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Post by hibernicus on Aug 25, 2012 20:42:29 GMT
I give my reasons for referring to Fennell's position as "lunacy" rather than merely mistaken. These are that he operates a double standard, whereby he claims to be denouncing "foreign meddling in Syrian affairs" but in fact he denounces only British and American sympathy for the rebels, while ignoring Russian and Syrian support for the regime (of course he is not the only one operating a double standard, as can be seen by the disgraceful Western silence over the suppression of the democracy movement in Bahrain), and that his statement "Any government would put down an armed rebellion" completely dismisses the questions of jus ad bellum (who has right on their side) and jus in bello (how the conflict/suppression is conducted). I remember him being very critical of people who adopted the "any government would suppress terrorism" view of the British government's response to the Provisional IRA, on the grounds that PIRA was the product of genuine nationalist grievances; surely the same standard ought to be applied to the situation in Syria. I never denied that the British and the Americans are hostile to the Assad regime and support the revolt - I would be completely ignorant if I denied that - but I pointed out that other Middle Eastern powers are supporting the revolt much more actively, for their own good or bad reasons (including desire to weaken Iran and Sunni sectarian hostility to the Alawites). Des Fennell is saying that the revolt would end if the British and Americans did not support it, and this is clearly not the case (unless by advocating an end to "foreign meddling" he means not only that the Americans and British should not support the rebels but that they should pressurise the Turks, Saudis and Qataris not to support them either). I agree that there can be legitimate reasons for criticising the Anglo-American position, but Des Fennell is not merely criticising the British and Americans for supporting the rebels - he pretends he is speaking in the interests of the rebels themselves, whereas the course of action which he suggests they should follow amounts to admitting defeat and throwing themselves on the mercy of the Assad regime, whose offer of talks he professes should be taken at face value. (Let us suppose someone were to say that the rebels can be trusted not to massacre Christians and Alawites if they win, and gave as his sole reason for believing this that the rebels themselves said they would not do so - such a person would be either naive, dishonest or insane.) I admit that referring to Des Fennell's position as "lunacy" breaches the courtesies of ordinary discourse, and I do so because of the depth of my disappointment with Dr Fennell. There was a time when I took him very seriously indeed, and I would still agree with many of his positions on individual issues, but after more than twenty years' observation I have come to the conclusion that he is a fundamentally evasive and irresponsible thinker who is unwilling to accept opponents' good faith, who does not treat his own views as open to criticism, who is unwilling to be tied down to concrete propositions, and whose demonisation of Anglo-America is exaggerated and facile. Anything of value which is to be extracted from his works will require breaking down his categories of analysis and remoulding his observations into something which can be understood and transmitted coherently to others, and by attacking him forcefully I hope to awake others from the uncritical slumbers into which he tries to narcotise his readers, and to persuade them to apply their own critical analytical skills and analytical intelligence to the task of ascertaining what is worthwhile in his ideas and what is mistaken. If I have not made my reasons for taking this view of Dr Fennell sufficiently clear, let me know and I will endeavour to explain myself further. That was the whole purpose of this thread. THIS BTW is an example of clearly-reasoned legitimate criticism of the Western position on Syria, whether you agree with it or not. Compare it with the Fennell letter reproduced in my previous post, and if anyone can't spot the difference say so and we can argue it out: hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/08/syria-and-bahrain-whats-the-difference.html
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 2, 2012 19:08:18 GMT
Alasdair has occasionally suggested that we might have a discussion sometime on the question of patriotism and national identity, so perhaps this thread could accommodate it. Here's an opening suggestion. Here are some reasons why I dislike Desmond Fennell's attitude to nationalism. In his heyday his view on Irish nationalism was as follows: (1) Irish nationalism as represented by the early twentieth-century cultural revival and Easter Rising was an attempt to create a truly just society befitting our historical identity. He listed a number of thinkers and political activists as representing it - WB Yeats, Pearse, Connolly, Horace Plunkett, Douglas Hyde, Arthur Griffith, DP Moran and the like. (2) This project was so obviously justified that no criticism which stands outside it - which maintains for example that the Easter Rising was a mistake, or that the Gaelic League's view of Irish identity was narrow and misconceived - can ever be justified or even worth addressing. The only legitimate response is to try to update the project for a new generation, as Fennell himself tried to do. The problems with this as I see them are as follows: (1) The precursors whom Fennell invokes had quite significant differences in the sort of Ireland they wanted - Horace Plunkett was an Unionist and the rest were not; Griffith and Yeats famously disagreed about the relationship between politics and art; Moran equated Gael and Catholic, Hyde saw the Gael as an identity transcending the Protestant/Catholic division. To assume they all wanted the same thing and to elevate them above criticism is to remove what is distinctive about them and to reduce them to so many mini-Fennells - or to put things another way - I think we grow in understanding by a dialectic process, by arguing with those who came before us and working out what they got right and what they got wrong, not by projecting our own views onto them and denying they could ever have been wrong about anything. That's just a form of self-worship and makes us incapable of learning anything at all. (2) Once criticisms have been uttered of the views you defend, it is not possible just to ignore them and to assume that any criticism must be wrong