Post by hibernicus on Jul 29, 2014 19:39:55 GMT
I think Pearse does tell us something about the decline, because he is a striking example of national-Catholicism turning into idolatry, and of the assumption that every Irish person must agree with a particular version of nationalism and that anyone who disagrees with it is a traitor to God and country alike. (There is admittedly an alternative form in which the nationalism-Catholicism merger can be perverted, which is to see the nationalist movement or nation-state as a machine to provide jobs for the Catholic boys, a significant proportion of said boys being bishops' nephews and priests' brothers-in-law. I can think of examples of this both before and after independence.)
I still shudder when I think of how Criostoir O'Floinn writes about the Pearse debates in his book A WRITER'S LIFE. Not only does he think Pearse was a hero (which is an arguable view) he cannot see how any honest person can think that Pearse was wrong, so when O'Floinn comes across someone who says that Pearse was wrong, he immediately concludes that that person must be in the pay of the British.
What Pearse is doing, in those last writings especially, is saying that the time for talk is now over and the time to decide and act is here and irrevocable. (A comparison might be with Chesterton's comment on an open mind, that the purpose of opening your mind like opening your mouth is to close it on something solid, and it is as foolish to go on opening your mind forever and ever as to go on opening your mouth forever and ever. Actually there are certain similarities in sensibility between Pearse and Chesterton, they are both products of, and reacting against, the late-Victorian bourgeois-liberal era (known in other contexts as the belle epoque, with the objection that it was only "belle" for certain people) who find it criminally complacent and deadly boring and are looking for a heroic challenge to evil and corruption. Bernard Bergonzi's book on First World War literature actually cites THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL as an example of fin de siecle romanticisation of warfare, and I think that the romanticisation of 1798 and the Fenians by Revival writers like Alice Milligan (who is expressly contrasting them with the late Victorian industrial Belfast region where she grew up), or Pearse's regular contrast of the Western peasant with the snobby Unionist or quasi unionist respectable classes of Rathmines has certain affinities to Chesterton.
To get back to Alasdair's point, I think two of the drawbacks of our version of national-Catholicism, and the image of 1916 as reawakening a corrupted nation to its true spiritual destiny, are that (a) it discourages thought about how we got to where we are now, and what might be the best way to get out of it - it simply assumes that if we blow the trumpet loud enough, everyone will rally to the call, and that the possibility that under our present circumstances blowing the trumpet may be like going down to Carlisle Circus in Belfast on the morning of 12 July and assuming that the Orangemen assembled there in procession will all immediately be converted to Catholicism if you sing "Faith of Our Fathers" to them, and if that doesn't work the only possible tactic must be for someone to come back next year and sing "Faith of Our Fathers" to them again.
(b) It encourages a cultic mindset, in which fantasists and charlatans proclaim themselves the new infallible leader and tell everyone to do what they say without question. If the leader has a certain degree of charisma and cunning, they will get a certain number of uncritical followers who will accept the leader's claims to infallibility at their own word, and who will savage anyone who points out that the self-appointed leader has made blunder after blunder and seems to be driven by their own ego or by the collection money. Cults are not just maintained by the leader's deceptions, but by the desire of followers to be deceived.
Let me suggest another parallel for the Pearsean model, and that is the discernment of apparitions and private revelations. Obviously the tests for the authenticity of private revelations can be used as a way of evading the possibility that this might be genuine; obviously there are instances when genuine visionaries have been treated cruelly (St Catherine Laboure got rather a rough deal during her lifetime, for example); obviously once you believe such a thing is genuine you can no longer keep a perfectly open mind. But to treat Pearse's rhetoric as applicable in all times and circumstances is to fall into the same trap as those genuinely good and pious people - I can think of some - who have seriously maintained that we ought to accept immediately anyone who claims to have received a private revelation, and dismiss the possibility of fraud or delusion out of hand.
