Cassandra Voices

Tag: and

  • The Grandfather Clause

    ‘Where DID we come from?’

    Coincidence?

    The Sahara was not always a desert.

    As evidenced by fossilized pollen, it was once covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, It was green, verdant, populated by antelopes, giraffes, rhinoceros, supporting all life forms including settled human beings. Cave drawings in southern Algeria (Tassili) testify to this lifestyle.

    Disaster came in the year 3,440 B.C..

    According to carbon-14 dating of cores from the Atlantic coast of Senegal as well as from Lake Koa in Chad, Summer temperatures increased sharply in the Sahara region and precipitation decreased. This event devastated the people and their socio-economic systems. The recently-introduced farming techniques no longer supported life.

    It was a case of global warming in a specific place.

    According to climate theoretician, Dr. Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institue, the disaster was partially initiated by one of the regular changes in the Earth’s orbit and the tilt of its axis (earth wobble). July happened in January!

    The ensuing warming and feedback effects on Vegetation and Atmosphere in this particular area combined to produce a sudden, localised desertification which resulted in the Sahara.

    This transition to the Sahara’s present arid climate was not gradual, but occurred in two specific episodes. The first, which was less severe, occurred between 6,700 and 5,500 years ago (4,700 B.C. and 3,500 B.C.). The second, which was brutal, lasted from 2,000 B.C.to 1,600 years ago.

    What has this to do with Ireland?

    Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne)

    Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne), the finest and greatest Megalithic structure (earlier than Stonehenge) in Europe,  was built by ‘unknown farmers’ in approx. 3000 B.C.

    At the same time the first Egyptian dynasties were founded.

    It is my thesis that Newgrange and the Egyptian dynasties were developed by a long-civilised and cultured people whose origins were in the Sahel of North Africa.

    Where to?

    Once their lifestyle was destroyed, where did the people of the Sahara go? Many escaped northwards to the still fertile coasts of North Africa and eastwards to the Nile. This sudden incursion created extreme pressure on the existing inhabitants of the thin North African coastal littoral. Something had to give. What did they do?

    In approx. 3000 B.C. they took to the sea. Their DNA traces (E1b1b1- Y) are to be found in the southern regions of most Mediterranean countries. Far from being a far-fetched idea, a North African Berber DNA haplotype is shared by, among others, people as faraway as the the Pasiegos of Cantabria in Northern Spain and the Saami people of Finland!.

    Newgrange in Ireland is the oldest and finest example of a megalithic culture that spread along the Atlantic coast from North Africa to the Baltic.

    Newgrange has been dated to 3000 B.C. and is slightly older than the Pyramids of Egypt. It and Ireland’s impressive megalithic heritage were built in about the same period as the desertification of the Sahara. The megalithic culture spread up the Atlantic coasts from North Africa where similar structures proliferate.

    Thirty years ago this writer found the equivalent of Newgrange in Larache, Morocco – which was also colonised by Phoenicians after 800 B.C. – and indicates a continuity of Atlantic coastal movement.

    Medina of Larache, Morrocco.

    The Sea is Key

    Professor John T. Koch of the University of Aberystwith wrote the following in Celtic from the West:

    No one has taken the possibility of Celtic coming from ‘Hispania’ to the other Celtic countries seriously since we stopped taking Lebor Gabála Érenn seriously, but it is now at least worth pausing to review what it is we think we know that makes that impossible.

    Professor Barry Cunliffe (Oxford) co-editor of the same collection of essays, repeats his long-held advocacy of the reality of an Atlantic coastal trading community, active at least as long ago as the Bronze Age – and probably much earlier – along which people moved and shared languages and cultures. The area in question stretches from Scandinavia as far south as Mogador – which was once a Phoenician colony. The sea is, as always, the key to such perspectives. The sea connects, does not divide.

    Linguists such as Heinrich Wagner, Pokorny, Orin Gensler, Vennemann et alia have long held that there is a substratum of North African languages (Hamito-Semitic) underneath the first official language of Ireland – Gaelic.

    Dara Beag O Fatharta.

    Sub plot

    The Grandfather Clause is a legal entity in Western Law. It is an exemption in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations. Sometimes, the exemption is limited; it may extend for a set period of time, or it may be lost under certain circumstances.

    It means that traditional customs and rights cannot be arbitrarily abolished by new legislation.

    The simplest example is a claim to a traditional right-of-way through private property. The courts often entertain such claims.

    Suppose that a North African appeals for asylum in Ireland, is refused and threatened with deportation. Might he/she invoke the Grandfather Clause?

    He/she might perhaps claim that when the ice melted his/her ancestors were the first tentative inhabitants of  Northern Europe – including Ireland – 10,000 years ago and that in Ireland there exists physical, linguistic and literary evidence of a continuity of such seaborne immigration and occupation by his/her ancestors down the years – seven thousand years!  This continuity would embrace the first Neolithic farmers, then the Phoenicians, then the Algerian Corsairs of the seventeenth century.  Could it be recognised as a legal, or at least a moral, precedent?

    The science of genetics i.e. evidence from the human genome project would support such a proposition.

    The argument would be that his/her ancestors arrived here long before we were the ‘Irish’ and took possession of the island. Therefore he/she, as a putative descendant of, say, the Fomorians, the Fir Bolg’s or the De Dannan, the Phoenicians, had a right to stay here! The fact that their occupation predated the concept of Land Deeds is relevant. (Of course the abused rights of native American Indians – who also had no land deeds – are also relevant to the case.)

    he Irish Gaelic chieftain receives the priest’s blessing before departing to fight the English.

    A More Recent Analogy

    In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Elizabethan and Cromwellian soldiers came to Ireland and were paid off with stolen tracts of Irish land. Nevertheless, after four centuries of such (often absentee) ownership no one could realistically take a case challenging the rights of the Anglo-Irish descendants of those soldiers. The suggestion that the Irish State might repossess such lands and forcibly deport the descendants without compensation would be treated as absurd – as well as inciting violence! It would be a stretching of the Grandfather Clause which only a despairing defense lawyer might use as a persuasive metaphor.

    However, the rehearsal of the above asylum seeker’s argument – before being laughed out of court – would be an opportunity to reveal the complex background of colonialism and racism that has resulted in attitudes to immigrants of colour. In Ireland, native biodiversity is considered sacrosanct. Foreigners (esp. black) are considered an invasive and basically threatening species.

    The ancient Europa is now Fortress Europe!

    Sarcophagus of Ahiram, which bears the oldest inscription of the Phoenician alphabet (Beirut, Lebanon).

    The Phoenicians

    The Phoenicians were a classic case of a such a blackguarded culture and people. Although prominent in the Bible, they were written out of history by Greek and Roman authors. However, an ancient and deep-rooted anti-semitism also informed the historical prejudice against those Canaanite pioneers whom some accounts say reached these northern islands in the late Bronze Age – approx. 600 B.C.  An extensive tin trade with Cornwall is widely believed.

    Examining the Phoenicians can be an illuminating approach to Irish identity as well as European attitudes and racism in general.

    Irish passports have in the recent past been doled out for cash, thereby entitling rich Saudis and their families to come and go as they please. This is not an unusual practice. At one time the Cypriot president Präsident Nikos Anastasiades is offering citizenship as compensation to rich foreign (i.e Russian) investors.  In modern usage, Irish international sports teams liberally use the ‘granny rule’ to acquire talented non-Irish players.

    There is nothing immutably sacred about Irish or any national citizenship. The arguments for excluding or including certain ethnic types are implacably economic but can raise questions of discrimination on ethnic grounds.

    After working and living in Ireland for a certain number of years many ‘non-nationals’ are granted Irish citizenship. What is the essential difference between these favoured ones and those asylum-seekers who may have endured living for three/four/five years in prison-like circumstances on this island? Those who are forbidden to work, who are given pocket money of €19.10 per week?

    A court hearing as hypothetical as the above might reveal the shaky grounds on which our historical assumptions of identity are based.

    Suppose the old, once-sacred, Irish legends of immigration from Africa and Spain, the Fomorians from Africa, the Milesians from Spain, the De Danaan, the Fir Bolg are not entirely mythical?

    Suppose that seventeenth and eighteenth century Irish scholars who believed in the literal truth of those legends were not entirely mistaken?

    Suppose that modern Irish writers (Heaney, McGuinness, Friel, Durkan et al) were not entirely taking artistic license or imagining things when they invoked the Carthaginians as an anti-colonial metaphor?

    Tradition is never entirely true but never entirely false.

    Rabbit Beach in the southern part of the island of Lampedusa.

    In recent years the island of Lampedusa and the ancient island of Ireland have had this in common: the incursion of desperate people from the other side of the Mediterranean, particularly from North Africa.

    Note

    The changes in Earth’s orbit occurred gradually, whereas the evolution of North Africa’s climate and vegetation were abrupt. Martin Claussen and his colleagues believe that various feedback mechanisms within Earth’s climate system amplified and modified the effects touched off by the orbital changes. By modelling the impact of climate, oceans, and vegetation both separately and in various combinations, the researchers concluded that oceans played only a minor role in the Sahara’s desertification. The earths axis wobbled. The desertification of North Africa began abruptly 5,440 years ago (+/- 30 years). Before that time, the Sahara was covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, as evidenced by fossilized pollen.

    The Sahel is the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition between the Sahara desert in the North and the Sudanian Savannas in the south, having a semi-arid climate. It stretches across the north of the African continent between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. In Arabic the word Sahel means  ‘a coastline’ which delimits the sand of the Sahara.

    The Sahel covers parts of (from west to east) Senegal, southern Mauritania, central Mali, southern Algeria and Niger, central Chad, southern Sudan, northern South Sudan and Eritrea.

    In the history of this planet geologists say there have been five major Ice Ages, each lasting hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. There have been periods when this entire planet was covered in ice. At other periods the tectonic plates supporting continents were all jammed together in the southern hemisphere and Ireland was located below the equator – beside the African tropical zone. We were all neighbours once.

    An ice age is defined as when both polar caps are covered in ice. We are presently in an ‘ice age’.

    There have been hundreds of ‘inter-glacials’ or global warmings. During one of the interglacial periods – perhaps fifty million years ago – conditions favoured the emergence of the first primitive life forms.

    In another, more recent, period the sudden desertification of the Sahara occurred. This event had a dramatic and long-lasting effect on population movements around the Mediterranean.

    Featured Image: Landscape of the Erg Chebbi, Morrocco.

  • Lessons From the Great Depression (I)

    This is the first instalment of a three part essay on the legacy of the Great Depression..

    The Great Depression began in 1929, leading Wall Street bankers literally to throw themselves from windows. I was shown one such exit site on 45th Street 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Lives were destroyed as a favourable market collapsed. The fundamental point then, and now, about a favourable or unfavourable market is it is always an illusion. Smoke and mirrors.

    Bull leads to Bear and back, and that cycle since 2008 is certainly where we are again, as confidence is lost in markets and neo-liberal non-interventionism. The effect in 1929 emphasised how when America catches a cold Europe contracts pneumonia. In the 1930s, the fragile, well-intentioned experiment in Wilsonian democracy collapsed virtually overnight. Now the effect is global.

    We are now seeing unmistakable signs of stagflation and even hyperinflation, accentuated by the additional disease burden of the virus on health systems subjected to decades of sneaking privatisation; while health inequalities widen, as transnational organisations and Big Pharma – using so-called philanthro-capitalism as a front – collude at the expense of the population at large.

    The prospect looms of fuel and food shortages, decreased life expectancies – already evident before the pandemic – repossessions, and evictions, with limited support in countries without social democratic support structures.

    In terms of civil liberties, we are entering dangerous territory too, with compulsory vaccination and quarantines. A long winter is coming. And what are we to make of most non-essential court cases in the UK being adjourned until September of next year?

    The New Deal

    In 1932 at the height of its destitution, America elected its greatest ever leader the aristocratic bon vivant socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who brought in the New Deal to save the country from ruin.

    In contemporary America, no such leadership exists. Biden is no Roosevelt. He is unwilling to develop a true social market. All too many in America are ‘Bowling Alone’ as communities fall apart in a digitally mediated age of social atomisation.

    The Great Depression represented a failure of the American idea of government. Apart from a few dissenters, such as the legendary Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, the business of America has always been business, until it goes bust.

    In a tremendous refutation of free market economics in Lochner v. New York (1903) Holmes said: ‘The third amendment does not enact Mr Herbert spencer’s social statics’

    Holmes was at least a quasi-socialist, who corresponded with Harold Laski. But neither an intellect like him or a proper social democratic deal maker and integrator like Roosevelt is evident in American politics today.

    Obama received money and recruited Goldman Sachs alumni to his cabinet which is a bit like inviting a cuckoo into the nest.

    Studs Terkel

    Hard Times

    Another Chicago native and reporter of the last century, Studs Terkel chronicled American life in his book Hard Times, which is an oral history of the Depression era. Terkel argued that ‘the worst day-to-day operators of businesses are bankers,’ and quotes one source who has fallen on hard times:

    We thought of the poor, at that time, as quite divorced from us, who were not poor. By the exercise of one’s charity, life could be made all right. You would always have the poor with you, they were the unfortunate, and you made donations. You could handle them. It was mildly unpleasant, but not fundamentally upsetting. Now, for the first time, we face the dreadful reality that we are not separated. They are us.

    And another describes a scene of acute desperation:

    They would just walk all over and kill each other. They got more than they ever need that they would just step on anybody to keep it. They got cars, they got houses, they got this and that. It is more than they need, but they think they need it, so they want to keep it. Human life isn’t as important as what they got.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Worse Still?

    I fear that this collapse will be on a greater scale. Indeed, despite deprivation, life expectancies actually increased in America over the course of the 1930s, but since the turn of this century epidemiologists have been predicing a decline.

    The successful application of the ideas of the master J. M. Keynes generated a worldwide social democratic model in the wake of the Great Depression, which became the consensus before the resurgence of neo-liberalism. This has undermined humanity since the late 1970s, and its effect now appear irreversible, given the absence of an alternative Communist model that compelled even governments devoted to capitalism to maintain a basic standard of living and healthcare.

    In contrast, the neo-liberal model of marketisation of human activity has intruded into all sectors of life. This has denuded and in some cases destroyed what Habermas describes as the public sphere.

    A set of unworkable ideas have spiralled out of control, and are generating a disaster. Liberal democracy is failing and becoming unworkable. In effect, the End Of History is the acceptance of discredited ideas, which have led us to this impasse.

    Capitalism is not working because capitalism is not allowing people to work. Joseph Stieglitz, a former economist for the World Bank remarked: ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor.’ And increasingly basic liberties are being sacrificed at the altar of security.

    Artistic Response

    More than statisticians or economists, artists convey the individual effects of world historical events such as the Great Depression.