by definition. The various Redmondite and MacNeillite critiques of the Easter Rising (e.g. that it supplies a precedent for any self-appointed minority to take up arms against the majority on the basis that they will get a mandate in the future) are not self-evidently wrong, and to refuse to address them raises the suspicion either that you have no answer or that you are a petty dictator who believes in suppressing disagreement. (An interesting contrast would be with something I heard about the IRA prisoners in the Maze Prison - that one of the first aims of their political education classes was to make the student realise that the Unionists actually have a case if you grant their basic assumptions, the idea being that if you do this you can then present the republican arguments with greater confidence, whereas if the student is told the republican view is self-evident you run the risk he will realise this is not the case under circumstances where you can't control his response.) (3) The argument that the history of the post-independence state shows the Revival project was flawed in ways that cannot simply be accounted for by "national apostacy" arguments of the sort put forward by diehard republicans - e.g. the failure of economic protectionism and of cultural protectionism/censorship to bring about economic self-sufficiency or cultural flowering; the fact that the image of rural Ireland as the real Ireland was coined at a time when a majority of Irish people lived in the countryside and were evidently much poorer than the inhabitants of middle-class Dublin, whereas now the majority live in towns and while there is significant economic inequality there is not the sort of absolute poverty found in the Dublin slums and the poorer areas of the West in, say, 1913. Fennell, I think, tacitly acknowledged this from the early 90s when he moved away from the idea of making Ireland a model of his "community of communities" to realising this was hopeless and turning to analysis of what he thought was wrong with the western world as a whole.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 9, 2013 23:40:09 GMT
The current PHOENIX has a review of Des Fennell's new book of essays THIRD STROKE DID IT, whose central argument is that American liberalism is delivering the final death-blow to European civilisation, already weakened by the earlier assaults of Nazism and Soviet Communism. I have ordered a copy of this book and may try to review it sometime. In the meantime, let us look at the PHOENIX review to see what it says about the reviewer and about Fennell. The reviewer quite rightly points out that Fennell's view of European civilisation as being opposed to mass killing (hence for Fennell Hiroshima, and still more the refusal to collectively repent for Hiroshima as Germany and Europe have repented for the Holocaust, is the decisive break with the past) is considerably idealised, and that there have been many instances of mass killing in European history (he instances Charlemagne's massacre of the Saxons - whom he mistakenly describes as heretics rather than pagans, not that this makes any difference to the crime - and the massacre of the Cathars of Provence by Catholic crusaders advised to "Kill them all - God will know his own"). The big problem with this is that the reviewer does not seem to think Western civilisation has any particular value at all. He suggests, for example, that it might have been better for Europe if Charles Martel had lost the Battle of Poitiers and Islam rather than Christendom had become the predominant European religion, on the grounds that the Umayyad Caliphate of Spain was more religiously tolerant and cultured than mediaeval Europe. This omits the limitations to Islamic tolerance and implies that mediaeval Christendom was completely uncultured (which would be like praising Averroes, Avicenna and Maimonides while assuming Dante, Aquinas and Albertus never existed). The reviewer seems to have a sort of simplified cultural-marxist mindset according to which any genuine culture must be created by the oppressed because they are in touch with the realities of things in ways the elite are not - "brought about from the bottom up because they were excluded from the top". (He rightly notes the Jewish contribution to western thought in this context.) The trouble with this view is that oppression also tends to brutalise the oppressed, narrow their horizons, and deny them access to the means of improvement - that is one of the most terrible forms oppression takes - and there are some forms of cultural achievement (let us think of much modern technology, for example) which require access to elaborate training/education and considerable resources. Pretending that this is not so may flatter populist sensibilities, but leads to disaster. The same mindset is evident when the reviewer complains that Fennell lacks "any analysis of class struggle". Fennell's shortcomings in this area go beyond class struggle - he has no access of the means of production and how they impinge on politics and culture at all. (It is very revealing that he treats the cultural achievements of the Irish nationalist project as being to its credit, while dismissing its economic failures as merely incidental, as though there was not a clear link between cultural and economic protectionism, nor when he advocated a form of extreme political localisation based on the supposed models of Maoism and Titoist Yugoslavia did he discuss how such ultra-decentralisation could be economically viable.) Similarly, when the reviewer denounces Fennell's view of Irish identity as explicitly Catholic on the grounds that it ignores the Protestant founders of Irish republicanism, which the reviewer presents as the truly progressive force of Irish history, he implies that there has not been any overlap between republicanism and Catholicism (which clearly there has been) nor does he address the point that repudiating Catholicism raises major questions about Irish identity. Of course the reviewer assumes, as does Fennell, that unionists and non-republican forms of nationalism, be they espoused by Protestants or Catholics, have made no positive contribution whatsoever to Ireland and can just be airbrushed out of history. All in all, I would say Des Fennell and his reviewer are of equal intellectual crudity albeit in somewhat different ways.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 14, 2013 13:41:07 GMT
Read the Phoenix review of Fennell. It does seem like an armchair job. There certainly were major problems in Western Christendom, but the reviewer is a bit too uncritical of the Umayyad Caliphate.
