Separation Anxiety (3)

In an unpublished document written in December 2017, I wrote as follows:

‘Sheikh Khalid bin Mafouz, who died in 1989, a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, was apparently a naturalised Irish citizen.  He purchased Irish passports and citizenship for himself and eleven other members of his family in 1990 via Charlie Haughey.  Now this doesn’t particularly irritate me—I have neutral feelings on it.  But the question keeps nagging at me: Is possession of an Irish passport actually sufficient to make someone Irish, other than in some purely legalistic sense?

If you were asked to think of a typical Irishman, would a picture of Khalid bin Mafouz, or someone like Khalid bin Mafouz, spring immediately to mind?  Or would the imagination be more likely to produce an image along the lines of, say, some notional big red-faced farmer with a hurley in his hand down in Tipperary?

If Adolph Hitler had been able to escape to Ireland at the end of the war and get a passport would that have made him Irish?

Is the nature of being Irish dependent on nothing more than the random possession of a piece of paper?  Are we to be defined purely by our passports?

The fact is that the quality of being Irish or German or Yoruba or Ibo comes from the possession of a shared culture.  Tribes and nations have individual and unique cultures, different from other cultures, without necessarily being in any way inferior or superior.  A culture is what you are steeped in from the moment of birth, as were your parents and generality of your forebears before you.  It is something that you unconsciously assimilate in much the same way as you come by language.

A culture is impossible to define—as most attempts to do otherwise so amply show.  A culture is a living and rather sedately evolving organism.  It is like a giant tapestry to which each of us individually may contribute our few stitches without at all affecting the overall meaning.  It is our shared ground of reference.  It is, in our case, what makes us Irish . . .’

I quote this now in the context of the ongoing discussion of the psychological effects of the loss of kinship-based social systems.  Whilst Irish society may no longer be a strictly kinship-based society, it is nonetheless something analogous to it, in a way that, say, American society certainly isn’t.

More anon . . .

Separation Anxiety (2)

The psychological damage, the demoralisation, visited upon great sections of the Greek population by the destruction of the old kinship-based tribal system, dealt with in the first part of this article last week, was a consequence of a deliberate decision of the Greek leadership of the time.  It involved forcing people out of social arrangements they had for generations grown up in and which were second nature to them.

But there were and are different ways of achieving the same ends.  One way would be through the massive dilution of the native population through mass immigration.  Indeed it was this that primarily led—though it is seldom admitted—to the Brexit referendum being carried in Britain in 2016.  Ordinary people of a certain age had over a period of time began to feel themselves increasingly strangers in what used to be their local surroundings.

Like people sheltering from a flood, they looked out across a drowned landscape where the everyday symbols of community were gradually being swallowed by change.  Rather than those they shared a familiar culture with, they found themselves living increasingly side by side with people with whom they had little in common, other than in the abstract sense of being human beings.

Which is not to say, of course, of course that nations or cultures need be exclusive.  Nations have rubbed along side by side for thousands of years, exchanging molecules. Rather like the guard in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman who muses philosophically on the notion that he may be turning into his bike and his bike turning into him as a result of ongoing friction between him and the saddle.

But what seems to be going on nowadays is on a totally different scale.  Without any explicit by your leave, and not as a result of armed invasion or conquest, the world would now seem to be free range for anybody who wants to travel, especially to the extent that they can concoct a sympathetic backstory.  And not alone to travel, but to be fed, clothed and housed as a matter of right.

The obvious effect of such a policy is not to balance development or living standards internationally, but rather to fuel a cavalry charge from the impoverished world (not to mention the flood of opportunists passing as poor) to the relatively advanced world, which, like connecting the positive and negative terminals of a battery, can only have the effect of reducing every place to a similar common level of poverty.

The UN Human Rights Commission has published, in its Handbook for Parliamentarians No. 24, a schedule of reasons it sees as driving migration, which just as easily might be seen as a tick-off list for would-be migrants to follow.

