I sit at the piano and a melody flows smoothly from my mind. I think “How great,” and quickly write it down, then continue playing and writing, playing and writing. Feels like I came up with something special this time. I become emotional with excitement and am very pleased. Then a moment passes, and nothingness. Thick darkness appears in front of me, as I realize that I am lying warm and cosy under the black sheets on my bed.
It was just a dream, again. And again I awaken, unable to remember the notes I had just dreamily composed. This is getting exhausting. A nightmare in reality. Again.
These dreams happen frequently when I am unable to compose for a period. Naturally, having downtime to put thoughts and emotions together is necessary for every artist. But sometimes the pause is much too long. The more I think in music, the more I feel in music, the more it builds in my head and must be released.
Sometimes I’m not even sure if I want to write music, or if I have to. Most of the time, it feels as though I have no choice. Melodies and harmonies; they take up so much space in my head. Growing and developing inside, they need to come out. And I have little control over it, so I comply and write it down.
The most joyful feeling I have is when I say to myself “Ok, looks like I have finished this piece.”
My debut album ‘Silhouettes’ contains ten pieces for string quartet. You will find a vivid example of my compulsion to write music in a piece called ‘Warum?’. The story behind this composition is sad, yet philosophical. Walking in a small Berlin park at the side of a cemetery, I came to a wall beside a few small gravestones lying in a row. Looking closer, I noticed from the dates that there were small children buried there.
Nearby, I hear many kids running around, laughing. Observing children happily playing and joyfully screaming with their peers under ground was a surreal moment. The juxtaposition engendered such strong emotions that I ran home to write them out of myself.
Another piece, called ‘Prayer’, came about spontaneously on a dark and rainy autumn evening. My mind was strained by feelings of longing and hopelessness, sadness and madness. I let them gush out, in tears and notes.
Most of my inspiration to write music comes from the world that surrounds me. I observe it daily on walks, in talks and relationships, reading news and watching events unravel. My music reflects all these emotions. Often, however, global events, leave me too upset to compose.
On these occasions I wish to hide from it all, to calm down. I like to imagine myself living on a farm somewhere, far away from everything, with a cat and a dog, growing my own vegetables.
It probably sounds like I have a love/hate relationship with music, but ‘Silhouettes’ was a turning point in my life – the fruition of a lifelong road in composition. The album was a long time coming despite a connection to music from early childhood, when my parents first took me to the music school.
Naturally, neither of them could have imagined the path I would take, nor would either of them have wanted me to have fallen under this spell. Now, after years of singing in choirs and playing many instruments (piano, guitar, violin, percussion, bagpipes), I fondly remember myself as a young teenager, sitting at the piano, writing my first pieces, thinking how I wanted to become a composer or a conductor.
I knew, even then, that I was not a performer, or at least I wasn’t able to discover MY instrument. But I always felt strongly that music was something I wanted to be connected to, that I wanted to dig deep into; that I wanted to understand from other perspectives – that I wanted to create.
Back then, perhaps I was afraid of the powerful feelings composing awakens. I don’t know. In the end, I selected sound design and engineering and dove deep into my studies. It was those significant experiences that are still helping me in many professional and conventional situations today.
Unfortunately, working with sound was never very comfortable for me. I spent my life looking to lose myself in one activity or another (I am still very passionate about photography, for example), but have since seen that nothing works as well for my mind as writing music.
At one time, I wanted to become a tattoo artist. I had been drawing and painting for many years and had even tattooed my own legs. For whatever reason, I left this idea behind (at least for now, but who knows in the future?).
I still regularly paint and draw, trying out different styles. It’s an important activity for me. I enjoy using watercolours and acrylics the most. Painting has one enormous benefit: I can listen to music while creating.
My musical taste may seem a little strange since I enjoy looping the same albums or songs, for hours or even days. But I can’t listen to music simply in the background – even when I loop something. I live the music every single time.
Throughout childhood, I listened more to classical music and different metal bands. But over the last few years, my playlists consist mostly of contemporary classical music, black metal, and Nick Cave. Recently, I’ve added a little techno, ambient and drone. But, one thing has always been clear to me: silence is the best music. And rain.
For two years, after completing my studies, I managed concerts in a classical music concert hall in Klaipeda. It was amazing working with musicians and composers from all over the world, as well as seeing two or three concerts a week.
Now I think about how every concert I’ve been a part of and all of the music I’ve listened to were lessons in themselves. They have directly contributed to my current compositional work.
In 2018, after many ups and downs and changing cities every two years (who wants to hear about my experience living in Moscow?), I began to seriously devote myself to composing. Leaving my past behind, I moved from Lithuania to Berlin, a city that I had only visited twice before, and where I didn’t know another person.
So I began writing music upon my arrival and in the early days of 2020 I released my first piece for strings, ‘Rituals’, which was inspired by Baltic mythology, folk music, and nature.
One year on came the release of the aforementioned debut album, ‘Silhouettes’, under the wonderful care of the Piano and Coffee Records label. I’m glad to say that the album was very well received and continues to touch people’s hearts. That makes me extremely happy, and certainly motivates me to keep moving forward.
As regards the future, to quote Jonas Mekas: ‘I have no idea what winds are driving me and where.’ Now, I am just grateful to be able to work on what I want. Whether it’s writing a new piece or allowing myself to live a slow life. I realise that this is a luxury for many and feel lucky to be able to enjoy it.
What comes later I do not know. But one thing is certain: new music will be coming out and hopefully soon.
This is the first instalment of a three part essay on the legacy of the Great Depression..
The Great Depression began in 1929, leading Wall Street bankers literally to throw themselves from windows. I was shown one such exit site on 45th Street 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Lives were destroyed as a favourable market collapsed. The fundamental point then, and now, about a favourable or unfavourable market is it is always an illusion. Smoke and mirrors.
Bull leads to Bear and back, and that cycle since 2008 is certainly where we are again, as confidence is lost in markets and neo-liberal non-interventionism. The effect in 1929 emphasised how when America catches a cold Europe contracts pneumonia. In the 1930s, the fragile, well-intentioned experiment in Wilsonian democracy collapsed virtually overnight. Now the effect is global.
We are now seeing unmistakable signs of stagflation and even hyperinflation, accentuated by the additional disease burden of the virus on health systems subjected to decades of sneaking privatisation; while health inequalities widen, as transnational organisations and Big Pharma – using so-called philanthro-capitalism as a front – collude at the expense of the population at large.
The prospect looms of fuel and food shortages, decreased life expectancies – already evident before the pandemic – repossessions, and evictions, with limited support in countries without social democratic support structures.
In terms of civil liberties, we are entering dangerous territory too, with compulsory vaccination and quarantines. A long winter is coming. And what are we to make of most non-essential court cases in the UK being adjourned until September of next year?
In 1932 at the height of its destitution, America elected its greatest ever leader the aristocratic bon vivant socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who brought in the New Deal to save the country from ruin.
In contemporary America, no such leadership exists. Biden is no Roosevelt. He is unwilling to develop a true social market. All too many in America are ‘Bowling Alone’ as communities fall apart in a digitally mediated age of social atomisation.
The Great Depression represented a failure of the American idea of government. Apart from a few dissenters, such as the legendary Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, the business of America has always been business, until it goes bust.
In a tremendous refutation of free market economics in Lochner v. New York (1903) Holmes said: ‘The third amendment does not enact Mr Herbert spencer’s social statics’
Holmes was at least a quasi-socialist, who corresponded with Harold Laski. But neither an intellect like him or a proper social democratic deal maker and integrator like Roosevelt is evident in American politics today.
Obama received money and recruited Goldman Sachs alumni to his cabinet which is a bit like inviting a cuckoo into the nest.
Studs Terkel
Hard Times
Another Chicago native and reporter of the last century, Studs Terkel chronicled American life in his book Hard Times, which is an oral history of the Depression era. Terkel argued that ‘the worst day-to-day operators of businesses are bankers,’ and quotes one source who has fallen on hard times:
We thought of the poor, at that time, as quite divorced from us, who were not poor. By the exercise of one’s charity, life could be made all right. You would always have the poor with you, they were the unfortunate, and you made donations. You could handle them. It was mildly unpleasant, but not fundamentally upsetting. Now, for the first time, we face the dreadful reality that we are not separated. They are us.
And another describes a scene of acute desperation:
They would just walk all over and kill each other. They got more than they ever need that they would just step on anybody to keep it. They got cars, they got houses, they got this and that. It is more than they need, but they think they need it, so they want to keep it. Human life isn’t as important as what they got.
The successful application of the ideas of the master J. M. Keynes generated a worldwide social democratic model in the wake of the Great Depression, which became the consensus before the resurgence of neo-liberalism. This has undermined humanity since the late 1970s, and its effect now appear irreversible, given the absence of an alternative Communist model that compelled even governments devoted to capitalism to maintain a basic standard of living and healthcare.
In contrast, the neo-liberal model of marketisation of human activity has intruded into all sectors of life. This has denuded and in some cases destroyed what Habermas describes as the public sphere.
A set of unworkable ideas have spiralled out of control, and are generating a disaster. Liberal democracy is failing and becoming unworkable. In effect, the End Of History is the acceptance of discredited ideas, which have led us to this impasse.
Capitalism is not working because capitalism is not allowing people to work. Joseph Stieglitz, a former economist for the World Bank remarked: ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor.’ And increasingly basic liberties are being sacrificed at the altar of security.
More than statisticians or economists, artists convey the individual effects of world historical events such as the Great Depression.
Although written in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is one of the core texts of the Depression, demonstrating the appalling work conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry. Many of his works including Oil, which became the film with Daniel Day Lewis ‘There Will be Blood’ attack unbridled capitalism and its depressing effects on the human spirit.
Two crucial quotes from The Jungle are as follows:
The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.
And
Into this wild beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.
Sinclair paints a familiar scene, now throw in the disinformation of our post-truth universe and you have a neo-liberal Molotov cocktail. At least at that time there was vibrant social commentary, and a less captured media.
All little lives need protecting as Sinclair and above all John Steinbeck in his portrayals of the Okies in dustbowl America clearly recognised. His great novel The Grapes Of Wrath depicts a migration from the dustbowls of Oklahoma to California, which turns out to be no Promised Land, as any unionization or collective action is supressed, just as has been the case over the last thirty years.
More relevant than even Sinclair or Steinbeck as an evocation of the Depression-era in America is a book by James Agee, and photographer Walker Evans called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941. The phrase originates in the Jewish religion. The complete sentence is: ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the fathers that beget them.’