The current SF weltanschauung is all too apparent in the piece - in many degrees agreeing with Fennell's analysis, but distancing itself from his Catholicism. I'd like to see Hibernicus view of the book - maybe in a future BR issue.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 14, 2013 18:48:50 GMT
I have just received my copy of the book and am reading it at present. IMHO it reflects two big inter-related problems: (1) He exaggerates the coherence of traditional western civilisation - Christendom was never completely Christian IMHO, and the trends he presents as appearing out of nowhere after Hiroshima (amoral raison d'etat, non-representational art) in fact have long European pedigrees (he dislikes the Spire for much the same reason Chesterton disliked the Impressionists; Machiavelli and Hobbes are major figures of western civilisation, and they certainly weren't Americans). Thus he exaggerates the post-1945 break (I think there is a significant break in the post-1945 era, but it has a much longer build-up than Fennell lets on). (2) Fennell treats his own opinions as self-evident and not open to debate or analysis. He is not willing to accept the possibility of reasoned disagreement, still less to engage with it. If you think, for example, that a federal European state would be a good thing, or that the Easter Rising was a dreadful mistake, or that the sexual revolution increased the sum of human happiness (I am not choosing views that I necessarily agree with; my point is that reasonable people can produce arguments for them which need to be addressed rather than just being dismissed out of hand) Fennell's attitude is that you are not merely wrong, you're not even human - you're a dupe of the power-mongers of the American anti-civilisation. The idea that Ivana Bacik, horribly misguided though she is and downright evil as some of her views and practices are, is operating on the basis of a reasonably consistent worldview derived from certain basic assumptions has no place in Fennellworld - if you're not Des Fennell then you are simply a blind follower of a more or less arbitrary selection of random rules produced out of thin air by the Correctorate, sez Fennell. I think the central problem with Des Fennell is that he has tried to create his own self-referential version of reality and has succumbed to the paranoid megalomania which it inevitably produces, because the mere existence of other people as autonomous beings is an existential threat to such a worldview.
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Post by assisi on Feb 15, 2013 10:33:27 GMT
I have just received my copy of the book and am reading it at present. IMHO it reflects two big inter-related problems: (1) He exaggerates the coherence of traditional western civilisation - Christendom was never completely Christian IMHO, and the trends he presents as appearing out of nowhere after Hiroshima (amoral raison d'etat, non-representational art) in fact have long European pedigrees (he dislikes the Spire for much the same reason Chesterton disliked the Impressionists; Machiavelli and Hobbes are major figures of western civilisation, and they certainly weren't Americans). Thus he exaggerates the post-1945 break (I think there is a significant break in the post-1945 era, but it has a much longer build-up than Fennell lets on). (2) Fennell treats his own opinions as self-evident and not open to debate or analysis. He is not willing to accept the possibility of reasoned disagreement, still less to engage with it. If you think, for example, that a federal European state would be a good thing, or that the Easter Rising was a dreadful mistake, or that the sexual revolution increased the sum of human happiness (I am not choosing views that I necessarily agree with; my point is that reasonable people can produce arguments for them which need to be addressed rather than just being dismissed out of hand) Fennell's attitude is that you are not merely wrong, you're not even human - you're a dupe of the power-mongers of the American anti-civilisation. The idea that Ivana Bacik, horribly misguided though she is and downright evil as some of her views and practices are, is operating on the basis of a reasonably consistent worldview derived from certain basic assumptions has no place in Fennellworld - if you're not Des Fennell then you are simply a blind follower of a more or less arbitrary selection of random rules produced out of thin air by the Correctorate, sez Fennell. I think the central problem with Des Fennell is that he has tried to create his own self-referential version of reality and has succumbed to the paranoid megalomania which it inevitably produces, because the mere existence of other people as autonomous beings is an existential threat to such a worldview. Hibernicus I agree that Hiroshima may not be the landmark event that Fennell thinks but he does contrast it with the Holocaust. We all abhor the nightmare of the Holocaust but we rarely hear of a big budget Hollywood movie on Hiroshima - Hiroshima has been pushed to the side, perhaps reflecting the US ability to accept that their actions, their worldview, as righteous and non-negotiable. Although Christianity may not have been as coherent an influence in the West, it certainly was the prevailing influence. I think that Fennell ultimately sees that the Christian ethos, however abritrarily adhered to by some individuals and countries, at least provided a context of social and moral rules that could be adhered to. In short it made 'sense' and this is the key to the wellbeing of a culture or society. What he decries now is the breakdown of the Christian ethos and the lack of a 'sense giving' replacement (as we are now witnessing). I am not sure I understand the term 'his own self-referential version of reality' but I think that all writers do have that element of self belief in believing their own view, otherwise why bother putting the view forward. And all writers will be self referential in the sense that they will at times call upon their own experience of life. A quick view of his life has shown that he has stepped out of his comfort zone on many occasions to travel and live in Sweden, Italy, Germany the US as well as spending many years in the Gaelteacht. I don't think that we should be so critical of people who are broadly sympathetic to Catholicism. There are may writers much more worthy of criticism. Yes, we can argue with their arguments and conclusions but we can leave it at that. Indeed in one of his essays I remember him asserting that Catholics writers in Ireland tend to be overly aggressive towards other Catholic writers. Why, I would ask, when we are not short of enemies elsewhere.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 15, 2013 21:54:57 GMT
I call his view of reality self-referential not because it draws on his own experiences but because it assumes that his observations are simply the way things are and anyone who disagrees with him is evil or stupid.
