Cassandra Voices

Tag: and

  • Post-Pandemic Marketing Strategies

    Contemporary marketers must simultaneously think global, local, and glocal factors in order to stay ahead of the curve, or just keep up, given evolving market conditions and a growing attention to ‘bespoke’ needs.

    The IT revolution – plus the possibilities that AI, deep and machine learning have to offer – have washed away static approaches to marketing.

    Moreover, although it is widely known that internationalisation is a process of firm expansion into new markets, the importance of marketing is often overlooked. There are cultural, regional norms, leadership and change, and also cross-cultural branding amongst others that need to be prioritised while planning.

    International business essentially covers international transaction of economic resources as well as international production of goods and services, and, as such, the broad forms of business internationalization cover trade, technical collaboration and investment.

    While in the past, trade was undoubtedly conducted internationally, never before has it had the broad and simultaneous impact on nations, firms and individual households as today. What is more, global trade has been consistently outperforming domestic transactions over the past few decades. As a result many new countries and firms, especially in emerging markets, now prioritise international markets.

    Internationalisation of trade has been accelerated and facilitated by rapid technological advances through 2G to 3G to 4G, and now 5G.  In many respects, this has reduced the world to a Global Village where producers, customers and other stakeholders can all engage collaboratively.

    Global Village, Dubai.

    Differentiating global, international, and glocal marketing…

    ‘The international market goes beyond the export marketer and becomes more involved in the marketing environment in the countries in which it is doing business.’

    There is a crossover between what is commonly referred to as international marketing and global marketing, which are terms often used interchangably. International marketing is simply the application of marketing principles to more than one country. That is to say, International marketing is a simple extension of exporting, whereby the marketing mix is simply adapted in some way to take into account differences in consumers and market segments.

    Global marketing, on the other hand, takes a more standardised approach to world markets and focuses upon sameness, in other words, commonalities in consumers and market segments.

    Evidently, international business expanded at lightning speed over the past decade. The reasons for this rapid growth can mainly be found in new technologies, but also supportive institutions, the openness of many economies, as well as intensified competition in many sectors.

    Myanmar, for example, is now making a foray into the energy sector; while Bangladesh has emerged as a tough competitor to India in the field of ready-made garments, a sector that Russia is now also interested to participate in internationally.

    Finally, a significant difference between domestic marketing and international marketing is that in the former case business remains confined to the political region’s jurisdiction, where government rules and regulations are generally consistent; while in the latter case, once cross-border trade begins it is subject to the rules and regulation of the host country, making the situation far more complex.

    When marketing domestically, a company can have the same policies and strategies, while international marketing calls for varying strategies when promoting products and services.

    As every country has distinct laws, firms must develop an awareness of the codes, practices and norms that apply. Moreover, consumer tastes and preferences may also differ, so marketing strategies should be formulated with different consumers in mind.

    Cabbage market by Václav Malý.

    The Customer Remains King

    Both globalization and glocalisation have led to more companies pursuing the same customers, while at the same time, customers have become more sophisticated (often seeking whatever is ‘bespoke’), while information technology enables analysis of competing products, allowing consumers to make informed (and sometimes ‘rational’) choices.

    No doubt, the discovery of online alternatives by consumers has brough greater comparison of offers. Furthermore, many products have become virtual commodities, while rapid changes in technology have dramatically shortened product life cycles.

    Often similarities between offerings make it quite difficult for firms to differentiate themselves from  competitors, which, in turn, further empower customers. That is to say: a decisive shift from supplier-dominated economies towards ones dictated by customers.

    Adapting to the ‘New Normal’

    Historically, during any crisis such as the pandemic today, consumers expect proactive action, not only from their government, civil society, and local neighbourhood, but also the brands they purchase.

    For a business aiming to remain financially successful, and sustain a good reputation it is often not about the products and services, but more importantly: a corporate identity.

    Thus, one of the key ones is to keep the customers ‘informed’. Thus companies balance financial responsibility with the need to keep consumers engaged, especially during periods of long term uncertainty.

    Thus research by the American Association of Advertising Agencies indicated that 43% of consumers find it reassuring to hear from brands during lockdowns. In addition, 56% said they like learning how brands are helping their communities during the pandemic. Only 15% said they’d rather not hear from companies.

    During the pandemic, certain global companies invested heavily in new market analytics in order to adapt rapidly to new trends. A COVID-19-ready ‘client-agency’ relationship is the new norm for customer relationship managers and marketing teams.

    In the second quarter of 2020, Amazon recorded high growth in the face of COVID-19, with profits reaching a staggering $89 billion. Following that trend, companies such as P&G and GSK have also doubled their investment in the e-commerce sphere more than ever before.

    New Trends in Post-Pandemic Marketing

    Once again, recalibration is required through innovative product design, packaging and also pricing models to survive in the ‘new normal.’ Among the new ‘differentiators’ for brands is ‘health and safety’ protocols, offering bookable shopping times, fully sanitised delivery, and at-home ‘make-up’ experiences. This phase of marketing innovation is, however, costly for firms.

    Firms will surely be able to operate once against under radiant blue skies, after the dense clouds of masks and hand-sanitisers slowly fade over time.

    COVID-19 didn’t bring an end to competition; and any forthcoming slump seems likely to accentuate it. Most firms, particularly those with an established ‘brand’, will need to have multiple plans ready to go.

    They must, however, be willing to let go of an existing idea of what is ‘the right way to go’ and devise innovative ways to reach customers, suppliers, civil society, and others. This should lead to the prioritisation of people, planet and profit.

    Over the course of the crisis we have been bombarded with video ads, emails and other digital outreach initiatives. But with all the noise, especially on social media, consumers seem likely to be drawn towards a softer, more subtle, tone.

    Some brands have opted to move slowly as markets reopen, ‘playing it safe’ on the path towards reactivity. Then there are those who remain conservative, considering the sensible choice to be unadventurous, amidst continuing uncertainties around how long the crisis will last. Although the show must go on, many entrepreneurs have slowed down on marketing and PR activities.

    Leveraging #workfromhome

    Little fresh content is being created in this phase, notwithstanding how many creative ‘zoom’ screens appear in the ‘lockdown creativity’ slots on popular news channels. Most creative companies and marketers are spending the time building new campaign narratives, initial creative, copy, and baseline graphics.

    This can be a fertile period during which creative staff from media, R&D, marketing and sales are encouraged to engage in ‘blue sky thinking’ – brainstorming without limits – so as to deliver consequential output when the right time arrives. Executing new campaigns post-pandemic will demand muscle memory, not mental horsepower.

    Business marketing over the years has demonstrated that leveraging genuine empathy can be a real asset. Think of the 90s ads for Nescafe and the story building ads of ‘a lot can happen over coffee.’

    During the pandemic some companies have appealed directly to the issue. In the automobile sector for example Jeep released positive messages to encourage social distancing and ‘stay at home’ practices. It also says in online commercial that ‘with a little patience, the views will get better.’

    Company databases retain the customer feedback and other date from research programs. This is an opportune time to develop an understanding of the emotions underlying people’s shifting attitudes and behaviours in the market.

    Instead of repeating adverts, companies need to ensure they understand the process of customer engagement. The cultural and cognitive connection is equally important.

    Best Practices Shared? Further examples…

    There are some prominent examples to share in light of the above. Thus Dove created a slot shining a light on the courage of health care workers.

    Also, companies like Budweiser and Burger King are focusing on social distancing and encouraging people to play their part by staying home. While Apple quickly mobilized their resources to produce much-needed PPEs, and Nike has temporarily removed its subscription fees for its health and exercise app to help people stay fit under quarantine.

    Also, in some developed countries, there is growing appreciation that the ‘retail heroes’ who have often been working around the clock during the period of lockdown – a period that has strangled the capacity and also ability of the supply chain to function effectively.

    While regrettably severe job cuts have already happened all over the planet, big-box retailers in Canada such as Loblaw and Save-on-Food have been paying extra wages to their front-line staff as a gesture of appreciation for their efforts. And they are certainly ensuring customers are up to date with these initiatives.

    It is a good time to take stock and recalibrate. This is a period of inaction in many sectors, which at least gives a space for businesses to rethink their messages in newsletters, and how ‘new content’ on social media can be created; along with considering how all the adverts, emails, webinars and podcasts may be overhauled in light of current consumer priorities.

    Marketing campaigns are known to have solid long-term goals, especially in the case of brand management. This pandemic has asked us to rethink some of our fundamentals afresh. For example, short term planning and incremental innovation may work wonders in the immediate post-pandemic stage.

    Therefore, there will be new markets created, and new products introduced factoring in new demand amidst altered consumer patterns and long-term behavioural changes. Relying on detailed long-range planning may actually hurt an institution.

    With rapidly changing market dynamics survival may become the priority rather than turnover (of profit and not of employees) to ensure a firm’s viability. As markets, and the nature of markets, evolve with e-tails (Amazon, Alibaba, etc.), AI-driven SMEs, green supply chain etc., the essence of marketing and its channels must realign with company goals and values. They cannot simply rely on on flooding inboxes and other ways of dominating our screens.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Ireland and Colombia: the Coal Connection

    Most Irish people could not imagine what links their country with Colombia, or even the extent to which their electricity is still comes from coal into the 21st century. But the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), and therefore Ireland as a whole, is complicit in human rights violations, as well as ongoing air and water pollution occurring in a Colombian region.

    Cerrejón

    To understand better what I am talking about we need to go to the north east of Colombia, to La Guajira region, just before the border with Venezuela. Here we find the largest coal mine in South America – and one of the largest in the world – in operation since 1985, which produces, on average, approximately thirty-two million tonnes of coal a year.

    All of this coal is exported, principally to Europe thanks to a Free Trade agreement highly beneficial to multinational corporations, under a neoliberal global economic model where developing countries in the Global South provide cheap natural resources for the Global North’s energy production, through mining and extractive industries.

    In most cases this model is highly destructive. The company and the mine, both called Cerrejón, have changed owners throughout its thirty-six years of operation and are now owned in equal parts by the multinational companies Glencore, BHP Billiton and Anglo-American, which run many other mega-mining projects all over the world.

    Many local and international activists and organizations, including a UN Human Rights expert in September 2020[i], have been demanding a halt to mining on the grounds of human rights violations.

    Over thirty indigenous, Afro-Colombian and campesino communities were displaced due to the coal mining project. Of these communities only a few have been resettled in urban areas, where they do not belong, and promised a series of measures – services, financial aid, school bursaries – which are mostly inadequate.

    If the company justifies resettlement as a measure of protection of the local communities’ health and safety, no other choice is given to them: they have to leave the land that they have been occupying for thousands of years, since before the arrival of the European settlers.

    In most cases their economy was based on agriculture and livestock, so without access to the land and without the possibility of employment in cities, the subsistence of these people, and of their cattle, is at immense risk.

    In fact, drought  is another big issue in this semi-arid to arid region. The main source of water, which the local communities rely directly upon, is the Ranchería river and its tributaries: the mine has been accused of drying seventeen of these waterways throughout the years. For instance, in 2017, Cerrejón proceeded with the diversion works of the Bruno stream even though the Colombian constitutional court ruled that the company had to consult all twelve of the communities affected before starting the works.

    Wayuu

    The Wayuu, or Guajiros, are an Amerindian ethnic group of the Guajira Peninsula, including the northernmost part of Colombia and northwest of Venezuela. A study reported by Human Rights Watch in 2017[ii] that one Wayuu child dies every week on average because of malnutrition; 5000 Wayuu children died of hunger between 2010 and 2018.[iii]

    Children and youth are certainly the most vulnerable[iv], but are not the only ones suffering respiratory problems due to their proximity to pollution from the mine.

    In particular, the high concentration of substances such as Sulphur, Chromium, Copper, Bromine, Nickel, Manganese and Zinc in the air, as stated in the Colombian Constitutional Court Ruling T-614/19,[v] and the contamination of rivers and bodies of water in the area.

    High concentration of metals has also been found in the blood of people from the communities surrounding the mine: this can lead to DNA damage, skin lesions, lung cancer, respiratory and heart diseases.

    Furthermore, the Wayuu people and organisations have suffered harassment and death threats as a result of dissent and resistance to the coal extraction practices. For example, the local organisation Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu (Wayuu Women’s Force) has been reporting death threats against them from the far-right paramilitary group Aguilas Negras since 2019.

    You will not find any of the above details either on the Cerrejón company and foundation website and Facebook page or on the mine marketer’s website (CMC), where they claim to be

    a reflection of the best of Colombia: a world-class operation committed to the sustainable development of La Guajira […] in areas such as education, health, culture, sports, productive projects, the environment, infrastructure enhancement, training, employment and basic sanitation for our neighbouring communities, including the native Wayuu people.

    Ireland

    Moneypoint Power Station By GavinZac – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7582681

    Moneypoint, located on the River Shannon in County Clare, near Kilrush, is Ireland’s largest electricity generation station. The power station is run by the ESB, the semi-state electricity company – 95% owned by the Irish government – and it is the only coal-fired power station in Ireland, and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the country.

    It has relied entirely on imported coal since 2011, 90% of which has been imported from Colombia, mostly from the Cerrejón mine, and it has been polluting Ireland too. Coal represents 14% of the country’s total energy mix.