The book, partially governmentally funded, chronicles dustbowl America. Evans adds the pictorial record of the devastation wreaked by the great economic depression in the dustbowl.
From the pictures of Walker Evans it is noticeable how grim the faces are. The anguished expressions on children is particularly harrowing. Lives lost by neglect and the degradation of poverty.
Any yet we cannot give up. Produced and directed by Frank Capra in the wake of World War II, ‘It’s a Wonderful life’ is about a good banker memorably played by Jimmy Stewart, who helps people to build new homes.
Capra, made many great films, but ‘It Happened One Night,’ which came out at the height of the Depression captures a spirit a popular spirit of defiance. So there is cause for optimism in poor folk.
Featured Image: Lunch atop a Skyscraper, Charlie C. Ebbets, 1932.
Unaware of the roaring cataract ahead, a small boy splashes in the dark river named Dodder, cheap buoyancy aids on his arms, flailing them in the manner called the dog’s paddle, eyes and mouth squeezed shut, neck stretched to keep his head above the surface. I shout a warning, which he must hear because he squints one eye open, manages an uncertain glance at me before he drops in slow motion towards the froth and blackness below, not screaming. An unseen piano makes clichéd sounds in the background and this musack is the main element that irritates me awake. I already know that all the children are safe in their beds, and this can only be a cheap movie scenario in which I am the small boy.
Even my nightmares are cinematic clichés, retribution for spending most of my life trying to avoid them. It’s a bit late for me to invent a new scenario in which life itself might be a dream, the music not potently cheap, the mise-en-scène not too close to the bone; too late to wake up and start all over again. Best to count my blessings and face the end of my ninth decade with equanimity.
Not much older than me, my island home has survived the past hundred, vaguely independent years before falling over the economic cliff. Despite having lived the greater part of my life in a contented region called Conamara in the waste of Ireland, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that my personal and cultural identity are also falling to bits.
My fellow-citizens and I have shape-shifted from being the credulous members of an imperial Roman Church, then being shanghaied as reluctant subjects of the British Empire, finally citizens of an embryonic European Empire, which looks like ending up as the Fourth Reich. But unconsciously we are, and have been for many years, carriers of the most recent imperial virus, this time North American. Now, as Hubert Butler predicted many years ago, ‘…there is nothing but Anglo-American culture to unite us.’
In this chameleon state we exist, of course, less in the literal sense than imaginatively which, in the Irish psyche, certainly in mine, tends to be more real. Our new masters’ films – pardon me, movies – and TV shows have filled our waking hours and daydreams.
Not many years ago I counted ninety cinema screens in Dublin in which not a single Irish film was to be seen. The bulk were American. Although I now require subtitles for the more recent manifestations of their staccato, one-phrase dialogue I have not quite mastered the Tarantino fashion of peppering my scripts with four letter expletives. Must try harder.
The empire’s audio-visual avalanche has forged mine, my childrens’ and my grandchildrens’ dialects and tastes. We of an older generation cannot be excused; Jack Nicholson was for long my ideal actor and Humphrey Bogart taught me to smoke fifty years ago.
It should not upset me that my grandchildren prefer Rap to O’Riada. The truths of the three Williams – Faulkner, Saroyan and Goulding – were once gospel to me. American playwrights Arthur Miller and Edward Albee were in my mind long before Brian Friel became my favourite.
We are now fortunate to speak the American dialect of English because we need go no more with our bundles on our shoulders to Philadelphia in the morning. Philadelphia has come to us in the form of Google, Facebook, Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard and the rest of the multinationals, which are now the core of our island’s economic wellbeing as well as a reminder of our anxious dependency.
The fact that up to seventy five percent of the resident I.T. multinational employees are non-Irish, while four hundred thousand of our youngest and brightest have in the last five years slipped quietly away only confuses the matter, but must not be brooded over. At least the multinational surveillance company (SGS) from which I must beg renewal of my driving license is harmlessly Swiss.
Apart from the last exception, our cultural credentials are impeccable. If forty million United Statesians are deluded enough to call themselves Irish we must be entitled to return the compliment and claim documentation as Yankee Doodle Dandies. Unfortunately the US immigration authorities now screen us potential emigrants at source, literally on our native soil in Shannon airport. As Peter Fallon urged – and I know very well I am retooling his context – in a recent poem:
Say never again to The Wild Irish Rover,
No more to The Minstrel Boy.
Give us back our sons and daughters,
Say that Ireland is over.
How fragile our illusions of sovereignity have been, how transformed has been this trading post in the last century, since a teenager named James Toner – along with 200,000 other Irishmen who needed a job – ran away from his home in Dublin to join the British Army. As a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps young James’ task was to collect the body parts of his fellow youths killed among the bloomin’ roses in Picardy. He survived the horror and grew up to be my uncle Jim.
I just looked him up in the British Military Archives.
Conferment of the D.C.M. gallantry award was announced in the London Gazette (1920) and accompanied by a citation:
Award Details: 61586 Pte. J. Toner. During the period 17th September to 11th November, 1918, while acting as a bearer, particularly at the capture of Bohain. There being a congestion of wounded, he repeatedly led forward squads of bearers over very difficult country during the night and greatly assisted in the evacuation of them.
This means that Jim did something foolhardy, at least under cover of night, in the midst of a carnage that was never revealed to us, his nieces and nephews.
Back in Dublin with a small war pension, Jim married, begat no children and endured Irish patriotic resentment at his fighting for the Old Enemy. Even his brother-in law disapproved of him. When my father made the drawing of four-year-old me, Jim was not impressed. He acidly pronounced: “The boy may be alright, but he has the head of a bloody rogue.”
I overheard that remark and worried about it. Surely he was joking? Or was he envious because he had no children himself? I now surmise that it was general bitterness because nobody, especially not my father, wanted to hear about the horrors Jim had witnessed in France. He had been informally decreed an Irish traitor in the British army.
Sometime in the 1950s he decided to abandon his golf, at which he was local champion, and his buoyancy aid, whiskey, and put an end to the pain that was identified too late. It is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is applied to the euphemism ‘veteran’. Uncle Jim put an end to his pain with the aid of a gas oven.
There are other associations. When the British army abandoned our sacred soil in 1922, Uncle Jim’s sister Kathleen ran away with her boyfriend, a Tommy named George Thomas.
A possible fatal attraction was the fact that both of their fathers kept pigs; science now says that personal odour is a most powerful sexual signal. I met the ageing lovers in their home at Abingdon, Berkshire in 1964 when Uncle George unexpectedly said to me: “I glory in you, Bob.”
I think he meant that I appeared not to have inherited my father’s prejudices against the English. He was wrong; our parents’ prejudices are lodged in our DNA but, as a form of energy, can happily be redirected at more fitting targets, such as the English Public School system and all their imitators closer to home. Oh, the bitther word!
When World War II (like War Number 1, a civil war between blood brothers, the Germans and the English) came along, one of Uncle George’s sons, Sidney, enlisted as a teenage frogman and acted, at nineteen, as one of those cockleshell heroes who attached limpet mines to enemy ships. He became a hero of mine and survived to produce a pretty daughter named Cathy whom I subsequently persuaded to elope with me briefly to Ireland where we had midnight swims at Killiney beach and were referred to as kissing cousins. Cathy later married a Red Devil, one of those RAF people who put on daring aerial displays.
These connections make me wonder if I am not still a bloody rogue and worse, a fellow-traveller of that suspect class, a West Brit rather than a putative citizen of America.
For a start, I was born in the Pale: Dublin and its environs. My first language was English, albeit in a dialect light years away from the BBC accent, whose Home Service provided most of my childhood listening pleasure; Radio Éireann broadcast only a few hours per day.
My early reading was what we called the comicuts, The Rover, The Hotspur, The Eagle, all published in England. My favourite authors were Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.A. Henty, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, John Wyndham, Leslie Charteris and so forth. Even the Irish language detective story writer Reics Carlo, who was obligatory reading in school, turned out to be English.
But as I grew up I betrayed them all for the likes of Irwin Shaw, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Hemingway, and now I know I’m a virtual Yank. I assure you that this is less a form of ingratiation with the American Chamber of Commerce than one of realisation and resignation. No problemo.
There are more ingredients in this cultural Irish stew.
Among our official heroes, Pádraic Pearse’s father was from Birmingham; James Connolly came from Edinburgh and James Larkin was a Liverpudlian. No wonder I am ambivalent about nationalism, Irish, English and American and still cling to that long-lost cause: socialism.
The last night of the Proms in the Albert Hall disturbs me, with its sea of Union Jacks and Hooray Henrys rendering Land of Hope and Glory – because I am moved by Elgar’s music (although he did not write the lyrics, which are as Kiplingesque and vainglorious as Deutschland Ueber Alles).
When filming American schoolchildren with their hands on heart, reciting the daily oath of allegiance to their flag, I am also uneasy. Indoctrination of the unruly young starts early on that continent but, by contrast, nationalism has in recent years become a vulgar word in Ireland.
How do the British and the Yanks get away with their jingoism? And where, apart from everywhere and nowhere, do we Irish really fit in? To those who, like myself, find all of this disconcerting I say, cop on, get a life, get the message, get over it, get with it, and other such novel and useful imperial edicts. No worries.
Staying for a moment with the phenomenon of British and American nationalism, I wonder if the answer may not be that they were both empires whereas Ireland’s only imperial conquest was spiritual – mainly among the black babies of Africa – and that appears to have been erased by our national amnesia. As very soon must happen to me as, dragging my feet like a reluctant schoolboy, I approach four score and ten, intending that looming watershed to be more an act of defiance than any petty celebration.
On my ninetieth birthday I shall beware of those who say: “You’re looking great, haven’t changed a bit.”
My exact contemporary, the late Ben Barenholtz, a survivor of Naziism and a New Yorker, who produced Coen brothers’ films and gave me a present of a book of all of Cole Porter’s lyrics, told me that he has an ex-friend, a liar who has said exactly the same thing to him every year for the past twenty years.
The astonishing thing about this compliment is that we ancients believe it. We skip and dance down the road until we are forced to pause, whereupon we resemble the silent nun in Elizabeth Jenning’s poem who was breathless with adoration. We oldies, by contrast, have merely run out of breath, full stop, or period, as I should really learn to say.
The truth of the above platitude, ‘yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’ is simply this: we are decommissioned. Joseph MacAnthony has described our aged generation as tourists in the departure lounge. We exist, persist, only in our anecdotage.
Who would have thought that little Riobárd, the boy in the drawing, would survive so long? Certainly not himself, whose life expectancy as a film and TV maker was long ago estimated by an insurance Actuary to be no more than forty five years.
