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Post by hibernicus on Apr 30, 2013 17:23:12 GMT
Given the prominence of Fintan O'Toole I thought it might be an idea to start a thread on his mindset, possibly with the aim of doing a BRANDSMA piece on him at some time in the future. One recent O'Tooleism which illustrates his habit of playing with language to avoid addressing the points made by his opponents, or even admitting that they have a coherent viewpoint, comes in this extract from his review of the Broadway production of Colm Toibin's atrocity THE TESTAMENT OF MARY www.irishtimes.com/culture/sometimes-even-on-broadway-words-speak-louder-than-actions-1.1372755EXTRACT Tóibín’s text is indeed trying to have it both ways; to tap into a sense of religious yearning without the necessity for religious belief. Warner and Shaw’s vision is more one-eyed. It does not wish to see the aura of aching that surrounds the play’s scepticism. [i] [i]Oddly, they seem to agree with the small band of protesters who gathered outside on Monday night that the play is simply an attack on religious mystery. But it isn’t. One of the most beautiful parts of the Dublin version was a passage in which Mary confesses that she has been to worship at the temple of Artemis. The idea is shocking, but it is also utterly poignant: even the Blessed Virgin needs a blessed virgin to pray to. The moment is cut on Broadway. Shaw’s ferocious, unstoppable, thrillingly aggressive Mary is not allowed to yearn for such consolation. END But of course the play IS an attack on "religious mystery" as anything other than a subjective human yearning; an attack on the idea that there might be a Reality to which it corresponds, and that Jesus and Mary embody that Reality. What O'Toole is saying in his dismissive remark about the protestors is that such an idea is so absolutely unthinkable that it can safely be indulged as a fantasy, and that the producers are excessively frightened of being sucked back into the world of the yahoos.
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tobias
Junior Member
Posts: 77
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Post by tobias on Apr 30, 2013 21:35:30 GMT
I think you may be giving Mr. O'Toole more notriety than he deserves.
Anyway, away you go!
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 13, 2013 22:10:29 GMT
I am currently reading Fintan O'Toole's ENOUGH IS ENOUGH - HOW TO BUILD A NEW REPUBLIC and I must say that the account of the development of Catholic health and education in the chapter "The Myth of Charity" contains some shockingly bad history, so bad as to suggest either that he is utterly incompetent or he is deliberately misleading his readers. The most charitable interpretation of this farrago (I am not BTW saying that all his statements are false or that none of his criticisms are true) is that he is so obsessed by his hobbyhorses that he projects them onto his reading and assumes agreement with his views where none exists.
I do not have time to deal with all his misstatements at present, but I will pick up on one particularly egregious one. After an account of the development of the Catholic school system in Ireland, which is oversimplified to put it politely, O'Toole has the following passage (pp95-96): EXTRACT "That it [i.e. the Irish system - HIB] was indeed specific [i.e. a local Irish development rather than something universal to Catholicism - HIB] is evident if we consider a whole other Irish Catholic tradition that arose at the same time - in America. In the US, Irish Catholics were in a very different situation from their co-religionists in Ireland. They were a minority within a Protestant-dominated official culture. If there was to be a fusion of Church and state in the US, the church in question would not be of the Holy, Roman and Apostolic variety. In these circumstances, the leadership of the Irish Catholic Church took precisely the opposite view to the one that became dominant at home. It argued - brilliantly and with obvious sincerity - for the separation of Church and State. In 1884 the Kilkenny-born Archbishop of St Paul, Minnesota, Dr John Ireland, gave a startling address to the third plenary council of the American Catholic Church. It was called 'The Catholic Church and Civil Society'. Ireland, who had served as a chaplain for the Union army during the Civil War and was passionately committed to republican democracy, argued that 'the principles of the Church are in thorough harmony with the interests of the Republic'. Against the obscurantist authoritarianism of much official Catholic teaching in Europe, Ireland argued that the 'laws and institutions' of the American republic, including the constitutional separation of church and state, were the fulfilment of the Christian vision of equality and human rights. Catholics, Ireland argued, should feel 'love and admiration for the republican form of government'. Ireland's position was subsequently denounced by Pope Leo XIII as 'the Americanist heresy'. But it enabled generations of Irish Catholic women to become the driving force of the (strictly non-religious) public school system in the US. And it marks an alternative Irish Catholic tradition that is at ease with a state that upholds religious liberty by keeping its distance from any one religion".