    The ESB claims that it has been purchasing only a small percentage of the Cerrejón mine’s total output and that senior managers personally visited the site and met workers, community leaders and trade union officials; while the company committed to remain vigilant on the issues.

    In 2018 the Irish Department of Climate, Environment and Communications announced that Moneypoint would phase out coal burning by 2025[vi] and in 2019 the Irish government launched its Climate Action Plan,[vii] including a commitment to stop burning coal, so far no concrete details have been provided on what technologies will be used to replace coal, or alternatives for Moneypoint employees.

    In 2018 the Irish government acknowledged the impact of coal mining on human lives in La Guajira and the human rights abuses connected to the supply chain, but no formal action has been taken still on the situation by the government,[viii] nor by the ESB.

    In the last few years, on the one hand, Ireland, like other European countries, has contributed aid towards developing countries to tackle climate change and to the Colombian peace process; yet on the other hand, it hasn’t stopped importing environmentally destructive coal that involves human rights violations.

    But Ireland is responsible also for another reason: CMC, the exclusive marketer of Cerrejón coal, which coordinates the sale and delivery of this coal globally, has its headquarters in Dublin, thanks to the well-known corporate tax regime that has made Ireland such a popular destination for multinational corporations.

    Recent Developments

    In January 2021, GLAN (Global Legal Action Network), supported by a coalition of Colombian, International and Irish human rights and environmental groups, including Christian Aid Ireland, lodged a formal complaint to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) through their national contact point in Ireland.[ix]

    They claimed that Cerrejón and the ESB were in breach of their human rights responsibilities by continuing to import coal and failing to take necessary actions to identify and prevent the harms caused by the operations, i.e. human rights abuses; air and water pollution and displacement of local communities.

    Simultaneous complaints have also been filed to OECD representatives in Australia, the UK and Switzerland against the three corporations involved and against ESB and CMC. The OECD will now have to investigate if the multinational companies are in compliance with with the OECD’s Guidelines, and take action accordingly.

    For the same reasons Irish organisations such as Stop Blood Coal Ireland and Terra Justa  – based in Bolivia but with staff members in Ireland and the UK  – have been calling on the Irish government to stop purchasing Cerrejón coal on human rights grounds. Compensation to communities affected for more than three decades, as well as support for basic rights and resources in La Guajira, including transition measures to support mine workers, are also demanded.

    Furthermore, very recently, in March 2021 Still Burning, a ‘network fighting against the global hard coal industry’, also launched the book Coal, Colonialism & Resistance, which centralises the voices of affected communities and warns of ‘false green solutions’, highlighting the colonial entanglements of coal.

    The Irish organisation, Latin American Solidarity Centre, based in Dublin, is now hosting two webinars on land defenders along with the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies of the University College Cork (UCC).

    On the 13th and 20th of May the Irish organisation, Latin American Solidarity Centre, based in Dublin, hosted two webinars on land defenders along with the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies of the University College Cork (UCC).

    The second session, ‘Law, threats and criminalization’, analysed the threats that land defenders face. The two panellists, Jakeline Romero, from the Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu in La Guajira, and Isabel Matzir, from the Resistencia de Cahabón in Alta Verapaz (Guatemala), explained the state and corporate strategies and practices used to criminalize them and delegitimize their struggle. Within Colombian distorted system, threats and violence from the state and corporations against indigenous people are still taking place with total impunity. And the reason is simple, as claimed by Jakeline Romero, “they have interests; economic and political power are in their hands,” so they can still declare nothing of what has been denounced is real.

    She claims also that the recent repression against peaceful protesters has a lot in common with the emblematic violence against the indigenous, Afro-descendent and campesino communities in Colombia. The is the same military response from the state. The government does not recognise either their rights or their cultural difference, but local organisations like Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu keep on defending the land and denouncing the systematic human rights violations. As it is not always possible to denounce these injustices nationally – people in the territories often fear for their lives – and local communities cannot do everything on their own, international exposure and support are essential.

    “People have to know that the coal arriving in Europe is bloodstained, it’s against human life,” says Jakeline. She adds that the pandemic has been used by the government to legislate against the indigenous people, and in general against the people in Colombia. To repress more than ever on the street of the Colombian cities, as well as in the indigenous areas.

    Further sources:

    Erika Quinteros, Emma Pachon, ‘Climate Change and its Effect on Indigenous People’, Council of Hemispheric Affairs, 27 June 2017, <https://www.coha.org/climate-change-and-its-effect-on-indigenous-people/>.

    Angelica Ortiz, ‘Indigenous resistance: my fight for land and life in Colombia’, The Ecologist, 12 October 2017, <https://theecologist.org/2017/oct/12/indigenous-resistance-my-fight-land-and-life-colomba>.

    Extractivismo en Colombia, ‘Comunicado: Corte Constitucional Ordena Proteger el Agua, la Salud y la Seguirdad Alimentaria de Comunidades que Dependen del Arroyo Bruno’, 21 December 2017, <http://extractivismoencolombia.org/comunicado-corte-constitucional-ordena-proteger-agua-la-salud-la-seguridad-alimentaria-comunidades-dependen-del-arroyo-bruno/>.

    London Mining Network, ‘Open letter to Cerrejon Coal’, 27 July 2018, <https://londonminingnetwork.org/2018/07/21828/>.

    GreenNews.ie, ‘Calls for ESB to explain large coal imports from controversial Colombian mine’, 21 September 2018, <https://greennews.ie/calls-esb-explain-coal-imports-cerrejon-mine/>.

    Marienna Pope-Weidemann, Sebastian Ordoñez Muñoz, ‘The Cost of Mining in Latin America’, New Internationalist, 23 October 2018, <https://newint.org/features/2018/10/23/cost-mining-latin-america>.

    Latin American Solidarity Centre, ‘Briefing – The Irish connection to the Cerrejón coal mine’, 14 January 2019, <https://lasc.ie/briefing-the-irish-connection-to-the-cerrejon-coal-mine/?fbclid=IwAR3q4cEAlV7kXhtSj5lgu8_qCGVhhOUAapaBtxM-GI45mBiUpzgMbslvmvE>.

    Peter Hamilton, ‘ESB called out for ‘contributing to human rights violations’’, The Irish Times, 20 February 2020, <https://www.irishtimes.com/business/energy-and-resources/esb-called-out-for-contributing-to-human-rights-violations-1.4178686>.

    Luca Manes, ‘Colombia, la miniera a cielo aperto della discordia: sfruttamento miliardario di tonnellate di polvere nera’, ReCommon, published in La Repubblica, 1 February 2021, <https://www.repubblica.it/solidarieta/diritti-umani/2021/02/01/news/colombia_la_miniera_della_discordia-285426246/>.

     

    [i] United Nations Human Rights, ‘UN expert calls for halt to mining at controversial Colombia site’, 28 September 2020, <https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=26306>

    [ii] Human Rights Watch, ‘OECD: Examine Local Hunger Crisis in Colombia’, 30 October 2017, <https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/10/30/oecd-examine-local-hunger-crisis-colombia#>

    [iii] Sandra Guerrero, ‘“4.770 niños muertos en La Guajira es una barbarie”: Corte’, El Heraldo, 15 October 2018, <https://www.elheraldo.co/la-guajira/4770-ninos-muertos-en-la-guajira-es-una-barbarie-corte-553890>

    [iv] Claudia Morales, ‘El exterminio del pueblo wayuu’, El Espectador, 19 April 2015, <https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/nacional/el-exterminio-del-pueblo-wayuu/>

    [v] Corte Constitucional República de Colombia, Sentencia T-614/19, 2018-2019, <https://www.corteconstitucional.gov.co/relatoria/2019/T-614-19.htm#_ftn6%20%20Sentencia%20T-614/19>

    [vi] Eoin Burke-Kennedy, ‘Ireland 2040: €22bn to turn State into low-carbon economy’, The Irish Times, 16 February 2018, <https://www.irishtimes.com/business/energy-and-resources/ireland-2040-22bn-to-turn-state-into-low-carbon-economy-1.3394805>.

    [vii] Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, Climate Action Plan 2019, Published on 17 June 2019, <https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/ccb2e0-the-climate-action-plan-2019/>

    [viii] Dail Debates, Topical Issue Debate Human Rights, 12 July 2018, <https://www.kildarestreet.com/debates/?id=2018-07-12a.432>.

    [ix] Eoin Burke-Kennedy, ‘Complaint made against ESB over purchases of coal from Colombian mine’, The Irish Times, 19 January 2021, <https://www.irishtimes.com/business/energy-and-resources/complaint-made-against-esb-over-purchases-of-coal-from-colombian-mine-1.4461662>; Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), ‘OECD to investigate human rights abuses filed against the owners of Cerrejón coal mine; BHP, Anglo American and Glencore’, 19 January 2021, <https://aida-americas.org/en/press/oecd-to-investigate-human-rights-abuses-filed-against-the-owners-of-cerrejon-coal-mine>.

  • COVID-19: Virtual Work a Bridge Too Far?

    For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
    Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

    “That’s how you learn. But after you make the same mistake one, or two, or five times, you’ll eventually get it. And then you’ll make new mistakes.”
    Louis Sachar, The Card Turner (2010)

    Managing and Nurturing the New Workplace Culture

    A recent report from the International Labour Organization provides evidence that employees are more productive when they work outside a conventional office.[i] They are, however, more vulnerable to longer working hours, a more intense pace of work, work-home interference, and elevated stress.

    Mark Twain

    Other research indicates that common problem for remote workers[ii] include: ‘unplugging after work’ (38%); as well as loneliness (19%); lack of collaboration (17%); distractions at home (10%); managing and coping with time zones (8%); and last but not the least, Staying motivated (8%).

    Mark Twain once said: ‘If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worse things that is going to happen to you all day long. Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.’

    So, I list two recommendations for managing expectations while we survive the #workfromhome phase.

    1. Focus on a few things, and do them well. The ‘Eisenhower matrix’ is often used to avoid unnecessary time-wasting tasks and know which tasks to do next. Ideally plan to do just one big thing, three medium things, and five small things per day,[iii] the 1-3-5 rule.
    2. Managing energy is more important than managing time: Keep track of how much you’ll be able to focus at different points of the day. You improve by pushing your practice, not yourself during periods of low energy.

    ‘Given the lack of face-to-face interaction and heavy reliance on technology, the intent of what someone wants to communicate might be misconstrued.’

    Communication (a lack of it or too much of it) generally improves when a collaborative work management platform is used to centralise all communication and collaboration. Suggestions would include using Trello or Asana to Basecamp or Wrike – they are inclusive in keeping managers in the loop and on top of what is happening.[iv]

    An MIT Sloan study shows that employees were twice as likely to discuss the quality of communication by top leaders in positive terms during the months of the pandemic than they were a year earlier. In fact, they were 88% more likely to write positively about leaders’ honesty and transparency (46%). Employees also expressed more positive sentiment about transparency (42%) and communication (35%) in general.[v]

    One of the most important themes that stand out in the months of the pandemic is the degree and quality of communication by leaders. A recent study shows that employees of Culture 500 companies gave their corporate leaders much higher marks in terms of honest communication and transparency, during the first six months of the pandemic compared to the preceding year.[vi]

    On the other side of the coin, when you work from home, you no longer have a clear geographic division between workspace and personal space. It is for this very same reason, once again, difficult to switch off when both personal and professional worlds operate under the same roof. With constant remote work in action, the boundaries between working and not-working start to fade rapidly.

    Home-based workers do not tend to receive signals about when to switch off. Therefore, leaders need to communicate clearly on the ‘time for work’ and ‘time for play’ model, which would help smooth everybody’s work model and conduct.

    No Place Like Home

    Fundamentally, one’s home is a place of relaxation, safety, and security. It’s a place where you subconsciously slip into a calm, easy-going state of mind, putting the stresses of the workday behind. However, working from home punches a hole right through that neat division. Many telecommuters complain they feel like they’re never off the job. They always feel a compulsion to check email or get “just one last thing done.”

    So how to set the rules of engagement and boundaries?

    Remote work becomes more efficient and satisfying once managers set expectations for the frequency, means, and ideal timing of communication for their teams. For example using videoconferencing for daily check-in meetings, but using IM when something is urgent.

    Also, if leaders can allow employees to specify their hours to be contacted and equally importantly, when not to be. Finally, it is important for leaders to keep an eye on communication among team members to ensure that they are sharing information as needed.

    Additionally, leaders need to do more frequent check-ins to see how they can support their people in moving forward. Since, above all, leaders need to build trust. During this period managers in certain industries have enjoyed a bit more autonomy within companies to take ownership of projects and complete these how they see fit. A responsible degree of empowerment and delegation is what came out of the process when done with purpose.

    Consequently, there’s also been a huge shift in flexibility in this period, with firms having to acknowledge – often for the first time – that their employees have complex lives, which sometimes incorporate children, ageing parents, health concerns, and poor housing, to name but a few of the challenges the pandemic has brought to the fore.