    Although written in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is one of the core texts of the Depression, demonstrating the appalling work conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry. Many of his works including Oil, which became the film with Daniel Day Lewis ‘There Will be Blood’ attack unbridled capitalism and its depressing effects on the human spirit.

    Two crucial quotes from The Jungle are as follows:

    The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.

    And

    Into this wild beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.

    Sinclair paints a familiar scene, now throw in the disinformation of our post-truth universe and you have a neo-liberal Molotov cocktail. At least at that time there was vibrant social commentary, and a less captured media.

    All little lives need protecting as Sinclair and above all John Steinbeck in his portrayals of the Okies in dustbowl America clearly recognised. His great novel The Grapes Of Wrath depicts a migration from the dustbowls of Oklahoma to California, which turns out to be no Promised Land, as any unionization or collective action is supressed, just as has been the case over the last thirty years.

     

    More relevant than even Sinclair or Steinbeck as an evocation of the Depression-era in America is a book by James Agee, and photographer Walker Evans called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941. The phrase originates in the Jewish religion. The complete sentence is: ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the fathers that beget them.’

    The book, partially governmentally funded, chronicles dustbowl America. Evans adds the pictorial record of the devastation wreaked by the great economic depression in the dustbowl.

    From the pictures of Walker Evans it is noticeable how grim the faces are. The anguished expressions on children is particularly harrowing. Lives lost by neglect and the degradation of poverty.

    It’s A Wonderful Life

    Austerity

    It is well documented how austerity in our present age has killed people by stealth through the gradual removal of social supports. Lawyers and NHS workers might share the same fate. Whatever ramparts of social protection that previously existed are being whittled away by Covid. And

    Any yet we cannot give up. Produced and directed by Frank Capra in the wake of World War II, ‘It’s a Wonderful life’ is about a good banker memorably played by Jimmy Stewart, who helps people to build new homes.

    Capra, made many great films, but ‘It Happened One Night,’ which came out at the height of the Depression captures a spirit a popular spirit of defiance. So there is cause for optimism in poor folk.

    Featured Image: Lunch atop a Skyscraper, Charlie C. Ebbets, 1932.

  • 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

  • The Significance of Religion in the World

    Midway upon the journey of our life
    I found myself within a forest dark,
    For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
    Dante Alighieri

    Religion is an emotional need of mankind. The rationalist may not want it, but he has to admit that other people may…
    Let’s not leave out a single god! […] Let’s be everything, in every way possible, for there can be no truth where something is lacking.
    Fernando Pessoa

    The Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan came as a shock to Western consciousness. It was not merely that a U.S.-sponsored regime proved so fragile once the troops pulled out; but the apparent enduring appetite among Afghans for policies at least purporting to be Islamic flies in the face of a starry-eyed view of humanity steadily evolving towards a uniform set of customs and beliefs.

    That is not to argue that common principles cannot be agreed by sovereign states – and peoples – but to expect uniformity in outlook across a global population living in starkly differing circumstances, and at varying historical junctures, appears naïve at best. Any globalisation project striving for homogeneity will surely fail.

    In abandoning religious traditions – as many of us have done – it may be that we are losing ethical frameworks grounded in those traditions with profound consequences for relations among ourselves, and with Earth itself. It begs the question: at a critical juncture for humanity does faith, or transcendence, offer a path out of despair, and indeed a Theology of Hope? We may further ask whether, without this ethical grounding, if the direction of scientific research is guided by a reliable moral compass, or simply the exigencies of a Capitalist market?

    Peace on Earth

    Without subscribing to the banal equanimity of moral relativism disregarding gross human rights violations, we should question all military interventions in pursuit of peace. Saint Augustine in the City of God stated: ‘there is no man who does not wish for peace… even when men wish a present state of peace to be disturbed … they do so not because they hate peace but because they desire the present peace to be exchanged for one that suits their wishes.’ The Hippocratic Oath might be adapted in international relations whenever the invasion of another country is contemplated: ‘first do no harm.’

    The idea of peace for eternity is an illusion. So Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) – where ‘the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism’ is ‘replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands’ – now seems an increasingly absurd notion, formulated in a moment of peak post-Cold War hubris.

    Likewise, a Marxist assumption that History will simply end, thereby removing a requirement for politics, or for difficult choices to be decided is also, sadly, Utopian; this is notwithstanding the continued relevance of Marxist analysis to current economic relations, in particular a seemingly inexorable widening in the gap between rich and poor in an age of technology; and the idea of metabolic rift, meaning, broadly: the alienation of exploited workers from their environment.

    Thus, both Liberals and Marxists have fallen prey to an assumption that we are bound for a Promised Land governed by Enlightenment Values. In fact, Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume called into question fundamental rights derived from an Aristotelian tradition, developed in Europe over centuries. Science only emerged as a distinct discipline in the 1830s, untethered from an ethical foundation in philosophy.

    U.S. President Reagan meeting with Afghan mujahideen at the White House in 1983.

    Religion in Global Diplomacy

    The Taliban’s victory demonstrated that religious identity remains a galvanising force in politics, beyond even national identity, in the developing world especially. Although, it should be noted that the Taliban is largely drawn from the dominant Pashtun ethnic group. We may also safely assume a long Afghan tradition of resistance to foreign occupation remains an inspiration.

    Nonetheless, as the case of ISIS also highlighted, and indeed the perseverance of the Religious Right in the U.S., we in Europe especially should reconcile ourselves to the endurance of belief systems other than our own dominant secularism. For, as the authors Philip McDonagh, Kishon Manocha, John Neary and Lucia Vázquez Medonza of a new work On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy (Routledge, London, 2020) point out, it is a fallacy to equate ‘modernisation’ with a decline of religious observance.

    This work provides an important guide to negotiate challenges in a world where those professing no religion amount to just 16% of the population. Globally, atheism is a strictly a minority taste, a point its often evangelical advocates are wont to ignore. Thus, in the half century since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, we have witnessed a succession of political movements emerge shaped by religious identities – if not the humane insights contained within all traditions.

    Show on the life of Jesus at Igreja da Cidade, affiliated to the Brazilian Baptist Convention, in São José dos Campos, Brazil, 2017

    Religion as a Force for Good and Ill

    Anyone advocating in favour of a place for religion in the public sphere must grapple with a strong tendency for this to be expressed in fundamentalist politics – a word, incidentally, deriving from the description of Protestant sects of the early twentieth century. All too often, where religion lies behind political formations it has brought harsh ordinances, generally to the detriment of women – in terms of their status relative to men – in a patriarchal order.

    In power as such, we have witnessed the crushing of dissent, or heresies. Indeed, the approach of many rulers claiming faith-based authority resembles that of the Grand Inquisitor from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamoz, who Laurens van der Post described as ‘the visionary anticipation of Stalin and his kind.’ This tale or parable, which the character of Ivan Karamazov’s recounts in the novel, is set in post-Reformation Spain, where the all-powerful Inquisitor is visited by a resurrected Christ. The fearsome leader, however, dismisses the putative saviour, revealing that the Church has embraced the devil:

    we have accepted from him what You had rejected with indignation, that last gift that he offered You, showing You all the kingdoms of the earth: we accepted Rome and the sword of Caesar from him, and we proclaimed ourselves the only kings on earth, the only true kings.

    The Grand Inquisitor maintains that he is serving the common people, who will be lost if freedom of conscience is permitted. He thus banishes the saviour with the words: ‘we shall withhold the secret and, to keep them happy, we shall opiate them with promises of eternal reward in heaven.’[i]

    Characteristics of the Grand Inquisitor’s approach were evident in the Irish Catholic Church after independence that opiated the people “with promises of eternal reward in heaven.” Thus, Ronan Sheehan describes a ‘Theology of Incarceration’ – associated in particular with the legacy of Matt Talbot in his visionary Dublin: Heart of the City (2016).

    However, notwithstanding criminal actions of Catholic clergy, we may question whether contemporary Ireland is a more, or less, caring society. There are certainly greater opportunities for women – but in an increasingly two-tier society in housing, health and education it is a shrinking number that can avail of these.

    In an increasingly neoliberal society political ambitions have given way to passivity. The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy remind us that twentieth century history witnessed resistance to National Socialism, and plans for the Welfare State ‘inspired to a large extent by leaders who were religious leaders.’ There are numerous examples of religious leaders and movements in developing countries, from Gandhi to Hamas, that have emphasised the importance of social programmes. The Catholic Church under Pope Francis is also now engaging seriously with many of the profound social and environmental questions of our age.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822.

    Poetic Origins

    A more acceptably entry to the idea of religion – for a younger generation anyway – is perhaps through poetry. The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy locate religion in poetic inspiration, which has often arrived in response to tyranny, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s plea in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (1819):

    Let a vast assembly be,
    And with great solemnity
    Declare with measured words that ye
    Are, as God has made ye, free–

    Shelley wrote the first public argument for atheism in England as a young student in Oxford, but this may be considered an undergraduate flourish, designed to provoke. As his career developed, according to his wife Mary Shelley, he became a ‘disciple of the Immaterial Philosophy of Berkeley. This theory gave unity and grandeur to his ideas, while it opened a field for his imagination.’[ii]

    Shelley’s work emphasised a divine inspiration, and believed a poet’s ‘impartial care for the birth of situations’ reaches towards goodness. Likewise, Osip Mandelstam said ‘the consciousness of our rightness is dearer to anything else in poetry.’

    Many poets maintain, at least in private, that their inspiration, including that conveying moral ideas, is in a sense, god-given, or at least derived from an ‘other’ world. Thus, the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod describes a certain kind of judge, touched by the Muses, who ‘can put a quick and expert end even to a great quarrel.’ Viewed as such, religion may yet offer a poetic space for developing empathy, imagining a new world, and holding on to what remains sacred in a dying planet.

    For the authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy, the formulation of ‘a more just arrangement of human affairs’ comes about not only through philosophical reasoning, but also in a Theology of Hope. Thus, the say ‘the meaning or pattern in events shines out in the perspective of eternity.’ This is the faith of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer who believed that ‘something new can be born that is not discernible in the alternatives of the present.

    Therefore, the authors ‘do not argue for theocracy in any form,’ and instead ‘argue merely that to try to exclude God and religion from the conversation would be about our global future is to aim deliberately low.’

    Everything is Permitted?

    Does the negation of religion – however tenuous and abstract – leave us operating within a moral void, where, as in the words of Ivan Karamazov: ‘everything is permitted,’ including murder? This is not to say that all atheists operate without moral scruples, but ultimate justifications for “rightness” or “goodness” may prove elusive in the absence of faith or transcendence. Through the character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky wonders what deeds we are capable of in the absence of divine judgment.

    More broadly, we may ask whether a new species of evil develops in a value-less neoliberal setting, where callous murders are increasingly commonplace – not least in the gangland shootings we have grown accustomed to in Dublin in recent times? Is it simply fear of being caught in the act that holds back more of us from committing heinous crimes?

    Contemporary alienation has been powerfully expressed by Michel Houellebecq the French author of Atomised (1998) and other novels. His latest offering, Serotonin (2019) again plumbs the depths. Here, we find a narrator contemplating the murder of the four-year-old son by another father of the love of his life, after coming to the conclusion the child would stand in the way of a successful revival of their relationship.

    His mind returns to his own feelings as a young child after a New Year celebration. Adopting a neo-Darwinian, (scientific?) outlook, he observes:

    it was as that memory came into my mind that I understood Camille’s son, that I was able to put myself in his place, and that identification gave me the right to kill him. To tell the truth, if I had been a stag or a Brazilian macaque, the question wouldn’t even have arisen: the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of her genotype. This attitude has been maintained for a long time in the human population.

    He continues:

    I don’t think that contrary forces, the forces that tried to keep me on track for murder, had much to do with morality; it was an anthropological matter, a matter of belonging to a late species, and of adhering to the code of that late species – a matter of conformity.

    Overcoming “conformity”, ‘the rewards would not be immediate’ he says, ‘Camille would suffer, she would suffer enormously, I would have to wait at least six months before resuming contact. And then I would come back, and she would love me again.’[iii]

    Houellebecq’s “contrary forces” represent an increasing loss of moral conviction. As the characters conformity diminishes, the “code” of our “late species” breaks down and the possibility of violence increases, as we see in the book’s characterisation of the violent response of farmers to a neoliberal order that is putting them out of business.

    Ultimately, however, Houellebecq’s narrator proves incapable of pulling the trigger as he has intended, entering what he refers to as an endless night, ‘and yet’, he says:

    deep within me, there remained something less than a hope, let’s say an uncertainty. One might also say that even when one has personally lost the game, when one has played one’s last card, for some people – not all, not all – the idea remains that something in heaven will pick up the hand, will arbitrarily decide to deal again, to throw the dice again, even when one has never at any moment in one’s life sensed the intervention or even the presence of any kind of deity, even when one is aware of not especially deserving the intervention of a favourable deity, and even when one realises, bearing in mind the accumulation of mistakes and errors that constitute one’s life, that one deserves it less than anyone.[iv]

    Hope springs eternal it seems, even in a novelist-of-despair such as Houellebecq.

    Moreover, if we refuse the temptation to pull the trigger and reset our lives; if we embrace an idea of hope; we may conceive the Earth itself to be sacred; a view shared by all religious traditions, which enjoin respect towards all life on the planet. One wonders whether a view of all life on Earth being sacred is shared by pure materialists. Moreover, untethered to any faith tradition is “everything permitted” in scientific research?

    Niccolò Machiavelli 1469-1527.

    The Political Craft

    Contemporary politics often appears to operate within a moral vacuum, where warfare is conducted through drone strikes, and the planet reels under the impact of over-exploitation; while even in Advanced Economies, millions endure shocking poverty. New forms of propaganda have been unleashed via a social media that is removing agency, implanting ideas that distort politics. Most politicians claim to care, but as often as not they distract from the structural questions and emphasise issues of only peripheral relevance to the lives of ordinary people. In particular, identity politics has been used to divide and conquer, while the wealth of billionaires continues to accumulate.

    The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy come down squarely against the statecraft associate with Niccolò Machiavelli, which now appears ascendant in a contemporary politics of spin – where September 11 was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Here, according to the authors: ‘Deceit, and even cruelty, are justified by results – by their results as measured over time – which requires very sharp judgment by the Prince if his recourse to realpolitik is not to undermine the moral standards of ‘ordinary people.’’ Means cannot easily be distinguished from ends, while the body politic is contaminated by mendacious politicians.

    They argue: ‘Not to tell lies or to make contradictory promises would seem to be a rule of peace-building that we should never set aside.’ Lies erode trust in institutions and tend to catch up with political actors. Tony Blair and his 45-minute claims before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is an obvious example, albeit one unmentioned in the book.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Pandemic Response

    A Populist wave emanating from the Americas has, thus far at least, failed to propel a European equivalent into power. Nonetheless, distrust in politicians and the media is probably at an all-time high, and with some justification. Moreover, all too often, scientists guiding government policy have adopted Machiavellian approaches that only fuel paranoia.

