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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 12, 2015 22:27:16 GMT
I couldn't really tell you anything about Ballymun that you don't know already, except that Mass attendance is very low. On weekday mornings I'd say there are about twenty at the most, maybe seventy to a hundred on Sundays. There are three churches serving Ballymun, which has a population of twenty-two thousand. Glasnevin next door has much bigger congregations. I'm not aware of any anti-clerical feeling. First holy Communions are as popular as ever (though at the last one I attended, the priest had to make several appeals for the adults to behave themselves-- one woman beside me was drinking a sports drink). All ages bless themselves when passing a church. In terms of social cohesion, it seems to have much improved from the time I was a kid. Maybe that's just because kids feel more insecure than adults when they're out and about, but Ballymun was really the pits in the eighties, as far as I remember-- vandalism and filth everywhere, open drug dealing, fires, all-night raves, etc. The demolition of the high-rise flats and towers may have had something to do with the improvement, if improvement it is.
I don't know much about gang activity, but there was a gang murder there only last year.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 27, 2016 22:16:22 GMT
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Post by Young Ireland on Jan 27, 2016 22:40:21 GMT
I would say yes, the West is definitely facing an apocalypse of sorts, with the problem of radical Islamism like IS et al. on one hand, and the self-professed saviours of the hour (Putin, Orban, Le Pen, the various right-wing populist parties across Europe) offering false hope and silver bullets on the other. Part of the problem is that the ruling classes see neo-liberalism as self-evident: notice how in Britain, there is a great stigma around being on benefits, conveniently ignoring the fact that it was Thatcher's rationalisation of British industry that largely created this class in the first place. Said generation and their equivalents across Europe are now being told that they have no jobs because of immigration, and accordingly this generates animosity towards immigrants. Said immigrants are then wide open by radicalisation by people like IS or al-Qaeda or their equivalents who then channel this disgruntlement into deeply horrifying ways. This is then exploited by the populist groups, thus leading to a vicious circle of mutual distrust, alienation and societal collapse not unlike that which the US experienced between 1968-73. In that case, it took them until c.1983 to recover from that particular ordeal completely, and I fear that Europe is in for a similar lost decade, though we will probably be shielded from its full effects somewhat, though not completely. Of course, I think the root cause is the side-lining of Christian ethics from European politics where concepts of social justice, civic responsibility and respect for all people born and unborn went out the window. The classic liberalism that dominates today's political discourse in contrast elevates individual freedom as a virtue above all others and to the exclusion of everyone else. Such a society is simply unsustainable in the long term.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 29, 2016 23:09:39 GMT
Classical liberalism argued that freedom requires the ability to self-rule. I think what we are getting is a mixture of variants of liberalism with a debased form of marxism which is more like anarchism.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 30, 2016 0:01:21 GMT
I don't buy it. It seems to me that Marxists (and their progenitors) have been predicting the demise of the capitalist system since the year dot, and yet it continues to do a roaring trade. Orwell was predicting its demise during the Second World War. Chesterton was predicting it before the Second World War. Everybody was predicitng in 2008. The death of capitalism seems to have been greatly exaggerated on many occasions.
In the same way, cultural and moral conservatives seem to have been claiming (forever and ever) that social liberalism is parasitic upon certain virtues that it cannot sustain, that it must draw on the capital of religion or patriotism or some other source. There was an exchange of essays in First Things magazine some years ago that made this argument. But the apocalypse never seems to arrive.
The way we live now, whatever you call that, seems to be amazingly resilient.
I'm not even sure I disapprove. What would you call our current way of life? Liberal democratic welfare consumerist pluralism? "The open society"? The casual comedy? I can't make a sophisticated argument in its favour, but I have to admit that, increasingly, I'm emotionally and aesthetically attached to it. I don't think family breakdown and sexual libertinism and secularisation are inherent to it. I think it has been shown to be amenable to religious revivals, as happened in fifties America and is apparently happening in Israel right now.
I'm always asked to define my terms here, but I'm not sure I can. Surely we all know what we mean by a 'Western' way of life?
Dreher says "economic and cultural structures cannot be separated"; indeed, he puts it in bold. But what proof is there that this is so? I am increasingly dubious of the proposition.