What matter that this little Jackeen has spent more than half his life in the least colonised part of Ireland – the Gaeltacht of Conamara which, paradoxically, he has long known to be spiritually and economically closer to Boston than to Dublin.
Who gives a tinker’s curse that the Jackeen in question, having read so many comments, references, articles, essays, even PhD theses about his minor oeuvres, now dares to give his version of the story? But age confers a protective veneer of immunity, anonymity, even a kind of invisibility on the elderly so one is free to say what one likes.
As Kurt Vonnegut – who in one of his modest communications to me referred to himself as an old fart who smokes Pall Mall – put it: “Old men are obscene and accurate.” We can experience a kind of lightheaded bliss when we notice our fuel gauge moving towards empty and we can offload petty concerns.
The present words are thus an act of memory, which is equally an act of imagination and may be approached academically as sub-Proustian because although my life sentence has been long these sentences are, with a few exceptions, not.
I also possess unlimited memorabilia – photos, letters, diaries, the usual bric-a-brac of a life – which may save me from downright lying. Besides, there are those modest films which constitute aides-memoire and, not least, may be treated as having been personal buoyancy aids, otherwise described as vain aspirations.
I occasionally wonder, as I float towards the brink of the cataract, if I do not exist in some other, gentler person’s nightmare?
What do I want from you? Why do I write this text? Is it because I want to share something, or because I was told to? In considering how ‘you’ will read it, (‘you’ hopefully being someone other than ‘me,’) I would like to share some things relating to the development of viewership and audience engagement.
This is by no means a definitive list, rather, a haberdashery of sorts, my own narrative stitched through the history shelves into relevant spines, to prop up against my own bar, serving tall pints poured with personal narratives. How academic!
Good Performance
The majority of good performance dictates to its audience how they must act. Rather than being something written down in a pamphlet to digest and practice pre-show, the way you should watch the performance has been defined through the performance itself.
Live, in the moment. The only way to learn the new terms of engagement is to attend, to witness, to participate (or not participate), and most of all, to act.
It’s like ballroom dancing with a good dance partner, the leader leads, the viewer follows. Dance with a bad dancer, however, and you might be inclined to rebel, to revolt or to leave the dancefloor. I think it was Chekhov who said, show the audience a gun in the first act, you had better use it in the third.
I draw your attention to Hugo Ball, dressed up in a cardboard cylinder to perform his abstract phonetic poem ‘O Gadji Beri Bimba.’ It caused chaos among audience members as they just did not know how to react, what to take seriously, how to engage.
Language, the motherload of culture, the determiner for how we think and communicate, whittled down into a collection of sounds chirruped and chanted by an obelisk shaped man. The ramifications were huge, to challenge the central pillar of communication, attacking it in such a way, also challenged the perspectives which we garner through language, behaviours, nationalism, politics, history, etc.
How do we perform (via language) in our everyday lives after that, knowing that it has been called out for being insincere? Ball wasn’t the first artist to use this medium, before him there was Marinetti, with his ‘Zang Tumb Tumb,’ and also Russian Futurist Aleksei Kruchenykh’s
Zaum language in ‘Victory Over the Sun.’
Language strikes again:
Hans Richter. Dada, Art and Anti-Art.
Marinetti and the Futurists
Marinetti and the Futurists welcomed heckling and shouts from their audience. The viewer was crucial to the performance, so much so that they would glue them to their chairs, patches of trousers and skirts screaming off as tempers tore.
They wanted to break the compliance of passive consumption, of blind acceptance, and so agitating the viewer towards a riot was a crucial factor in their performance. This focus on the role of the viewer as a fundamental component echoes throughout the twentieth Century, most notably with Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics. In stating that the only way to truly engage with an artwork was to be a part of it, this movement placed the viewer centre stage, the artwork’s legacy depending on their enthusiasm. Only then could the artist be sure that responsible viewing had been contracted.
Relational Aesthetics also sought to display the network of relationships necessary in creating a work of art, to blur the boundaries between negotiating the piece as creator, and negotiating the piece as viewer. But, as Claire Bishop pointed out, simply making us aware of these negotiations does not necessarily introduce a form of criticality in that it does not define what types of relationships we are looking at, if they are equal, or democratic. She criticized the vagueness of many R.A artworks, but held up Santiago Sierra as a successful Relational Aesthetics artist, for showing the subversive, and sometimes unequal transgressions that happen in many negotiations.
‘Ten People Paid to Masturbate,’ Santiago Sierra. Cuba. 2000
Roman Britain
‘The Romans in Britain’ when staged in 1980 at the National Theatre was sued by Mary Whitehouse, who accused the director Mr Bogdanov, of procuring an act of gross indecency between two males actors in the play.
The fact that no act really happened, (there was a simulation of a male rape scene) did not seem to matter, nor did the fact that Mrs. Whitehouse never actually saw the play. Her moral stance overrode these factors, and she felt obliged to tackle the theatre for staging a play which she considered unnecessary and indecent.
Fortunately, the court ruled in favour of the theatre. It was the first male rape scene to ever appear on a stage in the UK. Accounts from the opening night speak of nine hundred audience members, not shouting or walking out, but sitting frozen for the remainder of the play. ‘The atmosphere was later compared to the night in London theatres when it was announced before curtain-up that JFK had died.’
There have been recent attempts by morality campaigners to ban theatrical productions (e.g. ‘Behzti’ UK, 2004, ‘Jerry Springer, The Opera,’ 2005, and ‘Sur le concept du visage du fils de Dieu’ Paris, 2011), which brings back to the forefront the question of censorship, and deciding what narratives are appropriate for audiences today.
A group exhibition I was part of in Turkey 2016, ‘Post-Peace,’ was cancelled last minute by the institution, Akbank Sanat, deemed to be too culturally insensitive to stage. The offending artwork ‘Ayhan and me’ by Belit Sağ, is a video created from news archives which showed a Turkish police officer bragging about killing Kurdish people.
Belit Sağ. Ayhan and Me. 2016
In this age of fake news, and political correctness, it is more important than ever that we don’t treat audiences as children. Which begs the question; is engagement with morality absent from the modus operandi of our times?
Representing the Immoral
Art has a necessary role in presenting situations that challenge and provoke, it is through these provocations that a society sets its standards of behaviour. Rather than questioning the role of morality in art, (which doesn’t exist,) in order to be relevant, art must, to some extent, represent the immoral.
These provocations offer the possibility to stimulate reflection on and discussion around what is acceptable, and what is not, and why not. Without this avenue culture becomes something that we consume, the same way we consume McDonalds, or a Coca-cola.
Placing the artwork in a way that the viewer can have the maximum opportunity to be aware of their role is, for me, the ideal. Here I think of Guatemalan artist Aníbal Lopez (a.k.a. A-1 53167.) For the piece ‘El Préstamo (The Loan) (2000)’ situated in Guatemala City, the artist robbed a citizen on the street at gunpoint, and used the stolen money to pay for an exhibition at Contexto. This included invitations, installation, a lavish opening reception, all paid for by this victim, now unwillingly performing as patron. Upon arrival at the exhibition, the audience learned these events through a poster on the wall, the only visual piece on display. The attending viewer became complicit in this crime by participating as viewer, and as consumer. Which makes me wonder about complicity and the act of spectating: Are not all audiences complicit?
THE LOAN. On the 29th day of September, 2000, I did an action, which consisted of assaulting a person with the appearance of middle class. It was performed in the following way: armed with a gun I went out to a street in zone 10, stopped such a man of about 44 or 45 years, brown hair and a little overweight, I pointed in his face and told him, this is not an assault, it is a loan, and will bring visual language to your children. Such a person I call Q874.35. This work is being sponsored by the man that was assaulted, who has funded: invitations, assembly and part of the toast of this sample. A-1 53167 Guatemala 21/10/508 D. O.)
Perhaps this is why the most popular form of viewing has remained the same for over a hundred years, since The Moscow Art Theatre reformed the relationship between the viewer and the stage.
Stanislavski nailed the fourth wall up and many have been banging it down ever since. The ramifications of this wave have crashed through into other art forms, television, cinema, and sometimes, contemporary art, with many collectives fighting its wake to establish other ways of viewing. This invisible wall, invented by this collective, removed the necessity of communicating directly with the audience, establishing instead an experience where the viewer is required to watch this bubbled environment, creating an altogether more realistic performance and allowing for suspension of disbelief. The audience arrive and become silent observers, flies on the wall with no responsibility.
It remains, however, the most popular way of watching something today, this disengaged mode and you may ask, should it be so?
At this moment, culture cannot serve as a salve for nervous souls, even if the (then) President elect tweeted his disapproval of Broadway actors for using the theatre to communicate their doubts about his future administration.
Art’s particular license to speak up, to misbehave, mock and imitate reality, to blur genres and disciplines, this freedom, as long as it lasts, must be deployed to prevent the normalization of the emerging authoritarian paradigm.
To recap…
Violate language and communicate it. Curse your audience and kiss their throats. Question what you’re watching. Attack ‘appropriate’ narratives by telling the truth. Replace complacence with awareness. Leverage weakness to break power. Attack acts of gross indecency by staging acts of gross indecency. Take an axe to axioms. Swallow bubbles for breakfast. Divorce disengagement.
Ask in the taking, instead of begging for scraps under the table, howl at the edges of town.
The penny drops as I listen to RTE’s Liveline. There’s a highly articulate woman in her fifties, who is renting. Holding out little hope for the future, she pleads with the powers that be to solve the Housing Crisis, in its entirety, no more sticking plasters: “Solve it for everyone,” she stresses, “even if 50,000 houses were built and delivered next year, I could not afford one.”
This leads to the following questions: first, assuming she has a regular wage, why can’t she affort to own a home as her parents and grandparents before her would have expected? And secondly, is the housing market really broken, or is that our financing market is broken?
Now let’s consider how we view the family homes market. Should we treat these as assets that appreciate in value and make us rich at the end of our lives, or something else?
Why should we become economically confident when house prices rise? If we have more than one child, and we want them to own their own house, any increase in the value of our homes will be lost when they come to buy; our gain is their loss.
Whenever a wealth manager – the financial advisor to a rich sophisticated investor – records a family’s net worth, they exclude the family home. This is because it is not a tradeable asset; it cannot be realised for alternative investments; it’s where a person lives and any investment strategy should not put that at risk; a roof over one’s head is a basic requirement after all.
If we are to have any chance of solving this crisis of housing insecurity for a growing number of our fellow citizens, then we must accept that family homes are not investments, not a substitute for a pension. In any case with rising life expectancy and care needs growing, it’s an asset many of us won’t be in a position to leave to our children.
