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Post by hibernicus on Aug 6, 2013 21:30:08 GMT
Alasdair, I think there is a third factor which would have undermined the mid-century version of Irish national identity, even if there had been no Vatican II and Northern Ireland had been defused peacefully, and that is economic modernisation and urbanisation. When the Irish Revival and its precursors spoke of the small farmers as the true Irish people, they were reacting against the limitations of the urban middle classes (both Catholic and Protestant) but they were also making a pretty straightforward observation. 100 years ago the farmers and the people of the small towns were the majority (overwhelmingly so if you take the 26-county area) and many inhabitants of the cities had recent connections to the land. It was in the early 1960s that the Republic ceased to be majority-rural, but rural society was in decline well before that. I've seen commenters in the 1900s lamenting that the farmers' victory in the Land War had failed to stem the drift from the land in terms very like those used a few decades later by those lamenting that independence hadn't stopped emigration, and well into the 1950s various commentators were calling for small-farm society to be preserved by government fiat and/or community action. This IMHO is one big problem with Des Fennell's and John Waters' suggestion that the present-day "Dublin 4" mentality can simply be seen as an inheritor of pre-independence Southern Unionism and west Britonism, because it is centred in the same Dublin suburbs inhabited by such people pre-1914; there are certain similarities between the two classes but they exist in a very different Ireland, and "Dublin 4" makes up a much larger and more firmly-rooted part of the country than the earlier version. The way Dublin (and to a lesser extent the provincial cities) has developed, in terms of the emptying out of the countryside and the migration of former smallholders and their descendants to housing estates on the edge of the traditional city core, with corresponding cultural fragmentation and secularisation, is very like the European pattern since 1945 - in Palermo, or Milan, or other cities - in the 40s and 50s they drew in labour from their own shrinking rural sector or from poorer neighbouring countries, now they do it from further east or from North Africa and the Middle east - the Poles here and in Britain now are what the Irish in Britain once were. This is the sort of urban migration that liberal or leftist Catholics of various hues were trying to address in the period immediately before and after Vatican II - whatever we think of their attempted solutions, they had identified a real problem, and the way to address it is not with feudal fantasies of returning to an era of lord and peasant, as some trads do.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 6, 2013 21:48:23 GMT
Another thought that comes to mind in the Irish context is that the growth of a secularist and secularising state bureaucracy has some affinities with early modern Europe - just as the early modern absolutist-bureaucratic state, with its assertion of a monopoly of power and violence and its bureaucratic organisation of the state resources, was a response to the internal conflicts of late feudalism and the prospect that if you didn't organise like the new-model states you'd get swallowed by them (and organising meant having a new class of lay bureaucrats who were willing to handle existing institutions, including the church, roughly), so the Irish state reacted to its economic failures by adopting a new model of bureaucratic planning and gearing the educational system to produce the sort of administrators needed. If you look at Tom Garvin's books on the failures of the mid-century state, you see a mindset which in some respects is not too far removed from Thomas Cromwell. (Geoffrey Elton's eulogisation of Cromwell as meritocratic planner dealing with irrational feudal relics, which is where Hillary Mantel's version of him comes from, is a product of postwar British moves towards a planned state; add post-Catholic resentment, which is where Mantel and a large number of her readers are coming from, and you begin to understand why her Cromwell novels have been such a hit; just as A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS has as much to do with postwar fear of totalitarian regimes crushing individuality as it has with the real More). Perhaps I've been rambling a bit in tonight's posts, but I think I am onto something. So many trads think we still are, or potentially could be, living in the Ireland of 1916 or 1936 or even 1966 - which in many cases they well remember- and haven't come to grips with how Ireland has changed and how those changes might be addressed. I return once more to the memory of the late IRISH FAMILY proclaiming after the 1992 Euro-referendum that even though it had been passed by 2-1 the fact that a few parishes in Connemara and West Kerry returned majorities against it meant "the real Ireland voted No". Too much Irish trad and nationalist-sovereigntist commentary is on that level IMHO.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 7, 2013 8:49:59 GMT
Do you think there is a possibility that this board pays too much attention to rad trads? They are really a minority (radical) of a minority (traditionalist, or even traditionally minded) of a minority (practicing, orthodox Catholics in Ireland). I've never encountered one in real life. I appreciate the danger of over-reaction-- Luther's famous image of the drunken rider falling off one side of the horse, then getting on and falling off the other-- and, since I guess the majority of people who post and read here are traditionally-minded, I appreciate the ever-present danger, to us, of becoming unthinkingly reactionary, and how salutary it is to guard against this. I also appreciate that ginger groups tend to have an influence well disproportionate to their numbers, and that rad trads might be to conservative Catholics what Trotskyists are to the left.