Or to look at it another way - well back into the nineteenth century commentators, Catholic/nationalists as well as unionist/protestants and liberal/secularists (to use the term very broadly) have defined our national failing as the combination of a massively romanticised and idealised official self-image with a private cynicism/nihilism, which in turn derives from conscious or unconscious awareness of the gap between rhetoric and reality. The cynicism/nihilism in turn is overdone because there is actually more substance to the idealised picture than we realise, but because it is presented in such unreal terms we don't grasp what is real in it but assume it was all a delusion. (Since DP Moran's PHILOSOPHY OF IRISH IRELAND has come up in this discussion, it is worth recalling his remark about young men of his generation repeating the official rhetoric about Ireland being a land of saints and scholars without understanding what it was based on, and consequently suspecting in their hearts that the Irish were really a pack of savages until the Normans came.) This cycle of actual achievement coupled with massive exaggeration and followed by nihilistic disillusion when the feet of clay become all too visible is seen in every nationalist movement of the nineteenth century, it's seen when the post-1916 movement ends in the Civil War, it's seen all too painfully in the twentieth-century history of the Irish Catholic Church and in the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger.
The heroic leader tends to simplify and to end up in defeat and disillusion, but they usually achieve something concrete en route. The pseudo-heroic leader offers a flight straight into delusion which ends in disaster and making things worse than before, and his followers will attack anyone who points out their delusion because it is delusion that they want. Whether you think Pearse was a heroic or a pseudo-heroic leader, people who think they can achieve everything they want by just repeating his rhetoric and tactics without reference to their own actual circumstances are guaranteed to end up in disaster.
Too many Catholics and pro-lifers think that today Ireland is like O'Connell on the eve of Catholic Emancipation, or just before the post-1916 rise of Sinn Fein; just blow the trumpet, and everyone will rally. It's more like Ireland after Cromwell or after Aughrim; everything that seemed so solid has been destroyed, we must start again from the beginning under very unpromising circumstances (which are going to get worse IMHO) and it will take generations to achieve anything. What we need are Nehemiahs and Ezras to build the walls of Jerusalem from the ground, the hard way, and to rediscover and proclaim the forgotten Law. (Or in the Irish context, like the Young IReland writers of the NATION trying to articulate their understanding of Irishness and educate the people in it so that they would no longer be dependent on the erratic charisma of a single man, or the Gaelic Revivalists and Cultural Revivalists trying to understand and explain how the remarkable achievements of the Parnell movement had ended in civil dissension, humiliation and defeat and how it was possible to articulate and propagate an understanding of IRishness that rested on popular understanding rather than being dependent on a single great but flawed leader.)
This is a hard saying, but I think we need to understand it. If you have any reasoned disagreement with it, I'm willing to listen. That I think is the first thing we need - reasoned understanding, which is based on mutual trust (within limits) and acceptance of each other's good faith (within limits).
I think I have gone on long enough for now. Any thoughts?
I still shudder when I think of how Criostoir O'Floinn writes about the Pearse debates in his book A WRITER'S LIFE. Not only does he think Pearse was a hero (which is an arguable view) he cannot see how any honest person can think that Pearse was wrong, so when O'Floinn comes across someone who says that Pearse was wrong, he immediately concludes that that person must be in the pay of the British.
What Pearse is doing, in those last writings especially, is saying that the time for talk is now over and the time to decide and act is here and irrevocable. (A comparison might be with Chesterton's comment on an open mind, that the purpose of opening your mind like opening your mouth is to close it on something solid, and it is as foolish to go on opening your mind forever and ever as to go on opening your mouth forever and ever. Actually there are certain similarities in sensibility between Pearse and Chesterton, they are both products of, and reacting against, the late-Victorian bourgeois-liberal era (known in other contexts as the belle epoque, with the objection that it was only "belle" for certain people) who find it criminally complacent and deadly boring and are looking for a heroic challenge to evil and corruption. Bernard Bergonzi's book on First World War literature actually cites THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL as an example of fin de siecle romanticisation of warfare, and I think that the romanticisation of 1798 and the Fenians by Revival writers like Alice Milligan (who is expressly contrasting them with the late Victorian industrial Belfast region where she grew up), or Pearse's regular contrast of the Western peasant with the snobby Unionist or quasi unionist respectable classes of Rathmines has certain affinities to Chesterton.
To get back to Alasdair's point, I think two of the drawbacks of our version of national-Catholicism, and the image of 1916 as reawakening a corrupted nation to its true spiritual destiny, are that (a) it discourages thought about how we got to where we are now, and what might be the best way to get out of it - it simply assumes that if we blow the trumpet loud enough, everyone will rally to the call, and that the possibility that under our present circumstances blowing the trumpet may be like going down to Carlisle Circus in Belfast on the morning of 12 July and assuming that the Orangemen assembled there in procession will all immediately be converted to Catholicism if you sing "Faith of Our Fathers" to them, and if that doesn't work the only possible tactic must be for someone to come back next year and sing "Faith of Our Fathers" to them again.