It’s time to accept that family homes provide accommodation for the workers of this State. These are taxpayers who support the retired civil servants, and many other pensioners besides. It is vital that their cost of living is kept sufficiently low to ensure a decent quality of life, which ultimately underpins the productivity of labour in the State, and maintains the global competitiveness of our economy.
We need to return to how we treated family homes in the 1970s and 1980s. This is not to suggest that councils building homes is the only solution we have. But we should return to the idea that homes are not, and never should be, treated as investments.
Now ask yourself the question: how come our children and our fellow citizens cannot afford to purchase a home, but can service the commercial rent on the very same property?
Let’s be clear, we don’t need to ‘fix’ the housing crisis or ‘deliver’ affordable homes. We need to ensure that each tax paying citizen of this country has the basic security of a home. In order to do this they must be able to access financing that will put them on a par with Vulture Funds, thereby allowing them to compete for this scarce commodity.
Any solution must eliminate the inequality and injustice in such a way as to deliver home financing to our citizens. We therefore need to create a structure that can deliver competitive finance to all our taxpayers.
If foreign investors can borrow from the banks at 1.2% and first time buyers borrow at 3.99%, who do you think will be in a better position to purchase any houses and apartments that come on to the market?
Let me pose another question: why has the Central Bank of Ireland placed restrictions on our citizens, when buying a home, but placed no similar restrictions on commercial operators in the same market? This is grossly unfair. It is not a financial level playing field.
If you are going to interfere in the market, interfere in such a way that it affects all parties. Put another way: why would you put your savings in the local Irish bank at a return of 0% when your kids borrow from that very same bank to buy their home at 3.99%?
As things stand, I predict that there will be very few new housing developments delivered for sale directly to individuals over the next decade. Let me explain why I believe this.
When a developer purchases a property he obtains planning permission, then seeks finance. In Ireland we only have two commercial banks operating on any scale, and both have been severely hurt by developers in the past and now have tightened lending limits on exposures to this sector.
So the rational developer turns to international investors to finance a project. These international lenders are very cautious people, they don’t lend unless they are almost 100% sure they will be repaid in full; they don’t take punts. They also insist that the developer seeks out pre-sales. Pre-sales occur when the developer sells the entire complex or a significant element to an investment fund before it is built, thus eliminating the risk of the economy tanking, banks restricting their lending to individuals, a recession, a global pandemic, etc.
So, hardly any properties are delivered for individuals to purchase. Small builders cannot access this market, it’s all sown up.
This means that the generation growing up faces renting for the duration of their lives, and accumulating worries into their retirement years. This occurs even, sadly, when they could actually afford that property if there was a level financial playing field. I ask you: is this the kind of community you want to live in?
There is a sinister explanation for why certain individuals might not want to define and solve the problem of property ownership. The more fair a system is, the less profit exists for existing home owners.
Thus, there is an enormous conflict of interest right across the spectrum of those charged with this significant societal responsibility.
Now we, the home owners, all need to ask ourselves, are we willing to give up the vast paper wealth that accumulates over time from owning a home. Or at the very least, can we share it?
The airwaves are full of property experts, everyone has a view. But property is not just an asset, and no one ever talks about the financial aspects, and how we can improve access to finance.
The international investors are not primarily property experts, they are financial experts and investment bankers. The Irish experts talk about vacant property development, Cuckoos, affordable housing, discounts to market rent, homes over the shop, etc. etc. But all the Vultures know, is the value of money, and how they can deploy it effectively. Unfortunately the Irish public has not developed this financial literacy, meaning the institutions will win every single time, until, that is, we wake up and understand the problem.
In essence, we need to create a co-operative housing body which can access finance on the same basis as the Vultures, and thereby deliver inexpensive money to all tax payers without risking taxpayer’s money. This is possible without breaching EU State Aid rules, without upsetting the banks, but it will rightly piss off international profiteers.
In response to COVID-19: how are we to explain people drawing starkly differing conclusions from the same data? To understand this requires a search for context and motivation.
In the second series of the Duffer Brothers Stranger Things, set not uncoincidentally in 1984, there is a critical scene in which the story reaches its conclusion. Murray Bauman, the experienced investigator and sceptic is confronted by Nancy and Jonathan, two of the series’ teenage characters. They present him with conclusive proof of events and happenings, apparently shattering all the certainties he had operated with until that point.
Pouring a large measure of vodka to steady himself, Murray contemplates what he has just heard before explaining to Nancy: “I believe you, but that’s not the problem… you need them to believe you… your priests, your postman, your teachers, the world at large. They won’t believe any of this.” He then clasps his drink close to his chest as if it’s a lifeline.
“You heard the tape,” Nancy insists, clearly frustrated.
“That doesn’t matter”, snaps back Bauman as he waves the glass in the air. People want to be comfortable, and this truth is uncomfortable. He takes another gulp of Vodka and grimaces. But it gives him an idea.
“The story,” he says. “We moderate it, just like this drink here, we water down the vodka … We make it more tolerable.”
The events that have unfolded since March 2020, when the pandemic began in Europe and the U.S., have been extraordinary by any standards.
After over seventy years of peace in the West, during which wars were fought on foreign lands, and apart from the occasional lurch to the left or right there has been political stability, democratic norms, a generally fair justice system and continuous growth in prosperity and education.
Moreover, infectious diseases have been all but conquered with new drugs and treatments. Combined with improvements in public health and nutrition we have seen life expectancy grow year on year in what appears a steady pattern. We have grown accustomed to continuous improvement in the standard of living and security. After seventy years of improvement, we have come to expect this to continue.
After such a prolonged period of peace even the idea of warfare – or it not being safe to walk the streets – is almost beyond our comprehension. Never before has humanity in the West been so removed from the terrors of war, the tyranny of oppressive regimes and the ravages of natural disasters or famine.
We get up each day expecting it to be exactly like the last and for tomorrow to be the same. We cannot contemplate a world that is not exactly like that of today.
Yes, we will have technological changes and workplaces will change, but fundamentally we expect everything to remain the same. Footballers will be paid too much money; screen stars will fall in and out of love with each other; war will break out in some far-flung land and a natural disaster will occur somewhere only to be forgotten and replaced in our consciousness by another somewhere else. Meanwhile, what really concerns us is reaching the gym on time after work, getting the kids to school and catching up on the latest Netflix mini-series.
So, what happened when we woke up one morning to a potentially fatal virus that was not happening on the other side of the world? By early March we had watched with indifference what was happening in China, but now it was here in our community.
Cases, first slowly but then steadily, began rising until on the March 11th 2020 we had our first death. Now it was for real; now for the first time in seventy years there was an immediate threat to our health and even our way of life.
We approached the pandemic within the paradigm of our world of seventy years of increasing prosperity and health. We believed we were invincible, that our medical community would protect us and that all lives were saveable.
For any illness there must be a drug. If we don’t have it today, we will have it tomorrow. We just need sufficient money and political will and it will be discovered. So, we laid down the challenge to the pharmaceutical industry to produce a vaccine, and all we needed to do was give them enough time to develop it, locking down hard until then.
In so doing, we revealed an aversion to risk and a failure to critically analyse the extreme, and erroneous, warnings on fatalities that were issued by politicians and scientists; strangely our media and politicians accepted the doomsayers and ignored optimistic assessments.
The WHO definition of health, as not just the absence of disease, but the physical, mental and social wellbeing of the individual, was ditched. We would get back to that once we found the vaccine and the virus was eliminated. The pharma industry took up the challenge and we sat at home watching Netflix until they told us they were ready.
Alternative approaches that involved natural immunity, and isolating the vulnerable as the Great Barrington Declaration advised, or applying early treatment with a range of therapeutic drugs were dismissed in a concerted attack by public health officials, doctors, universities, politicians, the media and in particular social media.
There was to be one response and no challenge would be allowed. Civil rights to freedom of movement and to bodily integrity were trampled on with barely a whimper in the mainstream media.
Emergency powers not contemplated since World War II were ushered through by the government without so much as a peep from the opposition or the media. Lockdowns were for the greater good; while the fear and panic that had been sowed ensured almost complete compliance and a demonisation of dissenting voices.
Compelling stories from reliable sources tell us of the more than reasonable possibility of the virus originating in the lab in Wuhan, but we don’t want to know. Valid alternative early-stage treatments, such as Ivermectin, shown to work in other parts of the world are not merely dismissed, but actively smeared.
Early stage VAERS data on vaccine safety, particularly in young males, is ignored based on thresholds that would have previously stopped approval of a vaccine. The fact that the vaccines have not passed long term safety trials is conveniently ignored.
Questions about how wide a spectrum of immunity is covered and the length of time immunity lasts is also overlooked. Boosters are unquestioningly accepted and used off-label, although no research exists on the possible impact to both short and long term health, and overall immunity. Public health concerns about the impacts of lockdown on society and other illnesses are forgotten. There is only one train leaving town and you are either in the vaccine carriage, or you are on your own.
So why did all this happen; why have we thrown away hard won civil rights; why have we allowed ourselves to be coerced into taking drugs, without what would normally be considered informed consent?
Why aren’t we desperately trying to investigate the origins of the disease? Why have we dismissed any and all alternative treatments? Why was the Swedish approach derided, and now treated as if it did not happen?
I guess it’s a case of too much, too soon. We craved the comfort of our old world so much that we accepted without question the solution offered; we were told this was simply “following the science”, as if “the science” was settled.
Once embarked on that path there could be no turning back. There could be no dissenting voices. There could be no alternative science. Voices straying from the perordained plan must be crushed at whatever cost.
So here we are now nineteen months later and it still not politically correct to say that perhaps we got it wrong. Most people are so desperate to return to our safe world, that to believe that, would be to recognise that we have been misled and badly informed throughout that time.
It would mean that doctors, much of the scientific community, public health officials, universities and the media have been participants or active orchestrators of the worst medical and public health mismanagement in modern history. That’s too much to take on board, the brain can’t compute, it overheats, dismisses, and attacks those who even suggest it.
So how will the story unfold? There is surely no question, but that the truth will out. As time passes we will acknowledge the errors. Then we will rue how it was ever possible for such catastrophic mistakes to occur.
I suspect posterity will not look kindly in particular on a medical community who, with a few honourable exceptions, sat back and watched the policies unfold. Who kept their head down and took the easy road.
As a society we invest in doctors, educating them and offering them considerable rewards. In return we expect them to look after our interests. We expect them to speak out on our behalf when they see injustice. After after what has just happened it may be difficult to regain that trust.