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Post by assisi on Feb 6, 2016 22:00:35 GMT
Maybe the longevity of Capitalism in the West is simply due to the fact that it (and its bedfellow consumerism) appeals to 'desire'. On the other hand Communism and Socialism, in theory at least, appeal to an equality that demands an element of 'sacrifice' from each participant. Desire, or desire fulfilment, will always be a more readily marketable philosophy than sacrifice, especially if it is actively encouraged by advertising, governments and the media.
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Post by Young Ireland on Feb 6, 2016 22:19:28 GMT
Maybe the longevity of Capitalism in the West is simply due to the fact that it (and its bedfellow consumerism) appeals to 'desire'. On the other hand Communism and Socialism, in theory at least, appeal to an equality that demands an element of 'sacrifice' from each participant. Desire, or desire fulfilment, will always be a more readily marketable philosophy than sacrifice, especially if it is actively encouraged by advertising, governments and the media. I agree with this, Assisi, though it should be pointed out that all the main parties in Government over the last few years appealed to patriotism and sacrifice in implementing effectively neo-liberal economic measures, so the two are not mutually exclusive. Hibernicus, fair point, and I was probably imprecise in my choice of terms. By "classical liberalism" I meant the fusion between economic and social liberalism of the type that one sees in FG, Renua (abortion aside), sections of FF, the Conservatives in Britain and the establishment Republicans in America. I think I'll call it "fusion liberalism" from now on to avoid confusion.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 10, 2016 20:49:15 GMT
A couple of points that might be worth noting: Capitalism/the West may not have collapsed since Chesterton's day (or whenever) but it has changed in quite remarkable and widely unforeseen ways (e.g. the fall of the colonial empires and the discrediting of racism and anti-semitism, the deindustrialisation of many traditional "rust belts" and the economic rise of South Asia). I think it's worth discussing how these have played out and are playing out for both good and evil. The world of the US NEw Deal and the Attlee Govenment in Britain is a lot more remote than we seem to realise, and the fear that we are heading back to a version of C19 capitalism - a minimal state with no safety net - is very widespread. One thing that strikes me a lot in recent years is the extent to which we internalised the mindset of Cold War liberalism as part of the struggle against communism, and the extent to which the arguments it deployed against communist millennarianism and calls for sacrifice (and I would agree that those calls were largely futile and misguided) seem to lead to unrestrained hedonism and individualism is very disturbing. Governments generally seem a lot more reluctant to appeal to patriotism and sacrifice, because their appeal is much more based on the satisfaction of economic wants (something BTW which should not be dismissed lightly). George W Bush's post 9/11 exhortation to keep calm and carry on shopping is a case in point. Oddly enough, the strongest exhortations to sacrifice seem to come from the Greens, because they have a set of values to which they appeal, which is not based on human utility.
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Post by rogerbuck on Feb 11, 2016 7:54:22 GMT
Oddly enough, the strongest exhortations to sacrifice seem to come from the Greens, because they have a set of values to which they appeal, which is not based on human utility. Agreed that it is not utilitarian. However, it is striking for me that the appeal to sacrifice is now rooted in material factors alone - the hard science of ecological damage. We are called to sacrifice on the basis of the scientific _data_ - not something as intangible or 'ethereal' or 'wooly' as religion or patriotism. If for example massive clean ecologically friendly energy were suddenly realised as possible, would not the calls to sacrifice disappear or at least diminish radically? I say this as someone convinced of grave ecological threat. I am enormously sympathetic to the green agenda when it is limited to addressing the environment. Thus it appalls me that the green agenda is basically materialistic. Where there is sufficient scientific/material PROOF, greens can be called to sacrifice. With something as resistant to proof as the soul or humanity of a foetus it is different.
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Post by pugio on Feb 12, 2016 17:57:20 GMT
And what Roger has said about the Greens could also be said about the neo-liberal calls to 'sacrifice' and 'patriotism' noted above by Young Ireland. The latter also assumes materialistic purposes as its end goal; we shall sacrifice material comfort and well-being now in order to preserve it or gain it again in the future.