    The Art of Learning (by doing)

    According to Erin Driver-Linn of Harvard University: ‘Experiential learning is participative—for example, either making or doing … What do we need to understand, as a learner, which is conceptual? And what do we need to understand by experiencing things in a different way?’[vii]

    Managing talents and the right selection followed by allocation of relevant resources are attributes that a good institution requires. The core skills any individuals who wants to thrive in an innovative business environment or organisation come down to the following: creativity, problem-solving and continuous improvement skills, developing attitudes and behaviours that are needed to frame and solve problems, and generate new ideas on a continual basis.

    Additionally there is risk-assessment and risk-taking skills; the mindset to manage these has to be solidified over time. Upgrading these skills depends heavily on effective planning and implementation.

    Managing the ‘New Normal’ Workplace Culture

    ‘People find meaning in their daily rituals of getting ready to leave home, commuting, grabbing their cup of coffee, and filling their water bottle before sitting at their desk.’[viii]

    Broadly, organisational culture is defined by the collective norms of behaviour exhibited by the individuals within an organisation. Since the first, almost global, lockdown of early 2020, there was a shared buzz, online and otherwise, that #wfh would be a recipe for disaster when it comes to maintaining stable company culture.

    Among the questions that leaders and managers pondered were:

    Will the company culture take a hit because people can’t meet in person, making it harder to solidify their shared beliefs?

    Will they be less able to use the company culture as a roadmap for making sensible decisions during tumultuous times?

    How can companies continue to build and leverage their culture while all operations are functioning remotely?

    At least we seem to be wasting less time now. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research claims that even though we’re attending more meetings in the Zoom era, the average meeting length is shorter and we’re collectively spending less time in them.[ix] Most firms claim to have increased communication, meaning that employees might be feeling more connected.

    Besides communication and trust exercise, leaders also need to establish and maintain discipline and boundaries. People working alone tend to become less productive over time, even if they work longer hours than they did in the office. This has less to do with productivity than losing their frame of reference and task orientation. As is often the case, it comes down to mindset. While some of this is innate, other aspects are derived from situational and environmental conditions.

    Social media giant Twitter was one of the first companies that decided that their workers could work from home when COVID-19 cases began rising in March 2020.[x] With foresight, Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter and Square) also stated that employees will potentially have the option to work remotely indefinitely.

    In addition to being ahead of the game, Twitter also provided employees with day-care reimbursements, continued to pay contract workers[xi] whether they’re able to work or not, and banned all in-person events for the rest of 2020. This is the situation to this day.

    American graphic artist Harvey Ball.

    Put a Human Face on your Organisation

    Especially in the context of an abrupt shift to remote work, it is important for leaders to acknowledge stress, listen to employees’ anxieties and concerns, and empathize with their struggles. If a newly remote employee is clearly struggling, but failing to communicate stress or anxiety, ask them how they’re doing.

    Even a general question such as: “How is this remote work situation working out for you so far?” can elicit important information that you might not otherwise hear.

    Once you ask the question, be sure to listen carefully to the response, and briefly restate it back to the employee to ensure that you understood their answer correctly. Let the employee’s stress or concerns (rather than your own) be the focus of this conversation.

    Cut to Credits!

    Successful organizations need effective leaders. With the aging of the workforce and imminent retirement of the Baby Boomers, U.S. organizations are experiencing a shortage of skilled leaders and a significant need for leadership training. Skilled leadership affects the entire workforce; numerous studies indicate that one of the key reasons for employees leaving their jobs is because they are uncomfortable with the working environment created by a direct supervisor. Successful organizations need effective, parental, and democratic leaders at this juncture.

    Leadership training could reduce turnover at all levels in an organization, the focus remains on learning and managing adaptability, interpersonal people skills, self-awareness, developing and maintaining a sense of purpose, timely and effective decisiveness, as well as collaborative skills. The basic aim of training and development programmes is to help the organization to achieve its mission and goals by improving individual and, ultimately, organizational performance.

    In light of the initiatives of prominent global businesses as well as small businesses at a domestic and local level, the concept of a virtual workplace has been redefined in the past twelve months. This is a useful time to document the process as at a later stage we will need to look back and take lessons from this period.

    Virtual bonding is helping many to come emotionally closer to their colleagues. Some have seen a marked reduction in the communication gap between themselves and their senior. This insight may not seem like rocket science, but a key lesson for companies is to work out ways of avoiding toxicity and recognise the supreme importance of fairness and kindness.

    Research into emotional intelligence and emotional contagion tells us that employees look to their leaders for cues about how to react to sudden changes or crisis situations. If a manager communicates stress and helplessness, this will have what Daniel Goleman calls a ‘trickle-down’ effect on employees.

    Effective leaders[xii] generally take a two-pronged approach, both acknowledging the stress and anxiety that employees may be feeling in difficult circumstances, but also providing affirmation of confidence in their teams. We are all in this together, and we will get through it – perhaps we should see it as a time to get to know ourselves a bit better.

    [i] ‘Working anytime, anywhere: The effects on the world of work’, Eurofound, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/—publ/documents/publication/wcms_544138.pdf

    [ii] Business Coach: Vanessa Moore, May 30th, 2019 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/eat-frog-vanessa-moore-1c/

    [iii] Deen Dayal Yadav, ‘How to cope up with the challenges of remote working?’ Thrive Global, May 6th, 2020, https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-to-cope-up-with-the-challenges-of-remote-working/

    [iv]  Trello vs Asana vs Basecamp, Grasshopper Resources, https://grasshopper.com/resources/tools/project-management-tools-trello-asana-basecamp/

    [v] ‘STUDY: Organizations Rising to the Challenge of COVID-19 Communications, but Needs Persist; Leaders Must Address Concerns and Demonstrate Transparency, Clarity and Openness’ BusinessWire, April 3rd, 2020. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200403005278/en/STUDY-Organizations-Rising-to-the-Challenge-of-COVID-19-Communications-but-Needs-Persist-Leaders-Must-Address-Concerns-and-Demonstrate-Transparency-Clarity-and-Openness

    [vi] Donald Sull and Charles Sull, ‘How Companies Are Winning on Culture During COVID-19’ October 28th, 2020, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-companies-are-winning-on-culture-during-covid-19/

    [vii] ‘Innovation & discovery skills for ‘innovention’ managers’ The Sentinel, February 14th, 2021, https://www.sentinelassam.com/editorial/innovation-discovery-skills-for-innovention-managers-524593

    [viii] James Thomas, ‘How the pandemic can change workplace culture for the better’ Strategy&, https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/m1/en/articles/2020/how-the-pandemic-can-change-workplace-culture-for-the-better.html

    [ix] Daniel Kost, ‘You’re Right! You Are Working Longer and Attending More Meetings,’ Harvard Business School, September 14th, 2020, https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/you-re-right-you-are-working-longer-and-attending-more-meetings

    [x] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Twitter tells staff to work from home,’ BBC, March 3rd, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51700937

    [xi] Jack Kelly, ‘Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Tells Employees They Can Work From Home ‘Forever’—Before You Celebrate, There’s A Catch’, May 13th, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/05/13/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-tells-employees-they-can-work-from-home-forever-before-you-celebrate-theres-a-catch/?sh=32caf77a2e91

    [xii] ‘Daniel Goleman, ‘An EI-Based Theory of Performance’ Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organisations, 2000, http://www.eiconsortium.org/reprints/ei_theory_performance.html

  • A Few Good Men and Women

    In the wake of the murder by a police officer of the unfortunate Sarah Everard, and the ensuing justified anger, many media people were calling for “good” men to act more visibly in opposing violence against women. While I back 100% the calls made for “good” men to speak up, I am also concerned that the more general ideas of social equality are fast becoming reduced to a gender-specific proposition, having the potential knock-on effect of splitting the Left.

    This is not to diminish the seriousness of violence against women, but only to attempt to bring to light how the focus on gender equality may be impacting our perception of more general inequality, and how this apparent narrowing of focus risks being manipulated by those whose interests are not necessarily best served by social equality.

    While many women are exploited by many men, in the wider culture there are those still looking to keep wages low; rents and the cost of living high, while reneging on any social housing provision, who will look to spin the fact of female exploitation in order to capture the female vote to the service of their own particular brand of social exploitation.

    Spin

    In a recent tweet, Una Mullally, responding to Josepha Madigan’s dig at the Kerryman newspaper, suggesting the paper be renamed the Kerryperson, called this out for the cynical political ploy it was. Referencing her own Irish Times article of March 8th which predicted this type of play, Mullally described Madigan’s move as an awkward Fine Gael grab for the female vote, which, as things stand, may decide the next government, as it decided the referendum in 2015.

    But the main talking point in the past week has not been Fine Gael attempts to capture the female vote, but the more immediate mystery as to why “good” men don’t speak out against violence against women.

    Fintan O’Toole, writing in the Irish Times on March 16th said that in order for men to make a more overt stand against violence against women they must first learn to be shocked by that violence. At the moment, he argues, such violence all seems routine to most men. I wonder about that, since it seems to suggest that silence equals complacency equals broad approval.

    When you remove the particular instance O’Toole is referring to, that is, the emotive and highly charged question of violence against women, and replace it with say, general social inequality; you immediately already have an answer as to why “good” men appear to do nothing in the face of violence against women. The truth is, the majority of good men, and good women too, tend to remain strategically schtum on a wide range of problematical social issues until they see which way the political winds are blowing.

    Good Men

    Edmund Burke is reputed to have said that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.‘

    Burke wrote the line in a letter in 1770, which is more than a little while ago. The point being, the good men idea is far from being new. In fact, Burke’s quote needs updating, since at the time of his writing the realization of women’s suffrage was a long way in the future. An updated version would read: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and good women to do nothing.‘’

    So instead of posing the question, Why do good men do nothing, in such a way as to refer to a specific issue – in this case male violence against women – it is perhaps clearer to ask why do good people, regardless of gender, not raise their voices in say, situations where right-wing policy creates homelessness and subsequent deaths from exposure; or privatisation results in poor services and deaths due to cut corners and profit-conscious oversights? Why do good people not raise their voices en masse on these issues too?

    By the strict criteria of the “good” men concept as framed by Edmund Burke and others, we are all responsible, good men and good women alike, for homeless deaths, for direct provision deaths, for deaths caused as a result of medical privatisation, for domestic violence in all its guises and so on. Since this is a democracy, we all, strictly speaking, bear equal responsibility for the failings of democracy to deliver equal treatment to all. But these are difficult questions when applied to the real world.

    For instance, if you were an arts practitioner cosying up to Josepha Madigan when she was Minister for Arts, with a view to gaining favour and financial support for some project you had planned, are you complicit in Madigan’s rallying support to oppose Traveller accommodation? Or are the two issues compartmentalised? One being her political position and the other being her apparent social and class intolerance. Do you sacrifice your project to make a point, or do you compromise?

    Herds

    Along with such moral quandaries you also have the problem of the behaviour of crowds, which tend to behave like herds. Even politicians don’t really lead, they too follow the herd in the form of the public mood glimpsed in polls. Most people are spectators, going with the flow of the herd. We stand and watch the game until some critical mass is reached and then we raise our voices in support of whatever new majority appears to be on the rise. This works for every growing gang, from commies to fascists. A critical mass is reached and the herd follows. History shows that the herd will follow any old idea once this critical mass is achieved.

    Søren Kierkegaard, writing on this phenomenon, noted that an individual is worth more than a crowd of individuals, because an individual has personal agency, whereas a crowd tends to go with the flow of the herd. As a result, Kierkegaard comes to the conclusion that truth always belongs to the minority, since the majority tend towards unthinking obedience to the movement of the herd.

    It could be that now is the time where the issue of violence against women is to be embraced by the herd as an issue whose time has come. An issue for which good men are expected to speak up. But the point is, that apart from the particular issue, the question as to why do good people do nothing might be more properly considered in relation to a wider sense of social equality, encompassing all issues of social inequality.

    This applies equally to the politician allowing the market to decide the fates of those seeking housing, as it does to the person turning a blind eye to white collar corruption, or a man turning a blind eye to violence against women.

    Good Men and Good Women

    In this regard, for Fintan O’Toole to suggest that the evil of violence against women is exacerbated by good men doing nothing, is disingenuous at best, or is simply more political gamesmanship.

    Because the Irish Times also plays politics with notions of equality, quietly supporting right-wing Fine Gael policy through the manner in which it shapes and pitches stories, while always being first up with the property supplements when the market shifts, eager supporters of the housing Ponzi scheme, where the wealthy business class figuratively eat our young by selling them over-priced houses, while their political cronies refuse to enter into any believable form of social housing policy.

    Which begs the question, that when Fintan O’Toole is calling on “good” men to be more vociferous in condemning violence against women, is he referring to the same “good” men who remain silent in the face of social inequality on a more general level, keeping strategically schtum on a range of social equality issues, in order to ensure the perpetuation of a neoliberal status quo that is giving rise to social inequality in the first place?

    Conclusion

    All of this is not to suggest that the call for “good” men to raise their voices on the subject of violence against women is a wasted exercise; but only to point out that such a call to “good” men is not new; and furthermore, that by repackaging that call as an issue-specific moral imperative, while ignoring the same demand across a more general range of social equality issues, is to have the effect, whether knowingly or not, of splitting the Left by narrowing the imperative of social equality to a divisive gender issue, in such a way as to assist the project of the establishment parties and the elite they appear to represent.

    This will doubtless remain the situation until such time as good men and good women of all classes speak out against social inequality in all its guises.

