think big” any dream is attainable.” – jimrennert.com

    Ersatz Replica

    Philosopher and aphorist E.M. Cioran once wrote that, “Existing is plagiarism.” If to be is to simply be an ersatz replica of the palatable, then why exist, either as individual, artist, or work of ‘art’? Nobody has asked Rennert.

    The statue, the name of which is like much modern advertising – quite clearly it is the first name that entered the brain of the artist (or advertiser, as the case may be). Thinking big, as it were, entails thinking big on behalf of the corporation for which you work; the ideas are not truly your own; the mission of the business is not your mission (unless you internalize it); and the life trajectory, even, is one set by the whim of the corporate market to which you sell your labor.

    Rather differently, the labor strikes and protests that once occurred in this space, were fuelled by men and women fighting to have all of the things elided by the statue, shaved away by the sculptor’s judicious hand: your own mission; your own ideas; your own life and career trajectory. Thus, Herbert Marcuse wrote: ‘Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties, but work in alienation.’

    How well the Think Big man resembles this perception: a drone, like others in appearance and wardrobe and function, alienated from his own desires, subordinated to those of a faceless overlord of industry. As a representation of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), it is equally apt, as that class sits as a bourgeois buffer between elitism and populism, between a secular aristocracy and the abject proletariat, both classes growing exponentially so that the metaphorical abyss widens in two senses: vertically and horizontally.

    This bourgeois buffer provides an aesthetic disguise for the dirty business of capitalism. They are not the sweat-drenched coltan miners in the Congo, but the svelte marketers who ply the ether with iPhone ads. His hard edges have been sanded down; he is perfectly polished, nonthreatening, inoffensively bland.

    Eugene V. Debs five times candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States.

    Virtue Hoarders

    In her book Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu historicizes this class. As the Socialist Left in America was progressively destroyed by the public relations efforts of big business, the haute bourgeoisie sided with capital. She writes:

    When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favor of capitalists it once despised. The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable.

    She describes them as ‘salaried mental workers,’ including doctors, lawyers, advertising managers, IT professionals, and bank managers who reproduce the status quo, having abandoned political radicalism in favor of cultural wars and careerism.

    This is the buffer class, idealized in the sanitized vision of Think Big. Yet Think Big betrays the idea of simple reproduction, revealing the compulsion of neoliberalism to shave cost to stave a falling rate of profit. As Liu puts it:

    In the United States, generations of allegedly neutral experts have hollowed out public goods, degraded the public sphere, facilitated the monetization of everything from health to aptitude, and indebted generations of Americans in a fantasy of meritocracy enhanced social mobility. Liberals have sat by while finance capital and corporate interests gutted the public treasury.

    Image: © Constantino Idini.

    Delirium

    E.M. Cioran says Western societies are beholden to – fatally obsessed with – technology, innovation, and the drive of capitalism for rapid obsoletion, and the process of ceaseless enhancement and replacement. He says they are in a state of ‘delirium,’ but adds (in Drawn and Quartered) that this kind of breathless preoccupation with novelty is itself relatively new in history:

    Archaic societies have lasted so long because they know nothing of the desire to innovate, to grovel before ever-new simulacra. If you change images with each generation, you cannot anticipate historical longevity. Classical Greece and modern Europe typify civilizations stricken by a precocious death, following a greed for metamorphosis and an excessive consumption of gods, and of the surrogates for gods. Ancient China and Egypt wallowed for millennia in a magnificent sclerosis. As did African societies, before contact with the West.

    Given that societies are anchored in historical circumstance, they are subject to the same iron law of all civilizations, that they will eventually ‘sag and settle’ as the initial dynamism dies. How much more likely in a society built on an idée fixe, a fetishistic mania.

    And yet – small consolation for those whose lives are on a far faster downward trajectory than civilization itself.

    Hence the siren call of rebellion will continue to outline itself precisely against this insipid, pulseless figure paradoxically anchored at the center of a monomaniacal society. A society the signature of which is the fixity of its preoccupation with profit – and the consumption that enables it.

    U.S. President Donald Trump displays the signed Executive Order for the Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity on May 11, 2017.

    The American Dream and Authenticity

    This cultural underbelly outlined above is eviscerated not just by the corporate art we are confronted with, but by the modern narrative of the American Dream™ ; this statue is just a recent embodiment of it.

    Anyone, color and creed aside, through their efforts and ingenuity, can do or be anything they wish to be. No material circumstances obtain in their pursuit of happiness. Class is a byword of another era, trampled underfoot by the ascent of free-market capitalism, which brooks no discriminatory practice in its market-rendered even-playing field.

    As any sentient being can observe, this is a historical fiction, a deceit reproduced daily through the channels of mass media and its advertising, entertainment, and news content, all of which is owned and operated by elite capital and managed by its flyblown class of sycophants.

    Essayist and playwright John Steppling gets at much the same thing in his book Aesthetic Resistance And Dis-Interest (2016). He writes, in the context of the dissolution of art as an anchor of culture, of the loss of art’s radical conscience in favor of corporate cliche.

    Steppling would despise the ‘Think Big’ statue. Its banality is that of a Jeff Koons work, the more celebrated the less memorable. He argues that mass electronic screen culture has destroyed something critical in the collective consciousness, namely the space for authentic art.

    He also notes that art is radical insofar as it refuses to adopt particular meanings, just as space is forever unyoked to purpose, yet radically ratifies none, and is the necessary background to all purpose.

    He quotes Robert Kullot-Kentor, biographer of Theodor Adorno, ‘Art’s truth appears guaranteed more by its denial of any meaning in organized society…’ As Steppling later adds, ‘It’s purposelessness is its radical expression.’

    And again: ‘Art is self destructive. It is guided by impulses that are anti-social, but only insofar as they question the status quo, because the status quo cannot survive history or memory.’

    What artists like Rennet and Koons produce is effortlessly mainstream; it doesn’t challenge the status quo but rather reifies it. It is therefore not art. There is no question posed by the skygazing statue, no threat emerges. It is the reproduction of the placid mind of endless consumption, of ceaseless salesmanship, the mind of the individual cog in a system that it neither sees nor questions. Deification of the quotidian.

    Steppling says the clue to the decay of society is the sense that culture is themed by ‘the inauthentic and counterfeit.’

    That sensibility, that sinking feeling, for me, is most evident in the hypocrisy of modern advertising. Ads relentlessly tell us they are making commodities to make our lives better – that is their mission and purpose. Yet that is a half-truth at best, a full-blown deceit on a bad day.

    Products are produced for profit, first and foremost. They are made to solve the sometimes real but largely artificial needs of consumers only insofar as they must. The initial aim of the product line is the MVP, or Minimally Viable Product.