The extent of the suppressio veri and suggestion falsi in this passage is quite breathtaking. Let me point out a few examples: (1) The impression which the casual and ignorant reader would take from this passage is that American Catholics, unlike their Irish counterparts, saw no need to create a separate Catholic school system and were happy to send their children to secular state schools. As a matter of fact, Ireland (and possibly some other bishops) favoured sending Catholic children to state schools and having separate religious education classes, but this was not generally acted on. Instead, in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth centuries, American Catholics ploughed vast resources into creating an independent Catholic school system (and indeed a hospital system, and a system of universities). They did this because they saw its value in educating children in their faith, and because they knew full well that the state system could be, and in many places was, deliberately used to undermine the faith of Catholic children. Throughout this period they lobbied extensively to get state funds for Catholic schools, exactly on the Irish model. They did not get it (in many places) because of anti-Catholic hostility, at first from Protestant nativists and later from secularists. The US Catholic school system has been severely affected by suburbanisation and the decline of the teaching orders (which subsidised it on a considerable scale by ploughing their salaries back into it) but it still survives and is renowned for its effectiveness. Nobody who is familiar with public affairs in the US as Mr O'Toole is can be unaware of the existence of this school system, so why does he write as if it didn't exist?
(2) It is true that throughout the C19 and C20 there were always large numbers of Catholic children in public schools, and that jobs as teachers in state schools were a major means of social mobility for many Catholic immigrant women. What O'Toole does not mention is that this situation arose because large Catholic concentrations in urban areas meant that in many places state schools were Catholic in all but name because the catchment areas (and hence the students) and the teachers were overwhelmingly Catholic, and in many cases local government was dominated by Catholic politicians who winked at this Catholicisation of public schools. (It will be recognised that this is much more like the Irish situation than O'Toole lets on.) This was the situation in Boston, for example, for much of the twentieth century, and its breakdown was one of the reasons why the busing crisis there was so explosive. See Philip Lawler's book on Catholic Boston THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED, for a (somewhat one-sided) account of this.
(3)One reason why the transformation of state schools in Catholic districts into quasi-Catholic institutions was winked at for so long is that O'Toole has deliberately mixed up two different interpretations of "separation of church and state" and projected the strictly secularist view that he favours (and which was imposed in a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s and 60s) back into the earlier period. IN the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries "separation of church and state" in the USA was interpreted simply as meaning the absence of an established state church (such as the Anglican church in England, or the Catholic church in various parts of the continent). It was not seen as incompatible with the state's adherence to a general non-denominational Christian ethos (in practice tending to be non-denominationally Protestant). At precisely the same historical moment that Ireland spoke, the US Supreme Court was upholding laws against Mormon polygamy on the explicit grounds that the US was a Christian state and the Constitution might not mention Christianity but presupposed it. The same ethos obtained in the school system, which assumed a non-denominational Christianity (with the caveat noted above); this was why Ireland thought Catholic education could be done within these schools as an "add-on" to a common Christian core. Ireland certainly was not advocating the sort of "strictly non-religious" ethos found in present-day American public schools (even now in many rural areas state schools are somewhat more religiously-tinged than in big cities), nor did he mean by "separation of church and state" the French-style view that religion must be confined to the private sphere and excluded from public life.
(4) O'Toole implies that Ireland favoured "separation of church and state" and "republicanism" or "republican democracy" in precisely the same sense that O'Toole himself does. As we have seen, O'Toole does this in part by egregiously blurring the difference between nineteenth-century American republicanism and the version found in France (and dominant in American state institutions and among American liberals today). Leo XIII's condemnation of "Americanism" is a complicated issue (see Russell Shaw's new book AMERICAN CHURCH for an introduction) but basically what he opposed was the view that the American model of government and of church-state relations was of universal validity and should be followed everywhere; he did not condemn it as applied in America. Insofar as he condemned it, he did so out of fear that it would inevitably lead to the sort of doctrinaire state secularism advocated by O'Toole, and Ireland's whole case rests on the view that it would not in fact have this effect - Ireland would have been just as hostile to O'Toole's view as Leo.
(5) O'Toole talks of the Irish Catholic Church in America as if it was a separate body from the Roman one, and as if Ireland was its unquestioned leader. In fact, the faction of bishops opposed to "Americanism" on the grounds that it was too sanguine about the compatibility of America and Catholicism was led by Archbishop Corrigan of New York and Cardinal O'Connell of Boston - who, as their names suggest, were just as "Irish" as Ireland, and as powerful within American Catholicism if not more so. Moreover, the view that Ireland's Americanism involved excessive conformity to American expectations, and was often ill-thought-through, is not confined to supporters of his "Romanising" opponents - for example, the history of his disastrous attempts to establish colonies of Irish emigrants in Minnesota, or the intolerance he displayed towards Eastern-rite Catholicism, which drove thousands of eastern-rite Catholics into the Orthodox Church, suggests a downside to his views which has to be taken into account. (Again, Shaw is good on what can be said for and against "Americanism" in the broader and vaguer sense, though Shaw takes Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore rather than Ireland as leading representative of Americanism.)