I wonder when will the serious post-mortem begin? When will data, evidence and outcomes start driving policies; when will marketing mantras and outright propaganda be left behind?
Will the story need to be watered down to become more tolerable? How much water do we need to add to the vodka?
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Dante Alighieri
Religion is an emotional need of mankind. The rationalist may not want it, but he has to admit that other people may… Let’s not leave out a single god! […] Let’s be everything, in every way possible, for there can be no truth where something is lacking. Fernando Pessoa
The Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan came as a shock to Western consciousness. It was not merely that a U.S.-sponsored regime proved so fragile once the troops pulled out; but the apparent enduring appetite among Afghans for policies at least purporting to be Islamic flies in the face of a starry-eyed view of humanity steadily evolving towards a uniform set of customs and beliefs.
That is not to argue that common principles cannot be agreed by sovereign states – and peoples – but to expect uniformity in outlook across a global population living in starkly differing circumstances, and at varying historical junctures, appears naïve at best. Any globalisation project striving for homogeneity will surely fail.
In abandoning religious traditions – as many of us have done – it may be that we are losing ethical frameworks grounded in those traditions with profound consequences for relations among ourselves, and with Earth itself. It begs the question: at a critical juncture for humanity does faith, or transcendence, offer a path out of despair, and indeed a Theology of Hope? We may further ask whether, without this ethical grounding, if the direction of scientific research is guided by a reliable moral compass, or simply the exigencies of a Capitalist market?
Without subscribing to the banal equanimity of moral relativism disregarding gross human rights violations, we should question all military interventions in pursuit of peace. Saint Augustine in the City of God stated: ‘there is no man who does not wish for peace… even when men wish a present state of peace to be disturbed … they do so not because they hate peace but because they desire the present peace to be exchanged for one that suits their wishes.’ The Hippocratic Oath might be adapted in international relations whenever the invasion of another country is contemplated: ‘first do no harm.’
The idea of peace for eternity is an illusion. So Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) – where ‘the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism’ is ‘replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands’ – now seems an increasingly absurd notion, formulated in a moment of peak post-Cold War hubris.
Likewise, a Marxist assumption that History will simply end, thereby removing a requirement for politics, or for difficult choices to be decided is also, sadly, Utopian; this is notwithstanding the continued relevance of Marxist analysis to current economic relations, in particular a seemingly inexorable widening in the gap between rich and poor in an age of technology; and the idea of metabolic rift, meaning, broadly: the alienation of exploited workers from their environment.
Thus, both Liberals and Marxists have fallen prey to an assumption that we are bound for a Promised Land governed by Enlightenment Values. In fact, Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume called into question fundamental rights derived from an Aristotelian tradition, developed in Europe over centuries. Science only emerged as a distinct discipline in the 1830s, untethered from an ethical foundation in philosophy.
U.S. President Reagan meeting with Afghan mujahideen at the White House in 1983.
Religion in Global Diplomacy
The Taliban’s victory demonstrated that religious identity remains a galvanising force in politics, beyond even national identity, in the developing world especially. Although, it should be noted that the Taliban is largely drawn from the dominant Pashtun ethnic group. We may also safely assume a long Afghan tradition of resistance to foreign occupation remains an inspiration.
Nonetheless, as the case of ISIS also highlighted, and indeed the perseverance of the Religious Right in the U.S., we in Europe especially should reconcile ourselves to the endurance of belief systems other than our own dominant secularism. For, as the authors Philip McDonagh, Kishon Manocha, John Neary and Lucia Vázquez Medonza of a new work On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy (Routledge, London, 2020) point out, it is a fallacy to equate ‘modernisation’ with a decline of religious observance.
This work provides an important guide to negotiate challenges in a world where those professing no religion amount to just 16% of the population. Globally, atheism is a strictly a minority taste, a point its often evangelical advocates are wont to ignore. Thus, in the half century since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, we have witnessed a succession of political movements emerge shaped by religious identities – if not the humane insights contained within all traditions.
Show on the life of Jesus at Igreja da Cidade, affiliated to the Brazilian Baptist Convention, in São José dos Campos, Brazil, 2017
Religion as a Force for Good and Ill
Anyone advocating in favour of a place for religion in the public sphere must grapple with a strong tendency for this to be expressed in fundamentalist politics – a word, incidentally, deriving from the description of Protestant sects of the early twentieth century. All too often, where religion lies behind political formations it has brought harsh ordinances, generally to the detriment of women – in terms of their status relative to men – in a patriarchal order.
In power as such, we have witnessed the crushing of dissent, or heresies. Indeed, the approach of many rulers claiming faith-based authority resembles that of the Grand Inquisitor from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamoz, who Laurens van der Post described as ‘the visionary anticipation of Stalin and his kind.’ This tale or parable, which the character of Ivan Karamazov’s recounts in the novel, is set in post-Reformation Spain, where the all-powerful Inquisitor is visited by a resurrected Christ. The fearsome leader, however, dismisses the putative saviour, revealing that the Church has embraced the devil:
we have accepted from him what You had rejected with indignation, that last gift that he offered You, showing You all the kingdoms of the earth: we accepted Rome and the sword of Caesar from him, and we proclaimed ourselves the only kings on earth, the only true kings.
The Grand Inquisitor maintains that he is serving the common people, who will be lost if freedom of conscience is permitted. He thus banishes the saviour with the words: ‘we shall withhold the secret and, to keep them happy, we shall opiate them with promises of eternal reward in heaven.’[i]
Characteristics of the Grand Inquisitor’s approach were evident in the Irish Catholic Church after independence that opiated the people “with promises of eternal reward in heaven.” Thus, Ronan Sheehan describes a ‘Theology of Incarceration’ – associated in particular with the legacy of Matt Talbot in his visionary Dublin: Heart of the City (2016).
However, notwithstanding criminal actions of Catholic clergy, we may question whether contemporary Ireland is a more, or less, caring society. There are certainly greater opportunities for women – but in an increasingly two-tier society in housing, health and education it is a shrinking number that can avail of these.
In an increasingly neoliberal society political ambitions have given way to passivity. The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy remind us that twentieth century history witnessed resistance to National Socialism, and plans for the Welfare State ‘inspired to a large extent by leaders who were religious leaders.’ There are numerous examples of religious leaders and movements in developing countries, from Gandhi to Hamas, that have emphasised the importance of social programmes. The Catholic Church under Pope Francis is also now engaging seriously with many of the profound social and environmental questions of our age.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822.
Poetic Origins
A more acceptably entry to the idea of religion – for a younger generation anyway – is perhaps through poetry. The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy locate religion in poetic inspiration, which has often arrived in response to tyranny, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s plea in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (1819):
Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free–
Shelley wrote the first public argument for atheism in England as a young student in Oxford, but this may be considered an undergraduate flourish, designed to provoke. As his career developed, according to his wife Mary Shelley, he became a ‘disciple of the Immaterial Philosophy of Berkeley. This theory gave unity and grandeur to his ideas, while it opened a field for his imagination.’[ii]
Shelley’s work emphasised a divine inspiration, and believed a poet’s ‘impartial care for the birth of situations’ reaches towards goodness. Likewise, Osip Mandelstam said ‘the consciousness of our rightness is dearer to anything else in poetry.’
Many poets maintain, at least in private, that their inspiration, including that conveying moral ideas, is in a sense, god-given, or at least derived from an ‘other’ world. Thus, the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod describes a certain kind of judge, touched by the Muses, who ‘can put a quick and expert end even to a great quarrel.’ Viewed as such, religion may yet offer a poetic space for developing empathy, imagining a new world, and holding on to what remains sacred in a dying planet.
For the authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy, the formulation of ‘a more just arrangement of human affairs’ comes about not only through philosophical reasoning, but also in a Theology of Hope. Thus, the say ‘the meaning or pattern in events shines out in the perspective of eternity.’ This is the faith of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer who believed that ‘something new can be born that is not discernible in the alternatives of the present.
Therefore, the authors ‘do not argue for theocracy in any form,’ and instead ‘argue merely that to try to exclude God and religion from the conversation would be about our global future is to aim deliberately low.’
Everything is Permitted?
Does the negation of religion – however tenuous and abstract – leave us operating within a moral void, where, as in the words of Ivan Karamazov: ‘everything is permitted,’ including murder? This is not to say that all atheists operate without moral scruples, but ultimate justifications for “rightness” or “goodness” may prove elusive in the absence of faith or transcendence. Through the character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky wonders what deeds we are capable of in the absence of divine judgment.
More broadly, we may ask whether a new species of evil develops in a value-less neoliberal setting, where callous murders are increasingly commonplace – not least in the gangland shootings we have grown accustomed to in Dublin in recent times? Is it simply fear of being caught in the act that holds back more of us from committing heinous crimes?
Contemporary alienation has been powerfully expressed by Michel Houellebecq the French author of Atomised (1998) and other novels. His latest offering, Serotonin (2019) again plumbs the depths. Here, we find a narrator contemplating the murder of the four-year-old son by another father of the love of his life, after coming to the conclusion the child would stand in the way of a successful revival of their relationship.
His mind returns to his own feelings as a young child after a New Year celebration. Adopting a neo-Darwinian, (scientific?) outlook, he observes:
it was as that memory came into my mind that I understood Camille’s son, that I was able to put myself in his place, and that identification gave me the right to kill him. To tell the truth, if I had been a stag or a Brazilian macaque, the question wouldn’t even have arisen: the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of her genotype. This attitude has been maintained for a long time in the human population.
He continues:
I don’t think that contrary forces, the forces that tried to keep me on track for murder, had much to do with morality; it was an anthropological matter, a matter of belonging to a late species, and of adhering to the code of that late species – a matter of conformity.
Overcoming “conformity”, ‘the rewards would not be immediate’ he says, ‘Camille would suffer, she would suffer enormously, I would have to wait at least six months before resuming contact. And then I would come back, and she would love me again.’[iii]
Houellebecq’s “contrary forces” represent an increasing loss of moral conviction. As the characters conformity diminishes, the “code” of our “late species” breaks down and the possibility of violence increases, as we see in the book’s characterisation of the violent response of farmers to a neoliberal order that is putting them out of business.