    This is the industry jargon for a commodity that meets the minimum threshold for sale-ability. Beyond that – innovations that improve the product – are seen as incurred costs, unnecessary but sometimes preferable if the cost-benefit analysis predicts higher profits with higher quality. This corrosive smile that fronts modern culture is the clue to the erosion of meaning but also somehow echoes the voice of the Cassandra exposing its desiccated spirit, having submitted itself to the hegemonic ideal, represented by the bland everyman that serves none but the needs of blind profit.

    Mass Infantilism

    Alongside the denuded character of the Think Big skygazer – alongside the erasure of individuality, i.e., authenticity, in its homogeneity – is its infantile sensibility; yes, the only quality it truly has.

    Its puffy childlike hands loose at its side; its rounded babyface; its gaze more wondrous than critical. Steppling says the infantile is a product of capitalist culture.

    To paraphrase: the Oedipal narrative of the child overcoming his father as a path to self-actualization is denied by modern neoliberal society.

    Neoliberalism denies meaningful work in a race to the bottom rungs of servitude. It denies meaningful leisure as labor is stripped evermore of its rightful surplus, no small measure of that margin being lost time. And it ultimately leaves in its infectious wake a featureless figure, bereft of purpose and means, a man unable to exceed or even succeed the father.

    In such a state, the man opts for a permanent infantilism. Hence our recidivist culture that seems to drag us back, back, back toward childhood, finally into the warmth of the womb, the original safe space, protected by ignorance just as ignorance is unconscious bliss.

    Benjamin Barber was an earlier prophet of our devolution. His seminal work Consumed detailed the ways in which commodity culture manufactures artificial needs beyond the realm of actual needs, an entirely predictable eventuality given the desperation of capital to continuously expand the marketplace of consumption.

    Industry compels consumers to confuse needs with wants and then promises happiness through the instant gratification of that wanting. As one reviewer astutely noted, Barber, ‘…ably identified many of the contributing factors, not the least of which are our collective cultural boredom and our naive but doomed expectations of fulfillment via uncontrolled acquisition.’

    The consequence of unlimited choice and acquisition is an infantile impatience with what one has as one is perpetually enthralled by novelty, the tradition-destroying feature Cioran lamented.

    We see this trend everywhere. Often in Hollywood, which has found a stupendous revenue stream in the marketing of superhero comics to adults. Once, Superman was a movie for kids; now it is a movie for adults who have yet to put away childish things. Which is all of us.

    As Steppling notes, the superhero story is the dream of childish omnipotence, a kind of puerile fantasy that adults once shed by the time they exited their teens. Now the happy myth persists well into adulthood. Its Manichean quality is a mirror of the imperial narratives of the state: one side is all good and the other all bad.

    This reductive dichotomy is the cornerstone of modern consumer narratives, whether in entertainment or news, and has been instantiated in the programming strategies of major media entities.

    Another feature of the infantile is what Stuart Jeffries alludes to in Grand Hotel Abyss (2016), his biography of the Frankfurt School. Namely, the infantile nature of modern man as his culture radicalizes identity politics by the insistence that its demands be instantaneously gratified, less an urgency than an hysteria. What more emblematic aspect of childhood than the baby that screams when denied what it wants?

    But we see it in advertising, especially, and in general marketing. What does a professional basketball franchise ask its roster of players when interviewing them for promotion? [Giggling] What would your superpower be (if you could have a superpower)? As game show music plays in the background.

    Likewise in broadcast advertising. A bank commercial shows a middle-aged father dancing around in a virtual reality headset while his more mature daughter plays on her mobile. Faces of consumers are increasingly banal in disposition, blank gazes, wide innocent eyes, awaiting information from the sales shill embedded in the commercial, the messiah of commerce. In the idealized playground of consumerism, modern man is a tabula rasa at 35, eyes awaiting the advent of the next shiny distraction.

    If the endless spectacle of mathematically correct diversity casting is defended as reflecting the social ideal, and hence instructive, what is the repetition of the unsophisticated and simpleminded consumer in ads but an admonition?

    Steppling interestingly notes that the infant mindset in adults feels incomplete, perhaps through its Oedipal failure to assert its worth and power. As such it must deny many facets of reality that might undermine its fragile psyche.

    It must turn away from the wars raging, the coming barbarities narrated by arbiters of power, the afterthought that is endemic poverty and illness. We must turn to safer, more simplistic answers and the narratives that attempt to legitimate them; the ones espoused by the cult of decrepit professional liberalism, window-dresser of society’s distemper, pollyanna in purgatory, to whom we light a votive every day at dusk.

    What Lies Beneath: Sometimes Nothing

    As an art theorist, Steppling notes a simple dichotomy in art that applies more broadly: good art, or art, shows an artificial reality and then shows the actuality beneath it; bad art, or non art, just show the artificial reality. In this sense, most broadcast advertising is bad art, or non art. It normalizes artificiality, the uncritical acceptance of every sales pitch, taking the pitch at face value.

    This is reflected in bourgeoisie art criticism, which seems to again and again strip art of its system critique and either reinterpret it as a celebration of industry or a critique of individual foibles within a benign landscape of earnest employee/consumers.

    Hence the narrative of history is penned not by the victors but by their dutiful scribes, the professional parasitic class who earn their livelihood through sycophancy and servitude. In service to the status quo.

    Fold your hands behind your back and think big—on their behalf. Your passage through will be as frictionless as first class air travel. But say bon voyage to your dreams. This is inimical to the artist. Because art undermines. Art challenges. Art unsettles. There is no safe space in art. No diversity calculus. No appeasement of the herd.

    We are thus left with a modern culture which no longer understands the term ‘sell-out’, which sees brand partnerships as a path to social uplift, not recognizing the inherent contradiction of allying with the perpetrator of inequity in order to rectify inequity. The irony is lost on us because there is no irony. The artificial is all. Irony would require a second perspective. In the marketplace of consensus, no second opinions exist.

    Feature Image: © Constantino Idini

    Jason Hirthler is a writer, media critic, and veteran of the digital media industry. He has published in a variety of progressive publications including CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and The Hampton Institute.

  • Ciarán O’Rourke: Breaking the Cycle

    One Big Union is a self-published collection of essays by Irish poet Ciarán O’Rourke. The essays, many of which have been previously published in such outlets as Poetry Ireland Review, Irish Marxist Review, and indeed, Cassandra Voices herself, are a mix of literary criticism, political theory, and personal writing.

