Cassandra Voices

Tag: public

  • The Journalist as Public Intellectual

    Many of those featuring in this series wrote top class journalism, including Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Voltaire and George Orwell. None of them, however, are pre-eminently or exclusively associated with their journalism. There is one intellectual who is however. That of course is Christopher Hitchens – the non pareil journalist of our recent age, and perhaps the last of the just.

    The purpose of this essay is not to deal with types of journalism or codes of ethics, or to deal with the complex relationship between editors and proprietors, and indeed now social media exerts control over journalism. Instead, I seek to identify which hacks, from Fleet Street or otherwise, have singularly, through the restrictions and obsession with news and sensation, stood out to become true Public Intellectuals.

    There has never been a greater need for a mass circulation public intellectual. I open this debate by suggesting five choices, at least two of whom displayed superiority in this arena to Hitchens.

    The Criteria

    A Journalist-Public Intellectual must seek the truth, understand the nature of fact-gathering and vocationally support speech rights even at the outer limits. He or she must also form a bulwark against the degradation of language. In this respect the Promethean storm of social media opens the door to ever more unregulated and unfiltered opinions, often deliberately orchestrated by far right-wing or absurd woke viewpoints to enforce wrecking ball compliance and control.

    It begs the question: compromised by corporate control how can a journalist in the mainstream press now become a Public Intellectual?

    Recently I visited my friend Patrick Healy éminence grise of Irish Public Intellectualism in Amsterdam. He is a retired professor of architecture, painter, writer and a global authority on Karl Kraus. So let us get to the first of my five choices. The first greater than Hitchens and Swift greater than all.

    1. Karl Kraus

    In my piece The Austrian Mind I omitted Kraus given the challenge of writing on him, as Jonathan Frantzen in effect suggested in his interpretation of certain of his texts in The Kraus Project (2013). How do you grapple with so protean or unclassifiable an intellect? He seems almost incomprehensible in the present age.

    Kraus acted as editor from 1899-1936 of the leading Viennese magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) which he used as his own personal soapbox. He was the exclusive writer from 1911 onwards. People feared his intemperate pen. A satirist, polemicist, aphorist and playwright, writing in the Golden Age of literary Vienna, which ended very abruptly. All shortly emigrated and dead. The fate of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth.

    His targets, not unlike the later Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, was the mediocrity of the Austrian Bourgeoisie and above all their distortion and abuse of language, particularly his fellow journalists. He could often be seen for half an hour trying to work out the insertion of a comma in Café Mozart!

    In his book on Kraus Frantzen primarily deals with an essay on the German national poet Heine, where with very effective pastiche Kraus crucifies Heine and by implication those like him, saying: ‘Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.’

    He was a scathing aphorist and two of my favourites are applicable to our own age. First, is the idea that ‘corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.’ The second is also quite relevant: ‘Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.’

    Reading the entirety of Die Fackel is an experience not unlike an extended viewing of Peter Cooke’s four great impersonations of English archetypes, judge, football manager, naturalist and rock star for the Clive Anderson show shortly before his death. Peter Cook was also Lord Gnome, the proprietor of Private Eye. He employed Ian Hislop and was by indirection a journalist and public intellectual. In fact, his impersonations, his support of and informal and sometimes formal contributions to Private Eye make him an intrinsic if not central choice.

    Krauss epic play The Last Days of Mankind (2015), which Patrick Healy has translated, is an attack on press barons, hacks facilitating, through mass orchestration, Populist bellicose hysteria, and the First World War. Its uneven tone demonstrates his evolution from aristocratic condescension to social democrat. The play is a mammoth fifteen hours long for voices or rather a voice best read by Kraus, or as a substitute Patrick, attacking stupidity in all directions.

    Die Fackel also attacks psychoanalysis as a quack science; antisemitism, though his own antisemitism as a self-loathing Jew is also evident; corruption, not least the police chief of Vienna who he forced out of office; the pan-German Populist movement; laissez-faire economic policies; and numerous other subjects.

    He dies at the very precipice of collapse, of natural causes, after a self-enforced interregnum when he suspended publication with the rise of Hitler, only for one last push of part of an extended essay The Third Walspurgers Night (1936). Its essential argument is that through their devotion to the pastime of palaver and tactics, the social democrats had facilitated Hitler’s rise and had lost all material gains. He despaired at their belief ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss, as anything other than Hitler was needed. Historic desperation.

    The opening paragraph of the essay is devastating in its implications for today I interpose.

    As to Hitler, [read Trump or any other contemporary ‘strongman’ leader] I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly – but mistakenly – expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor but may also prevent the associated, ….?

    The rest of the essay deals with the propogandists and the facilitators primarily Goebbels [read Musk, The Daily Mail, and indeed other legacy media].

    The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht as Patrick Healy suggests is that satire is as the Roman genre par excellence satura tota nostra est – and should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility, but also use mockery, insult, indignation etc, fusing the voice of the moralist and the skill of a standup comic. Indeed, the word also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together.

    1. Jonathan Swift

    The only equal of Kraus as a Journalist-Public Intellectual, and thus also greater than Hitchens in the pantheon is, in my view, Swift. Incontestably, the greatest satirical essay in the English language is A Modest Proposal ((1729). Kraus was in fact pleased to be compared to Swift on the basis that false modesty was the most arch kind of hypocrisy.

    Swift’s essay argues, in light of a policy of Malthusian liquidation, that rather than allowing children starve to death a profit could be made that would contribute to the common weal. Apparently informed by an American friend, the author says that children make a very fine dish. A passage towards the end of the essay perfectly encapsulates much of the awfulness of that time, and our own:

    I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.

    Swift wrote other great journalistic tracts such as The Tale of The Tub (1704) and in a golden age of satire his skills were venerated. His exact contemporary Alexander Pope, particularly in his epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1717) stirring up the upper classes, was more lyrical than trenchant. In fairness Pope’s wonderful Dunciad (1728-43) castigates stupidity in all its manifest forms and is dedicated to Swift. Indeed it was possibly partly written by him. It is also apposite to our time. Two quotes suffice.

    How with less reading than makes felons scape, less human genius than God gives an ape

    And out of context but an elaboration of the above.

    To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.

    Consider also the final book of Gulliver’s Travels, where ‘Yahoos’ – a term that has entered the lexicon as a pejorative description of humans – describes lawyers and judges in the following unflattering terms:

    Judges… are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

    Or

    It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.

    1. H.L. Mencken

    In Kraus’ own time only the legendary muckraking American journalist H.L. Mencken is comparable. He wrote a fantastic treatise on The American Language (1919 and revised) and was the bugbear of the American bourgeoisie of his time. In colourful terms Mencken referred to the religious right in his day as ‘gaping primates, anthropoid rabble’, and the ‘boobiesie’. Famously through the Baltimore Sun he briefed Clarence Darrow to defend the teacher accused of the criminal offence of teaching Darwinism in the Scopes Trial (1925).

    Darrow’s opponent as prosecutor was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won, but Darrow won the moral victory not least in his devastating cross examination of Bryan on expert lessons from the Bible. The verdict was reversed on appeal. One week later Bryan died and Mencken penned his infamous obituary of William Jennings Bryan to a chorus of disapproval. Here is a flavour of it:

    Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. … He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

    The thread that unites Kraus, Swift, and Mencken is fearless satire and rhetoric and opinion of the most audacious type, built on the defence of rationality against institutional, governmental and fundamentalist abuse.

    1. Christopher Hitchens

    Hitchens could not write a bad sentence, a line Edmund Wilson used about Scott Fitzgerald. The towering achievement of his gifted polemics is in my view  The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), which he argues that he ought to be arrested for war crimes. There was an equally famous and blasphemous text about the ostensibly good Mother Therese of Calcutta The Missionary Position (1995). Irreverent journalism of this type is now sorely lacking!

    1. Ryszard Kapuscinski

    The book on the Islamic Revolution in Iran Shah of Shahs (1982) or his equally famous book on the fraud that was Haille Selassie The Emperor (1978) are eye-witness accounts, and rightly lauded. He had no fear, like Hitchens, of wading into dangerous territories, but his wisdom is contained in other more reflective books.

    Whereas learning about the world is labour, and a great all consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact-to look without seeing, to preserve oneself within oneself.
    Travels with Herodotus (2004)

    Or best of all in Imperium (1993), his best book and a summation, he writes:

    Three plagues, three contagions threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.

    All three share one trait a common denominator an aggressive all powerful total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that waits its sacrificial victims.

    The final word is left to Karl Kraus, who I regard as the second greatest journalist of all time, after Swift:

    Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.


    Feature Image: Suzy Hazelwood

  • Public Intellectuals: Voltaire

    Voltaire (1694-1778) is the self-invented name of François-Marie Arouet, riffed on a childhood description of him as a determined little man. He belongs in the Panthéon in Paris, old wise and wizened, but eyes sharp and gleaming through the stone. The central figure in the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s legacy is now being systematically dismantled worldwide.

    It is notable that Black Lives Matter sought to desecrate his statue despite condemnation of slavery in his most famous book Candide (1759). It was an unjust attack, even allowing for his occasional ambiguity as a product of his times. Why not go to Monticello and attack icons of Thomas Jefferson? John F Kennedy famously said in a meeting of Nobel Prize winners in the White House: ‘there is more intellect in this room except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ We may not simply be desecrating statues, but also those who brought Enlightenment to the human soul.

    Voltaire’s work is eclectic and difficult to classify. His plays are rightly disparaged, though these were often his main source of income. They also brought a lengthy stay in the Bastille, as well as forced exile for over two years in London, where he got to know among others Newton and Swift. There, he wrote a celebratory text on the English, famously describing them as a nation of one hundred religions but only one sauce. He went on to popularize Newton, and is attributed with spreading the story of the apple tree.

    So, using quotations from the man himself let’s explore his central contribution.

    Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille from 16 May 1717 to 15 April 1718 in a windowless cell.
    1. Freedom Of Speech

    I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

    If we resort to ‘no platforming’ or censoring people for saying things we disagree with then all is lost. Sadly, we no longer have a polity dedicated to ideal speech, the utopia envisaged by Habermas, via Jeremy Bentham. Instead, we find a uniform, soporific social media blandness.

    Ronald Dworkin  towards the end of his illustrious career, and in response to the Danish Cartoon incident, wrote a nuanced defence of the right to offend, saying:

    Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended.

    So, in a democracy no one, however powerful or important, can have a right not to be insulted or offended.

    Thus, for example, in 2015, when 12 journalists from satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were shot in a terrorist attack, Voltaire’s Trait sur la tolerance/ Treaty on Tolerance (1763), which defends freedom of speech was drawn attention to. Protesters marched down the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris brandishing images of the great man shouting: Je suis Charlie.

    In the treatise he argued: Oh, different worshippers of a peaceful god. …love God and your neighbour.

    Christoper Hitchens Oscar Wilde, along with others such as the English judge Stephan Sedley, have in substance also remarked that the freedom to speak inoffensively is a freedom not worth having  They are merely his intellectual offspring.

    Voltaire with Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-François de La Harpe.
    1. Religion

    If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

    The problem in this post-truth-transhumanist zeitgeist is that there exists a moral vacuum. Moral relativism and the structuralists have destroyed community, sociability and the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. The death of God in people’s lives has undermined society and social ordering. Habermas‘ most recent text in effect says so. Voltaire agrees.

    Voltaire was actually an atheist but deliberately circumspect. On his death bed he was asked did he want the services of a priest for the last rites and renounce Satan. His Delphic response was: ‘This is no time to be making new enemies.’

    Thus, the arch-rationalist and pragmatist recognised the need for doubt. He understood the need for Christian compassion and religion as a source of social order. Indeed, he famously was sceptical of certainties.

    On the brink of the destruction of the ancien regime, he spent his final twenty-five years in Ferney, a fabulous estate near the Swiss border at Geneva. It was built to some extent on the proceeds of winning the French lottery. He treated his workers admirably and built a model town, which I have had the privilege of visiting.

    Luckily, he was not around to witness the descent of the French Revolution into barbarism and terror ushered in by virulent atheists such as St Just and Robespierre.

    Indeed, Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man and co-author of The French Declaration of The Rights (1793) narrowly avoided the guillotine by a mark on the wrong door at the height of the Terror.