(6) Finally, when O'Toole talks of Ireland favouring American republicanism as the fulfilment of the Christian vision of equality and human rights, he does it in a way that gets Ireland (and most other American Catholics/Christians of his day) exactly backwards. Ireland, like most other contemporary US Catholics and Protestants, would have believed that republican institutions could only survive in the long run if the people were trained in religious beliefs and habits which, by causing them to see their actions in the light of eternity, would enable them to live up to the virtues necessary for republican citizenship. O'Toole's claim at the end of the chapter from which this quotation is taken that removing the church from the schools would set it free to come to terms with modernity and apply its insights to community actions rests on the opposite assumption - that the church must liberate itself from supernatural belief (which of course requires education to be understood and transmitted) and must see its mission simply as a social service agency implementing morality as defined by the state - a view which Pope Francis, whom nobody will accuse of undervaluing the Church''s social mission, has recently warned us against.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 16, 2013 20:43:18 GMT
The current issue of the NEW STATESMAN has an interesting piece on Donal Donovan and Antoin Murphy's THE FALL OF THE CELTIC TIGER, which references Fintan O'Toole's book SHIP OF FOOLS: HOW GREED AND STUPIDITY SANK THE CELTIC TIGER. The author (whose name I forget) notes that O'Toole's thesis, stated in his self-explanatory subtitle, overlooks two points. The first is that the Irish bubble was not an unique Irish phenomenon but represents something found in many such "bubble" situations over the years - the idea that rising asset prices must be a good thing and represent real lasting gain. The second is that the regulatory and non-regulatory decisions which led to the disaster were actually not taken unthinkingly (the politicians may have been unthinking, but the administrators weren't); they were based on a highly sophisticated analysis, which represented international conventional economic wisdom but turned out to be mistaken, that financial markets are self-regulating if left to themselves. This does not of course mean that the corruption and stupidity described by O'Toole did not exist, merely that they weren't the only causes. Two points come to mind on what this says on O'Toole's general style of argument. The first is that while he is fiercely hostile to the nationalist idea that Ireland is somehow incomparable with anywhere else in wisdom and virtue, he tends not to use this to argue that Ireland is more or less like other places; instead, he inverts nationalist idealisation and implies or downright states that Ireland is uniquely delusional, corrupt and demented. His view is that there is a straight path to modernity (generally involving a revival of post-1945 European social democracy) which Ireland must go back and replicate if it is to achieve anything, treating as contemptible such possibilities as (e.g.) that it may not be possible to reproduce postwar social democracy under present-day socio-economic conditions. The second is that he really does not consider the possibility that people who disagree with him have a worked-out analysis even if it is mistaken; he always likes to imply that what he wants to do is the obvious thing to do and the only possible thing to do, and everyone who disagrees with him is delusional or corrupt. (Note, for example, how he always assumes his opponents' view derive from amisunderstood or misplaced metaphor, whereas his own views represent cool clear reason.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 20, 2013 19:18:20 GMT
Today's IRISH TIMES has a piece by Fintan O'Toole discussing how the declining role of Catholicism in modern Ireland means that Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST has lost much of the impact it had for older generations. I want to focus on the second half of the essay, which I reproduce below for purpose of fair comment, as IMHO it shows the element of self-indulgence and evasion which lies at the heart of O'Toole's comment. As you will see below, O'Toole imagines a "conservative" discussing what the decline of Catholicism/Christianity has meant in cultural terms, and suggesting that this loss is disastrous. O'Toole goes on to argue that the greatest loss in this process is not the loss of faith, but of the thrill of apostasy. One obvious point is that this is a grumpy old man proclaiming that by shaking off the church his generation have made themselves the Greatest Generation and the young can never equal them - but let's look at it a bit more closely. First of all, we will note what O'Toole's strawman interlocutor, "the conservative" does not say. That is, he does not argue, as I here and now maintain, that Catholicism is in fact the true Church founded by Jesus, Who was God Incarnate, and through which He offers Himself to us; and that however apt Joyce and other apostates were in pointing out flaws in the church's human members and in its cultural presentation, their rejection of it was a disastrous mistake and a tragedy for them and all others influenced by them. "The conservative" seems to stand in the same relationship to faith as Matthew Arnold, nostalgic for lost certainties and looking for a substitute to perform the same functions in integrating human experience. Secondly, O'Toole maintains that the greatest loss is not any of these integrative functions, but the experience of apostasy and rebellion for its own sake. (The touch of romantic satanism in his remark on Joyce should not BTW mislead any