    The book’s introduction locates itself in the burgeoning genre of pandemic writing. Thus he writes:

    Between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2021, a period of cascading social and ecological crises, I found myself returning to the work of a number of poets, artists, and political firebrands, with a fresh sense of discovery and gratitude. This miscellany of essays is the result.

    In essence, this book is a polished version of a reading diary, with O’Rourke responding to the artists he was confined with over quarantine. As such, it’s an intensely personal and vulnerable work, even when the directly autobiographical material is minimal. 

    You finish the book with the impression that Percy Bysshe Shelley plays a leading role in O’Rourke’s inner life ; that Irishness is something O’Rourke feels strongly attached to; and that he is passionately devoted to left-wing political ideals, even though he finds the atmosphere of devoted Communist organisations mentally stultifying. 

    This is a lot to know about a relative stranger, and it’s a testament to O’Rourke’s ability as a writer that this distinct, personal voice is present throughout, even in moments when the subject matter veers into academic territory.

    Hole in the Wall Blues

    Perhaps it’s scholarly fatigue, but I must admit I found the moments of personal, autobiographical writing the most compelling parts of the book. 

    In ‘Hole in the Wall Blues’, O’Rourke writes about a topic made timely by the Save the Cobblestone protest – the erosion of Dublin’s cultural geography – in an endearingly personal way.

    The example he uses is the Screen cinema on Townsend street, now a building site for what O’Rourke believes will be a “rental hub”.

    It wasn’t like the Screen cinema was some beautiful location, he argues. No, it was dingy, cheap, and outmoded. But, O’Rourke writes, “just by being there and providing the service it did, this rather run-down space had made the city a home of sorts”. 

    In another essay, ‘Sea Music’, he talks about the strange intimacy that has grown between himself and the other regular bathers at Seapoint. These accounts of his private life made me care about the more abstract essays, helping me, as a reader, trace the thread of emotional necessity behind his discussions of Percy Shelley or Langston Hughes.

    Satisfying Punch

    Although most of these essays are ruminative and introspective, there are a few that pack a satisfying punch. My favourite is ‘Smashing the Mirror’, where O’Rourke excoriates Poetry Ireland’s toothless humility in front of the strong arms of cultural hegemony, exemplified in their partnership with the Dublin office of Facebook for national poetry day in 2017, and their use of a video of Joe Biden giving a merry, public-relations-approved speech about the beauty of Irish poetry for their fundraising campaign in 2019. 

    What does it mean for the institutions of Irish poetry to flatter the centres of power so shamelessly? O’Rourke is excitingly sharp in his rhetorical denouncement:

    The emerald glint in Biden’s eyes, the nostalgic quaver in his voice, is meant to reinforce, for voters at home and lackeys elsewhere, a relation (between lord and vassal, say, or centre and outpost) that each of these circumstances also exemplifies – all under the guise of celebrating Irish poetry. And Poetry Ireland, it seems, is happy to play along: cosying up to power, for the sake of PR, and presumably on the long-term promise of cash.Admission of Bias

    I may be biased when it comes to reviewing this book. In the first year of my English Studies course in Trinity College, Ciarán O’Rourke was working as a teaching assistant while he finished his phD, and I happened to be placed in his Romanticism tutorials. 

    Ciarán was a wonderful teacher, with a gift for generating class discussion. He also had the touch of eccentricity required to deliver a course on Romanticism. At one point he had the whole class stand up and communally recite Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in early Spring; as if we could hurry the pace of the seasons through the right incantation of the words.

    With that said, I had no idea I was reading my former teacher’s book until after I had read through the collection. From the tone of the writing, and the subjects covered (bathing in Dun Laoghaire, Marxist politics, nineteenth century poets), I had assumed the author was in his fifties or sixties. I imagined a Terry Eagleton type – hip enough to know about Ursula Le Guin, but whose outlook on life has been shaped by figures from a deeper past. Then I looked up some interviews, and, with a jolt, recognised the fresh-faced, tall figure of my Romanticism tutor.

    Critique

    One criticism I have is in relation to the structure of the book. First, it lacks certain features of a professionally published work. There is no publication date. The cover image, by Lewis Hine, is not credited on the back cover, or on one of the first pages, but in the ‘Introduction and Acknowledgements’ section.

    These may seem minor issues, but by failing to follow conventions, it becomes harder to work with, and conveys an attitude of slight carelessness, unbefitting of its important contents.

    My second criticism is of the repetition between essays. As many of the essays were published in different publications, it appears the author was unconcerned at repeating a few key points. When gathered together in a book, however, these repetitions jar on the reader.

    For example, several pieces of information related to Shelley in the essay entitled ‘Shelley’s Revolutionary Year’ are duplicated without development in the title essay ‘One Big Union’, for example. This certainly conveys the extent of Shelley’s psychological importance to the author, but it doesn’t expand on the issue.

    Overall, this is an intriguing collection of essays from a young Irish poet. Those interested in O’Rourke’s poetry will gain insights into his artistic influences, and anyone looking for topical cultural critiques will be well served by some of the later essays in particular. Its main value is as a political statement of purpose for the poet. It also represents an opportunity for those interested to support a promising Irish writer, whose work has been hitherto largely available to readers for free.

    One Big Union is available for purchase through Ciarán O’Rourke’s website, ragpickerpoetry.net

  • Towards the Brink of the Cataract

    Unaware of the roaring cataract ahead, a small boy splashes in the dark river named Dodder, cheap buoyancy aids on his arms, flailing them in the manner called the dog’s paddle, eyes and mouth squeezed shut, neck stretched to keep his head above the surface. I shout a warning, which he must hear because he squints one eye open, manages an uncertain glance at me before he drops in slow motion towards the froth and blackness below, not screaming. An unseen piano makes clichéd sounds in the background and this musack is the main element that irritates me awake. I already know that all the children are safe in their beds, and this can only be a cheap movie scenario in which I am the small boy.

    Even my nightmares are cinematic clichés, retribution for spending most of my life trying to avoid them. It’s a bit late for me to invent a new scenario in which life itself might be a dream, the music not potently cheap, the mise-en-scène not too close to the bone; too late to wake up and start all over again. Best to count my blessings and face the end of my ninth decade with equanimity.

    Not much older than me, my island home has survived the past hundred, vaguely independent years before falling over the economic cliff. Despite having lived the greater part of my life in a contented region called Conamara in the waste of Ireland, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that my personal and cultural identity are also falling to bits.