‘Migration today is motivated by a range of economic, political and social factors.  Migrants may leave their country of origin because of conflict, widespread violations of human rights and other reasons threatening life and safety.  Many are compelled by the absence of decent work to seek employment elsewhere.  They may also migrate to join family members already established abroad . . . As globalization expands the global circulation of capital, goods, services and technology, migration responds to growing demand for skills and labour in destination countries.  These factors along with aging populations and declining workforces in high-income countries increase international migration, including mobility of labour and skills.’

The one thing that you do not find in any of this—or if it exists it is certainly not easy to find— is a schedule of the rights of indigenous populations in the face of serious migration.  The philosophy would seem primarily to be one of just roll over and play dead.  No preliminary negotiation or consultation.  No worry about consequences.  Nothing.

What we have here is the result of ivory-tower thinking by ivory-tower elites, used to deliberating in purely globalist terms, who are never themselves likely to come face-to-face with the knock-on damage arising from their actions, such as having to scuffle around in a saturated rental market to try and find somewhere to live.

Not to mention the ongoing psychological damage rising from the ruthless internal reconfiguration of societies going on to make them fit to accommodate our ‘welcome diversity’.

Not the other way around, of course.

More later . . .

Joker

Through matters beyond my control the second part of the article on the psychological effects of imposed social change has been briefly delayed.

In the interim, I wish to sing the praises of the brilliant dystopian film Joker, which is currently in the cinemas.  Dystopian with a capital D in that, despite being set against a comic book background, it convincingly portrays a world psychologically very close to our own; indeed, just one step beyond our own; where violence, neglect, paranoia and greed have combined to form some great heavy beast, it’s belly dragging along the city streets, like the keel of a ship grinding nervously across a submerged ice-floe.

So brilliantly done, that it manages to convey in one scene of a couple of seconds the way in which the gangster element took advantage of the ideological flim-flam of the 1960s to reinvent how it presented itself.  And this did happen.  I saw it happen.  And I saw people die as a consequence of its happening. But such was the naivety of the revolutionary left at the time, mainly middle-class and anxious to view everything through the make-believe of red-rose-tinted glasses, that it was wide open to such penetration.

Wise guys who would otherwise have been doing it for themselves as a form of private enterprise were now doing it for a ‘cause’—or so they thought to persuade the world, often convincingly

That is not to say that there were not genuine people involved, too, save that they left themselves vulnerable through a simpleminded intellectualism, as so often happens, to those with a harder, more-stripped down, more closely focused and more ruthlessly accurate view of the world.

Sometimes you hear arguments about which political forces or parties are likely to come out on top in the event of social collapse.  Make no doubt about it, the ones who will inevitably rule will be the gangsters.  Untrammelled by any drag of ideology or principle, they tend to be brutally effective at what they do.  While the ideologues are debating, the tough who get going when the going gets tough will be running rings round them.

Nor take any consolation from the various state institutions that are supposed to prevent this, they are just as bound up in red-tape and bullshit and careerism as the rest.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, one stage of that collapse—or of the recovery from that collapse—was the fragmentation and localisation of power, so that control descended to those ruthless and strong enough to grab it.  From being a vast and unified enterprise, the map of Europe—purely notional, because by that stage society had degenerated to the borders of ignorance and illiteracy—turned into a patchwork quilt of tiny, independent and unmappable  fiefdoms.

There is no reason why this time it should be any different –save that there is always the suspicion that beyond the present chaos there may exist the hand of some hidden controlling agency—perhaps the intertangled intelligence services—shadowy as sharks when viewed from above.

But that is all just speculation.

What is true, however, is that Joker is a brilliant film, with one of the most outstanding lead performances—if not the most outstanding—for quite a long while.

Don’t miss it.

[This is a section something I wrote in December 2017, in the aftermath of mass migration of refugees etc., overland into Europe.  I have edited it slightly in the interim.  The rest of it will be addressed via further posts.]

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Separation Anxiety . . .

A society is a combinations of classes existing in a more or less stable form.