  • Public Intellectuals: Hannah Arendt

    A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.
    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966)

    It is, perhaps, notable that as a young student Hannah Arendt was the Nazi-sympathising philosopher Martin Hedeigger’s lover. His little Jewess trophy, perhaps redolent in his mind of Weimar Republic decadency. Surprisingly, she never really developed a hated for him, intellectually at least, despite his stunning failure in selling his soul to the Nazis.

    In contrast to Heidegger, the ultra-conservative German burgher Thomas Mann chose exile. His rather clunky prose is excused on that point alone, and, suitably, his best work arrived after decamping to Switzerland. This includes especially Doctor Faustus (1947) an oblique portrayal of an actor and academic visited by a Mephistophelian figure, who sells his soul to the Nazis – a Heideggerean type in fact.

    Arendt’s background, steeped in the great German philosophical tradition, but rejected as a Jewess – and even subjected to a period under Gestapo confinement – gave her an unparalleled vantage on the great evils of the twentieth century, and the perils of ideological conformity that corrupted even the most elevated intellects. A failure to exercise a moral conscience in performing actions is a recurring failure, even where we do not see the extremes of totalitarian rule.

    Arendt and Albert Camus

    Arendt is among the most important public intellectual of our age for a variety of reasons.

    First,  she witnessed at first hand the rise of antisemitism in Germany, before migrating to the Americas, along with others from a golden generation of great mitteleuropean thinkers – many of them also Jewish – such as Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin. She was young and resilient enough to avoid the despair that led many to suicide, or to expire prematurely like Louis Althusser, whose structuralist influence has had a less than positive influence.

    A migratory professor with lifestyle “issues” including a nicotine habit that has become increasingly unacceptable in America, Arendt’s cosmopolitan “Europeanness” was tolerated in her time. In a bygone age the Frankfurt School colonised American academia, and a person such as Vladimir Nabokov – a different beast altogether – could became a professor in Columbia. Imagine the uproar if his Lolita was published today?

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

    In some respects her Gallic twin – and the other indispensable public intellectual for our time – Albert Camus also disavowed extremism, strict ideological conformity and what may be described as scientism. Both firmly rejected a positivism identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions according to Camus ‘are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.’

    According to Camus, Comte conceived of a society whose:

    [S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience ‘of action, of thought, and of feeling’ would be given to the high priest who reign over everything.[i]

    As today we hang on the pronouncement of anointed scientists who decide our intimate social lives, it would appear Comte’s vision has come to fruition. Thus, one of the latter-day hierarchy, Professor Niall Ferguson in an interview with The Times revealed his amazement at the power he wielded. After the British government followed Chinese policy in introducing a lockdown he observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

    Likewise, Arendt equated Comte’s hope for ‘a united, regenerated humanity under the leadership – présidence – of France’[ii] with the idea of a ‘national mission’ used by English imperialists to justify global expansion during the late nineteenth century. Arendt also pointed to the danger of the positivists’ assumption – evident in totalitarian Soviet propaganda – ‘that the future is eventually scientifically predictable’.[iii]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem

    Eichmann on trial in 1961.

    Arendt’s fame rests especially on the proverbial shitstorm caused by her coverage of the former SS officer Alfred Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She coined the immortal phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe how under Nazism ambitious functionaries and bean counters – such as Eichmann – climbed career ladders without regard for the supreme brutality of their regime. This was not apparent to them in their day-to-day lives; so out of sight was out of mind. In any age, including this, we should be wary of a cost-benefit analysis of life where board room decisions decide the fate of human beings and the natural world.

    Indicatively, in Ireland between 1996 and 2012 the number of qualified accountants grew by a staggering eight-three percent to number 27,112.[iv] It is now clear that bean counters and bureaucrats dominate our lives. Although many may not seem like villanous characters, any buffoonery on display should not be a source of reassurance. As Arendt describes Eichmann:

    Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.[v]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem highlights how an obsession with compliance and promotion blunts moral sensibility; and how a cognitive dissonance takes hold where slavish obedience leads to a failure to question one’s actions. This is the moral corrosion generated by a lack of consequentialist or moral thinking.

    The Human Condition

    I would argue that The Human Condition (1958) is central to understanding our age, in that it emphasizes the good life, and a need for Aristotelian measure and moderation in pursuit of eudaimonia. As the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics puts it: ‘Every art and every scientific inquiry, and similarly every action and purpose, may be said to aim at some good.’

    The Human Condition emphasizes a moral conscience that should ideally inform all our actions, especially politics. And she warns of a detachment from human realities that may occur once the “pensionopolis” of an entitled state class have no concern for trade or manufacturing:

    No activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sustaining only the life process, was permitted to enter the political realm, and this at the grave risk of abandoning trade and manufacture to the industriousness of slaves and foreigners, so that Athens indeed became the “pensionopolis” with a “proletariat of consumers”[vi]

    It is insufficient to perform a deed in isolation; you have to understand what you are doing and for whom and why. Or at the least investigate and interrogate your motivations, while avoiding the pitfalls of perfectionism. As Voltaire put it: ‘the best is the enemy of the good’, a point seemingly lost on certain scientific authorities in their utopian pursuit of ZeroCovid.

    Arendt also warns against the scientism in our public discourse, or more crucially the triumph of a form of mathematical intelligence, which is often divorced from moral decision-making, with Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ after the launch of the atomic bomb an obvious statement of this pitfall.

    It is a point the philosopher Mary Midgley (above) has also made in response to a letter Albert Einstein wrote to the wife of a deceased physicist that ‘people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’[vii]

    In response Midgley wrote:

    if reality was indeed something that only physicists could reach – if everybody else was wandering clueless through a hopeless maze of illusions – there would be a crucial difference between these scientists and the rest of us. We are being told that we are mere peasants, helpless “folk-psychologists”, and we may well hear this dictum as a simple insult “you are nothing.”[viii]

    Thus Arendt, along with Midgley, warns against placing too great a premium on mathematical intelligence – and those who may consider lesser mortals as mere nothings. Arguably, this can be seen in the all-too-ready acceptance of Professor Ferguson’s doomsday mathematical modelling for Covid-19 mortality last year, which proved to be wrong by a significant margin. According to Mark Landler and Stephen Castle in the New York Times, Ferguson’s interpretation was ‘treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’

    More widely, the contemporary veneration of science has spilled into worship of the ‘dismal science’ of economics, and the triumph of homo economicus. This represents a negation of critical human identity through a hyper-inflated economic reality of survival. That any critical intelligence endures, divorced from corporate ‘influencers’, is almost a minor miracle.

    The Human Condition also ably demonstrates that when the sphere of political engagement and the public sphere become redundant and private interests control democracy, then it has given way to something else

    Technocracy

    Arendt warns of the dangers of technocracy, pointing to the blunted moral conscience of an Eichmann, who reasoned that he was only putting people on trains, and did not have the intellectual curiosity to consider their destination and the likely outcome, or was casually indifferent. Arendt understood that he was more concerned with consorting with powerful people, and networking in a moral oblivion. One might add that being exclusively within one’s own silo bubble, or online echo chamber – as all too many are today – is recipe for serious trouble.

    Likewise, Jurgen Habermas has warned of the danger of technocratic solutions devoid of a moral compass, coining the phrase the public sphere.

    Juergen Habermas

    To offset growing consumerism Arendt advocates the Vita Activa of civic engagement. She remains even-handed, recognising that scientists should of course be listened to – providing crucial specialisation – but it should be understood that many lack a moral or philosophical education, and without ethical training ultimately hold no allegiance to the truth.

    In our time, all too often, political debates reach a point of paralysis in endless arguments over statistics; we are to quote Peter Greenaway ‘Drowning By Numbers’. Arendt’s analysis demonstrates how number can give rise to anti-humanism, perfectionism including an obsessions with tidiness, and other forms of anal retentiveness that inhibit our development as human beings.

    Science detached from philosophy is divorced from ethical considerations, and thus can be deployed for great evil. Therefore, ‘totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which ‘science’ [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.’[ix]

    Banner of Stalin in Budapest.

    The Origins of Totalitarianism

    The Origins Of Totalitarianism (1951) is the seminal account of twentieth century totalitarianism – as distinct from the ‘mere’ fascism of figure such as Mussolini – of both the Nazis under Hitler and Communism under Stalin. It offers a series of reflections that should serve as a warning in our time – when we cannot be said to live under totalitarianism – but where, nonetheless, an unmistakable shift has occurred in the relationship between the state and the individual. Thus measures that no government would previously have contemplated – from lockdowns to curfews – have been normalised in many countries, and controls have even been tightened in Ireland at precisely the point when a declining number are dying from the disease. Coincidentally, ‘terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition.’[x]

    We cannot overlook the damage of enforced social isolation, as Arendt put it:

    What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the nontotalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of ever-growing masses of our century.[xi]

    Arendt also well understood the fictions that underpin our understanding of the world, and a tendency to embrace conspiratorial ideas in the absence of reasonable explanations:

    Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. Man, who has not been granted the gifts of undoing, who is always an unconsulted heir of other men’s deeds, and who is always burdened with a responsibility that appears to be the consequences of an unending chain of events rather than unconscious acts, demands an explanation and interpretation of the past in which the mysterious key to his future seems to be concealed. Legends were the spiritual foundation of every ancient city, empire, people, promising safe guidance through the limitless space of the future. Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.[xii]

    Thus, it is essential that in responding to the damage of contemporary social atomisation that we do not succumb to ideologies that sow further division.

    Arendt observed how allegiances break down when Populist mobs gain traction. Initially the targets are those of no influence or assets, but essentially anyone is guilty under the arbitrary laws of totalitarianism in power. Thus she recalls:

    It is obvious that the most elementary caution demands that one avoid all intimate contacts, if possible – not in order to prevent discovery of one’s secret thoughts, but rather to eliminate, in the almost certain sense of future trouble, all persons who might not only who might have an ordinary cheap interest in your denunciation but an irresistible need to bring about your ruin simply because they are in danger of their own lives.

    Sadly, this agitation seems reminiscent of the states of mind actually cultivated by government scientists, who have deployed ‘fear, shame and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China,’ according to Gary Sidley, a retired clinical psychologist. Nowadays, instead of being imprisoned, we contend with social shame and even loss of a job for heinous crimes such as meeting a friend for a pint or taking a hill walk.

    Radical Evil

    Arendt observes a failure ‘inherent in our entire philosophical tradition’ to conceive of a radical evil.[xiii] Such a blind spot she argues means, ‘Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’[xiv]

    Moreover, it is important to note in our present state of enforced isolation:

    [I]t has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical governments is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror, it certainly is its most fertile ground, it always is its result.[xv]

    So let us be wary of the strongman leaders who have emerged to ‘guide’ us to the promised land during a pandemic, which shows up the damage of their own making; and who now argue that solutions lie in asserting the very neoliberal values that brought us to this impasse in in the first place.

    Sadly Burkean and Habermasean moderation has been lost in an age of tribal nationalism. The handmaiden’s of the strongman leaders are in fact a grasping “pensionopolis” that are removed from the dramatically worsening poverty in countries such as Ireland caused by the pandemic.

    This sadly is the digital generation of what are, in effect, fabricated human identities – a kind of unreal Blade Runner replicant. Homo faber has given way to homo economicus, as the law and economics ideologues put it. Craftsmanship and intellectualism are despised, and the public space denuded of significance.

    Finally, and perhaps more optimistically, Arendt clearly distinguishes between loneliness, and solitude: ‘Solitude requires being alone, where loneliness only shows itself most sharply in company with others.’ Let us thus endeavour to accept solitude as a temporary gift and resist the loneliness which is fertile ground for the infliction of terror.

    [i] Albert Camus, The Rebel, Translated by Anthony Bower, Penguin, London, 2013, p.145

    [ii] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.237

    [iii] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.454

    [iv] Tony Farmar, The History of Irish Book Publishing, Stroud, The History Press, 2018, p.12

    [v] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking Press, New York, 1963, p.55

    [vi] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958, p.37

    [vii] Mary Midgley, Are You an Illusion, p.136

    [viii] Beard, Ibid, p.138

    [ix] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.453

    [x] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.514

    [xi] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.627

    [xii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.271

    [xiii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.602

    [xiv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.603

    [xv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.623

  • The Dogs and Deer with Fionn mac Cumhaill

    We’ve lost Fionn and his Fianna, the stories that were told for hundreds, thousands of generations by firesides in Ireland and Scotland. Our language gone from us, and with it these science-fiction-like stories have drained away.

    The stories of the poets and hunters and warriors may, it seems to me, have been part of a Neolithic shamanistic religion.

    This was Ireland’s Dreamtime, our golden age, the perfection of time and place that we long for, we remember, we memorialise, we identify with, we idolize.

    All of the important names of these idols of the Fiannaíocht relate to deer. Fia is a deer in Irish, a fianna is a deer herd; Fionn, named for his white-blond hair, was originally Deimne, a fawn; the name of his magically-acquired wife, Sadhbh, means a doe, and Oisín and Oscar, his son and grandson, are both words for young male deer.

    Both Sadbh and Oisín came to Fionn in deer form – they were hunted down by the Fianna’s hounds, but defended from the hunting-pack by the enchanted superdogs Bran and Sceolan.

