Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film ‘Dr Strangelove’ dramatizes the still not-altogether-remote scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It begins with a deranged U.S. Airforce General, Jack D. Ripper, overriding Executive Command and ordering a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Russians, unbeknownst to the Americans, have developed a deterrent – the Doomsday Machine – that automatically detonates, with devastating global effect, if a nuclear device explodes in Soviet territory.
Kubrick masterfully conveys the absurd conformism of a military organisation obeying orders to a point of self-annihilation. In the end, Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong, the B-52 commander delivering its payload, straddles the bomb, whooping as he descends to his own, and humanity’s, demise. Despite its apocalyptic message, the film remains enduringly hilarious, reflecting its alternative title: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’
A recent viewing in Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema left me wondering, though, whether Kubrick derives too much comedy from an appalling vista we still confront. Laughter remains a safety valve, permitting an audience to carry on with business-as-usual, while the ultimate stupidity of nuclear war remains a real possibility. Are we, unconsciously, making light of President Donald Trump’s recent euphemistic warning of an ‘official end’ to Iran?[i] As Friedrich Nietzsche puts it: ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’[ii] Regular doses of humour are one of life’s balms, but sometimes we laugh along to the exclusion of more serious engagement. Fittingly perhaps, the serious work of producing Cassandra Voices generally occurs in a studio above a crowded comedy club in the heart of Dublin, from where laughter often wafts upstairs!
If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!
Millenarian doomsday scenarios have haunted humanity since time immemorial. A ‘Great Survey’ of England and Wales in 1086, used to ascertain the proportion of the national wealth owing to King William ‘the Conqueror’ (also less flatteringly known as ‘the Bastard’), was subsequently labelled the ‘Book of Domesday’ (Middle English for ‘Doomsday’). This accumulation of data in the hands of a monarchy had terrifying connotations at a time when many perceived the end of the world, and its Final Judgment, to be nigh.
Today humanity confronts varied doomsday scenarios – generally gleaned from scientific analysis rather than metaphysical speculation – with anthropogenic climate chaos, mass extinctions and the still unresolved danger of a nuclear Armageddon topping the list. We remain in many respects, in Carl Jung’s phrase, technological savages[iii], operating machinery with capacities far exceeding our wisdom as operators. It just takes one fat finger to push the button, or an unimpeded algorithm.
But perhaps it is not nuclear warheads, or even coal-powered stations, that represent the Doomsday Machines of our time. After all, humanity could quite easily seize control of its fate, elect reasonable leaders, bring about a Green New Deal and decommission nuclear weapons. So what is holding us back from taking the action required for the benefit of the great mass of our species, and the rest of the natural world? Another mechanism, operated by most adults in developed countries, is, I believe, befuddling our wits and deterring a collective shift in consciousness.
Developed simultaneously in the early 2000s by a number of manufacturers, the smart phone is replicating the Book of Domesday by tracking our movements and online preferences to the benefit of vested commercial interests, and shadowy state emanations.
Of greater concern, perhaps, than the hollowing out of our privacy is the addiction the vast majority of us have to the narcissistic, solipsistic and often pugilistic ‘social’ media of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Twitter, conveyed through apps on our smartphones. Staring into the void of communication-without-end from dawn-to-dusk, successive ‘hits’ are delivered, revealing who messages us, ‘likes’ our image or words, or offends us. Notably, Donald Trump is the acknowledged master of the soundbite Twitter update (maximum length two-hundred-and-eighty-characters), heralding the short-attention-span-politics evident in most countries.
Social media is the thief of time and an agent of homogenisation. Writing in the early twentieth century, the
Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa seemed to anticipate the contemporary malaise. ‘Given the metallic, barbarous age we live in,’ he wrote, ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’[iv]
The smartphone provides a simulacrum of varied technologies, such as an automated camera providing the semblance of a real one, but where the necessary application to understand the apparatus is no longer needed. The capacity to share easily what we have created has overtaken the creative process. The necessary isolation of the artist has been abandoned in favour of the instant hit of validation from our peers.
Likewise, through digital attenuation, music is debased and choice diminished when we succumb to the algorithms of Spotify and YouTube that are carried with us everywhere we go on our Doomsday Machines.
Of particular concern is a generation of teenagers who know of no other life other than that mediated by the Doomsday Machines. What is missing from their lives is the crucial ingredient of tedium, which again according to Pessoa is ‘that profound sense of the emptiness of things, out of which frustrated aspirations struggle free, a sense of thwarted longing arises and in the soul is sown the seed from which is born the mystic or the saint.’[v] Being bored can have its advantages.
I would like to say I had the willpower to renounce my own device, but as is so often the case in life, the end of the affair occurred by accident. Fiddling with its AMAZING properties, for the umpteenth time that day, as I double-jobbed playing with my young nephew, the Machine slipped from my grasp and hit a hard stone floor. The glass did not shatter exactly, except in one corner which felt the full impact, and from which a few glittery shards crumbled away. But, faintly detectable, three deathly cracks ran up from where it had landed, strangely mirroring the lifelines on my hand. When I tried to switch it on, all I found was a faint blinking light, which soon lapsed. Still looking sleek and powerful, though now veiled in a black hood of inoperativeness, it appeared to me like the corpse of a young soldier, handsome features intact, save for a bullet wound to the neck.
I felt deflated, angry and increasingly tetchy. How was I going to survive without it after a decade-long reliance? Like any addict, I felt pangs for the addled communication, information-gathering and idle scrolling that had become my early morning ritual, as I lay prostrate in bed.
As it transpired there was still some life in the Machine — I had simply smashed the screen, which I replaced at a reasonable price in a shop on Capel Street. But the liberation of a few days had changed my perspective. I had an unmistakable feeling of a great weight being lifted off me. In the meantime, I had purchased a ‘brick’ phone for next to nothing and now alternate between the two, only using the Doomsday Machine, now shorn of most, though not all, social media apps, when strictly necessary. I am a work in progress.
I know many people, more sensible than I, who have deleted all social media apps from their smartphones save for WhatsApp. This is, however, the Gateway Drug that maintains the addiction, leaving the impression that you cannot live without the Doomsday Machine. In a sinister twist, WhatsApp cannot be used on a laptop, for example, without already being connected to a Doomsday Machine.
Facebook has become the lightning rod for much of the bad press around social media – those pesky Russians again – and its distorted algorithm is a distinct nuisance if one is attempting to share meaningful content, as the cutesy image will always win out. Used strategically, however, it has its advantages, especially as a means of staying in contact with a large number of people, and for the purpose of events. It only really becomes problematic as an app on a smartphone that sends out regular notifications, prompting idly scrolling. I can live with it on my laptop, although I have given up on the hope of using it as a conduit for radical journalism.
As regards the confessional nature of posting our thoughts, I was struck by further prescient words from Pessoa: ‘What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former, it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible.’[vi] I am coming to recognise that most of the online outbursts I am prone to are perhaps better left unsaid.
Instagram offers a good medium for photographers to display their work, but is overwhelmingly narcissistic, not only through that ultimate expression of Doomsday Machines, the selfie, but also via the look-at-my-beautiful-life imagery that abounds. Planet Instagram is full of beautiful people who overcome life challenges, reveal plenty of tanned flesh and speak in a patois of hashtags.
Selfie by name.
Pessoa would take an uncompromising view:
Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible that that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes … he could only see his face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of his seeing his own face … the creator of the mirror poisoned the human race.[vii]
There are times when access to the Internet while on the move is of great value. Google Maps makes travel immeasurably easier. But are we comfortable with all our movements being tracked? Smart-phone maps also reduce the sum total of our interactions with fellow human beings, and makes us less observant of the world around us.
A good rule of thumb is that, unless we are sitting upright, communication is unsatisfactory. The same applies to reading news sites – I had become all-too-prone to only partially reading articles. Indeed, the ‘most read’ articles on most sites tends to be prurient ‘click-bait.’
I suggest you forget about the hurried message and make time for real expression in communication. There is no point attempting to stay in touch with everyone, because it is impossible. Leave more time for reading books, making music, being present to friends and family, and allow space for the tedium that brings daydreaming.
The Internet can open new horizons of knowledge, bringing to fruition Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (d. 1716) dream of a bibliotheca universalis, a ‘universal library’, where expert insight is available to all, everywhere. It could lead us into thinking more globally. But this beast needs considerable taming. Its great potential may be more easily realised by abandoning Doomsday Machines altogether. The wider consequences of a less mediated society could be profound. If enough of us can escape the clutches of the Machines, perhaps we can eventually develop the focus required for collective action.
On a crisp, sunny morning in Hebron in January of this year my friend Atta Jaber tells me: ‘The settlers have what they wanted and Randina sits on a chair.’
Atta resembles a Kerry farmer, one in particular comes to mind: the late Sam Brown from Maharees in West Kerry. He is sinewy, with a mahogany-coloured face, and a mischievous twinkle in dark Arabic eyes, revealing a profound gentleness of soul.
Atta is also a farmer, whose family land of fifty-eight dunums (one acre is the equivalent of four dunam) spans both sides of Route 60, outside Hebron in the West Bank. This land is his vocation and passion, and the overwhelming source of the family’s food.
His wife Randina used to work on the land from 5am every morning. He confides: ‘Randina has green fingers and made everything grow!’
Today, Atta’s farm house has only four metres of land surrounding it and some eight dunums at the bottom of a steep hill. The white plastic chairs outside the back door are still there for chat, tea and cigarettes in the sun. But the soul of the Jabers has been uprooted. Randina sits on a chair now for long periods of time. The state of Israel has confiscated forty-eight of the fifty-six dunums of which they own the title deeds.
I first met Atta in early January, 2010, while volunteering with EAPPI in Hebron. We received a call from him saying settlers had arrived in three large buses, and were on his land with picks and shovels, guns slung over their shoulders.
As ever with settler incursions and attacks, they were accompanied by heavily armed Israeli military personnel. In randomly banging their picks and shovels into the ground, they were making a statement: Atta’s land was now their land. One teenage settler shouted out to say I was a Nazi.
Later, while discussing what happened, Atta rhetorically asked: ‘Why did Randina marry me? What kind of a life does she have here with me?’
The family home had been occupied by either settlers or the Israeli army on three separate occasions by 2010. During one period, the family was permitted to remain in a part of their home, while the military occupied the rest.
In the intervening years the settlers continued to display a sense of entitlement over the land, which they claim Abraham gave to the Jewish people. Year after year they ripped out the Jaber family’s irrigation pipes; then they trampled on the crops.
Atta and Randina would repair and re-plant, again and again and again. The land was the source of their food after all.
In the last two years three members of Jaber’s family have seen their homes on the land bulldozed and demolished. One of Atta’s brothers now rents an apartment in Hebron city. His food and income has disappeared.
Forty-eight of the original fifty-six dunams have been seized by the state of Israel. Parts of the remaining Jaber land can only be accessed with an Israeli permit. The last time they worked that part they required a permit for access. They went ahead and planted the ground, and continued to water it, but were then denied a permit when it came to the harvest. The produce was seized by settlers, which could have easily found its way onto an Irish dinner plate.
The remaining eight dunams accessible to the Jabers lies at the bottom of a hill. Randina has developed asthma and is unable to walk the route. That illness also means she cannot be prescribed other medication to ease a damaged soul. Randina sits silently and for long periods now, and as Atta says goodbye he adds: ‘I stand beside her.’
As I am leaving, Atta then tells me he is returning home to tend to his newly planted cauliflower crop on the remaining eight dunums. I said I hoped they would become really, really big cauliflowers. What more could I say? I wish I could help him get his land back, but only the combined will of the governments of the world have the power to bring that about.
Atta and Randina have a deep and enduring love for one another, but the land sustaining their bodies and souls has been brutally seized by the state of Israel.
This is the human impact of illegal settlements on the Palestinian West Bank, and not an isolated case. Since the U.N. Declaration in 1949 establishing the state of Israel, dividing Palestine in half, Palestinians were left with 22% of their former land.[i] That proportion of historic Palestine was allocated by the U.N. to other Arab states, Jordan and Egypt – the areas of Gaza and the West Bank. These lands, and more, were conquered by Israel during the Six-Day-War of 1967, but were not incorporated into Israel proper.
Under the Oslo Accords of 1993, Palestinian land was further divided into Areas A, B and C. A part of the West Bank, known as Area C, is now under full Israeli military and civil control. This comprises 60% of the original 22% of land allocated to the indigenous population. Area B is under Palestinian administrative control, but Israeli military occupation.
Accordingly, advocating for a ‘Two-State Solution’ is now empty rhetoric. The land is being taken, inch-by-inch, and the governments of the world do nothing to prevent Israel’s ongoing violation of international law and human rights.
Yet according to the Geneva Convention an occupying state cannot move its citizens into the land it occupies. [ii] There are now over six-hundred thousand Israeli citizens living on the Palestinian West Bank.[iii] Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to annex settlements in the West Bank into the state of Israel.[iv]
An effective non-violent response is urgently needed.
The Seanad and Dáil recently passed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018.[v] Despite a resounding 75 to 45 majority, with all Opposition Parties voting in favour, Fine Gael voted against this Bill and it is understood they will use the controversial ‘Money Message’ procedure to block it.
This procedure has been employed in recent times to block a number of Private Member’s Bills. It is clearly undemocratic and potentially unconstitutional.
Its use also exposes tacit support for Israel’s breach of International Law and human rights. This is consistent with the Irish State’s failure to exchange diplomatic accreditation with the State of Palestine, despite the Dáil and Seanad voting unanimously for recognition in 2014.