(b) It encourages a cultic mindset, in which fantasists and charlatans proclaim themselves the new infallible leader and tell everyone to do what they say without question. If the leader has a certain degree of charisma and cunning, they will get a certain number of uncritical followers who will accept the leader's claims to infallibility at their own word, and who will savage anyone who points out that the self-appointed leader has made blunder after blunder and seems to be driven by their own ego or by the collection money. Cults are not just maintained by the leader's deceptions, but by the desire of followers to be deceived.
Let me suggest another parallel for the Pearsean model, and that is the discernment of apparitions and private revelations. Obviously the tests for the authenticity of private revelations can be used as a way of evading the possibility that this might be genuine; obviously there are instances when genuine visionaries have been treated cruelly (St Catherine Laboure got rather a rough deal during her lifetime, for example); obviously once you believe such a thing is genuine you can no longer keep a perfectly open mind. But to treat Pearse's rhetoric as applicable in all times and circumstances is to fall into the same trap as those genuinely good and pious people - I can think of some - who have seriously maintained that we ought to accept immediately anyone who claims to have received a private revelation, and dismiss the possibility of fraud or delusion out of hand.
Or to look at it another way - well back into the nineteenth century commentators, Catholic/nationalists as well as unionist/protestants and liberal/secularists (to use the term very broadly) have defined our national failing as the combination of a massively romanticised and idealised official self-image with a private cynicism/nihilism, which in turn derives from conscious or unconscious awareness of the gap between rhetoric and reality. The cynicism/nihilism in turn is overdone because there is actually more substance to the idealised picture than we realise, but because it is presented in such unreal terms we don't grasp what is real in it but assume it was all a delusion. (Since DP Moran's PHILOSOPHY OF IRISH IRELAND has come up in this discussion, it is worth recalling his remark about young men of his generation repeating the official rhetoric about Ireland being a land of saints and scholars without understanding what it was based on, and consequently suspecting in their hearts that the Irish were really a pack of savages until the Normans came.) This cycle of actual achievement coupled with massive exaggeration and followed by nihilistic disillusion when the feet of clay become all too visible is seen in every nationalist movement of the nineteenth century, it's seen when the post-1916 movement ends in the Civil War, it's seen all too painfully in the twentieth-century history of the Irish Catholic Church and in the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger.
The heroic leader tends to simplify and to end up in defeat and disillusion, but they usually achieve something concrete en route. The pseudo-heroic leader offers a flight straight into delusion which ends in disaster and making things worse than before, and his followers will attack anyone who points out their delusion because it is delusion that they want. Whether you think Pearse was a heroic or a pseudo-heroic leader, people who think they can achieve everything they want by just repeating his rhetoric and tactics without reference to their own actual circumstances are guaranteed to end up in disaster.
Too many Catholics and pro-lifers think that today Ireland is like O'Connell on the eve of Catholic Emancipation, or just before the post-1916 rise of Sinn Fein; just blow the trumpet, and everyone will rally. It's more like Ireland after Cromwell or after Aughrim; everything that seemed so solid has been destroyed, we must start again from the beginning under very unpromising circumstances (which are going to get worse IMHO) and it will take generations to achieve anything. What we need are Nehemiahs and Ezras to build the walls of Jerusalem from the ground, the hard way, and to rediscover and proclaim the forgotten Law. (Or in the Irish context, like the Young IReland writers of the NATION trying to articulate their understanding of Irishness and educate the people in it so that they would no longer be dependent on the erratic charisma of a single man, or the Gaelic Revivalists and Cultural Revivalists trying to understand and explain how the remarkable achievements of the Parnell movement had ended in civil dissension, humiliation and defeat and how it was possible to articulate and propagate an understanding of IRishness that rested on popular understanding rather than being dependent on a single great but flawed leader.)
This is a hard saying, but I think we need to understand it. If you have any reasoned disagreement with it, I'm willing to listen. That I think is the first thing we need - reasoned understanding, which is based on mutual trust (within limits) and acceptance of each other's good faith (within limits).
I think I have gone on long enough for now. Any thoughts?