    The origins of the pandemic itself are shrouded in mystery, amidst a growing suspicion that the COVID-19 virus is a product of so-called ‘gain of function’ research, involving US government agencies and China.

    Attempts to supress this involvement – including by EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, who jointly authored an article in The Lancet dismissing the idea out of hand at the beginning of the pandemic – generates serious concern. A recent slew of emails released under freedom of information: ‘indicate involvement by individuals with undisclosed conflicts of interest; limited peer-review; and a lack of even-handedness and transparency regarding the consideration of lab-origin theories within the scientific community.’

    Would anyone who believes in the sacredness of life on Earth engage in work so fundamental to all life on Earth? It recalls the inventor of the Atomic Bomb Charles Oppenheimer’s quoting The Bhagavad Ghita: ‘I am death destroyer of worlds.’

    Ethical debates in science would surely benefit from religious insights. As Laurens van der Post put it: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call ‘religion’, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’

    Fauci speaks to the White House press corps on COVID-19 in April 2020.

    Bioterror Czar

    Damningly, in 2011, in the capacity of George Bush’s ‘bioterror czar’ the long-time Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President Anthony Fauci argued that the benefits of ‘engineered viruses’ made it a ‘risk worth taking.’

    During the pandemic Fauci appeared as a rational antidote to the bleach-belching Trump, but is prone to an arrogance assuming he can do no wrong. This is epitomised by the remarkable statement: ‘A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.’ In other words, Le Science C’est Moi.

    An early example of Fauci’s mendacity was his claim that he committed a ‘white lie’ in relation to the efficacy of masks. He said that he shaded the truth to avert a run on scarce equipment. Even if we take him at his word, why should the public believe what he is saying thereafter is not also a white lie? This is the attitude of a Grand Inquisitor who believes the little people cannot hope to understand the big questions. But this Machiavellian approach easily backfires.

    As David Bromwich in The Nation put it:

    In this testimony, as in much of his conduct over the past two years, Dr. Fauci was speaking “nothing but the truth.” Yet he was mindful of what Jesuits used to call a reservation.

    A reservation, in this sense, is an unspoken qualification. The speaker telegraphs a public meaning, confident it will be misunderstood. He holds in reserve a private meaning whose release might damage a higher cause (a cause known to the speaker and God, of which God approves). For God, in this context, we should read: “US government institutions of scientific research.” Yet American support of catastrophically hazardous experimentation was by no means the only pertinent fact withheld from American citizens.

    There are perhaps programmes that a government can justifiably occlude, but it enters dangerous territory in doing so. Fauci’s over-weening arrogance – tying his own fate to the credibility of science which is enshrined as the guiding light for humanity – appears to have led him to the moral failings of the Grand Inquisitors that we associate with religions in power.

    Black Lives Matter Dublin Protest June 1st 2020.

    A Point of Inflection

    The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy stress a need for preserving universal values, and institutions, while upholding a spirit of hopefulness in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges for humanity. History shows that democratic institutions alone cannot be trusted, given the extent to which opinions are moulded using increasingly sophisticated propaganda. This is one reason why we have constitutions that purport to contain immutable and even transcendent values.

    As the authors stress, ‘we have reached a point of inflection in the global story’ and if they are to address forthcoming challenges religions ‘need to make themselves understood in the common language of reason.’

    The input of the billions of religious should be welcomed in our public discourse, and not associated with ignorance in a one-track view of development. In particular, the idea of all life on planet Earth being sacred should be affirmed, although tendencies towards authoritarianism and mendacity among representatives of religions requires attention.

    In an age of science, where humans act as gods, altering the building blocks of life we can draw on wisdom contained within religious traditions on the sacredness of life. In a world of mounting challenges, even those of us who have dismissed religion from our lives may benefit from consideration of core principles contained therein. In any case, we must navigate a path through a world where, like it or not, religious belief remains the norm.

    Featured Image: The Thinker in the Gates at the Musée Rodin

    [i] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Ignat Avsey, Oxford World Classics (1994), p. 322-325

    [ii] Kenneth Neill Cameron ‘Philosophy, Religion and Ethics’ in Shelley: The Golden Years, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971, p.151

    [iii] Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin, London, 2019, p.265-266

    [iv] Ibid, p.270

  • Love and Literature in Numbers

    Whenever I think about Literature I think about Love. Both are written with big Ls. The Elles. Like an enjambment of run on legs, going on ad infinitum.

    And when I think of Love I think also, inevitably, of betrayal. One cannot be without the other; the two legs upon which humanity stands. Only in their resolution can we find peace. So, Literature – like His story – is very personal. Let me tell you my own.

    It is a story about numbers, mainly Thee and Four. Here I am borrowing from Joyce and Beckett, both of whom in their turn drew from Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher, a genius unjustly ignored in his lifetime. Even today, if you ask an educated people about Gimbattista Vico chances are most won’t know anything beyond his Three Ages of Man theory that helped Joyce formulate the structure of Finnegans Wake.

    Now let me go back to the women in my life. There were three, you see. I said that this was a story about the numbers Three and Four, but in order to tell this story, I first need to tell you about these three women.

    It is a story about Power; all history concerns Power after all.

    With the first I was in a situation of Power. I could do anything. Or so it seemed. She clung to me. She lay at my feet and looked up to me like I was a God. And I was too. For when you are so very young, you feel God-like. Such is youth!

    Look at them now, the youth of today, walking on the street! Love for them is the eternally INFINITE. That is why with youth there is still hope. As they are believers in the truth. It spreads out before them in space and time. Boundless. They are perpetually in a mindset ready for exploration. Of all kinds. This is why some of them love Art and Literature.

    Rogelio de Egusquiza‘s Tristan and Isolt (Death) (1910).

    Life Moves On

    I am in my fifties now. I no longer believe in infinity. For me things are all too FINITE. Where I once saw open space, I now see enclosure.

    She used to lie at my feet like I was a God. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it, to have that power! You stand above them like a God or a Goddess, looking down upon them, deciding on their fate.

    And of course – as we all know – with such power comes enormous responsibility. The only problem is that when you are young you rarely feel like being responsible. Then one day you decide to do a terrible thing. Everyone does it, at some point. You kill them!

    Metaphorically, at least. But this is the first real taste of death, and it is a truly terrible thing. Now, you have the taste of death upon your tongue. The one that you used to kiss. Now, s/he only tastes of poison.

    You move on.

    It is that simple. It’s called survival. Call this the first age when everything was divine and when you discovered metaphor and the apocalypse of dying.

    The Soler Family, Pablo Picasso, 1903.

    Nemesis and Trinity

    So, time passes. You meet another one. Number Two. S/he is your Nemesis. For she will destroy you. Just like you destroyed number One, now your time too will come. Somehow this enters into our conception of justice. What goes round comes round. Karma.

    Just as you had looked down, all those years ago, on your first lover; just as you looked down on the one who crawled around at your feet, now you are in that very same position! Who would have thought it? There now, look at you! That miserable specimen down on both your hands and knees before Her, who is looking down upon you. Like she’s contemplating an insect. And, of course, She eventually squashes you under Her boot heels. She crushes and grinds you into the earth so that there is no longer any trace of you. You are extinguished. Finally. You are dead.

    There now. That is the story of numbers One and Two.

    What happens next? And what, by the way, does any of this have to do with Messrs Beckett and Joyce? Everything, my dears. Just wait. Be patient, as I will explain. I will take you by the hand and help you to join up all the dots.

    But first, let me introduce you to number Thee.

    Isn’t she a beauty? Now, remember the score is one-all now. Even Stephens, as we say. You are finally at the age of equality. It happens early on for some; for others later on. And for some poor buggers, it never even comes!

    You have to will it. But if s/he does come, you will finally have a chance to redeem yourself. For, like her, you too have been broken. You are no longer the youth you once were. Infinity has been clouded by impossible violence. You need to thread carefully now, and hold onto what you have with more caution.

    And you do. Whereas before your relationships – that is with numbers One and Two – may have lasted only five or so years, with number Three it is all-enduring. Before you know it, twenty years have passed and you have children growing up around you; who you now cherish as you once cherished your own life.

    This is the story of Three. The Trinity, if you will.

    Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy.

    How It Is

    Moving on to Samuel Beckett and a story from his How It Is (1961) that has obsessed me like no other in Literature. This novel by the Irish Modernist writer has obsessed me throughout most of my adult life. It acts like a portal into human history through Literature, travelling back to the Ancients of Greece, and Rome. But before exploring this, I must first tell you about Giambattista Vico.

    When talking about Giambattista Vico and Samuel Beckett, we must also consider James Joyce. The number three is there again! They form a triad. A holy Trinity. It was Joyce, after all, who asked the young Beckett to write an article about Work in Progress – the working title for Finnegans Wake (1939) – when they first met in Paris in 1928.

    This was when he wrote his famous essay Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce (1929), in which he singles out Vico – more than the other Italians mentioned in the title – for particular attention, and the important influence of this Neapolitan thinker on James Joyce, in particular on the structural composition of Finnegans Wake.

    But it also demonstrated Vico’s influence on Samuel Beckett, a point that has tended to be ignored by Beckett scholars.

    Let us consider the essence of Vico’s ideas on the Three Ages of Man, and how Joyce was to incorporate Vico’s theories on history into his epic final novel.

    In the La Scienza nouva or A New Science (1725), Vico attempts to break history down into a cyclical process, as natural as the four seasons. In fact, Vico’s Three Ages of Man idea actually contains four parts, and in this Joyce is a stickler. For this reason, though not alone, that Finnegans Wake is made up of four books. One being for each Age.

    The Muses Melpomene, Erato, and Polyhymnia, by Eustache Le Sueur, c. 1652–1655.

    The Four Ages

    What then are these Four Ages? The First is called the Divine Age and language in particular, but also laws, are divinely thought of, or God-given. God in this case is Jupiter, as we are in the Pagan era.

    Though, coming from a Christian era, we should recognise the intermediary nature of the Muse Uranus, mother of all the Muses, assigned the role of intermediary between God and man. However, She, in turn, needs a human vessel in order to transfer her God-given knowledge, and this, according to Vico, is where the poets come in.

    As it was a theological age, so all poets were theological, unlike today. That is to say, they were only concerned with divine matters.

    Language itself was divine. And metaphor played an incredibly important role, as signs and symbols were all-important.

    Vico singles out the bolt of lightning, for example, as the first sign of Jupiter. This is simply to show how terrified these primitive people were in the beginning. They lived in caves, like Home’s Cyclops. This was a period of epic wandering. Man was chaotic and unruly. The Muse, through her instruction, tamed him. Such are the divine origins of language.

    Joycean scholars have had great fun deciphering the various myths from the Bible and Antiquity that register in Book 1 of Finnegans Wake. It is indeed a really funny book – as Joyceans constantly highlight –full of puns referring back to famous figures, such as the Duke of Wellington and Ishtar, the ancient Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, and the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, and so many more.

    It is a great sprawling narrative divided into eight chapters each one given over to one of the major characters who are called the Earwickers. Father and Mother – Humphry and Anna, and their three siblings Shem, Sham and Issy. The first chapter is a kind of prelude given over to history and the origins of the Muse.

    Beckett in How It Is begins his novel in similar fashion. Just as Joyce derives his ideas from Vico on the origins on human societies, Beckett too points to the Muse at the very beginning of the novel by starting with an invocation.

    Although unconventional, as you would expect from Beckett, that he uses the structural form tells us everything.

    The great Russian comparatist Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogical Imagination (1975), is at pains to point out the origins of the novel as a genre and its debt to epic poetry, from which it took many structural features. Most novels are of tri-partite structure in theory, as Aristotle in his Poetics asserts, telling of events before, during and after – which is exactly what Beckett does in How It Is: events before Pim, with Pim and after Pim.

    Who is this Pim, you might be asking? To answer this we move on now to Vico’s Second Age, which is given over to violence.

    Odysseus and his crew are blinding Polyphemus. Detail of a Proto-Attic amphora, circa 650 BC.

    Female Domination

    Recall my story with girl Number Two? How She kicked my sorry little ass! Yes, I am talking about Female Domination of the male species, just as I spoke about Male Domination of the female in the First Age. This is karma. Although with Beckett the characters are practically sexless.

    Similarly, Joyce parodies Hitler and the Nazis in Book 2 of Finnegans Wake, who were on the rise during Joyce’s lifetime. Book 2 of Finnegans Wake is full of wonderful puns at the expense of the Nazis, referencing particularly their atrocious treatment of Jews.

    Beckett in How It Is uses the most crude and forceful comedy. It is truly grotesque. The only comparison that I can think of in literature is a Satyr play – bringing us back to Ancient Greece.

    There is only one surviving Satyr play: The Cyclops by Euripides. Anyone who is familiar with this hilarious text will be aware that it is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey. A grotesque parody in the style of Rabelais.

    Essentially, Euripides takes the myth of Zeus and Ganymede which sees the king of the gods having his way the beautiful youth.

    Ganymede is synonymous with the submissive person in an amorous relationship. The Bottom, in short. As opposed to the Top. We here use the language of S&M, which is what we are talking about. Bottoms and Tops. Dominants and submissives. This is what Beckett is obsessed with in How It Is. This is what I have come to call the maths of rejection.

    Set Theory

    As the novel progresses, Beckett becomes more and more obsessed with the numbers Three and Four. In fact the quartet, not the trilogy, is the ideal set.

    I am using the mathematical term now, taken from set theory. As this is how Beckett chooses to enter into the subject matter. It went on to become a major obsession of his during his later writing career. Consider there were two decades between the publication of How It Is in 1961 and his play Quad, completed in 1981, although tit wasn’t published until three years later.

    Beckett spends the greater part of parts 2 and 3 of How It Is going over the innumerable permutations of movements. We are back with girlfriends One and Two, which started this small discourse on Love and Literature. Remember 1 + 2 = 3. Therefore, if we were to progress to 4, that would mean a return to 1 – to my mind anyway. Meaning I would have to become the bastard again.

    Beckett uses the terms Victim and Torturer. These are the two modes of so-called human behaviour. In Beckett’s world, or, at least in the universe of How It Is, you are one or the other. I wonder which one are you?

    This is a slight simplification, as the movement of the couples in How It Is is in permanent flux.

    Beckett was also obsessed by Heraclitus and Democritus, the crying and laughing philosophers who form the two masks of theatre showing both aspects, extreme poles of human nature: the Tragic and the Comic; the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, which Beckett – without a doubt the greatest playwright of the twentieth century – revitalized.

    What other playwright uses farce to such a violent advantage? Think of the Tramps Estragon and Vladimir contemplating hanging themselves from the tree, as a form of entertainment in Waiting for Godot; Nag and Nell consigned to the dustbins in Endgame; or Winnie up to her neck in it in Happy Days.