Yet this failure of democracy in Ireland pales in comparison with the tyrannical treatment meted out to Atta Jaber and his family.
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Gerry delivers Certified Professional Mediation Training that is accredited by the Mediators’ Institute of Ireland. She has delivered conflict and mediation training internationally with U.S. based Lawyers Without Borders, in partnership with the Director of Training from CEDR, U.K., and she is also an externally employed trainer with CEDR U.K. Gerry is a member of the Mediators Beyond Borders Consultants Team. She is a panel member with One Resolve and delivers mediation training under their auspices. Gerry was involved in the development of the Level 8 Certificate in Mediation training programme in the Law Faculty of Griffith College and she was invited to be the senior lecturer in that programme. She also delivered mediation training for the University of Limerick’s, “Masters in Peace and Development” programme. Gerry has written ‘The Mediator’s Toolkit: Formulating and Asking Questions for Successful Outcomes’, and it is published by New Society Publishing, Canada.
[iii] ‘Btselem’, ‘Statistics on Settlements and Settler Population’, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Updated January 19th, 2019, https://www.btselem.org/settlements/statistics
Nowhere that I have visited has quite the charm of Umbria, Italy’s throbbing green heart, and only land-locked province apart from the Alpine region. Along its horizon, verdant hills culminate in fortified settlements that act as sentinels over fecund valleys, where wheat fields and vineyards have long sustained a saturnine populace. The lumbering waters of the Tiber snaking through the countryside bestow lush fertility, while in the distance the spine of mountains that form the Apennine range cleaves into view.
The region has strong spiritual traditions: Saint Benedict, who developed the communal model of Western monasticism, hailed from Norcia; while around Assisi Saint Francis saw the divine in all living beings. But inward contemplation has often intertwined with outward savagery, the charming cities bearing the stain of bloodshed from centuries of internecine conflict.
Just as sweet birdsong contains fierce threats to competitors, so the form and grace of Umbria’s built environment belies the violence of perennial power struggles. Extravagant civic architecture was a form of competitive display between the signorie that ruled those city states during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
First among equals is Perugia, Umbria’s capital and hub. At dusk, imbibing the rising chatter on Piazza IV Novembre, one may assume the light to be eternal, and that the dancing shadows will never give way to the enduring gloom of night.
Into this setting in 2007 strode an insouciant Amanda Knox, then twenty years of age. Enrolling in Perugia’s Universitá per Stranieri, she realised a dream of studying the Italian language on a semester abroad from her native Seattle, a world apart on the distant west coast of America. A familiar student lifestyle followed in those first weeks of term: falling in love; alcohol and cannabis; the irritations of part-time work as a waitress; all this as she nursed the hope of a career as an interpreter.
Video footage from the period reveals her as vivacious and quirky, a bundle of mischievous energy whose fair complexion might break a few hearts over the course of her stay. She seemed destined to skip back home to the relative anonymity of grad school, career and family, holding on to fond memories of an old Europe she would rarely, if ever, return to. What lay in store was an altogether different fate, a living nightmare. She retains the role of femme fatale in a film noir that was not of her choosing.
On November 1st, 2007 British student Meredith Kercher was found dead in the apartment she shared with Knox and two other Italian students. Knox and her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were accused of her rape and murder. The prosecution alleged that Kercher had been killed during a sex game gone wrong, with Knox orchestrating proceedings. Crucially, DNA evidence linked Knox to a knife the prosecution claimed could have been the murder weapon. But this evidence was found inadmissible when independent forensic experts found a strong likelihood of contaminationof the DNA, leading to Knox and Sollecito’s successful appeal in 2011, ending their incarceration. They were definitively exonerated in 2015 by the Italian Supreme Court. In the meantime, a serial offender, Rudy Guede, was found guilty of the crime and is currently serving a reduced sentence after an early admission of guilt, based on incontrovertible DNA evidence and a confession after he had fled to Germany, from where he was extradited back to Italy.
The circumstance of Meredith Kercher’s horrifying demise gave rise to a mystery play, in which the two main characters are removed from the scene of the awful attack. As the plot unfolds we encounter another articulation of evil no less sinister than that which prompted the fatal assault.
It involved a battle of wills, and wits, between Amanda Knox and her prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, whose bizarre conjectures suggests perverse imaginings. He had been revealed as a fantasist before his attention was drawn to the pretty American student ‘inappropriately’ kissing her boyfriend outside the crime scene. In 2001, the same Mignini, as Perugia prosecutor, had ‘identified’ a satanic sect that supposedly killed women for black masses, which he linked to the unsolved ‘Monster of Florence’ serial murder case. To that he end, he arrested twenty people all of whom were, like Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, completely exonerated.
In the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox we meet an unrepentant Mignini, who speaks of his fondness for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The pipe he sports seems in homage to the Victorian sleuth. It is unsurprising to discover this taste for fantasy fiction, and characterisations of extreme evil. Did he cast himself as the English gentleman – the ‘dandy’ long revered in Italy – defending an idealised damsel? In such imagining Kercher had been killed at the instigation of the promiscuous and drug-addled Knox, who was portrayed as a sinister witch.
We may speculate that Mignini developed a sordid fascination with both Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox. A devious and enduring campaign against Knox might suggest a Freudian sublimation.
Mignini’s persecution of Knox and Sollecito could be dismissed as a sinister aberration of Italian justice, but for the extent to which his theories found favour among many Italians, stoked by an international tabloid media that latched on to every gruesome conjecture. The prosecution manipulated damaging evidence against Knox, in particular, before the court of international opinion, and a character of ‘Foxy Knoxy’, previously her MySpace handle, was invented. To this end, a policeman masquerading as a doctor lied to her saying she was HIV positive, and encouraged her to write a diary outlining her sexual history, which was then stolen and passed on to the media.
In the documentary Mignini makes the startling boast that ‘normally people say that ‘Nobody is a prophet in his own country’, but that’s not what I experienced’. Casting himself as a Savonarola for our time, he sought to cast away the sins of the world, sins he believed were personified in Amanda. The backdrop to this was a widespread feeling of moral decline in Italy, especially identified with the then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s lewd antics. But Mignini’s self-righteousness recalls Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 94’: ‘Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds’.
Mark Williams suggests that a mythology ‘furnishes a culture with a total worldview, interpreting and mirroring back everything that that culture finds significant’. Contemporary Italian culture is still steeped in mythology, whose living presence is emphasised by the ubiquity of ancient ruins. Perugia itself possesses an architectural legacy stretching back to the ancient Etruscans.
The Etruscan Arch or Arch of Augustus, Perugia. Image: Daniele Idini
Italy was only unified in 1861. The following day, the politician and intellectual Massimo d’Azeglio famously said: ‘We have made Italy and, now, we must make the Italians.’ The formidable culture of Ancient Rome was drawn on in particular. For example, the term ‘fascist’ derives from the Latin word ‘fascis’ meaning bundle. ‘Fasces’ is a bound bundle of rods, which had its origin in the Etruscan civilisation and was passed on to ancient Rome, where it symbolised a magistrate’s power and jurisdiction.
That Roman inheritance still exerts influence on the Italian collective unconscious, often importing an ideal of woman as objective beauty and passive agent. Laurens van der Post contrasts the Ancient Greek attitude to women, expressed in Homer’s Odyssey, with that of the Roman, expressed in Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘It is precisely because this journey of Odysseus and his reunion with the eternal feminine that is Penelope, is the blueprint of the Greek story that made Greece, I believe, more creative than Rome.’
Van der Post contrasts Odysseus, who returns to his wife after twenty years of exile, with Aeneas – a Trojan who becomes the first hero of Rome – and symbolically rejects ‘the eternal feminine’, not once but twice. Firstly, in choosing to carry his father Anchises rather than his then wife Creusa, on his back out of a burning Troy; and afterwards, in his memorable rejection of Dido’s love in favour of patriarchal duty.
After many trials Aeneas and his fellow surviving Trojan refugees land in Latium in Italy. There, he has learnt on a mystical Underworld journey, a (male) ancestor will establish the city of Rome. To bring this about, however, he must first subdue the local tribes. Defeating their champion Turnus in mortal combat he wins the hand of the virginal Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, king of the Latins. Critically, Virgil describes her as, ‘the cause of all this suffering, her lovely eyes downcast.’ The unashamed sensuality of Amanda Knox – kissing inappropriately outside a crime scene – was an insult to a Roman ideal of downcast loveliness.
Knox and Sollecito – he as collateral damage it seems – became the victim of Mignini, the latter-day Sherlock. In custody for days on end, and without access to lawyers, the young pair were made to sing. Confessions were extracted and subsequently recanted. In the grip of terror, bizarre fictions emerged.
This is not unusual. Saul M. Kassin describes ‘coerced-internalized false confessions‘, as ‘statements made by an innocent but vulnerable person, who, as a result of exposure to highly suggestive and misleading interrogation tactics, comes to believe that he or she may have committed the crime – a belief that is sometimes supplemented by false memories.’ Kassin cites numerous US cases where innocent parties implicate themselves in crimes in which subsequent DNA evidence definitively reveals they had no involvement. One such instance was the notorious Central Park jogger case, in which a number of young men confessed to a crime and were found guilty, before the real perpetrator came forward and admitted to the crime, saying he acted alone, with DNA evidence corroborating his account.
Amanda Knox is often criticised for implicating Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese boss of the bar she worked in at the time. But who among us knows the scenarios that would spill forth to end a long and tortuous interrogation, after probable trauma in the wake of a horrific murder? The important principle is that confessions extracted under duress are entirely unreliable as evidence, and unworthy of consideration. Any charge of conspiracy over the false accusation should never have been leveled against her.
As far back as 1908 Hugo Munsterberg wrote about a Salem witch confession involving ‘illusions of memory’ in which ‘a split-off second personality began to form itself with its own connected life story built up from the absurd superstitions which had been suggested to her through the hypnotising examination.’ A witch hunt will find “absurd superstitions”, just as a man with a hammer sees nails.
Jung’s conception of evil is useful for examining the aftermath of Meredith Kercher’s murder and rape. His ideas diverge from the Catholic doctrine of Privatio Boni, which identifies evil simply with the absence of good and not as an independent and eternal phenomenon. In contrast, Jung argues: ‘Evil does not decrease by being hushed up as a non-reality or as mere negligence of man. It was there before him, when he could not possibly have had a hand in it.’ Furthermore, he warned: ‘The future of mankind very much depends upon the recognition of the shadow’. The serpent may crawl into the most rarefied of environments.
Shadows in Perugia. Image: Daniele Idini
The evil evident in Rudy Guede’s offence is a sadly familiar story of a dislocated childhood, and a spiral of nefarious deeds, ending in a heinous crime. But Mignini’s actions appear to represent denial of the shadow. He comes across as virtuous – disciplined, abstemious, family-orientated – but he may have failed to countenance an evil lurking within his own nature. This may have led him to build a narrative out of diabolical imaginings, which nearly destroyed the lives of two young people, who will never fully recover from the ordeal.
Jung saw the mechanism of the shadow as accounting for the persecution of Jews through history. He argued that Christians scapegoated Jews in response to their own rejection of the real meaning of Christ. Mignini’s reign of terror fits into a wider phenomenon of targeting individuals for broader perceived failings in a society. The origin of contemporary racism is also located in the inability of communities to live up to standards some members expect, with contagion blamed on an internal enemy.
The Meredith Kercher case became a cause celebre in early twenty-first century in Italy. Television channels featured nightly debates which voyeuristically picked apart the details, while the personalities of the protagonists were relentlessly scrutinised and their images placed on constant display. One may assume it suited Silvio Berlusconi’s government, which controlled most television channels, to saturate the public mind with the protracted case, distracting from the endemic corruption, which would ultimately bring down his government in 2011, the same year as Knox’s successful appeal.
Moreover, it is commonly believed in Italy that official explanations cannot be relied on. The suspicion that there is always something going on behind, ‘dietro’, the surface, produces the common word ‘dietrologia‘, used to refer to a conspiracy. The bizarre details of the Knox-Sollecito case fed a veritable industry in competing interpretations. Besides, a liberal critique could be countered by the racial dimension: the black African languishing in jail, while the white American escapes, plus ca change.
Many Italians are still unwilling to contemplate that the whole Knox-Sollecito prosecution was indeed a bizarre invention. After all, to do so casts grave doubts over the integrity of their entire legal system. This has parallels with the unwillingness of Lord Denning to countenance the ‘appalling vista’ of police criminality in the Birmingham Six, wrongfully found guilty of the Birmingham pub bombings, who spent sixteen years in prison before the Court of Appeal quashed their conviction in 1991. The ‘Umbrian vista’ of a serious miscarriage of justice is still questioned by many Italians.
Douglas Preston argued that the answer for this denial of an unwillingness to recognise a manifest injustice lies in the Italian concept of face (‘la faccia‘) ‘whose deep and pervasive power most Anglo-Saxons who have not lived in a Mediterranean country have a hard time appreciating.’
V
Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson ‘selfie’, Dublin, February 2018
I met Amanda Knox and her boyfriend the writer Christopher Robinson when they visited Dublin last month. They had arrived in advance of Amanda’s appearance on the Ray D’Arcy Show, her first television interview outside the United States since her exoneration in 2015.
Like most people, I had taken a passing interest in what seemed a bizarre case, piqued more by the Umbrian backdrop to thecrime scene than the lurid storylines. In truth, I had not given serious consideration to the guilt or innocence of the protagonist, and only engaged with the case when I met a person whose nature seemed entirely unfitted for the role of psychotic murderess. The more I read, the more my intuition was confirmed.