All the same I think the ideological forces that are coming to bear on Ireland and on Irish Catholicism are all coming from their opposite side of the spectrum. We (the modern Irish, or even the conservatively-minded modern Irish) are not in any real danger of idealizing our past or having a naively feudalistic vision of society, or replaying the conflicts of the twentieth-century. Mainstream Irish Catholics are not in any danger of becoming obsessed by liturgical purity, or veering towards misogyny or anti-semitism. We could go a lot further in the direction of concern for the liturgy, or resistance to the barmier strains of feminism or political correctness, without risking (or even beginning to risk) falling off the other side.
What danger is there that Desmond Fennell will sway Irish public opinion, or even win a following amongst ordinary Mass-goers? None. But what danger is there that Fr. Brian D'Arcy and "Bishop" Pat Buckley will?
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 7, 2013 20:44:52 GMT
Speaking for myself, I pay a lot of attention to the follies and vices of Catholic trads because this board is directed to a considerable extent at trads (note the sub-forums on the liturgy and the traditional Mass) and it is important to try to educate people (and myself) and to keep our minds clear. We do get radtrads turning up on this board quite regularly, demanding that we ignore such trivial matters as the Protection of Life in Pregnancy Bill to focus on the much more urgent business of declaring that all non-Catholics will go to Hell and anyone who disagrees with this automatically ceases to be a Catholic; since these obsessives generally wind up getting banned and having all their posts deleted to get them to go away you may not have noticed them. (One of the most problematic features of the ACP, by the way, is that they seem to operate a "no enemies to the left" policy - for example, they allowed "Bishop" Pat Buckley, who has trampled on large areas of Church teaching and excommunicated himself by his illicit consecration, to attend their AGM; in a recent tweet Fr Flannery in noting the recent death of Professor Sean Freyne boasts that he was "a great supporter of the ACP" - although Professor Freyne, whatever his private virtues, expressly denied the bodily resurrection of Our Lord: blog.beliefnet.com/bibleandculture/2010/11/the-historical-jesus-----sean-freynes-view.html Furthermore, precisely because we are so beset by dangers and enemies, we are often vulnerable to charlatans and predators who offer a seeming way out of the mess. One of the most tragic aspects of the stories of Palmar de Troya and Christina Gallagher is the sight of naive and decent people delivering themselves over to predators and charlatans who seemed to offer messages of hope. One of the purposes of this board is to try to teach people how to think, because if we are going to deal with the perils we face that's a sine qua non. I would also point out that the criticism on this board is not limited to trads - there are threads on the ACP and on Fintan O'Toole, the pro-life and what it says in the papers threads regularly take notice of what the IRISH TIMES is up to, etc. Hope this answers your question - any suggestions for improvement will be gratefully received.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 10, 2013 0:30:21 GMT
Suggestions for improvement-- it's a tough one because I think a forum like this is very dependent on people actually turning up and participating, and that seems to be in the lap of the gods (excuse the polytheistic turn of phrase). A few years ago I was a regular poster on the forum of The Philip Larkin Society in England. It was a vibrant forum with perhaps ten or so regulars, who were all passionate about Larkin, and a good number of occasional contributors. Then the webmaster died, the forum was taken offline to be redesigned-- and when it finally reappeared there was nobody to post there anymore, most of the (few) posts now having no replies at all. This despite Larkin's apparently ever-burgeoning popularity.
There seem to be a lot of "lurkers" here. Perhaps topics that invite peoples' own personal experience might draw them out? People who are slow to put forward an opinion are often more willing to relate their own experiences, which they know better than anybody. I'm thinking about experiences of Catholic schools, parish life, interactions with secular colleagues, prayer, etc. This just to get things moving a bit more, which I think might be needed.
Another suggestion is that we might exchange ideas on how to handle various questions that come up in apologetics-- this was my thinking behind the "How to argue against euthanasia" thread. I think this would be helpful-- it would certainly be helpful to me.