    Dara Beag O Fatharta from ‘Culchies – An Excerpt from ‘A Monk Manqué’

    My fellow-citizens and I have shape-shifted from being the credulous members of an imperial Roman Church, then being shanghaied as reluctant subjects of the British Empire, finally citizens of an embryonic European Empire, which looks like ending up as the Fourth Reich. But unconsciously we are, and have been for many years, carriers of the most recent imperial virus, this time North American. Now, as Hubert Butler predicted many years ago, ‘…there is nothing but Anglo-American culture to unite us.’

    In this chameleon state we exist, of course, less in the literal sense than imaginatively which, in the Irish psyche, certainly in mine, tends to be more real. Our new masters’ films – pardon me, movies – and TV shows have filled our waking hours and daydreams.

    Not many years ago I counted ninety cinema screens in Dublin in which not a single Irish film was to be seen. The bulk were American. Although I now require subtitles for the more recent manifestations of their staccato, one-phrase dialogue I have not quite mastered the Tarantino fashion of peppering my scripts with four letter expletives. Must try harder.

    The empire’s audio-visual avalanche has forged mine, my childrens’ and my grandchildrens’ dialects and tastes. We of an older generation cannot be excused; Jack Nicholson was for long my ideal actor and Humphrey Bogart taught me to smoke fifty years ago.

    A Monk Manqué II: Thaura Mornton

    The Truth of the Three Williams

    It should not upset me that my grandchildren prefer Rap to O’Riada. The truths of the three Williams – Faulkner, Saroyan and Goulding – were once gospel to me. American playwrights Arthur Miller and Edward Albee were in my mind long before Brian Friel became my favourite.

    We are now fortunate to speak the American dialect of English because we need go no more with our bundles on our shoulders to Philadelphia in the morning. Philadelphia has come to us in the form of Google, Facebook, Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard and the rest of the multinationals, which are now the core of our island’s economic wellbeing as well as a reminder of our anxious dependency.

    The fact that up to seventy five percent of the resident I.T. multinational employees are non-Irish, while four hundred thousand of our youngest and brightest have in the last five years slipped quietly away only confuses the matter, but must not be brooded over. At least the multinational surveillance company (SGS) from which I must beg renewal of my driving license is harmlessly Swiss.

    Apart from the last exception, our cultural credentials are impeccable. If forty million United Statesians are deluded enough to call themselves Irish we must be entitled to return the compliment and claim documentation as Yankee Doodle Dandies. Unfortunately the US immigration authorities now screen us potential emigrants at source, literally on our native soil in Shannon airport. As Peter Fallon urged – and I know very well I am retooling his context – in a recent poem:

    Say never again to The Wild Irish Rover,
    No more to The Minstrel Boy.
    Give us back our sons and daughters,
    Say that Ireland is over.

    Northern Ireland, 1969.

    Great War

    How fragile our illusions of sovereignity have been, how transformed has been this trading post in the last century, since a teenager named James Toner – along with 200,000 other Irishmen who needed a job – ran away from his home in Dublin to join the British Army. As a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps young James’ task was to collect the body parts of his fellow youths killed among the bloomin’ roses in Picardy. He survived the horror and grew up to be my uncle Jim.

    I just looked him up in the British Military Archives.

    Conferment of the D.C.M. gallantry award was announced in the London Gazette (1920) and accompanied by a citation:

    Award Details: 61586 Pte. J. Toner. During the period 17th September to 11th November, 1918, while acting as a bearer, particularly at the capture of Bohain. There being a congestion of wounded, he repeatedly led forward squads of bearers over very difficult country during the night and greatly assisted in the evacuation of them.

    This means that Jim did something foolhardy, at least under cover of night,  in the midst of a carnage that was never revealed to us, his nieces and nephews.

    A Monk Manqué

    Back in Dublin with a small war pension, Jim married, begat no children and endured Irish patriotic resentment at his fighting for the Old Enemy. Even his brother-in law disapproved of him. When my father made the drawing of four-year-old me, Jim was not impressed. He acidly pronounced: “The boy may be alright, but he has the head of a bloody rogue.”

    I overheard that remark and worried about it. Surely he was joking? Or was he envious because he had no children himself? I now surmise that it was general bitterness because nobody, especially not my father, wanted to hear about the horrors Jim had witnessed in France. He had been informally decreed an Irish traitor in the British army.

    Sometime in the 1950s he decided to abandon his golf, at which he was local champion, and his buoyancy aid, whiskey, and put an end to the pain that was identified too late. It is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is applied to the euphemism ‘veteran’. Uncle Jim put an end to his pain with the aid of a gas oven.

    There are other associations. When the British army abandoned our sacred soil in 1922, Uncle Jim’s sister Kathleen ran away with her boyfriend, a Tommy named George Thomas.

    A possible fatal attraction was the fact that both of their fathers kept pigs; science now says that personal odour is a most powerful sexual signal. I met the ageing lovers in their home at Abingdon, Berkshire in 1964 when Uncle George unexpectedly said to me: “I glory in you, Bob.”

    I think he meant that I appeared not to have inherited my father’s prejudices against the English. He was wrong; our parents’ prejudices are lodged in our DNA but, as a form of energy, can happily be redirected at more fitting targets, such as the English Public School system and all their imitators closer to home. Oh, the bitther word!

    When World War II (like War Number 1, a civil war between blood brothers, the Germans and the English) came along, one of Uncle George’s sons, Sidney, enlisted as a teenage frogman and acted, at nineteen, as one of those cockleshell heroes who attached limpet mines to enemy ships. He became a hero of mine and survived to produce a pretty daughter named Cathy whom I subsequently persuaded to elope with me briefly to Ireland where we had midnight swims at Killiney beach and were referred to as kissing cousins. Cathy later married a Red Devil, one of those RAF people who put on daring aerial displays.

    Early Days in RTE.

    Born in the Pale

    These connections make me wonder if I am not still a bloody rogue and worse, a fellow-traveller of that suspect class, a West Brit rather than a putative citizen of America.

    For a start, I was born in the Pale: Dublin and its environs. My first language was English, albeit in a dialect light years away from the BBC accent, whose Home Service provided most of my childhood listening pleasure; Radio Éireann broadcast only a few hours per day.

    My early reading was what we called the comicuts, The Rover, The Hotspur, The Eagle, all published in England. My favourite authors were Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.A. Henty, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, John Wyndham, Leslie Charteris and so forth. Even the Irish language detective story writer Reics Carlo, who was obligatory reading in school, turned out to be English.

    But as I grew up I betrayed them all for the likes of Irwin Shaw, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Hemingway, and now I know I’m a virtual Yank. I assure you that this is less a form of ingratiation with the American Chamber of Commerce than one of realisation and resignation. No problemo.

    There are more ingredients in this cultural Irish stew.