The protagonists in high-profile cases seem unreal until you actually meet them, or not, as is the case with most of the self-anointed true-crime experts, who search Amanda Knox’s every gesture for ‘signs’ of guilt; bestowing credibility on evidence that was not only inadmissible, but may have been part of a sinister conspiracy.
What is most striking about Amanda is an outgoing disposition, a West Coast woman with plenty of spunk. She and Christopher are a gregarious pair, at ease in the territory of literature, philosophy and languages, the last of which is her specialism. Surprisingly, she gives no impression of bitterness, even towards Italy. Perhaps it is still that failure to play the role of downcast Lavinia bemoaning her fate which evokes suspicion, but why should she restrain a natural joie de vivre?
Nor does she shy away from recalling her experiences: casually dropping in a mention of the aubergine – or ‘egg plant’ – provided in prison; or how she earned the respect of illiterate inmates by writing letters on their behalf (in return at one point a Neapolitan gang pulled her out of a brawl that was getting nasty). Nonetheless, she has admitted to suicide ideation during four years behind bars. Sharing cells with hardened criminals for four years for a crime she did not commit provides a perspective few of us gain.
On their trip I accompanied the couple on a hike along Howth Head, during which she revealed herself as an animal lover, greeting every pooch and kitty as if they were long lost friends. Travelling by train I became conscious of a few gawkers, mostly Italian tourists, but this did not interrupt her flow. She refuses to cower before unsubstantiated accusations. Understandably, between Amanda and Christopher humour has become a safety valve, though a lifetime of being the butt of cheap jokes cannot be an easy lot.
Following her release she took a degree and then worked as a journalist for a local newspaper under a pseudonym. Now she uses her unchosen fame judiciously, advocating on behalf of the Innocence Project in the United States, and writing for Vice magazine, among others. Ideologically, she is left-liberal and opposes President Trump, despite his support for her cause. I can envisage her becoming a politician herself one day.
The monster of Giuliano Mignini’s imagining is still at large in the obscure regions of virtual reality, and Amanda Knox seems likely to be pursued by vengeful furies all her life. She told me she receives death threats on a daily basis. In the anonymous chambers of social media she still evokes an outrage proving that mud, no matter how unearned, always sticks. A cursory search on Twitter for #AmandaKnox reveals an array of hateful commentaries. Yet she is free – free of guilt and free-spirited.
From these exacting trials she bears wounds that will never heal, and a life sentence of having to defend herself against unsupported accusations. From a depth of suffering she emerges as a hero to anyone wrongfully accused; to women who are attacked for unashamed sensuality; for those who embrace life and do not succumb to despair. Like the rest of us, she has made mistakes, but her life experiences give her rare insights.
The Knox-Sollecito case exposed wider failing in the Italian justice system – 4 million Italians since the Second World War have been falsely charged with criminal offences. That Giuliano Mignini and his jackbooted Squadra Mobile remain in positions of authority suggests the endurance of fascist attitudes in the administration of justice. Widespread corruption did not begin or end with Silvio Berlusconi, as Michael Day puts it: ‘Perhaps Italians should start looking in the mirror rather than blaming everything on one brilliant but unscrupulous entrepreneur.’ The octogenarian’s apparently impending return to power might be interpreted as a symptom rather than a cause.
As part of that self-assessment embedded mythologies might be explored. Can the sympathetic vision of St. Francis displace the judgmental attitude of latter-day Savonarolas? Might the spirit of the exiled Roman poet Ovid return to metamorphose the relationship with the ‘eternal feminine’? His ‘Kind Earth Mother’ asks:
Do I deserve this? Is this the reward for my unflagging truthfulness? For bearing year after year, the wounds of plough and mattock? And for providing flocks with pasturage, the human race with ripened grain to eat, the gods with incense burning on their altars?
At least the many enlightened Italians I know can draw solace from Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s belated exoneration by the Italian Supreme Court. That court also upheld a prison sentence against Silvio Berlusconi in 2013, which is now preventing him from returning to the office of Prime Minister. Many observers consider the senior Italian judiciary as a crucial bulwark against erosion of democracy and the Rule of Law.
Perhaps the bereft family of Meredith Kercher may some day come to believe Amanda Knox’s protestations of innocence. Their grief must have been considerably heightened by Giuliano Mignini’s handling of the case. One suspects that any process of coming to terms with their loss will include some form of reconciliation with Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.
I arrive twenty minutes late for a casting, but it doesn’t really matter. Only three other girls have found their way into the casting room so far; ‘girls’ being a euphemism – the youngest person in the room is a women in her early twenties. At a fashion casting we are never ‘women’, always ‘girls’ – most likely because no grown-up woman would tolerate the treatment we endure on a daily basis.
I sit down on one of the few cheap chairs propped up at the back of the room, next to the other girls. Most idly scroll on their phones, knowing they have time on their hands, because this is not a regular casting. This is a casting with the dragon.
The dragon, among the most feared casting directors in the fashion world, is responsible for the booking of models for clients like Calvin Klein, Balenciaga and Jil Sander. She got into hot water in 2017, when it came to public attention that before Paris Fashion Week she had locked one hundred and fifty models in a dark stairwell while she went out for lunch.[i]
Though not well received, the conduct was insufficiently reprehensible for her to lose a seat on fashion’s Mount Olympus once and for all. A rap on the knuckle and the incident was soon forgiven, though certainly not forgotten by the models left in the cold stairwell for up to three hours – a duration the dragon still denies.
At the end of the room someone has pushed together some tables, forming a long line. Behind the tables there’s an abundance of sweating assistants typing into their MacBooks. But I am not paying attention to them, as I cannot take my eyes off the dragon, seated at the left hand side of the table. In front of her – weirdly reminding me of the feasts in Harry Potter – there lies a pile of greasy McDonalds paper bags.
It seems sickly ironic that a woman who hires other women based on the suitability of their bodies (preferably size XXS) is unashamedly spooning an Oreo McFlurry into her mouth in front of us. Now the windowless room is beginning to fill with the smell of grease, but the dragon takes no notice of this, or of us, lurking in the back of the room.
At this stage she seems to be enjoying herself, wise-cracking with her assistants,. The room is starting to fill up with other I models. I recognize a few of them; some I know from previous castings, others I have seen in campaigns or in magazines. There are insufficient chairs for everyone, models start to crouch on the floor. The casting was supposed to begin forty minutes ago.
Stale sweat and make-up stains
Suddenly there is movement. One of the assistants gets up and asks the first five girls to put their names down on a list. We are led to a small toilet and handed undergarments to put on. The assistant tells us to be quick, blushing as she says so. With few words we strip down in front of each other. We are used to it.
My dress, black, cheaply-made nylon – the sort you might pick up at the checkout of a drug store – has undoubtedly been worn before, smelling of stale sweat and caked in make-up stains.
The assistant returns. ‘Low ponytail’, she says, and orders us to line up – as if we are being chosen for a game of dodge ball. We walk back into the room. The McDonalds paper bags have magically disappeared. Instead there’s a list in front of the dragon. She calls my name.
It feels odd standing in front of her; her name – taken in vain more often than not – being a staple in fashion industry gossip. Even odder is how charming she becomes once you are in front of her, and no longer a nameless model, but an actual person. Almost like a human being?
Why we put up with it…
I now wonder when I first became habituated to the absurdity that is the fashion industry. I remember how glamorous it all seemed at the outset – like a high school clique that I desperately wanted to be a part of – and once I had made it, I was even more desperate to remain a part of it.
It took a while for me to realise that it is not all glamour and champagne. It demands countless hours at airports, sleepless nights in lousy hotel rooms, and blue lips from icy shooting locations.
Latterly I no longer feel as exclusive as I once did. The features that made it so exciting to begin with are now annoying routines: constantly having your hair done becomes irritating; sitting still for hours while you are made-up causes back pain; waiting for what seem like eternities during lighting tests makes it all become a blur.
I wonder if all so-called dream jobs crash against reality at some point. Or is it only models who are not supposed to talk about the negative sides of their profession, and who must pretend every day is glorious and lock away their mental problems?
An insider gag is that we all want to quit, and yet here we remain. While the lows may be really low, it seems the highs are too addictive to let go of. It is all too alluring to earn a regular person’s monthly salary in the space of a day; too tempting to visit places you would otherwise never reach; too fascinating to abandon the dream.
How can anyone who travels the world and meets people we all grew up seeing on TV complain? It seems tasteless to moan about non-sensical work conditions, when life could be so much harder.
Most of the time models keep quiet. The only safe space for venting our annoyances seems to lie within the industry itself. Though competitors, fellow models are often the only allies we have. Every model understands the pressures, stresses, body dismorphia, loneliness and petty jealousies.
We exchange knowing looks before pulling out phones to broadcast our fabulous life on social media. We are models after all, so we must maintain the fantasy.
They probably all want to quit
The casting is over within five minutes. The dragon is precious with her own time – it is ours that is of no value to her. She orders me walk in a straight line, scribbling down something on a sheet of paper. She asks me to walk again. And again. I walk up and down the room three times, the eyes of everyone in attendance following my every step.
The dragon makes no comment, she just watches. When I am finished she asks the next girl to do the same walk, I stand with the others and watch. After the five of us have done our walk she calls me up again and takes some pictures with a 2007-esque bubble gum-coloured digital camera.
I have met her before, at another casting in another city. She pretends to remember me when I tell her, though fails to look me in the eyes. Yet I can feel her gaze all over my body, scanning every flaw, comparing ‘it’ to the countless (and to her nameless) other bodies she has surveyed before.
I am ordered to look left, right, chin up, chin down, profile, smile, smile with teeth, smile with less teeth, sit-down, fetch. When she has finished the examination she moves on without addressing me again. As I turn, her assistant waves me over to her. She has an amateurish spreadsheet in front of her with a set of questions.
‘Would you walk topless?’
‘Would you wear fur?’
‘Would you wear leather?’
I wonder if anyone ever dares to say no to any of these questions. If so I have never heard of it. We didn’t make it this far to limit our chances by refusing anything we are offered. She ticks every category next to my name.
Then I am free to go. I hurry back into the toilet, handing my disgusting gown over to the next girl, waiting alongside the others in the tiny room, like battery chickens at a factory farm.
As my eyes adjust to the sunshine outside, it all seems surreal – that there are some of the most beautiful girls of Paris stuffed into a back room in a nameless shop in a nameless street. They probably all want to quit.
‘Roxanne Smith’ is a pseudonym, if you have stories you wish to share in confidence contact us at admin@cassandravoices.com.
‘Descend the stairs, bend your legs, melting one by one. / Open your mouth to the snake in the sand, swallowing you one by one.’ So begins the first single from our latest album. It’s one of my treasured moments in the meandering Loafing Heroes journey: in how it came about, how it was constructed, the unfolding of its words and arrangement, and how it sounds on the record.
“Stairs” sums up much of what I dream about with this music, its vision and where I’m at – then and now. Because, really, however much I say this is the end of a project, or that it is the beginning of a new one; we are really, always, in a way, wrenched into the middle of things, into the middle of life.
Feeling heartbroken at the end of a relationship, trying to come to terms with the death of a loved one, suddenly hearing by accident a special song from a moment in your life, or catching a smell that brings you somewhere, smothering you with longing, nostalgia, a great sadness or joy – these all throw me into the middle of things, into the middle of life.
We are suddenly tuning in again – or rather – we may feel that we are spectacularly out of tune with the regular speed of day-to-day, calculative life, and in tune for a moment with another world that is alarmingly alive.
Months can go by when no new song emerges, as an energy once bubbling over deserts you, and you think, well, that’s the end of that. Or, perhaps you say that I must find a way to begin again, do something new. And then it comes.
Sometimes all it takes is to hear someone speak, watch a concert, see someone dance, or travel in the countryside away from the chatter of the city. In my case, the intervention came in the form of a visiting friend called Jonathan.
Along the great river
After a lifetime thinking about it, I had been travelling along the great river Amazon for almost 3000km, listening to the mesmerizing cacophony, seeing the green, green, green of all the jungle, and following the trail of an extraordinary human called Roger Casement. After making it back to Europe, I went straight on a tour with the band to Ireland for two weeks, and then finally returned to my apartment in Lisbon.
I just wanted to be alone for a few days after being in such close quarters with people on the road. But Jonathan was staying at my place and he was still there. He was full of beans and delighted to see me, and yet he could quickly see that I was a little moody and withdrawn.
But that wouldn’t stop him. He knew that I hadn’t written a song in at least six months. So that evening, we forced ourselves to play a game. He offered me three words – ‘hair’, ‘software’ and ‘snake’; a chord to begin; and thirty minutes to come up with something. That’s how the song ‘Stairs’ came about.
I was thrown into the middle of things – I found myself diving, drowning and then submerged in the interlude, and suddenly I was singing about my hair being on fire and my skin turning to water. It was exhilarating, liberating, revealing. For me, that is what making music is all about. And if you can connect that creation and performance with someone else – then it really is alive.
I began The Loafing Heroes back when I was living in Denmark doing a Phd on Kierkegaard, where I met a wandering soul called Jamie from Arizona. We started making music together and recording the first Loafing Heroes songs.
Four years later, I was living in Berlin pursuing a career as a philosophy lecturer wondering where to go next with the music. The spirit of The Loafing Heroes is that it morphs with the people that have come in and out over the years. This allows diverse flavours and colours to emerge and fade away along the trail.
We recorded three albums in Berlin: Unterwegs (2009), Chula (2010) and Planets (2011). With Jonathan – yes the same one (from Berlin), another Jaime (this one from Nebraska), and Noni (from Dublin).