Let me illustrate this. Suppose I walk down O'Connell Street tomorrow morning and then write an account of what I saw and heard on my walk. This would probably give many useful insights into O'Connell Street, Dublin, and Ireland as they are today. But let us suppose that I then claim that I saw everything of significance which was going on in O'Connell Street and that no other account of it can possess any value. Let us suppose that someone points out that the people I saw hanging around in certain parts of the street were actually drug dealers but I didn't realise this, that I made a far-reaching generalisation about the statues in O'Connell Street while failing to mention the Joyce statue at the corner of Talbot Street because I didn't notice it, that I failed to notice the Trotskyite demonstrators under the arcade of the GPO because I was walking down the Clery's side - and that instead of engaging with these points and using them to broaden my understanding of O'Connell Street I sneer at the critic and call him a member of the Liberal Correctorate - wouldn't that make me a flawed guide to O'Connell Street? Des Fennell's accounts of how the world is suffer from the same flaw as my imaginary account of O'Connell Street - he will not engage with critics or accept that any observations which do not agree with his own can have validity. I think it's dangerous to place anyone above criticism just because they agree with you on certain points. I would agree with Fennell on some issues and disagree with him on others, but I think he goes wrong in some very dangerous ways.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 18, 2013 0:52:28 GMT
I would argue that this piece says what is valid in Des Fennell's analysis of modernity and says it better because whereas Fennell assumes that anyone who disagrees with him must be in conscious bad faith and the tool of self-seeking power elites, Dreher notes that they do sincerely subscribe to a rival philosophy of life - harmful and destructive, but one which has its own internal logic, which its adherents sincerely believe to be true, and which genuinely does have some good effects as well as many evil ones: EXTRACT In his column today, Ross Douthat — who, you should know, is an orthodox Catholic — observes the end of what the late Fr. Neuhaus once called “the Catholic Moment,” a time in which Catholics, once marginalized in American society, could make their mark on public life by bringing a distinctly Catholic vision to bear on our affairs. That’s definitely over now, says Douthat. More: DOUTHAT QUOTE The fact that the Second Vatican Council had left the church internally divided limited Catholic influence in some ways but magnified it in others. Because the church’s divisions often mirrored the country’s, a politician who captured the typical Catholic voter was probably well on his way to victory, and so would-be leaders of both parties had every incentive to frame their positions in Catholic-friendly terms. The church might not always be speaking with one voice, but both left and right tried to borrow its language. If this era is now passing, and Catholic ideas are becoming more marginal to our politics, it’s partially because institutional Christianity is weaker over all than a generation ago, and partially because Catholicism’s leaders have done their part, and then some, to hasten that de-Christianization. Any church that presides over a huge cover-up of sex abuse can hardly complain when its worldview is regarded with suspicion. The present pope has too often been scapegoated for the sex abuse crisis, but America’s bishops have if anything gotten off too easily, and even now seem insufficiently chastened for their sins. The recent turn away from Catholic ideas has also been furthered by a political class that never particularly cared for them in the first place. Even in a more unchurched America, a synthesis of social conservatism and more egalitarian-minded economic policies could have a great deal of mass appeal. But our elites seem mostly relieved to stop paying lip service to the Catholic synthesis: professional Republicans are more libertarian than their constituents, professional Democrats are more secular than their party’s rank-and-file, and professional centrists get their encyclicals from Michael Bloomberg rather than the Vatican. END DOUTHAT QUOTE I think Ross is right, up to a point. It is too convenient to blame the execrable behavior of the bishops in the abuse scandal for the end of the Catholic moment (to be clear, Ross is not doing that here, only pointing to that behavior as a contributing factor; I know some readers will not be so discerning). The rotten behavior of the bishops, among others, hastened the decline of Catholic authority in American life, but if we’re honest, we will have to admit that even if the bishops had been luminous saints to the man, the second coming of the Apostles, things wouldn’t be all that different from where they stand today. The fact of the matter is that Roman Catholic Christianity (also Orthodox Christianity, and some forms of Protestantism) cannot be reconciled with the expressive individualism that is the hallmark of late modern civilization. Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill, a former Catholic turned atheist, lamented Pope Benedict’s resignation as a kind of capitulation to our degraded culture: O'NEILL QUOTE What the resignation really points to – or rather what the congratulatory reaction reveals – is how uncomfortable our society is with the idea of vocation. In the back-slapping for Benedict we’re really witnessing the breathing of a mass, global sigh of relief that pretty much the last institution which elevates its own needs over the needs of its occupant, which demands unwavering, total, literally Christ-like commitment, has now allowed the reality of frailty to creep into its hallowed halls. Today’s fashionable allergy to the pope, and to the Catholic Church more broadly, is driven more by a petit-bourgeois disdain for firm commitment to a cause and belief in something bigger than ourselves than it is by a grown-up critique of Catholic theology. Ours is an era in which people are implored to cultivate their self-esteem, or to focus obsessively on preserving their bovine physical wellbeing, rather than to give themselves fully to a cause or a mission or even another individual. We’re so hostile to the idea of vocation, and to its underpinning: commitment, that we have pathologised self-sacrifice, now referring to it as the psychological ailment of ‘co-dependency’: ‘placing a lower priority on one’s own needs while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.’ In such a narcissistic era, where ‘one’s own needs’ are everything, the idea of a man remaining married to his mission forever is extraordinarily alien, and so we cheer like crazy when even the moral descendant of St Peter elevates his own physical wellbeing over his devotion to something bigger. END O'NEILL QUOTE I don’t think that’s a fair judgment of Benedict’s act, or an accurate consideration of his motives, but I take O’Neill’s general point, and it’s akin to Ross’s more generous (to Benedict) conclusion in his blog reaction to the papal abdication: DOUTHAT QUOTE Yet these benefits need to be balanced against the longer term difficulties that this precedent creates for the papacy’s role within the church. There is great symbolic significance in the fact that popes die rather than resign: It’s a reminder that the pontiff is supposed to be a spiritual father more than a chief executive (presidents leave office, but your parents are your parents till they die), a sign of absolute papal surrender to the divine will (after all, if God wants a new pope, He’ll get one), and a illustration of the theological point that the church is still supposed to be the church even when its human leadership isn’t at fighting trim, whether physically or intellectually or (for that matter) morally. END DOUTHAT QUOTE Leaving Benedict’s resignation aside, who will argue with O’Neill that our culture is hostile to the idea of vocation — and, more broadly, with the idea of sacrificing individual desire to higher truths, or causes? Our entire culture is built around the apotheosis of the Self, of the self’s will, the self’s desires, the self’s autonomy. This has required a progressive liberation of the Self from rules, mores, institutions, and customs that bind the Self. We are well within a cultural era in which truth is believed — whether or not people recognize it — to be determined by emotion far more than reason. I don’t entirely condemn this, because in some cases, it has resulted in a more humane condition, and in any case I am as personally formed by and implicated in this condition as anybody else. The point here is neither to condemn nor to praise, but simply to recognize it for what it is. This is not something temporary or sudden, but rather the culmination of centuries of social development in the West. Philosopher Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, writes of the rise of “expressive individualism” as central to our collective understanding of the moral order now embedded in our culture. Taylor observes that the emergence of expressive individualism — that is, the emancipation of the Self — has been a gradual process in the West since the Enlightenment, but really took off after World War II, and, with the Sexual Revolution, became general in society. “This is obviously a profound shift,” he writes. He describes the religious manifestation of this shift thus: TAYLOR QUOTE The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this. This takes us farther. The choice of denomination was understood to take place within a fixed cadre, say that of the apostles’ creed, the faith of the broader “church”. Within this framework of belief, I choose the church in which I feel most comfortable. But if the focus is going now to be on my spiritual path, thus on what insights come to me in the subtler languages that I find meaningful, then maintaining this or any other framework becomes increasingly difficult. END TAYLOR QUOTE The end result of this process has been the severing of what was widely considered to be the necessary connection between faith and civilizational order. Taylor says religious conservatives still assume this connection, and much of their (our) political anxiety is a reaction to this cultural revolution. This is why, on same-sex marriage, both sides talk past each other. We religious conservatives believe that the secular order must be dictated by the sacred order, however attenuated. Many others — most others, I would say — believe that there is no such thing as a sacred order, at least not one knowable to and share-able by all. The desiring Self is the sacred thing — something I say not as a criticism, but as an observation. In this worldview — which I believe is thoroughly mainstream — to deny the legitimacy of the Self’s desires is felt as a denial of personhood, and of rights. The moral order, then, must be built around the ongoing expansion of individual rights, especially when it comes to sex and sexuality, because Truth emerges from the individual’s heart, not from an external source of authority, such as the Catholic Church. We can’t have a meaningful conversation because we cannot agree on the source of moral order. I’ve gone a bit far afield here, so I’ll close with this conclusion: there never was a possibility for a Catholic moment in America. Not even American Catholics agree on what it means to be Catholic, and what is required of them as Catholics. From the outside, Catholicism looks unitary, but from the inside, Catholicism (in America, at least) is just about as fragmented as Protestantism. This is why you have the spectacle of Garry Wills denying the sacramental priesthood and the Real Presence, but still presenting himself as a Catholic, and being received by many Catholics as Catholic. Catholicism in this country has lost its distinctives, because many, probably most, actual Catholics have no sense that the faith they profess calls them to accept and to live by a set of theological and moral precepts that they may struggle to accept, but must accept because God revealed them authoritatively through His church.... END OF EXTRACT www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/goodbye-catholic-moment/
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 23, 2013 0:31:55 GMT
