Advent Reappraisal, 2025: The Anatomy of De-Absolutisation, Part 1 of 3.
The language of the public domain is not so much actively hostile to religious ideas as imbued with a deep fear of them, which often causes the message of religion to be misstated and misunderstood.
To mark the coming of Christmas, this is the first of a three part series of extracts from Beyond Consolation, my 2010 book which asks the question: are despair and nihilism reasonable? Parts 2 and 3 will appear between now and Christmas.
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Part 1: Untruths About Freedom
Each of us has two lives: the public and the inner, and each of these lives has its own tongue, which we might call the tongue of the public square and the tongue of the heart. In one sense, the two are coterminous – each usually comprises, for example, vocabulary drawn from a single language, English. But in another sense, they are utterly dissimilar. The tongue of the public square speaks of ‘rational’ things, things we ‘know about’, things we can ‘prove’, but above all things we feel confident about articulating in a public space that becomes more and more limiting in what it allows us to say in its jurisdiction. The tongue of the heart is loosed only in our private spaces: in our most intimate relationships, to our Gods before the altar, perhaps, just perhaps, to our fellow art-consumers in the gallery or the theatre bar during the interval, but mostly in silence to ourselves.
Anticipating the arrival of the global media society, you might have predicted that universal means of communication would extend the quality and range of public expression beyond, as it were, belief. But you would have been wrong. With each expansion of the reach of public communications, the quality of communication has been reduced. As the scope for consensus becomes more limited, the scope for saying, in public, profound personal things is more and more diluted: we feel able only to say things that ‘everyone’ will be bound to see as reasonable. Anything tentative, vaguely irrational or truly heartfelt is reserved for the personal sphere. We no longer, in Patrick Kavanagh’s word, ‘blab’ about the things that might enable us to alert each other to the ‘griefs we thought our special own’. Even as the balm of the poetic and transcendent becomes more urgently required, we are losing the public means of telling each other that we are not alone in our loneliness.
It mainly comes down to money. The word ‘consumerism’ is one of those dead words, like ‘materialism’, or ‘spirituality’, that intrude on our public conversation only as platitudinous weapons of mass destruction, short-circuiting true comprehension. But, when you think about it, it is obvious that global commodity-markets would tend to maximise their potential in a culture where all belief concerning the satisfaction of human craving is targeted at the purchase and consumption of material things. This would almost certainly imply an imperative to close down competition from things of the spirit.
Media are creatures of the market and so must do its bidding. The injunctions of the market are conveyed in a complex way, and really cannot be perceived other than in their effects, which are remarkable. They include: the media compartmentalisation of the world into, for example, what is ‘rational’ and what is not; the policing of these compartments with cynicism and scorn; and the public humiliation of those who do not follow the rules.
The poet has been banished to the arts pages, where his eccentric meanderings could cause but the minimum of confusion, even if he were disposed to troublemaking, which increasingly he is not. Religion is still reported on the front pages, but in a manner largely confined to its political aspects, and in a process that parallels the replacement in public conversation of invocations like ‘Please God’ and ‘Thank God’ with secularisms like ‘hopefully’ and ‘thankfully’, a change that reflects our shifting sense of ourselves from creatures to pseudo-creators of reality.
God, when He makes the headlines now, has been consigned to quotation marks, or some such distancing device, which simultaneously invokes the concept of a deity and questions His existence, disposing of Him with an irony He now shares with mythical figures and invented soap characters. The internal culture of media in relation to religion might, with the merest hint of parody, be depicted as follows: ‘Some of you out there seem still to believe all this hogwash about “God”, and, because you are our valued customers, we continue to accord these superstitions due prominence. But really…!!’
This is not necessarily the honest personal response of individual journalists, or even a majority of them. Journalists, mostly, have hearts that speak, as much as the hearts of non-journalists, in the tongue that dare not reveal itself. But in their public role, journalists must obey the rules of the marketplace, which dictate that, whereas things of the spirit may be mentioned in passing, and to this extent treated with respect, they must not be accorded the same importance as the rational business of pursuing the version of happiness extended by modern society. If people were allowed to glimpse, in an atmosphere of seriousness, that the feelings in their deepest beings are shared by perhaps a majority of their fellows, the whole consumerist edifice might begin to disintegrate.