My dear friend and gifted songwriter Michael Hall whom we all affectionately called Big Bear produced the first album (Unterwegs) and was present throughout the album. He died tragically in 2013, yet his ghost continues to haunt and inspire us.
After four years, we all found ourselves going in different directions. I headed down to Lisbon to begin a research project on the enchanting poet of multiplicity – Fernando Pessoa; Jonathan formed another band called Fenster that have gone on to record some really special experimental pop music; Noni set off to work on solar energy in Rwanda; while Jaime remained for the time being in Berlin, but would remain committed and connected to The Loafing Heroes. She plays the bass clarinet – one of the trademark sounds of the band over the last ten years – and has recorded on all of our six albums.
The three other albums were recorded while based in Lisbon (Crossing the Threshold [2014], The Baron in the Trees [2016] and Meandertales [2019]). I met Portuguese novelist João Tordo on my first night in the city, and he became a new loafing hero, and played double bass on the two albums before Meandertales.
I glimpsed Judith with a violin on her back one night at The Lisbon Players Theatre, and soon she was playing with us too. From Germany, Judith actually makes her own violins and violas, and has played on all three of the last albums.
Other musicians and friends have weaved in and out, but before Judith left Lisbon to return to Germany she introduced me to Giulia with a plan for her to join. From Italy, Giulia is now at the centre of the band, playing autoharp, piano, percussion, concertina, and singing and writing songs on the last two albums.
To complete this crooked cosmopolitan tale, four of our albums have been produced and mixed by our very talented, generous comrade and friend from Greece – Tadklimp.
Many of the songs have evolved from various strange places; on the one hand, from travelling through vast expansive landscapes; and, on the other, hiding away in dark melancholy, verging on paralysis, in the interiors of a room that can sometimes seem like a shrinking capsule.
Loafing is always essential in an age of increasing speed, technological overload, psychological detachment and environmental collapse – as we humans exhaust everything under the sun.
Let’s slow down. Let’s wander. Let’s see and think anew, and laugh. Let’s channel and imbibe energy not into potency, possibility and power; but rather as actual, as here and now, in everything that exists. Energy as a passive ‘is’.
These twelve new songs (constructed by Giulia, Judith, Jaime and I), from our new album under the title Meandertales, encompass the distorted fairytale and dream-folk that throw us into the middle of life. In the totality and disintegration of chaosmos, in this loafing musical endeavor, I work and play to transform my energetic pessimism into a subversive joy.
Man-made climate change is as good as a fact, but the consequences are uncertain in any specific location. Indeed, the island of Ireland could actually be more hospitable to human habitation under certain scenarios: drier and hotter summers are predicted, albeit with an increased likelihood of storm events; higher atmospheric CO2-levels could also increase crop yields.[i] Our rising emissions could have greater impacts elsewhere.
Mitigation strategies may also have adverse side effects. Witness the expansion of sitka spruce plantations across Ireland, which acidify soils and strangle biodiversity,[ii] in pursuit of an improved carbon balance sheet permitting increases in dairy production. There are also question marks around the impacts of wind farms, especially those sited on blanket peat[iii], requiring hundreds of tonnes of concrete in construction, and disrupting the flightpaths of birds. If this energy is devoted to a new generation of electrified autonomous vehicles, rather than communal transport, it will be in vain.
Climate change opportunism includes the distortion of supermarket shelves being stacked with organic products wrapped in plastic and flown halfway around the world. It is most obvious in the greenwashing of the agricultural sector,[iv] which consistently argues that Irish livestock’s lower emissions profile justifies expansion – as beef and dairy would only be produced elsewhere with higher emissions. Thankfully, the ‘our coal smokes less than their coal’ argument is more easily dismissed as data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), analysed by An Taisce, shows that Ireland is, in actual fact, the most carbon-intensive beef producer in Europe, and ranks third on emissions from its dairy sector.[v] Most importantly, however, narrowing the environmental agenda to climate change alone obscures the equally pressing consideration of the Sixth Extinction, the unarguable reality of which is apparent in Ireland.
With this in mind, Is it possible that interested parties could assert rights, already implied by the Irish Constitution, to protect Irish nature itself? Could spiralling emissions then be reduced alongside meaningful biodiversity-gains? Such an argument would build on a foundation of Natural Law, a school of thought embedded in the language and historic interpretation of the Irish Constitution. It can be traced to Classical antiquity, as Sophocles’s Antigone puts it: ‘the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven’, beyond the temporary, and occasionally illegitimate, laws of any state.
During the Middle Ages, especially through Thomas Aquinas, ‘pagan’ Classical arguments were adopted by the Roman Catholic Church. In more recent times these became associated with a toxic and myopic focus on human sexuality, especially women’s bodies. Natural Law still transmits, however, compelling arguments for a universal justice beyond, and above, positive law, informed by dialectic, rather than Christian Revelation as is widely assumed.
The jurist and former President of the High Court, Declan Costello wrote: ‘It has more than once been judicially observed that it can clearly be inferred that the [Irish] Constitution rejects legal positivism as a basis for the protection of fundamental rights and suggests instead a theory of natural law from which those rights can be derived.’[vi] Thus, from the 1960s, Natural Law interpretations ascribed a host of ‘Unenumerated Rights’[vii] to all citizens, including rights to bodily integrity, work, marry, privacy in marital relations, and free movement within the State. These rights are not explicitly identified in the Irish Constitution but are considered intrinsic to the human condition, flowing in particular from a generalised protection of personal rights under Article 40.3. With the Sixth Extinction now upon us, there is an urgent need for Natural Law to be extended to imply an Unenumerated Rights of other species to exist, along with ourselves.
For this to occur, however, the Court must overcome a contemporary moral relativism, and aversion to decisive ethical responses. No doubt truth is a shifting target, and any single account is insufficient, but faith in our capacity to settle ethical arguments at a given point in time needs to be restored. As Aristotle – whose influence on Aquinas’s Natural Law theory was immense – pointed out:
The theorizing of truth is in one sense difficult, in another easy. This is shown by the fact that whereas no one person can obtain an adequate grasp of it, we cannot all fail in the attempt; each thinker makes some statement about the natural world and as an individual contributes little or nothing to the inquiry; but a combination of all conjectures results in something considerable.[viii]
Post-modernists will argue otherwise, but an outlook of ambient confusion is an admission of failure. Holes can be picked in any argument, but the argument as a whole – “a combination of all conjectures” – may stand. One cannot propose anything meaningful without the conviction of arriving at “something considerable” – an elusive truth. A capacity to determine justice requires we overcome a ponderous Post-Truth incoherence.
A contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre sees in the dialectic process, ‘the movement from thesis to thesis as a movement towards a kind of logos which will disclose how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such’. Contemporary environmental challenges require new logical departures, disclosing “how things are”, “as such.” Natural Law theory should encompass an Earth Jurisprudence. Then our laws may confront the reality of an oversized human population radically out of balance with its environment, with Ireland presenting a difficult case.
Currently, however, environmental laws are generally seen as a body of rules foisted on the populace, often in exchange for a subsidy, rather than practices adopted for the commonweal. Accordingly, Coyle and Morrow claim such regulations are seen ‘as a technical instrument of social goals and policies, rather than a body of principles aiming at the articulation of a concept of justice and the good life.’[ix] This can partly be attributed to the prior failure of Natural Law theorists to identify inherent rights in other species.
In contrast, the sanctity of human property rights have been vigorously upheld. Early modern theorists, drawing more on Christian revelation than reason, assumed rights of virtually unrestrained possession, along with dominion over all wild creatures therein. The seventeenth century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius described this as ‘a grant which was renewed on the restoration of the world after the deluge’. To deprive any owner of this would, he said, be ‘an act of injustice.’[x] Importantly, however, up to that point there had been little necessity to assert the rights of wild animals, even in Europe, as humans were living in relative harmony with nature, or at least allowing other species to survive. According to Tim Flannery: ‘after the last muskox died in what is now Sweden about 9,000 years ago, the European mainland did not lose another species until the seventeenth century.’[xi]
Since then the picture has changed dramatically across the world with sixty percent of wild animals wiped out since 1970 alone.[xii] Coyle and Morrow affirm: ‘The very agricultural practices which were held out as a moral necessity by the natural rights theorists can, it seems, create untold environmental damage.’ Given the scale of ecological damage that has ensued – associated with European colonisation of the globe – they argue that ‘the ethical assumptions of the seventeenth century conception of property cannot survive in such circumstances.’[xiii] The accumulating impacts on our planet of over seven billion human beings, living longer than ever, enjoins alternative approaches to land ownership. As Coyle and Morrow put it: ‘If human agriculture was ever in harmony with nature it certainly is not any longer and the sanctity of individual ownership must be restrained. Duties must join rights.’[xiv]
Natural Law is an ongoing, truth-seeking dialectical process with the aim of disclosing, “how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such.” If Natural Law is to have continued relevance it must adapt to current conditions. A re-imagining of Natural Law is evident in the field of Earth Jurisprudence, or Wild Law, a term coined by Cormac Cullinan to refer to human laws that are consistent with Earth Jurisprudence.[xv] According to one of its inspirators, Thomas Berry: ‘The Universe is not a collection of objects but a communion of subjects and every member of the Earth Community has three inherent rights: the right to be, to habitat, and to fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community.’[xvi] These rights ought, logically and morally, to be incorporated into Irish law.
But how can these aspirations be given tangible legal form? In a seminal 1972 article ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’[xvii] Christopher D. Stone explores how Wild Law might apply. He argues that natural objects could have legal standing by analogy with companies, states, infants, incompetents, municipalities or even universities. Thus, a court appoints a trustee when a corporation displays incompetence. He writes:
On a parity of reasoning, we should have a system in which, when a friend of a natural object perceives it to be endangered, he can apply to a court for the creation of a guardianship … The guardian would urge before the court injuries not presently cognizable – the death of eagles and inedible crabs, the suffering of sea lions, the loss from the face of the earth of species of commercially valueless birds, the disappearance of wilderness areas.
He also draws an analogy with the law of patents and copyright:
I am proposing that we do the same with eagles and wilderness areas as we do with copyrighted works, patented inventions and privacy: make the violation of rights in them to be a cost by declaring the piracy of them to be the invasion of a property interest.
Furthermore, he suggests this could lead to modifications in our representative democracies:
I am suggesting that there is nothing unthinkable about, and there might on balance even be a prevailing case to be made for an electoral appointment that made some systematic effort to allow for the representative “rights” of non-human life.
Stone envisages changes in our legal culture informing wider social norms, as, ‘a society that spoke of the “legal rights of the environment” would be inclined to legislate more environment-protecting rules by formal enactment.’
Intriguingly, he also speculates, ‘What is needed is a myth that can fit our growing body of knowledge of geophysics, biology and the cosmos’, proposing ‘that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism of which mankind is a functional part’. Similarly, Coyle and Morrow argue: ‘The problem is that meaningful change responding to environmental and social imperatives will require a true paradigm shift in how we regard our relationship with the world of which we form a part.’
A transformation in our legal relationship with the natural world requires the participation of other fields. It was Percy Bysshe Shelley who famously described the poets as the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ The philosopher Timothy Morton makes the provocative claim that putting ‘something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy did for the figure of women.’[xviii] Perhaps W.B. Yeats’s identification of Irish nature with a ‘glimmering girl’, ‘with apple blossoms in her hair’ distracts from an ongoing exploitative relationship, linked to our colonial inheritance. Indeed, rather than celebrating a patriarch ‘Digging’ for turf, as in Seamus Heaney’s poem by that name did, new accounts might draw inspiration from an often-overlooked visionary poet of the early twentieth-century Irish Revival, Eva Gore-Booth. She gave up the wealth and privilege of her aristocratic background to devote herself to the poor. Gore-Booth also recognises the right of all creatures to exist on the land, notwithstanding human ownership in her 1906 poem ‘The Landlord’
O the bracken waves and the foxgloves flame,
And none of them ever has heard your name –
Near and dear is the curlew’s cry,
You are merely a stranger passing by.[xix]
Hearteningly, all around the world, from Ecuador to New Zealand, conceptions of Earth Jurisprudence, Wild Law or Pachamama are actually taking route. For example, Germany’s constitution makes protection of ‘the foundations of nature and animals’ a national imperative, applicable to government agencies, the legislature and the judiciary. The provision has been cited in over seven hundred cases. Moreover, echoing Christopher D. Stone, Oliver A. Houck points out this ‘does not include the more numerous acts of compliance that drew no litigation at all.’[xx]
Meanwhile in Ireland species loss continues apace. Liam Lysaght recently records: ‘of the 3,000 species that have undergone a red list conservation assessment, one in every four species is threatened with extinction here.’[xxi] Of particular concern is the continued exploitation of peat bogs for fossil fuel extraction – where considerations of nature conservation align precisely with keeping fossil fuels, and embedded methane, in the ground – as well as the impacts of grazing ruminants.
Unfortunately, existing environmental legislation, including the EU’s Habitats Directive, is failing to protect endangered species adequately, including the iconic curlew, which is now on the red list. This can partly be attributed to a lack of enforcement, but also, as we observed, such laws are currently considered an encumbrance on property owners, and not a scheme of protection for a common inheritance. So how do we spare what remains of Irish nature from the ravages of human exploitation?
A constitutional amendment enshrining nature rights, similar to that operating in Germany, should be the long-term goal. But this will take time to bring to fruition, especially as mainstream media only falteringly highlights extinction threats, and none of the main political parties prioritise protection of biodiversity.