conspiracy theorists into seeing O'Toole as a genuine satanist, as I have seen done with Marx and some others. Recall the greatest triumph of Satan is to get people to revere him while denying his actual existence.) This is a significant divide between conservative views of culture (such as those held by Arnold) and radical ones (such as those advanced by O'Toole). The big problem with Arnoldianism and similar conservative formulations (Arnold wanted a version of Anglicanism in which the traditional forms of faith were still used but had been emptied of their theological content, and in which high culture and the trained intellect basically took the place of religious revelation in explaining what it is to be human) is fundamental insincerity and despair. The big problems with radical views are two. The first is that mere rebellion is not enough by itself - as Arnold pointed out when mocking those who advocated "the Dissidence of dissent and the Protest of Protestantism", dissent and protest necessarily suppose some rival set of beliefs in whose name the protest is being made. You can't run a society on rebellion alone; somebody has to govern it, and that involves a set of decisions and choices and disagreements. Quite a wide variety of people feel the same exhilaration O'Toole describes in rejecting Catholicism when they adopt new self-definitions at odds with those prevailing in their society, whether these self-definitions are in fact good or evil. As I have learned by painful experience through trying to reason with such people on other blogs, anti-black racists feel the same exhilaration described by Mr O'Toole when they finally accept and intrepidly declare that everything makes sense once you realise that blacks are animals, that the fall of apartheid was a tragedy and that Irish culture should be "defended" from them; that they are voicing feelings which many people have in an inchoate way, and saying things not said in polite society. Similarly, Mr O'Toole's old bete noire Charles HAughey seems to have been driven by a similar reaction against the constraints of his impoverished Catholic boyhood when he lived by the principle that the rules were for little people and should not constrain NApoleonic geniuses like him. These heinous examples shows that the "rush" of rebellion and supposed insight Mr O'Toole exalts is (like the conservatism it opposes) morally neutral in itself and can be attached to evil and contemptible causes as well as good ones. It really cannot be detached from the question of whether the cause to which it is attached is actually true. Mr O'Toole blurs this because, as readers of his ENOUGH IS ENOUGH are aware, he actually has a very detailed (and noticeably authoritarian) view of the form the good society should take and how it should ensure that its citizens are suitably indoctrinated in "republican values" as defined by Mr O'Toole; an agenda which he wants to smuggle in by appealling to the exhilaration of rebellion for its own sake, just as Lenin and Stalin appealed to the glamour of revolution when imposing a new form of red tsarism. www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-impact-of-a-portrait-has-waned-for-modern-young-men-1.1468944EXTRACT Conservatives will frame this question in their own way. The secularisation of Ireland, they will say, is a self-inflicted wound; not just in spiritual or religious terms, but in relation to the continuity of culture. We’ve had 1,500 years of Irish art soaked in Christian imagery; how can a society understand its own heritage if it loses contact with this religious tradition? This is a perfectly valid question. It’s not just that it’s hard to appreciate a towering work of Irish art such as the Book of Kells if you don’t understand Christianity. It’s that it’s hard to connect even with, say, the work of a communist writer such as Seán O’Casey. The emotional climax of Juno and the Paycock is a prayer: “Sacred Heart o’ Jesus, take away our hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh! Take away this murdherin’ hate, an’ give us Thine own eternal love!” You don’t have to have been brought up in a Christian tradition to understand it, but you do have to have been brought up in a Christian tradition to fully feel it. But this conservative argument misses something important. Arguably the greatest cultural loss inherent in secularisation is not faith. It is apostasy. You can learn Christian history and Christian imagery even if you’ve never been near a church. You can’t learn the shock and joy, the terror and exhilaration of Stephen Dedalus’s “non serviam”. Stephen’s cry isn’t a storm of teenage hormones. It’s not a roll of the eyes or a surly pout. It is a momentous leap of unfaithfulness. The phrase – I will not serve – is, as the priest says in his thunderous sermon at the retreat, that of Lucifer himself. It is, in the Bible, the accusation of God himself against a fallen Israel: “Of old time thou hast broken my yolk, thou hast burst my bands and thou saidst: I will not serve.” To identify with the devil, to defy God, is a vertiginous, heart-stopping thing. To really feel the full import, you have to have grown up in a world that takes such things with absolute seriousness. Apostasy has to have been almost literally unimaginable, so that, when it happens, it brings something starkly new into your mental universe. That’s why A Portrait “changed everything” for Montague and for so many of us who grew up in the same imaginative landscape. But it’s also why A Portrait can’t have quite that force any more. In a secular culture, apostasy is always imaginable and seldom deeply consequential. As the tide of faith recedes, the two fingers will be missed as much as the bended knee. END