    Among our official heroes, Pádraic Pearse’s father was from Birmingham; James Connolly came from Edinburgh and James Larkin was a Liverpudlian. No wonder I am ambivalent about nationalism, Irish, English and American and still cling to that long-lost cause: socialism.

    The last night of the Proms in the Albert Hall disturbs me, with its sea of Union Jacks and Hooray Henrys rendering Land of Hope and Glory – because I am moved by Elgar’s music (although he did not write the lyrics, which are as Kiplingesque and vainglorious as Deutschland Ueber Alles).

    When filming American schoolchildren with their hands on heart, reciting the daily oath of allegiance to their flag, I am also uneasy. Indoctrination of the unruly young starts early on that continent but, by contrast, nationalism has in recent years become a vulgar word in Ireland.

    How do the British and the Yanks get away with their jingoism? And where, apart from everywhere and nowhere, do we Irish really fit in? To those who, like myself, find all of this disconcerting I say, cop on, get a life, get the message, get over it, get with it, and other such novel and useful imperial edicts. No worries.

    Staying for a moment with the phenomenon of British and American nationalism, I wonder if the answer may not be that they were both empires whereas Ireland’s only imperial conquest was spiritual – mainly among the black babies of Africa – and that appears to have been erased by our national amnesia. As very soon must happen to me as, dragging my feet like a reluctant schoolboy, I approach four score and ten, intending that looming watershed to be more an act of defiance than any petty celebration.

    Last Day in RTE: “I have come to kill you”

    ‘Yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’

    On my ninetieth birthday I shall beware of those who say: “You’re looking great, haven’t changed a bit.”

    My exact contemporary, the late Ben Barenholtz, a survivor of Naziism and a New Yorker, who produced Coen brothers’ films and gave me a present of a book of all of Cole Porter’s lyrics, told me that he has an ex-friend, a liar who has said exactly the same thing to him every year for the past twenty years.

    The astonishing thing about this compliment is that we ancients believe it. We skip and dance down the road until we are forced to pause, whereupon we resemble the silent nun in Elizabeth Jenning’s poem who was breathless with adoration. We oldies, by contrast, have merely run out of breath, full stop, or period, as I should really learn to say.

    The truth of the above platitude, ‘yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’ is simply this: we are decommissioned. Joseph MacAnthony has described our aged generation as tourists in the departure lounge. We exist, persist, only in our anecdotage.

    Who would have thought that little Riobárd, the boy in the drawing, would survive so long? Certainly not himself, whose life expectancy as a film and TV maker was long ago estimated by an insurance Actuary to be no more than forty five years.

    What matter that this little Jackeen has spent more than half his life in the least colonised part of Ireland – the Gaeltacht of Conamara which, paradoxically, he has long known to be spiritually and economically closer to Boston than to Dublin.

    Who gives a tinker’s curse that the Jackeen in question, having read so many comments, references, articles, essays, even PhD theses about his minor oeuvres, now dares to give his version of the story?  But age confers a protective veneer of immunity, anonymity, even a kind of invisibility on the elderly so one is free to say what one likes.

    Kurt Vonnegut

    As Kurt Vonnegut – who in one of his modest communications to me referred to himself as an old fart who smokes Pall Mall – put it: “Old men are obscene and accurate.” We can experience a kind of lightheaded bliss when we notice our fuel gauge moving towards empty and we can offload petty concerns.

    The present words are thus an act of memory, which is equally an act of imagination and may be approached academically as sub-Proustian because although my life sentence has been long these sentences are, with a few exceptions, not.

    I also possess unlimited memorabilia – photos, letters, diaries, the usual bric-a-brac of a life – which may save me from downright lying. Besides, there are those modest films which constitute aides-memoire and, not least, may be treated as having been personal buoyancy aids, otherwise described as vain aspirations.

    I occasionally wonder, as I float towards the brink of the cataract, if I do not exist in some other, gentler person’s nightmare?

    Enjoy further episodes from Bob Quinn’s A Monk Manqué on Cassandra Voices

  • Jack B. Yeats: Painting and Memory

    Often overshadowed by his elder, Nobel laureate, brother W.B., Jack Butler Yeats occupies an exalted position among Irish painters. ‘Jack B. Yeats: Painting & Memory’ is a new exhibition in the National Gallery commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the painter’s birth, and exploring a stylistic evolution that draws on both Irish and British scenes.

    Jack was born on August 29th, 1871 into a marriage of two Irish Protestant families, the Yeatses and the Pollexfens. Whereas the Dublin Yeatses embodied a faded aristocracy, priding themselves on genealogically questionable claims of descent from the Dukes of Ormonde, the Pollexfens were of a more recent vintage, having come to Ireland in the eighteenth century, finding prosperity through their shipping interests.

    Each of the surviving children of moderately successful portrait painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen made significant marks in their respective fields, perhaps compensating for their father’s relative obscurity, and profligacy.

    W.B. emerged as an illustrious poet, anointed by John O’Leary to lead the Celtic Revival, while Jack B. became a successful illustrator and painter from his early twenties, while their sisters, Lilly and Lolly,  set up the Cuala Press and were leading lights in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. All must be counted as important figures in what was an Irish Renaissance of sorts that sought, partly to distinguish and partly to create, an Irish cultural identity distinct from that of England’s.

    Jack’s career sailed independently of his siblings, a state of affairs conditioned by his childhood. The historian R.F. Foster writes that Yeats’s ‘childhood was disrupted by his removal for eight years to Sligo, where he was brought up in close proximity to his grandparents. This probably conditioned his artistic development; it also conferred a certain distance from the rest of the family, particularly his brother.’ (R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, p. 14).

    Later in life, Jack diverged sharply from his brother’s political opinions, holding to an anti-Treaty stance in the Civil War, in contrast to W.B. ‘s support of the 1922 Treaty, and later service to the state as a Senator.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), A Summer Evening, Rosses Point, 1922. Oil on canvas, 23 x 35.5 cm
    Credit Line: Private Collection, Courtesy of Adam’s
    © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021 Image courtesy Adam’s

    Exhibition

    There is already a room devoted to Jack B. Yeats in the Milltown wing of the National Gallery, available to view with a free general admission ticket. Here, twenty of his paintings are on permanent display.

    The new exhibition features a much larger selection of eighty-four paintings, many of which are on loan from private collections or galleries overseas. As such, it offers a rare chance to view many works that have not been on display in Ireland for some time.

    I had the opportunity to speak with Donal Maguire, co-curator (along with Brendan Rooney) of the exhibition. Donal revealed the rationale for the exhibition’s lay out, including the decision to focus exclusively on his oil paintings, and Jack B. Yeats’s role in forging a national Irish identity in the early twentieth century.