I propose the alternative of a test case, applying Thomas Berry’s tripartite rights to a particular native species; proposing, for example, the curlew has a right to be, to habitat and to reproduce, alongside humans, based on a Natural Law interpretation of the Irish Constitution – as a previously Unenumerated Right. It seems crucial that such rights are ‘discovered’ sooner rather than later before further, irreversible, losses occur.
The Court could certainly injunct particular activities to protect species under threat, or prohibit certain classes of herbicides or insecticides outright, or even declare particular lands under private ownership as protected habitats. This will require expert witness from recognised authorities to distinguish competing rights of native, invasive and naturalized species. Property owners should be compensated for any loss, but under the Irish Constitution all rights, including that to property, are subject to the common good, which is served by preventing extinctions.
The allocation of reserves and prohibition on the use of certain chemicals would be a proportionate appropriation by the Judiciary of the powers of the Legislature and Executive branches, in circumstances where there has been a serious dereliction of duty. The Sixth Extinction is an emergency happening before our eyes with recognisable victims, unlike the unpredictable devastation that climate change is wreaking.
Cattle and sheep farmers can find new roles as landscape guardians. Re-wilding may begin with marginal lands, where farming is already uneconomic, while better land currently under pasture can be converted to tillage in order to accelerate what a recent article in The Lancet has referred to as the ‘Great Food Transformation.’[xxii]
Eventually, beyond legal prescriptions, habitat reclamation can endear the population to the landscape, and reform destructive behaviours. In developing our appreciation of the soft sounds and sweet aromas in nature we may consider reducing dependence on noisy, polluting motor cars. Greater biodiversity also offers scope for judicious harvesting of foodstuffs, building materials and fuel. The tragedy of the loss of other species is almost impossible to convey.
Many of us wish to see our laws go further: putting an end to the perverse subsidy regime that only benefits the Beef Barons; or dignifying all animals with a decent life, in the wild. For the moment, however, our best legal argument is to assert the rights of all resident Irish species, living in ecological balance, simply to exist. Reduced emissions will be a happy by-product of biodiversity-gain, raising environmental awareness to a point where destructive behaviours are recognised, and changed. In beginning to liberate the natural world from human dominion let us recall the small victories won in the battle against human slavery along the road to the great milestones. Wild Law can emerge incrementally in Ireland through our existing constitutional framework.
[vi] Declan Costello, ‘Natural Law, the Constitution, and the Courts’, from Lynch and Meenan (eds.) Essays in Memory of Alexis FitzGerald, Dublin, The Incorporated Law Society of Ireland, 1987, p.109
[vii] The original ‘Unenumerated Right’ to ‘Bodily Integrity’ was approved by the Supreme Court in Ryan v. A.G. [1965] IESC 1; [1965] IR 294 (3rd July, 1965)
[xvii] Christopher D. Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing–Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’, Southern California Law Review. 45 (1972): 450–87.
[xviii] Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, p.5.
[xix] [xix] Eva Gore-Booth ‘The Land to a Landlord’, from Sonja Tierney (ed), Eva Gore-Booth: Collected Poems, Dublin, Arlen House, 2018, p.166
[xx] Houck, Noah’s Second Voyage: The Rights of Nature as Law, 31 Tul. Envtl. L.J. 1, 2017
[xxi] Liam Lysaght, ‘The six steps needed to save Irish Biodiversity’, February 19th, 2019, Irish Times
[xxii] Prof Walter Willett, MD et al, Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, January, 2019. The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext?utm_campaign=tleat19&utm_source=HPfeature’, accessed 26/1/19.
The Russian bear looms in the English-speaking imagination as savage and barbaric, but with a native cunning in need of taming. Throughout the nineteenth century British imperialists looked on their seemingly ursine counterparts with a mixture of dread and superiority. William Makepeace Thackery’s poem ‘The Legend Of St. Sophia Of Kioff’ (1855) contains a typical portrayal of their Asiatic barbarism:
Down they came, these ruthless Russians,
From their steppes, and woods, and fens,
For to levy contributions
On the peaceful citizens.
The ‘Great Game[i]’ of that time involved intrigues between British and Russians agents. India was the ultimate prize, with the ‘Near East’ forming part of an expansive theatre. Curbing Tsarist Russia’s encroachments brought British military expeditions into Central Asia. There they met the bellicose Afghans – who dished out one of the most ignominious defeats in British military history: the 1842 retreat from Kabul, when all but one European and a few Indian sepoys from Sir William Elphinstone’s 4,500-strong army limped back to base in Jalalabad.
Great Game Cartoon from 1878.
These colonial intrigues endowed the English language with a term now more commonly used in a sporting context: ‘pundit’, originating from the Sanskrit word ‘pandit’, meaning ‘knowledge owner’, or ‘learned man’. These local informants provided intelligence on the warlike peoples inhabiting the inhospitable terrain between lush India and the endless steppe. Tales were embellished to please the ear of the listener, moulding enduring Oriental stereotypes. Today’s pundits on international affairs also draw, perhaps unwittingly, on historic accounts, and are similarly prone to over-statement.
By Jingo
Nineteenth-century British Russophobia popularized the term ‘jingoism’, which can be traced to a song commonly sung in Victorian musical halls:
We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.
The Anglo-French victory in the Crimean War 1853-56 checked Russian designs on a Mediterranean port, but the dispute simmered, as Tsardom became a byword for tyranny – ironically, given the brutality of the simultaneously expanding British Empire. Projecting one’s worst characteristic onto to a remote ‘other’ is not restricted to individuals.
By the end of the nineteenth century British imperialists felt more secure in their hold over the ‘jewel in the crown’, and another, Teutonic, enemy had arisen, aspiring to weltmacht (‘world power’): Germany was upsetting the balance of power in Europe, and required containing.
Détente with Russia – which from 1891 had been in alliance with the French – followed, culminating in the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907, and eventual alliance during World War I. Long before the unexpected Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, however, British policy makers were worrying about the consequences of a Russian victory on the Eastern Front.
These concerns reached fever pitch after the October Revolution, and the triumph of the Reds in the Russian Civil War, which included an unsuccessful intervention by Allied forces in support of the Whites. But by 1920 the Red Army was in command of most of the former Russian Empire, and had reached the gates of Warsaw. A shattered Germany, experiencing Communist insurgencies, lay ahead, before ‘the miracle of the Vistula’ – the victory of the Polish forces under Marshall Pilsudski, supported by the French. The Polish-Soviet conflict was resolved by the Treaty of Riga in 1921, bringing respite for two decades.
In the Western imagination, during the 1920s and 1930s the Russian menace merged with the Red Peril, and a layer of ideologically-driven ruthlessness was added to the character. American reactionaries used the scare to destroy the labour movements that were then making inroads. The clampdown on the American left involved draconian measures (instigated by, among others, a young J. Edgar Hoover) against ‘subversives’, such as five-time Socialist Party Presidential candidate Eugene Debs, sentenced in 1918 to a ten-year prison sentence for urging resistance to the military draft, later commuted to three years. The media played its part, including disseminating the forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which established the myth of Jewish Bolshevism. America would bend principles where necessary to keep out the ‘Commies’.
In Europe in 1939, the uneasy peace on the Eastern Front ended with the unlikely Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, ushering in the fourth, and most savage, partition of Poland. Hitler repudiated that Pact in 1941, with Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The ensuing alliance between Britain (and eventually the United States) with the Soviet Union decisively changed matters. The murderous Red Tsar, Joseph Stalin, was affectionately known as ‘Uncle Joe’, as long as the Nazi foe persisted.
Predictably, relations deteriorated rapidly again after the war – especially after the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 – but the prospect of mutually assured destruction (MAD) brought a Cold War, lasting forty years.
John le Carré
From an imperialist perspective, World War II was a pyrrhic victory for Britain, which completed its metamorphosis from global hegemon to medium-sized client-state in the bipolar geopolitics of superpowers. The shambolic invasion of Suez of 1956 was the dying gasp of the British Empire, and the ‘winds of change’ swept through Africa during the 1960s.
To a large extent, the United States inherited Britain’s role as the world’s policeman, although the U.S. has shown greater reliance on proxies – ‘divide and conquer’ – the extension of ‘soft’, cultural power, and economic manipulation – with the Iraq and Vietnam Wars notable exceptions.
As part of a contiguous Anglosphere, the United States nonetheless inherited various tropes about a Russian ‘other’, extending back into the nineteenth century. The McCarthyite witch hunt in the 1950s against Communist sympathisers, especially in Hollywood, showed the U.S. at its most paranoid.
The excesses of the American intelligence services both internationally, through the CIA, and internally, through the FBI under its long-time director J. Edgar Hoover, are well documented. These included targeted assassinations, foreign coups and mind control experiments (the MKUltra project saw U.S. citizens being dosed with LSD, generally without their consent or knowledge). In any intelligence war, the U.S. could play just as dirty as its opponent.
In the latter half of the twentieth century a new layer to the Russian mystique was added by the Cold War literature of John le Carré, and other spy novelists. Karla, a recurring le Carré character, emerges as the archetypal devious, ruthless and ideologically driven Russian spymaster.
That is not to imply that the Soviet and successor Russian regime have not been villainous, and manipulative. According to Ben MacIntyre in his account of the extraordinary career of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who spied for the British, the KGB ‘had long excelled in the art of manufacturing ‘fake news’;’ taking ‘’active measures’ to influence public opinion’, and ‘sow disinformation where necessary’[ii].
But the organisation was also beset by money-grubbing corruption and institutional decay, especially as ideological fervour wavered in the great chill of the final decades before glasnost and perestroika, under Mikhail Gorbachev. After being posted to Copenhagen in the early 1970s, Gordievsky discovered that the recruitment of informants was ‘an invitation to corruption’, since most officers invented their interactions, falsified bills, ‘made up their reports and pocketed their allowances.’[iii] Upon being posted to London at the end of that decade he then found that most of the information sent back to Moscow by the heavy-drinking KGB bureau chief was ‘pure invention.’[iv]
The Russia of the Western imagination refuses to conform to reality. Indeed, the threat may be aggrandized by self-serving writers. It is in the interest of the powerful Military Industrial Complex, for U.S. society to remain on edge, at war-without-end. In one rare slip, Lockheed Martin Executive Vice-President Bruce Tanner revealed to a conference in 2015 that his company would see ‘indirect benefits’ from the ongoing war in Syria.[v]
Al-Jazeera reported that the ‘black budget’ of secret intelligence programmes alone was estimated at $52.6bn – under President Obama’s watch – in 2013. That was only for the secret programmes, not the far greater intelligence and counterintelligence budgets.[vi] These agencies at times use mouth pieces in the press, and academia. The import of information being released to the public by U.S. agencies competing for funding and survival surely requires careful analysis.
One former CIA station chief in the Middle East, characterised the diverging roles of the main agencies to the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh as follows: ‘Don’t you get it Sy? The FBI catches bank robbers. We rob banks … And the NSA? Do you really expect me to talk to dweebs with protractors in their pockets who are always looking down at their brown shoes.’[vii] U.S. spooks are every bit as manipulative, and far better funded, than their Russian equivalents in a discipline the former CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton described as ‘the wilderness of mirrors’.
Vladimir Putin is not a mass murderer in the mould of a 1930s dictator, intent on imposing an inflexible ideology on the rest of the world. Crony capitalism or strongman rule could be used to describe his regime. Importatnly, his ambitions appear to be limited to restoring the territory of the Soviet Empire to Russia, rather than fomenting World War III.
The Russian President is probably best viewed as a Shakespearian villain, whose violent impulses, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, ‘stop short at ten or so cadavers, because they have no ideology.’[viii] This offers scant consolation political prisoners in Russian prisons, but Putin has certainly shown no genocidal tendencies. Soviet technology has been in decline vis-à-vis the West since the 1960s, and with the breakup of the Union the rump Russian state lost important technological and industrial centres, such as Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine; but the English-speaking world remains fixated on the threat.
Russia’s ‘strengths’
The academic author Timothy Snyder is a leading purveyor of Russian history, and mythology. In a recent interview he stated:
Throughout the Cold War, Russia was always better than us when it came to penetrating their enemies and breaking them down from within. Rather than smashing things overtly, they would work from behind the scenes to cast doubt on things. They’d insert their people into enemy organizations and slowly create chaos from inside. They’ve always excelled at turning people against each other.
The British, in particular, by the end of the Cold War had gained the upper hand over their Soviet counterparts, with their man in London’s KGB station feeding her Majesty’s government almost anything they would wanted to know, including that then Labour leader Michael Foot had been in the pay of the KGB until 1968.[ix] Gordievsky’s intelligence-gathering was of an enormous assistance in Margaret Thatcher’s (and Ronald Reagan’s) establishment of good relations with the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev. Also, by the early 1980s the CIA had over one hundred covert operations underway inside the Soviet Union, and at least twenty active spies.[x] Nonetheless Snyder insists on the fiction of an omniscient Soviet spymaster transitioning into a Russian web guru:
Russia lost the Cold War because the Cold War was decided by economics and technology; it was a material competition. But after the Cold War, we moved into a different world, a world defined by the internet, and that’s a much more psychological world. The techniques they’ve been honing for decades are much more powerful in this new digital world, where emotion dominates and everyone is connected and there is so much information floating around. This is a world of information warfare, and that suits Russia’s strengths.[xi]
Snyder’s anachronistic generalisations about the Russian character belie the distinction between the ideologically-driven Communists under the Soviet Union, especially prior to the Prague Spring of 1968, and the more venal aspirations of the successor Russian regime.