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 24, 2013 21:21:25 GMT
Here is my discussion of what is wrong with Fintan O'Toole's account of the history of Catholic education in Ireland in his book ENOUGH IS ENOUGH (especially pp85-89. [Note that some of his specific criticisms are in fact correct (for example, that the church was hostile to compulsory education in the late C19, that it tried to destroy lay-run secondary schools in the postwar decades, even when these were in fact set up as Catholic institutions and that it resisted 1950s proposals to increase government funding to secondary schools for fear that this would eventually lead to state control)- it is his overall account of the history that I am criticising. O'Toole's account goes like this: In the 1830s the government established the National School system on a non-denominational basis. Catholics, including the hierarchy, by and large accepted this, with opposition initially coming from the Church of Ireland and principally from the Presbyterians. After the Famine, however, a more confident hierarchy set out to assert control over the school system, using the Christian Brothers as their spearhead (and in the process moving them away from their initial objective of serving the very poor) and driving people into Church schools by threats of excommunication. Here are a few problems with this account: (1)To start with, O'Toole presents the actions of the Church purely as an aggressive assertion of power. He presents Catholic education purely as an assertion of power over the student (and unfortunately there have been forms of Catholic education that see it as exactly that) rather than a positive desire of parent and teacher to transmit their beliefs to the next generation, because they see those beliefs as true and believe it is a good thing to keep the faith and a bad thing to lose it.
(2)He also omits an important factor in the bishops' actions; fear that the education system would be deliberately used for proselytism, either by wealthy and well-funded Protestants (especially Anglicans) who were trying to establish a mass school system as a tool for converting Protestants to Catholicism, or by a liberal-Protestant state which did indeed dislike Catholicism (how far it actually tried to undermine it through the national school system is debatable, but some administrators certainly did entertain such views). Those who accepted the national school system did so because they believed rejecting it would leave the proselytisers in a stronger position, and because they thought they had been given effective safeguards (we'll get back to these in a minute). those who rejected it thought the state was fundamentally hostile to Catholicism and untrustworthy - and I might add that Fintan O'Toole's discussion of this subject shows that he thinks the state should be fundamentally hostile to Catholicism on the grounds that it is undemocratic, and should use an educational monopoly to undermine Catholicism or at the very least to reshape it into something he finds more congenial. This of course is precisely what the proselytisers wanted or were suspected of wanting in the C19.
(3) The Irish Catholic hierarchy were divided over accepting the National Schools right from the start, and a large minority, led by Archbishop John MAcHale of Tuam, were in favour of rejecting them outright. (One of the more painful paradoxes of nineteenth-century Church education policy is that the decision to boycott the Queen's Colleges was equally narrow in the other direction, due to a shift in the balance of the hierarchy; to be consistent the bishops should have accepted or rejected both.) The bishops who accepted the National system did so for a number of reasons. One was that the resources simply were not there to create a fully independent Catholic school system - macHAle actually tried this in his archdiocese, with the result that many of the people did not get schooling at all, and the proselytisers were able to develop a clientele for their schools through fair means or foul. Another, as I said before, was that they were given safeguards.
(4) First of all, we should note that the National Schools were interdenominational rather than on the secular model that O'Toole favours. Where O'Toole maintains that religion should be a purely private matter to be expressly excluded from the public sphere, the National Schools explicitly maintained that religious belief was necessary to underpin morality and public order (their tendency was more towards a highest-common-factor form of liberal Christianity). The second point is that while it was hoped that the schools would be interdenominational, they incorporated explicit safeguards for denominational interests; in particular, clerics of different denominations were allowed to establish schools with themselves as managers, a post which allowed them very extensive power over the choice and dismissal of teachers (power which I am sorry to say was often misused), and essentially permitted them to make these schools denominational in all but name in order to satisfy them that the schools could not be used to proselytise pupils away from Catholicism. Without these powers the national schools would not have been accepted, and their existence meant that the NAtional system rapidly became a denominational system. O'Toole talks as if the national Schools were driven out of existence by the Christian Brothers; in fact the majority of Catholic schools in Ireland are national schools under Catholic management in the model that derives directly from the original Stanley scheme of the 1830s, rather than having been founded by Catholic orders. (I should note that some Catholic orders, such as the Presentation Brothers, worked within the national scheme).