    After rejoining his family as a young adult, Jack enrolled in a number of art schools. The skills he acquired as a draughtsman, allied to natural ability, earned him a decent living through contributions to a number of London magazines.

    At this time the majority of his output was in drawing and watercolour, often depicting the colourful side of everyday life. Country races, market fairs, and circuses feature, depicted predominantly in a realist style. His first exhibition in 1897 won him immediate acclaim from sketches and watercolours, depicting bucolic ‘scenes of racing, boxing, fairgrounds, cider-making, children, and animals.’ (Bruce Arnold, Yeats, Jack Butler, Dictionary of Irish Biography).

    Near the turn of the century, Jack married Mary Cottenham White, who he had met while at art school. The young couple eventually chose to settled down in Ireland. Unfortunately, depictions of equivalent scenes from Irish rural life did not meet with similar success. It was not until the 1920s, after Ireland’s independence brought a greater appetite for articulations of Irish life and characters, that Jack’s career took off.

    Jack began to take a serious interest in oils only after settling down in Ireland. After adopting the medium, however, it became his dominant artistic language. From the 1920s onward, his manner of painting became increasingly tactile and expressionistic, inspired by the Modernist movement. By the end of his life, he was producing vast canvases in oil in a highly idiosyncratic style, with increasing recourse to esoteric subjects from folklore and mythology.

    With such a clearly definable narrative arc to his career, it is common for Jack B. Yeats’s work to be exhibited in a manner that emphasises his development from sketches, to watercolours, through to increasingly expressionist oil paintings. With this exhibition, however, Maguire and Rooney saw an opportunity to take a different tack

    “We decided very early on that the show wouldn’t be hung chronologically”, Donal Maguire informed me. “Exhibitions give you the opportunity to look across a practice and see connections that are twenty, thirty, or forty years apart,” he said.

    The theme of memory was chosen as the central focus of the exhibition. Oil was the material Jack B. Yeats painted with during the final half of his career, and paintings commonly feature scenes drawn from earlier periods in his life, particularly the experience of growing up in Sligo.

    A non-chronological approach to laying out the paintings serves to emphasise the associative, non-linear quality of memory.

    “Memory isn’t a linear thing,” Maguire observed. “It’s relational. You connect things from across different periods of your life. Certain things pop out, or are remembered more strongly than others.”

    In each of the five rooms of the exhibition, works from different decades of Yeats’s life engage in a fascinating conversation with one another. The most striking example is the sequencing of ‘The Barrel Man’ (1912) and ‘Humanity’s Alibi’ (1946). Without the earlier, realist depiction of a rural festivity, involving a man fighting off sticks being aimed at him from the safety of a barrel, the origin of the expressionistic painting of the 1940s, with the headscratcher of a title, would be difficult to fathom.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), The Public Letter Writer, 1953 Oil on board, 35.5 x 53 cm. Credit Line: Private Collection, Courtesy of Adam’s © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021 Image courtesy Adam’s

    The remarkable ‘The Public Letter Writer’(1953) appears to be an example of what Maguire means by certain memories standing out more than others . He notes that this painting was “painted from a memory fifty years earlier that he never sketched. It was a memory of seeing this person on the street in New York, and fifty years later he decided to return to it.”

    The vagueness of memory is conveyed by the hazy, almost hallucinatory character of the painting. The figure is less a real person than a character from a nightmare. Whereas the expressive depiction of the figure in ‘Humanity’s Alibi’ suggests a memory that has been mulled over beyond the point of reason – overloaded with metaphorical possibilities – the manner of ‘The Public Letter Writer’ is for Maguire suggestive of “a memory which isn’t fully formed.”

    This is achieved through a particular technique according to Maguire:

    He painted with thick paint, but also with very thin paint. It’s the contrast of the two that gives it this interesting effect. You have very thin brushstrokes, or dry brushstrokes, and then suddenly a very thickly applied stroke over it. There’s interesting layers of paint there, that seem very fragile at times, or without much structure, but they’re all held together by an overall picture.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), Pilot Sligo River, 1927. Oil on canvas, Unframed: 45.72 x 60.96cm
    Credit Line: Private collection, image courtesy Whytes.com © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021 Image courtesy Whytes.com

    Irishness

    Exhibitions of this sort require years of preparation. Ideally, Maguire told me, a three year lead in is required. It is thus difficult to read topical applications into its staging.

    Before the interview, I had wondered if the exhibition of a quitessentially Irish artist was related to a  drop off in foreign visitors to Dublin since the COVID-19 pandemic. As it happens, it is fortuitous that the National Gallery is giving Irish people a chance for introspection.

    While the theme of memory reflects the preoccupation of the subject in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings, it also provokes us to interrogate what role the painter occupies in our cultural memory.

    Jack, B. Yeats now occupies a rarefied position in Irish culture. His works are on the Leaving Cert Art curriculum, just as you’ll find his brother on the English curriculum. This stature was not self-evident in his own lifetime, however.

    Bruce Arnold writes bluntly of Yeats’s career in the 1910s: ‘His work did not sell. From a professional point of view his and Cottie’s decision to settle in Ireland had not been a success.’ Even after critical acclaim in the 1920s, ‘the resources to buy [artwork] were thinly spread in Irish society at the time, particularly those interested in modernism, and Yeats’s work did not sell at all well. His output, substantial during the 1920s, fell off in the following decade, and in a mood of self-doubt he turned to writing.’

    It wasn’t until a successful 1942 exhibition that he came to be regarded as a great Irish artist. Even then, his reputation declined after his death in 1957, until it was revived by a significant National Gallery exhibition in 1971.

    Fifty years on, the artist is still celebrated, but for perhaps different reasons than in the 1940s. We may still appreciate his ground-breaking work that reacted against sentimental nineteenth century depictions of rural life. But attention to curiosities of rural life might still be considered distasteful, even kitsch. Therefore, rather than being charmed by what may now be considered benignly nationalistic, it is the ambiguities within the oeuvre that still speak to us. Here we find the hallucinogenic letter writers; the sinister boatmen who stare the viewer down; the master of ceremonies chalky in the spotlight; an odd cast of characters that seem to stand with one foot in the thick of everyday life, and one foot in the most whimsical of dreams. Insofar as they are alien to us, these figures still have something to say.

    Maguire explains Yeats’s enduring appeal to contemporary Ireland: “People enjoy the expression and experimentation and risk taking that’s in it.”

    It might be this numinous quality that will ensure their longevity. “Yeats allows you to develop your own interpretation, through your own imagination, of what these pictures are about.” Maguire comments.