Writing in a foreword to the annual report of the Catholic Communications Office some years ago, Archbishop Sean Brady of Armagh, and Primate of All-Ireland, strongly criticised, without naming names, several Irish Sunday newspapers, and urged Catholics to use consumer power to effect change in the media. Catholics, he said, should be careful about buying newspapers that continually offend their moral and religious values, and should in particular review their purchase of certain Sunday newspapers if these continue to ridicule and undermine religious belief. Such acts of discretion, he urged, might lead to ‘a fairer and more representative secular Sunday media in Ireland’.
He remarked also on the unrepresentative nature of journalism and on the particular scarcity of opinion writing from a religious perspective. It was ‘peculiar’, he said, that more people in the media do not reflect the overall values of the population in relation to family, faith, religious practice and community. In this regard he again turned his focus on Sunday newspapers which, he noted, were utterly out of kilter with the lives of their readers, many of whom will have attended some form of religious worship before picking up the Sunday paper.
The archbishop raised an interesting question but did not extend his argument sufficiently. Perhaps he wished to emphasise his perception of a particular anomaly in relation to the Sabbath, but the phenomena he describes are by no means confined to Sunday newspapers. They affect all Irish media, including broadcast media and so-called quality daily newspapers, and manifest every day of the week.
One of the reasons is fairly simple: media are not democratic. I don’t simply mean that the internal operation of media is not a democratic process — it isn’t, of course, because democracy would render media unworkable — but that media, for all journalism’s claims to act as a bulwark of democracy, are not really all that bothered about democratic values. In Western societies, media is business, of course, but that is a secondary issue, since it should be possible for media to operate to commercial principles and still manage to approximately reach the basic democratic requirement. The real problem has to do with the culture of journalism, which is a far more monolithic entity than is ever acknowledged by journalists. Journalism is a kind of cultural club, in which the members respond to an unwritten set of prescriptions relating to the purpose and character of the profession. Journalism prides itself, for example, on being a ‘progressive’ profession, which means that it is governed by a fundamental, indeed fundamentalist, opposition to traditional ideas. To call oneself a journalist and not to subscribe to ‘progressive’ principles is to invite suspicion and hostility from other journalists. In Ireland, this culture is especially virulent because of the historical role of Catholicism as moral police force, which brings all the ‘progressive’ instincts of journalists to the fore. There are, of course, journalists who regularly deviate from the orthodoxies, but they are a minority and generally must operate from outside the cultural heart of the profession. They work from home, rarely socialise with their fellows, and often do not think of themselves as journalists at all. Moreover, many such journalists fall into the category of tokenistic counterbalance, providing a gracing aspect to the otherwise unrelenting ideological monolith that is the modern newspaper or broadcasting organisation.
Archbishop Brady was certainly correct in his impression that Irish journalism is deeply hostile to Catholicism. But it would be a mistake to believe that journalism is opposed to religious practice or belief. In fact, there is what might be characterised as an unacknowledged ‘hierarchy of tolerance’, by which journalists accord respect to believers on the basis of an assortment of factors, including historical victimhood and opposition to Christianity. Thus, despite the misleading impression conveyed by a sandstorm of allegations to the contrary, Muslims are almost invariably accorded enormous respect. Jews likewise, except where they are in conflict with Muslims, in which case their historical victimhood meets a higher trump. Christians come way down, though of course in Ireland Protestants are higher than Catholics, who prop up the hierarchy of (in)tolerance.
One of the difficulties besetting the capacity of religion to confront the nature of the modern world is connected to language, how it is used and who controls it. Religions have their own languages, with which they speak among themselves, though each of these has more in common with others than is often acknowledged. Believers the world over speak broadly the same language of piety, austerity and devotion. But their communications with the outside world are necessarily limited or doomed to be misunderstood.