    In the interests of balance it was worth recalling another of his aphorisms on religion:

    I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. (Letter to Étienne Noël Danielsville, May 16, 1767)”

    and

    God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

    Voltaire at Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci, by Pierre Charles Baquoy.
    1. Miscarriages of Justice

    It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

    In the summer of 1765, in the little town of Abbeville in Picardie in northern France, three young men, Franzoi’s-Jean Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, Gaillard d’Alene and Charles Moisnel, were accused of sacrilege, blasphemy and irreligion. A crucifix had been damaged on a bridge leading to Abbeville. The three young men had been observed failing to doff their hats as a religious procession passed. They had been heard singing songs with pornographic allusions to the Virgin Mary. Shocking and libertine books were discovered in La Barre’s room, among them Voltaire’s Dictionarie Philosophique, printed anonymously in Geneva in 1764.

    On July 1 1766, La Barre was tortured and beheaded. His body was burnt on a pyre together with Voltaire’s Dictionary. Voltaire heard about the case in his retreat at Ferney, when the first accusations were made.

    At first, he was hopeful that the death sentence would be commuted. Later, when he learned that the execution had taken place, he was horrified. In a letter to a friend, he expressed his horror at the strange combination of frivolity and cruelty he observed in the French. After the burning and symbolic execution of his Dictionary he felt indirectly targeted and under genuine threat. Extradition in fraught times was a possibility.

    He retaliated brilliantly. In the 1769 edition of the Encyclopaedia entitled La Raison par alphabet, Voltaire includes an article on torture in which he relates La Barre’s ordeal. The prosecution mentioned this scandalous book which was later put on the Vatican’s Index Libro.

    He wrote initially in the hope of achieving a retrial. With each new attempt to intervene on behalf of the accused, Voltaire goes back to the documents, re-reading and cross-checking. As new information comes to light, he modifies his arguments, considering the potentially biased nature of the “facts” that had been presented to him.

    Noticeably Voltaire scatters them throughout his letters to friends, but also circulates them among important members of the judiciary. Luckily, he had the privilege of being on friendly terms with the powerful. Thus, he enjoyed a volatile lifelong relationship with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia as well as the King of France. This saved his skin.

    In the Le Barre case what was at issue was not the legality of the proceedings, but the legitimacy of the judiciary.

    A crucial text Prix de la justice et de humanity (1777), describes the French justice system from the point of view of a Swiss protestant traveller in France. Yet, the last important text Voltaire wrote on the case was Le Cri du sang innocent (1775), a letter addressed to the King of France, Louis XVI, and signed by La Barre’s co-accused who had escaped to Prussia. It was a decidedly brave stance.

    He also intervened famously in the Calas affair, involving a Protestant merchant who was sentenced to death on the Wheel by the Parliament in Toulouse. and executed on March 10th, 1762 after being convicted of murdering one of his sons who had openly converted to Catholicism. Voltaire wrote to the Comte argental and Memo la Comtesse:

    …You will ask me, my divine angels, why I am so interested in this merchant of Toulouse who has been broken on the wheel. I will tell you. First, it is because I am a man. Then it is because I see how foreigners in discussing this affair condemn us. Is it necessary to make the name of France stink all over the continent…. which dishonours the whole of human nature?

    Voltaire was contacted about the case, and after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism were dispelled by his investigations, he began a campaign to get the sentence overturned, claiming that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and being unable to finish his university studies

    Voltaire’s efforts were successful, and King Louis XV received the family and had the sentence annulled in 1764. The king fired the chief magistrate of Toulouse, and in 1765 Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated. There was also the posthumous pardon of the Comte De Lally, which led to a comment from a Swiss functionary with whom he maintained cordial but confrontational relationships: ‘You seem to attack Christianity but do the work of a Christian.’

    Portrait of Voltaire in the Palace of Versailles, 1724-1725.
    1. Post Truth

    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

    and

    It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

    Is there a more apt comment on the way our post-truth disinformation society justifies genocide, racism and the exclusion and murder of the other

    Then there is the defining quote representing the motif of his career: It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

    1. Self-Care

    We also find him dispensing advice that is superior to any self-help books currently on the market, and certainly a lot better than Jordan Peterson’s

    The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

    and

    Let us cultivate our garden.

    And he did so for twenty-five years.

    So, what if he was a bit of a libertine. The alt right and indeed puritanical left are very adept at confusing sexual licence with immorality.

    He also wrote science fiction. In Micromegas (1752) fiction aliens visiting earth learn that a theologian Thomas Acquinas said the universe was made uniquely for mankind they collectively erupted in laughter.

    He is really the creator of all that is now being lost. The father of constitutionalism, the rule of law, decency and anti-extremism, a hater of superstition. His scepticism still stares down from the Panthéon.

    Feature Image: Voltaire’s tomb in the Paris Panthéon

  • Public Intellectuals: Leonardo Sciascia

    Corruption is worse than prostitution; the latter might endanger the morals of an individual. The former invariably endangers the entire country.
    Karl Krauss

    Leonardo Sciascia or Shaza was an Italian or rather Sicilian political journalist, an elected radical member of the Italian parliament and the most prominent anti-mafia and indeed anti-corruption critic of his time. He was also a voice of moderation in a sea of extremism in the 1970s and 1980s.

    All this features in his famous detective novels which are really anti-detective novels or works of political observation. Along with his masterful analysis of the assassination by the Red Brigade of the Christian Democrat conciliator and former Prime Minister Aldo Moron – a book not unlike the equally masterful News of a Kidnapping (1997) by Garcia Marquez concerning Colombia in the era of Escobar – his oeuvre offers a sustained critique of Italian and Sicilian political and cultural life.

    This reflects the complex interstices of corruption and collusion between extreme-right-wing Catholicism, organised crime and the shadowy self-protection syndicates of big business, politics, as well as a malevolent state bureaucracy deeply embedded in all of the aforementioned. His books also demonstrate the lethal effects of innuendo, smoke, mirrors and the nefarious rumour mill.

    You could cut and paste these, change the names, and apply them to Ireland, the U.K. or U.S. or any country where extreme neo-liberalism or Christian evangelism holds sway.

    Sciascia was a specialist on the mafia, and he demonstrated how they kill and destroy. First, they isolate and disempower and then they denigrate. Often, demonising or scapegoating their prey. And those who seek to investigate them – such as the anti-corruption Sicilian Judge Giovanni Falcone – who act on principle are destroyed. This is exquisitely detailed in Equal Danger (1971), his best book.

    Illustrious Corpses

    In Sciascia’s fiction, it is the detective, not the murderer, who is isolated and suspected, suffering the same fate as whistleblowers around the world today. It is a post-truth doppelganger of good and evil. Thus, those who oppose corruption in the words of the film adaptation of his book become Illustrious Corpses [1976].

    In fact, his current heir, as the anti-corruption conscience of Italian letters, Robert Saviona was placed under police protection after his exposure of the Neapolitan mafia in Gomorrah (2016), and his fabulous text Zero Zero Zero (2013), which was made into a T.V. series that highlights how the practices and modes of organisation of the drugs trade are mirrored in corporate organisation, and vice versa. The same brutality. The same hierarchical structure. The same partnerships.

    Mr Saviona was recently prosecuted by Meloni for calling her a bastard over her immigration views. A cautionary tale perhaps for the revival of the hate crimes bill in Ireland, and our anti-immigrant stance? Who would dare call Jim O’Callaghan a bastard?  I doubt he would sanction a prosecution, but who knows as the centre-right moves even further to the right, just as Starmer has the taken the so-called Labour Party.

    In Ireland, anti-mafia or anti-corruption activists face an uphill not impossible struggle in our present universe. Witness the case of Jonathan Sugerman.

    In a world of statist and corporate authoritarianism, what Eisenhower historically called (in interview with the late great Walter Cronkite at the end of his Presidency) the military industrial complex poses an existential threat to humanity. Meanwhile, on X, Elon Musk perversely uses freedom of speech to undermine the civic space.

    Indeed, Habermas‘ ideal of communicative action is poisoned by misinformation undermining the democratic rights and entitlements of all by pandering to far right-wing extremists and racists and WOK simpletons.

    The film Illustrious Corpses. (1976) begins with the murder of Investigating Judge Vargas in Palermo, amidst a climate of demonstrations, strikes and political tension between the Left under a Christian Democratic government. The detective Rogas is assigned to investigate the case and no sooner has he started then two more judges are murdered.

    He is encouraged ‘not to forage after gossip,’ but to trail the ‘crazy lunatic who for no reason whatsoever is going about murdering judges.’  He focuses mistakenly on a suspect leftist wrongfully convicted by the judges. Whereupon he is advised by the President of the Supreme Court, played in sinister fashion by Max van Sydow, that the court is incapable of error.

    At a party he is advised there will be a coalition of the Communists and the Christian Democrats, and that the murder of the judges as well as Rogas’s investigations were causing tensions, and justify the prosecution of the far-left groups. Rogas also discovers that his suspect, Cres, is present at the party. Rogas meets with the Secretary-General of the Communist Party in a museum. Both are killed.  And the murder is blamed on the innocent detective.

    The film ends with the dictum: ‘The people must never know the truth?’

    Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in March 1992. Two assassinated judges.

    Equal Danger

    It is this kind of disrespect for the truth that has led us collectively, in my view, into the present quagmire. The gatekeepers of the system must be above reproach, and the exposure of corruption may lead – as it did to the Italian judge Falcone – assassination by the mafia, although in more ‘civilised’ countries this may consist of a fabricated charge, or some form of propaganda-by-omission where a critic of government policy is no-platformed in the media.

    The salient message of the book Equal Danger is that the system breaks down when one of the canonical features of the Rule of Law is eradicated. This includes when the gatekeepers are no longer independent, as Lord Bingham suggested in his canonical text on The Rule of Law.

    At the core of the ideal of the Rule of Law, the legendary Law Lord and jurist Bingham, suggests is the idea ‘that ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them reasonably, in good faith, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, and without exceeding the limits of such powers.’ Sadly those conditions have been undermined in many jurisdictions.

    Ironically in the end, Sciascia attacked crusading judges for putting civil rights at stake in an article, while on his deathbed, that irredeemably punctured his reputation: attacking Falcone as a celebrity judge which was ludicrous and frankly in bad taste.

    First Edition.

    Anomie

    Another Sciascia theme, particularly evident in his most famous text, The Day of the Owl (1961)’ is the Sicilian trait of anomie or indifference, implying that pursuit of principle, justice and the truth are all a waste of time.

    In controlled societies, such as Italy or Ireland, Sciascia’s books demonstrate the lethal effects of innuendo, smoke, mirrors and the nefarious rumour mill, along with the collective trivialisation that amounts to a resigned admission that the victims of crime had it coming to them in some obscure way. This betrays a latent desire for yourself not to go the same way. What C.S. Jung referred to as the shadow.

    The Day of the Owl also brilliantly shows that to succeed in a mafiosi culture you must pay the protection money or pizzo; just as in Mario Puzo’ s vastly underrated The Godfather (1969) you must kiss Don Corleone’s ass. An understanding of patronage and feudalism remains crucial in our time.

    That book also canvasses another theme of distraction central to our age: the playbook of the false sex allegation. The virtuous are undermined by the crime passional, the allegation of sexual impropriety, including child abuse. Those who carry out the task appear sanctimonious and mask political persecution, often framing their victims. A favourable appointment follows. Robespierre would approve.

    In the context of false allegations Roy Cohn, Trumps lawyer, was barely twenty-four years old when he played perhaps the central role in the Rosenberg’s’ espionage trial, relentlessly and vindictively lobbying the judge for their execution. Both were found guilty of passing information to the Soviet Union and electrocuted at Singh Sing in 1953.

    It was quite clear that this was utterly malicious in that he knew Ethel Rosenberg was innocent but used forged documents, perjured evidence and the art of persuasion – in that he believed her indictment would force Julian Rosenberg to reveal his espionage sources.

    Well whistleblowers and anyone accused of sedition, espionage or treason also come from the fascist playbook. That is now Trumps agenda for even academics and students.

    And people forget. Memories fade. The shadow play moves on. Thus, Sciascia a proper Sicilian communist has much to say about the rule of law and not just in Italy. His work is crucially relevant to our time.

    Roberto Calvi

    Roberto Calvi

    Close to my Chambers is Blackfriars Bridge where Roberto Calvi the former head of the Vatican bank was found dangling. Sciascia’s acidic response was: ‘Why was a good mystery preferred to finding out the truth?’

    But the truth depends on memory, pattern recognition and a sense of history, and as Milan Kundera – as good an exposer of corruption as Sciascia in his way – remarked, the first way of liquidating a people is to destroy memory, or the lessons of history.

    Thus, in contemporary Italy the mayor of Montefalco banned cricket in a village played by immigrants near Joycean Trieste, forgetting that AC Milan was founded as a cricket club. And lest we forget that in the jaw-droppingly beautiful village of Sant Angelo in Ischia Italy gave refuge to one of the great artists and enemy of Pinochet, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, though the film Il Postino (1994) fictionally suggests it was nearby Procida!