    In many of Jack B. Yeats’s paintings, “He doesn’t give you a lot of information,” Maguire said, providing only enough information to pique your curiosity. Although “there are little clues to lead you in a particular direction, like with the title, a particular figure, or element in the picture. But there always seems to be some sort of secret there, or something that’s not being fully revealed.”

    Jack B. Yeats, The Master of Ceremonies. Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 46 cm
    Credit Line: On loan from the Hunt Museum, Limerick. Photo © Hunt Museum
    © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021

    Call to Action

    Even among those of us with visual cortexes fried by twenty-first century technologies, Jack B. Yeats’ works allow access to powerful imaginative vistas.

    The use of colour at times astonishes, the character studies are fascinating, and the focus on everyday scenes allows for surprisingly personal moments of connection.

    Maguire urges anyone going to avoid getting:

    too distracted by the imagery of what he’s making, but allow yourself to appreciate how the painting is made as well. Not to be frustrated by, but to enjoy the technique and the brushwork, and the experimentation with the medium. How fragile it can seem, but at the same time very bold and expressive. It’s that material quality that people should really take time to enjoy in his work, because you can really lose yourself in it.

    The exhibition runs until February 6th, 2022. Tickets range in price from €5 up to €17 for an adult weekend ticket. Discounted prices are available for students, jobseekers and pensioners. Tickets are significantly cheaper during the week than on weekends, and there’s even a chance to see the exhibition for free on Mondays between 11am and 2pm, if you can manage to book a slot during that period.

    Featured Image: Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), Singing Under the Canopy of Heaven, 1950. Oil on board, Unframed: 22.86 x 35.56cm. Credit Line: Private Collection © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021. Image courtesy Whytes.com.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), Leaving the Far Point, 1946. Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 46 cm
    Credit Line: The Niland Collection. Donated by the artist, 1954. Courtesy of The Model, Home of the Niland Collection. © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021

  • Where is Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World?

    For Christmas two years ago, my mother bought me a copy of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People (2018). I tried to read it, I really did, but gave up after twenty pages. Looking back now, I can’t remember exactly what it was that turned me off it. I recall saying something along the lines of not liking the dialogue and the way the characters were realised.

    Looking back, I think I disliked the social pressure exerted on me to read and admire Sally Rooney. You see, as a student in Trinity College Dublin, the figure of Sally Rooney loomed large.

    Access to campus was restricted while a TV adaptation of her book was filmed. Her novels lined the windows of nearby book shops. Rave reviews appeared everywhere you looked online. She was the voice of the Irish millennial.

    All of this, rather than encouraging me to embrace her work, raised my hackles and ensured that I would find fault in anything I read by her.

    After laying Normal People aside, my girlfriend read it. After finishing it, she expressed the opinion that it was a good read, but nothing special in literary terms. Then she read reviews of it in well-respected publications, and began to experience a cognitive dissonance so severe I worried about her mental health.

    “What is it I’m not seeing? Why is everybody praising it so highly? Am I not seeing something here?” she beseeched.

    I tried to comfort her. “It’s the world that’s gone mad.” I said, “Your judgement was correct.”

    “But everyone is saying it’s great!”

    “It’s all just marketing! The whole industry is a sham!”.

    Alas, my words offered scant comfort. It wasn’t until she saw some negative reviews in major magazines that she felt consoled.

    ‘A lot of press attention surrounded the publication,’ says a novelist character in Rooney’s new novel, ‘mostly positive at first, and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity of the initial coverage.’

    For my girlfriend and me, the negativity was a justification. Maybe our generation’s aesthetic sense hadn’t atrophied after all. There was still hope.

    “Why do you need other people to say something is bad before you can trust in your own judgement?” I asked.

    “Let’s stop talking about this.” she replied.

    After my girlfriend’s near loss of sanity, I resolved to maintain a safe distance from Sally Rooney. The best minds I knew assured me that Sally Rooney’s popularity was a product of marketing, and that her writing was nothing special.

    A New Assignment

    My life went on peacefully, untroubled by the exorcised spirit of Rooney, until two years later an editor challenged me to review Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).

    “I’m afraid to say I’m not a big fan of Sally Rooney”, I said.

    “All the better!” he replied, “She will get enough positive reviews as it is. Write what you really think!”

    I left the office elated at first, but then an inner contrarian bristled. That’s right, I’m a contrarian even among other contrarians. If asked to criticise a mainstream work, I’m inclined to defend it.

    Buying the book in Chapters, I felt immensely self-conscious at the bestsellers shelf. I scanned the shop before taking the blue paperback from the number one slot.

    “If anyone I respect asks why I’m buying it”, I thought, “I’ll tell them I’m writing a review.”

    Returning home, I sat down on the couch with the novel and a pen and notebook on hand. Upon reading the first page, I found an adjective that felt awkward, and I noted this down. On the next, I found a sentence I didn’t like, and then a character description that annoyed me. I noted these down too. Then I realised I wasn’t reading at all.

    I laid aside the notebook and returned to the beginning. Time passed. A few times, I wanted to reach for the notebook, but resisted the impulse, accepting the text for what it was. Slowly, my ego disengaged, and I started to focus on the scenes, the characters, and the structure of the story. The afternoon slipped away.

    On the second afternoon, I became even more deeply engaged. I found some of the ideas expressed by characters exciting. I laughed at parts, enjoying the romantic dynamic between different characters. When I wasn’t reading the book, I looked forward to when I would be again.

    The pace of the novel appeared to slow in the final third however. By the end, I had lost some of the enthusiasm sparked earlier. I still enjoyed it, but believe it doesn’t amount to a substantive whole.

    Summary

    The novel primarily follows two Irish women in their late twenties/early thirties. Eileen works for a low-paying literary magazine, and is terribly jealous of her friend Alice, who is a successful novelist.

    Alice lives in a beautiful house by the sea, has money and time to spare, yet never goes out of her way to visit Eileen. The novel alternates between chapters following Eillen or Alice individually, and chapters composed of email exchanges between the two friends.

    The alternating structure is used very artfully. In the narrative sections, the narrator is extremely remote and impersonal: ‘He was wearing a black zip-up, with the zip pulled right up, and occasionally he tucked his chin under the raised collar, evidently cold.’ (p.216)

    This is a very roundabout way of telling us a character is cold, but it maintains the sense of the narrator’s detachment. This technique is characteristic of Beautiful World, Where Are You. In the narrative sections, we watch the characters keenly, with an interested gaze, but we’re barred from access to their minds; nor does the narrator offer insights into the characters. Thus, for example:

    The waitress from behind the bar had come out to mop down the empty tables with a cloth. The woman named Alice watched her for a few seconds and then looked at the man again. (p. 6)

    Or,

    When Felix saw Alice approaching, he stood up, greeted her, touched her waist, and asked what she would like to drink.” (p. 214)

    There’s a clinical coldness to the narrator, but while fulfilling the role of a dispassionate eye, the descriptions of actions remain vague. It lacks, therefore, a truly realist attention to detail.