The problem is not so much with secularism as with the public language which has evolved in tandem with it. The language of the public domain is not so much actively hostile to religious ideas as imbued with a deep fear of them, which frequently causes the message of religion to be misstated and therefore misunderstood.
Of course, many of the objections to religion in the modern world are well-founded, in the sense that the records of various institutional forms of religion are chequered with abuses of power, obscurantism and authoritarianism. In a previous book, Lapsed Agnostic, I wrote about the influence of the 1960s generation, the Peter Pans, who made a burst for freedom from the dark shadow of religion-dominated moralism and created for the first time in history a culture centred on the values of youth. I met more than a couple of people who told me that, in the course of reading the book, they had become irritated by my descriptions of this condition and the fact that I seemed not to acknowledge that I was myself a product of this generation and its freedom-seeking. Progressing further through the book, they found that I did indeed make such an acknowledgement, that in fact it was my membership of the freedom generation that enabled me to see where things had gone wrong with the freedom project. It is very much a characteristic of Irish public debate that denunciations almost invariably take the form of accusations, and people are therefore not attuned to the idea that sharper critical clarity is often attainable through observing your own mistakes.
I was born in 1955, which makes me approximately the same age as rock ‘n’ roll. This has significance for me because it provides me with a sense of having lived through a time when something coherent was happening, something with a beginning, a middle, and, not that far into the future, an end — a phantom destination that promises perfect happiness.
The rock ‘n’ roll element is not accidental: culturally and ideologically it gives expression to the concept of freedom that has defined Western humanity through my lifetime. Rock ‘n’ roll has about it an aura of perpetual revolution, of agelessness, of defiance of just about everything, including nature itself. Forty-three years ago, British band The Who, in their anthem of Sixties rejectionism, My Generation, sang ‘I hope I die before I get old’, articulating something that conveys still the mindset of this age of freedom. The important thing was to remain young, because in youth it was possible to avoid the issue of ultimate meaning. Not only did the question of the Beyond not matter because it was, relatively speaking, so far away, but for the moment its logic stood between you and achieving happiness and satisfaction right here, now. Thus did youth become central to the culture we created as we emerged from that 1960s moment of revolution. If you could freeze yourself culturally in a moment in time, there was no need to believe in anything but your own capacity to be happy on your own terms. The same sentiment was voiced in the opening lines of All the Young Dudes, the song David Bowie wrote for Mott the Hoople: Billy rapped all night about his suicide/How he’d kick it in the head when he was twenty-five/don’t want to be alive when you’re twenty-five. At the age of 20, five years seemed an eternity in which to enjoy yourself by breaking all the rules the greybeards have imposed to curtail your freedom. To die was not so much to go to a better place, a question the emerging culture elided, but to be spared the humiliation of existential decay.
What is extraordinary is that the generations which entered the public realm between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, and which today control the levers of power in our societies, have managed to perpetuate the idea of remaining young long after youth has passed them by. They have created a culture in which agelessness is paramount, even though the delusional nature of this aspiration is obvious and ineluctable. Perhaps every generation is destined to commit a crime against the next, though the nature of these crimes appears to change through time. A grudge concerning the alleged wrongs committed by our fathers’ generation, more than 40 or 50 years ago, is still widely nourished in our cultures. These alleged wrongs had to do with the imposition of rules that were not fully or properly explained and which therefore seemed to be arbitrary and somewhat vindictive. To listen to the louder voices in our cultures, one would imagine that these wrongs still continue, when in fact they are, to the extent that they occurred at all, long in the past. Today, the generations which grabbed cultural power at that time in a coup against the greybeard killjoys they conjured out of their desire to be free, perpetrate a wrong that is related but wholly different: a refusal to be truthful about the experience of freedom.