Around the seventh century BC Athenian society began to come under pressure due to the growth of a wealthy merchant class that threatened the status of the aristocracy.  The response of the aristocracy was to rack-rent the tenant farmers as a way of keeping up appearances.  The consequence was widespread class struggle, sufficiently bitter to threaten the very survival of the society.

In 594 BC an aristocrat called Solon, who was respected by all sides, was chosen as an honest broker.  His solution included the abolition of all outstanding debts and the abolition of the practice of selling debtors into slavery.  As well, he gave the poorest sections access to a citizen’s assembly, but without the right to speak in it.  He also codified and published a system of laws.

In practice, he abolished the unique right of the aristocracy to rule—explaining to its members that it was in their long-term interests to do so.  The new basis for ruling in Athens was wealth, no matter how it was earned.

‘Everything must change so that everything can stay the same’ is the leitmotif of the main character in The Leopard, by Giuseppe de Lampedusa, a novel (and also a film) set in Sicily in a time of great political and social upheaval.  The meaning of the phrase basically is that it is sometimes necessary to give some ground, in order to protect a greater interest.  In The Leopard this meant allowing the ambitious middle class a share of power in order to stave off the complete collapse of society.

The same description applies to Solon’s settlement in sixth-century BC Athens.  It involved a partial sacrifice by the powerful so that the bulk of their power might remain intact; and even be strengthened by the addition of the wealthier middle-class elements.

But the problem is that once you begin to give ground, no matter how slightly, the chances are that you are setting in train a movement that you are no longer guaranteed to be able to control.

Within 150 years of Solon’s reforms, and via a series of stages, what has been termed a ‘radical democracy’ had come into existence in Athens.  Involved was equality for all citizens before the law and a transfer of power to the population in general by means of one man, one vote.  Also involved was the introduction of pay for public office, so that the poor would not be handicapped from holding office because of their poverty.

Thus, the development of democracy didn’t occur in one fell swoop, but came about through a series of stages, and one stage in particular, involving a series of reforms by an aristocrat called Cleisthenes, proved vital to the whole process.

Now my reason for bringing all this up is the degree to which it would seem to have a certain relevance to aspects of what is going on in our own modern world.  Not a literal relevance; more an abstract understanding of the possible knock-on effects of imposed social and political change

In a recent mailing, I quoted Cormac Lucey, writing in the Sunday Times, with regard to the tendencies and modi operandi of the EU:

‘Consider recent remarks from Peter Sutherland, a former attorney-general, EU commissioner and chairman of AIB and Goldman Sachs International.  He has stated, regarding the current refugee crisis: “The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others.  And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.”

‘Sutherland suggests the EU should undermine nationality and any sense of nationality.  No wonder the Brits think about leaving.  The wonder is that more aren’t considering joining them.  And the wonder is that we don’t harbour greater resentments against the EU for its authoritarian rejection of democratic referendum results here—see the treaties of Nice and Lisbon.’

Now there is implied social and political change here.  Not the same sort of change as was occurring in Greece; but change in its broadest brushstrokes, nonetheless.

To continue with the story of Cleisthenes: he was a member of one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Athens.  Such families were engaged in a constant struggle among themselves for control of the state.  More than even the matter of self-aggrandisement, this struggle seems to have been driven by an almost biological desire simply to rule.

[Of course, the reason for this was relatively simple.  If you weren’t prepared to fight your corner, no matter how you might have felt about it, then you were likely to lose everything.  There doesn’t seem to have been any room in Greek aristocratic society for retiring into private life and simply enjoying your privileges.  Indeed, the whole thing seems to have been driven by an almost evolutionary logic, like the clash of buffalo in the rutting season.]

And everything went in these intra-aristocratic struggles—murder, war, the use and backing of foreign powers etc. etc.  In terms of the skulduggery of everyday politics, the Athenians—and the Greeks in general—had nothing to learn from modern times.  They wrote the original handbook.  Nor was there any seeming consideration of the wider interest of the state or population.  It was basically just a hunger to rule.  Indeed, Cleisthenes himself was involved in several attempts at the seizure and re-seizure of power, some involving foreign backers, before finally succeeding.