    Tír na nÓg

    The Fianna and their wit and prowess are part of the language – of our lost language in Ireland. To someone arriving late and bewildered we used to say they were “Oisín i ndhiadh na Féinne” – Oisín long after the Fianna, searching hopelessly for them. It’s a saying that came from the story of Oisín, lured to the land of youth, Tír na nÓg, by a seductive blonde on a white horse; he comes home for a visit and finds himself crumbling into a man of three hundred years old as soon as his foot touches the soil of Ireland.

    Ossian playing his harp, by François Pascal Simon Gérard, 1801.

    For equality we said cothrom na Féinne, the equality of the Fianna, because equal shares and equal respect were their watchword. Even our picnics and barbecues were fulacht fia, the word coming from the ancient method of pit cookery. We said “Dar fia!” for “by Jove!” Our ancient board game was fiachall, played with pieces called fia. It’s not for nothing that our national anthem starts “Sinn na Fíanna Fáil”, identifying us as Destiny’s deer.

    All of the stories might be medieval fanfic; or they might have been written by monks schooled through childhood in the oral tradition, who took their chance to undercut the Christianity from which they were now making a nasty, brutish and short living. Or they might be ancient béaloideas given written form by those transgressive monks. Wherever they come from, their echo rings out from our hearts.

    Fionn mac Cumhaill

    Fionn, the leader of the Fianna, started his life, as did many heroes in stories everywhere in the world, hidden from those who had killed his family and were hunting for him. Brought up by poet aunts deep in the woods of Slieve Bloom, he sallied out and became the leader of the royal guard that included his father’s killers.

    In between battles and contests, hunts and hero-deeds the Fianna loved to sit around on mountain-tops composing poetry. In one of the beloved stories of these poem-contests, one of the lads asked what was everyone’s favourite sound. The pretty boy Diarmuid said it was the cries of women in love; Oisín said it was a cuckoo calling from a hedge; Oscar, the sound of a spear on a shield. Then they asked Fionn, and he said the best music in the world was “the music of what happens”.

    But back to the dogs. The Fianna’s dogs were central to their stories, and especially Bran and her brother Sceolan: “We went westward one time to hunt at Formaid of the Fianna [aka Ballyfermot], to see the first running of our hounds.”

    These are the words of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s son Oisín, a few days earlier a buff young man in his prime, now suddenly three hundred years old and feeling it.

    Lady Gregory

    “It was Fionn was holding Bran, and it is with myself Sceolan was; Diarmuid of the Women had Fearan, and Oscar had lucky Adhnuall,” he says, in Lady Gregory’s translation of the debate between the the two ill-tempered old gentlemen, St Patrick and Oisin, in her book Gods and Fighting Men.[i]

    “Conan the Bald had Searc; Caoilte, son of Ronan, had Daol; Lugaidh’s Son and Goll were holding Fuaim and Fothran.

    “That was the first day we loosed out a share of our hounds to a hunting; and Och! Patrick, of all that were in it, there is not one left living but myself.”

    Oisín had landed back from his Tír na nÓg love nest and gone around Ireland looking for his family and friends. Everyone he met told him these were people from a myth, or had lived hundreds of years ago. He was at the south end of Glenasmole, in the Dublin Mountains, when he went to help some puny little fellows who were trying to shift a boulder out of the way of a road they were building. The girth of his horse broke and he got a shocking land, his burden of years coming on him in a moment. St Patrick took him in, in the hope of bringing him to the Christian way of thinking. But they had one big problem with each other: their attitude to dogs.

    “Fionn, the son of Uail, delighted in dogs,” wrote James Stephens in one of the best children’s books ever written, Irish Fairy Tales[ii], a reworking of the Fiannaíocht stories. “And he knew everything about them from the setting of the first little white tooth to the rocking of the last long yellow one. He knew the affections and antipathies which are proper in a dog; the degree of obedience to which dogs may be trained without losing their honourable qualities or becoming servile and suspicious; he knew the hopes that animate them, the apprehensions which tingle in their blood, and all that is to be demanded from, or forgiven in, a paw, an ear, a nose, an eye, or a tooth; and he understood these things because he loved dogs, for it is by love alone that we understand anything.”

    Fairy Child

    John Duncan ‘Riders of Sidhe’

    Fionn was the son of Uail Mac Baiscne. He was, in the way of mythic heroes, also a child of the Sidhe; his mother, Muirne, was the granddaughter of Nuadha Airgeadlámh, the Tuatha de Danann’s silver-handed king.

    Fionn was also – in one of those family problems we don’t talk about – a cousin of his dogs Bran and Sceolan. Fionn’s mother’s sister, Tuiren, made the mistake of falling for and marrying Iollan, a man of the Sidhe, but Iollan’s old partner, Uct Dealv, took grave exception to his marriage.

    She kidnapped Tuiren and turned her into a bitch, as you do, and handed her over to Fergus Fionnlaith, the man in Ireland who most disliked dogs. However, Tuiren’s charms were just as powerful in doggy as in human form, and Fergus was soon as besotted as anyone with a new puppy.

    Fionn tracked down his auntie and disenchanted her, but in the meantime she’d had two pups which remained in dog form, and were Old Irish superhero dogs – Bran and Sceolan.

    Bran, whose name meant ‘raven’ was the kind of dog we nowadays call a merle. “Speckled back over the loins; two ears scarlet, equal-red… Yellow feet that were on Bran, two black sides and belly white, greyish back of hunting colour,” as Douglas Hyde translated the bitch’s description in his collection Beside the Fireside, adding “Bran would overtake the wild geese, she was that swift.”[iii]

    Some 1,969 years later, Led Zeppelin underlined this good taste, singing, “You can tell all your friends around the world, ain’t no companion like a blue-eyed merle.”[iv]

    Heaven Awaits

    As Oisín debated with the newfangled patron saint of Ireland, he was enraged by Patrick’s insistence that his beloved dogs would not go to heaven, a place Patrick was bigging up.

    The leap of the buck would be better to me, or the sight of badgers between two valleys, than all your mouth is promising me, and all the delights I could get in Heaven,” he says snarkily. “Fionn never refused strong or poor, although cold Hell is now his dwelling place.

    Patrick tells him he’s a withered, witless old man, and what’s more, the Fianna are all in Hell.

    “O Patrick, tell me as a secret, since it is you have the best knowledge, will my dog or my hound be let in with me to the court of the King of Grace?” asks Oisín.

    “Old man in your foolishness that I cannot put any bounds to, your dog or your hound will not be let in with you to the court of the King of Power,” says Patrick.

    Yes, the pre-patrician old Irish were doggy people. In the long-gone words of Oisín:

    If I had acquaintance with God, and my hound to be at hand, I would make whoever gave food to myself give a share to my hound as well. It was a delight to Fionn, the cry of his hounds on the mountains.

    Lucille Redmond’s collection of stories, Love, is available on Amazon and on Apple Books

    [i] Gods and Fighting Men by IA Gregory, published by John Murray, London, 1905

    [ii] Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, published by Macmillan, New York, Toronto, London, 1920

    [iii] Beside the Fireside: a collection of Irish Gaelic folk stories, by Douglas Hyde (parallel texts in English and Irish), published by D Nutt, London, 1890

    [iv] Bron-y-Aur stomp, from Led Zeppelin III, released by Atlantic, 1970

    Feature Image: The Monarch of the Glen, 1851, by Sir Edwin Landseer

  • Plagues of Prejudice

    In December 1899 Honolulu-based physicians attributed two deaths to bubonic plague, and a local paper duly announced that the ‘scourge of the Orient’ had arrived.[i] Within months a first plague fatality was reported in continental U.S. as Chinese-American Chick Gin (Wing Chung Ging or Wong Chut King depending on the transliteration) succumbed to the disease in San Francisco. The cause of death was based on a classic plague symptom of swelling around the groin, but was disputed even after rudimentary bacterial analysis. Regardless, political and health authorities were already taking actions that resonate today.

    Fearing the economic impact of a dreaded disease, the state governor denied the existence of plague altogether, accusing his own health officials of propagating rumours and ‘injurious opinions’ detrimental to the ‘great and healthful city.’[ii] Conversely, successive quarantines had already been imposed on San Francisco’s Chinatown, excluding non-Asian homes and businesses despite their proximity. Enforced by barbed wire and a heavy police presence, the blockade led to dwindling food supplies and a steep rise in costs. An experimental vaccine with severe side effects, developed in 1897 by bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine, was made obligatory for any Chinese (and Japanese) wanting to leave the city.

    In 1900, Honolulu’s Chinatown was set on fire to in a misdirected effort to control Bubonic plague.

    Unsurprisingly, the turn-of-the-century scapegoating of East Asians in California did not occur in a vacuum. Anti-Chinese prejudice had already been formalized in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning their immigration for undermining the ‘dignity and wage scale of American workers.’[iii] There were, likewise, widespread perceptions of the Chinese as carriers of disease. If Europeans had been imperilled by the ‘barbaric hordes of Asia’, germs represented ‘a peaceful invasion more dangerous than a warlike attack.’[iv] And while dogma of the day suggested limited danger to the West due to advances in health and civilization, extreme measures might be necessary with plague. In such cases Russia’s ‘heroic methods’ in its Chinese colonies were helpfully referenced, as firing squads for the infected ‘saved trouble and other people’s lives.’[v]

    An 1886 advertisement for ‘Magic Washer’ detergent: ‘The Chinese Must Go’.

    Old Wine, New Bottle

    Associating disease with marginalized groups, minorities and others has hardly been an exclusively American experience. And by today’s standards, persecution over illness is not necessarily as crude, but neither can toxic discourse or indeed violence be excluded. The arrival of a new coronavirus in December 2019 is a case in point. The linking of its presumed place of origin in Wuhan with East Asians generally, and Chinese in particular, did not take long to manifest itself as multiple accounts of discrimination emerged. In Western countries this played on traditional racial tropes such as sordid animal markets and uncleanliness. Reflecting an entirely different experience, namely apprehension over Chinese influence, regional reaction was also alarmist. Both say as much about perceptions of mainland China as of the disease itself.

    There is no shortage of recent examples that demonstrate medical scapegoating around a novel or poorly understood disease. In 2010, the lynching of voodoo priests in Haiti originated with rumours of pout kolera (magic cholera powder) deliberately poisoning the water supply. The choice of target was partially reflected in the complex history of voodoo practitioners and the Haitian State. At times associated with resistance to foreign occupation, at others integrated into the personality cults of Haiti’s twentieth century dictatorships, notably that of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. Confusion over the origins of the cholera epidemic ‘fed on feelings of insecurity and fear’, in turn fuelling stigmatization and violence.[vi] More sustained anger eventually shifted towards the unwitting culprits, negligent United Nations peacekeepers that had contaminated the Artibonite river with cholera-infected faeces.

    Vodou ceremony, Jacmel, Haiti, 2002. Image: ‘Doron’.

    A corollary of medical scapegoating is fear and misinformation. Fundamental weaknesses in the Pakistani health sector, combined with accusations of a fake Hepatitis B campaign orchestrated to locate and kill Osama Bin Laden, has reinforced suspicions of polio vaccinations. With rumours of polio vaccines being either harmful or simply a front for intelligence gathering, health workers have since borne the brunt of attacks by armed groups.[vii] Misunderstandings and distortions around Ebola, both in West Africa in 2014 and more recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo have led directly to the deaths of medical staff. In the latter case, mistrust over the response is rampant, provoked in part by ‘community resentment’ over the focus on Ebola while ignoring underlying problems in the country.[viii]

    The targeting of health workers as somehow responsible for bringing illness into a community, and thus the cause or at least the visible manifestation of a terrifying epidemic, is an extreme example of the need to apportion blame. But if sickness has historically been portrayed as a punishment for sin, socially excluded groups and minorities have proven most vulnerable. Whether linked to mortality or fear of the unknown, context is key to understanding the long history of how those on the margins of society have been scapegoated. Much as nineteenth century descriptions of Chinese immigrants as ‘walking time bombs of infection’ cannot be separated from pervasive Sinophobia, the frequent panic associated with novel or misunderstood illness has tended to reinforce pre-existing stereotypes.[ix]

    From Tragedy to Farce

    The fate of Chick Gin aside, apportioning individual responsibility for epidemics is unusual in that it is difficult to prove. ‘Typhoid Mary’ is likely the most infamous example as she came to be seen as ‘synonymous with the health menace posed by the foreign-born.’[x] An Irish immigrant cook, Mary Mallon was a so-called healthy carrier of typhoid bacteria, unintentionally instigating outbreaks amongst her wealthy employers in New York until she was eventually tracked down in 1906. Vilified in the papers as a ‘walking typhoid fever factory’ or a ‘human culture tube’,[xi]  Mallon would end her days in forced isolation.

    ‘Typhoid’ Mary Mallon in hospital.

    On a more grandiose scale, Canadian air steward Gaëtan Dugas was posthumously declared ‘Patient Zero’, accused of intentionally infecting his partners with HIV and provoking the spread of AIDS in North America.[xii] Although later disproved, the fear and exclusion of the five ‘H’s – homosexuals, heroin addicts, haemophiliacs, hookers and Haitians – remained commonplace in the 1980s.