One academic review of his recent book (The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, New York, Tim Duggan Books, 2018), portraying Putin as a latter-day Nazi, sets the record straight:
The fact that Timothy Snyder is an influential public intellectual and respected historian is no reason for scholars not to challenge his facile and polemical analysis of the contemporary Russian state. By obfuscating the broad debate on Russia, Snyder denies the need for a serious, unbiased analysis of those features of the Putin regime that could be characterized as fascist. Distortions, inaccuracies, and selective interpretations do not help illuminate what motivates the Russian leadership’s self-positioning on the international, and in particular the European, scene. Simplistic reductionist techniques and invalid reasoning further confuse the analysis—and bias policy responses.[xii]
Snyder’s polemics appeal to the mass media market, and “bias policy responses”. It is as if failings in our own civilisation appear to demand external explanation.
Timothy Snyder, historian and author, teaching at Yale university in 2017.
‘The Russia in ourselves’
In his account of the career of Carl Jung, Laurens van der Post recalled, ‘many post-war occasions when he [Jung] spoke with increasing urgency of the necessity for us all to understand that the Russian problem in the external world could never be resolved without more disaster unless we first dealt with the Russia in ourselves.’[xiii] Through the Cold War and beyond, from South America to Vietnam and Iraq, the U.S. acted with just as much contempt for human rights and international law as the Soviet Union, or Russia. Even under Obama’s Presidency, drone strikes – extra-judicial assassinations – were a recurring projection of U.S. power.
The main difference between ‘East’ and ‘West’ has been, for the most part at least, domestic preservation of the Rule of Law, including freedom of expression, in the latter. This has permitted criticism on the fringes, if not in a mainstream media often beholden to corporate interests.
The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe in the 1990s stoked Russian fears of encirclement, bringing a desire for a strong, militaristic, leadership to protect the country from outside interference after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. More recently, EU leaders sought to absorb the Ukraine into the Western orbit. This is despite many parts of that country containing Russian-speakers with a nostalgia for the predictability of life under Pax Sovetica.
Ukraine’s fertile plains were the bread-basket of the Tsarist and Soviet Empires, making many Russians understandably apprehensive about a complete divorce. Moreover, Russia’s military planners see these flat lands as military indefensible, and her ‘natural’ frontier as extending to the Black Sea, Carpathian mountains, and flood plain of the Vistula.
Squeezed in the middle, Ukrainians labour under kleptocratic and tyrannical rulers serving interests in both East and West. But many Western commentators have failed to acknowledge the machinations of the latter, while magnifying the role of the former amidst a twenty-four hour news cycle that offers little time for dispassionate reflection.
Trump-Russia
The arrival of Donald Trump at the U.S. Presidential helm may prove to be one of the worst disasters to afflict the world’s environment. He is the quintessence of a loud-mouthed American who knows nothing of the world, or even his own country, while irrationally believing in his powers of divination, and capacity ‘to get the deal done’.
For many commentators the success of his malignant buffoonery requires an external explanation, drawing attention from the disgust that many ordinary Americans justifiably felt towards a Washington capital seething with lobbyists, spooks and over-paid bureaucrats. Enter Vladimir Putin in the Karla role – himself an ex-KGB agent – manipulating not only Trump, who is supposed to have been captured in flagrantedelicto romping with Eurasian hussies, but also the American people who – according to this narrative – have been stupefied by Russian trolls: “Russia’s strengths” according to Timothy Snyder.
Whatever about the veracity of any claims of Russian collusion, or the idea that U.S. intelligence community could so easily be outflanked, psychologically we appear to be obscuring the ‘Russia in ourselves’. The United States is an increasingly dysfunctional and unequal society. Aside from the dismantling of Medicare, the appeal of Trump to blue collar American is not entirely irrational. He promised to protect indigenous U.S. industry, and ‘drain the swamp’ of a widely despised capital. ‘Lying’ Hilary Clinton was correctly seen as an establishment figure who would do nothing to alleviate the continuing decline of working class America, bedevilled by obesity and drug addiction, while real wages have stagnated for decades.[xiv]
No doubt Putin sought a friendly regime in the White House, but pundits habitually exaggerate the Russian leader’s influence, just as many journalists blithely accepted the nonsense about Saddam Hussein constituting a threat to global peace. The accumulated myth of the sly and aggressive Russian has been given a new lease of life.
A Colossus of American Journalism
Seymour Hersh is a colossus of American journalism, who has interrogated the structures of power internally and externally since the 1960s, invariably setting the record straight. His real breakthrough was exposing the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War; he went on to reveal chemical and biological weapons programmes in the late 1960s; internal repression of anti-War groups by the CIA; mafia intrigues; the foreign policy dirty tricks of Nixon and Kissinger; the hypocrisy of JFK’s Camelot, U.S. links to Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes in the 1980s; and the horror of Abu Ghraib. Without his tireless work we would know a great deal less about Uncle Sam’s unseemly side.
It is reassuring that neither Hersh, nor his family, were harmed over the course of an ongoing award-winning career, contributing especially to the New York Times and The New Yorker. He records just one death threat in that time, from a prominent mafia fixer in the 1970s.[xv] Among the American establishment there were, and still are, progressive forces resisting foreign misadventures and barbarities, such as using a sack full of fire ants to extract information from an internee, as occurred during the so-called War on Terror.[xvi]
Seymour, ‘Si’, Hersh, photographed in 2004.
Fascinatingly, however, in his Reporter: A Memoir, Hersh bemoans the unwillingness of editors in the New York Times to support investigations into corporate America in the late 1970s, which frustrated him at one point to such an extent that he hurled his typewriter out the office window – the following day the window was replaced and nothing more was said of the incident.
Hersh recalls:
Writing about corporate America had sapped my energy, disappointed the editors, and unnerved me. There would be no check on corporate America, I feared: Greed had won … the courage the Times had shown in confronting the wrath of a president and an Attorney General in the crisis over the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was nowhere to be seen when confronted by a gaggle of corporate conmen.[xvii]
The point about freedom of expression in the English-speaking world is that mainstream media only generally conduct investigation into threats to political and economic stability. The Watergate investigation was permitted, as this was an illegal attack on half of the U.S. political establishment; also, a significant proportion of America’s elite began to viewed the Vietnam War as unwinnable after the Tet Offensive in 1968, permitting critical articles form Hersh and others. But investigating white collar crime can be to the detriment of advertisers, and therefore altogether more difficult to pursue.
Holding his nerve
Hersh delivers a withering assessment on further media decline in the Internet era:
We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.[xviii]
The problems are by no means restricted to the purveyors of fake news, external or otherwise:
The mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television networks will continue to lay off reporters, reduce staff, and squeeze the funds available for good reporting, and especially for investigative reporting, with its high costs, unpredictable results and its capacity for angering readers and attracting expensive law suits.[xix]
He concludes: ‘it’s very painful for me to think I might not have accomplished what I did if I were at work in the chaotic and unstructured journalism world of today.’[xx]
As an old school reporter that pursued stories as doggedly as his body permitted, Hersh now considers himself an odd-man-out, and has found his recent reporting falling foul of editorial disfavour, even in supposedly progressive outlets such as The New Yorker, and TheLondon Review of Books. Thus, while investigating the assassination of Osama bin Laden, David Remnick, the editor of TheNew Yorker, who had close ties to the Obama administration, complained about his use of the ‘same old tired source’, much to the grizzled Hersh’s bemusement.
Perhaps more surprisingly, The London Review of Books delayed publication of another article he wrote challenging ‘the widespread perception that Bashar Assad had used a nerve agent two months earlier against his own people … The article, which was taken by many as an ad hoc defence of the hated Assad and the Russians who supported him, and not the truth as I found it’,[xxi] worried the editor. As a result Hersh took the story to Der Spiegel.
Corroboration arrived in early 2018 when Defense Secretary James Mattis diverted from the previous narrative about the chemical attack, saying: ‘We do not have evidence of it’. Mattis can hardly be described as a Putin supporter, considering he resigned over Trump’s abrupt announcement that he would pull U.S. troops out of Syria – which presumably gives a free hand to the Russians. An investigator as formidable as Hersh generally has his ducks in a row.
Russia Today
In many respects, the state news agency Russia Today acts as a mouthpiece for Putin’s government. At times it does purvey what appears to be fake news, casting a fog of uncertainty over the reliability of everything it publishes. But to suggest mainstream media in the West is not also serving vested interests would be naïve, and fails to recognise that what is delivered as news is a product of editorial decisions: facts do represent opinions, contrary to one banal advertising slogan of the Irish paper of record.
Any online publisher, even a reputable state broadcaster such as the BBC, measures success in ‘clicks’, albeit the bait must be sophisticated if it is to ensnare the educated reader. A bare-chested, unapologetically homophobic Vladimir Putin performs the role of pantomime Russian villain with aplomb. Even The Guardian is not immune from dangling half-baked investigations before its consumers.[xxii] Seymour Hersh, notwithstanding his contempt for the U.S. President, stated in 2017: ‘Trump’s not wrong to think they all fucking lie about him.’[xxiii] The Trump-Russia affair may prove to have more to do with inter-agency disputes – cops and robbers – than Russian machinations.
But the buffoon Trump must have been manipulated by the Eurasian spymaster, whose agencies have ingeniously transformed the Internet into a labyrinth of conspiracy theories and distracting nonsense, right under the noses of the CIA, FBI and NSA. This allows us to avoid assessing the ‘Russian in ourselves’, and acknowledging the pathologies of Western societies, from social media addiction to ever-widening inequalities, and ecocide.
With mainstream media failing to pursue vested interests, the greed that Seymour Hersh points to may have won, for the time being at least. It is simpler to blame a straw Russian bear, rather than examining the serious failings in our own societies.
[vii] Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York, Random House, 2018, p.300.
[viii] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, New York, Perennial Classics, 1974, p. 173.
[ix] It is believed that most of these payments were used by Foot in order to keep afloat the left wing newspaper, Tribune, he edited. When the cabinet secretary, the politically neutral Sir Robert Armstrong, was presented with this incendiary information he elected not to inform the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, assuming, correctly, that Foot would lose the forthcoming election in 1983. MacIntyre, 2018, p.142
The Harp needs more than tuning. The single most important and useful change we should make to our Constitution is to remove the first paragraph of Article 45 which reads:
Directive Principles of Social Policy
The principles of social policy set forth in this article are intended for the general guidance of the Oireachtas. The application of those principles in the making of laws shall be the care of the Oireachtas exclusively, and shall not be cognisable by any court under any of the provisions of this constitution.
As detailed below, this article provides clear instruction to the Oireachtas to ensure the material welfare of the people, but, crucially, prevents any meaningful judicial enforcement.
Article 45 covers a lot, instructing the Oireachtas:
to promote the welfare of the entire people.
to secure wage equality and sufficiency.
to manage the natural assets to ‘subserve the common good.’
to prevent free competition from detrimental concentration of essential commodities.
to manage credit for the benefit of the people.
to ensure private enterprise is efficient and where lacking be supplemented by the State.
to safeguard the interests of the weak and needy.
to ensure the health of the people and prevent exploitation.
There is so much to welcome here. It is clear, humane, balanced, and entirely workable. Sadly, our Constitution grants the Oireachtas, and hence the Government, a judicial free-hand, and so allows them to ignore their responsibilities.
An amendment to remove the offending ‘cognisable’ clause, highlighted above, would allow judicial oversight of the vast majority of Government business, requiring efficiency, charity and compassion.
There is limited jurisprudence on the matter. Initially the courts refused to countenance any argument appealing to Article 45, but it has also served as guidance, insofar as it has been used to inform decisions. This progressive approach to allow reference to the Article has yet to be accepted by the Supreme Court, and current conservative thinking reckons it to be clearly beyond the competence of any court: ‘an invalid usurpation of legislative authority’, and a breach of the separation of powers.
Quite apart from rendering these goals easily ignored by the government, as citizens we have no recourse in law against any government for failing in its duties. Witness the Housing Crisis, Direct Provision, wage inequality, the gap between the minimum and a living wage, the destruction of natural habitats, commercial exploitation of natural resources, multinational tax avoidance, and the general inefficiency of public services, especially health care in all its forms.
Instead, our government suggests we turn our attention to the Blasphemy clause. This is welcome among secularists, profoundly uncomfortable for the devout, and so will stir a lot of debate but it will make no meaningful difference to the lives of people.
Consider one issue afflicting the Nation: the Housing Crisis
The ideology that free markets are inherently efficient is rampant across the world, and clearly evident in Ireland. The common belief that only very lightly regulated business can achieve efficiencies unobtainable in the public sector is especially clear in our Government’s current policies. This avoids both the fundamental conceptual problem of measuring efficiency in terms of money, or more generally wealth creation, and also breaches sections 1, 2-ii, 2-iii, 2-iv, 2-v, 3-ii, and 4-1 of Artcle 45.
Rents are rising rapidly, and are already 23% above the pre-Recession peak.
Rather than exercise Eminent Domain and issue Compulsory Purchase Orders, an old and well established technique of Government, to buy and re-use exiting property to house families, the Oireachtas is considering the Home Building Finance Ireland Bill, which proposes:
to provide for the establishment of a company called Home Building Finance Ireland (HBFI), to increase the availability of debt funding for residential development in the State. HBFI will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.
The Bill facilitates funding of HBFI from resources currently held by the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), the granting of the necessary power to the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) to provide staff and services to HBFI on a cost recoverable basis, the granting of specific powers to HBFI to enable it to carry on the business of residential development finance, and ensures appropriate accountability for HBFI.