    Thus, as I enthused about the country on a train from Perugia, after viewing the Fra Angelica painting Resurrection, an Italian lawyer said yes but what about the government? He reminded me not just about Berlusconi, but Andreotti so closely connected with the corruption I have referred to – Il Divo (2008) to reference Sorentino’s film about him. Surviving into his nineties, he was the reptile like crystallisation of the world’s corruption. A man who sent people to their death via his associations with the mafia, but a pious Catholic. Sound familiar?

    Now let us pave a path for a new resurrection to create a better world based on the Rule of Law and moderation, whether secular or Christian. Let us wonder if the good man Jesus would stand for what has been done and is being done in his name.

    The message of our sceptical and brilliant communist Sicilian friend is most relevant to this age. Keep to the truth and let the heaven’s fall.

    Title Image: Paolo Borsellino with Leonardo Sciascia (Creative Commons).

  • Public Intellectuals: Charles Darwin

    In a court case in Kent recently I detoured to the small village of Down near Orpington where I had the privilege of visiting the Home of Charles Darwin. This is the residence where he wrote both The Voyage of The Beagle (1839) and The Origin of The Species (1859). It is a symptomatic of the controversy his name still arouses that my avowedly religious taxi driver expressed scepticism as to why anyone would entertain a trip to visit the house of The Great Satan, and proceeded to quiz me as to my belief in the bible.

    In fact, Darwin publicly indicated one could be both a theist and an evolutionist in 1879. Shortly before shuffling off this mortal coil he defined his position as an agnostic.

    Since these were not times an atheist would be put to death or socially shunned for declaring themselves there was no overwhelming need to abide by Victorian convention. Further, as is remarkably clear from the visit, he and his family were hugely influential and well connected. They were creatures of the enlightenment. Charles Darwin was a kind of evolutionary apotheosis of his clan.

    The crucial point to appreciate – as I explained to the taxi driver who maintained his vain attempts at spiritual conversion – is that Darwin is and was right. It remains one of the few works of science that has stood the test of time. The qualifier, an idea as old as Lamarck the spiritual father of genetics, is that the environment leads to genetic alterations and random mutations that generate the gene sequence for natural selection to act. Thus, our environment can influence DNA by altering phenotypic and genotypic variation. This is called epigenetics. Nature. Nurture. Genetics. But the citadel stands.

    His ideas evolved gradually. And common design was very much part of the reflection and collection exercise that was The Voyage of The Beagle, which occurred in spite of the reservations of his wealthy father, who funded the trip. On returning he was lionised, becoming a national hero. That almost five-year trip – particularly his observation on the different types of tortoises and mockingbirds and how certain species became extinct – led to the theory of evolution and the notion of the transition of the species. Thus, The Voyage nurtured the fundamental ideas, based on empirical findings of live specimens and fossils in South America.

    He published extensively on his return, but there is a paradigm shift in 1837 In July, with the development of his famous evolutionary drawing The Tree of Life, immortalising his notebook, which I viewed at first hand. The tree is prefaced in his bold handwriting with the words: I THINK.

    Watercolour by the Beagle’s artist Conrad Martens,

    Cartesian

    Well Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is the foundation of all human elevation. Centuries later, freedom of thought was central to Clarence Darrow’s famous speech in defence of Darwinism the Scopes Trial of 1925. Such thought distinguishes us, he said, from the sponge or the amoeba. In defending Darwin Darrow said:

    Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? In addition, tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. Soon you may ban books and newspapers. Then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance are forever busy and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we will be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!

    That seems like a description of what is being done in America and elsewhere in God’s name and, indeed, in the name of secular political correctness.

    After many papers and an exhaustive study of barnacles, Darwin developed the crucial idea of a homologue or variation, for it is variation and adaption that are crucial to evolution. His greatest work was only ultimately published after his fellow scientist Russel wrote to him with the same idea. He did not want to be gazumped, intellectually speaking. This led to a joint paper shortly followed by the bestselling masterwork, The Origin of The Species, which has became a secular bible.

    The book refutes completely creationism, the beautiful poetry of genesis as Darrow called it in The Scopes Trial that the world was created in seven days. Darwin was clearly right, but we are no longer in a secular age. All of this might have seemed trite and taken as accepted fact, save for the recrudescence of evangelical Christianity worldwide, which is creating a new auto de fe and inversion of the truth.

    Harvard Yard.

    The Trump administration is now defunding the academy. Harvard, in a last gasp of American liberalism, is fighting back. Yet its corporate sponsors resile. We are entering a new dark age. In the list of prohibited books of the future I expect The Origin of The Species to appear every bit as much as Nabokov’s Lolita or Joyce’s Ulysses. In the legendary American science fiction writer Ray Bradburys novel Fahrenheit 451 books are burned by firemen. Now we have a social media and controlled media auto de fe,

    Regarding the theory of evolution, it seems that the initial idea may have in genesis in his grandfather Erasmus. In 1794 his polymath grandfather book Zoonaamia made the same point, so the idea was implanted early:

    Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament which the great first cause with animality with power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities …….and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity.

    In fact, the entire family, represented by a tree on the wall in the museum, had a significant influence. Another grandfather, Josiah Wedgewood was one of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution.

    The Darwin Museum is also littered with quotations, including the most obviously true about how one singular fact, or mutation, can lead to survival or the decline of a species, or an individual. In that respect let us confront the gorgons head and assess whether he bears responsibility for what has been done in his name. By that I mean Social Darwinism, the most centrally awful vogueish evil idea of our age.

    Erasmus Darwin.

    Social Darwinism

    Darwin drew a crisp distinction between his ideas as a scientist and social commentator. He never expressed the idea that evolutionary theory was a good idea for social policy. He also argued particularly in The Descent of Man that feelings, or social instincts, such as sympathy for one’s fellow man, and moral sentiments, were intrinsic to society. This is an important, if scientifically detached, concession

    On the other hand, he associated with various people including his cousin Martineau who were proponents of Malthusianism, the strict regulation of breeding and the need to confine the unfit in prisons and insane asylums. Swifts earlier A Modest Proposal (1729) demonstrates the absurd cruelty of these ideas.

    Social Darwinist ideas led the American business caste, including the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, to advocate for the triumph of the fittest, and apply selection criteria and concepts of struggle to the world of business, despising the weak and the defenceless. Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1944 book Social Darwinism in American Thought actually coined the phrase Social Darwinism. He used it to attack unregulated greed, oligarchical capital and racism. He also, in a subsequent book, equated it with populist ignorance. This reaches an apogee of awfulness with the quasi-scientific ideas of Ayn Rand, in books such as The Fountainhead (1943).

    Darwin’s half cousin friend, the polymath Francis Galton was the founder of eugenics, and in effect he argued for the coupling of superior minds. He also came perilously close to condoning genocide in arguing for the extinction of inferior races, though he did not consider other races as intrinsically degenerate. He believed immigration was needed and welcome, depending of course on the immigrant. The sense of falsetto superiority is clearly apparent. Such nonsense led to even the legendary socialist judge Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v, Bell (1921) – who was cited in the defence in the Nuremberg Trials – upholding the compulsory sterilisation of a mental defective, saying that three generations of imbeciles are quite enough.

    Darwin himself was quite specific that his theory of evolution did not apply to social policy and was undesirable. The Nazis endorsed social Darwinism One key high command proponent Alfred Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremberg.

    The Decline of the West

    Perhaps the most influential text of Social Darwinism came with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926), which suggested that much of the blame for the decline of European civilisation could be blamed on the Slavic and other ‘degenerate’ races.

    The counterpoint of the argument was that Aryan blue blood, whether Germanic or Anglo Saxon, was the emblem of purity and that the other races had corrupted the gene pool. Spengler influenced Hitler, and the snowball of fascism led to the extermination of those undesirable races and the nightmare of the Holocaust.

    Such matters were hitherto of historic concern, which until recently seemed like a distant epoch, but regrettably this form of Social Darwinism is back in fashion, as a new corporatised Shoah of economic liquidation and segmentation beckons, accentuated by the effect of lockdowns and the rise of the far right. In an age of chaos and uncertainty, the power grab of the strongman is evident for all to see.

    Intellectual ideas that gain traction are not necessarily good ideas. Social Darwinism and Malthusian ideas are back in vogue. But do not blame Charles Darwin at least exclusively.

    If forced or available for comment, what would he say I wonder. A contemporary scientist, the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics wrote:

    I believe our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All our cousins are already extinct. What is more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilisation.

    The late great Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires appears to have shaped an empathy towards those afflicted with extreme poverty and subjected to degradation. He preached tolerance, engagement and social and economic justice.  Let us hope the liberation theology that is intrinsic in Francis’s legacy is not tainted by the dark money of the Vatican. He died several hours after meeting Mr Vance. Darwin would, I suspect, also have approved of Pope Francis but felt the ideas of Mr Vance deeply inappropriate.

  • Putting the ‘Public’ Back into Enterprise

    Part I of this series examined Mario Draghi’s recent proposals for reforming the E.U.’s economic model. It explained how one key tool was missing from his new industrial policy toolkit. That missing tool was public enterprise. Here in part II, we take a closer look at commercial State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Particularly regarding their role at times of market failure, and how they can be used to channel investment into promising new sectors, with positive spillovers.

    The role of SOEs as drivers of Irish industrial policy may seem like a thing of the past, or at least very much peripheral to Ireland’s tax-driven industrial strategy. However, a new debate is starting to take root. Although long overdue, it should be welcomed, particularly when we consider different options for how the €14 billion Apple tax receipts should be invested.

    Note the government’s proposal to use some of the funds for their shared equity scheme is exactly the opposite of what’s needed.

    A New Debate or a New Departure?

    As part of their pre-election campaigning the various Irish parties of the broad left offered different public enterprise solutions for various challenges.

    For instance, both People Before Profit and Labour called for the establishment of a new construction related SOE. There are differences in how each proposed it would operate in practice. Part III takes a closer look at these. It will also briefly touch on the Spanish government’s recent announcement that it’s to establish a new housing SOE, and ICTU’s call for the creation of ‘a new housing semi-state- Housing Ireland.’

    Sinn Féin in their election manifesto called for existing SOEs like the ESB to drastically increase the number of craft apprenticeship places they offer (electricians, plumbers, etc), to help address shortages of key skills and improve workforce planning. They’ve also called for €2.5 billion of the Apple money to be used by the state to take equity stakes in joint energy ventures undertaken by the ESB and private providers.

    The Social Democrats, for their part, called for an increase to Bord na Móna’s capacity to deliver large renewable energy projects (onshore and offshore wind). They also had Dr Rory Hearne elected as one of their new TDs, so it’s possible his previous research on a new national home-building agency could influence party policy in this respect.

    So, it’s clear that we’re noticing something of a shift away from a narrow (and reductive?) focus on tax and spend; toward a more ambitious and positive conception of the role of the state in helping to shape markets, and drive socio-economic outcomes.

    President Michael D. Higgins in a speech last year celebrating the 20th of anniversary of TASC highlighted the ‘dearth of progressive or heterodox policy debates’ over the last few decades. Something he rightly attributed to the ‘dominance of neoliberalism’ and its ‘economic orthodoxies’.

    Mainstream (neoclassical) economic theory says remarkably little about SOEs. This is despite their scale, scope, and importance in the history of economic development and industrialisation. In an Irish context, they have traditionally entered public consciousness at times of some proposed privatisation, or in reflection on the failures of past privatisations.

    It’s time our thinking evolved. Michéal Martin said the Irish left ‘doesn’t get our enterprise economy’. The problem is that there are many people who feel they aren’t ‘getting’ much out of it. Perhaps it’s time we put the ‘public’ back into enterprise.

    The Business of the State

    So, what’s the purpose of the state directly entering commercial activities via SOEs? The most common rationale is correcting market failure, and the OECD/EU provide several theoretical reasons:

    • The private sector’s not providing sufficient goods/services, which are deemed necessary.
    • The need to provide public goods (housing, health, education) which a free-market system won’t provide adequately.
    • The decision to become involved in an activity where the private sector overproduces certain undesirable good with negative externalities (e.g. pollution, carbon emissions)

    Other supportive arguments include the countercyclical function they can serve in terms of investment expenditures/employment during a downturn. Their ability to promote industrialisation by launching new industries that may have significant start-up costs and the requirement for long-term investments. Their use as vehicles for innovation, knowledge dissemination, and technological spillovers. Lastly, for national security reasons and to contend with monopolistic sectors.

    There’s no one size fits all model when it comes to SOEs. In practice there’s significant variation observed. There are commercial and non-commercial SOEs. They can be owned at the national level (e.g. Government Ministry), the sub-national level (municipal/local authority) or through some other entity (e.g. a sovereign wealth/development fund or a Central Bank).