    Much like the five ‘H’s, easier to trace is the scapegoating of entire groups, the archetypal example almost certainly being the pogroms and massacres inflicted on European Jews during the Black Death. Rumours of an ‘anti-Christian international conspiracy’ fit snugly with long-standing antisemitism, particularly when mortality rates among Jews were seen as inexplicably low (the fact that sensible hygiene laws laid out in the book of Leviticus had been employed was entirely ignored). Initially directed at medieval lepers and vagrants, Jews came to be accused of poisoning wells, eventually resulting in the extermination of entire communities.[xiii] Six hundred years later hygiene control of typhus, a lice-borne pathogen, became an element of Nazi propaganda intended to justify the mass murder of human carriers during the Holocaust.[xiv]

    Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium).

    The transatlantic journey of yellow fever holds particular irony in the history of racial stereotyping over disease. The mosquito-borne virus’s first documented appearance in the New World was in 1647 Barbados. Even if thoroughly misunderstood at the time, much like malaria there was an assumption that black Africans were immune to the disease, all the more so as white Europeans were so highly susceptible (in reality this was largely due to early exposure during childhood). This immunity in turn became one of the justifications on which the Atlantic slave system was built. Brutal conditions on the sugar plantations and corresponding high mortality rates ensured continued new arrivals, often with the same immunity, all the while reinforcing the original racial stereotype. It was only as slavery was gradually abolished in the nineteenth century, a period coinciding with multiple outbreaks of yellow fever in the American South, that former slaves were themselves accused of spreading the disease.[xv]

    Skibbereen, west Cork, in 1847 by James Mahony.

    Cholera likewise has a special place in the history of medical scapegoating and became highly politicized. Despite having long circulated locally on the Indian subcontinent, it only emerged on the global stage in the early nineteenth century, an appearance closely intertwined with colonial trade policies. As the bacteria must be ingested through contaminated water or food, the poorest and most deprived urban areas proved most vulnerable. And given the profile of its victims, the spread of cholera inevitably took on class connotations that shifted smoothly towards immigrants, even as disease transmission came to be better understood. The Irish migratory experience was strongly marked by outbreaks of cholera, with higher mortality rates used as ‘corroboration that they were carriers of the disease’ rather than a reflection of widespread discrimination and impoverishment.[xvi]

    The link between poverty and disease was particularly apparent with venereal disease, more specifically syphilis (and gonorrhoea with which it was often confused). Referred to at times as the ‘secret plague’ given the strong underreporting, symptoms had been recognizable since the late fifteenth century. And while there had long been a feminized connotation as per responsibility, hence the expression ‘one night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury’, apportioning syphilitic blame took on far more sinister connotations through the later association with underprivileged women. Various incarnations of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1860s Britain essentially allowed the arrest and forced treatment of prostitutes in an attempt to limit venereal disease in the military, and subsequently the broader population.[xvii]

    The emergence of syphilis also provoked an unusual example of xenophobic scapegoating, essentially a bizarre etymological battle that took on global proportions. As the disease spread throughout Europe and beyond, rivals were duly named responsible. For the French it was the Neapolitan disease, the Italians vice versa; the Russians blamed the Poles; the Dutch turned towards the Spanish; in Japan it emerged as the ‘Chinese ulcer’; while the Turks were less discerning, simply referring to the Christian disease.[xviii] The 1918 influenza pandemic likewise went through multiple national incarnations before settling on the familiar Spanish flu, a reference to the neutral country that first reported the disease. Both examples border on the farcical and if there are lessons to be learned, at least as far as 1918 is concerned, it is rather the impact of censorship and misinformation in controlling a pandemic.[xix]

    Lessons Unlearned

    Being reminded of past madness has a purpose, especially as we have a nasty habit of repeating our errors. Our understandable fear of disease sadly has often revealed our basest instincts, further stigmatizing the most vulnerable and endangering the health of all. Barbaric reflexes are never far from the surface. The emergence of a new pandemic has provoked ugly reactions very much reminiscent of the past, and counterproductive to controlling both the disease and the corresponding panic. While there are no rules to the patterns of hate linked to epidemics, just as increased social cohesiveness is also a potential consequence, the choice of scapegoating targets is not random. Facile demonization of the ‘foreign’ remains a perpetual risk, and disease a convenient pretext.

    As for Chick Gin, he was merely the first of many plague fatalities in 1900 San Francisco. Over the next eight years at least one-hundred-and-seventy-two others would perish, both Chinese and non-Chinese.

    Duncan McLean is a senior researcher with the Research Unit on Humanitarian Stakes and Practices, Médecins Sans Frontières – Switzerland. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and in no way represent the organization to which he belongs. The content is an extension of a short editorial published in French and German, available as follows: https://www.letemps.ch/opinions/fleaux-sanitaires-aux-prejuges-sociaux; and https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/coronavirus-seuchen-suendenboecke-gesucht-ld.1543032.

    [i] ‘Bubonic Plague, Breed of Filth, Here’, The Hawaiian Star, Honolulu, 12 December 1899.

    [ii] ‘No Plague Says Governor Gage’, The San Francisco Call, San Francisco, 14 June 1900.

    [iii] Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ‘Immigrant Menace’, John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1994, p. 80.

    [iv] ‘Chinatown is a Menace to Health’, The San Francisco Call, San Francisco, 23 November 1901.

    [v] ‘The Scourge of a Century’, Lincoln County Leader, Toledo, 11 May 1900.

    [vi] Ralph R. Frerichs, Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-up in Post-earthquake Haiti, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 2016, p. 148.

    [vii] ‘Winning the War on Polio in Pakistan’, International Crisis Group, Asia Report 273, 23 October 2015.

    [viii] ‘DRC Ebola Outbreaks: Crisis Update’, Médecins Sans Frontières, 9 March 2020. https://www.msf.org/drc-ebola-outbreak-crisis-update

    [ix] Quote taken from testimony to Congress in 1876 over the state of Chinese immigration, Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, Arno Press: New York, 1969 (original 1909), p. 106.

    [x] A. Kraut, see above note 3, p. 97.

    [xi] ‘Woman ‘Typhoid Factory’ Held a Prisoner’, The Evening World, New York, 1 April 1907.

    [xii] Charlie Campbell, Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People, Duckworth Overlook: London, 2011, p. 161.

    [xiii] John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An intimate History of the Black Death, Harper: London, 2006, pp. 232, 248.

    [xiv] Samuel K. Cohn, Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S., Historical journal (Cambridge, England), 2012 November 1; 85(230): 535-555.

    [xv] Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism, Yale University Press: London, 1999, pp. 245-246.

    [xvi] Philip Alcabes, Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu, Public Affairs: New York, 2009, pp. 74-75, 77.

    [xvii] S. Watts, see above note 15, pp. 153-54.

    [xviii] Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis, Basic Books: New York, 2003, p. 23.

    [xix] Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, Jonathan Cape: London, 2017, p. 63.

  • Thought Leadership Required for Climate and Biodiversity Crisis

    The great English chemist James Lovelock conceived the Gaia (Gr. ‘goddess of earth’) Hypothesis in 1972, later developing this alongside American microbiologist Lynns Margulis. Later still, Lovelock, aged eighty-seven, was awarded the prestigious Wolston medal by the Geological Society of London for his pioneering concept.

    Now firmly embedded in the zeitgeist, the Gaia Hypothesis posits that unknown forces, popularly conflated with the idea of Mother Earth, nurture our planet’s physical environment to sustain life. To draw on another famous scientific analogy, it might be said that Gaia maintains ‘just rightness’ (i.e. ‘the goldilocks theory’) through righteous homeostasis.

    As Gaia approaches her golden jubilee, however – and James Lovelock edges toward his one-hundred-and-first birthday – the evidence mounts against faith in the concept of perpetual renewal; her resilience and raison d’être has been weakened after millennia of selfless resolve .[i] The precipice lies before us.

    Gaia has tolerated humanity’s repeated abuses, but only in recent geological time has her mood turned conspicuously (and literally) stormy.

    There are, nonetheless, grounds for hope. As Gaia’s health fades, Greta Thunberg’s rage burns ever more brightly. There is an existential ecosystem crisis to be called out, and Greta has risen to the challenge.

    A strange energy reverberates whenever this Swedish teenager speaks publicly. Her unflinching delivery is as riveting as a tense drama; her conviction is that of a seasoned stateswoman, with deliciously scathing rhetoric unleashed in staccato rhythm.

    Intriguingly, the voice retains the appeal of naivety. Significantly, despite and indeed because of this innocence, the overall effect can be intoxicating to grownups who thought they had lost hope.

    ‘Futile Nobility’

    Greta’s fury has burned a hole in the establishment’s defences. The fire she started has been stoked by public sentiment. A paradigm shift in environmental attitudes is now apparent, but worryingly certain world leaders have adopted a bizarre form of stoicism in the face of Greta’s resuscitation of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’.

    Against this backdrop, scientists’ noble pursuit of rigorous data to prove what may seem obvious can seem futile.

    For instance, in the recent Special Report on Climate Change and Lands, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), embodying the spirit of righteous scientific detachment, claim only ‘high (but notably not ‘very high’) confidence’ in the (surely self-evident) statement that ‘sustainable land management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies.’[ii]

    There are other examples of such reticence. In the midst of the Sixth Extinction, following on from a century-long campaign of insecticide, a team of UK entomologists published a paper calling for more data on insect declines, state:

    we respectfully suggest that accounts of the demise of insects may be slightly exaggerated. Bad things are happening—we agree—but this is not the whole story. We call for hard‐nosed, balanced, and numerical analysis of the changes taking place, and for calm and even‐handed interpretation of the changes, rather than rushing headlong into the hyperbole of impending apocalypse.[iii]

    Selling Copy

    Political leaders such as the POTUS Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a.k.a ‘Trump of the Tropics’, who recently mocked his latest nickname ‘Capitão Motoserra’ (Captain Chainsaw),[iv] provide a jarring contrast to valiant scientific rigour. Sadly but no longer surprisingly, these leaders frustrate efforts to slow anthropogenic ecosystem decay. Sadder still, we are increasingly desensitized to the toxic brew of xenophobia and climate denial.

    Whilst posing less risk to the environment than ignorance at world leader tier, the disregard of the most bombastic commentariat is equally galling. Cue journalistic tropes of Alpen-crunching tree embracers, guffawing reference to Ireland’s ecological anti-hero, the Kerry slug, and glib ‘kill the whales, save the plankton’ slogans.

    Purveyors of such sensationalist hyperbole do so to sell copy. The shock-jock Jeremy Clarkson wincingly entreats Greta, with misogynistic undertones ‘to be a good girl, shut up, and [don’t] go out in a skirt that short.’[v]

    Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed ‘obnoxious, loud, and frequently fired ,’[vi] U.S. Republican journalist Michael Graham is another exploiting an angry white male anti-environmental constituency to garner a following.

    For his part, the POTUS has also sparred with the Swedish child activist, in characteristically unbecoming fashion, mockingly referring to this ‘very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.’[vii]

    What fun would ensue if the IPCC were to invite Thunberg, Trump, and a band of other incendiary speakers to a public climate debate. The Canadian clinical psychologist and global media star Jordan Peterson could provide ruthless post-match psychoanalysis to provide car crash television on a stratospheric level.

    I suspect Thunberg might decline the opportunity as a matter of principle stressing the irrelevance of idle words.

    Yet it seems we need Greta to stimulate our senses, deadened as we are by a constant stream of ever-worsening statistics. As an example, take these statements of fact: ‘Nature declines are at rates unprecedented in human history;’[viii] an area of primary tropical rain forest the size of Belgium was lost in 2018,[ix] and these losses exceed those from 2017 when an area the size of a football pitch was lost every second.[x] Is it just me, or do these harbingers come off sounding oddly banal?

    Here in Ireland, 85% of habitats, protected under EU Habitat Directives, are in ‘unfavourable status.’[xi]  Curlew numbers – whose reverberating cry was once a soundtrack to Ireland’s uplands – have declined by 96% since the late 1980’s,[xii]  and may go extinct within five to ten years. Such statements sting and depress, but many of us seem desensitized by over-stimulation in a mediated age.

    Eco-thinkers

    ‘Ms.’ Thunberg, as she is sometimes addressed with mocking respect by her dissenters, is inarguably an ecological ‘thought leader.’ That term seems to have been first used to describe American philosopher and early ‘eco-thinker,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was said to have ‘the wizard-power of a thought leader.’

    As we face down the ecosystem crisis, we need more environmental thought leaders to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Lovelock, E.O Wilson, and Dublin’s own Frank Mitchell.

    We need effective eco-communicators to recruit followers to the environmental movement. These new recruits could heal the fatigue in long-term activists – labelled as outré or leftfield by the establishment – jaded by the inaction of policymakers.

    With environmentalism mainstreaming, new voices can dynamise and nourish environmental stewardship on the heretofore disinterested fringes.

    Hearteningly, in May 2019, Dáil Eireann became the second legislative assembly on the planet (after the House of Commons in the U.K.) to declare a Biodiversity and Climate Emergency. After decades of numbing stasis, law-makers in this State with the power to instigate change seen to have committed to radical environmental objectives through Ireland’s Climate Action Plan,[xiii] and Ireland’s (third) National Biodiversity Action Plan.[xiv] Let’s wait and see whether long-term institutional failures can be overcome.