Something else that strikes me is the lengths to which Des Fennell goes in demonising his opponents so as to avoid taking them seriously in any way at all. He repeatedly states that American post-Hiroshima culture was just as evil and godless as Soviet communism, if not more so, and that western countries are just as much American satellites as the East Bloc were Soviet (this would come as news to the French, for example); he states that the EU could have no legitimate reason for extending into Eastern Europe and the east Europeans' joining the EU can only be due to their having been bribed and/or fooled by the EU and their leaders (the idea that they might rationally prefer the EU to Russian domination, or that the EU might legitimately fear that unless east-central Europe was incorporated in a stable political framework it might develop more conflicts like those in former Yugoslavia and possibly draw the great powers into its rivalries a la 1914, is not even considered). He is not just content to condemn Israeli treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories (which God knows is bad enough) - he equates the Israelis with the Nazis, saying Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory are like those of "a particularly well-trained Nazi regiment". If anyone thinks that comparison is appropriate they should read Christopher Browning's ORDINARY MEN, which describes a few hundred semi-trained middle-aged police reservists systematically murdering THOUSANDS of people within a few months in Poland in 1942. What the ISraelis do is bad, but it's nowhere near that level, which doesn't make it OK. He uses the NAzi comparison for the Americans as well - he implies at one point that the American people as a whole are more guilty than the nazi-era Germans because the Nazis kept the Holocaust secret while US governments have openly used and possessed atomic weapons. (In fact, while the Nazis kept the details of the Holocaust secret it was generally known that terrible things were being done to the Jews and other opponents of Nazism - the White Rose opposition group in Munich explicitly denounced the mass murder of Jews in their leaflets, and in the later stages of the war a major theme of Goebbels' propaganda was that the German people must resist to the bitter end because the JEws would wreak a terrible revenge on them.) When he discusses contemporary Irish literature, he does not just say that works such as John McGahern's AMONGST WOMEN and Patrick mcCabe's THE BUTCHER BOY are flawed by an underlying nihilism - he jeers at them as dishonest stage-Irish productions intended to make money by presenting the Irish to international and particularly British audiences as freaks, begorrah; he dismisses the question of whether such works are well-written as irrelevant aestheticism, and he seems to imply that the really serious social problems which are touched on in these works (for example he dismisses the horrendous father in AMONGST WOMEN as "an Irish patriarch patriarching", when it is fairly common knowledge that the character is largely based on McGahern's own father and his siblings have attested the truth of the portrayal). This attitude that everything in LEtterfrack was rosy, and if it wasn't you mustn't say so, is precisely what got us into our present mess. I am more and more inclined to suspect that Des Fennell's praise for Mao's Cultural revolution in the 1960s did not, as I had thought, stem purely from naive belief in the genuineness of its claim to represent decentralised popular self-government. I have just been reading a book on the Maoist suppression of Catholicism in Shanghai in the 1950s, and the unremitting hatred, the vicious demonisation of the enemy as stooges of imperialism, the refusal to tolerate any criticism however moderate or loyal, reminds me distinctly of the mindset on view in THIRD STROKE DID IT.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 3, 2013 17:23:20 GMT
Another thought that strikes me about Des Fennell is this. I would say that Ireland is an entity which exists independently of an "Irish national project" - such projects - there have been several - are about how that society or societies we may call Ireland can best fulfil the potential that lies within it/them; such projects may be more or less successful, may come and go, but something called Ireland exists independently of them. Fennell's view, on the other hand, is that there is only one Ireland and that is the "Irish national project" as defined by Pearse (say in his pamphlet GHOSTS, where Pearse claims that the Redmondites have betrayed a multi-generational Irish identity which can only be fulfilled through separatism, and in so doing have not only ceased to be Irish but have ceased to be humanly intelligible and become gibbering wraiths) as Fennell understands it, and as continued by Fennell himself. In this view, if Ireland had settled down as a contented West Britain in the past, or if it were (for example) to convert from Catholicism to Buddhism in the future, it would not merely be different - it would not exist at all. This mindset seems to me to reflect the very worst aspect of the Irish republican tradition - the claim that a minority (in Fennell's case, even a single person) can declare what it is to be truly Irish and can enforce it on a whole people, all dissenting views on Irishness being dismissed as the product of "a slave mentality" (a phrase Fennell uses in THIRD STROKE...) This is a recipe for the worst sort of tyranny IMHO. Fennell has also argued in the past that it does not matter whether the version of the past which people believe to be true actually is true, just so long as it sustains Irish identity. (Hence his recent manifesto in HISTORY IRELAND declaring that as a precondition for writing about the Irish Revolution all historians must accept his particular view of the 1916 Rising as directed towards creating a more "authentically human" or "normal" way of life.) In other words, what he says is true and nobody is to be allowed to question it. If it is never questioned, how can it be upheld, any more than it can be rejected? If it is to define people's lives, are people not entitled to make up their own minds up about it?