I belonged to these generations, growing up at the centre of this culture, deeply immersed in it as a rock music journalist and writer. Somehow, the culture persuaded me to perceive only a narrow dimension of myself, to promise me particular kinds of freedom for as long as I remained within a narrow definition of my humanity. But, the more I became unable to remain within this mould, the less the culture seemed able or willing to meet my needs and desires. After a while, it became obvious that this limitation was intrinsic to the culture, and indeed that things could not have been otherwise. But what was really interesting was the way the culture had succeeded in hushing this up, in persuading people not to talk about their sense of disappointment or the extent to which, as they grew older, or fell victim to the conditions which sooner or later afflict all human beings who do not die before what seems like their time, the promise of freedom and happiness had been surreptitiously withdrawn by the culture. Somehow, everyone to whom this happened — and it happened, sooner or later, to everyone — seemed to have been persuaded to believe that the fault lay with themselves, that they had been pursuing the promise of freedom in the wrong way or in the wrong place or with the wrong people. There was nothing wrong with the promise — they needed simply to give the wheel another spin.
To be fair, conveying one’s experience of this aspect of the culture — if any — was not easy. Because the culture was defined by the ethic of rebellion, and the morality of this rebellion was self-evident to everyone involved, it was difficult to describe what one had experienced without seeming simply to have changed sides, to have betrayed the idea of freedom, or simply to have gone mad. To attempt to describe reality outside the bubble of the culture was to acquire the appearance of a traitor, to become a reactionary, a lamentable shift immediately presented by the culture as the consequence of middle-aged crisis. Although the freedom of the 1960s is evaporating like the snows of April, these conditions still remain in place to stymie or lead into ridicule anyone who might be inclined to blab about the true nature of the experience.
My sense of things now is that I have only recently begun to think of myself as I really am — that, until relatively recently, the culture managed to conspire with my own desire to rationalise my dream of freedom, so as to prevent me speaking the truth about myself. This is to say that, for most of my life so far, the culture has managed to block me, or dissuade me against, perceiving myself truthfully across the entire span of my life. Perhaps the most urgent cultural task of the coming time is to analyse how it has become possible to replace the absolute meaning of reality with a more limited one, and yet to retain a kind of logic that enables this new version of reality to remain plausible.
This trick works on our blinkeredness — our evasion or denial of how reality contradicts and undermines the idealised versions of ourselves that we draw from the culture. The collective voice of our culture, to which we contribute and from which we receive a sense of ourselves, elevates the idea of youth above everything. It is possible, perhaps, to identify in that culture an ideal age, perhaps late 20s or early 30s, which speaks back to us about our hopes, dreams and aspirations. Most of us are not yet, or no longer, that ideal age. But those who are younger are already being conditioned to pay homage to this imposed ideal, and those who have passed the ideal are so seduced by the culture that they cling to its value-system rather than bear witness to their own reality. Because we have created a culture that ‘stays young’, even though we ourselves grow old, the culture inflicts on each of us a sense of alienation, which we respond to either by withdrawing to a private space or by remaining and trying to extend our grasp on youth for as long as possible.
This culture withholds a central meaning, but denies that it is doing this. In all its babble of promise, it fails to suggest an ultimate destination, but at the same time implies that some such destination exists. The question is elided, not so much in the formal discussion of our societies, where the issue of human purpose is in a sense ‘covered’, but in the very atoms of the culture, in the assumptions and conventions that govern reality, in what is conveyed between words, in the shadows of the constructs that we take for granted in everyday life. This condition seeps into language, into the very glances we exchange with one another. Each of us, internally, remains to some degree authentic, but when we meet in the public square, we are so fearful of betraying the inner reality which is so in conflict with the culture that we affirm the culture all the louder and provoke others to do likewise.