(5) The co-option of the Christian Brothers, and the use of threats of excommunication, does not refer to a campaign to eliminate the national schools, which would not have been possible. It refers to conflict with proselytising schools (which themselves engaged in coercion - there are examples of landlords threatening to evict tenants who did not send their children to schools under their control rather than to Catholic schools) and probably also to pressure on parents to send children to Catholic secondary schools rather than to competitors.
I note BTW that O'Toole seems to imply that there were no independent Catholic schools before the national System, and they were only introduced after the Famine, although he does not assert this in so many words.
So why is it important to show that O'Toole's account of nineteenth-century Irish educational history is spectacularly garbled and inaccurate? (Since he cites Donald Akenson's work on C20 Irish education in connection with his discussion of the Church's educational flaws - and much of this is correct - I suggest readers compare my account and O'Toole's with Akenson's account of nineteenth-century Irish education in his book THE IRISH EDUCATION EXPERIMENT.) Quite simply - it shows that O'Toole is a reckless and inaccurate partisan who carelessly distorts history to strengthen his case, and this says something about his claim for the moral superiority of "republican values". These evidently do not include treating your opponents fairly, or scrupulous accuracy. Remember once again that this is someone who argues that his version of "republican values" should be the only moral framework permitted in schools - especially primary schools. It is also worth noting that one criticism of "republicanism" as opposed to Liberalism is that republicanism fosters uniformity while liberalism emphasises individual freedom. For precisely this reason liberals like John Stuart Mill opposed the sort of monopoly in education that O'Toole favours, because it gives too much power to the state to suppress views with which it disagrees by indoctrinating the next generation in a single mindset.
(BTW O'Toole can use liberalism when it suits him - he repeatedly declares that it is unrepublican that government and society should intervene in citizens' sexual lives because sexuality is inherently private, but a classical republican would point out that sexual behaviour can impact on the public sphere in many ways and therefore should be regulated by republican virtue. His view is in fact based on liberalism, even on the sort of libertarian deregulation he denounces when applied to the economy.)
It is also the case that this sort of bad history circulates in certain quarters and can have serious implications for public policy. Remember the "Clontarf Document" drawn up by some of Aodhan O Riordain's supporters, which pretended that national schools only became denominational through a nefarious Catholic conspiracy in the 1960s (when in fact the documents cited were simply codifying what had been the case since the nineteenth century) in order to argue that state funding for denominational schools is unconstitutional and that the constitution does not confer a right to denominational schooling.
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luke
New Member
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Post by luke on Jul 25, 2013 10:14:27 GMT
Hibernicus puts his finger on it above: the sustained confusion and tension within the thinking, such as it is, of Ireland's liberal class. In the case of O'Toole he is confused between liberalism and republicanism and is simply blind to the contradictory impulses in both - individual verses commmunal values.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 25, 2013 18:50:00 GMT
I would say that O'Toole's confusion is partly strategic - he is basically a socialist but he doesn't want to use the word so he calls himself "republican" instead. What covers over the confusion is that he is a fundamentally oppositional thinker - if you are calling for a revolt against the existing order, it is relatively easy to skate over the question of whether "freedom" means individual or collective freedom. In the book I am discussing, for example, he argues that the school system needs to be "democratic" - that is, controlled by elected school boards - but also that it needs to inculcate "republican values". If the elected representatives can change the values of the schools under their control, how can he guarantee that he will like the outcome? If they are not able to abandon or modify "republican values", in what sense are they "democratic"? I notice this about quite a few current schemes to reform the Irish political system; they talk about making the system more democratic/responsible, but in practice they want changes which will make the executive more capable of decisive action and render "vested interests" less able to resist it - in other words, less "responsible". There certainly is a case for privileging efficiency and decisiveness over accountability, but they don't admit there is even a choice. (To be fair, this is not unique to our modern left/liberals. Old-style Catholic vocationalism was advertised as a way of making Ireland as prosperous as richer countries, but in fact it tacitly assumed that society and the economy were more or less static and that the prosperity of the richer countries was an illusion.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 2, 2014 21:41:25 GMT
Recently read the 25 YEARS OF FINTAN O'TOOLE selection that the IRISH TIMES published in November. A couple of points come to mind: (1)He always operates on the assumption that Catholic/Christian teaching in sexual matters is totally and self-evidently irrational and nothing whatever can be said for it.