    There’s different levels of ownership and control observed, ranging from full state ownership to a more limited shareholding. Some have shares privately held, with others having some equity traded publicly. The degree of control also varies from those directly answerable to a Minister/Department, to those subject in more indirect control. Part III returns to the variation in organisational structure in an Irish context.

    Despite the large-scale privatisations that have occurred with the ascendancy of neoliberalism, the relative importance of state ownership has increased in recent decades (OECD 2023). Data-driven research over the last quarter of a century has been somewhat limited, but we are currently seeing something of a resurgence.

    This is partly being driven by the ‘renewed interest’ in SOEs amongst policymakers (World Bank 2023). But also, by a multilateral institutional realisation that the footprint of the state in commercial activities is far larger than previously thought (figure 1).

    As the OECD (2023) notes, the number of SOEs in the list of top 500 global companies has tripled, and at the end of 2022 ‘the public sector held almost 11% of global market capitalisation of listed companies, amounting to $10.6 trillion, with public sector ownership in some markets amounting to over 30% of listed equity’.

    SOEs in the 21st Century

    SOEs are major actors in most economies holding assets of $45 trillion, equivalent to 50% of world GDP (IMF 2020). They’re also active across a wide range of sectors (figure 2). China’s sharp rise (see part 1) has supported the ongoing re-evaluation of the state’s role in the economy. But in the West the Financial Crisis (2008), Covid-19 and the energy crisis, which all saw partial/full nationalisations, government backed recapitalisations and a host of other state subsidies, has also fed into the ongoing re-evaluation.

    In 2009 the Harvard International Review argued that there was ‘no reason to believe’ that the SOEs of the 21st century would be like their counterparts from the 1980s/1990s. Criticisms of that period centred on the favouritism shown by the state, governance issues, inefficiencies, and so on.

    This assessment proved to be prophetic as extensive OECD research (2021) found that the ‘noteworthy trend’ has been that ‘states are operating increasingly like professional investors.’ That is, most had a commitment to ‘competitive neutrality’ meaning favouritism was not shown toward SOEs, and competition law and public procurement law were used to create a level playing field.

    They also noted for corporate governance it was now ‘common practice’ to have auditing and accounting standards (International Financial Reporting Standards) equivalent to stock market listed companies.

    MacCarthaigh (2008) in a review of Irish SOEs found that performance indicators were used extensively, with their use having increased significantly from previous years. Financial results and profitability were the focus, but other societal performance metrics like environmental and corporate social responsibility were also observed.

    Notwithstanding the recent work by multilateral institutions, academic research on SOEs over the last quarter of a century has been somewhat limited. The results of extant studies are also relatively mixed and lacking consensus. Table 1 provides an overview of some studies that have been carried out.

    SOEs have been studied across a range of issues, including: profitability performance vs private firms; level of innovation vs private firms; general performance following privatisation; effects on economic growth etc.

    There are some studies which found private firms tend to perform better in terms of profitability, with others finding no such evidence following privatisation, or that this brings higher costs in the provision of formerly public goods. Some found SOEs to be more innovative than their private sector counterparts.

    One study, examining their effect on economic growth, found that it was neither negative nor positive per se. Rather, their effect was conditioned by the institutional environment they operated within, meaning in the presence of good quality institutions their effect was positive, and in the presence of poor-quality institutions their effect was negative.

    This reminds me of something a former professor of mine once said. The answer to any question in economics is always – ‘it depends’! SOEs are not some kind of magic bullet. How they perform will depend on a range of factors. These factors can also apply to private firms.

    Factors like whether its organisational structure is sound. The presence of sound management and a board with a strategic vision, which are in alignment with its shareholder goals;[1] a good understanding of the market conditions they are operating within etc.

    Where they have differed in the past is that private firms could be quicker to exit a market when it was no longer competitively viable.[2] The case of Irish Steel – nationalised to save jobs – is a good case in point. It continued well past its sell by date, despite no longer being economically viable.

    But SOEs like private firms can adapt to a changed environment. For example, Bord na Móna went from being a major peat harvester to making good progress in renewable energy.[3]

    Lastly, it must be noted that SOEs may not be solely driven by maximising profit, measured via financial metrics (gross/net profit margin; return on equity (ROE); return on assets (ROA), etc).

    As commercial enterprises they will still need to make a profit, but they often have a so-called double bottom line, meaning they also look to maximise a second objective, such as capital investment, social impact, environmental performance, etc.

    So, comparing their profitability to private firms which are explicitly profit maximising is not necessarily a fair comparison. Next, we’ll take a brief look at specific Irish SOEs in historical perspective.

    Table 1
    Authors & year Research area/concern Findings Comment/limitations/ implications
    Shirley & Walsh

    (2000)

    		 Reviewed 52 studies (1980s to 1990s) which examined the difference in performance between SOEs and private corporations. They reported that there were only five studies indicating that SOEs outperformed private corporations Only monitored firms in monopolistic utility sectors
    Omran

    (2004)

    		 Examined the performance of 54 newly privatized Egyptian firms against a matching number of SOEs (1994-98) His analyses showed that privatized firms did not exhibit significant improvements in their performance relative to SOEs. These findings questioned the benefits of Egyptian privatization Cautioned that ‘changing ownership’ has no instant magical effect on performance, and greater consideration should be given to market structure or the power of competition
    Anderson (2007) Examined the impact of privatisation in Latin America (Ecuador), in relation to natural monopolies and public goods The privatisation of SOEs in involved in the provision of public goods can head to lower output and higher costs in the long run Noted that for Ecuador to develop the public sector still needed to play a significant role in developing human capital and physical infrastructure
    Mazucatto (2013) Examines the role of the state/public funding in the US economy’s success. Tackles the myth of neoclassical economics which juxtaposes a supposedly bureaucratic state versus a dynamic, innovative private sector The role of government as both a risk-taking funder of innovation and a market creator is widely understood. Public/state-funded investments in innovation and technology has been the driver of success, rather than free market doctrine Correctly recognises that governments form an essential role in the innovation chain. Points out that state has not only fixed market failures, but has also actively shaped and created markets. Sometimes successfully sometimes not.
    Benassi & Landoni

    (2018)

    		 Deals with the role of SOEs in innovation processes through two case studies (STMicroelectronics in the semiconductor and Thales Alenia Space in the space industry Illustrates how SOEs can contribute to innovation by exploring new opportunities and recombining different sources of knowledge. Highlights the conditions under which success can be realised. Highlights how these SOEs succeeded through a continuous wave of agreements, mergers and acquisitions. This has bearing for some of the proposals Mario Draghi has made (see part 1)
    Asian Development Bank (2019) Using a large sample of firms with cross sectional data, compares SOEs to private firms across various financial performance measures Found that SOEs ‘be less profitable than privately owned enterprises’. Argues SOEs should shift to profit maximising behaviour, although this runs counter to the double bottom line they often have
    Lee et al

    (2021)

    		 Examined the innovation performance of SOEs vs private corporations in Asian middle-income countries (2012-15) The authors note ‘somewhat surprisingly’ they found that SOEs in the study population tended to innovate more than private firms Noted the scarce data availability for empirical comparisons, meaning survey data was used instead
    Szarzec et al (2021) Examined the effect of SOEs on economic growth in 30 European countries (2010-16) Impact of SOEs on economic growth is not good or bad per se, but conditioned on the level of institutional quality. SOEs are positive on economic growth in a good quality institutional environment, and negative for poor quality institutional environments
    Castelnovo (2022) Analyses the innovation performance of more than 2000 SOEs vs private firms, using patent applications as a proxy for innovation value Results suggest that cross-industry heterogeneity exists. Overall, SOEs innovative performance is comparable or even superior to that of private firms Paper restricts attention to developed countries (EU Member States). Therefore, its findings cannot be generalized to developing countries

     

    Poolbeg Generating Station Ringsend, Dublin.

    Irish SOEs in Historical and Contemporary Perspective

    In the wake of the financial crisis (2008-10) a report for the Department of Enterprise noted that there was renewed global interest in SOEs in ‘promoting economic development’, and their ‘significant contribution to the economic and social development of Ireland since independence’ (FORFÁS 2011).

    At the time there were calls by ICTU to establish a strategic investment bank ‘to address the collapse in domestic demand’, to help support infrastructure investment and address the loss of jobs.[4] Such calls went unheeded. Instead, we got the below value sale of An Bord Gais and the attempted privatisation of our water services.

    Let’s briefly consider some of our current and former SOEs in historical perspective (see below), before considering some of the impacts of privatisation.

    • the ESB,
    • the Irish Shipping Company,
    • the National Building Agency,
    • Telecom Éireann,
    • ICC Bank,
    • Aer Lingus

    ESB

    At the time of independence/partition agriculture was Ireland’s main industrial sector. Yet most farms had no electricity or light, severely hampering profitability, productivity, and incomes (Schoen 2002). The ESB in helping to electrify the state had an immediate impact on economic, social, and industrial development, and average sector level income.

    Today it remains a large employer (supporting 0.5% of total employment). It’s a major capital investor (€6.7bn in the period 2018-23) and continues to provide strong returns to the state in the form of taxes, payroll, purchases, and dividends (€2.7bn in 2023). 

    The Irish Shipping Company

    The outbreak of WW2 threatened supply chains as many private shipping operators were unable to service Ireland. According to the old Department of Industry and Commerce, in 1939 only 5% of the total tonnage required for the Irish import and export trade was provided by Irish-owned vessels. During World War II, the U.S. initially refused to enter the warzone around Irish waters, meaning they couldn’t transport directly to Ireland.

    Other ships moved to the British register leaving a crisis in the availability of ships for transporting imported/exported goods. The establishment of the Irish Shipping Company was vital for the continued importation of energy supplies, as well as supporting exporting businesses in maintaining their trade routes, incomes, and employment. It was also considered essential to the preservation of Irish neutrality.

    National Building Agency

    The shift toward trade liberalisation and our FDI-led model in the 1960s was at first impeded by a lack of housing, as neither the private sector nor local authorities could meet demand. The National Building Agency was established for ‘facilitating industrial expansion through the provision of houses and ancillary services.’

    It soon undertook multiple large-scale developments and won plaudits from across the aisle. Even Fine Gael’s arch-conservative T.D. Oliver J Flanagan stated: ‘In my own constituency the NBA have provided what I consider to be the best type of houses that I have ever seen erected, in record time and to a plan and a design second to none.’[5]

    It was noted during one debate of the period how it had worked closely with the IDA, and after a decade in existence it had constructed multiple large scale developments, having ‘brought new techniques to Irish workers’, and ‘coordinated very well with the trade union movement’. The NBA was also an early pioneer in modular built structures and underfloor heating.

    Telecom Eireann

    The onset of the Celtic Tiger has multiple explanatory factors, but one often neglected was the quality of our telecommunications network infrastructure (Harris 2005). Thanks to the heavy capital investment of Telecom Eireann, by the early 1990s the network was amongst the most digitalised and modern in the world, and essential to attracting emerging ICT and financial services industries.

    At its height it provided employment to 18,000 workers, and by the mid-1990s the telecommunications infrastructure had become 100% digitised. It was privatised in 1999 as Eircom (now EIR).

    ICC Bank

    The Industrial Credit Corporation (ICC Bank), first established as a strategic industry lender, later became key to the SME sector. It made strategic equity investments in venture capital in the software sector, which was one of the successful indigenous export industries to emerge from the Celtic Tiger period (Kirby 2011).

    It expanded steadily, enjoying consistent profitability, and made equity investments totalling £36.9 million. At the time of privatisation (2001) it had grown its balance sheet to €3 billion.

    Aer Lingus

    Aer Lingus when it was an SOE was very entrepreneurial in its diversification activities, designed to mitigate the cyclical nature of the aviation industry (Sweeney 2004). It diversified into activities like financial, computer and engineering related services.

    It established successful subsidiaries like Airmotive, TEAM, Aviation Traders Engineering, Aer Turas, Pegasus and Futura, to name but a few. Aer Lingus, and its then employee Tony Ryan, can also lay claim to leasing one of the world’s first aircraft, which helped to create a global industry (aircraft leasing) in which Ireland now holds a 65% market share (PWC).

    Today Ireland’s remaining SOEs continue to contribute to the Exchequer, not merely in terms of employment and taxes paid, but also in terms of the dividends they have returned to the state. For example, in the period 2013 -2020 they contributed almost €2.5bn (Table 2). To put this in perspective, that is somewhere around where the final cost of the new National Children’s hospital will land.