    In all the unforgettable imagery conjured in Beckett’s theatre we find unforgettable visual metaphors encapsulating, in their simplicity, human tropes, which endure eternal.

    In this Beckett is the poet of catastrophe and disaster, a role he inherited from the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

    Baudelaire was the first to mine the negative aspect in man to such a profound and relentless degree, in this sense Beckett is really his doppelgänger. It was Beckett’s genius to align himself so much to the dark side, as it were, which Baudelaire had ploughed so successfully in Les Fleurs Du Mal.

    Featured Image: Louis Jamnot (1814-1892), Le Vol de l’âme

  • Housing: A Banker Speaks Out

    It is often said the current Irish housing crisis is mainly the result of a lack of supply of new houses; a supply that slowed down and never really fully recovered following the burst of the property bubble in 2008.

    Developers lament a lack of initiative in governments past and present; housing plans replace one another, at least in their facades. The latest example is the Fianna Fail Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien’s Housing for All replacing, or rather refining Rebuilding Ireland introduced under Fine Gael’s Eoghan Murphy – all while multiple cranes never really stopped crowning Dublin’s skyline.

    The spin is that this lack of supply, in turn, generates scarcity, which translates into higher prices.

    Thus far, the solution we have been served is to create a tax-friendly environment: a de-facto tax haven, to attract reliable (and well-resourced) institutional landlords and investment funds – commonly referred to as Vulture or Cuckoo Funds – to accelerate badly needed developments, besides keeping the Irish banking system afloat.

    Apparently, such entities are best placed to pursue ambitious housing schemes, and the management and maintenance of as much of the national housing stock as possible. And supposedly, as in the Housing for All plan, it is the market that is best equipped to understand and deliver the population’s needs, down to every neighbourhood and community.

    Unfortunately, however, the nature of this demand, might not be guided by the community’s needs, but the obligation of a certain profit margin for a financial instrument; held in a pension fund – perhaps owned by a kindly grandmother somewhere else in the world – while enriching the asset managers of these private equity juggernauts.

    What actually gets built, and at what price, is increasingly under the control of entities that hardly take into account the repercussions for society at large. In some cases they simply up sticks to gnaw on bones elsewhere. The Cuckoos have been here for a long time, locking in the spread between ever increasing rents and the financial costs.

    The influence of the banking and financial sector over the delivery of housing has become ever more evident. Thus, the quagmire of basic supply and demand arguments have little or no bearing on how a complex infrastructure such as housing is managed.

    It is within the banking sector, and regulations set by the ECB and Irish Central Bank that a substantial proportion of the residential properties of this country are held, packaged and repackaged, and sold in bundles to foreign investment funds in a process called securitization.

    For most people, despite the shocking revelations arising out the 2008-09 Crash, the inner workings of those dynamic sytems remain out of reach. We therefore find it necessary to look for guideance from someone who really understands the relationship between the current housing crisis, and the financial markets underpinning this.

    Ben Hoey has worked in commercial and investment banking for the past thirty years. After leaving Ireland in the 1980s, he went on to become CFO of Merrill Lynch International:, CFO of Bank of Ireland Capital markets in the wake of the 2008-09 crisis, and managing director of Kennedy Wilson Europe until 2015. Then, as he likes to put it, he failed to retire.

    He is now in the process of setting up his own Fintech business, aimed at creating a Rent to Buy structure.

    It was while analysing a distressed home loans portfolio on behalf of the Not-for-Profit organisation called Right2Homes, that he awoke to the full scale of banking misconduct, and mis-selling of the mortgages in the first place.

    Hoey contends that up to one-hundred-and=fifty-thousand mortgages may have been affected, including some currently in the Courts for repossession hearings, and others that have already been repossessed by banks and Vulture Funds.

    He is now taking approximately one hundred test cases of misconduct and mis-selling of mortgages before the Financial Services Ombudsman: and that seems to represent just the tip of the iceberg.

    Today, Irish interest rates remain, intentionally, the highest in the EU in order to increase bank profitability. This allows the Vulture Funds to purchase swathes of property and maximise their returns. Nowhere else in Europe offers such attractive rates, and hence Ireland is plagued by the funds, who see us as easy picking. Distressed mortgage holders are simply the low hanging fruit.

    How can we explain why an entire generation is paying the highest mortgage rates in the Eurozone, or being forced to rent at at more than double the rate compared to ten years ago? Extreme commodification of residential assets lies at the heart of this.

    Image: ©Daniele Idini

    Ben Hoey: It’s all about cash flow. Property, as an investment, is valued based on its ability to generate cash. Cash is king, and that’s why these Vultures, even the Cuckoo Funds, can access so much low cost leverage. No one has a hope against them. That’s what’s wrong with the world. Capital markets are so cheap now that they can buy anything. And if you think that the current government policies and Central Bank policies is putting free cash into the system, you need to recognise that free cash doesn’t go to you or I. Free cash flows to the banks to make sure they are solvent and healthy. And it’s the banks that make the fortune out of the free cash from quantitative easing.

    Cassandra Voices: What would be the average rate that Vulture Funds will buy loans for? Is there an average or is it dependent on the amount of NPLs versus performing loans if it’s a mixed package, for instance?

    Ben Hoey: No, it will never be mixed. Even when Nationwide Building Society was sold off, it was broken into different portfolios of loans depending on the ability of the debtor to pay. For simplicity, there was the complete deadwood, ‘haven’t heard from them in years‘; to the guy struggling; missing every couple of months; to the performing ones [the loans that were regularly being paid off]. So even within the Non Performing world, they split them into different categories and then they’re priced accordingly per portfolio.

    In 2018/19, the average pricing for Irish bank’s non-performing residential home loans was circa 65 cents on the dollar. And that’s per portfolio. Nothing is ever priced per loan because it’s all priced on the cashflow of the portfolio. Cash flow primarily generates what price they’re prepared to pay for the portfolio in total. Then, once they work out that, they apportion the price back across the portfolio for tax and regulatory reasons. Other factors such as equity in the home, negative equity, etc. do play a role, but they don’t care much about the price per loan, as each loan position will be managed individually and the portfolio will be managed and funded in its entirety; the objective being to maximise the cash flow on every loan.

    Image: ©Daniele Idini

    Cassandra Voices: The narrative supporting the presence of Vultures Fund in Ireland is that their investment is a necessary precondition for a stable banking market, and consequently construction industry. Why are we still seeing massive sell-offs of loan portfolios to Vulture Funds? Are the banks still in a sort of intensive care unit and in need of continuous injections of capital, as in the wake of the Crisis?

    Ben Hoey: I don’t think so. The banks are generally a cash cow. But what happened in 2009 is that there was a liquidity crisis as international investors and depositors withdrew their cash from the Irish banking system. NAMA was formed to solve that liquidity crisis in the banks. Most of the developer loans, which were completely dead in the water (with no cash flow), which were extensive relative to the rest of the banking market, were transferred to NAMA and again cheap, very cheap bonds were issued to support the purchase. All of those bonds were issued to the banks that transferred their loans. They effectively swapped their bad developer loans for low cost NAMA bonds which greatly improved their liquidity and capital position, as they could use those bonds to generate cash or liquidity in the market. NAMA was vital to addressing the liquidity issue in Irish Banking at the time.

    The interesting thing is that actually they didn’t start getting the residential loans off their books until about 2016, 2017 and 2018. So, there was clearly no rush as the liquidity crisis passed. The main reason that the banks in Ireland started to sell the residential loans was that the European Central Bank said: “guys, we are worried about the next crisis and you’re still living in the current crisis. So get your residential non-performing loans down below a certain percentage of your balance sheet.”

    It was typically seven percent on residential NPLs dropping to around five percent. So the Irish banks, faced with severe imposed capital costs, were strongly encouraged to sell their portfolios to hit these ratios. The European Central Bank brought in horrendous capital hits like a 100% reduction of your capital if you didn’t get below that level. So, for example, if you had a €100 million loan portfolio and you had provided say €60 million against it, your exposure to future losses was only 40, the ECB was saying: “if you don’t get below that ratio, then an ever increasing amount will be deducted from your capital, greatly limiting your ability to undertake new business.”

    We need a strong banking system which is ready for the next crisis. So after NAMA, there does not appear to have been a liquidity crisis for the Irish banks and, by their very nature, liquidity crises need to be solved immediately, as they are not like property and health service crises, which seemingly can go on for decades.

    In 2008-2009 the Irish government stepped in and did the craziest thing ever, which was to guarantee €400 billion of customer deposits, because all the international deposits were leaving the Irish banking system literally by the second. And they actually started to realize that, oh, my God, we have a bank account too that needs to be funded – and, they know, it’s going to run out of cash soon. And that was the problem. Nothing to do with lack of profitability. It was lack of cash or liquidity as it is better known in the industry.

    Cassandra Voices: So it was the withdrawal by investors, essentially a withdrawal of money by other banks or investors?

    Ben Hoey: By all the deposit base. Ok, not so much the Irish people, because they had access to the deposit guarantee scheme already. There was some stories of customers moving their cash to Switzerland and they all lost their shirts on the exchange rate. But no, in the main, it was the big institutional money that would have always chased the higher yielding banks. So, the Irish banks would have been paying a greater rate because they were less safe, because of country risk, etc. So as soon as those institutions got scared, they just pulled the cash out and the short term money markets closed to the banks. All right. And then that’s when the ECB had to allow Irish banks to start printing bonds. So they printed money. They issued bonds. But it was to save the banking system. Yeah, I think that was the bottom. Remember, you can only have a liquidity crisis over a short, very short, period. The liquidity crisis is a week or two weeks where – I always have to remind people – the truth is hard to establish, as each bank fights for survival and many assumptions have to be made by chief executives. It’s a very, very awkward position to be in.

    Cassandra Voices: Isn’t it the job of bankers to project a level of confidence that might exceed the reality of the picture?

    Ben Hoey:  The chief executive always has to take the optimistic view. Then, you know, you look at the Irish regulator at the time. He looked at that crisis. I don’t know where he got his information from. He came out and said that the Irish banks are well capitalised to weather the storm. So there was a man who wasn’t even a chief executive talking up the banking system in order to give it a chance of survival. I think a month later it was all over. But to have no liquidity is what kills a bank, not lack of profit, as the accounting rules are focused on the long-term profitability of the banking system.

    Image: ©Daniele Idini

    Cassandra Voices: But what happened to Iceland in your view? Did they do the right thing  when they more or less let their banks fail.

    Ben Hoey: They had no choice. There was no EU there to support them. You know what partially got us into the problem was joining the EU: the euro and cheap money coming into an economy that was used to expensive money. People thought, “I can service a million euros worth of tracker mortgage for six bob a week.” And so when we went into the crisis, the ECB helped us out. We are part of the euro. We couldn’t be brought down. But Iceland had no backstop. They were on their own. It was a common belief that the guarantee by the Irish Government of €400 billion of bank liabilities was stupid, but the markets ignored it. Do I think NAMA was a good thing. Yes, I think it saved the liquidity of the Irish banks.

    It’s after that period, after 2010, there was a tremendous opportunity for Irish banks to rebuild and innovate. And they didn’t. They just sank back in and took the cheap money and did the same thing day in and day out. And then they screwed their own customers, beat the shit out of them, treated everyone the same. Talked about moral hazard and how certain members of our community overborrowed and made a mess of it. I hope society never forgives them, but some people move on. So in answer to your previous question, after the liquidity crisis was solved they didn’t need to sell their NPLs, they wanted to sell them. They didn’t need the cash. In fact, the banks were overcapitalised in my view and wanted to repay capital.

    Cassandra Voices: So if the banks, after 2010, were not in need of cash, but they were forced by the ECB to sell most of their distressed loans nonetheless, why didn’t they consider more ethical solutions that would have protected family homes for example? Instead of selling to the American, Canadian or other international funds?

    Ben Hoey: Two reasons. Execution risk and moral hazard. The moral hazard in this case is: banks say we can’t give a discount to someone even though they might deserve it, or we may have lent them too much cash. We can’t restructure the loan fairly and write off some debt as their neighbours will want a debt write off too. You can argue all day as to whether that’s right or wrong, but that’s the moral hazard argument. So they have to sell to someone who would be seen to be not so fair. And there’s a lot of hassle and maybe a bit of shame. Moral hazard helps to embed that shame in people. So that’s the moral hazard,.

    Then there’s execution risk. If you consider, at the end of the day, you have a bank official charged with selling several billion euros worth of loans. So you have a small number of ambitious well paid people who want to continue to be successful. So do they sell to Brian Reilly and his not-for-profit initiative, who’s never done anything like this before, who appears to have the funding, but it’s never been executed? Or do I just give it to Cerberus, who will walk in the door with the cheque immediately?

    You know, the head of Lone Star, the richest Irishman in the world, John Grayken, visited some of the Irish banks selling assets, which is akin to Warren Buffett popping in for a chat; that’s powerful messaging to Irish bank officials who need a guaranteed sale. They are big talkers; you tell me the cheque you want and I’ll write it now. That’s execution risk. There’s no executive risks with the likes of Lone Star or Cerberus.

    Cassandra Voices: What do they ultimately want out of all of this if, at the end of the day, they’re buying something that’s not performing? The cash flow really isn’t there. Do they want the properties? What do they want out of this?

    Ben Hoey: The normal model was they would price the portfolio on the current cash flows and then, after the purchase, they would improve those cashflows or liquidate some loans, i.e. repossess. And, in certain cases, they do deals for guys to walk away. So, say the property was worth €100,000 for simplicity sake, and they gave the guy twenty grand to walk away. God knows what they bought the loan for, but they ask themselves: “is this the maximum cash we can get here?” So €100,000 sale price, minus the 20k that they gave them to walk away. That’s generated €80k today, and the today is very important. That would have fed into the model. So it’s all about maximizing the cash flow.

    When they couldn’t maximize the cash flow because the Irish courts didn’t cooperate, they minimized the cash outgoing. So, originally when you buy a non-performing loan book that actually has a bit of cash flow, you don’t use all your own money to buy it. You go to a London bank and they give you what’s called a loan on loan. So they lend you money, and probably at one and a half percent, up to 60 percent loan to value, secured on the loans you bought. So that’s really cheap. But your own equity needs are say, nine percent unlevered.

    After a while you think this is not going anywhere. I’ll just put the whole lot into securitization vehicle and then issue triple-A notes up to a high percentage, paying out 80 basis points. So, they drive down their funding costs, which again enhances the cash flow. Net cash flow.

    Yeah. It’s all about cash. Show me the cash. The trouble is that they couldn’t do deals with Irish people because there was so few who had any cash and had no access to cash. And the Courts wouldn’t allow them to repossess.

    Cassandra Voices: And what has all of this to do with the Housing Crisis? How does this affect supply and demand on the Irish housing market?