Ultimately, however, Houellebecq’s narrator proves incapable of pulling the trigger as he has intended, entering what he refers to as an endless night, ‘and yet’, he says:
deep within me, there remained something less than a hope, let’s say an uncertainty. One might also say that even when one has personally lost the game, when one has played one’s last card, for some people – not all, not all – the idea remains that something in heaven will pick up the hand, will arbitrarily decide to deal again, to throw the dice again, even when one has never at any moment in one’s life sensed the intervention or even the presence of any kind of deity, even when one is aware of not especially deserving the intervention of a favourable deity, and even when one realises, bearing in mind the accumulation of mistakes and errors that constitute one’s life, that one deserves it less than anyone.[iv]
Hope springs eternal it seems, even in a novelist-of-despair such as Houellebecq.
Moreover, if we refuse the temptation to pull the trigger and reset our lives; if we embrace an idea of hope; we may conceive the Earth itself to be sacred; a view shared by all religious traditions, which enjoin respect towards all life on the planet. One wonders whether a view of all life on Earth being sacred is shared by pure materialists. Moreover, untethered to any faith tradition is “everything permitted” in scientific research?
Niccolò Machiavelli 1469-1527.
The Political Craft
Contemporary politics often appears to operate within a moral vacuum, where warfare is conducted through drone strikes, and the planet reels under the impact of over-exploitation; while even in Advanced Economies, millions endure shocking poverty. New forms of propaganda have been unleashed via a social media that is removing agency, implanting ideas that distort politics. Most politicians claim to care, but as often as not they distract from the structural questions and emphasise issues of only peripheral relevance to the lives of ordinary people. In particular, identity politics has been used to divide and conquer, while the wealth of billionaires continues to accumulate.
The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy come down squarely against the statecraft associate with Niccolò Machiavelli, which now appears ascendant in a contemporary politics of spin – where September 11 was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Here, according to the authors: ‘Deceit, and even cruelty, are justified by results – by their results as measured over time – which requires very sharp judgment by the Prince if his recourse to realpolitik is not to undermine the moral standards of ‘ordinary people.’’ Means cannot easily be distinguished from ends, while the body politic is contaminated by mendacious politicians.
They argue: ‘Not to tell lies or to make contradictory promises would seem to be a rule of peace-building that we should never set aside.’ Lies erode trust in institutions and tend to catch up with political actors. Tony Blair and his 45-minuteclaims before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is an obvious example, albeit one unmentioned in the book.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
Pandemic Response
A Populist wave emanating from the Americas has, thus far at least, failed to propel a European equivalent into power. Nonetheless, distrust in politicians and the media is probably at an all-time high, and with some justification. Moreover, all too often, scientists guiding government policy have adopted Machiavellian approaches that only fuel paranoia.
The origins of the pandemic itself are shrouded in mystery, amidst a growing suspicion that the COVID-19 virus is a product of so-called ‘gain of function’ research, involving US government agencies and China.
Attempts to supress this involvement – including by EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, who jointly authored an article in The Lancet dismissing the idea out of hand at the beginning of the pandemic – generates serious concern. A recent slew of emails released under freedom of information: ‘indicate involvement by individuals with undisclosed conflicts of interest; limited peer-review; and a lack of even-handedness and transparency regarding the consideration of lab-origin theories within the scientific community.’
Would anyone who believes in the sacredness of life on Earth engage in work so fundamental to all life on Earth? It recalls the inventor of the Atomic Bomb Charles Oppenheimer’s quoting The Bhagavad Ghita: ‘I am death destroyer of worlds.’
Ethical debates in science would surely benefit from religious insights. As Laurens van der Post put it: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call ‘religion’, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’
Fauci speaks to the White House press corps on COVID-19 in April 2020.
Bioterror Czar
Damningly, in 2011, in the capacity of George Bush’s ‘bioterror czar’ the long-time Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President Anthony Fauci argued that the benefits of ‘engineered viruses’ made it a ‘risk worth taking.’
During the pandemic Fauci appeared as a rational antidote to the bleach-belching Trump, but is prone to an arrogance assuming he can do no wrong. This is epitomised by the remarkable statement: ‘A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.’ In other words, Le Science C’est Moi.
An early example of Fauci’s mendacity was his claim that he committed a ‘white lie’ in relation to the efficacy of masks. He said that he shaded the truth to avert a run on scarce equipment. Even if we take him at his word, why should the public believe what he is saying thereafter is not also a white lie? This is the attitude of a Grand Inquisitor who believes the little people cannot hope to understand the big questions. But this Machiavellian approach easily backfires.
In this testimony, as in much of his conduct over the past two years, Dr. Fauci was speaking “nothing but the truth.” Yet he was mindful of what Jesuits used to call a reservation.
A reservation, in this sense, is an unspoken qualification. The speaker telegraphs a public meaning, confident it will be misunderstood. He holds in reserve a private meaning whose release might damage a higher cause (a cause known to the speaker and God, of which God approves). For God, in this context, we should read: “US government institutions of scientific research.” Yet American support of catastrophically hazardous experimentation was by no means the only pertinent fact withheld from American citizens.
There are perhaps programmes that a government can justifiably occlude, but it enters dangerous territory in doing so. Fauci’s over-weening arrogance – tying his own fate to the credibility of science which is enshrined as the guiding light for humanity – appears to have led him to the moral failings of the Grand Inquisitors that we associate with religions in power.
Black Lives Matter Dublin Protest June 1st 2020.
A Point of Inflection
The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy stress a need for preserving universal values, and institutions, while upholding a spirit of hopefulness in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges for humanity. History shows that democratic institutions alone cannot be trusted, given the extent to which opinions are moulded using increasingly sophisticated propaganda. This is one reason why we have constitutions that purport to contain immutable and even transcendent values.
As the authors stress, ‘we have reached a point of inflection in the global story’ and if they are to address forthcoming challenges religions ‘need to make themselves understood in the common language of reason.’
The input of the billions of religious should be welcomed in our public discourse, and not associated with ignorance in a one-track view of development. In particular, the idea of all life on planet Earth being sacred should be affirmed, although tendencies towards authoritarianism and mendacity among representatives of religions requires attention.
In an age of science, where humans act as gods, altering the building blocks of life we can draw on wisdom contained within religious traditions on the sacredness of life. In a world of mounting challenges, even those of us who have dismissed religion from our lives may benefit from consideration of core principles contained therein. In any case, we must navigate a path through a world where, like it or not, religious belief remains the norm.
Featured Image: The Thinker in the Gates at the Musée Rodin
[i] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Ignat Avsey, Oxford World Classics (1994), p. 322-325
[ii] Kenneth Neill Cameron ‘Philosophy, Religion and Ethics’ in Shelley: The Golden Years, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971, p.151
[iii] Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin, London, 2019, p.265-266
Two months ago, after releasing my new album, Songs & Stories,Vol 1, I asked Irish composer Craig Cox to listen and offer his thoughts, without any prompting from me. Craig and I have worked together on several projects since I arrived in Ireland in 2012. His response resonated with me, so I will comment on parts of it here in order to explain my background, and what led me to write these songs.
The music on Alain Servant’s new album is a synthesis of his years of artistic vagrancy.
Vagrancy! This is a word that well summarises my artistic path. I started in theatre as an actor in my early teens and, at the age of sixteen, with eight friends, created a theatre company called ‘Tour de Babel’ (Tower of Babel). This adventure continued for over fifteen years. After moving from the Parisian underground scene to the French countryside, we created more than twenty shows, with the aim of meeting other cultures and using theatre as an intercultural laboratory. We always worked in collaboration with artists from other cultures, simultaneously immersing ourselves in them as we went along.
As an actor, director and musician, I was able to incorporate practices and visions from the Mediterranean world (Lebanon and Tunisia), Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Cuba), Asia (India and China) and Europe. I discovered Indian Classical music and started practicing the sarod
Then the Turkish Oud.
But all adventures must come to an end! The company split up and we all parted on our own paths. I next created a residency space for artists in the countryside in France where all arts and artistic movements were welcome to create and experiment. Over a period of ten years, I met and practiced with clowns, jugglers, acrobats, theatre makers, butoh dancers…
Then, I arrived in Ireland! This island has become for me not only a personal nest but also a place in which to focus my practice.
Alain’s practice is fundamentally one based in narrative: his craft is the construction of worlds that hold up a warped mirror to the familiar, placing the listener inside an ethereal realm in which everything is distorted yet illuminated.
I am a storyteller. I am also an actor, writer and musician. In Ireland, I found that songwriting was a way of merging my practices. My head is filled with myths and stories, and I found in Ireland a fertile land for my imagination to blossom.
The dark earth and the cold sea have allowed the seeds of strange plants that I have carried all my life to take root in a peaceful garden, the poisonous and the medicinal growing side by side.
I sit now in this garden, picking these fruits and becoming intoxicated with their smells and the memories they recall in me. I am present in the here and now, but many dimensions overlap. And I sing my perceptions as they arise.
An appropriate adjective for this album is “multi-lingual”. Not simply in reference to the actual shifts between European tongues (so that the inherent musicality of language is demonstrated, it becoming a texture in itself), but also in reference to the musical world.
I have no real mother tongue. I spent my early childhood in Bolivia, speaking Spanish and listening the indigenous people speaking Quechua and Aymara. Arriving in France in Marseille, I learned French with a strong southern accent, then moved to Paris and, although fascinated by Classical French literature and poetry, I spent most of my time hanging around with the kids of my quartier learning argot, the Parisian slang that was very much alive at the time. And then English came for me, a language that seems to fit the songs I sing.
A language is a way of seeing the world, as well as its music, different frequencies that don’t strike the soul’s strings in the same way. It is not necessarily the language that drives me, but rather the language revealing itself through whatever the subject is. A rock in a high mountain sings in Spanish, and a tree by a gentle river in French. What language would a bottle of whiskey lying in the gutter speak? I am this rock, this tree and this bottle of whiskey!
Moving through this album is like rolling through the shifting narrative structure of a dream, each track morphing into the next so that an overall tone manifests and an internal metaphorical logic constructed, with references to flowers, flowing water and undeath mushrooming and acting as way points that trick the listener’s memory while revealing the underlying subtext of an almost squalid hopefulness: a unique wisdom that weaves piss and vinegar parables, speaking reassurances in hoarse tones.
For me, any creative act is a journey into the subconscious world. I jump into unknown depths and come back laughing, clutching some new treasures that become songs or something else. In these depths, I meet gods, kings and queens, slaves, even children playing with wild animals…
Any new creation is a cathartic process that brings me back to a world of wonder. The logic emerges by itself with no conscious will. I try to follow the natural movement of expansion and contraction. And it can be hard work! As hard as the craft of the blacksmith at times. Because art is a craft, and demands skills, experience and practice.
I would like to conclude with a word on collaboration. Collaboration is essential for me. The creative process at times can be solitary, but becomes useless if there’s no transformation through exchange.