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 9, 2013 21:27:41 GMT
These quotes from the Orthodox writer David Bentley HArt's book ATHEIST DELUSIONS seem to describe, and to describe a lot better, what Fennell is talking about in his comments on the breakdown of western civilisation. I do think Fennell grasps something that is really there; the trouble is that he offers crude and simplistic analysis and actively denounces any attempts to go deeper: www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/best-book-ive-read-all-year/EXTRACT A good friend of mine is a university professor who went through a years-long crisis in which he pretty much lost his Catholic faith. This past Lent, he experienced a wonderful rebirth of religious conviction and feeling. It wasn’t a sudden thing, but it really crystallized this past spring. When I asked him about it, he told me that the Orthodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart’s book Atheist Delusions was key in challenging many of the things he, as a philosophically informed and culturally engaged intellectual, thought he knew about historical Christianity. The book made a big difference for my friend, in bringing him back to the belief and practice of his Christian faith, and he highly recommended it to me. Though I like Hart’s work, I hadn’t read this book because the title made me think it was a Christian version of the bomb-throwing polemics we get from the Ditchkins side. That was dumb of me; Hart is far too sophisticated a thinker to have tossed off something like that. And yet, I stayed away from the book … until my friend said, in effect, you’ve got to read this! I bought it from Kindle earlier this week, and though I’m not quite halfway through it, I can tell that the Hart book is probably the best thing I’ve read all year. It’s not a polemic, exactly, but a work of interpretive cultural history. What he does is take the assumptions so many contemporaries — even many contemporary Christians — make about the world before Christianity, and the world Christianity brought into being, and demolish them with clear prose and muscular argument. From what I can tell so far, Atheist Delusions basically says: “What you think you know about Christianity and the West is wrong.” But not just that. For example:
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 11, 2013 22:25:05 GMT
Here is another piece which I think rests on the same sort of intuition that Fennell has - that something is radically wrong with the modern worldview which makes it ultimately unsustainable - but which develops this insight intellectually in a way he never manages. This is because Fennell sees this worldview as having been deliberately devised by a conspiratorial elite which imposes it on a population of brainwashed zombies. The central problem with this, as with all conspiracy theories, is that Fennell never addresses the question of what it would be like to actually believe in such a worldview - what it looks like from inside. (Another example of this mindset would be some Catholic accounts of the Protestant Reformation which attribute the whole thing to a power-grab by cynical aristocrats and bankers. Evangelical Protestantism may have deep flaws of all sorts, it may lead to secularisation and infidelity in the long term, but there have been too many pious and benevolent Protestants, too many Protestant martyrs, too many who have held to Protestantism when it was very much to their disadvantage, for it to be simply a conjob.) The great Fennellite Refusal is an utter refusal to try to understand what it is like to believe what he anathematises - to be a Unionist, a revisionist, an American neocon, etc Kalb's analysis, on the other hand, makes it clear what the attraction of secular liberalism is for its adherents (and there are subsidiary attractions as well such as technocratic efficiency) - the claim to godhood, to the satisfaction of unrestricted desire - to be like gods, knowing good and evil from a position of detached superiority. An example of this which comes to mind recently is the response to last Saturday's MArch for Life. I have been looking at the picture galleries which have gone up on some of the pro-choice sites, and while they do pick out some of the nutters who turned up for the march (including a couple from neo-fascist microgroups) what attracts their utmost distaste and contempt is simply the number of old people on the march - as if old people are not citizens entitled to express their views like anyone else. The photographers treat marchers' being elderly as self-evidently discrediting the cause. Similarly several of the more rabid posters on Politics.ie sneer that pro-lifers are a bunch of elderly hasbeens who are dying off while pro-choicers and atheists are the young strong wave of the future. www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2409/religion_liberalism_and_worldly_success.aspx#.Ud8qvPmmjW4EXTRACT ... The religious outlook that corresponds to a secular liberal social order is not worship of a literal Caesar so much as belief in individual man as the supreme divinity. If the highest good is promoting individual preferences and autonomy, within the limits of a system that does that for everyone, then every individual makes things good simply by desiring them. His will creates moral reality, and thus has divine efficacy. Such an outlook leads to problems, which are at bottom the same as the problems of advanced liberalism. How can you have seven billion supreme beings, each of them establishing what is good with equal authority? What do you do when they disagree? Liberalism can be viewed as the religious system that has grown up to answer such questions. Like other religious systems, liberalism has certain dogmas and disciplinary requirements. Its first requirement is that the divine individuals accept liberalism itself, and recognize each other’s equal godhead. To the extent one of them fails to do, for example by recognizing a supreme being that transcends the secular liberal system, he is trying to suppress some divine wills in favor of others, or so it is thought. Such a person has no place in the system, so he is cast out as a fallen deity, a demon, an oppressive bigot with no right to any kind of consideration. The divine individuals must also support and accept the authority of the hierarchs of the liberal church, in the form of the governing structure that constitutes the liberal state and determines the practical resolution of conflicting wills. The authority of that structure is based on its claim that it is indifferent to the intrinsic value of what the billions of divinities happen to choose—to judge such matters would be to judge one divine will better than another—but only concerned with their joint fulfillment and mutual non-interference. It determines such matters, or so it claims, in a purely rational matter, so that to reject its authority is (once again) to favor arbitrary oppression of one will in favor of another and thus to fall from grace and become demonic and unworthy of consideration. Such a governing structure, which rejects intrinsic value in