The Brits are having another Oxbridge-style debate about keeping nicotine away from children, with Sunak on the one side arguing that there’s nothing ‘unconservative’ about protecting children, while “former Prime Minister” (the title needs those quotes) Liz Truss on the other saying it’s Nanny State nonsense. This idea of ‘being conservative’ has morphed over time, but there are certain things that it retains, not least a belief in personal freedom. It’s laden with hypocrisy of course – not least that the current and “former” Prime Ministers, both Oxford graduates, are arguing about how the hoi polloi should behave.
Forty years ago, Apple changed the world when they launched the Macintosh computer, with a superbowl ad echoing Orwell’s 1984. So the story goes anyway. Reading that (really very good!) piece from Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Guardian this morning, I was struck as I so often am by the declaratory confidence of the headline. WORLD CHANGED; MACHINE LAUNCHED. Vaidhyanathan layers it on, claiming that the launch could be seen as ‘the beginning of the long 21st century’. It struck me in reading that we are now starting to see the end of the twentieth century as a historical phenomenon, and writing about it in a way that seeks consistency and consensus, in the same way as there is consensus about the rest of history as we have learned it – that there were two world wars in the 20th century, that the Cold War was between America and Russia, that the EU was formally launched in 1993, and so on. In structuring history, we superimpose salience upon people, and events, that may not have been obvious at the time, and that possibly misshapes our understanding of the world we live in today.
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008/9, many commentators argued that the old neoliberal consensus had finally been dealt a hammer blow. If 9/11 had been a wakeup call for the West to recognize the weaknesses in the global system, due to its inherent inequality and the problems of globalization, now the impact of neoliberal disequilibrium would be felt at home, and domestic politics would be forced to drive change. People and leaders suffered – bankers were fired, governments replaced, and companies destroyed – but new people and companies replaced them, and appeared to resume the old model. For the past ten years or so, it’s been difficult to figure out what’s been going on. We know it’s a failed model – so why do we persist with it?
Salvador Allende, a man who tried to change the world.
In considering diagnosis and prescription when it comes to political order, the imperative is in some sense to do something. As Karl Marx said in his Theses on Feuerbach, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ How does one change the world, when faced with the inevitability of solitary time? The world – perhaps like (g)od, especially in the sense Spinoza intended – is unitary. Is it a single thing, as is time itself. Time is not mutable, at least for us and our current technology. There are no A-B tests on history.
It could be said that Ireland has had four phases of development: the first as the country emerged from its fledgling days of independence and civil war before the Second World War; the second one of institutional stabilisation and development in the 1950s and 1960s (think Todd Andrews, TK Whitaker, and the rest); and the third through EEC membership and a series of political crises in the 1970s and 1980s. The fourth – through the last thirty years or so – has seen commercial and corporate success, relative affluence, and international recognition as a beacon of prosperity and peace. Through that time, however, there have been several high-profile scandals, beginning with those in the church, then in the banks, and in recent days an unfolding one within the state broadcaster. Do these scandals have anything in common?
There has long been a persistent tension, a binary opposition in my thinking, between romanticism and enlightenment, faith and reason, spirituality and science. It was first awoken in my in depth research into the essence of technology, as it revealed itself as little more than an interaction with nature; and as my research into the philosophy of mind, agency, and time suggested, it was not all that clear that such interactions were intentional. All of that appeared to coalesce in Spinoza’s monism, his idea that there is only one substance, that each of us – and everything else that exists: rocks, trees, stars, time, even god – is part of a single thing, a single substance. Habermas claimed the ascendancy of the existential fissure in the Axial Age – the time of classical Athens, around 500BCE give or take. Neitzsche agreed, blaming Socrates, and looking instead to the pre-socratics for wisdom. Carlo Rovelli, whose The Order of Time I’m just about finished (such a lovely book – more on that later), goes to Anaximander (610 -546 BCE, roughly) to understand his modern science (in particular quantum mechanics) and its real meaning. However, most people today would identify the French Revolution and the late eighteenth century as being the true breaking point, when the Divine Right of Kings was abandoned, and Science asserted itself as our true…well, our true faith.
How revolutionary are revolutions? Are they accelerated historical developments? Or are they merely dramatic and shocking moments that somehow capture a moment, and lend themselves to compelling narrative? Having just finished Simon Schama’s monumental Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, I’ve been thinking a lot about how genuinely revolutionary revolutions are, so to speak. Schama himself is sceptical on how much the Revolution changed, and excoriating when it comes to the needlessness of the violence that surrounded the fall of the monarchy in France. While there was a disempowering of the clergy, and some transfer of wealth in that sense, little else really changed in France, in terms of social order and loci of control. While at the time the book was seen as a revisionist work, I am persuaded by his arguments that the required social reforms were underway well in advance of the Revolution, and that the subsequent reversion to traditional power structures further emphasised its vapid core. The General Will, as the wags had it, was ultimately replaced by the General’s Will, as the shadow of Napoleon loomed large over the epilogue.
John Moriarty, the Irish philosopher and mystic, was as detached from the physical world as a philosopher can be. He chose to live remotely; that is, outside of the city, though he had travelled some as a younger man. In later life, he returned to his roots in Kerry, where he was buried – near Muckross – in 2007. In reading and studying Moriarty recently, I was struck by how familiar his work seemed to be, and how it danced across the gamut of modern western philosophy and philosophers.
As the annual St Patrick’s festival draws to a close, a global celebration of Irishness fostered by the two-headed monster of the Irish Diplomatic corps and the Tourist Board, the DUP in the North is coming under pressure to accept the terms of the latest negotiation between the UK and the EU on post-Brexit arrangements, specifically as they apply to the island of Ireland. There are significant baubles on offer, but in the eyes of most unionists it is one more step away from their cherished union with the big island next door. Nationalists meanwhile have been trying to stifle the laughter at such a self-inflicted wound as Brexit – encouraged by a dreadfully judged political position taken by the DUP – and trying to be mature about the process. A new Ireland must be considered, and planned for, given the imminent reintegration of the six counties into the island nation as a matter of formality. And yet what should that mean?
In considering environmental ecologies – independent, perhaps, of humans – John Moriarty uses the concept of the rhizome, to make a point, about the rootedness (or otherwise) of things. ‘Unlike the dandelion,’ Moriarty says, ‘we have now no rhizome, no rhiza, no root, down into the nourishing earth.’ He laments in the same piece how the human mind is merely clever, impoverished in some ways by its ignorance of alternate, ecological sensibilities. I’m trying to identify the actual source, though I think it’s from Night Journey to Buddh Gaia. Moriarty wonders, just before this reference, whether – just as dandelion and the groundsel has their etymological roots in French and old English, respectively, each with its own eternal story (the dandelion from ‘tooth of a lion’) – these plants had their own names ‘among the leeches who tended the warriors who had been wounded at the Battle of Maldon.’ It is as if, in some way that is strange-to-us, the leeches had their own version of the academy, their own epistemic basis for understanding the world and their role in it. Moriarty’s vision is nothing if not all-encompassing!
State Legitimacy 