    Ben Hoey: You said “there’s no supply.” So how do you know that? Supply of what to who? No one has defined how many affordable and social houses our society can afford. We don’t actually know what supply we’re trying to meet. And, you know, like all journeys, if you start in the wrong place, you have no hope of getting to where you want.

    The pension fund, the Vultures, are just one mechanism of delivery. But who are we trying to supply to? The family paying a bit of tax, probably earning up to €80,000? They should be able to buy a home or rent it affordably. We’re not trying to supply housing to a German pension fund. They don’t need housing. They need profit.

    Cassandra Voices: But a larger section of society in Ireland actually needs housing. And instead, what you are saying is that we are supplying Vulture and Cuckoo Fund profits, through the delivery of housing for their needs, and not the Irish people?

    Ben Hoey: Can you imagine if Apple said they were going to build a new phone with special features and they were going to sell it to a German pension fund so they could sell it on to our citizens? That’s exactly what we’re doing here. We’re saying we’re building these houses for German and U.S. pension funds because they’re the only ones that can afford them. We put a profiteer in the middle – a middle man. And that’s what happens when you commodify an infrastructure, a key infrastructure like housing.

    Image: ©Daniele Idini

    Cassandra Voices: Is this by design where we are now in terms of housing?

    Ben Hoey: This is inevitable when you make something a tradable commodity. You’ve turned homes into an investment class. There’s no rules anymore. The cheapest money will get the deal. And that’s the fundamental issue.

    What would happen if the Vultures took the airport over and were charging everyone €300 a head to get through? It wouldn’t happen because it’s so obviously wrong. But so is just about everything obviously wrong with the family home market. And you can see the effects. You go to Dublin, North Docks and South Docks; There are thousands of beautiful apartments, worth €600,000 to a million sitting empty because the German and U.S. pension funds want that type of housing, as they were told there’s loads of wealthy young people living in the city. How’s that worked out? Again, their money is so cheap that they can leave those apartments empty, and wait for rents to recover.

    There’s no crisis for them, even though their flats are empty. We’ve actually allowed a particular type of Vulture investor to dictate the supply of family homes to the Irish market.

    Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, we started building stuff all over the country where it wasn’t needed. We’ve learned from our mistakes, but we’re building the wrong sort of property in the right place: and this kills me as a capitalist to say it but… stop treating family homes as a commodity that can be traded. It will make the cost of labour very expensive and the country very unproductive.

    Image: ©Daniele Idini

    Cassandra Voices: Would it be possible to gradually stop treating the residential property market as a tradable commodity?

    Ben Hoey: No, I think you have to go back to basics and look at the complete supply chain: who ultimately is the rightful owner? Is it the individual, the government, or is it a commercial operation? And then you’ve got to put the right structure in place. And the funding naturally comes. Everyone looks out to different models such as the Austrian model etc. And they do work, but you can’t just pick and choose bits of them. You’ve got to look at the whole structure, holistically.

    Cassandra Voices: Ultimately it comes down to a vision of the society that we want to live in. And in order to define this we need a political environment that is willing to build an economic system that takes into account the needs of the population at large, and as you said is willing to define, in the first place, what those needs actually are. In the case of the Irish housing markets, the problem doesn’t seem to to be about access to financial resources, but again, who has access to it.

    Ben Hoey: When I was listening to you there, I was thinking about how we got rid of the British landlords in the past, who took the land with the backing of military power. And we’ve replaced them with, private equity, the Vultures who have employed not military power, but their cheap money. If only you knew the pain they go through before they decide to buy or to build. If you watch that pain, that risk mitigation, you realize how naive we are. The governments says build, build, build. But the clever money agonizes before it decides what to do. The Vultures know exactly what they want. But we don’t. So we end up being picked off.

  • Reviving Martin Heidegger’s Dasein – Be-ing

    Before a recent online poetry reading I was invited to meet with other international participants. I assumed the purpose was to gain a little insight into the other writers’ work. In fact, one of the main reasons – I was informed by our overtly gracious American host – was to establish which pronouns we would feel happiest to have ourselves described with.

    It was the first time that I had experienced first-hand the increasingly bizarre world of contemporary gender politics. While the subsequent exchange of pronouns went on its way, I couldn’t help thinking of Martin Heidegger’s radical alternative to Descartes cogito.

    Shortly after the reading I took down again my English translation, a first edition, of Beiträge zur Philosophie ( Vom Ereignis ), written between 1936 and 1938, though not appearing in print in Germany until 1989 – at Heidegger’s insistence thirteen years after his death – and Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ), which was also published posthumously in 1999.

    For the purposes of the present essay, I would like to contrast some of my findings on From Enowning, also known as Of the Event due to a later translation by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (2012), with those of Charles Bambach, who published a book called Heidegger’s Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Cornell University Press, 2003). I believe this may be useful in the context of identity politics today – as illustrated in the anecdote above.

    As I see it, Heidegger’s ideas on Be-ing, along with other useful insights, have been completely railroaded through the excesses of so-called Woke culture. These ideas could have profound implications as we confront contemporary challenges, including climate change.

    Peter O’Neill. Image (c) Victor Dragomiretchi.

    Nazism and Wider Work

    Among the most sinister aspects of contemporary academia is a declining rigor in argument. Thus, for example Heidegger’s undoubted Nazism is being used to undermine all aspects of his work which are simply unparalleled in the context of modern philosophical ideas is. As his former, Jewish, student Hannah Arendt put it:

    The gale that blows through Heidegger’s thinking – like that which still, after thousands of years, blows to us from Plato’s work – is not of our century. It comes from the primordial, and what it leaves behind is something perfect which, like everything perfect, falls back to the primordial.

    In Heidegger’s Roots[1], however, Charles Bambach attempts to demonstrate that the political ideology of the Nazis infects all of Heidegger’s thought, and so, by implication, this thinker can have very little to contribute to society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    I take the case of Bambach here in this essay, but he is just one of many over the last few years who have jumped on the “Heidegger was a Nazi” bandwagon, which may be located within the context of woke ‘cancel culture.’ Against this I argue that if one reads the books Heidegger wrote during the 1930’s – and indeed also during the war – you find his thought has actually nothing to do with Nazi ideology.

    I will be making this case based on two books here, one written in the mid- to late- 1930’s, which I will be referring to as Vom Ereignis/From Enowning[2]; and another from the early 1940’s, at the height of the war as the fate of Stalingrad was being decided, written on the subject of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.[3]

    But let us begin with Bambach in Heidegger’s Roots, who discusses Heidegger’s now infamous Rectoral Address at Freiberg University in 1933, after he had been appointed to the position with the support of the Nazi party. Bambach states that unlike other academics he will actually read the text as a serious piece of philosophical writing, wholly consistent with his Heidegger’s overall contribution to philosophy.

    This is the substance of Bambach’s book: that Heidegger’s politics is an intimate extension of his entire philosophical outlook and that one cannot distinguish between the Nazis and his thought, as they come from the same source. This is a very interesting idea, and Bambach puts up a meticulous case, at least when it comes to this very questionable period in Heidegger’s life and thought.

    Under the Influence

    Even as late as 1935, with the publication of Introduction to Metaphysics[4],  there are still pro-Nazi passages, deeply shocking to read today, revealing the extent to which Heidegger was under the influence of Nazi ideology, and how he tried to use it to promote his own ideas.

    I remember putting this particular book down, despite having been excited by Heidegger’s notions on early Greek thinkers, such as Heraclitus. I simply found the cheap Nazi sentiment really difficult to stomach.

    Bambach is very good when explaining the mood of the times, and the extent to which Heidegger was carried along by Hitler being made Chancellor of Germany, thus legitimating the Nazis as the most powerful party in all of Germany, an idea unthinkable in the 1920’s.

    If other Germans responded to the National Socialist takeover with “a widely held feeling of redemption and liberation from democracy”and felt relief that an incompetent and petty-minded government would no longer be left to solve the profound crisis of the times, Heidegger concerned himself with greater issues. He interpreted the events of early 1933 not as a political transfer of power, but as an epochal shift within being itself, a radical awakening from the slumbers of Weimar politics as usual.[5]

    Two years later, in the summer of 1935, still as Rector of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger, while offering an interpretation of Heraclitus’s fragment number 59 – generally translated as ‘War/conflict is the Father and King of all,’ – claims that ‘along with the German language, Greek (in regard to the possibilities of thinking) is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages.’

    This is just one quote among many peppering a text written in the context of German rearmament that would culminate in World War II, which makes for very unsavoury reading, particularly when considering his standing in German academia.[6]

    Heidegger in 1960.

    Change of Track

    One year later, however, after the Introduction to Metaphysics, in 1936, one meets a radically different text: Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).

    It is as if the book is written by a different author altogether. Gone is the hyperbole. The very register and tone are completely different. But, most importantly, there is no mention of German supremacy. There is no mention of Germany at all!

    Along with Sein und Zeit (1926) or Being and Time, Vom Ereignis or From Enowning (1936) this is the most important of all Heidegger’s texts and the one that he considered the most important of all his books.[7]

    Ten years earlier in Being and Time Heidegger claimed that his task was to ‘destroy’ the history of Ontology, or Western metaphysics as we know it; in other words Descartes cogito  by replacing it with Dasein or Be-ing, in Vom Ereignis/ from enowning/ of the Event. Here Heidegger sets out, for the first time, a philosophical structure in six parts, in which he attempts, using the concept of Be-ing/ Dasein, to return to inceptual Greek thinking.

    This will become the most important concept for Heidegger to put down in writing. Bambach actually acknowledges this shift , but with nothing like the emphasis it deserves.

    The contents of Vom Ereignis/From Enowning/Of the Event retains real significance for us today, particularly considering our current environmental crisis – a crisis even more severe than the one that Heidegger confronted in the 1930s in Nazi Germany; given today we face actual extinction if we do not radically change the way we live as a species (Dasein) on planet Earth.

    Machination

    One of Heidegger’s central concerns with the world of men he expresses in Vom Ereignis is machination. In part two of the book Echo, Heidegger attempts to grasp inceptual historic thinking originating from the Greeks.

    This involves an attempt at recuperating Be-ing which has been abandoned as he sees it, as opposed to following cause and effect metaphysics, which are the result of Christian thinking.

    There are whole passages in this text which are profoundly at odds with Nazi German policy at the time of the book’s composition, and which, frankly, apart from a mere sentence acknowledging this fact, Bambach largely ignores in this his most fundamental work. It is, after all, referred to as ‘the turn’ or the seminal event in his thinking, in which he decisively takes his own path in philosophical thinking, which remains completely unparalleled today.

    One is accustomed to calling the epoch of “civilisation” one of dis-enchantment, and this seems for its part exclusively to be the same as the total lack of questioning. However, it is exactly the opposite. One has only to know from where the enchantment comes. The answer: from the unrestrained domination of machination.[8]

    Notably, at the time of writing, in March and in June 1936, the German army had marched into the Rhineland, and were also supplying General Franco with ‘several formations of Junkers 52’s’.[9]

    The German military was to become one of the most technologically advanced armies in the world. Heidegger was not only critical of this particular phenomenon, but in the same passage, he continues:

    The bewitchment by technicity and its constantly self-surpassing progress are only one sign of this enchantment, by virtue of which everything presses forth into calculation, usage, breeding, manageability, and regulation. Even “taste” now becomes a matter for this regulation, and everything depends on a “good ambiance”.[10]

    Joseph Goebbels views the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

    Degenerate Art

    The Degenerate Art Exhibition (Die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst ) took place from July to November of 1937, while Heidegger was working on his masterwork Vom Ereignis – From Enowning – Of the Event.

    Heidegger’s use of the term ‘bewitchment’ is interesting considering the mesmeric effect Hitler had on the masses at Nurnberg. During the same year, 1937, the ‘Rally of Labour’ was held (Reichsparteitag der Arbeit) in which masses of people converged on the city.

    In the Pathé newsreels of the time you can see the machination of people converging in the stadium. They are marching just like machines. Heidegger repeats the phrase again, even placing it in italics in the text: ‘the epoch of total lack of questioning of all things and of all machinations.’[11] Heidegger did not allow the book to be published for fifty years after its composition. So far, it has been translated into English twice. It is the most extraordinary testament to Martin Heidegger’s thought, as it is a complete break with Western metaphysical thinking.

    Regenerative Ideas

    Having begun this essay with a discussion of the use of pronouns today, in terms of gender identity, I now consider Heidegger’s concept of Dasein or Be-ing in English as an alternative designator for the subject.

    Heidegger is an Aristotelian in his thinking, who views the multiple in the One, Be-ing as representative of all living creatures, regardless of race, sex etc. It is a wonderfully free and natural idea, totally revolutionary in concept, and here is the thing: the majority of people living in the world today have absolutely no sense of the existence of such a rich philosophical idea

    People are far more interested in banging on about an extremely regrettable period in the German thinker’s career. But if we are really serious as a species, in other words if we are really serious about surviving as opposed to going extinct, we had better put such petty notions of self aside, and concentrate instead on regenerative ideas on the way we perceive one another as Dasein.

    Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia – Heraclitus (believed to be Democritus) 1652-53 – Luca Giordano

    Heraclitus

    As stated in the introduction, I want to speak about two of Heidegger’s works. The second book that I turn to is Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos[12] which was originally written at a point when the Wehrmacht met disaster at Stalingrad in 1943.

    One of the first things I noticed was, again, the register or tone of the book. Especially considering when it was written, it is a miraculously peaceful work. None of the posturing that appeared in Introduction to Metaphysics is on display in this book.

    Bambach does not refer to this work as it was only published in English for the first time in 2018. So a period of fifteen years separates the publication of his 2003 book and this second posthumous work.

    My focus here is Heidegger’s beautiful meditation on a god so synonymous with Heraclitus, who is of course Artemis, goddess of the hunt.

    Heidegger refers to fragment number 51 which he translates as, ‘The jointure (namely, the self differentiating) unfolds drawing – back, as shows itself in the image of the bow and lyre.’

    This meditation is taken from the first section of the book, whose title is The Inception of Occidental Thinking. This point is important to underline as it forms a continuum with Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).

    Heidegger sets out in the former work the six ways to inceptual thinking (1. Preview, 2. Echo, 3. Playing Forth, 4. Leap, 5. Grounding and finally 6. The Last God.). He rejects all causality in place of what he defines as inceptual Greek thinking. In other words, pre-Platonic.

    Nietzsche had already made this distinction in his lectures from Basel in the 1870s,[13] so Heidegger was following his former master in many respects. For Heidegger, the elegance of this fragment, contrasting the bow and the lyre, is emblematic of all of Heraclitus’s essential doctrine of unity in opposites.

    Drawing on the laws of attraction, Heidegger uses the terms ‘submerging’ and ‘emerging’ to remarkable effect. He draws out the subtlety of Heraclitus’s thought in his own very particular way through the idea of unconcealment, which for Heidegger is the essence of authentic Greek thinking before Plato.