    We can see from the foregoing the significant contribution that public enterprise has played throughout the state’s short history. And whilst there will always be those who assert that ‘the state has no business in business’, the above examples should demonstrate how erroneous that thinking is.

    It should, however, be said that when it comes to economic planning on the part of the state, it has often been found wanting (Casey 2022). The relationship between SOEs and the Irish government has often lacked ‘clearly articulated policy or objectives’ meaning public debate has rarely evolved beyond ‘the issue of privatisation’ (MacCarthaigh 2008).

    Table2 : Dividend payments to the exchequer from SOEs (2013-2020)

    Irish Privatisation in Perspective

    The importance of SOEs in Ireland has declined in relative and absolute terms since the early 1990s, through a combination of privatisation and the growth in the economy. In the 1980s SOEs employed ninety-one thousand people, accounting for 8% of total employment, falling to less than half that number and 2% of total employment by 2008.

    The wave of privatisations, with the ascendency of neoliberalism, saw major state divestment in sectors like construction, transport, telecommunications, other utilities, and finance (Parker 2021). In Ireland, arguably the biggest privatisation since the foundation of the state wasn’t from the sale of a single SOE, but rather the sale of more than half of all the public housing stock (Sweeney 2004).

    Ireland’s experience with privatisation largely mirrors the mixed results and disappointments seen elsewhere, as Table 3 sets out.[6] Despite promises of greater efficiency, cheaper and superior quality services/infrastructure, etc; often the reality failed to match the hype.

    In certain instances, privatisation had very costly consequences for households, businesses, the state, and its competitiveness.[7] As we can see below (table 3), four of the six SOEs (TE, ICC, IS and BG) were all profitable at the time of their sale, one of which had reached record profitability, and were returning dividends to the state.

    Of the two which were loss making; the Irish Shipping Company had been ‘a viable and successful state enterprise’ (Barrett 2004) before it made significant losses from speculative charter agreements, entered into by management without the approval of its shareholders (Minister for Finance/Transport).

    In the case of Irish Steel, major changes in global steel markets beginning in the 1980s, meant it became a significant loss maker and was no longer commercially viable. It was sold for £1 in 1996 and the new private entity would shut its doors in 2001.

    The impact of the privatisations of late 1990s/early 2000s were particularly acute. The sale of Telecom Eireann led to two leverage buyouts (think private equity) with much asset stripping and loading the company up with debt. There was then significant underinvestment meaning Ireland lagged behind EU peers in broadband connection for a long time.

    This privatisation was described as the ‘the biggest own goal’ for the state, next to the blanket bank guarantee. Although some of the proceeds of the sale were used to capitalise Ireland’s first sovereign wealth fund (the National Pension Reserve Fund), this of course would later be raided to bail out the banks.

    ICC bank was sold in 2001 despite being quite profitable and returning increasing dividends to the state. The proceeds of these sales were used ‘to cut direct taxes, incentivise property investment and so boosted the Crash’ (Sweeney 2018). In other words, successful public enterprise was sold off, partly used to lower taxes, and fuel the crash, and partly put aside in a new sovereign wealth fund, which would then be used to pay for the cleaning up of the mess.

    Bord Gáis, which was described as ‘extremely efficient in operational terms’, was sold under pressure from the Troika, and for less than its worth. Between 1976 and 2009 it had returned €689 million in dividends to the state. At the time it was still in public ownership, Ireland had one of the lowest energy costs in the EU, a situation which has now been drastically reversed.

    Table 3
    SOE, lifespan & industry Rationale for existence Max employees Performance prior to privatisation Aftermath of privatisation
    Telecom Éireann

    (1983-99)

    Communication

    		 To roll out digital telephone switching technology along with extensive fibre optic. 18,000 ·        Went from loss making (-£83 million) in 1983-84, to earning profits of £94 million by 1990-91.

    ·        In 1998 it made pre-tax profits of IR£223m, up 9%, on turnover of IR£1.35 billion.

    ·        By the early 1990s, the Irish network was amongst the most modern and most digitalised in the world and by the mid-1990s had become 100% digitally switched.

    ·        In 1999 it had debts of €340 million which rose to €4.27 billion by 2007 after privatisation.[8]

     

    		 Underwent two leveraged buyouts (LBOs), asset stripping, loading company up with debt, significant underinvestment, Ireland lagged behind EU peers in broadband connection for a long time.

     

    A report by ICTU noted that next to the blanket bank guarantee, the privatisation of Telecom Eireann ranked as “the biggest own goal” for the state.
    Industrial Credit Corporation – ICC Bank

    (1933-01)

    Finance

    		 Setup as strategic lender for industrial expansion.

    Later acted as key lender to SMEs, indigenous businesses, and venture capital.

    		 358 ·        Expanded steadily, enjoyed consistent profitability, and made equity investments totalling £36.9 million.

    ·        Grew its balance sheet through its own efforts to almost £3 billion at the time of privatisation.

    ·        Paid regular and increasing dividends to the Exchequer over the previous two decades.

    ·        In the five years before privatisation, dividend payments amounted to £14 million, while corporation tax payments in the same period came to £10 million.

    ·        The bank made a profit of €47 million the year before it was sold.

    		 Return on assets (ROA) declined after privatisation, asset size increased (Reeves).

     

    Post-crash, loss of ICC cited in support for establishing State Investment Bank (NESC 2013), (ICTU 2011).

     

    Credit demand muted after GFC, accessing finance today for SMEs remains a challenge with 66% having difficulties.[9]
    Irish Shipping Company

    (1941-1984)

    Transport

    		 Setup to protect imports and exports during WW2, to promote greater self-sufficiency and protect neutrality. 300 ·        Liquidated following significant losses from speculative charter agreements entered into without the approval of its shareholders (Minister for Finance/Transport).

    ·        Liquidation cost £101 million, which was £13 million more than allowing the company to keep trading.[10] Its ships were sold off.

    ·        Prior to this mistake with the charter agreements it was “a viable and successful state enterprise” (Barrett 2004).

    ·        It was described as having “offered good careers to many” and brought “benefits to our commercial reputation as a nation”.[11]

    		 Claims cost of liquidation would be £50 million whereas C&AG reports for 1984, 1985 and 1986 estimated in excess of £100 million.
    Irish Steel

    (1947-96)

    Basic Materials

    		 Initially nationalised to “save jobs” 1,200 ·        Loss of competitiveness from other EU markets and declining steel prices.

    ·        Although modest profitability in the 1950s/1960s, problems emerged in the 1970s and despite significant state investment in 1980s, and workforce changes (90s) it made a loss of £20.7 million (1993-94) and a loss of £5.8 million (1994-95).

    ·        Serious environmental damage caused from dumping of toxic materials.

    		 Often cited as a “white elephant” project.

    Was not viable as a commercial enterprise. Firoz (2003) argues that the significant drop in steel prices in the 1990s was a major problem for producers without trade protections, strong state subsidies, and increased competition from the developing world (China).
    Irish Sugar Greencore

    (1933-91)

    Agribusiness

    		Commercial and wider social reasons like promoting regional development and employment in the West 1,757 (1991) ·        Experienced rapid growth and improvement in the pre-privatization period.

    ·        Heavy investment in the 1980s and diversified into other agribusiness streams.

    ·        Turnover in the year ending September 1990 was £271 million, which was also a record year for net profits £18.4 million.

    		 In the decade post privatisation, its performance was not strongly associated with improved financial performance and productivity.[12]
    Bord Gais Energy

    (1976-13)

    Energy

    		 Established (Gas Act 1976) as owner of the national gas transmission & distribution systems, mandated with development and maintenance of the natural gas network. 1000 est. (2013) ·        Under pressure from the Troika the lucrative energy supplier valued at €1.5 billion was sold for only €1.1 billion, because no reserve auction price had been set.[13]

    ·        BGE had yielded rising profits with an EBITDA of €91 million in 2013.

    ·        It paid dividends of €689 million between 1976 and 2009,[14] the paid €30 million (2010), €33 million (2011) and €28.3 (2012).

    ·        It lost its profitable wind farms, plants and the right to supply gas to nearly a million customers in Ireland.

    ·        The SOE was a heavy infrastructural investor and was described as “extremely efficient in operational terms”.[15]

    		 Sold for less than valuation amidst much parliamentary/public criticism.

     

    Advisers’ fees for the privatisation amounted to €27 million.

     

    Irish electricity prices were 26% above EU average (Eurostat 2022), with Bord Gais like other suppliers having raised prices multiple times in 2022.


    Conclusion

    The late great Tony Benn once said there will always be those who don’t want public enterprise to survive, even where it succeeds. For instance, David Luhnow of the Wall Street Journal, recently issued sharp criticism of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for saying she wanted her country to place a greater focus on its SOEs. He said it was like the economic evidence of the last half century had been forgotten.

    But what evidence does he think she has forgotten? Joseph Stiglitz recently pointed out that after forty years the numbers in: ‘growth has slowed, and the fruits of that growth went overwhelmingly to a very few at the top. As wages stagnate and the stock market soared, income and wealth flowed up rather than trickling down’.

    It’s not enough for the broad left to say that neoliberalism and privatisation has failed. We need to have a coherent program to start reversing it. One element of such a strategy could be public enterprise. The point here is not that the Irish state should return to direct involvement in previous areas it operated in like agribusiness or steel production, or even that SOEs are always the best option for addressing socio-economic problems or promoting industrial development.

    Rather it’s to recognise that in certain circumstances SOEs are the only actors capable of doing this when the private sector fails. It’s also to acknowledge that they can also be entrepreneurial actors, making the necessary long-term investments in transformational infrastructure, technologies and industries, when the private sector is unwilling or unable.

    [1] For mismanagement and misalignment can lead to ruin, as in the case of the Irish Shipping Company, which prior to its engagement of speculative charter agreements had long been a profitable and successful company.

    [2] Irish Steel is clearly an example of this where political pressure kept the entity alive well past its sell by date.

    [3] It recently announced the biggest change of land use in modern Irish history, 125,000 acres of bog land will soon be repurposed for wind, biomass and solar energy.

    [4] https://www.ictu.ie/news/jobs-plan-fails-deal-demand-deficit

    [5] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1969-10-29/41/

    [6] Other SOEs privatised but not dealt with in Table 3 include Irish Life, TSB, the Agricultural Credit Corporation, Irish National Petroleum, British and Irish Line, BOI/AIB and Aer Lingus.

    [7] Poor access to broadband, housing crisis harming competitiveness, loss of dividends to the exchequer, proceeds of sale of privatisations of 2000s was used to reduce direct taxes rather than reinvestment, this helped to fuel property speculation, at time country was running surpluses, exacerbated the crash, etc.

    [8] https://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/policy/econconf/Reeves_Palcic01022013.pdf

    [9] https://p2pfinancenews.co.uk/2022/02/17/two-thirds-of-irish-smes-struggle-to-access-credit/

    [10] Recalling Irish Shipping liquidation – The Irish Times

    [11] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1984-11-14/28/?highlight%5B0%5D=financed&highlight%5B1%5D=finance&highlight%5B2%5D=bill&highlight%5B3%5D=1932

    [12] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00036846.2015.1061643

    [13] https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/tni_privatising_industry_in_europe.pdf

    [14] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/2009-02-03/7/

    [15] http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2009/11/04/the-benefits-of-increased-investment-and-efficiency-in-public-infrastructure-and-utilities/

  • Public Intellectuals: Fyodor Dostoevsky

    In an age of unrestrained Russian-bashing, the figure of Fyodor Dostoevsky might seem a provocative choice for this Public Intellectual series. He remains, however, in my view, the greatest writer of prose fiction who has ever lived. His greatest novels The Devils/Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) are, frankly, unsurpassed in world literature.

    As I see it, other great Russian novels of his time, Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev and Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy are just a notch below; perhaps reaching the heights of Crime and Punishment (1866) or The Idiot (1869), the two lesser of his four great novels.

    This is to assume that his other works are of lesser value. Yet in the novella Notes from an Underground (1864) as well as White Knights (1848) Dostoevsky surpasses The Death of Ivan Illich (1886) by Tolstoy.

    The anti-hero of Notes from an Underground anticipates a form of government where:  

    All human actions will then of course be calculated, mathematically, like logarithm tables up to 108,000, and recorded in a calendar; or even better, well-intentioned publications will then appear … in which everything will be so precisely calculated and recorded that there will no longer be deliberate acts or adventures in the world.

    This he suggests would create a reaction, in the form of a dictator:

    I, for example, wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the midst of all this reasonableness that is to come, suddenly and quite unaccountably some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a reactionary and mocking physiognomy were to appear and, arms akimbo, say to us all: ‘Now, gentlemen, what about giving all this reasonableness a good kick with the sole purpose of sending all those logarithms to hell for a while so we can live for a while in accordance with our own stupid will!