(2) He operates under a "false binary" argument - you must either have it his way or their way, and if his way is shown to be flawed my way wins by default. Thus he (quite rightly) contrasts Archbishop Ryan's claim that a society where sex is restricted is better for children, with the archbishop's entire failure to take child protection into account when assigning priests whom he knew to be paedophiles, and thereby implies that one being discredited we are left with the other. (He also denounces opponents of Stay Safe for criticising the view that "children own their own bodies", and implies that the alternative is to say that adults own them and can abuse them at will. Now there is some truth in this, and he gives examples of children being abused by abusers who implied they had the right to do so and who bluffed and intimidated the children into not speaking of it, so that the abusers went on to abuse others. What hasn't occurred to him is that the belief in absolute self-ownership can also lead to highly damaging and destructive forms of premature sexualisation, some of which are on display in numerous media accounts of the courtship practices of contemporary secondary schoolchildren. O'Toole would get round this by arguing that these problems would go away if children were taught to own and exercise their sexuality wisely, which is like saying that drink problems would go away if we abandoned all licensing restrictions and taught drinkers to drink wisely; there's an inherent risk which has to be taken into account and can't be explained away by appealing to education.)
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Post by humphrey on Jan 12, 2014 20:30:16 GMT
O'Toole was on a radio programme during the week debating whether the president should be more open about his religion. The controversy was a media fabrication but during the piece O'Toole referred to an alleged difference between Pope Benedict Catholics and Pope Francis Catholics. I remember but cannot find comments by O'Toole praising the Catholicism for its social work etc.
When O'Toole refers to Pope Francis Catholics he must be referring to the kind of Catholics he would have sympathy with, because they would allied with him, at least rhetorically, in his project to create a strong social democratic, secular state that was governed by serious minded people who would have such a sense of civic duty that would stop them from ever engaging in corruption. What is stopping that agenda now. The global market which dictates that each country is in competition with each other. Enda Kenny has referred to Ireland as 'Ireland inc.' and David Cameron has referred to 'UK PLC'. This would be referred by some people as neoliberalism. On the other hand people are dis engaged from politics and do not respond to grand projects like building strong welfare states. They prefer to go shopping instead. This could be referred to as postmodernism. Cynicism about grand political projects could also help to engender political corruption.
Maybe O'Toole would like to revive Catholic liberalism as bulwark against these two tendencies. The optimism of Vatican II toward human progress is a basis for Catholic liberals to adopt uncritical attitudes towards modern states as unalloyed goods which the Church should imitate. The gathered community at mass would be used as a glue to bind people together in a common project instead of the atomisation that we see in contemporary society. Catholic liberalism was marked by optimism about the modern world that has probably faded in the actual secular world. In sense Catholic liberalism (and liberal Protestantism) might have been the primary the vehicle for idea of a 'modern world'.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 14, 2014 22:06:11 GMT
O'Toole basically wants to turn Catholicism into a civic religion in which the real object of worship would be the social-democratic state and supernaturalism would be downplayed so much that it vanishes altogether. It's another version of the pinch of incense offered to Caesar. (To be fair to O'Toole, there are right-wing version of the pinch of incense as well.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 23, 2014 23:54:58 GMT
A little thought that occurs to me - one of the central tensions in Fintan O'Toole's politics is that he sees art as necessarily and inherently critical/oppositional (hence his lament that secularised future generations will not experience the thrill of Luciferian rebellion in the way that Joyce's generation, or his own, did) but at the same time his ideal is a "social democratic" state founded on republican values - which would necessarily require a governing administrative elite whose legitimacy is accepted and deferred to by the population at large on the basis of shared values. This of course is a feature shared with different projects; the idea of a nationalist state based on shared nationalist values, of a Catholic state based on Catholic values etc. O'Toole devotes a great deal of time and effort to pointing out the shortcomings of these projects in practice, but rather fails to address the possibility that any social project at all would fall short of what it was meant to achieve (e.g. a neo-liberal "public choice" theorist could use O'Toole's arguments to claim that ALL social elites are self-seeking and the concept of public spirit or the public interest is a polite fiction). His only response is to say that Catholic/nationalist etc values are irrational in a way that social democratic/republican values are not, but each of them requires certain assumptions and is capable of rational defence to a certain extent. I think this disjuncture creates in O'Toole a certain irresponsibility which underlies his failure to put himself forward at the last general election when the country was looking for self-appointed saviours to a much greater extent than it is likely to do for some time again.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 6, 2014 18:43:45 GMT