What do ye think of the reactionary/Platonist argument that mass democracy inherently tends towards a social order directed to satisfaction of material desires rather than to higher goods, e.g. honour under a militarist-aristocratic regime, say, or intellect and spiritual ascent under a regime of Brahmins?
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 12, 2016 20:51:31 GMT
The problem with the utilitarian mindset is not that it does not identify a real good, but that it exalts that good inordinately. I think there may be something in the reactionary/Platonist argument, but I think that it suffers from the same problem I mentioned above, as Plato found out when he tried to persuade Dionysius of Syracuse to become a philosopher-king. The temptation scenes in THE BALL AND THE CROSS, where both the honest reactionary and the honest revolutionary are offered the realisation of their ideal society at the cost of accepting cruelty to the serfs, or the reactionary lumpenproletariat, (or in the instances you give, the UNtouchables or the men of bronze) are a piercing comment on a perennial temptation. For example, this story which I came across recently makes me feel queasy about some (not all) of the anti-communist enthusiasm I felt for US foreign policy in the 1980s. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/el-salvador-churchwomen-murders/460320/ We follow a poor man who died the most shameful and dishonourable of deaths, a God who took on bodily human nature with all its pains and humiliations and necessary appetites, and whose followers recorded His deeds in Greek of deplorable literary quality. Don't lets forget that.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 12, 2016 20:55:56 GMT
Also, I wouldn't be too sure that Greens are materialist in the normal sense; they are pantheists who treat nature or the cosmos as an object of worship. This involves either having a very idealised view of nature, or willingness to engage in some very dark deeds, but it's not utilitarian in the usual sense.
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Post by pugio on Feb 14, 2016 12:15:41 GMT
The problem with the utilitarian mindset is not that it does not identify a real good, but that it exalts that good inordinately. I think there may be something in the reactionary/Platonist argument, but I think that it suffers from the same problem I mentioned above, as Plato found out when he tried to persuade Dionysius of Syracuse to become a philosopher-king. The temptation scenes in THE BALL AND THE CROSS, where both the honest reactionary and the honest revolutionary are offered the realisation of their ideal society at the cost of accepting cruelty to the serfs, or the reactionary lumpenproletariat, (or in the instances you give, the UNtouchables or the men of bronze) are a piercing comment on a perennial temptation. For example, this story which I came across recently makes me feel queasy about some (not all) of the anti-communist enthusiasm I felt for US foreign policy in the 1980s. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/el-salvador-churchwomen-murders/460320/ We follow a poor man who died the most shameful and dishonourable of deaths, a God who took on bodily human nature with all its pains and humiliations and necessary appetites, and whose followers recorded His deeds in Greek of deplorable literary quality. Don't lets forget that. Yes, of course. The question is important, though, in any conversation about how the common acknowledgment of a hierarchy of goods can be made and preserved in a liberal democratic context. Christian democracy is - or should I say 'was' ? - a noble attempt to reconcile orthodox Christianity with liberal civilisation (and Vatican II can be seen as part of this process) but the fact that it has not succeeded raises the question of whether it was ever tenable in the first place. I'm not certain about this anymore. We should definitely be alert to the potential for evil in the political right, but I'm not sure that pointing out examples of US-backed terrorism in Central America is really addressing the heart of the issue either. I mean, all it shows is that ostensibly liberal democratic regimes are just as capable of ruthless cruelty in pursuit of their geopolitical objectives as any other kind.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 19, 2016 23:47:09 GMT
I was talking about my own willingness as a teenager in the early 1980s to overlook this sort of thing because of anticommunist zeal (based on awareness of the horrors of communist persecution) leading me to the assumption pas ennemis au droit (or almost none). I can think of some trad writers who encouraged this by idealising far-right dictatorships as models of Catholic integrism. I agree that Christian democracy has not lived up to expectations and that this raises very serious questions (which perhaps are best expressed in an exchange between the Victorian [Anglican] Christian Socialists JM Ludlow and FD Maurice: Ludlow said Christ was King by the consent of the people and Maurice asked whether this meant that the people were entitled, as a matter of right, to depose and replace Him). But I don't think the answer lies in a return to monarchy or in looking to Putin as a new Constantine or Franco - neither of those seem to have worked out very well either.
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Post by Young Ireland on May 29, 2017 19:36:23 GMT
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