    In fact, across Russian literature only Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov wrote better short story writers. Besides being a master of the short story form, Chekhov was primarily a playwright. Unprecedented in world letters, he is almost the equal of Dostoevsky, but not quite!

    In Russian letters thereafter only the great novels of Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita (1967) and The White Guard (1925) the latter of which perfectly encapsulates – unlike our official media – the reasons for Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Many Russians (and indeed some Ukrainians) view what was the breadbasket of the Russian empire as integral to and inseparable from Russia itself.

    Portrait by Vasily Perov, c. 1872

    Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

    In a famous monograph (1959), Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?, George Steiner argued that the two authors represent polar opposites in the Western canon, the former epic, utopian, and aspiring to achieve heaven on earth – with all its attendant dangers. The latter, for all his peasant Christianity and hatred of nihilism, asserting the pre-eminence of free will, while portraying a world beset by evil, intrigue and deceit.

    The great Russian effete of a later era Vladimir Nabokov, lecturing in exile in Columbia University claimed he despised Dostoevsky’s vulgarity and excess. Of course, unlike Nabokov, Tolstoy or Turgenev – the latter of whom Dostoevsky had a fractious relationship – Dostoevsky was not an aristocrat. He was not a blue blood. His father was a ‘mere’ country doctor, murdered after a descent into dissolution and an echo, Freud argues in Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928), of the central theme of The Brothers Karamazov. Moreover, Dostoevsky was profoundly anti-Catholic

    It should also be said that Dostoevsky was an editor, journalist, and social critic, which could be a dangerous role to play in Czarist Russia. He was really a philosopher in that all his great books are novels of ideas, and display in all its fullness the eschatological imagination. An intellectual of the highest rank, and superb jurist and penologist, not just in terms of the immense amount of attention devoted to questions of justice and the criminal process in his work – not least the trial of Dmitri Karamazov – but also heavily influenced by his penal servitude in Siberia.

    Also, uncomfortably for this writer at least, he was a deeply religious man, and there was no hypocrisy evident in this outlook. He acquired a deep religious faith from his mother during his childhood, quite contrary to the secular temper of his age. While I distrust this, I understand in Freudian terms its aetiology.

    He was, however, deeply anti-Catholic. At one point his apparetnly omniscient Idiot, Prince Myshkin exclaims:

    In my opinion Roman Catholicism isn’t even a religion, but most decidedly a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinate to that idea, beginning with faith. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne and took up the sword; and since then everything has gone on in the same way, except they’ve added lies, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, wickedness. They have trifled with the most sacred, truthful, innocent, ardent feelings of the people, have bartered it all for money, for base temporal power. And isn’t that the teachings of the Antichrist?’

    Dostoevsky, 1847.

    Early Period

    In his school years, splendidly documented by his great biographer Joseph Frank he intervened to protect children against thugs. On his way to the prestigious engineering school, where he was accepted in 1831, he was horrified by an act of savage brutality against a peasant he witnessed at a coach station. Later, through his hugely influential periodical Diary Of A Writer – not unlike Charles Dickens’ Household Words or All The Year Round towards the end of his life – he declaimed against a brutal flogging of a serf by an aristocrat, who was put on trial and justly punished. There is no doubt that from the get-go his sympathies were with the little man. Thus, like Charles Dickens he was the chronicler of his time in Time.

    Thus, for his entire life no matter how famous he became he was always an advocate for the poor, students if they had legitimate grievances, those falsely accused, unless, unforgivably, they were Jewish. Poor Folks (1845) is of course his first novel and is a huge success and a minor masterpiece. It is, however, an elaboration of that greater Russian work Dead Souls (1842) by Gogol whose awful theme is the purchasing of dead peasants’ souls for profit. The ultimate extension of the landlord class. This is again prescient for our times.

    Poor Folks was acclaimed as the first exercise in social realism, and the plight of self-abnegation before corporate feudalism. Here we find words relevant to our neoliberal age: ‘Judge whether one was right to abuse oneself for no reason and be reduced to undignified mortification.’ Today’s serfs are subject to social media targeting in an age of surveillance and consumer capitalism. Our very identities are mined for data.

    Poor Folks was followed by The Double (1846), which though not among his great novels expresses the split personality – a dominant theme in his oeuvre to come –  as later do Oscar Wilde in A Picture of Dorian Grey (1891), Robert Louis Stephenson in Jekyll and Hyde (1886), and more recently Naomi Kleins’ Doppleganger A Trip into the Mirror World.

    Vissarion Belinsky

    Belinsky

    During this early period Dostoevsky came under the influence of the intellectual Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky who was torn between the veneration of the poor – a form of Christian humanism – and an overarching commitment to materialism. The book expresses that conflict.

    The success of Poor Folk led him to being welcomed into intellectual circles. An unfortunate association with the Petrashevsky Circle, however, led to him being exiled to Siberia and then conscripted into the army. Moreover, he strongly believed he was about to be executed as the Tsar staged a mock execution of him and his co-conspirators in Samonkey Square. Interestingly, one of those involved in his persecution was Ivan Nabokov, a distant relative of Vladimir Nabokov.

    This terrifying event it is said to have turned his head grey. It scarred him for life and was fictionally recreated in The Idiot (1869). We may assume that the description of the plight of a person sentenced to death by the state in The Idiot is biographical, considering his own experience of narrowly avoiding the Czarist firing squad. By comparison with the fate of a person assailed and killed by brigands he says: ‘the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no greater agony than that’. He asks: ‘Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness?’

    That and Siberia, where he underwent extreme hardship led to the fascination that engendered Crime and Punishment. In Siberia, as diarised by his biographer, he became less interested and mistrustful of the application of the letter, as opposed to the spirit of the law. Dostoevsky was never a literalist in legal interpretation terms, and was acutely conscious of the law’s failings. He was treated barbarically and barely survived. The law and its failings went on to dominate much of the rest of his fiction.

    He returned a felon but quickly contributed to Time magazine, along with several other journals thereafter as editor and contributor, and to his next defining book The House of The Dead (1854), which offers a far better examination of the gulags than Solzhenitsyn.

    Hans Hobern’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb.

    Nihilism

    This period of incarceration led to the development of a complex dialectic through his life. His hatred of nihilism – a phrase actually coined by Turgenev for the character Bazharov in his masterpiece Fathers and Sons (1862), alongside his warm embrace of Young Russia, a movement recalling Thomas Davis in Ireland and Disraeli in Britain. It was a progressive movement for reform in Russia, not least in seeking to ameliorate the conditions of the serfs.

    Dostoevsky despised the nihilistic attitude, expressed ironically in Turgenev’s masterpiece: ‘That is not our business let us have a grand clearance first.’

    The Russia of his lifetime, from Nicolas I onwards, was a time of great political turbulence and the development of revolutionary cabals often to reform the plight of the serfs. There was also a dialectic perfectly conveyed between Turgenev and Dostoevsky of a need for Russia to become more European. Turgenev, the aristocratic exile, argued for to become more autarchic. Dostoevsky sided with the poor folk and Mother Russia but not in a shrill way. The idea he coined, evident as early as 1861, was Pan Humanism, within a Russia influenced, but not dominated, by Westernisation.

    The success led to a degree of European decadence, and for the rest of his life he was often abroad and in debt, though finally happily married after a string of unhappy relationships to Anna, his stenographer who he adored and was most attentive to.

    What became a gambling addiction developed during his peripatetic European travels, and put enormous stress on his wife. Yet, in a moment of epiphany, after essentially losing the family silver, he finally gave it all up. His great novella The Gambler (1866) offers a frenzied portrayal of an illness, which destroys lives – as I have witnessed during my professional career. It also provides a lacerating attack on enduring national cultures. Here, Russians are portrayed as gambling riskily and haphazardly, Germans methodically and in a philistine way, while the French display an elegant decadence. How times have changed.

    Prior to The Gambler there arrived the seminal existential text, unique in his oeuvre, Notes from Underground (1865), which predates Sartre and Camus by an epoch but is no doubt influenced by Kierkegaard.

    The self-reflexiveness of the narrator in that he is both accused and accuser, torn between rational egoism and a concern for others. This is the Dostoevsky dilemma, and a prelude to the themes of the great novels to follow.

    So on to Crime and Punishment (1868), written for the establishment Russian magazine Messenger, and a final step towards financial stability. It is his most famous and widely read work. To say it is not his best work would be true, but misleading in that within it scope it remains one of the great works of European literature.

    The novel is the prototypical detective novel. Without this there is no Wilkie Collins or Raymond Chandler. The anti-hero Raskolnikov is torn between a nihilism inspiring an Übermensch sense of superiority, and a Christian piety. Here Dostoevsky anticipates the serial killers and corporate monsters of our age.

    The prosecutor Petrovich is the voice of atonement and represents Dostoevsky’s sense of guilt before God. The book is also a condemnation of extremism and lawlessness.

    When the prosecutor first hauls Raskolnikov into custody he expresses curiosity about an article that Raskolnikov wrote called ‘On Crime’, in which he suggests that certain rare individuals – the benefactors and geniuses of mankind – enjoy a right to ‘step across’ legal or moral boundaries if those boundaries act as an obstruction to the success of their idea. The prosecutor, in a much kinder way than the approach offered by Camus in The Outsider (1942) – who was hugely influenced by Dostoevsky not least in his play of The Possessed/Devils (1959) – finally forces him to confess.

    The Idiot (1871) is the book that pleased Dostoevsky the most – and is arguably his most disciplined novel – and there is much of him in it. The central character of Prince Myshkin was much influenced by Dostoevsky seeing Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ (1529) painting. No doubt it expresses his deep faith in the decent and Christian man.

    Yet Myshkin’s other-worldliness is the cause of his self-destruction, along with death and chaos wrought on others. The crucible of Russia at that time augments dark Dostoevsky’s mysticism. It is deeply personal and invokes his mock execution and epilepsy. It is a work that is curiously relevant to our time of vaccines, compliance and control, where 90% of humanity are to be treated as cattle, a process which can be achieved through re-education and vogueish Social Darwinism.

    Joachim Schnürle

    The Devils

    This brings us to the great citadel of world literature and in my view the greatest novel ever written The Devils (1868). At the time Dostoevsky was much influenced by the malign neglect of the civilised anarchist Herzen and his criticism that nihilists wished to abandon books, science and instead embrace destruction. Herzen in a famous polemic, echoing Dostoevsky’s own ideas I suspect, argued that Shakespeare and Raphaël were higher in the pantheon than socialism, nationalism or the emancipation of the serfs. The immediate sensation which precipitated the novels was the activities of the real life murderous Nechaev, a model for many of The Devils.

    Towards the end of The Devils, one of the conspirators Lyamshin is put on trial and asked ‘Why so many murders, scandals and outrages committed?’ He responds that it was to promote:

    the systematic undermining of every foundation, the systematic destruction of society and all its principles; to demoralize everyone and make hodge-podge of everything, and then, when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical and sceptical, but still with a perpetual desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self-preservation – suddenly to gain control of it.

    The novel is the greatest condemnation of extremism in the history of ideas, containing his essential credo that once you have rejected Christ it is possible to go to inordinate lengths of evil. The book provides almost a replica of the current political climate where anarchy and extremism prevail, and in the midst of it all is the crucial figure of native Dostoevsky ambivalence, Stavrogin – a man who is torn between good and bad impulses, but the nihilism and decadence prevail.

    The essential argument is that materialism, nihilism and decadence will stop at nothing and boundary after boundary will be crossed in the descent towards the personal and societal abyss.

    Dostoevsky response, or antidote, is to assert that humanity must take collective responsibility in a Christian way. Thus, when Stavrogin reveals his appalling crime to the elder Tikhon, the latter responds by asking the forgiveness of Stavrogin: ‘Having sinned, each man has sinned against all men, and each man is responsible in some way for the sins of others. There is no isolated sin. I’m a great sinner, perhaps greater than you.’

    After its publication, and his resumption of journalistic activities with The Diary of a Writer (1873-1881) he was widely acknowledged as the greatest living writer in Russia. He finally settled in his homeland, holding court both in letter and visitations to an increasingly enamoured public. In essence, he became the moral conscience of Russia.

    Though the Diary of a Writer – finally published in totality by Scribner’s – contains some of his greatest short stories. He also rages against injustice and took a keen interest in the criminal process.

    Dostoyevsky’s notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov.

    The Brothers Karamazov

    Thereafter he began his final novel The Brothers Karamazov. His sensitivity to injustice, it must be said, is afflicted with one blind spot, lest this piece be represented as hagiographical! He showed a lifelong hatred of Jews, who he and Turgenev too often caricatured, in the most vicious of terms. When a Jew was correctly acquitted, he bemoaned the verdict. In this sense he a creature of his time, but also trespassed a moral boundary.