The weapon that Cleisthenes (in 508/7 BC) forged to bring about eventual victory involved gaining the support of the general populace through the promise of further democratic reforms, and later the implementation of those reforms as a way of ensuring that once onside the plebeians stayed onside.

And this is where the matter of imposed social and political change comes in.  The mechanism devised by Cleisthenes to achieve his ends involved undermining the four traditional kinship-based tribes of Athens and creating in their stead ten new artificial tribes, all territorially based, and involving no element of kinship.

One consequence of this—the one this article is most concerned with—is the psychological consequence.  It may not have been so traumatic for the well-off—and there is evidence to suggest that they put up no great resistance to it—but for the mass of the population it was equivalent to being ejected from the womb.  The very thing that had underpinned their sense of identity and allowed them to differentiate themselves from the world at large and enjoy an insider, or at least the illusion of an insider, relationship with the rich and powerful of their own particular tribe—all this had at a stroke been removed.  Instead they found themselves cast into an outer Hell of mere undifferentiated citizenship.

The sociologist Eli Sagan, writing in the context of the Athenian experience, drew as a general rule the conclusion that ‘Any dissolution of kinship forms of social coherence will provoke an anxiety of separation’ (The Honey and the Hemlock, 1991).

To be continued . . .

Interval . . .

From Anti-Memoirs by Andre Malraux.

‘1965, Off Crete.  In 1940 I escaped with the future chaplain of the Vercors.  We met again shortly afterwards in the little town in the Drome where he was parish priest and where he used to hand out baptismal certificates wholesale to Jews—on condition, however, that they let him baptise them.  “Some of it may stick, after all . . .”  He had never been to Paris, having completed his studies at the seminary in Lyons.  We talked far into the night, as friends do when they meet again, amid the homely village smells.

            “How long have you been hearing confessions?”

            “About fifteen years.”

            “What has confession taught you about men?”

            “Oh, confession teaches you nothing, you know, because when a priest goes into the confessional he becomes another person—grace and all that.  And yet . . . First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks . . . and then . . .”

            He raised his brawny lumberman’s arms in the starlit night: “And then, the fundamental fact is that there’s no such thing as a grown-up person . . .”

            He died on the slopes of Glieres.’

Where Things Stand Now . . . [repeated]

[My posting of articles tends to be sporadic.  Beginning in 2009, there have been long periods of silence, sometimes of years, between.  What tends to happen is that I come across something that I feel needs urgent saying, and having said it, tend to let the mailings drift on until I get bored with the process and wind it up.  Therefore, as far as I’m concerned, the initial article or series of articles in any particular tranche of mailings tends/tend to be to be the most important.

The present series of articles began on July 6^th 2018, though it only finally went public in September of this year.  Before that it had been essentially private, and the earlier mailings are quite likely to have gone unnoticed.

The reason I mention this is that one of last weekend’s papers carried an extensive review of a new book, Science and the Good by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky, dealing with the matter of ‘objective morality’: that is, the various attempts to argue into existence some sort of artificial and universalist human ethic that would do away with all previous moral systems and would provide the basis for solving all our problems, individual and otherwise, including global warming and providing the foundations for world peace etc. etc.

However, the book provides instead, at least according to the reviewer, ‘a closely argued, always accessible riposte to those who think scientific study can explain, improve or even supersede morality.  It [also] tells a good story, too, as it explains what led us to our current state of moral nihilism’.

The reason I bring this up is that it was a similar contention, argued to a similar conclusion, which provided the basis of my initial series of articles, beginning on July 6 last year.

On the dubious basis that someone might still be interested in it, I reprint here the initial mailing (the first in a series of some four or five) from the 6 July 2018.]

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There has long been a debate over the matter of nature versus nurture, though, of course, the commonsense opinion is that what is involved is a variable combination of the two.  But the materialist and left-wing point of view has tended to show a preference for nurture over nature.  Another name for this is the ‘blank slate’ position; in other words, we are born with no inherited programming, but instead, as it were, pull ourselves up by our own bootstrings.