    The rationale for this style seems to receive its most explicit justification around the midpoint, where the narrator says:

    Their conversation seemed to have had some effect on them both, but it was impossible to decipher the nature of the effect, its meaning, how it felt to them at that moment, whether it was something shared between them or something about which they felt differently. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves, and these were questions without fixed answers, and the work of making meaning was still going on.(p. 126)

    I am bound to ask: if a realist novel doesn’t offer readers insights into their lives then what is its purpose? Are the experiences of Dublin millennials really so profound that they can’t be explained in words?

    The coldness in the narrative chapters emphasises the emotional warmth of the email correspondence between Eileen and Alice. The end of chapter five, for example, shows us an Alice aloof and withdrawn in conversation; whereas the next chapter opens with a forthright Alice telling Eileen: ‘Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way.’

    The emails allow floodgates to open kept firmly closed through the narrative chapters. In there, Alice and Eileen share their worries, hopes, and undergraduate analyses of our current predicament.

    This is my favourite part of the book by far. Why? Because the opinions expressed by the characters show conspicuous self-awareness on Rooney’s part of her place in contemporary culture, and the role her novels play.

    The contemporary novel is irrelevant (pp. 94 – 95); the cult of the author is philosophically groundless and dangerous but is maintained by marketing hacks (p. 55); the oppressor/victim complex in online discourse is more theological than political (p. 74); beauty died in 1976 (p. 75). These are ideas we can agree on, and I am glad to hear them voiced in a mainstream novel.

    Ruthless Self-Examination

    Beautiful World, Where Are You doesn’t need to be critiqued. It does that for you. At one point, the millenial novelist Alice laments her public image:

    I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe she is me.(p. 55)

    The ruthless self-examination offers Rooney salvation from her cultural sins. No longer do we need to critique her. She is doing it for us.

    Now, you could view this cynically in two ways. First, consider Theodor Adorno’s idea that the culture industry actually feeds off its own critics.

    Thus Punk came along and rails against Popular music, and then became the new Popular music. In a postmodern turn, the more you look into the myth of Punk, the more produced and insincere it seems.

    The Sex Pistols were a punk-look-alike band, a few handpicked chaps that fitted the image of a Punk band, not a real group of rag-tag lads from the street as in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. Nirvana is a similar case. We’re sick of hair metal, let’s make music rock again, and then you’re on the front cover of Rolling Stone. The more you rebel against the industry, the more you’re playing into the angry rocker cliche. There’s no way out.

    Top of the Food Chain

    So, Sally Rooney’s novel can complain about how banal contemporary novels are, how useless and privileged its author is for spending her life writing such things, and through that self-critique, she secures her position at the top of the millennial novelist hierarchy.

    Slavoj Žižek has discussed at length the role played by guilt and self-deprecation in our current discourse, evident in its most extreme form on Twitter.

    If we are guilty of all the ills in the world, then we become, paradoxically, important. It all centres around us. Thus, Alice writes of going to a Dublin shop and thinking:

    of all the rest of the human population – most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty – who have never seen or entered such a shop. And thus, this is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! (p. 17)

    She is highlighting her sense of guilt, and therefore her virtue, but it also reveals an arrogance. We are at the very top; we must be generous; we must be humble; we must be self-deprecating. Why? Because we are important.

    Žižek refers to a marketing ploy used by Starbucks to sell their coffee The chain acknowledges it is more expensive than competitors, but every 10 cent goes to starving children in a far off country.

    Therefore, to assuage your guilt about commodifying the planet to the detriment of the developing world, simply buy this particular commodity.

    Likewise, if you feel defeated by the state of the contemporary novel, read a contemporary novel that complains about this too. It may be banal, but at least it will be ‘relatable’, and can we ask for anything more?

    This is really the key issue. Rooney can articulate what is wrong with the contemporary novel, but can’t seem to write any differently for all that self-critique. The same dross is dished out, but now it’s served with a side of cringing humility.

    The aperitif of self-criticism may eliminate the lingering dull flavours, but I’d rather have eaten some good food in the first place.

    Possibly Insidious…

    I was pleasantly surprised by the self-awareness exhibited in this novel, especially evident in the emails sent between Eileen and Alice, articulating how I feel about the contemporary novel and the cult of Rooney in a way better than I could myself.

    These critiques are, however, ultimately unsatisfying, because they undermine rather than justify the narrative sections.

    They don’t spur Rooney on to write superior work, or even anything different. Instead, they simply undermine the banality of the narrative in a possibly insidious way.

    Why insidious? Because the critique of the mainstream fitting seamlessly into the mainstream really illustrates the failure of the critique to have any effect on the status quo. It becomes a pose, emotional venting that doesn’t amount to anything; failing to point to anywhere better, or just different.

    Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You was published by Faber & Faber (London) on September 7th.

    All Images (c) Frank Armstrong

  • Cuban Love Songs Launch

    In a rousing introductory speech, retired diplomat Philip McDonagh described the publication of Cuban Love Songs as a ‘significant moment for the Irish province of the Republic Letters.’ He spoke of the ‘importance of the Republic Letters for us all’, that space where we ‘can explore intelligently and in a disinterested way both the world and our place in the world.’

    McDonagh also spoke about his concerns over the blockade against Cuba.  He argued that there had never been a level playing field to allow the Cuban economy to prove itself and looked forward to a better dialogue between Washington and Havana.

    Reflecting on a challenging period in international relations, McDonagh wondered:

    are we prepared to wait for the gifts of the muses, on political truths that do not depend on what Shelley called the calculating faculty? Are we prepared to work towards restoring the resonance of great fundamental words: mercy, discernment, justice, trust and hope?

    He said:

    we need the poets and the public authorities to come together in something like the Republic of Letters to practise humility and re-evaluate key aspects of our culture, and this must be done of course in freedom … where citizens are prepared to discuss public challenges on the basis of first principles.

    There were also readings from Anthony Colclough, Caoimhe Lavelle, Karl O’Neill, Anne Haverty, Luke Sheehan, and Ronan Sheehan.

    The event took place in Merrion Cricket Club and drew a colourful crowd.

    All images (c) Yaqoub BouAynaya (www.theconsciouscamera.com).