favor of equality, efficiency, and manageability as supreme goals, is at odds with human nature, and becomes conceivable only through the remarkable success of technological forms of social organization such as the transnational corporation and the expert bureaucracy. The effect of making it supreme is that goods and ties that transcend individual desire must be suppressed because they get in the way. What place is there for family, church, or local community when experts, advertisers, and administrators run everything? The result is that the ideal for citizenship becomes careerism, political correctness, and moderate self-involved hedonism. That’s not an ideal that supports social order or efficiency in the long run, so the society tends (as we see today) toward dysfunction that with time grows ever more radical. That is the irony of liberalism: it is made possible by ties and loyalties that it rejects and destroys. That kind of irony is what leads to cycles in history. Every social order is associated with a religion, or something that functions as such. If the religion corresponds to realities and human needs the society will function well and become successful. As the society becomes more and more successful, the need for a religion distinct from the society seems less pressing, and the religion that made the society successful is likely to become more and more identified with the society itself. If the society is successful enough, or singleminded enough in its pursuit of success, the religion that made it successful will effectively disappear and the secular religion that replaces it is unlikely to be functional enough to prevent radical social decline. It is that process that we now see all around us in the West. END OF EXTRACT
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Post by assisi on Jul 12, 2013 11:49:24 GMT
Here is another piece which I think rests on the same sort of intuition that Fennell has - that something is radically wrong with the modern worldview which makes it ultimately unsustainable - but which develops this insight intellectually in a way he never manages. This is because Fennell sees this worldview as having been deliberately devised by a conspiratorial elite which imposes it on a population of brainwashed zombies. The central problem with this, as with all conspiracy theories, is that Fennell never addresses the question of what it would be like to actually believe in such a worldview - what it looks like from inside. (Another example of this mindset would be some Catholic accounts of the Protestant Reformation which attribute the whole thing to a power-grab by cynical aristocrats and bankers. Evangelical Protestantism may have deep flaws of all sorts, it may lead to secularisation and infidelity in the long term, but there have been too many pious and benevolent Protestants, too many Protestant martyrs, too many who have held to Protestantism when it was very much to their disadvantage, for it to be simply a conjob.) The great Fennellite Refusal is an utter refusal to try to understand what it is like to believe what he anathematises - to be a Unionist, a revisionist, an American neocon, etc march - as if old people are not citizens entitled to express their views like anyone else. The photographers treat marchers' being Hibernicus I don't see Desmond Fennell putting forward an idea of a 'conspiratorial elite'. He does refer to an 'informal' grouping (a 'correctorate' as he would call them). Talking about liberals in the USA from the time of Roosevelts New Deal to the present, he notes: As often before in history, it was a case of political power and a new idealist vision working together towards their distinct objectives. Rulers who wish to increase their power and wealth finding substantial common cause with innovative idealists who want to render human life as they believe it ought to be. The rulers empowering themselves by selectively supporting the idealists’ programme, while the latter celebrate them as enlightened and virtuous rulers. The idealists ending up powerful in a semblance of their envisioned life that has been tailored to suit the rulers’ interests. ....a kind kind of informal mutual cooperation and rewarding strategy that we see played out in the press and TV constantly
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 12, 2013 13:35:17 GMT
I haven't read all that much of Desmond Fennell but I get the impression he doesn't "think with the Church" as much as a Catholic intellectual should. I might be wrong. I don't think being a Catholic intellectual is just a matter of not contradicting orthodoxy. Fennell seems to have developed a highly individualistic and detailed theory of history entirely off his own resources.
When I suggested he address my Chesterton Society, he told me he'd never read Chesterton to his knowledge-- so maybe I am prejudiced!!
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 12, 2013 21:21:33 GMT
Assisi - I would say that Fennell is more conspiratorial in his view of the governing elite than you think - though I admit he is vague on this as on much else, the way in which he repeatedly equates the USA and the USSR does suggest a degree of conscious planning rather than informal co-ordination. My central point, however, is that he assumes the elite - whether conspiratorial or informal - simply imposes its will on the mass of the people, who are treated as unthinking zombies. He doesn't really address the possibility that the people might have rational motives, even if these are disastrously mistaken or harmful, for going along with the elite. He simply assumes that anyone who disagrees with him must be beneath contempt.
I would agree with you, Maolseachlainn. I think Des Fennell has constructed a little world of his own and is not interested in dialogue with anyone else if that requires him to re-examine his presuppositions. (For example, he rants about "jungle music" reflecting the moral chaos unleashed by Hiroshima, and seems to completely dismiss the possibility that people might actually like it - I presume he means syncopated music influenced by African styles, but he never bothers to explain what exactly he means when he talks of "jungle music.") One of his recurring complaints is that the world does not recognise (and subsidise) his intellectual ventures at his own high estimation. A serious thinker would not care about that as much as about perfecting the expression of his thought and finding disciples to pass it on. I'm surprised Fennell has never read Chesterton given that he was already moving in the Dublin Catholic journalistic world in the 1950s, but perhaps Chesterton was seen as a bit passe in some circles by them. (Ben Kiely has a definite Chesterton influence BTW - you would know he read a lot of Chesterton at an impressionable age even if he didn't say so in one of his memoirs - though he is also reacting against what he sees as his excessive optimism. It would be interesting to compare THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY with THE CARDS OF THE GAMBLER, which is very much influenced by it.)
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