Of course, I think the forum is already good as it is, despite my comments about the concentration upon rad trads! I am in awe at the erudition of the other posters, especially as regards Irish Catholic history, and also international Catholic history.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 13, 2013 13:27:06 GMT
The importance of national identity is relative in the universal Church. There is however one factor which reinforces the need for a sense of national identity and that is globalism. This is a topic which might be discussed in its own right.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 13, 2013 19:53:31 GMT
The big problem about globalism IMHO is that the world is too interdependent for it to be done away with, but too differentiated for it to work. Oddly enough John J Reilly (now deceased and unfortunately his very interesting website has gone) whom I used to link to a lot, suggested that in some respects Catholicism was better suited to a world government than a world of nation-states. (He was an odd Catholic Spenglerian, who used to argue that Spengler's view that the world was going to develop into a single civilisation in which nation states would merge, the decisive shape of this empire being given by the last state to merge, which Spengler thought during WWI would be Germany and Reilly thought would be the USA. That looks less plausible now than it did 8-10 years ago.) Reilly did have a point though when he said that for much of church history the idea that the "natural" form of government was an universal empire was deeply embedded in theology, though the idea that such an empire might be or pave the way for Antichrist was also deeply feared.
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Post by pugio on Aug 16, 2013 17:57:43 GMT
Hello. I suppose there are two salient questions relating to national identity. The first is what the proper Catholic attitude should be towards nationhood in the abstract. The second is what concern Irish Catholics should have for Irish national identity in current circumstances. (For these purposes I am understanding national identity as a sense of nationhood, and patriotism as a willing the good of the nation as a nation.)
It seems to me that Catholics have a duty to patriotism as an expression of love and piety, just as they have a duty towards family and community etc. Ideally, national patriotism should be merely the localised expression of Chesterton's cosmic patriotism already mentioned by maolsheachlann. I believe the Church has spoken on this before, though I'm afraid can't quote anything. And this is all very well in the context of a wider Catholic civilisation. But the question is complicated when national identity becomes a decisive factor in a wider religious/cultural/civilizational conflict or vice versa.
This, I think, is the messy situation in which Ireland finds herself. Especially since the disappearance of the Irish language, Ireland has long risked becoming a province of Anglo-America, empty of any substantive cultural content, but indulging in periodic bouts of toe-curling nostalgia. Although culturally and demographically dwarfed on either side by England and the United States, Ireland was kept spiritually, intellectually, and organisationally connected to a broader community by the strength of Catholicism. So the collapse of Catholicism here not only marks the end of a particular feature of Irish culture, it makes it harder for that culture to actually re-assert or reimagine itself.
Many advanced nationalists in the early twentieth century clearly understood political separatism and cultural revival not as a revolt against Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but rather against contemporary Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilisation as they perceived it, i.e. modern, liberal, capitalist, individualistic, atomising, homogenising, and, in short, un-Catholic. Back then they had a choice between English civilisation and something else that had yet to be fully defined but was full of possibility. Nowadays the picture is bleaker is some ways. Not only have we, to paraphrase Joe Lee, scrambled for political independence while succumbing ever more to cultural dependency, we now also have collective memory of a supposedly failed experiment in cultural independence.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 26, 2013 11:04:32 GMT
At the end of the day, culture independence is more important than political independence. We, as well as many other nations, have lost this in the face of globablism.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 31, 2013 18:12:00 GMT
I think cultural independence is less important than cultural confidence. A minority people in a larger state (always provided the state is prepared to tolerate minority cultures' self-expression) who have a clear sense of their identity and a commitment to it, may be better off than an independent state which has lost its raison d'etre. Also cultural independence doesn't exist in a vacuum; it is very hard to maintain a culture when its economic underpinnings are under threat (for example, one reason why the Welsh language survived better than Irish in the nineteenth century was because the industrialisation of Wales allowed Welsh-speakers to find employment in a Welsh-speaking milieu, and the collapse of traditional Welsh industries after World War I precipitated a major cultural crisis (partly because it increased migration out of Wales). This wasn't a single-cause thing (another source of problems was that the Welsh language had come to be heavily associated with the Nonconformist chapels and their associated culture, which meant it tended to retreat into a private realm and leave the public sphere to English.