    His antisemitism was a product of at times, a Little Russian mentality and his sense of the volk, so there is a negative and abhorrent mysticism here of old tensions, resurfacing in our age. Also, his embrace of what might be described as Populism at this stage has dangerous relevance to our time.

    Many of his great books were written like cliffhangers under enormous stress explaining the fervid prose, and as every book of his final novel – three years in genesis – came out the public reacted in a way not unlike the London public’s reaction to the death of Little Nell. His work, along with his literary peers, forged Russian consciousness, for better or worse.

    This culminated in a famous face off where all the intelligentsia of Russia attended an event to celebrate Pushkin’s anniversary. A feud had been brewing for decades between two opposite visions of Mother Russia, one represented by Turgenev with his condescending attitude towards the poor folk and his internationalism; the other by Dostoevsky who represented the Christian Tsarist nationalist strain.

    Dostoevsky’s great speech at the banquet is well worth reading. It effectively destroys the reputation of Turgenev and had the impact at the time of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream.’ It ends in a beautiful expression of compromise and Pan Humanism, envisioning a Christian Russia sympathetic to the poor, but receptive to other cultures, urging respect for tradition but acknowledging a need for reform and tolerance.

    It arrived while he was writing The Brothers Karamazov, by which time the debts, the epilepsy, the chaotic lifestyle and huge fame had taken their toll, He was writing around the clock to complete it, with old father time breathing down his neck.

    This book is a foundation stone of literate moderate civilisation, containing everything of the selfless Christianity and love he espoused, embodied in the character of Aloysha, who is a more modulated version of Myshkin from The Idiot. It contains some of the greatest passages in literature, including The Grand Inquisitor dialogue, and culminates in over one hundred pages of the trial of Dmitry Karamazov for parricide.

    It should be said that like Dickens, Dostoevsky distrusted lawyers, not least their tendency to allow their eloquence to overflow at the expense of the truth, and their blindness to the moral consequences of their action. The representation of the defence speech in Karamazov is deliberately weak. Even though, as the book makes clear, Dmitry is morally guilty for his monster father’s death, he is not legally guilty. Yet the defence lawyers seem to rely on the mercy plea, and on a confused argument suggesting implicitly some people deserve to be killed. Not exactly a full throttle defence, but one recently evident in Ireland.

    Dostoyevsky identifies a broad moral continuum between a capacity for the highest and basest thoughts and deeds. If any character represents the views of Dostoyevsky himself it is perhaps the chief prosecutor Ippolit Krillovitch, who, uncannily, like the author, dies within a few months of the novel’s central events: the apparent patricide, and aftermath, of the wily and debauched Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. His sons represent different faces of a timeless character, and in the ensuing trial Krillovitch draws attention to the inadequacies of each. So searing are the insights that Dimitri is prompted to thank his own prosecutor, admitting that he: ‘told me a lot about myself that I didn’t know’.

    Krillovitch describes those of the Karmazov ilk as having: ‘natures with such a broad sweep… capable of encompassing all manner of opposites, of contemplating both extremes at one and the same time – that which is above us, the extremity of the loftiest ideals, and that which is below us, the extremity of the most iniquitous degradation.’ He adds: ‘others have their Hamlets; so far, we Russians have only our Karamazovs.’ That Karamazov archetype surely extends beyond Russia.

    The reception to The Brothers Karamazov was ecstatic, and his finances looked permanently healthy, but accounts of the time show how frail he had become. The multiple social engagement at this stage were not helpful and a stroke occurred after some final pieces in Diary of a Writer, many published after his death.

    All of Russia mourned the death of a man who had been sent to Siberia. They had lost their great writer and intellect.

    Dostoevsky’s funeral,

    Legacy

    For our present age there is much to ponder over Dostoyevksy’s legacy. First is the need for the assertion of Christian, or humanist values. This includes the establishment of community, even if, as I would argue, this remains secular in its guidance. Moreover, we must protect the poor, the falsely accused and the defenceless. Moral nihilism in all its guises must also be opposed. And the devastating effect of extremism should be portrayed.

    We should also be alive to the excesses of Dostoevsky in a tendency towards Populism, veneration of an abstract volk and the denunciation of minorities, including Jews.

    Overall, he stands as the greatest intellect literature has produced, a mystic and theoretician, as well as a practical journalist. Moreover, the novels contain far more insightful philosophy than most arid books of philosophy,

    Along with Leonardo da Vinci, and even more so than Shakespeare, I would go so far as to say that he is the greatest genius that has ever drawn breath. I suspect he would have been distrustful of da Vinci’s cosmopolitanism and veneration of science. Sparks will surely fly if they ever meet!

  • Public Intellectuals: Thomas Mann

    Born in 1875, like many in his era Thomas Mann was initially a Great German Conservative, but by the outbreak of World War II he was making anti-Nazi speeches for the BBC.

    Mann won the Nobel Prize in 1929 for his chronicles of German families in Buddenbrooks (1901), and for his bildungsroman The Magic Mountain (1924), along with a number of well received novellas and short stories. Among his later publications, the novella Death in Venice (1929) is a terrific book, expressing his repressed same-sex attraction; it is a worthy expression of a hyper-civilised, fin de siècle aesthetic intelligence. The film by Luchino Visconti with Dirk Bogarde, though laboured, is also a masterpiece. It includes the famous adagio by Mahler, with whom Mann was acquainted.

    Mann seems to have known almost everyone who was anyone in his time, and was very catholic in his tastes and company. He remains, however, a crucial bridge between the tradition of nineteenth century letters and the twentieth century. Indeed, the earlier novels referenced above may appear at times like caricatures of that tradition.But great aestheticism does not necessarily equate to human greatness.

    As alluded to, Mann was a supporter of Kaiser Wilhelm during the First World War, and a romantic German nationalist with a lifelong fascination with Nietzsche. He lived for most of his adult life in Munich and his lifestyle consisted of work, an eclectic set of friends and a digression into unconventional Germanic behaviour. He was married to a Jewish woman, Katia, who he adored, notwithstanding a suppressed homosexuality or bisexuality: they had six children.

    As a novelist, not only Kafka but also Musil and arguably Broch, are greater twentieth century writers of fiction or prose within the Germanic tradition. But greatness also involves moral influence. Although, there was little until the 1930s to disclose his abundant moral courage, it was almost unparalleled among great writers even including Albert Camus. The stakes were higher.

    Colm Toibin’s recently published zeitgeist book on Thomas Mann The Magician (2021) reveals at one level a set of character traits crucial to how he achieved greatness. He was innately Protestant, despite a Brazilian, Catholic mother, modest and hard working. Commenting on his own prose style, Mann said it was ponderous, ceremonious, and civilised. This he said was all that fascists hate.

    And boy did he hate them. He hated in fact all forms of human fakeness, lies, deceptions and misinformation; an inclination very evident in the early novel Mario the Magician (1929). He also hated a lack of order and fecklessness, which was apparent in his attitude towards his brother Heinrich. And he hated barbarism.

    Thus, the arch conservative of Lubeck, in response to the rise of fascism and barbarism, changed his colour. Like Fernando Pessoa in Portugal, the caterpillar became a butterfly.

    The change was gradual. First, he had supported the Social Democrats in the Weimar government, writing treatises on his conversion to socialism as the Nazis emerged triumphant over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s.

    Mann simply could not deal with Nazis. At an implicit level, it might have been simply a matter of bourgeois taste, as he had an impeccable personal and aesthetic sensibility and was cosmopolitan but not decadent in his outlook.

    In American exile, where he was suspected of harbouring communist views, he was asked about his views on the avowedly communist Bertold Brecht. He said he did not like his writing, but that if he liked a communist writer he would have no problem saying so.

    Book burning in Berlin, 10 May 1933.

    Exile

    On holiday in 1933 he was advised not to return to Germany after many of his books had been burned in the modern day auto–da–fé. It is noticeable that it was mostly the books of Jews and communists that were burnt, but the German Student’s Union, spurred on by Goebbels, also burned Mann’s work.

    In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels deliver an address saying:

    No to decadence and moral corruption … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. … And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.

    Mann was excommunicated as a citizen in 1936. His life was threatened, and he was a moving target for the fascists for the rest of his life. Thus he left Germany when he was almost sixty, and apart from some brief post war visits never returned to reside there again.

    One wonders what would have happened if he had been more compliant. He was not Jewish and only a socialist at a stretch. It is possible that they would have showered him with hollow accolades if he had shown more deference. But unlike Martin Heidegger, he did not succumb, and thereafter in exile in Switzerland and America he became a more complete human being, which is reflected in the marked improvement in the quality of the prose thereafter.

    His wartime broadcast relayed on the BBC might be regarded as a kind of inverse Lord Haw Haw. On one of his eight-minute broadcasts from 1940 Mann condemned Hitler and his ‘paladins’ as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture.

    In another noted speech, he said: ‘The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture.’

    ‘Crude Philistines’…

    At the end of the war, he refused to allow his nation off the hook. They had turned mad; it was collective hysteria and even the 1945 atrocities documented so well in Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: the Downfall 1945 (2002) were in context to him condonable:

    Those, whose world became grey a long time ago when they realized what mountains of hate towered over Germany; those, who a long time ago imagined during sleepless nights how terrible would be the revenge on Germany for the inhuman deeds of the Nazis, cannot help but view with wretchedness all that is being done to Germans by the Russians, Poles, or Czechs as nothing other than a mechanical and inevitable reaction to the crimes that the people have committed as a nation, in which unfortunately individual justice, or the guilt or innocence of the individual, can play no part.

    Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten.

    Unamerican Activities…

    Extremism cuts both ways. In exile he was forced to testify before the House for unamerican activities as a suspected communist. Here is how he responded:

    As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’. … That is how it started in Germany.”

    Moreover, when Mann joined protests the jailing of The Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found ‘the media had been closed to him.’ Finally, he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress, and in 1952, he returned to Europe. Th Overton window of the thought police fell on the great writer, as it does to many today. He was now nearing eighty years of age.

    Exile created both a looseness and precision of prose style. A spring in the step. Dr Faustus (1947) is one of the best books ever written. It is a masterpiece and worthy of Broch or Musil or indeed Kafka. The stilted Germanic prose style becomes freer. The theme inspires: good versus evil.

    The book is about the composer Leverkuhn who sells his soul to the devil. The Faustian pact is Fascism. It is also about the corrupting influence of atonal music and its nihilistic dissonance which creates a valueless universe, like the structuralists and deconstructionists of our time. The great prose meister was having none of it.

    In my view, Dr Faustus is also about Martin Heidegger the other central intellectual figures in Germany at the time. Heidegger fell for the bait and took all the Nazi accolades, entering the Faustian pact despite his Jewish mistress Hannah Arendt, who wrote eloquently subsequently about the banality of evil. Mann, though a man of considerable means, said no.

    A theme central to his existence was that an artist cannot abandon politics at least not in such a period as the 1940s, and must recognise the moral consequences of his actions.

    Dr Faustus frequently references Leverkuhn’s veneration of Albrecht Durer, the great Renaissance artist, and his pictorial representations of moderation, judgment, melancholia and the apocalypse. Indeed, as the Nazi state collapses, he becomes obsessed with melancholia.

    In the search for spirituality, Mann invokes in a man who has lost all reason and his soul. When composing Dr Faustus, Mann showed and lectured on this to a fourteen-year-old girl who was visiting, who was Susan Sonntag. Thus, the magician bridges generations and resonates through the ages.

    And then at the end of Days with the light dimming he showed in his book about the conman Felix Krull the darkly comic humour at the heart of capitalist chicanery, which, if left unchecked, culminates in fascism.

    Mann is the great Protestant Germanic intellect of the last century, but he was also an ethereal magus and magician.

    His legacy lies in the assertion of standards, of discipline, of stable family values, and of a certain amorphous sexuality. Above all it is in the condemnation of extremism, the condemnation of barbarism, the assertion of civilised values, the rejection of censorship, the hatred of chauvinism and the social cleansing from the left or right. A consistent hatred of intolerance from all sides.

    That is what is needed now.

    His life is also an example of moral courage. The Germans wanted the magician back, but he was not satisfied that they had changed. It was him judging them not them judging him. He did not think they were displaying appropriate contrition for what they had done. He was right.

    In a different context, in Chile, when Pinochet was forced to call an election – as our conservative rulers will soon be required to in Ireland – a persecuted advertising expert advised the opposition as to how to orchestrate a campaign. No reference to mass murders or internment camps, just young Chileans with the slogan JUST SAY NO.