This overtly favours property developers, contrary to the common good. Indeed, the cost of administering this HBFI will likely run to many millions, millions which could be spent directly by the Government on building and maintaining public housing.
Consider section 2-iv of Article 45 states:
that in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole.
This bill favours developers over the people who are in most need of housing. It is against the spirit of Article 45, but our current Government is happier delegating responsibility to poorly overseen private quangos. This is just one example of why we need to be able to challenge our Government in our Courts.
Were we to remove the offending paragraph we could not only pursue our indolent government in our Courts for their derelictions of duties to the people; we could also ensure that all future legislation would take full account of our socio-economic rights.
This is not a charter for vexatious litigants, it should not and would not allow suit against the Government for minor infringements. The Supreme Court is, by necessity, selective in the cases it hears, and once a matter is decided there the precedent is binding on lower courts. But the doctrine of Separation of Powers should not allow the Supreme Court to deny jurisdiction over any part of our Law.
Let us recall that these principles of Article 45 are already for the guidance of the Oireachtas. That our elected representatives neglect their responsibilities is nothing short of abhorrent.
It is our Constitution and we must change it. It is up to us as citizens to elect representatives that will introduce legislation for a referendum to fix this broken string.
We can only imagine how poetry entered human consciousness. I intuit that its emergence was linked to the first use of fire, that most seminal of technologies, whose devouring mysteries transfix us with a spirit that endows our own.
I see one among a band awakening from a dream, and entering a trance. She incants a tale of the fire’s origin, her words embodied in physical expression, which inspires the band to adapt the tools to summon the first, intentional spark.
In the flickering light that ensues the poet appears to shift shape. She is a streak of light morphing into the appearance of other animals of the forest. Her words are not common speech, but arrive in measured cadences, uncannily familiar to a mesmerised audience.
The tale she recounts, though fantastical, resonates with commonplace experiences and includes practical insights. As the narrative arcs to a point of heightened tension the poet breaks the spell with a joke, seizing the assembly with laughter, but a few remain silent.
Transfixed by the incendiary words, the band begins to chant; eventually a chorus chimes, integrating non-verbal melodies. Next a rhythm is struck, then a communal dance previously employed to intimidate a long extinct primeval beast, still lurking in our nightmares.
For a moment the forest itself is convulsed by these energies. Afterwards, or even coinciding with this, a visual representation of the performance is crafted. It is kept as a sacred object for subsequent rites.
Out of this poetic source I see four springs generating story, song, dance, and visual art. These intertwine and will eventually merge into an oceanic consciousness. The continuity between words, music and dance is apparent, while the symbol is not only the origin of painting and sculpture, but also of the word, ‘made flesh’, in script, which over time migrates from pictographic representation to alphabets, rejoining and completing its journey along the great river of poetry.
The spoken word is an animating spirit and crucial catalyst joining language to a musical faculty. The written word records and even amplifies this. Only later does abstract, disembodied reasoning in the form of philosophy arrive.
Musical Language
According to Walter Ong: ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness’. The Greeks were not the first to develop it, but improved on earlier models by representing vowels for the first time, making literacy far easier to achieve.
Through this the Greeks derived great technical and intellectual benefits, but it brought the danger of abstraction, and a distancing from Nature. Socrates, a confirmed townsman, claimed he had nothing to learn from fields and trees, but only men.
In writing we encounter the dominance of the written word itself, a logo-centrism, which finds us in the narrow purview of the left hemisphere of the brain.
But according to Iain McGilchrist the origins of language lie ‘in the empathic communication medium of music and the right hemisphere, where it is deeply connected with the body.’ There is no conflict he says between this belief, and the idea language developed out of gesture: ‘Music is deeply gestural in nature: dance and the body are everywhere implied in it.’ He continues: ‘To the extent that the origins of language lie in music, they lie in a certain sort of gesture, that of dance: social non-purposive (useless).’
The origin of language, therefore, should not be seen in pure utilitarian terms.
“Useless” play in language is the stirring of poetry, but a creation that is the catalyst of Art, which acts as a form of revelation, where metaphor, according to McGilchrist, ‘links language to life’. The absence of utility in poetry is therefore superficial. It is a creative spark, bringing perception at new vantages, and sight through different lenses. Art is the resolution of the image.
Human communication is not uniquely ingenious, but we display a particular ability to measure speech in song and poetry – a mathematical sensibility in communication.
According to McGilchrist, what distinguishes our music is that ‘no other creature begins to synchronise the rhythm, or blend the pitch, of its utterances with that of its fellows, in the way that human singing does instinctively’. It would appear that we gravitate to a musical order that was established in the West by Pythagoras, who divined that a musical note produced by a string of fixed tension could be converted into its octave if the length of the string was reduced in half, and its fifth when reduced by two thirds.
Unlike ourselves, most bird species have a syrinx in their throats, allowing two notes to be sung simultaneously, as they exhale and inhale. But birdsong, however bewitching, is unmeasured. The dawn chorus is an unintentional unity, representing disconnected currents emanating from the varying concerns of often competing species; harmonious only as the voice of one Nature, spiritus mundi, or Gaia.
At its lofty height, poetry combines the order of music with profound questioning and metaphorical vision. This is a mysterious hallmark of humanity.
Grammars of Creation
Artistic beauty in its ideal, unrealisable, state is the expression of the diffuse and infinitely complex voices within Nature’s harmony. What we consider aesthetically pleasing derives from an ascetic order in music that finds an analogy in all artistic forms. The spark is poetry.
Poetry is the lute through which the voice of Nature sounds. But the instrument may be misshapen, perhaps through misuse. More tragic is when the pitch of beauty is too high for an audiences to hear.
What is poetic has a dual nature: generative and disruptive. Just as in Nature Heraclitus envisaged a fire of renewal, so poetry devours and renews. Philosophy may define beauty, including justice, at any point in time, but this is primarily exegesis rather than creation. Thus Yeats argued ‘whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent’.
Nature demands that plants and animals of diffuse species assist one another, but we appear to be alone in imaginatively standing outside our immediate frame, situating ourselves in the lives of others through fictions, as we see first in cave paintings.
The paintings in Chauvet Cave in France were begun approximately thirty thousand years ago.
To convey such imaginings required novel linguistic constructions. George Steiner points to a grammar of creation in the use of a future tense, allowing us ‘to discuss possible events on the day after one’s funeral or in stellar space a million years hence’.
This, he says, looks to be specific to homo sapiens, as do ‘the use of subjunctive and of counter-factual modes’, which are kindred to future tenses. Steiner intuits that these emerged at the end of the Ice Age to discuss food storage. He links this to the discovery of animal breeding and agriculture.
But I see a capacity for inter-subjectivity, including a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, arriving earlier: in the symbolic language of poetry, rather than to facilitate practical exchange. To chart this grammatical genesis I turn to Rene Girard’s idea of the scapegoat, which, he argued, emerged as a means of settling differences arising out of competition acquisition of scarce resources.
‘Man is not naturally a carnivore’, Girard writes, ‘human hunting should not be thought of in terms of animal predation.’ He argues that animal domestication arose out of the use of animals in sacrifice, not as food: ‘What impelled men to hunt was the search for a reconciliatory victim’.
After mining anthropological literature he found a ‘common denominator’ of a ‘collective murder’ of a scapegoat, attributed to animals or men. To conceive of this reconciliatory victim required a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, enabling the band to channel their grievances away from self-annihilation.
When an animal victim is chosen instead of a human and ritually slaughtered the smoke rising from the sacrifice is seen to appease the gods. Thus, in the Odyssey after Odysseus returns in disguise to Ithaca, he shares a meal with his loyal servant Eumeaus who performs the necessary rites of sacrifice:
The swineherd, soul of virtue, did not forget the gods.
He began the rite by plucking tufts from the porkers’ head,
threw them into the fire and prayed to all the powers,
“Bring him home, our wise Odysseus, home at last!”
Then raising himself full-length, with an oak log
he’d left unsplit he clubbed and stunned the beast
and it gasped out its life …
The men slashed its throat, singed the carcass,
quickly quartered it all, and then the swineherd,
cutting first strips for the gods from every limb,
spread them across the thighs, wrapped in sleek fat,
and sprinkling barley over them, flung them on the fire
In Christianity this culminates in the ‘lamb of good that takes away the sins of the world.’ The language of these fictions, therefore, appears to originate in symbolic representation, which is a hallmark of poetry.
These new grammars imparted a capacity for planning, and an understanding of natural cycles, which can lead to the outlook of the suzerain: the ‘keeper or overlord’ personified by Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, who says: ‘Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent’.
But it also engenders empathy with other life forms, which recalls the Isha Upanishad: ‘Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.’
McGilchrist writes: ‘I believe that the great achievement of human kind is not to have perfected utility through banding together to form groups, but to have learnt through our faculty for inter-subjective experience, and our related ability to imitate, to transcend utility altogether.’ That is the essence of true poetry.
Poetry and Justice
Art often awakes sensitivity to injustice indirectly, as the eighteenth century Swiss philosopher Johan Sulzer observed:
Wisdom knows about everything that man ought to be; it points the path to perfection and happiness which is related to it. But it cannot give strength to go down that often arduous path. The fine arts make the path smooth and adorn it with flowers which by their delightful scent, irresistibly entice the wanderer to continue on his way.
A shift in sensibility created by exposure to the beauty of Art operates unpredictably on ethical choices as, unlike a rational choice, shifts in sentiment rarely involve a decisive, eureka moment, when an argument is settled.
Rather, encountering beauty may lead to impulsive moral decisions based on heightened sensitivity, as where a person refrains from eating meat, when it does not ‘feel’ right.
Encountering a crowning achievement in music or poetry may awaken action in an apparently unrelated domain. Great music, and other Art, stills the mind, and engenders benevolence.
In divine rapture the poet builds a mythology out of imaginative materials located in Nature, and in the process incubates conventions and laws: ‘the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ wrote Percy Shelley.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822.
Firm moral convictions may bring a poet into conflict with temporal power, and demagogues appropriate and distort mythologies. The false poet, and prophet, appeals to the vanity of a sovereign.
A poet may feel compelled, nonetheless, to compromise with a patron – even a tyrant – to allow their work to reach fruition. In Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ the artist mocks a haughty ruler before posterity:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
A true poet’s opposition to political power is, however, based on principle, not an anarchic reflex, and he may support a wise and just regime. For example, Dante favoured the Holy Roman Empire, as he saw a strong transnational authority as necessary to maintain peace in the Italian peninsula. A contemporary poet could support the notion of a European Community, or the United Nations, for similar reasons.
Poetry remains a vital commodity in any culture, foregrounding and guiding other artistic endeavours, channelling empathy, and forging justice. Defining its nature is elusive, and perhaps futile, but it is apparent that philosophers are increasingly drawn to its revelation.
It is not restricted to composition of metrical verse: any writer aspires to it. Alasdair MacIntyre writes: ‘Knowing how to go on and to go further in the use of the expressions of a language is that part of the ability of every language-user which is poetic. The poet by profession merely has the ability to a preeminent degree’.
Shelley saw poetry in metrical verse as being its ‘imperial form’, but recognised its presence elsewhere. ‘The parts of a composition may’ even be poetical, ‘without the composition as a whole being poetical’, he said. Poetry inhabits the best prose as a flow that carries a listener into the vision of the writer.
Poetry is perhaps best defined by what it is not, which is the everyday speech often imitated in novels and plays. It aspires to originality and even prophecy, as Aristotle says: ‘it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen’.
It has an essential orality. Thus Yeats wrote: ‘Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover by beloved.’
The Sacred Spring
Poetic language need not be extravagant, but the true poet is never entirely in control of composition. Thus Socrates complained that a man cannot accede ‘to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses.’ This seeming loss of consciousness in a deep flow state may lead to extravagant language, but this is unintentional.
Kathleen Raine points to the lofty style that distinguishes poetry from regular speech. She notes how Jung, who generally disliked high-flown speech, found that when what he called ‘mana, daemons, gods or the unconscious speaks in words its utterances are in a high style, hieratic, often archaic, grandiose, removed as it is possible to be from the speech of that common man the everyday self’.
Raine identifies this with a primal poetic impulse she encountered in the composition of folk songs: ‘The singing of the ballad was by no means in common speech. It was extremely slow, dignified and highly mannered’. She concludes that: ‘It is a mark of imaginative inspiration and content to write in a high and mannered style, removed from common speech; as it is of the absence of imaginative participation to write either in a conversational tone or to write in a deliberately vulgar idiom.’
Raine further opines that: ‘What was written for the sake of easy comprehension is precisely that part of poetry which becomes incomprehensible within a few years.’ This we find in the lyrics of most contemporary popular music, which sounds dated almost at the point of release.
On the other hand, today we see a widespread trend whereby difficulty is equated with quality. This may originate in contemporary economic structures, where many professional poets survive on government grants, and as academic specialists. Linguistic obscurity may be a cynical calculation, which contributes to a widespread, and tragic, alienation from poetry.
It appears to have a meaning and form internal to itself, beyond any individual poet. Jahan Ramazani observed, ‘time and again’, how poems, ‘reasserted themselves as poems even in the moments of seeming to fuse with their others.’
Similarly, when Dadaists and Russian futurists tried to fabricate new languages they found their imagined syntaxes led back to established moulds. Any poet travels a path overlaid with uncountable footprints guiding their course. The poem knows where it wishes to travel in the anticipatory stillness of creation. The great challenge in today’s digital fog is to encounter this tranquillity.