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Post by chercheur on Sept 2, 2013 22:53:33 GMT
Suggestions for improvement-- it's a tough one because I think a forum like this is very dependent on people actually turning up and participating, and that seems to be in the lap of the gods (excuse the polytheistic turn of phrase). A few years ago I was a regular poster on the forum of The Philip Larkin Society in England. It was a vibrant forum with perhaps ten or so regulars, who were all passionate about Larkin, and a good number of occasional contributors. Then the webmaster died, the forum was taken offline to be redesigned-- and when it finally reappeared there was nobody to post there anymore, most of the (few) posts now having no replies at all. This despite Larkin's apparently ever-burgeoning popularity. There seem to be a lot of "lurkers" here. Perhaps topics that invite peoples' own personal experience might draw them out? People who are slow to put forward an opinion are often more willing to relate their own experiences, which they know better than anybody. I'm thinking about experiences of Catholic schools, parish life, interactions with secular colleagues, prayer, etc. This just to get things moving a bit more, which I think might be needed. Another suggestion is that we might exchange ideas on how to handle various questions that come up in apologetics-- this was my thinking behind the "How to argue against euthanasia" thread. I think this would be helpful-- it would certainly be helpful to me. Of course, I think the forum is already good as it is, despite my comments about the concentration upon rad trads! I am in awe at the erudition of the other posters, especially as regards Irish Catholic history, and also international Catholic history. I find myself lurking rather than participating for a few reasons. One is practical. I type slowly. Another is that I feel ignorant compared to some.....indeed I AM ignorant compared to some.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 3, 2013 17:01:27 GMT
Believe me, nobody on this board is as erudite as they seem. Its project is to pool our mutual ignorance and share what some of us know. Everyone has something to contribute, if we'll ten to others and think about our own lives and questions.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 4, 2013 7:31:24 GMT
Believe me, nobody on this board is as erudite as they seem. Its project is to pool our mutual ignorance and share what some of us know. Everyone has something to contribute, if we'll ten to others and think about our own lives and questions. Reminds me of the late Doris Manly's masthead in The Ballintrillick Review: "this magazine makes no pretence of moral superiority. It is produced exclusively by and for sinners" (might not have got this right after more than 20 years). I think we all try to throw in something here and see what we get out of it. However, if there are more frequent contributors, it will draw more in. On the other hand, I wouldn't want this to become a sounding board either - Hibernicus and I participate in a couple of other fora which tend to be just that.
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Post by rogerbuck on Sept 5, 2013 13:55:58 GMT
I have reading through this thread, gripped. In time, I will want to ask/say much. But for now, re: Second, much of the particularism of the older generation was related to a deliberate policy of provincialisation - the efforts of earlier nationalists and Catholics, most strongly in the early-to-mid-twentieth centuries, to insulate Ireland from British (and to a lesser extent) American popular culture and to promote distinctively Irish and Catholic local substitutes. My generation (mid-to-late 40s provincials) were still touched by the aftereffects of this policy, despite its collapse from the 60s onwards. (The most lurid British tabloids were not sold outside Dublin until the mid-80s, large areas of the country had no access to non-Irish TV and in some remote regions shops didn't sell the IRISH TIMES, provincial papers were still owned by long-established local families who mostly sold up in the subsequent boom, etc). I would like to ask either you, Hibernicus or any poster of similar generation to "(mid-to-late 40s provincials)" or older, a question. What did these "aftereffects" mean for your life? What did they yield in forming you as a person - good or bad? Any attempts to answer this, I guess, will have to draw on some speculative comparisons that are not straightforward. I mean, one would have to compare, then, with either the situation of later Irish generations or maybe the situation of, say, Irish Catholics growing up in England or the Six Counties etc in the same era.
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Post by rogerbuck on Sept 8, 2013 9:24:35 GMT
Hm, a confession to make, I think.
When I asked above, as to what effects growing up in a culturally protected provincial Ireland might have had on Hibernicus (or any other person of his generation or older) I was and am truthfully interested in both what is good and bad.
However, I think I am fishing for the good ...
In this thread, as elsewhere, Hibernicus shows how very expert he is at deconstruction. And I am sincerely grateful. Elsewhere I acknowledged how grateful I am for his thoroughly confronting the horror of the scandals and his very evenhanded deconstructions. Evenhanded, as in deconstructing both the deniers and the propagandists. And I just drank deeply of his deconstruction of Cooney's book on Archbishop McQuaid.
So I appreciate the deconstruction here of the shadowy side of Irish cultural protectionism. I think it good to illumine what is not legitimate, what is imposed, what is concocted on questionable grounds...
Nonetheless, there can be a danger with too much deconstruction. One can miss beauty.
I know I am still very naive about Ireland. However, at this point in my thinking, I do imagine there was something legitimate to these aspirations, as well as illegitimate.
I asked Hibernicus and others of his generation and older ...
I find myself wondering how these generations would imagine themselves had they been born in Ireland in 1990 say ... instead of 1950 or 1960? Would they still have the same faith?
Do I ask for impossible speculations? Yes, in a sense, but even impossible questions are worth asking.
There is so, so, so much being said about what culturally protected Catholic Ireland denied people.
I really would like to hear any thoughts on what it might have given people ...
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