    At that point truth was emerging from the abiding sway of Be-ing and could only be perceived in the clearing of the mind momentarily, before being obscured again. There is something profoundly sensual about Heidegger’s engagement with the Artemis fragment, and it is a testament to the translators who have managed to capture the wonderful poetry of the meditation throughout the entire work.

    Therefore, she roams, as the huntress, the entirety of what we call ‘nature’. We certainly must not think about the essence of ‘tension’ in modern dynamical and quantitative terms, but rather as the lightened apartness of an expanse that is, at the same time, held together. In emerging, emerging receives the self-concealing in itself, because it can emerge as emerging only out of self-concealing: it draws back into this. [14]

    Again, as in Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ), in Hercalitus, Heidegger departs from the twentieth century and all of its woes – its abandonment of Dasein Be-ing – in order to return to historic thought.

    Image Daniel Idini (c)

    The Turn

    Such is ‘the Turn’ – at least what has become known as ‘the Turn’ – in his thinking. When Heidegger abandoned not only Nazi ideology, at least in the thinking expressed in these books, but also Western metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche. The results are simply extraordinary.

    This is why I feel compelled, living in a world that seems to have abandoned all sense, to critique writers like Charles Bambach, who focus myopically on the very negative elements in Heidegger’s work, but which seems to me much more a part of the man, the lesser part, as distinct from the essential work.

    [1] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s Roots – Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University Press, London, 2003.

    [2] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions from Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999.

    [3] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus – The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, Translated by Julia Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018.

    [4] Heidegger, Martin: Introduction to Metaphysics, New Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press, 2000.

    [5] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University Press, 2003, p.70.

    [6] The German TV miniseries Generation War ( Unsere Mütter, unsere Vätter ) has one of the leading characters mention the possibility of attending a lecture by Heidegger when he gets his leave and he can return to Germany from the Eastern Front. Once can only imagine the very powerful feelings generated in the minds of young Germans who were exposed to such very powerful and interesting ideas, yet which were put to the service of National Socialism.

    [7] In a marginal note of Letter on Humanism, the Editor F.-W. von Hermann notes, that Heidegger wrote the following; “enowning” has been since 1936 the guiding word of my thinking’.

    Heidegger, Martin: Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ) – p.364.

    [8] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p.86.

    [9] Fest, Joachim C.: Hitler, Penguin, Classic Biography, Penguin Books, London, p.500.

    [10] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 87.

    [11] Ibid, p.86

    [12] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus, Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.115.

    [13] Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Translated from the German and Edited, with an Introduction and Commentary, by Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois Press, First Paperback Edition, 2006.

    [14] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus, Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.116.

    Feature Image: German POWs at Stalingrad

  • Irish Housing: Historic Roots of a Crisis

    As a UCD undergraduate I recall Professor Tom Bartlett likening Irish history to a pint of Guinness, ‘with black representing ownership of the land, and the white froth everything else, including all the political movements.’

    Old habits die hard. The issue of property remains a paramount concern. By the year 2004 Ireland’s rate of private home ownership was the highest in the OECD at approximately 82%, a proportion that only declined, to 69% in 2014, after the Crash from 2008, precipitated by reckless lending, often to ‘sub-prime’ borrowers. This reflects the ongoing effect of a global financialisation of property as a speculative asset from the 1980s, leading to the exclusion of a substantial proportion of a younger generation from home ownership across most of Europe, North America and beyond.

    Ireland’s housing crisis is a special case however. In order to understand its long term causes – Dublin is now the most expensive city in the euro area primarily due to staggeringly high rents – it is necessary to explore an historic relationship with land, arising out of a colonial experience. This has brought an economy where the land grabber reigns ascendant.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Urbanisation

    A nation derives characteristics from its relationship to the land it inhabits. Over recent centuries, in Ireland, as elsewhere, mass urbanisation, disproportionately directed at Dublin, has occurred, but we have built our cities on historical patterns of land ownership.

    There are two defining, and intertwining, legacies of the Irish relationship to property that have seeped into the broader culture. The first is the impact of English colonisation, in particular the Plantations, beginning in the sixteenth century, and the subsequent partial de-colonisation through the Land Acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    The second is the dominance of pastoral, livestock agriculture, particularly since the late nineteenth century under a system of individual land ownership – as opposed to treating property as a collective patrimony under Brehon Law in Gaelic Ireland.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    It is incorrect to assume cattle-farming has always been the dominant form of agriculture in Ireland. Since the first human settlements emphasis has swung back and forth between tillage and pasture; and in earlier centuries cattle were kept for domestic milk production rather than to produce a (beef) commodity for export.

    Moreover, the introduction of the wonder crop of the potato from the seventeenth century created a novel opportunity for subsistence on small holdings, bringing marginal land into cultivation for the first time. Although, ominously, according to John Reader in The Untold Story of the Potato (2008), ‘the innocent potato has facilitated exploitation wherever it has been introduced and cultivated.’ It acted like cheap credit in generating a ready source of subsistence on small parcels of land, but the potato cannot be preserved for a long period like grain so cannot easily be traded, thereby impeding development.

    Over time, the impact of Irish agriculture, especially extensive grazing, on Ireland’s nature has been profound. According to Frank Mitchell in Reading the Irish Landscape (1997): ‘from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape.’ This left a mere twelve per cent woodland coverage by the 1400s, before the most intense period of colonisation at the end of the eighteenth century when a poet lamented:

    Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad? / Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár;
    Now what will we do for timber, / With the last of the woods laid low?

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Today among EU countries only Luxembourg has lower coverage, and much of our woodland is in the form of sitka spruce plantations that further degrade the land, while offering little scope for biodiversity.

    The sixteenth and seventeenth century Plantations trapped an overwhelmingly Catholic peasantry, denuded of a departed upper stratum of Gaelic society, in a Malthusian grip that culminated in the Famine.

    Portrait of Seán Ó Faoláin by Howard Coster, 1930’s

    Describing the acquisition of annual leases by small farmers, who had previously held land in common under the Brehon Law system, Seán O’Faoláin wrote in The Irish (1947): ‘The thirst for security is, above all things, the great obsession of the peasant mind. And, in a long view, a deceptive obsession.’ Security of tenure under the new dispensation was illusory, as land became an asset to be bought and sold, rather than a collective patrimony.

    Trade conditions shifted in the nineteenth century. The raising of cattle, often exported ‘on the hoof’ to England for eventual slaughter, began to enjoy a comparative advantage over tillage as the British discovered cheaper sources of grain after Napoleon’s blockade ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Henceforth, the cheap labour of the Irish peasantry – a substantial proportion unconnected to the market economy – were an anachronism to the British administration in Ireland.

    The Famine (1845-1851) was, according to Charles Trevelyan the architect of Britain’s response ‘a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence’, which laid bare ‘the deep and inveterate root of social evil.’ Anticipating the Shock Doctrine, the Famine, he declared, was:

    the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected… God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part…

    Wood engraving, 1886. cc Library of Congress

    Strong Farmers

    The Famine was a catalyst for change that brought about the dominance of cattle agriculture, increasingly under the native so-called Strong Farmer. The key point about this mode of production was (and is) that profitability depends on a low labour input. It made no sense for numerous sons and daughters to remain on the land, and so the tsunami of emigration that formed during the Famine gave way to steady migratory waves. Over the long term this brought precipitous population decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

    As Joseph Connolly put it in his Labour in Irish History (1910): ‘Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places.’

    This process should not, however, be attributed solely to remote authorities in Westminster working on behalf of absentee landlords, as is commonly assumed. Significant gains were made by Catholic Irish farmers holding farms above twenty acres. As Kerby A. Miller wrote in The Atlas of the Great Famine (2012): ‘an unknown but surely very large proportion of Famine sufferers were not evicted by Protestant landlords but by Catholic strong and middling farmers, who drove off their subtenants and cottiers, and dismissed their labourers and servants, both to save themselves from ruin and to consolidate their own properties.’

    As Ireland did not witness an Industrial Revolution, except in the North-East corner, this shift from tillage to pasture led to unprecedented population decline. Ireland is perhaps the only substantial country in the world with a lower population now than in the 1840s, when the population stood at almost nine million. In the same period the global population has increased seven-fold.

    National Independence

    The struggle for Irish independence was taken up by Strong Farmers, a comprador class selling their primary products on the Imperial market, who emerged with enlarged holdings after land clearances, to become the dominant faction of an overwhelming Catholic ‘nation’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Through a succession of legislative measures, culminating in Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903, the British administration sought, but failed, to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’, allowing tenants to obtain freeholds over much of the country.

    This allowed their sons to set about dominating local government, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and later Sinn Féin. This cohort entered the professions, established a National University in 1908 (Maynooth University had also been established in 1796) and eventually won an independent state in 1922, wedded to an individualist and competitive approach to land, in contrast to collaborative arrangements typically associated with tillage, including the Clachan settlements of pre-Famine Ireland. The first Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan (in office from 1922-32), was a cattle farmer, and duly aligned the national interest with the economic fortunes of his ‘grazier’ class.

    After independence in 1922, pastoral Strong Farmers continued to sell mostly cattle onto the Imperial market, notwithstanding the aspiration of idealists like Robert Barton, the first Director of Agriculture (1919-21), for a reversion to more labour-intensive tillage for domestic consumption; except, that is, for a period in the 1930s and 1940s when national survival demanded increased focus on growing subsistence crops.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Individualist Outlook

    The outlook of the peasant-pastoralist has informed our laws and values since the inception of the State, spreading from rural Ireland into an increasingly urbanized society. As O’Faoláin put it:

    we have seen the common folk of Ireland rise like a beanstalk out of the Revolution of 1922 and, for a generation, their behaviour was often very unpleasant to watch.

    The arrival of mechanisation in the Green Revolution after World War II put tillage at a further disadvantage as, despite enjoying among the highest global yields, high levels of precipitation and humidity make Irish-grown cereals, apart from oats, unsuited to mechanised harvesting. The traditional method of ‘bindering’ – drying the harvest over months in stacks – became uncompetitive due to high labour inputs, and so the population drain form rural Ireland continued.

    Moreover, since the 1970s price supports from the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy have reduced flexibility and dynamism in land use, by inflating values as farmers were guaranteed payments, even on poor land, without adequately addressing the associated population drain.

    Legal Protections

    As the sons and daughters of peasant-proprietors migrated to cities, especially Dublin, Ireland’s politics of clientelism embodied in the two main political parties took hold. An urban population with roots in raising livestock prizes land as an asset from which profit is derived, as opposed to a situation where crops are cultivated for the family table and traded within the community.

    An inherited skill in deal-making was readily applied to urban development, which is also reflected in strict judicial interpretations of private property, allowing enterprising developers to make a killing. Thus, State institutions have favoured the landed interest over the property-less, in a troubling reminder of a bygone era.

    In 1973 the Kenny Report recommended that land around the hinterland of Dublin should be compulsorily purchased by local authorities for 25% more than its agricultural value. According to Frank McDonald, the former Environment Correspondent of the Irish Times, Dr Garret FitzGerald, a member of the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government that received the report could not remember why it wasn’t acted upon. ‘It just slid off the agenda’ he said, and no subsequent government acted upon it. McDonald said that ‘Ostensibly, the reason for this was that Kenny – a constitutional lawyer himself – had proposed something that would be unconstitutional. But no attempt was made to test this in the courts.’

    That was until Part V of the Planning Act 2000. This was referred to the Supreme Court which held that the acquisition of land for social and affordable housing did not offend against the Constitution. Unfortunately, however, that provision did little to ameliorate the housing crisis during the Celtic Tiger as developers evaded responsibility by paying over sums to local authorities, and successive Ministers watered down the provisions.

    The reluctance of politicians to implement the Kenny Report reflected a genuine fear that any such provision would fall foul of the Court, which has tended to vindicate a constitutional right to property under Articles 40.3.2 and 43.1.2 over competing interests of renters to security of tenure or a controlled rent.

    Thus, in 1981 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional attempts to introduce rent controls under The Housing (Private Rented Dwellings) Bill, while the wide scope of Article 45 has been given little attention.

    This reflects a sectional bias as the common good (to which all constitutional rights are subject) should allocate a reasonable prospect of basic accommodation to all permanent residents.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Unenumerated Rights

    The idea of an ‘unenumerated’ Constitutional right – in that instance a right to bodily Integrity – was first identified by the same Justice Kenny in his landmark High Court judgment of Ryan v Attorney General (1965). A right to adequate shelter may also be unenumerated. For instance, Kenny’s seminal Ryan judgment cited the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) which states that: ‘every man has the right to bodily integrity, and to the means which are necessary and suitable for the proper development of life. These means are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care and finally the necessary services.’ Yet the Court has avoided vindicating a basic human right to adequate shelter.

    Now, underpinned by legal and political deference to the property interest, we see huge swathes of land and buildings that have been left fallow in urban areas: a 2016 report in The Dublin Inquirer identified at least 389 derelict sites. We are unaccustomed to urban density, or community developments, except as a sign of poverty – with the 1930s schemes of Herbert Simms a rare and inspiring exception. Strict demarcation between properties, and a lack of community spaces, may be interpreted as a legacy of extensive cattle-rearing for the imperial market.

    Furthermore, the sons and daughters of nineteenth century pastoralists, accustomed to low-density living with few neighbours on the horizon, sought distance from their neighbours, and the assurance of owning a motor car. This accounts for the sprawl, and prevalence of needless boundary walls, in Irish suburbia; as well as a preference for one-off housing.

    The commercial culture can also be linked to the pastoral outlook. It is revealing that few successful Irish businesspeople have been technological innovators. Rather, success has been built on buying low and selling high, just as a cattle farmer buys a calf and seeks to sell him at a higher price – the entrepreneur Tony Ryan was quoted as saying ‘you make your profit the day you buy.’ Thus developers often purchase land at a low price and sit on this until financial conditions improve. The Irish dream is built on living off the fat of the land, creating conditions to the liking of the vulture and cuckoo funds our government now accommodates.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Historic Failings

    No Western economy experienced growth, at least in the period 1995-2007, comparable to that of the Celtic Tiger, but this was achieved, at least in part, through the availability of cheap, and ultimately ruinous, loans, by unscrupulous bankers. But like the wonder crop of the potato, these loans generated ultimately ruinous growth.

    Failure of both property and potatoes emanated from America. In the case of the Famine it was the dreaded blight, phytophthora infestans, which first blackened the leaves and then reduced the crop to inedible mush. The pin that burst the Irish property bubble, a large boil on a global wart, was marked with another American sign, that of the ruinous Lehman Brothers. Both the potato blight and subprime mortgages afflicted other countries, but perhaps nowhere as severely as Ireland.

    The austerity that followed may be likened to the extreme Shock Doctrine practised by Charles Trevelyan, while the feeding frenzy that occurred through NAMA recalls the land-grabbing in the wake of the Famine.