It is easy to see why the materialists would prefer this alternative, since at a stroke it removes the likelihood of any input from outside forces, divine or otherwise.

But in recent years, studies in linguistics have begun to show that where language is concerned mankind does indeed share a common pre-programmed and unconscious inheritance.  All languages, it seems, are shaped according to the same inherent ground rules; the differences between individual languages being the result of geographical and cultural factors in the course of their development.

All of which makes sense, considering that they are translatable into one another and enjoy a similar structure of nouns and verbs etc. etc.

This means, of course, that at least as far as language is concerned we are not born as blank slates.  We are programmed for language, and without that inherited programming, language would be impossible.

However, more recent studies have begun to show that just as there are certain ‘anatomical, neurological and physiological’ structures underlying our capacity for language, there are also analogous inherited structures underlying our capacity for moral thought and our sense of good and evil, justice and injustice.

In other words, there is a certain unconscious moral programming written into the human heart, irrespective of whether we abide by it or not, and which influences us automatically.

Just as with language, this moral inheritance has become translated through time and isolation and culture into the myriad different, and often seemingly contradictory, forms that we see about us now.  Rather like a carpenter turning sheets of oak into chairs and tables and sideboards, the forms may be different, but underneath they continue to share a common identity of oak.

Now one has to admire the honesty of the moral scientists in publicising a conclusion, which, no matter how unlikely, threatens the possibility of a return to more traditional ways of thinking about mankind, its origin and its destiny.  The response of science, however, is to insist that any such pre-existing moral apparatus can still only solely be the result of material evolution, though as yet it cannot begin to explain the possible mechanics of such a development.

Philosophers have tended to take a somewhat different tack.  In general equally materialist, they seek to bring the idea of an inherited moral compass under their control by insisting that it is something necessarily primitive and in need of constant updating—by philosophers, of course.

[The initial series of articles ran from the one above to ‘Now we come to the interesting part . . .’  of 23 July 2018.  Though they tend to meander a bit, they can still be accessed via this platform.]

Back down to the vaults . . .

[The following article was written in 2015, at a period when I was not publishing on-line, and therefore has remained unpublished until now.  In a certain sense it is now mainly of historical interest, yet it contains sufficient otherwise hard-to-access information to make it still worthwhile printing at this time.]

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In the Sunday Independent of February 1st 2015, Keith Mills, who describes himself as ‘an agnostic gay man supporting a “No” vote in May’ speaks of his opposition to the attempt to redefine traditional marriage, which campaign he sees as being driven by ‘a tiny but vocal minority’.  He supports the concept of a family ‘that can provide a mother and father, which all evidence suggests is the best environment for children’.  He is also a supporter of civil partnerships and sees them as ‘a better way [than marriage] of reflecting the reality of most same-sex unions’.  He also suggests that he is not the only homosexual to feel this way, most of those of a similar mind being afraid to speak out.

The reason for this reluctance was amply demonstrated when in March, Dolce and Gabbana, the fashion designers, and both homosexual, spoke out against same sex marriage, gay adoption and test-tube births.  They were forced to recant after a world-wide fatwa was called against them and their products by Elton John and others—John describing the designers as ‘judgemental’ and ‘archaic’.

Peculiarly enough, another fashion designer, Giorgio Armani, who is also homosexual, has decided to join the fray from a different direction.  ‘A man has to be a man,’ he says.  ‘When homosexuality is exhibited to the extreme—to say, “Ah, you know I’m homosexual”—that has nothing to do with me.  A man has to be a man.’

Now it long ago struck me that the ‘gay’ idea of the feminised man was something likely to be anathema to the old-style homosexual.  Indeed, it struck me at times that the gays weren’t really homosexuals at all.  That they were sufferers from a variant of neuroticism—or just dedicated followers of fashion trends.  Indeed, the more I look at it, the more I am convinced that many of them aren’t homosexual at heart.  Rather they are fellow-travellers—what Lenin in a related domain called the ‘useful idiots’—basically in search of a fashionable cause and the safe opportunity for an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment.