    That is what Mann said to fascism, and what we must now say to the ruling parties in Ireland. No images of homelessness, no incessant exposure of state corruption and criminality. JUST SAY NO, before it is too late.

    Feature Image: Thomas Mann in 1905.

  • Free Public Transport is Public Good Deliverable for Dublin (2019)

    In contrast to other major European cities, Dublin has few rail- or tram- lines. Instead, public transport users mainly rely on an extensive but complicated bus network. This is, however, slow and unreliable, owing to Dublin’s appalling traffic congestion. Moreover, for several key destinations outside the centre, notably Dublin Airport, buses are the only available public transport option.

    Dublin’s traffic congestion suffocates key transport corridors: from Stillorgan to St Stephen’s Green; Blanchardstown to Stoneybatter; Terenure to the Liberties; and Coolock to the Docklands. These arteries are so gummed up that drivers last year spent, on average, two-hundred and fifty hours in traffic – making Dublin the third worst city in the world for time spent sitting in traffic.[i]

    The effect of spending the equivalent of more than ten full days in a car each year, can only have negative health, psychological and social impacts, leading to isolation, stress, anger and weight gain. And how do many drivers compensate for time lost in traffic? By using smart phones to ‘connect’ – illegally of course – with the world outside.

    Regrettably, however, the authorities seem unwilling to contemplate a gradual retreat of the motor car from the centre. In contrast, across Europe, bicycle (and scooter) rental schemes, allowing residents to beat the traffic, have multiplied. Networks of cycle paths are mushrooming: for example Paris’s cycle lane infrastructure will, by 2020 have been expanded by 50% in the space of just five years.[ii] Elsewhere, city councils are lowering speed limits, introducing car bans and car-free days, pedestrianising streets and replacing car with bike parks.

    The ‘slow’ Dublin city centre, in tandem with the legacy of inept and corrupt planning for the suburbs, along with high car insurance and ancillary costs, present Dublin with severe challenges in terms of retaining both Irish and International business.

    Indeed, a 2018 study by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce found 73% of companies were finding traffic was having an increasingly negative impact on their businesses.[iii] In addition, heavy car reliance pollutes, causing both smog detrimental to human health, especially from diesel engines, as well as CO2 emissions generating climate chaos.

    One obvious way of addressing these problems would be to develop more extensive, comfortable and efficient public transport for Dublin; especially as without implementation of a pragmatic, but innovative, public transport infrastructure, any hope of expanding business and employment in the capital should be set aside.

    Dublin’s public transport network can be improved by diminishing distances between stops. Denser public transport can be delivered to the city (and the rest of the country too) swiftly, and without incurring vast additional infrastructure and capital costs. Importantly, adverse environmental and social impacts – such as we are witnessing with the BusConnects ‘mega-project’ – can easily have be avoided by liaising with community groups and other interested parties.

    The important question to address is how Dublin’s public transport network will alleviate traffic congestion. And after half a dozen incomplete Bus Network improvement plans (anyone remember the ‘Quality Bus Corridors Network’ and the ‘Swiftway BRT’ plans?) pompously rolled out over the last fifteen years  – all of them expensive and requiring costly compulsory purchase orders – it is high time to think outside the box.

    A Public Good

    The problem is that all previous bus network improvement plans – with BusConnects only the latest – accept the accommodation of other types of road users as axiomatic, including, of course, motorists. This, unavoidably, demands road-widening: usually requiring land acquisitions to establish minimal widths of twenty metres, i.e. a two-metre-wide footpath, a two-metre-wide cycle track, a three-metre-wide bus lane and a three-metre-wide traffic lane, on both sides of the road.

    If brought to fruition, twenty-metre-wide BusConnects corridors will, unavoidably, split neighbourhoods apart. Pedestrians will be channelled into designated ‘safe’ crossing points with communities separated by concrete corridors – what transport planners refer to as ‘pipelines’.

    But what if there were less cars on the streets? Would this really reduce the need for additional space and infrastructure, and diminish impacts?

    This brings us to the idea of recognising the use of public transport as a Public Good which should become free for passengers, thereby encouraging people out of their cars. Yes free – why not?

    Access to public transport might become viewed as a fundamental human right, akin to the provision of healthcare and education. Indeed, in more than a hundred cities in the world it is possible to ride on a tram, metro or bus for free – and without having to evade an inspector!

    From the buses of Porto Real in Portugal, to the Miami Metro in Florida, and from Noyon in France and Chengdu in China, free public transport is a successful urban mobility option for mitigating both the environmental and sociological impacts of transport. The latest place to embrace the concept is Luxembourg  – it will soon be the first country with all public transport free.[iv]

    There are a number of powerful arguments for making public transport free – or at least below the cost of operation and maintenance – provided either by government directly or through the private sector.

    For starters, private cars impose numerous costs on society that drivers do not pay for. Every time we start our diesel, petrol, hybrid engines – or even electric, as long as fossil fuels power stations – we generate air pollution, and clog up roads for other users. These costs are measurable in environmental damage, health care costs, and wasted time, which non-motorists pay for indirectly, through taxation.

    Economists and planners have long advocated that motorists should pay these costs directly, allowing people to make rational choices. Well-designed congestion pricing schemes, such as those found in Singapore, London, Stockholm and Milan, ensure that private vehicle drivers pay more if they choose a congested road – just as Dublin’s Port Tunnel has different rates depending on the time of day.

    A variation on a congestion pricing scheme for Dublin would be an additional levy on fossil fuels, which could be dedicated to relieving air pollution thereby raising respiratory health.

    In the absence of a congestion pricing plan for Dublin, however, and powerful opposition to it, subsidising public transport, which gets people to drive less than they might otherwise, is an feasible alternative – albeit, the combination of both measures would be optimal.

    Everyone benefits when people can travel around more safely and freely

    Making public transport freely available for all should create greater labour flexibility, with companies potentially choosing from a larger pool of employees, as well as accessing more suppliers who might not be deterred by high transport costs. Moreover, people would be more inclined to take more impromptu, and safer, outings for shopping, leisure or social purposes. It might save many rural pubs.

    Naturally, removing the financial cost of public transport to users would not make it ‘free’, as someone would have to foot the bill. It can be demonstrated, however, that using taxation revenue to pay for public transport would make everyone wealthier, in the wider sense of the word.

    Permitting ‘car sprawl’, i.e. unrestricted growth in car sales and road infrastructure with scant regard for urban planning, makes no economic sense, as profits generated by millions of generally single-occupant vehicles come with significant costs. The waste of resources, and other social costs are ‘conveyed’ from the calculation of these profits, and passed on to the taxpayer, future generations, and sometimes other countries.

    Implementation Challenges

    The concept of free public transport poses several implementation challenges. Amongst the arguments potentially adduced against it are as follows:

    1. It would require more public transport units to accommodate increased demand, which harms the environment, just as cars do.

    Indeed, if everyone used public transport, more, polluting buses would be required. In addition, upgrading our public transport infrastructure is energy-intensive, drawing largely on coal and other fossil fuels. But it would take many cars off the road and reduce the overall impact in the short term, while bus manufacturers could be incentivised to produce cleaner, more comfortable, and ‘smarter’ vehicles.

    1. With our level of public debt we cannot afford to spend money on frivolous projects like this.

    In fact public transport is the opposite of debt: when carefully and strategically planned it brings tangible rewards, and more importantly reduces carbon emissions; especially important with the Irish state facing hundreds of millions in fines for failure to reduce emissions that are the third highest in the EU.[v]

    1. Car sales would drop significantly.

    Indeed they would if public transport was free for everyone to get to work. Families would no longer feel the need for two or more cars. This would likely hurt the (non-indigenous) car industry, but manufacturing resources could be redeployed into making buses, or even bicycles.

    1. Some of our public transport is terrible – this would just increase the pressure.

    Regrettably, much of Dublin’s transport network is currently over-crowded and unreliable, and this is precisely why government investment is required to accommodate demand and increase capacity.

    1. Public transport service providers cannot be expected to provide a reliable service without a financial incentive.

    This argument rests on the assumption that when we pay nothing, and heaps of people are using the service, we cannot expect top-notch customer service. The ultimate client, however, in this case is the state and a simple clause in each public transport services contract could require all services to achieve a minimum standard of quality, based on the users expectations.

    1. Many people dislike public transport and would never use it.

    There are of course people who will stick to their cars whenever possible, but they would at least start bearing the real cost of using them.

    Combating Climate Chaos

    Introducing free public transport would reduce the number of cars on the road. A moderately loaded bus can carry approximately eighty passengers during a typical commuting hour. Compared to the typical car occupancy of a maximum average of two passengers at peak hour, it is a straightforward calculation that a single bus would remove up to forty cars from the road.

    A strategically designed and free bus-based city public transport system with, say, a fleet of five hundred buses could thus potentially take twenty-thousand cars off the road; almost half the number of cars currently dominating Dublin city’s centre.

    In all likelihood many of us would choose not to own a private car – perhaps renting where the need arose – thereby reducing the volume on the road. Repeated across dozens of cities in a country and thousands worldwide, free public transport could be a game changer in terms of transport emissions.

    Any government’s job is to provide services for the people. Free public transport is an example of a great service available to all. Taxation is already devoted to healthcare, education and road maintenance, so why not make provision for a service conferring such wide-ranging benefits? Moreover, it should go without saying that any government should  be taking care of the environment we pass on to our children.

    By making free public transport an aspect of the social contract, the government would be compelled to bring about improvements as required. With more users – especially vocal ones – deficiencies would be exposed. Reducing the number of cars on the road would also yield space for footpath and cycle track improvements.

    If public transport were offered for free more people would surely avail of it. Indeed, more of us would already be using public transport if it did not cost so much; ridiculously, driving into town is often ‘cheaper’ once you own a car and paid insurance.

    Enhanced Wellbeing

    A study conducted by the city of Copenhagen linked regular public transport use to a lower mortality rate, a happier disposition, and greater labour productivity. Public transport users take up to three times the amount of exercise per day compared to drivers, simply from walking between stops and their destinations.[vi]

    Public transport also brings financial benefits to communities: not only directly by providing jobs in the industry itself, but also by creating a key component to a healthy business ecosystem, and by increasing mobility options for both commuters and customers.

    It can assist in shaping a more active society, where people accept and respect each other, interact more, learning how to live together – the core elements of a healthy polity – all for free!

    Such an idea may seem revolutionary for a car-dominated city such as Dublin, but actually it’s more like a reversion to how it operated in the past. The city existed for at least a millennium before the motor car arrived on the scene. Its city centre was built around pedestrian traffic, which had to be forcefully adjusted as car ownership expanded. Cars never made sense in Dublin, but they found a way in and have become part of the urban tissue. Now that must change.

    Will we ever have free public transport in Ireland? Not anytime soon I fear. It would take considerable campaigning for this to occur. But we must do something to alleviate the insane traffic congestion in our city, and awaken to the responsibility of addressing the climate chaos afflicting the planet.

    [i] Fergal O’Brien, Dublin third worst city for time spent sitting in traffic – survey, RTÉ, February `13th, 2019, https://www.rte.ie/news/dublin/2019/0213/1029375-dublin-traffic-survey/.

    [ii] Sarah Barth, ‘Paris’s 5 year cycling revolution: Twice the cycle lanes and three times the cyclists by 2020’, road.cc – peddled-powered, April 4th, 2015, https://road.cc/content/news/147613-pariss-5-year-cycling-revolution-twice-cycle-lanes-and-three-times-cyclists-2020.

    [iii] Untitled, ‘Traffic congestion hitting Dublin companies – Dublin Chamber’, RTÉ, 15th of March, 2018, https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2018/0316/948010-dublin-chamber-traffic/.

    [iv] Daniel Boffey, ‘Luxembourg to become first country to make all public transport free’, The Guardian, December 5th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/05/luxembourg-to-become-first-country-to-make-all-public-transport-free.

    [v] Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Ireland has third highest emissions of greenhouse gas in EU’, Irish Times, 26th of August, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/ireland-has-third-highest-emissions-of-greenhouse-gas-in-eu-1.3998041.

    [vi] Sarah Boseley, ‘How do you build a healthy city? Copenhagen reveals its secrets’ February 11th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/11/how-build-healthy-city-copenhagen-reveals-its-secrets-happiness

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  • The Importance of Public Debate

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

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

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

    Christopher Hitchens.

    Right to Ridicule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Like paying a visit to Woolworths…

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

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

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

    It succeeds:

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

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

    George Orwell.

    Doublespeak

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Surveillance Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

    KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s.

    The Limits of Freedom of Expression

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

    Upholding speech rights, the Court concluded that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Village stocks in Bramhall, England c. 1900.

    Enemies of the People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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