    In order to address Ireland’s Housing Crisis we must face up to the sins of our fathers, including an enduring bias in favour of strict individual ownership preached by the two main political parties in government, as well as the judiciary.

    A version of this article appeared in Village Magazine.

    Title Image: House in proximity to Dog’s Bay, Connemara. ©Daniele Idini

  • Corporate Social Responsibility

    A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business”
    Henry Ford.

    “Improving Employee Wellbeing”. “Creating Social Good”. “Sustainable Procurement and Consumption”. “Fair Pay for Fair Work”.

    These are just some of the slogans used by people talking about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR, hereafter), which refers to practices benefitting society at large, or developing a fair and transparent working environment.

    The ‘people-planet-profit’ (3P or Triple Bottom Line) concept also falls within this ambit. It has been of great interest to businesses since the 1980s.

    However, Milton Friedman once said ‘the business of business is business’ and rightly so in many regards, since the primary objective and also the responsibility of a business is to survive as a profitable entity, regardless of how socially responsible (or irresponsible) it is.

    Nonetheless, one of the commonly ignored aspects of his work is that he added, “…shareholders want to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society”, and this brings the wider society into context.

    Friedman’s classic work on the ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits gained significant traction throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but clearly the ideal situation is where a business is both profitable and also meet the needs of other stakeholders. This creates a ‘win-win’ scenario, in addition to ensuring business sustainability in the long run.

    Defining Corporate Social Responsibility

    CSR can be viewed as a form of business self-regulation with the aim of being socially accountable and – to more cynical – being seen as a ‘good’ social entity. We live in a conscientious and environmentally aware society, where employees, customers, suppliers, and civil society in general, places significant weight on choosing and supporting organisations that prioritise CSR. CSR is also a way for companies to measure and control their impact on society.

    CSR can be also be perceived as demonstrating how a business can be organised in a particular way that could empower them to act in a socially responsible way. So, indeed again, it could be seen as a form of self-regulation that could manifest in say, social or environmental initiatives or strategies, without compromising organisational goals and agreed stakeholder objectives.

    CSR does not have to be a distraction from a company’s main goal, and instead could aim simply at aligning a company’s social and environmental activities with its purpose and values. Many examples in recent years show that CSR activities can mitigate risks, enhance reputations, and even contribute to the bottom line.

    Contributions via CSR initiatives, therefore, can be both positive and negative (also known as externalities) to the economy, environment, and wider civil society.

    There is increasing realisation among business leaders that companies should not choose to be driven solely and exclusively by profit, and that they have a responsibility to do what’s right, not only for shareholders but also to hit the Triple Bottom Line, i.e., people, planet, and global civil society.

    Typically, CSR list four categories of responsibilities that organisations can cater for: environmental, ethical, philanthropic, and economic. Now we have examples of companies that rebranded themselves as B Corporation (B Corps), social purpose corporations (SPCs), low-profit limited liability companies (L3Cs), and a variety of ‘green companies’.

    Creating Social Good

    Research by Cone communication has shown that over 60% of US citizens expect businesses to participate in social and environmental change in the absence of government regulation. Interestingly, about 90% of surveyed consumers said that they would purchase a product because a company supported a social cause or environmental challenge that personally appeal to them.

    These initiatives could many forms, including: proactive environmental efforts (e.g., reducing carbon footprints, recycling innovation, managing e-waste); funding philanthropy (e.g., Tom Shoes whose slogan is ‘one for one’, whereby they donate one-third of net profits to various charities, supporting physical and mental health); ensuring ethical labour practices, i.e. treating employees fairly and ethically, including employment outsourced in the supply chain; or finally, through volunteering. Thus, how Vodafone World of Difference Challenge has assisted community development in most parts of the world already.

    There is an important caveat. While CSR may help brand the image of a company, if this does not come from a genuine moral conviction or altruism it can easily backfire, and lead to accusation of hypocrisy. So any approach has to be embedded in the core of what any company is doing.

    Examples of CSR initiatives creating ‘social good’

    An early ‘good’ CSR initiative was one taken up by Starbucks when they secured the ‘Fair Trade foundation’ certification. Thereafter all of their products had the Fair-Trade logo (resembling the Chinese ‘ying-yang’ sign) on them, this logo insists that farmers and everyone else in their supply chain are all paid fairly and are free from illegal exploitation.

    Starbucks remains the largest purchaser of fair-trade-certified coffee, globally. Fair-Trade initially started as a social movement, saying their goal was ‘to help producers in developing countries achieve better trading conditions and to promote sustainability.’

    For businesses, it is a matter of being fully aware of their responsibilities towards the society as much as being about delivering value for business and society via creating social, environmental, or economic (similar to people-planet-profit) benefits, thereby ensuring the sustainability of a company.

    Interestingly, most of the business CSR initiatives these days are connected to SDGs or the global development goals. This could be about ensuring good health and well-being through a work-life balance, safety at the workplace, or supporting mental health of employees.

    Amongst other approaches are: decent work and economic growth (i.e. global goal 8), particularly in reference to the sharing or ‘gig’ economy. where the workers are not considered to be ‘employees’ and therefore not guaranteed benefits or entitlements; Responsible consumption and production (i.e. global goal 12), which does connect back to the Starbucks example, and also how certain University campuses in the US were terming ‘fair trade’ universities where students and academic faculty would only buy and consume products labelled fair-trade.

    Also, we have partnership for goals (i.e., global goal 17) where newer forms of institutional arrangements are created and sustained, moving on from the generic public-private partnership models, towards more inclusive and innovative ways of actor engagement via public-private-people partnerships.

    Build it and they will come…

    Lego has invested a fortune in addressing climate change, developing alternative energy usage, and reducing waste. Since this is also a part of the company’s philosophy, Lego’s environmentally conscious moves include reduced packaging, and also the use of sustainable materials.

    This is somewhat similar to Ben & Jerry’s, whose core goals have always revolved around supporting local dairy farmers and investing in the community where they have operations.

    Johnson & Johnson, another familiar brand, focuses heavily on reducing its environmental impact by investing in various renewable energy sources. At the global level, they also work towards providing cleaner and safer water to communities.

    Proctor and Gamble (P&G) is another example since their development of the two laundry products, Ariel and Tide, were sourced based on identifying environmental problems. Their research demonstrated that the most significant environmental impact that our laundry has is the energy used to heat the water in washing machines. 90% of the energy in a load of wash is expended on heating water, contributing to about two-thirds of all the greenhouse gas emissions in the Tide lifecycle. So, they developed products that could easily use cold water for washing, thereby reducing the total carbon emissions significantly as well as helping to save up to $150 a year on household energy bills.

    At the same time, it is not so much what the companies do, e.g. becoming environmentally friendly or ‘going green’ in its operations, it also about helping to generate a sufficient amount of awareness across society. For example, through adverts around packaging of P&G’s product Ariel would inform customers how to save energy by turning down the washing temperature on washing machines to thirty degrees Celsius.

    Similarly, Plan A by Marks and Spencer (M&S) has the goal of building a sustainable future by enabling their customers to have a positive impact on wellbeing, communities and also the planet through everything (process and product) that the company does. For example, in spring 2021 they launched their most sustainable denim range that was made using 86% less water, kinder chemicals and 100% responsibly sourced cotton. During the pandemic, the company distributed more than 11.8 million meals to those most in need and also raised £8.3m for NHS Charities Together in the UK through their M&S rainbow sale.

    No Longer Optional

    In recent years, however, companies cannot brag about ‘good’ practices and their ‘greenwashing’ philosophy anymore since the EU has now developed product requirements criterion; an environmental policy audit system for organisations; and EMAS certification, as a way of governing progress and control of eco-management.

    So, what was considered to be a ‘proactively good’ social action by a company is now somewhat mandatory by law. For example, the EU’s principles for global trade and sustainable development, development of sustainable development criteria and CSR in individual trade agreements can impact sustainability assessments of trade deals.

    Over the years, however, there has been numerous scandals around ‘brand image’. Among the questions we should be asking of businesses would be: What does a good corporate citizen mean? Is ‘profit’ a dirty word?  How much should society pick up the ‘external’ business costs such as pollution?  Does society really care about ‘fair trade’ or getting a good value in price and quality suffice?  How are ethical decisions made by businesses?

    Another important issue is how we address all these questions before jumping to conclusions based on subjective judgment and at times, situational ethics.

    Cases of workers exploitation, harsh working conditions, paying a wage that is lower than the statutory minimum wage are plentiful. From the customers’ perspective, organisations are not always transparent and honest. A plethora of issues include: false labelling, misleading pricing, quality differentiation, misleading information on packaging and advertising, and in worst cases, dumping products.

    Greenwashing

    The term ‘greenwashing’ was coined in 1980s by Jay Westervelt, which essentially means companies either misleading consumers about the green or environmentally-responsible credentials of a product or service, or misleading consumers about the environmental performance of the company.

    Then the question turns to whether companies ‘should’ tell customers everything. Corporate Governance plays a huge role in determining whether a school of thought that dismisses CSR altogether dominates.

    There is also a widespread assumption that businesses cannot be trusted, and that terms such as ‘sustainability’ or ‘community development’ are meaningless concepts for multinationals. It is interesting that the two key contrasting views that we come up with when reviewing CSR comes from two individuals, Milton Friedman and Edward Freeman.

    Briefly, Milton Friedman believed that businesses need to simply keep their shareholders and business owners satisfied, while Edward Freeman believed that businesses should be run for the benefit of all stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, civil society, government amongst many others).

    Stakeholders vs Shareholders

    The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham once opined that ‘action is best that produces the greatest good for the greatest number’.

    In the context of CSR, it is also a matter of fact that satisfying different stakeholders while maintaining profit isn’t everything, the idea of ‘contractarianism’ is equally relevant which is when no action by a business should cause uncompensated harm to ‘anyone’ else. So, it is also about the rights and responsibilities of a business. This is clearly not a black and white area, although dismissing CSR may seem an easy idea.

    For example, every stakeholder wants a ‘good deal’ for themselves. Employees want good pay, customers want value for money, suppliers expect a decent contract and fair prices. But this leads to inevitable friction. While customers want low prices, employees expect good wages. However, good wages lead to higher costs, thereby increasing the price of the products, which ultimately makes a customer unhappy.

    Similarly, suppliers want a good price for their supplies, which again could lead to higher costs (e.g. Starbucks works with the Fair-Trade Foundation), while a high price could leave a customer unhappy. Whether we take the example of a multinational or an SME, these challenges are common and unavoidable while also illustrating that a business cannot possibly satisfy all stakeholders. Therefore, the question becomes what CAN a business do?

    Three options, are possible: deliberately ignore all stakeholders, except shareholders, and go ‘flat-out’ for profit; pretend to take account of stakeholders and still go all out for maximum profit (e.g., ‘greenwashing’); engage with stakeholders and balance their ‘aspirations’ while not losing sight of profit.

    Bad Actions…

    Foxconn has been in the news with CSR scandals for over two decades now, particularly for violating employment laws.

    The company used to make Apple products in China and more recently Amazon’s Echo Smart Speakers and Kindle Devices. However, there have been reports of workers in hazardous factories run by Foxconn who are given sick or holiday pay. They can also be fired without notice during lulls in production. 40% of the staff that Foxconn used in their factories are ‘agency staff’ or ‘dispatch workers’. Those who worked overtime were paid at the normal hourly rate, which is illegal since both under Chinese law and even Amazon’s supplier code of conduct says that workers should receive time and half rate for such work.

    Foxconn has a history of worker exploitation, witnessed after a wave of workers committing suicide back in 2010, when Apple used to heavily outsource their manufacturing of iPhone and iPad to them. Besides, wage and worker exploitation, Foxconn also had serious factory accidents where workers died of electric shock in 2011, and also a factory explosion that killed four people and injured eighteen others in the same year.

    On top of that there have been frequent employee riots, use of underage (from as low as eight years-of-age) and illegal workers, along with violation of local laws. All of which has been to reduce costs.

    More recently, the company had invested in robotic technology to replace workers in manufacturing and to tackle the diminishing trust in the company name.  At some level we (as customers) should also wonder, how much and how badly do we really have to use the products of these giant companies such as Amazon and Apple?

    Just Do It?

    Similarly with Nike, 593,468 hours of overtime work went unpaid between 2010-2012 in Indonesia, which sent shockwaves through the Indonesian labour movement. Eventually after strikes and negotiations, Nike agreed to pay off $1 million to about 4,500 workers at a Nike plant in Serang, Banten in Indonesia.

    Again, there is nothing new about Nike’s labour exploitation and maintenance of sweatshops since the 1970s. From the early 1990s reports were flooding in detailing poor wages, child labour, and harsh working conditions in Nike’s outsourced factories (called ‘sweatshops’).

    After initially shrugging its shoulders, Nike said it was up to the outsourced parties. But subsequently, as the brand suffered, the company started auditing their factories for occupational health and safety. Their ‘bad reputation’ as an employer made them go to greater lengths than usual, while competitors adopted similar procedures.

    In the mid-2000s, several ‘anti-sweatshop’ groups were established, and at Brown University, Nike had to pull out of a contract with the Women’s ice hockey team after a student activist group demanded the company establish an ethical code of conduct. Similar cases occurred between 2010 and 2016 in Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and China, while at the same time the community activities on these matters became stronger, through fair labour associations and workers’ rights consortiums which exposed how child labour represented 70-80% of their workforce.

    Further examples can be drawn from fast fashion companies such as Zara, H&M, Gap, Primark, who all adopted exploitative labour practices at one time or another.

    Balancing Priorities

    Multinationals mentioned in this article are major players in our economies. Many multinationals have exploited workers or like Google, Coca Cola, and Starbucks systematically exploited tax loopholes across the world over the years. Of course many of these companies have simultaneously done some ‘social good’ with their CSR or ‘responsible image’ campaigns. This makes any assessment of the role of CSR difficult and prevents us from drawing definitive conclusions, such as that multinationals are inherently bad, or perform a social good that may be a part of the company’s culture.

    CSR activities can be designed in such a way as to align with the companies’ business purpose, the values of the companies’ key stakeholders, while identifying the local or glocal needs that the company (local or global) can serve in a particular community where they have their operations, among other considerations.

    Thus, for example, in countries that lack sufficient government funding for public health, business organisations can step in with philanthropic funding to develop clean water and sanitation. A strategic CSR can still create various levels of continued ‘win-win/s’ for a company, its wider list of stakeholders, and the community.

  • Czech Intellectuals: Kafka and Kundera

    I was briefly a Professor of Law and International Relations at the Anglo-American University in Prague, near where the Jewish, German-speaking Kafka was born and raised.