    As a career ecologist, I care as deeply for slimy moss, and eels as for doe-eyed dolphins or deer. All are a part of the web of life; even the wasps we love to hate play their part as aphid predators. Yet committing my life’s work to conservation has done little to allay a sense of powerlessness to bring about meaningful changes.

    And yet – with rumination over my own more unsustainable habits a favourite past time – I see that we can all do more on an individual level, becoming, like Greta, the change we want to see in the world.

    Whoever stated: ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ happened upon a problem and solution to the current biodiversity and environmental crisis.

    For the sake of Mother Gaia we must substitute kinesis for stasis. The power of one is the collective potential of all. Wizard- (and perhaps also witch-) powered thought leaders are at the ready.

    [i] Tyrrell, T. 2013, Gaia: Death of a beautiful idea. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029401-800-gaia-the-death-of-a-beautiful-idea/

    [ii] IPCC, ‘Climate Change and Land’, August 2019, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/

    [iii] Chris Thomas, T. Jones and Sue Hartley, ‘“Insectageddon”: A call for more robust data and rigorous analyses’, Global Change Biology, March, 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331456611_Insectageddon_A_call_for_more_robust_data_and_rigorous_analyses

    [iv] Tom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro rejects ‘Captain Chainsaw’ label as data shows deforestation ‘exploded’’ August 7th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-exploded-july-data

    [v] Clarkson, J. 2019 27 Sep 2019. The e world may be getting hotter, Greta Thunberg… but having a meltdown isn’t going to help https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10022396/greta-thunberg-meltdown-wont-help-world/

    [vi] Ward, E. He’s loud. He’s controversial. And he knows he’s right. Style Weekly. https://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/hes-loud-hes-controversial-and-he-knows-hes-right/Content?oid=1382305

    [vii] Kate Lyons, ‘Donald Trump tweet appears to mock Greta Thunberg and UN speech’, September 24th, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/donald-trump-tweet-appears-to-mock-greta-thunberg-and-un-speech-1.4028590

    [viii] Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), ‘Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’’ May, 2019. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

    [ix] Niklas Magnusson, ‘Deforestation Wipes Out an Area the Size of Belgium’, April 25th, 2019, Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/how-bad-is-deforestation-two-connecticuts-were-lost-last-year

    [x] Damian Carrington, Niko Kommenda, Pablo Gutiérrez and Cath Levett, ‘One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals’, 27th of June, 2018, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017-data-reveals

    [xi] NPWS (2019). The Status of EU Protected Habitats and Species in Ireland. Volume 1: Summary Overview. Unpublished NPWS report

    [xii] Unpublished data from Allan Lauder (2017) cited in O’Donoghue, B.G. (2019). Curlew Conservation Programme Annual Report 2018. National Parks & Wildlife Service, Killarney O’Donoghue

    [xiii] Government of Ireland (2019). Climate Action Plan 2019. https://www.dccae.gov.ie/en-ie/climate-action/publications/Pages/Climate-Action-Plan.aspx

    [xiv] Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (2019). National Biodiversity Action Plan 2017-2021 https://www.npws.ie/sites/default/files/publications/pdf/National%20Biodiversity%20Action%20Plan%20English.pdf

  • Confronting ‘the Russia in Ourselves’

    The Russian bear looms in the English-speaking imagination as savage and barbaric, but with a native cunning in need of taming. Throughout the nineteenth century British imperialists looked on their seemingly ursine counterparts with a mixture of dread and superiority. William Makepeace Thackery’s poem ‘The Legend Of St. Sophia Of Kioff’ (1855) contains a typical portrayal of their Asiatic barbarism:

    Down they came, these ruthless Russians,
    From their steppes, and woods, and fens,
    For to levy contributions
    On the peaceful citizens.

    The ‘Great Game[i]’ of that time involved intrigues between British and Russians agents. India was the ultimate prize, with the ‘Near East’ forming part of an expansive theatre. Curbing Tsarist Russia’s encroachments brought British military expeditions into Central Asia. There they met the bellicose Afghans – who dished out one of the most ignominious defeats in British military history: the 1842 retreat from Kabul, when all but one European and a few Indian sepoys from Sir William Elphinstone’s 4,500-strong army limped back to base in Jalalabad.

    Great Game Cartoon from 1878.

    These colonial intrigues endowed the English language with a term now more commonly used in a sporting context: ‘pundit’, originating from the Sanskrit word ‘pandit’, meaning ‘knowledge owner’, or ‘learned man’. These local informants provided intelligence on the warlike peoples inhabiting the inhospitable terrain between lush India and the endless steppe. Tales were embellished to please the ear of the listener, moulding enduring Oriental stereotypes. Today’s pundits on international affairs also draw, perhaps unwittingly, on historic accounts, and are similarly prone to over-statement.

    By Jingo

    Nineteenth-century British Russophobia popularized the term ‘jingoism’, which can be traced to a song commonly sung in Victorian musical halls:

    We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
    We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,
    We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
    The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

    The Anglo-French victory in the Crimean War 1853-56 checked Russian designs on a Mediterranean port, but the dispute simmered, as Tsardom became a byword for tyranny – ironically, given the brutality of the simultaneously expanding British Empire. Projecting one’s worst characteristic onto to a remote ‘other’ is not restricted to individuals.

    By the end of the nineteenth century British imperialists felt more secure in their hold over the ‘jewel in the crown’, and another, Teutonic, enemy had arisen, aspiring to weltmacht (‘world power’): Germany was upsetting the balance of power in Europe, and required containing.

    Détente with Russia – which from 1891 had been in alliance with the French – followed, culminating in the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907, and eventual alliance during World War I. Long before the unexpected Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, however, British policy makers were worrying about the consequences of a Russian victory on the Eastern Front.

    These concerns reached fever pitch after the October Revolution, and the triumph of the Reds in the Russian Civil War, which included an unsuccessful intervention by Allied forces in support of the Whites. But by 1920 the Red Army was in command of most of the former Russian Empire, and had reached the gates of Warsaw. A shattered Germany, experiencing Communist insurgencies, lay ahead, before ‘the miracle of the Vistula’ – the victory of the Polish forces under Marshall Pilsudski, supported by the French. The Polish-Soviet conflict was resolved by the Treaty of Riga in 1921, bringing respite for two decades.

    In the Western imagination, during the 1920s and 1930s the Russian menace merged with the Red Peril, and a layer of ideologically-driven ruthlessness was added to the character. American reactionaries used the scare to destroy the labour movements that were then making inroads. The clampdown on the American left involved draconian measures (instigated by, among others, a young J. Edgar Hoover) against ‘subversives’, such as five-time Socialist Party Presidential candidate Eugene Debs, sentenced in 1918 to a ten-year prison sentence for urging resistance to the military draft, later commuted to three years. The media played its part, including disseminating the forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which established the myth of Jewish Bolshevism. America would bend principles where necessary to keep out the ‘Commies’.

    In Europe in 1939, the uneasy peace on the Eastern Front ended with the unlikely Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, ushering in the fourth, and most savage, partition of Poland. Hitler repudiated that Pact in 1941, with Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The ensuing alliance between Britain (and eventually the United States) with the Soviet Union decisively changed matters. The murderous Red Tsar, Joseph Stalin, was affectionately known as ‘Uncle Joe’, as long as the Nazi foe persisted.

    Predictably, relations deteriorated rapidly again after the war – especially after the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 – but the prospect of mutually assured destruction (MAD) brought a Cold War, lasting forty years.

    John le Carré

    From an imperialist perspective, World War II was a pyrrhic victory for Britain, which completed its metamorphosis from global hegemon to medium-sized client-state in the bipolar geopolitics of superpowers. The shambolic invasion of Suez of 1956 was the dying gasp of the British Empire, and the ‘winds of change’ swept through Africa during the 1960s.

    To a large extent, the United States inherited Britain’s role as the world’s policeman, although the U.S. has shown greater reliance on proxies – ‘divide and conquer’ – the extension of ‘soft’, cultural power, and economic manipulation – with the Iraq and Vietnam Wars notable exceptions.

    As part of a contiguous Anglosphere, the United States nonetheless inherited various tropes about a Russian ‘other’, extending back into the nineteenth century. The McCarthyite witch hunt in the 1950s against Communist sympathisers, especially in Hollywood, showed the U.S. at its most paranoid.

    The excesses of the American intelligence services both internationally, through the CIA, and internally, through the FBI under its long-time director J. Edgar Hoover, are well documented. These included targeted assassinations, foreign coups and mind control experiments (the MKUltra project saw U.S. citizens being dosed with LSD, generally without their consent or knowledge). In any intelligence war, the U.S. could play just as dirty as its opponent.

    In the latter half of the twentieth century a new layer to the Russian mystique was added by the Cold War literature of John le Carré, and other spy novelists. Karla, a recurring le Carré character, emerges as the archetypal devious, ruthless and ideologically driven Russian spymaster.

    That is not to imply that the Soviet and successor Russian regime have not been villainous, and manipulative. According to Ben MacIntyre in his account of the extraordinary career of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who spied for the British, the KGB ‘had long excelled in the art of manufacturing ‘fake news’;’ taking ‘’active measures’ to influence public opinion’, and ‘sow disinformation where necessary’[ii].

    But the organisation was also beset by money-grubbing corruption and institutional decay, especially as ideological fervour wavered in the great chill of the final decades before glasnost and perestroika, under Mikhail Gorbachev. After being posted to Copenhagen in the early 1970s, Gordievsky discovered that the recruitment of informants was ‘an invitation to corruption’, since most officers invented their interactions, falsified bills, ‘made up their reports and pocketed their allowances.’[iii] Upon being posted to London at the end of that decade he then found that most of the information sent back to Moscow by the heavy-drinking KGB bureau chief was ‘pure invention.’[iv]

    The Russia of the Western imagination refuses to conform to reality. Indeed, the threat may be aggrandized by self-serving writers. It is in the interest of the powerful Military Industrial Complex, for U.S. society to remain on edge, at war-without-end. In one rare slip, Lockheed Martin Executive Vice-President Bruce Tanner revealed to a conference in 2015 that his company would see ‘indirect benefits’ from the ongoing war in Syria.[v]

    Al-Jazeera reported that the ‘black budget’ of secret intelligence programmes alone was estimated at $52.6bn – under President Obama’s watch – in 2013. That was only for the secret programmes, not the far greater intelligence and counterintelligence budgets.[vi] These agencies at times use mouth pieces in the press, and academia. The import of information being released to the public by U.S. agencies competing for funding and survival surely requires careful analysis.

    One former CIA station chief in the Middle East, characterised the diverging roles of the main agencies to the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh as follows: ‘Don’t you get it Sy? The FBI catches bank robbers. We rob banks … And the NSA? Do you really expect me to talk to dweebs with protractors in their pockets who are always looking down at their brown shoes.’[vii] U.S. spooks are every bit as manipulative, and far better funded, than their Russian equivalents in a discipline the former CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton described as ‘the wilderness of mirrors’.

    Vladimir Putin is not a mass murderer in the mould of a 1930s dictator, intent on imposing an inflexible ideology on the rest of the world. Crony capitalism or strongman rule could be used to describe his regime. Importatnly, his ambitions appear to be limited to restoring the territory of the Soviet Empire to Russia, rather than fomenting World War III.

    The Russian President is probably best viewed as a Shakespearian villain, whose violent impulses, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, ‘stop short at ten or so cadavers, because they have no ideology.’[viii] This offers scant consolation political prisoners in Russian prisons, but Putin has certainly shown no genocidal tendencies. Soviet technology has been in decline vis-à-vis the West since the 1960s, and with the breakup of the Union the rump Russian state lost important technological and industrial centres, such as Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine; but the English-speaking world remains fixated on the threat.

    Russia’s ‘strengths’

    The academic author Timothy Snyder is a leading purveyor of Russian history, and mythology. In a recent interview he stated:

    Throughout the Cold War, Russia was always better than us when it came to penetrating their enemies and breaking them down from within. Rather than smashing things overtly, they would work from behind the scenes to cast doubt on things. They’d insert their people into enemy organizations and slowly create chaos from inside. They’ve always excelled at turning people against each other.

    The British, in particular, by the end of the Cold War had gained the upper hand over their Soviet counterparts, with their man in London’s KGB station feeding her Majesty’s government almost anything they would wanted to know, including that then Labour leader Michael Foot had been in the pay of the KGB until 1968.[ix] Gordievsky’s intelligence-gathering was of an enormous assistance in Margaret Thatcher’s (and Ronald Reagan’s) establishment of good relations with the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev. Also, by the early 1980s the CIA had over one hundred covert operations underway inside the Soviet Union, and at least twenty active spies.[x]  Nonetheless Snyder insists on the fiction of an omniscient Soviet spymaster transitioning into a Russian web guru:

    Russia lost the Cold War because the Cold War was decided by economics and technology; it was a material competition. But after the Cold War, we moved into a different world, a world defined by the internet, and that’s a much more psychological world. The techniques they’ve been honing for decades are much more powerful in this new digital world, where emotion dominates and everyone is connected and there is so much information floating around. This is a world of information warfare, and that suits Russia’s strengths.[xi]

    Snyder’s anachronistic generalisations about the Russian character belie the distinction between the ideologically-driven Communists under the Soviet Union, especially prior to the Prague Spring of 1968, and the more venal aspirations of the successor Russian regime.