Homosexuality, or at least its ‘gay’ variant, is at the moment ‘cool’.  It used to be in times gone by that people talked in cliché of ‘the lovely young priest’, now it’s more likely to be ‘the lovely young gay’.  For the liberal media (and what other media is there?) is pouring the stereotype of the universally gentle, compassionate, empathic gay into the popular ear from all directions—print, movie, television.  Think of the last time you saw a negative representation?

The debate that is going on in Ireland at the moment over marriage equality is on the surface a spurious one.  It’s like a slave saying, ‘I won’t accept freedom—I want liberty instead!’  As I say, on the surface it seems to be a tautology, a way of speaking about the same thing in different terms.  Differences of rights between civil partnership and marriage are of so little significance as to be in practice unimportant.  Yet at the same time the matter is of tremendous importance.

If gay marriage is rejected then civil partnership effectively becomes the end of the line for the gay movement.  There is nowhere for it to go beyond that.  But if gay marriage is passed and installed in the constitution, then it will immediately become a prise-bar for breaking things up further.  One of the first demands (notwithstanding that it is supposed to have been ruled out in advance) will be for access to marriage in the churches, again on the grounds of a spurious ‘equality’.

The question arises: how did a relatively small category of people manage to capture the high ground in the current debate to the extent that they have? One in ten is the usual percentage given for the number of homosexuals in any population.  Now in an article in 2003, the eminent American academic, Philip Jenkins took a microscope to this claim.  He wrote: ‘In 1993, the Alan Guttmacher Institute reported that between 1.8 and 2.8 percent of men surveyed reported at least one sexual contact with another man  in the previous decade, while only about 1 percent had been exclusively homosexual in the previous year.  This was in accord with the findings of a national survey recently undertaken in France . . . Contrary to Kinsey’s “one in ten”, a figure of one in 30 would offer a more accurate assessment of the male population that can be described as homosexual or bisexual; and one in 60 would best represent the exclusively homosexual.  The corresponding figures for women reporting sexual contacts with other women are somewhat lower.’

The Alan Guttmacher Institute mentioned is a prominent liberal sexual research centre in America, an off-shoot of the pro-choice Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

On the percentages given, and based on 2014 figures, there would be some 40,233 exclusively homosexual males in the Republic of Ireland.  Be generous and double the number to notionally include lesbians and you get a total of 80,466.  Hardly enough, you would think, to swing a referendum in a total population of 4,595,000—especially given that a significant number of homosexuals seem to be against it.  And particularly on such a controversial matter with many as yet unclear implications.

But the fact is that the marriage debate and the broader gay liberation movement aren’t stand alone phenomena.  They are merely fronts in a bigger war, inspired by liberals and mainly leftists, to reduce society to a rubble—Lenin used to use the analogy of a bomb in the basement when speaking to the same end—out of which will arise the fabled (and fictional) classless society.

Even as we speak, the broader war is being taking place on other fronts, too: immigration, education, the strangling of free speech (as with Dolce and Gabbana above), the war on religion, the sexual wars, the rise of protest movements (all generally comprising the same people) etc. etc.

Another dictum of Lenin’s concerned the definition of morality.  Morality was whatever served the ends of the revolution.  Murder, extermination, lies, betrayal, enslavement—all were legitimate to the extent that they served the needs of the revolution.  And who decided the needs of the revolution?  Why, Lenin, of course.

It would probably be unfair to see the exaggeration of gay population percentages as part of this process.  Yet it seems to be a common liberal tactic.  Jenkins’ article appeared in a book of essays dealing with disinformation, including how biased statements and figures, if repeated often enough, can take on the appearance of holy writ and be almost unchallengeable.  Jenkins’ contributions set out to take a critical—and successful—look at some of these sacred cows.

The collection of essays is called: You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths.  It is published by The Disinformation Company, an award-winning countercultural publishing phenomenon, with an initial target audience of ‘hipsters, thinkers, anti-establishmentarians, and the merely curious’.  This particular series of essays contains contributions from different areas of the political spectrum, including the well-known liberal doyen Noam Chomsky.