    Before arriving, I had acquired a superficial knowledge of the main sights, which are somewhat deceptive and largely unrewarding in that rich tapestry of a city – of which it has been written that by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘deprived of political significance, abandoned by the aristocracy, commercially and industrially backward, [it] had the feeling of an industrial city, suffused by the elegiac atmosphere of a glorious past.’[i]

    Apart from heavy industry – the Czech Republic retains a glorious rail infrastructure – the Prague of that period can be likened to Dublin in the wake of the 1801 Act of Union, after which it fell into terminal decline. And, indeed, Arne Novak’s description of the Czech national temperament might apply to the Irish literati: ‘continually fluctuating between two poles: on the one hand a self-righteous over-estimation of everything native, with a stubborn clinging to ancient privileges; on the other hand, impatient curiosity about the latest foreign literary fashions, and a readiness for slavish imitation.’[ii]

    Nonetheless both nations, dominated by two cultural blocks – the British Empire and the European Catholic Church in the case of the Irish; Germany or Austria and Russia or the Soviet Union in the case of the Czechs – have produced literary titans, who have railed as much against native subservience as against colonial usurpers.

    Thus, in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) Stephen Daedalus calls himself ‘the servant of two masters,’ indicting ‘The imperial British state’ and ‘the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church’, while Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1923), also written in the shadow of the Great War, remains one of the great anti-war novels.

    In this article I focus on two Czechs authors, the aforementioned Franz Kakfa, and Milan Kundera whose response in different epochs, to imperialist oppression, provide important insights for contemporary challenges.

    Prague Spring

    It is in Prague’s shadowy labyrinth of side streets, with a rich diversity of specialist shops and bookstores – fast disappearing from other urban conurbations – that one finds the real gems. Apart from brief excursions, my knowledge of the Czech Republic had mostly been gleaned from cinema and literature of a society that has endured the evils of both Nazism and Communism, while managing to preserve its civilisation.

    This rich inheritance can be found in the gloriously satirical 1960s films of Milos Foreman such as ‘The Fireman’s Ball’, which provides an anatomy of the soul of man under Communism.

    Milan Kundera 1929-

    More importantly, there is the contemporary work of that most deserving living candidate for the Nobel Prize, the Czech writer, Milan Kundera. His novels are a crash course in uninhibited eroticism, vastly different culturally to an Irish sensibility. They offer textbook exercises in a form of European decadence alien to the repressive Irish mindset, and our smutty obsession with sexual activity – not undivorced, I believe, from the extremities of sexual perverted crimes that dominate newspaper headlines in an increasingly hedonistic society.

    Kundera’s novels, in translation at least, are written in an elegant lapidary style. There is a lot of dark laughter in those books, not unlike the Irish lachrymose sense of humour and despair, found in Flann O’ Brien especially.

    One such example is Kundera’s exposition on litost, ‘an untranslatable Czech word’, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

    Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog. As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it…

    Kundera expands on its meaning by way of anecdote.

    She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to give her athletic instincts a few moments’ free rein and headed for the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student [the boy] made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost. He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in physical exercise and friends and spent under the constant gaze of his mother’s overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life. They walked back to the city together in silence on a country road. Wounded and humiliated, he felt an irresistible desire to hit her.…and then he slapped her face.

    His most prescient points concern historical amnesia and the onset of tyranny. As he put it: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’

    Forgetting

    The internet and social media are fast becoming a tool of forgetting or non-remembrance through the deluge of unfiltered information. The greatest area of amnesia is the subject that Milan Kundera dedicated his career to preserving, namely the horrors of Communism, which finds strange echoes in our current transition from neoliberalism to neoconservatism.

    The ‘Liberation’ of Prague by Soviet Forces in 1945.

    Kundera described what passed for public discourse under Communism as political kitsch in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This emanates from an aesthetic ideal ‘in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist’. ‘Kitsch’, he argued, ‘is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.’

    It is the dream scenario of the spin doctor where the press is utterly compliant. He gives the example of politicians kissing babies as an obvious expression political of kitsch.

    In Kundera’s view political kitsch is not dangerous in itself, and most politicians cultivate a clean-cut, artificial, image. The real danger lies in totalitarian kitsch such as that encountered by the character of Sabina, who recalls the Communist parades of her youth, which projected an idealised vision of the worker removed from the corruption, suspicion and cruelty that infected her society. Indeed, it was said in Czechoslovakia that love for one’s family required theft in the course of one’s professional life.

    Kundera contrasts what looks suspiciously like de-platforming, or cancel culture, with the plurality of voices that he believed still lay in Western democracies:

    Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality. The artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

    It begs the question whether the Internet has reawakened this “totalitarian kitsch.”

    Air-brushed from History

    In the same work Kundera describes a moment in Prague in 1948 amidst heavy snow in which the bareheaded Communist leader Klement Gottwald, while giving a speech in Wenceslas Square, was handed a hat by his comrade Vladimír Clementis. Four years later Clementis was purged – charged with treason on trumped up charges and hanged. The propaganda section literally airbrushed him out of history by removing him from the photograph that is the title image for this article. Ever since Gottwald has stood on that balcony in splendid isolation.

    Where Clementis once stood, there is thus only a bare wall. All that remains of him is the cap on Gottwald’s head. Similarly, to get rid of an enemy today, you do not have to prove anything against them. Instead, you use the internet or family courts, or indeed a compliant media, to generate conflicting accusations and contradictory data. You sow confusion to elevate hatred and fear until that enemy is either banned from social media, their history re-written or erased from the minds of millions through smear, disposal and, in fact, apathy.

    If the struggle of man is the struggle of memory against forgetting, as Kundera put it, then we have in the cacophony of the internet a vast machine for forgetting. One that is building a new society upon the shallow, shifting sands of what Gore Vidal described as the United States of Amnesia.

    Of huge relevance to our times, Kundera said:

    The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what, it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

    It is like a clairvoyant presaging our times. A pre-Facebook comment on our age of gnat-like attention spans. A world of amnesia and the distortion of history; of canned laughter and forgetting.

    Václav Havel in 1965.

    Kundera’s only modern contemporary intellectual equal, the former President of the Czech Republic Václav Havel issued a similar warning in his seminal political essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1978). The then dissident playwright and philosopher argued that empowerment requires us to ‘live in truth,’ which means facing up to the uncomfortable reality that we are not solely victims of the political and economic order we live under, but sometimes also enablers who play into its myths and cover up its lies.

    We turn the lies into truth and come to believe it is the only way to get through; the only way to survive in what we are told again and again is a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world. In a reappraisal at the end of his tenure, Havel observed how neoliberalism had created similar social dynamics to Communism.

    Franz Kafka as a young man.

    Kafkaesque

    Despite writing in German, Franz Kafka reigns supreme as the writer par excellence of Prague. He now resides like an all-enveloping spirit in Prague. In the Jewish quarter there is a rather modernist statue of him; his visage and silhouette adorn mugs and t-shirts in every tatty tourist shop. There is also an expensive and rather uninformative Kafka Museum, and a bookshop in his name.

    Above all else, there is his former house near the Castle, down from the narrow Jewish mile road. His house, now converted into a museum, is not that dissimilar to the two bedroomed artisan houses near the Four Courts in Dublin.

    Apart from writing in German, Kafka was Jewish, giving him an outsider status in the Czech Republic; historically an uncomfortable position – though not anything like as bad as it was in Poland – to be in.

    While living in Prague, it was an immense surprise to find how Germania had been expurgated from Czech culture after the War. The Czechs now speak English primarily, and Russian occasionally, despite being enveloped by German speaking territories. Still, they venerate Kafka and why not.

    Legal Conformism

    Part of my own adoration of Kafka comes from training to be a lawyer, and an expression used in a case that has dogged and at times unsettled my career: Gilligan v Ireland. (1997).

    The expression I used a ‘Kafkaesque situation’ arrived impromptu to describe what was happening, although I was aware that other Irish judges, particularly Cathal O’Dalaigh had used a similar phrase.

    In a legal context the expression conveys a situation of labyrinthian complexity, absurdity, and perversity: one where the law is traduced by procedure and injustice and has become – to use common parlance – an ass.

    Franz Kafka did not find the study of law to be an edifying experience. Indeed, according to one account cited by the legal scholar Robin West, he found it ‘had the intellectual excitement of chewing sawdust that had been pre-chewed by thousands of other mouths.’

    In Authority, Autonomy, and Choice: The Role of Consent in the Moral and Political Visions of Franz Kafka and Richard Posner (1985), Robin West argues that in Kafka’s world law is alienating and excessively authoritarian, exerting in people a craving for conformity. Students have an urge to conform or obey the law. She argues:

    Kafka’s world is populated by excessively authoritarian personalities. Kafka’s characters usually do what they do – go to work in the morning, become lovers, commit crimes, obey laws, or whatever – not because they believe that by doing so, they will improve their own wellbeing but because they have been told to do so and crave being told to do so.

    Plaque marking the birthplace of Franz Kafka in Prague.

    She contrasts this negative view of the law, with the view that it facilitates the maximization of one’s own welfare, which is presented by the right-wing law and economics scholar Richard Posner:

    Whereas Posner’s characters relentlessly pursue autonomy and personal wellbeing, Kafka’s characters just as relentlessly desire, need and ultimately seek out authority.

    Further, West points out that although both Kafka and Posner see people as consenting to the various transactions they enter, for Kafka, such consent can lead to humiliating and degrading employment, sex and even death. This point is not expressly made by West, but this may be familiar to readers of The Trial. For Posner, such consent is rational and self-fulfilling. For Kafka, such consent leads to victimization.

    West thus posits a conclusion from Kafka on consensual market transactions which is far from positive:

    In all these market transactions – commercial, employment, and sexual – Kafka portrays one part consenting to a transfer of power over that party’s body, and in each instance the transfer, although consensual, is horrifying. In none of Kafka’s depictions does consent entail an increase in wellbeing … The participants are often motivated by a desire to submit to authority, not to enhance autonomy, and in each case, the authoritarian relationship they create proves to be a damaging one.

    Moreover, West examines the question of consent to law in Kafka. According to Posner, people consent to legal imperatives that are wealth maximizing. According to Kafka, they consent to impersonal state imperatives not because of wealth maximization but out of a deep-seated desire for judgment and punishment. Or one might add compliance.

    ‘The Judgment’ and ‘The Refusal’        

    Thus, in Kafka’s short story ‘The Judgment’, a son submits to death by drowning as his father has decreed. And in another short story ‘The Refusal’, the townspeople obey the colonel in charge of the town because authority has ‘just come about,’ and submit to his various denials of their petitions.

    The most dramatic example of this submission to authority is of course in The Trial, where Joseph K is arrested without having ever done anything wrong. He never learns the nature of the charges laid against him; he is arrested but not imprisoned; interrogated but never forced to appear; yet in time he passively accepts the jurisdiction of the court and the law’s authority, which results ultimately in his own death sentence.

    Finally, West relies upon the short parable ‘The Problem of our Laws’, in which Kafka informs us that law is ultimately sustained, not by force but by the craving of the governed for judgement by lawful, noble authority. It is this human craving, even more than the urge of the powerful to dominate, that sustains the illusion of certainty, fairness, generality, and justice.

    In conclusion, West derives the message from Kafka that:

    Our tendency to legitimate lawful authority – to give our hypothetical consent – may have good or evil consequences, depending upon the moral value of the legal system to which we have submitted and the moral quality of the relationship between state and citizen that our consent nurtures.

    Scepticism Towards Authority

    How much of this is of jurisprudential or indeed morally significance? First, it confirms an innate prejudice of mine which is to be at the very least sceptical of authority. Deep scepticism. Far too many people who have had no interaction with authority figures, such as police officers or indeed judges, are inclined to defer to their wishes and take what they say at face value. My experience as an Irish barrister has engendered in me the opposite instinct. Always confront, challenge authority, and never commit the cardinal error of submitting to the edicts or wishes of authority.

    Also, ask who is in authority and why they are there? Who appointed them and what agenda do they serve?

    Kafka also touches on the way procedural tangles and processes often run contrary to that elusive concept of justice. Law then should be transparent and accessible, and often it is not. Unduly complex procedures among other casuistries militate against just outcomes.

    Law of course relates to questions of punishment and both in The Trial and, above all, in the shocking story ‘In the Penal Colony’ – surprisingly neglected by West – about a perfect execution machine, the barbarism and cruelty of legal processes are there for all to see. It is frightening to see how the condemned man submits and, in some ways, enjoys the barbarity of his torture, just as occurs to the dissident in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon. Today we call this Stockholm Syndrome, where you empathise with your captors.

    I have always hated the death penalty and indeed torture or state sponsored cruelty, anyone who has experienced the jihadism of Roman Catholicism will know what I mean.

    Fishelson’s version of The Castle at Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, January 2002.

    Bureaucratic Nightmares

    Kafka lived under a deeply authoritarian extended Germanic state of bureaucracy and authoritarianism then ruling the Czech Republic. A Weberian bureaucracy gone mad.

    Alberto Moravia’s 1951 novel The Conformist demonstrates how a bureaucratic conformity evident in lawyers far too easily morphs into fascism. Kafka lived in a proto-totalitarian state and is often seen as someone who mystically envisages dystopian totalitarianism. In some respects, Kundera observed the completion of the projection. The full negation of the individual, and individual rights.

    Now such harbingers of dystopia are right back, for want of a better expression, in fashion and the reasons for this are obvious to anyone who looks up from their screen.

    We are in a new age of corporate fascism, with an ever increasingly authoritarian state. Mass monitoring and surveillance through artificial intelligence is dictating and controlling our choices. Ascendant right-wing extremism throughout much of Europe has drawn lessons from religious fundamentalism.

    Thus, Kafka’s arguments on the dangers of unconditional surrender to authority and acceptance of its legitimacy, as well as his arguments around how consent to authority can destroy us are important points to recall. Even in our daily lives.

    Both Kafka and Kundera urge us to challenge authority, and at the very least always ask: who is making a decision and why? Don’t look at the office, but at the man or women in control of it, and what he or she is purporting to do.

    The enlarged Kafkaesque state – in many respects experienced by Kundera – is right back in force in the coronavirus panopticon, with the vectors of evil apparent everywhere, not least in a plethora of falsely accused and indeed framed Joseph K’s. worldwide. Let us call them the dissentient.

    We have all too much faith in the law, a failing which led my friend the late Supreme Court Justice Adrian Hardiman to entitle an article on how the state falsely accused the DJ Paul Gambaccini, ‘Kafka On the Thames’; and yet faith in due process and legal fairness is one of the few values left to clutch on to.

    Kundera and Kafka are two titans of the Czech intelligentsia who have much to say in our contemporary era: be careful about unconditional obedience to authority and distrustful of legal processes; antennae should be raised to detect post truth nonsense and dissimulation; and witness how Communist totalitarianism has been replaced by another decline of the human condition: neoliberal degradation.

    Never unconditionally comply with the edicts of authority. Just say No. Do not obey orders just because they are orders. Exercise judgment.

    [i] Arne Novak, Czech Literature (translated from Czech by Peter Kussi), Ann Arbor (1976), p.170

    [ii] Ibid, p.9