I was lucky in Ireland to encounter John Linnane, one of the best musicians and performers I have ever met.
Since 2017, we have worked together and performed together and I would like to thank him, not only because he’s a great artist, but also because he’s a great human being. It is an honour to have him beside me in this adventure.
To understand the origins of the Irish Housing Crisis we also need to look beyond our shores, and excavate the substrate of the modern global financial order. This will reveal a slow journey towards the neoliberal financialisation of property as an asset today – overwhelmingly bought and sold regardless of the needs of society at large. Today, individuals act as private companies, but invariably lose out to better organised and resourced institutions, while the periodic burstings of speculative bubbles widen inequalities, and create conditions for Populist uprisings.
In particular, it should be recognised that our capitalist system is not simply a market economy, of which there have been numerous variants through history, none of which, including our own, truly “free” in any meaningful sense. Capitalism in its current guise exhibits a dispassionate face, but ultimately relies on violent enforcement of interest-bearing loans by officers of the State. It arrived in the wake of widespread acceptance of what was previously considered the sin of usury – the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender – by Protestant reformers during the Reformation.
Markets in goods and services have existed since civilisations first emerged in the Middle East, but these were invariably softened by community solidarity, wherein laws and norms ensured trade was not conducted – as we see increasingly today – as an impersonal, zero-sum game between competing parties. Of course, there were various categories of people – including women and slaves – that were excluded from such commonwealths, nonetheless a sense of mutual obligation and reciprocity was more pronounced in the trading arrangements of pre-modern polities.
It is only in recent history, as living standards have risen through technological advances, enhanced food supply and sanitation – along with the arrival of various forms of income redistribution associated with the welfare state – that property – in material terms shelter – has emerged as central to the achievement of a basic standard of living, and the good life we now expect. Its acquisition has become an all-consuming preoccupation in many countries, Ireland not least.
Subsistence Level
Even in Europe and North America, until the twentieth century the primary challenge for most families was to obtain sufficient food for survival. Due in part to a veneration of an economic philosophy of laissez faire, associated with Adam Smith, ample sufficiency was slow in arriving, despite increased supplies arising out of the Second Agricultural Revolution from the seventeenth century onwards; along with the arrival of subsistence crops from the Americas, including our beloved potato, and maize.
In Europe, initially at least, the ascent of the bourgeois from the seventeenth century worked to the detriment of peasants and a new working class. Thus, despite technological developments, such as the invention in Europe of the printing press, and a more stable food supply in the years between 1500-1650 prices rose by 500%, but wages rose much more slowly.
There were continuous interruptions to, and distortions of, food supply in a nascent capitalist market. The beginning of the seventeenth century witnessed grain surpluses in England as agricultural capacity exceeded the requirements of the population. Carryover inventories of food averaged between 33 and 42 percent of annual consumption. Therefore, in that period: ‘famines were man-made rather than natural disasters.’[i]
The typical English subsistence crisis after the ascendancy of Henry VIII did not take place because of insufficiency but because ‘the demand for inventories pushed prices so high that labourers lacked the cash to purchase grain.’ In essence, merchants were hording, and the poor were starving.
The Procession Picture, c. 1600, showing Elizabeth I borne along by her courtiers.
During the late Tudor period ‘paternalistic’ authorities recognised this and acquired surpluses, selling it on at prices affordable to the lower echelons of society, much to the annoyance of millers, brewers and bakers. That progressive market intervention unravelled during the Civil War of the 1640s, when Roundhead mercantile interests began to exert authority over government decision-making.
It was only in the 1750s, in the wake of food riots of ‘unprecedented scope’, that the State began to subsidise grain once again. As a result, by the early nineteenth century, famines had been conquered in England ‘not because the weather had shifted, or because of improvements in technology, but because government policy… had unalterably shifted.’[ii] Sadly that policy did not extend to Ireland.
Today, in order to achieve social harmony it seems likely that governments, including the Irish, will have to treat property as an essential commodity, similar to food, wresting control from a system that has enshrined the gambler.
Sealing of the Bank of England Charter (1694), by Lady Jane Lindsay, 1905
Bank of England
In the U.K. a financial system emerged associated with the creation of the Bank of England in 1693, when a consortium of bankers made a loan of £1,200,000 to the king. ‘In return’, according to David Graeber, ‘they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes … a right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king owed.’[iii]
A system of credit enforced by military might went global during the colonial era, leading to the enrichment of a class of financiers operating out of the city of London in particular. Fernand Braudel characterises this form of capitalism as first and foremost the art of using money to get more money.[iv] The capacities of this system appear to have reached a perfect pitch in our contemporary era.
But what system preceded this? And could there be an alternative? Prior to the arrival of paper money IOUs issued by the Bank of England, below the surface, older market systems based on mutual trust and solidarity operated. These were overwhelmed by the impersonal calculation that continues to characterise financial services, underpinned by the violent capacity of the State.
Thus David Graeber observes: ‘Under the newly emerging capitalist order, the logic of money was granted autonomy; political and military power were then gradually reorganized around it.’[v]
In his indispensable A History of Debt: The First 5000 Years, Graeber argues the ‘great untold story of our current age’ is of the destruction of an ancient credit system found in small towns and villages across England, and beyond. This was a complex market based not on coins, but on trust. In a typical English village: ‘the only people likely to pay cash were passing travellers, and those considered riff-raff.’ Reveallingly, he observes that ‘just about everyone was creditor and debtor’ and that ‘every six months there would be a public reckoning’ when the community would resolve their debts to one another based on a person’s ability to pay.[vi]
Such a system reflects a passage in the New Testament (Matthew 20:1-16) in which a landowner pays workers the same sum at the end of the day despite each one working different hours. When one of the workers complains the landowner responds:
‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
So the last will be first, and the first will be last.
In any community there are those less fortunate than others, and a pre-capitalist system of resolving debt, and rewarding work, acted as an impediment to excessive accumulation of resources in a few hands. Importantly it was not simply barter, as value was ascribed based on an ability to pay, and material needs, as much as on the labour or other input into the good or service. A cobbler might therefore produce shoes for an impoverished widow at a lower price than that set for a prosperous miller. No doubt it wasn’t idyllic, but it seems to have led to a fairer and more harmonious existence than what followed in its wake.
Graeber argues that ‘this upsets our assumptions [as] we are used to blaming the rise of capitalism on something vaguely called the market’, but these ‘English villages appear to have seen no contradiction between the two.’[vii]
John Constable – Parham Mill, Gillingham.
Money was Trust
In this world trust was everything: ‘Money literally was trust.’ Neighbours appeared he says ‘quite comfortable with the idea of buying and selling, or even with market fluctuations, provided they didn’t get to the point of threatening poorest families’ livelihoods.’ Thus Graeber describes the origin of capitalism as ‘the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest.’
The new legal order of strictly enforceable loans had serious consequences for debtors, a position which was connected to sinfulness, and led to imprisonment. Graeber goes so far as to argue that this amounted to ‘the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasised that in a small community, everyone normally was both lender and borrower.’
He also argued that this transition provided ample space for swindlers and cheats:
What seems to have happened is that, once credit became unlatched from real relations of trust between individuals … it became apparent that money could, in effect, be produced simply by saying it was there, but when this was done in … a competitive market place, it would almost inevitably lead to scams … causing the guardians of the system to periodically panic and seek new ways to latch the value of the various forms of paper onto gold and silver.
Moreover:
Only the wealthy were insulated, since they were able to take advantage of the new credit money, trading back and forth portions of the king’s debt in the form of banknotes.[viii]
Eventually the price of bank notes stabilized once notes became redeemable in precious metal. This is referred to as the Gold Standard, which emerged following the South Sea Bubble Crash of 1720. But this crash was far from the last in what appears an inherently unstable system. As Graeber puts it: ‘it does seem strange that capitalism feels the constant need to imagine, or to actually manufacture, the means of its own imminent extinction.’[ix]
Hogarthian image of the 1720 “South Sea Bubble” from the mid-19th century, by Edward Matthew Ward.
Separate Legal Personality
Companies were established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250, and applied to monasteries, churches, guilds and other institutions, but were in no sense profit-seeking enterprises in the modern sense. However, according to David Graeber ‘once companies’, such as the East Indian Company, ‘began to engage in armed ventures overseas … a new era in history might be said to have begun.’[x]
The inherent danger of profit-seeking corporations was once widely recognised. Thus, between 1720 and 1825 it was a criminal offence to start a company in England, during a period of rapid economic expansion.
In the United States until the nineteenth century there were two competing ideas regarding the purpose of companies: the first involved those with charters restricted to the pursuit of objectives in the public interest, such as canal building; the other regime issued charters of a general character, allowing companies to engage in whatever business proved profitable.[xi]
The latter category emerged triumphant, divorced from responsibility to fellow citizens; an unaccountable abstraction with separate legal personality established in the landmark 1897 case of Salomon v. Salomon. Thus capitalism discovered the perfect vehicle for wealth accumulation, and as wealth begets wealth, increasingly multinational companies overwhelmed smaller family-owned businesses as a wander down any high street today confirms.
Moreover, as corporations have swelled in size, a chasm has opened up between the pay levels of senior officers and rank and file workers. Thus, whereas in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors, then the model of a successful US business, was paid 135 times more than assembly-line workers, fifty years later the CEO of Walmart earned as much as 1,500 times as much as an ordinary employee.
Moreover, according to Theodore Zeldin: ‘In the twentieth century, the British colonial empire was replaced with a less visible but even more powerful financial empire compose of an archipelago of some sixty offshore tax havens presided over by the City of London.’[xii]
As companies grow in size and internationalize, the pursuit of profit becomes an overriding purpose, and the connection between management and workers diminishes to a point where companies are no longer embedded in communities. This is particularly evident in financial services, where making money out of money has become a conjuror’s act, increasingly incomprehensible to the uninitated. It was surely only a matter of time before property would be adopted as a speculative asset to an all-consuming leviathan.
Property Today
For obvious reasons, throughout history land has been a paramount concern for peasant societies, primarily as a source of food, grown for subsistence and as a commodity. Agricultural land, however, must be worked, so speculation in rural land produces scant reward unless there is skilled labour and capital attached. A surviving aristocracy has continued to draw incomes from rural rents, but this has been severely dented by agrarian movements that emerged in Ireland and elsewhere to produce a class of petit bourgeois peasant proprietors.
Similarly, at least until the end of World War II, in urban areas property brought significant trouble and relatively scant reward for any landlord, with tenancy considered a transitory existence associated with student years; while public housing schemes assisted the urban poor to leave tenement dwellings that had bedevilled many cities, including Dublin, which had the worst housing conditions of any city in the United Kingdom at the turn of the last century.