David Quinn's column in the just-out issue of the IRISH CATHOLIC replies to a recent Fintan O'Toole column which dismisses the Iona Institute's warnings of the breakdown of marriage by pointing out that more marriages took place in 2012 than in 1960 and inferring from this that there can be no crisis of marriage. With characteristic courtesy Mr O'Toole compares the Iona Institute to cultists who are always predicting the apocalypse and then have to explain themselves when it doesn't arrive. Quinn points out that the population has increased by a much larger percentage than the number of marriages has increased in the period cited by O'Toole, and points out that O'Toole ignores such factors as the increasing rate of marriage breakdown, the high level of extra-marital cohabitation and of births outside marriage. (In general, when I find someone brandishing a single statistic as conclusive in a wider argument and refusing to accept the possibility of qualification, I suspect sophistry. This is a rule-of-thumb of course, and there are genuine instances of a beautiful theory destroyed by a single fact.) Now O'Toole could defend his viewpoint by various arguments - he could say for example that older figures on extra-marital births or cohabitation are distorted by such factors as emigration of pregnant women/concealment of births/unacknowledged desertion - e.g by the husband taking the boat to England and never coming back. HE could argue that a society with a high level of extra-marital births and cohabitations and marital breakdowns is preferable to one in which (e.g.) people are kept together by social pressure even though they hate each other and fight like cat and dog, or where extra-marital sexuality is deterred by inflicting hideous punishment on women who become pregnant outside of marriage. (These arguments I should say have real substance, and those of us who wish to support marriage should be aware of this, should not idealise the past irrationally, and should try to mitigate where possible.) But to argue these cases would be to admit that there are choices to be made by society, that choices have consequences, and that the Iona Institute are rational actors who might even have a point. Much easier to lampoon them and to hold oneself up as having a monopoly on rationality.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 14, 2014 21:04:54 GMT
Fintan O'Toole quite recently had a column in the IRISH TIMES arguing that the Taoiseach should not march in the St Patrick's Day parade in New York, not just because of the gay issue but because it is a specifically Catholic parade under church authority and thus emblematises, as he sees it, an identification of Irishness with Catholicism which in his opinion is incompatible with modern IReland. This has some interesting implications. He is saying that a historic expression of Irishness cannot be acknowledged in/participated in by state representatives if it is associated with Catholicism. BY implication, any such event must be secularised before state representatives can participate in it. If you followed the same logic, the state should never be represented in ceremonies (let us say in the two Church of IReland cathedrals in Dublin, for example) unless those churches were first of all secularised. Ireland is not only to be secularised in the present, but it is to be retrospectively secularised to expunge any role religion played in its history, as this is offensive to Fintan O'Toole. Indeed, the logic of his argument would suggest that we ought not to celebrate St Patrick's Day at all, since it links Irishness with Christianity and many Irish people (native apostates as well as, indeed more than, some NEw Irish) are not Christians. If O'Toole practised the consistency he always demands of his opponents, he would be calling for the national holiday to be moved lock, stock and barrel to Arthur's Day. Surely that is as secular as he could wish, with all the undesirable bits (religious meaning, historical tradition) done away with and only the leprechauns, commercialism and boozing retained.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 29, 2014 21:22:17 GMT
Last week Fintan O'Toole had a piece in a special IRISH TIMES supplement celebrating ten years of the Children's Ombudsman. In the course of this he refers to his participation as a 15-year-old in the campaign to abolish corporal punishment, and stated that those teachers and parents who opposed the abolition believed "that children are evil and would go feral unless kept in check". Instead, he argues, children should be seen as rights-bearing republican citizens.
Leaving aside the issue of corporal punishment, its use and abuse, and the empirical observation that significant numbers of children do indeed go feral in classroom situations (whatever the cause and possible solutions) it strikes me that this remark comes very close to the heart of Fintan O'Toole is all about. He rejects the concept of original sin (whether in secular or religious terms) - he believes that humanity can be made perfect by the use of reason and the creation of proper institutions. As a corollary of this viewpoint he rejects the idea that there is any such thing as "nature" which cannot or should not be changed by the human will. He seems also to believe that anyone who disagrees with him must necessarily be delusional - through the misuse of metaphors - or corrupt (and he can point to plenty of genuine examples of both). Any thoughts on this? I am not saying he is delusional, and indeed his principles applied to the criticism of actually existing Irish society can take you quite a long way. I just think it will not take him as far as he thinks it can.
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