Poetry in Language
Many poets agree that composition is an ongoing revelation, conventionally attributed to the muse. But in the discussion of poetry there is perhaps too great an emphasis on individual genius, although the individual experience cannot be discounted.
We find in creation a dialectic between individual expression and the treasures hidden in all languages. The linguist Edward Sapir suggests that it is intrinsic to language every one of which ‘is itself a collective art of expression.’ He asserts that ‘An artist utilises the native esthetic resources of his speech. He may be thankful if the given palette of colours is rich, if the springboard is light. But he deserves no special credit for felicities that are the language’s own.’
Similarly Marcel Duchamp wrote: ‘Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ‘readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage.’ The poet, however, renews and recasts these materials, sometimes bringing new colours to the palette, and reviving the use of others.
In some cases we find a mingling of tongues as new words enter languages in neologisms, as in Shakespeare’s heroic contribution to the English language. But this process is fraught with the risk of contrivance. Great poets are not necessarily polyglots, though they often are.
The expression of poetry should not be seen as an evolutionary display of verbal plumage, although troubadours will always seek to enchant. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke firmly rejects meretricious verse. ‘Young man’ he warns:
it’s not about love, when your voice
forces open your mouth – learn to forget
your sudden outburst. That will run out.
True singing is a different breath. A breath
around nothing. A breeze in the god. A wind.
Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926.
The mythos of poetry is an intuitive response to life’s challenges, unconnected to the logos of philosophy, or scientific observation.
Its wisdom adds layers to a mystery lying beyond direct inquisition. ‘The abstract is not life’, Yeats wrote on his deathbed, ‘and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence’.
The poet is never in control of the process of composition, and eminent authorities such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Milton have attributed inspiration to their dreams.
Charles Simic criticizes: the assumption … that the poet knows beforehand what he or she wishes to say and that the writing of the poem is the search for the most effective means of gussying up these ideas: if this were correct, poetry would simply repeat what had been said and thought before.’
Untuning the Sky
William Dryden, the first Poet Laureate, proposed in his Essay of Dramaticke Poesie that, ‘if natural causes be more known now than in the time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poesy and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive still nearer to perfection’. Rather than affirming an alternative role for poetry, he was suggesting it should be informed by natural philosophy, as science was referred to until the 1830s.
In fact George Steiner observes a contrary trend: ‘Where the sciences, pure and applied, wherever mathematics came to map, to energize, to expand human experience and possibilities, the retreat from the word proved correlative and ineluctable.’
The greatest poetry looks beyond the real world of immediate perception and reinvents it, travelling at a different pace to the often linear progression of a philosophical argument. Thus the work of hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago may be compared with, and often exceeds in quality, the best available today.
The poetic vision arises from a sensitivity that sees the tears of a sycamore tree, as opposed to its biological classification. Nontheless, the greatest scientists – such as Alexander van Humboldt – have been animated by poetry, and poets, of course, do learn from science.
There are signs of stultifying premeditation as opposed to poetic vision, in Dyrden’s Grand Chorus to ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’ (1687), signalling the Final Judgement.
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.
The idea of music, which is the expression of harmony, signalling the end of days is troubling, and almost paradoxical. Samuel Johnson described this image as ‘so awful in itself, that it can owe little to poetry; and I could wish the antithesis of music untuning had found some other place’.
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A poet can be foolish, even sinister, without this undermining the aesthetic appeal of her work. Poetic ability does not equate with individual moral virtue. Posterity excuses the obnoxious behaviour and statements that are not intrinsic to the poetry itself, assuming Art to rise above the mundane, and that its beauty will engender justice.
Artistic censorship is a grave danger for any society, but in an era of free speech we may be facing greater dangers still, as George Steiner warns: ‘The patronage of the mass media and the free market, the distributive opportunism of mass consumption, could be more damaging to art and to thought than have been the censorious regimes of the past’.
Tune into any Irish radio station, and it is hard to escape the constant flogging of motor cars: RTE’s flagship ‘Morning Ireland’ is associated with Opel; sports bulletins on the same programme are brought to you by Kia; traffic introduced by Hyundai, only afterwards to be announced as ‘AA Roadwatch’. Ads for other brands such as Mercedes and Peugeot generally feature during commercial breaks, seemingly every third or fourth slot. By early evening it is ‘Drivetime’; while over on Newstalk, you find Ivan Yates’s ‘The Hard Shoulder’.
Meanwhile, national newspapers carry regular motoring supplements – with adverts also layered through the main sections. In Ireland car ‘culture’ not only prevails, it dominates.
Ostensibly innocuous, if anything the adverts appear reassuring: smooth voices caressing parents into protecting their little cherubs inside whichever metal-cocoon-on-wheels they are selling. Branding imbues these vehicles – or ‘estates’ – with a pioneering sense of ‘Discovery’; a ‘Highlander’, ‘Land Cruiser’ or ‘Land Rover’ ranging across a great sweep of virgin landscape, as opposed to the reality of sitting for hours in traffic.
The not-so-subliminal-message is that a shiny-new-car is a good sign. But car-usage is blatantly contrary to the national interest, if we are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and associated fines. Transport, a substantial proportion of which is private car-usage, accounts for approximately 20% of all national emissions.
As long as media outlets receive hefty advertising revenue from car importers, there will be an inducement to avoid questioning our car culture. More obviously, vehicles are frequently offered as prizes in competitions, most recently on RTE’s ‘The Late Late Show’ on the 25th of May(3). By contrast, the lowly bicycle is rarely, if ever, considered prize-worthy.
Lone cyclist, Charlemont Bridge, Dublin.
II – Cyclist ‘deaths’
Typically, when a cyclist is killed headlines and news bulletins state he has died in a collision – a passive inevitability arising from being on the wrong side of an autonomous vehicle. Yet such machines are under human control. Would it not be more accurate to say a cyclist has been killed?
Alas, neither cyclists, public transport users, nor pedestrians tend to purchase media space, despite comprising the vast majority of those in transit across Ireland, particularly in urban areas, in which most of the population now resides. Where there is coverage of transport alternatives it usually relates to how these affect motorists, as where bus lanes generate traffic jams, or where cyclists create a nuisance by failing to observe the law.
Little substantive probing occurs into improvements to the transport infrastructure – or indeed how Ireland stacks up internationally.
Apart from being presented as a nuisance, on those rare occasions that cycling is treated positively, it is depicted as good for children or fitness. But rarely, if ever, is it taken as a realistic alternative to the car. Overwhelmingly, the message is: four wheels good, two wheels bad.
Last month, a cyclist was killed by a driver turning a lorry at the main N11 junction immediately outside RTE’s premises in Dublin(4). Coincidentally, currently there are plans to develop a new vehicular junction along the N11 on lands formerly owned by RTE that are being redeveloped for housing. The plans are attracting objections, alleging the proposed provision for cyclists is unsafe and substandard(5).
Notably, the route is a major cycle artery to the country’s largest university, University College Dublin. The RTE radar does not appear to have picked up an important story on its doorstep.
III – Cars In Their Eyes
One basic measure the national broadcaster could make to raise public confidence would be to provide an easily accessible public declaration of any direct remuneration, ‘gifts’, or other contractual arrangements into which RTE or its senior personnel enter into with third parties, including car dealers and importers. This would be in line with the transparency the BBC demands of its employees(6).
It is of interest that over the years reports have emerged of various ‘stars’ being provided with complimentary cars by dealerships. As far back as May 2005, Tommy Broughan TD called for transparency, informing Dáil Éireann that Ryan Tubridy had the use of a Lexus, while Pat Kenny and Gerry Ryan (both then contracted to RTE) had ‘relationships’ with BMW and Mazda respectively(7).
Tubridy currently presents ‘The Late Late Show’, which is ‘sponsored’ by Renault. Earlier this year his comments – which the Dublin Cycling Campaign described as ‘casual incitement of hatred’ – attracted five hundred complaints to the broadcaster. He had suggested that people who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned‘(8).
Given RTE receives almost two hundred million euro per annum from the public through mandatory TV licences, surely the Irish people have a right to know whether Mr Tubridy continues to be provided with a vehicle by any outside firms.
What information there is available is generally gleaned from marketeers’ press releases. Investigations into possible conflicts of interest are almost unheard of, at least in public.
Meanwhile, an opinion piece last year by RTE’s Countrywide presenter Damien O’Reilly in The Farmers Journal ridiculed Irish cyclists for wearing luminescent clothing to ensure their safety: this was ‘aggressively coloured’ as O’Reilly put it(9). Separately, the Sunday Times revealed (following a successful freedom of information request) that O’Reilly had been paid for work done on behalf of An Bord Bia in Dubai, which was approved by RTE management(10).
‘Moonlighting’ of RTE stars has given rise to further controversy in recent months, with Claire Byrne landing herself in hot water over work done on behalf of financial services firm Davy’s(11).
Elsewhere there has been a failure to reveal corporate funding of programming. Phoenix Magazine reported that Derek Mooney’s Programme ‘Turf Life’, broadcast on May 4th 2018, was supported financially by Bord Na Móna, but this was not declared in the programme’s credits(12).
IV – George’s Marvellous Meddling
Over on Newstalk, George Hook set himself up as the champion of the poor downtrodden motorists, while castigating other road users – such as cyclists of course!
In 2015 on daytime television Hook declared that he ‘hates cyclists with a passion‘(13), before stating: ‘They do what the hell they like. They’re a threat to themselves, they’re a threat to pedestrians, and ultimately they’re a threat to motorcars, as motorcars trying to avoid these lunatics will have an accident.’
Notably, Hook has previously been provided with a free car by Peugeot. RTE’s own website carries a report from June 22nd, 2011 in their ‘Motors’ section, entitled (seemingly without irony) ‘508 Hooked’, in which ‘Peugeot Managing Director Geroge Harbourne said: ‘George is an excellent brand ambassador for Peugeot. We very much look forward to working with him to increase the awareness of the Peugeot brand in Ireland, through his high public profile’ (15).
V – Increasing Obsolescence
Last year, national car sales dropped 10%, yet contrary to perceived wisdom this did not coincide with economic stagnation(16). Increasingly, those fortunate enough to get by without a car realise that these metal boxes no longer represent freedom, but are instead a costly burden best avoided.
Cars are good for a weekly shop – but so is a taxi – and in any case the traditional weekly shop is a decreasing habit, especially among the younger generation. Yet perversely, as more people move away from cars, the national broadcaster sings the praises of the internal combustion engine with increasing vigour.
During the ‘Bertie boom years’, many first-time buyers bought a ‘starter home’ far from Dublin, which required a long daily commute by car. This was often endured in the hope of returning to Dublin at some later date. Alas many of those dreams have receded.
These days, although accommodation in Dublin is in notoriously short supply, most of the younger generation are nonetheless opting to stay put in the capital, and avoiding the daily imprisonment that car dependency brings. Wander around the ‘go-getter ghettos’ of Google’s HQ on Barrow Street, Docklands, and East Point Business Park: cyclists, pedestrians, and public transport users abound, but there is little sign of cars.
In Dublin twenty years ago taxis were notoriously rare, and buses did not enjoy their own lanes. Having a motor in those days was a distinct advantage. Yet roll on two decades and owning a car is arguably more of a burden, and increasingly identified with ill-health.
The link between car dependency and obesity is well established(17); sadly, Ireland could be set to become the most obese country in Europe(18), which in part reflects our car dependency. Yet instead of discussing the obvious links, the Irish media is more likely to allude to the danger and zealotry of cyclists. Could it be that the idea of cycling as a normal mode of transport for regular people is too much of a threat to vested interests?
VI – A Gathering Storm
The New Scientist(19) reported that the fumes created by car engines tend to have a worse effect on those inside vehicles, rather than outside, as had previously been believed. That lovely ‘new car smell’ may actually mask toxic odours, which the driver and occupants might otherwise detect. For example, PM 10s are among the numerous known carcinogens created by diesel emissions(20).
Another report recently featured in the UK media indicates that a class action is being brought against Volkswagen(21), following the emissions scandal, which involved the manufacturer lying for years about the level of toxic fumes generated by its vehicles. This may be the tip of a large iceberg.
If it turns out that children developed asthma from riding in such vehicles – and if there is no background family history causation is plausible(22) – the emissions scandal could explode further, with major consequences in terms of costs to manufacturers, and changes in public policy.
Unsurprisingly, there has been little coverage of this in the Irish media, but the story could be of even more relevance here. Firstly, our greater car-dependency exposes us to greater danger. Secondly, the manufacturer associated with misleading governments, the public, and owners – Volkswagen – was the top-selling brand in this country between 2012 and 2016(23).
That is a triple-whammy to which Irish people may have been particularly exposed – yet hardly a peep from anywhere in the Irish media. Might we see greater coverage of such issues in mainstream Irish media in the years to come? Don’t hold your breath, unless that is you are being passed by a noxious vehicle belching out toxic fumes.
On May 8th RTE’s Freedom of Information Officer accepted a Freedom of Information Request from Cassandra Voices seeking records of payments or payments-in-kind from motor car dealership to leading RTE stars that have been approved by RTE management since January 1st, 2017. RTE have 30 days in which to respond. Details will be revealed in the next edition.
(1) Untitled, Belfast Telegraph, ‘EU using Dublin as example of worst-case urban, 4th of October, 2016, sprawl’ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/breakingnews_ukandireland/eu-using-dublin-as-example-of-worstcase-urban-sprawl-28409383.html
(23)Melanie May, ‘These are the 5 top-selling cars of 2017 so far’, downloaded 29/5/2018 http://www.thejournal.ie/best-selling-cars-ireland-2017-3483985-Jul2017/