However, since the post-War period workers, including those engaged in monotonous ‘unskilled’ work, joined forces to win a series of improvements to their conditions. These included a five-day week and eight-hour working day, along with aspirations to a living wage. It allowed scope for many, if not most, of those pointedly referred to as ‘the working class’ to enjoy a reasonable, and improving, standard of living across the Western world. Importantly, a steady job permitted home ownership.
Moreover, in the wake of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture after World War II – which led to a radical reduction in the cost of food – steadily rising living standards in the U.S and Europe brought a profusion of recreational activities including sports, and unprecedented access to the arts, especially film – the defining cultural form of the twentieth century – along with access to higher education, even for the children of the poor. In these circumstances property became an increasingly prized asset – pent-up demand ripe for exploitation if circumstances permitted.
Crucially, from the 1970s, an ascendent neoliberalism led to governments around the world withdrawing from the housing market, leading to dramatic decreases in the stock of social housing. In 2015 in Ireland, for example, by which time economic growth for the year was at 7.8%, a mere 334 social and affordable units were built.[xiii]
In the meantime, regular stock market crashes underline to financiers the reliabiity of bricks and mortar as an investment. Pension funds especially relish the assured income that property generates. Thus, even when there is a crash in property prices, as in Ireland, rents continue to be paid, and with assistance from the State – socialism for the rich – property prices rise once again.
Throughout most of history the quest for a crust of bread has been the dominant struggle for the bulk of humanity. Today, in the Western world at least, somewhere to rest one’s head in a place of one’s own has become the overriding concern. At the heart of the housing crisis in Ireland, and elsewhere, lies a yearning for the good life that most us see as a right, but which is being exploited by a buccaneering class of financiers, many of whom survived the Crash of 2008, and continue to exert control over the institutions of the Irish state.
It appears that just as governments had to regulate food supplies in order to avert famines and accelerate development in the early modern period, similarly today it has become necessary for states, especially the Irish State, to regulate a property market which is working to the detriment of a growing proportion of the population. More generally, whether we can do away with the rigidity of a capitalist system of debt enforcement, and return to a market based on greater social solidarity and reiprocity remains to be seen. But at least we should radically reform an inherently unstable and unfair housing market, which is failing to deliver the good life we have a right to expect.
[i] Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, Sok Chul Hong, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, p.116
[iii] David Greaber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House, London, 2011, p.49
[iv] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down’ The Journal of Modern History Vol. 63, No. 2, A Special Issue on Modern France (Jun., 1991), pp. 354-361 (8 pages) Published By: The University of Chicago Press.
[xi] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Everyday Life. A new Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, Maclehorse Press, Quercus, London 2015 pp.232-233
[xiii] Dan MacGuill, ‘FactCheck: How many social housing units were actually built last year?’, 9th of February, 2016, www.thejournal.ie, https://www.thejournal.ie/ge16-fact-check-election-2016-ireland-social-housing-2587923-Feb2016/
On February 15th, 2021, John Buckley McQuaid, released an album of original songs about Ireland, This Is Where I Keep My Dreams, to a thundering silence from the media.
Long have I missed albums from Irish artists that address our present situation of apathy and indifference. Could it be that the media is ignoring such releases or could it be that such releases have so little commercial appeal, that artists refrain from recording and releasing them?
The situation for musicians is desperate, between Spotify and COVID-19, many musicians have thrown in the towel and have had to find other means of supporting themselves.
This brings me to ‘This Is Is Where I Keep My Dreams’, which delves into Irish history and has many comments, both critical and compassionate to make on the present situation. Mr. McQuaid (no relation to the late Archbishop!) is saying something that needs to be heard – now, more than ever! He has also created videos which add wonderful visuals to accompany many of the songs (links provided).
Here’s to the island of saints and of scholars ere’s to the biblical beasts of the field Here’s to the kingdom of clerical collars Here’s to the wounds that may never be healed. John Buckley McQuaid, ‘Land Of The Magdalenes’
‘Land Of The Magdalenes’ is a tale of the Diaspora, echoing James Joyce, a man who would not bend the knee to either Church or State, who referred to Irish art as ‘the cracked looking glass of a servant’ – an image of colonial subjugation.
Joyce himself went into exile in Europe, not being a man to play popinjay to an English court. He was guilty of the cardinal sin of pride, the sin of the devil – the defiant Joycean stance is still a reproach to any servile attitude towards Church, State, or a twisted, demonic God, who may, even now, be making Joyce pay throughout all eternity for his defiance.
Today the image in the servant’s looking glass is that of a post-colonial pig in lipstick smirking at its own reflection, aping its betters, mired in its own moral excrement, the sow rolling merrily on its young.
Rosary Beads and Respectability
Instead of rosary beads and respectability, we have the brash, vulgar, ignorant Castle Catholics, educating their children in private schools, a new pernicious breed of self-interested professionals and the very wealthy, whose aspirations are status, the acquisition of wealth, and self-advancement.
Give us this day lord, our villas in Spain, Lord Give us our castles with breakfast in bed
Give us a case of expensive champagne Lord,
Give us a place Lord, to lay down our heads. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Dear Mister Taoiseach’
All a far cry from the childhood of the late Frank McCourt, who wrote of having to conceal a pig’s head under newspaper walking home for fear he’d be mocked at Christmas, as they couldn’t afford a turkey.
When the brash Celtic Tiger gave way to the Crash; in a pub one afternoon, I noticed a couple walk in with Brown Thomas bags and noted their instinct to conceal them. People did not approve.
Today the Brown Thomas Brigade no longer care – the sale of luxury goods goes up and up, and the divide between the wealthy and the poor has widened and widened, decimating an already struggling middle class.
And you can be sure that we’ll never forget The culture of vultures and dealers and debt The struggles and troubles, the gold, white and green So much for our beautiful 1916 John Buckley McQuaid ‘Prodigal Kiss’
So we have replaced foreign oppressors with our own.
Class Solidarity
Class solidarity and resistance against oppression is necessary around the world today, but this nation has an extremely important role to play, and is surely judged by how it treats its vulnerable – the young – sure stick them in hotel bedrooms where they can’t even learn how to crawl – the sick – let them drop dead on waiting lists – and the old – let them die in nursing homes.
As capitalism consumes itself, we witness the consequences globally, increasingly powerful vested interests hold sway in so called democracies, polarising the divide, the social fabric disintegrates, and the world begins to convulse.
We have witnessed Brexit, Trump, civil unrest, our own electoral shifts, the established powers clinging on as the centre weakens, and the left and the right finding themselves curious bedfellows in opposing the establishment. All the while in this country, we have:
Trotters trotting to the trough. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Homeless Hotels’ (unpublished)
So what would a visitor from the past witness here? If Oisin were to return from the land of his youth:
His heart is still young ‘though he’s long in the tooth For want of a horse, he’ll be taking the Luas He used to be cool now he’s yesterday’s news. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Prodigal Kiss’
Maybe he’d notice the cherished children of the nation queueing outside the GPO. Maybe he’d
notice the obscenity of the tents in the city and the spectral figures begging for money. He might not even be sure what century he was in. He might notice the undeserving child eating its dinner off the ground outside the GPO.
So we had the Mother and Baby homes, the Industrial schools, the orphanages, the Magdalene laundries, the lunatic asylums, the Ferns report, the Ryan report…. those Girls who lived in hell:
Where cruelty prevailed
In gardens with forbidden trees
Whose walls we never scaled
John Buckley McQuaid ‘Girls Who Lived In Hell
What of the babies they left on our doorsteps What of the innocent girls that they shamed What of the idols they fearfully worshipped What of the bones that they buried unnamed What of the tears they pretend not to notice What of the orphanage blood in our veins What of the postcards that nobody posted Telling us where they could find the remains? John Buckley McQuaid ‘Dear Mister Taoiseach
Today we have our homeless hostels:
Children living on the street, leave these premises by ten, Every day’s a new defeat, seven, they’ll be back again John Buckley McQuaid ‘Here In Deirdre Land’
The homeless, who are forced:
To scrounge for a crust, and curse the hyenas betraying our trust. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Homeless Hotels’
Today we live in an open air Magdalene laundry, again sanctioned by the State, (and there are no high walls,) where the vulnerable are shoved into single rooms in hotels, battened on by private interests – if they’re in the way, they can be shovelled into a machine to clear them off the streets.
In the land of polished halos, nothing ever changes….
Undercurrent of Sadness
The undercurrent of sadness on this album by John Buckley McQuaid, himself an emigrant who lives in Denmark, is something that will actually suck you in, challenging the paralysis, indifference and passivity here, the ongoing connivance with the Church:
There’s a crowd of ghosts on O Connell Street And a spire where a pillar used to be Now the city boasts a mighty tourist fleet While the Liffey’s full of longing for the sea…. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Prodigal Kiss’
Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever changes, in the land of polished halos…….
Comfort’s a terribly cruel addiction, Comfort may never be cured, Comfort is closing its eyes to affliction Comfort just won’t be disturbed John Buckley McQuaid ‘Comfort Just Won’t Be Disturbed’ (unpublished lyric)
The prod of a pitchfork might cure it.
There’s a distant sound of drumming From the prisons of the poor Soon the pitchforks will be coming To administer the cure.
We should hang ourselves in private
For the greater common good And they dared us to survive it Or to write it down in blood. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Likes Of You And Me’ (unpublished lyric)
The depressed souls in our world serve a useful function – the first to be picked off in a dysfunctional, valueless world – as an unheeded warning to the stampeding herd hurtling over a cliff.
Sins of the Father
The children of the Celtic rodent may bang away on their pianos, but the Sins of the Father will be visited on them.
Dreams may be real for the freaks and the fools Finding employments like winning the pools Thats why we sent him to all the right schools Freedom is freedom to follow our rules John Buckley McQuaid ‘Follow Our Rules’ (unpublished lyric)
And what of this boy? I’m looking for a child With a heart of gold Stars in his eyes And a long way to go. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Looking For A Child’ (from the album Call It Love)
The Dreams of a child. The Dreams of a nation. Who dreams of being a pig?
Take a look in that cracked looking glass, and you may see the reflection of a lipsticked pig, possibly your own. You might ask yourself the question: is compassion possible in a land with a legacy of Church and State being so inextricably intertwined?
My musical taste may seem a little strange since I enjoy looping the same albums or songs, for hours or even days. But I can’t listen to music simply in the background – even when I loop something. I live the music every single time.