    One academic review of his recent book (The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, New York, Tim Duggan Books, 2018), portraying Putin as a latter-day Nazi, sets the record straight:

    The fact that Timothy Snyder is an influential public intellectual and respected historian is no reason for scholars not to challenge his facile and polemical analysis of the contemporary Russian state. By obfuscating the broad debate on Russia, Snyder denies the need for a serious, unbiased analysis of those features of the Putin regime that could be characterized as fascist. Distortions, inaccuracies, and selective interpretations do not help illuminate what motivates the Russian leadership’s self-positioning on the international, and in particular the European, scene. Simplistic reductionist techniques and invalid reasoning further confuse the analysis—and bias policy responses.[xii]

    Snyder’s polemics appeal to the mass media market, and “bias policy responses”. It is as if failings in our own civilisation appear to demand external explanation.

    Timothy Snyder, historian and author, teaching at Yale university in 2017.

    ‘The Russia in ourselves’

    In his account of the career of Carl Jung, Laurens van der Post recalled, ‘many post-war occasions when he [Jung] spoke with increasing urgency of the necessity for us all to understand that the Russian problem in the external world could never be resolved without more disaster unless we first dealt with the Russia in ourselves.’[xiii] Through the Cold War and beyond, from South America to Vietnam and Iraq, the U.S. acted with just as much contempt for human rights and international law as the Soviet Union, or Russia. Even under Obama’s Presidency, drone strikes – extra-judicial assassinations – were a recurring projection of U.S. power.

    The main difference between ‘East’ and ‘West’ has been, for the most part at least, domestic preservation of the Rule of Law, including freedom of expression, in the latter. This has permitted criticism on the fringes, if not in a mainstream media often beholden to corporate interests.

    The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe in the 1990s stoked Russian fears of encirclement, bringing a desire for a strong, militaristic, leadership to protect the country from outside interference after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. More recently, EU leaders sought to absorb the Ukraine into the Western orbit. This is despite many parts of that country containing Russian-speakers with a nostalgia for the predictability of life under Pax Sovetica.

    Ukraine’s fertile plains were the bread-basket of the Tsarist and Soviet Empires, making many Russians understandably apprehensive about a complete divorce. Moreover, Russia’s military planners see these flat lands as military indefensible, and her ‘natural’ frontier as extending to the Black Sea, Carpathian mountains, and flood plain of the Vistula.

    Squeezed in the middle, Ukrainians labour under kleptocratic and tyrannical rulers serving interests in both East and West. But many Western commentators have failed to acknowledge the machinations of the latter, while magnifying the role of the former amidst a twenty-four hour news cycle that offers little time for dispassionate reflection.

    Trump-Russia

    The arrival of Donald Trump at the U.S. Presidential helm may prove to be one of the worst disasters to afflict the world’s environment. He is the quintessence of a loud-mouthed American who knows nothing of the world, or even his own country, while irrationally believing in his powers of divination, and capacity ‘to get the deal done’.

    For many commentators the success of his malignant buffoonery requires an external explanation, drawing attention from the disgust that many ordinary Americans justifiably felt towards a Washington capital seething with lobbyists, spooks and over-paid bureaucrats. Enter Vladimir Putin in the Karla role – himself an ex-KGB agent – manipulating not only Trump, who is supposed to have been captured in flagrante delicto romping with Eurasian hussies, but also the American people who – according to this narrative – have been stupefied by Russian trolls: “Russia’s strengths” according to Timothy Snyder.

    Whatever about the veracity of any claims of Russian collusion, or the idea that U.S. intelligence community could so easily be outflanked, psychologically we appear to be obscuring the ‘Russia in ourselves’. The United States is an increasingly dysfunctional and unequal society. Aside from the dismantling of Medicare, the appeal of Trump to blue collar American is not entirely irrational. He promised to protect indigenous U.S. industry, and ‘drain the swamp’ of a widely despised capital. ‘Lying’ Hilary Clinton was correctly seen as an establishment figure who would do nothing to alleviate the continuing decline of working class America, bedevilled by obesity and drug addiction, while real wages have stagnated for decades.[xiv]

    No doubt Putin sought a friendly regime in the White House, but pundits habitually exaggerate the Russian leader’s influence, just as many journalists blithely accepted the nonsense about Saddam Hussein constituting a threat to global peace. The accumulated myth of the sly and aggressive Russian has been given a new lease of life.

    A Colossus of American Journalism

    Seymour Hersh is a colossus of American journalism, who has interrogated the structures of power internally and externally since the 1960s, invariably setting the record straight. His real breakthrough was exposing the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War; he went on to reveal chemical and biological weapons programmes in the late 1960s; internal repression of anti-War groups by the CIA; mafia intrigues; the foreign policy dirty tricks of Nixon and Kissinger; the hypocrisy of JFK’s Camelot, U.S. links to Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes in the 1980s; and the horror of Abu Ghraib. Without his tireless work we would know a great deal less about Uncle Sam’s unseemly side.

    It is reassuring that neither Hersh, nor his family, were harmed over the course of an ongoing award-winning career, contributing especially to the New York Times and The New Yorker. He records just one death threat in that time, from a prominent mafia fixer in the 1970s.[xv] Among the American establishment there were, and still are, progressive forces resisting foreign misadventures and barbarities, such as using a sack full of fire ants to extract information from an internee, as occurred during the so-called War on Terror.[xvi]

    Seymour, ‘Si’, Hersh, photographed in 2004.

    Fascinatingly, however, in his Reporter: A Memoir, Hersh bemoans the unwillingness of editors in the New York Times to support investigations into corporate America in the late 1970s, which frustrated him at one point to such an extent that he hurled his typewriter out the office window – the following day the window was replaced and nothing more was said of the incident.

    Hersh recalls:

    Writing about corporate America had sapped my energy, disappointed the editors, and unnerved me. There would be no check on corporate America, I feared: Greed had won … the courage the Times had shown in confronting the wrath of a president and an Attorney General in the crisis over the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was nowhere to be seen when confronted by a gaggle of corporate conmen.[xvii]

    The point about freedom of expression in the English-speaking world is that mainstream media only generally conduct investigation into threats to political and economic stability. The Watergate investigation was permitted, as this was an illegal attack on half of the U.S. political establishment; also, a significant proportion of America’s elite began to viewed the Vietnam War as unwinnable after the Tet Offensive in 1968, permitting critical articles form Hersh and others. But investigating white collar crime can be to the detriment of advertisers, and therefore altogether more difficult to pursue.

    Holding his nerve

    Hersh delivers a withering assessment on further media decline in the Internet era:

    We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.[xviii]

    The problems are by no means restricted to the purveyors of fake news, external or otherwise:

    The mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television networks will continue to lay off reporters, reduce staff, and squeeze the funds available for good reporting, and especially for investigative reporting, with its high costs, unpredictable results and its capacity for angering readers and attracting expensive law suits.[xix]

    He concludes: ‘it’s very painful for me to think I might not have accomplished what I did if I were at work in the chaotic and unstructured journalism world of today.’[xx]

    As an old school reporter that pursued stories as doggedly as his body permitted, Hersh now considers himself an odd-man-out, and has found his recent reporting falling foul of editorial disfavour, even in supposedly progressive outlets such as The New Yorker, and The London Review of Books. Thus, while investigating the assassination of Osama bin Laden, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who had close ties to the Obama administration, complained about his use of the ‘same old tired source’, much to the grizzled Hersh’s bemusement.

    Perhaps more surprisingly, The London Review of Books delayed publication of another article he wrote challenging ‘the widespread perception that Bashar Assad had used a nerve agent two months earlier against his own people … The article, which was taken by many as an ad hoc defence of the hated Assad and the Russians who supported him, and not the truth as I found it’,[xxi] worried the editor. As a result Hersh took the story to Der Spiegel.

    Corroboration arrived in early 2018 when Defense Secretary James Mattis diverted from the previous narrative about the chemical attack, saying: ‘We do not have evidence of it’. Mattis can hardly be described as a Putin supporter, considering he resigned over Trump’s abrupt announcement that he would pull U.S. troops out of Syria – which presumably gives a free hand to the Russians. An investigator as formidable as Hersh generally has his ducks in a row.

    Russia Today

    In many respects, the state news agency Russia Today acts as a mouthpiece for Putin’s government. At times it does purvey what appears to be fake news, casting a fog of uncertainty over the reliability of everything it publishes. But to suggest mainstream media in the West is not also serving vested interests would be naïve, and fails to recognise that what is delivered as news is a product of editorial decisions: facts do represent opinions, contrary to one banal advertising slogan of the Irish paper of record.

    Any online publisher, even a reputable state broadcaster such as the BBC, measures success in ‘clicks’, albeit the bait must be sophisticated if it is to ensnare the educated reader. A bare-chested, unapologetically homophobic Vladimir Putin performs the role of pantomime Russian villain with aplomb. Even The Guardian is not immune from dangling half-baked investigations before its consumers.[xxii] Seymour Hersh, notwithstanding his contempt for the U.S. President, stated in 2017: ‘Trump’s not wrong to think they all fucking lie about him.’[xxiii] The Trump-Russia affair may prove to have more to do with inter-agency disputes – cops and robbers – than Russian machinations.

    But the buffoon Trump must have been manipulated by the Eurasian spymaster, whose agencies have ingeniously transformed the Internet into a labyrinth of conspiracy theories and distracting nonsense, right under the noses of the CIA, FBI and NSA. This allows us to avoid assessing the ‘Russian in ourselves’, and acknowledging the pathologies of Western societies, from social media addiction to ever-widening inequalities, and ecocide.

    With mainstream media failing to pursue vested interests, the greed that Seymour Hersh points to may have won, for the time being at least. It is simpler to blame a straw Russian bear, rather than examining the serious failings in our own societies.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

    [i] See Peter Hopkirk’s canonical account: The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, New York, Kodansha, 1992.

    [ii] Ben MacIntyre, The Spy and the Traitor, London, Penguin, 2018, p.46

    [iii] Ibid, p.26

    [iv] Ibid, p.130

    [v] Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani ‘DEFENSE CONTRACTORS CITE “BENEFITS” OF ESCALATING CONFLICTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST’, The Intercept, December 4 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/12/04/defense-contractors-cite-benefits-of-escalating-conflicts-in-the-middle-east/ accessed 15/1/19.

    [vi] Jonathan Turley, ‘Big money behind war: the military-industrial complex’ Al-Jazeera, January 11th, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/01/big-money-behind-war-military-industrial-complex-20141473026736533.html, accessed 14/1/19.

    [vii] Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York, Random House, 2018, p.300.

    [viii]  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, New York, Perennial Classics, 1974, p. 173.

    [ix] It is believed that most of these payments were used by Foot in order to keep afloat the left wing newspaper, Tribune, he edited. When the cabinet secretary, the politically neutral Sir Robert Armstrong, was presented with this incendiary information he elected not to inform the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, assuming, correctly, that Foot would lose the forthcoming election in 1983. MacIntyre, 2018, p.142

    [x] Ibid, p.200

    [xi] History News Network, ‘Yale’s Timothy Snyder says Russia pioneered “fake news”’, May 4th, 2018, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168751, accessed 14/1/19.

    [xii] Marlene Laruelle, ‘Is Russia Really “Fascist”? A Comment on Timothy Snyder’, Ponars Eurasia, 9/2008, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/russia-really-fascist-reply-timothy-snyder, accessed 15/1/19.

    [xiii] Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, London, Verso, 1976, p.22.

    [xiv] Drew Desilver, ‘For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades’, Pew Research Centre, 7th of August, 2018. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/, accessed 14/1/19.

    [xv] Hersh, 2018, p.234.

    [xvi] Ibid, p.318.

    [xvii] Ibid, p.247.

    [xviii] Ibid, p.3.

    [xix] Ibid, p.4.

    [xx] Ibid, p.5.

    [xxi] Ibid, p.330.

    [xxii] Erin Durkin, ‘Trump: report FBI investigated him as possible Russian agent is ‘insulting’’ The Guardian, January 13th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/13/donald-trump-russia-new-york-times-washington-post-fbi-putin, accessed 14/1/19.

    [xxiii] ‘Tyler Durden’, ‘Seymour Hersh: “RussiaGate Is A CIA-Planted Lie, Revenge Against Trump”’,  ZeroHedge, 8th of February, 2018. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-02/seymour-hersh-2018, %E2%80%98russiagate%E2%80%99-cia-planted-lie-revenge-against-trump, accesseed 14/1/19.

  • An Irish Poet Attains Greatness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    II – The badger and the fox.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The ‘Third of May’, by Francisco Goya.

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

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

    Characterised as a badger, W.B. Yeats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    III – ‘The Dismal Science’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Karl Marx, ‘a know-all coldness’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Tanner, through O’Siadhail, says:

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

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

    IV – The Art of the Possible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    V – God and Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Vanier also offers encouragement to the poet:

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

    Then Hannah Arendt again condemns:

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

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

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

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

    VI – Poetic Futures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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