Thus, ours is a culture that sabotages hope. It implies that hope is possible, and yet has removed from sight the only source of hope that exists beyond the baubles and sensations offered by the marketplace and the false promise of eternal youth rather than eternal life. A culture constructed over 2,000 years ago on the conscioussness of Christ’s existence has been reduced in 40 years to a culture in which hope is defined merely by the prospect of some more of that which has already failed to satisfy, until the whole thing becomes untenable, at which point the accumulated and postponed despair of a lifetime of false seeking enters in with a vengeance. The culture insistently tells us that, if we have been trying out these baubles and sensations and are not satisfied, it is only because we have been doing things wrong. We have not arranged the baubles correctly, or we lack the necessary skills to experience the sensations to the full. It is a matter of technique, or attitude, or perhaps a little chemical assistance. Or perhaps I need a new suit to reclaim that eroding ideal version of myself. And, strangely, no matter how many times our personal experience tells us that these promises are suspect, the power of the message continues to convince us that the failure to achieve satisfaction resides in some inadequacy within ourselves. In the more extreme cases, the unsatisfied and therefore inadequate subjects of the marketplace are defined as victims of pathologies or illnesses. They are depressed, or addicted, or simply disturbed.
And because our societies are driven by these misapprehensions about freedom, and because of the fear we share that if our illusions are laid bare we will have nothing to live for, we refuse to look at the absolute horizon of reality, which has come to signify nothing in our cultures but the edge of the abyss, occasionally glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. When, from time to time, perhaps at the funeral of a friend or in the presence of the blurted despair of another, we are brought face-to-face with reality, we turn away in terror and bewilderment.
In this culture, ‘faith’ is doomed to the function of consolation for those who come to realise they cannot measure up to the ideal or anything like it. And something in the demeanour of the religious sensibility confirms that this is true. An embrace opens up which itself betrays the characteristics of disappointment, of resignation, of terror, of a kind of failure. Christ is offered as a consolation prize for those who cannot meet the standards of the culture. In other words, religious culture, in spite of itself, acquiesces in this characterisation of its role.
Thus, our culture seems to have constructed itself in a way that renders all but impossible our embracing of Christ, or at least that embracing without it seeming, even to ourselves, to be a mere capitulation to sentiment and fear. And religious culture appears content to avail of this limited ‘business’.
What the 1960s have come to represent in our culture is the moment when societies started to look forward to the power of the young and ceased looking back to the authority of the old. This was the moment when youth first began to assert a political force, when freedom, or a particular version of it, was posited as an answer to authority and tradition. It would be ludicrous to deny that the moment was long overdue. But, like all things that are good, it was pushed too far, and the main trouble with the 1960s revolution resides in its legacy of having unleashed in Western culture a rupture between youth and age, which shows no signs of being repaired. The moment and its symbolic assertion of individual freedom was essential, but no more essential than the preservation of tradition. As a result of the overwhelming acceptance of the values of the revolution, we are still unable even to imagine freedom and tradition being capable of happy co-existence.
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Addendum, December 2025:
If we meditate upon the photograph at the top of this article, showing three ‘cool-looking’ couples smooching in public for the camera in a fairly typical tableau of 1960s hedonistic insinuation, a strange jolt of consciousness may occur. Does their exhibitionism and bravado not seem a little cringe, in these days of sexual jadedness, and not just that brought on by age? Something that may strike is that such an image would never be choreographed now, and certainly not as an attempt to make a public statement. ‘Free love’, certainly ‘heteronormative’ love, is passé, nowadays — it is not a ‘thing’. Nor, for that matter, is ‘free thought’, or ‘free speech’, or ‘free protest’ — except in the dramatically negative sense that such freedoms are precisely not encouraged, and there is zero cultural kudos in parading an apologia for them. The picture is therefore replete with ricocheting ironies that would certainly have not dawned on those involved in its production as possibilities for the future they imagined themselves presaging. It is also replete with pathos, on account of these ironies, which wrench from the image the benefits of its aura of victory, delivering it instead to the status of pratfall. Its sense of self-satisfaction is also unwittingly hoist on the petard of history’s unforgiving bullshit detector, for it enables us to glimpse something that at the time would have been invisible: that the women in the picture — far from being ‘liberated’, as they clearly believe in that moment, are retroactively, albeit unwittingly, cast in a role somewhat akin to ‘chick singers’, something that does not appear to have occurred to anyone at the time. A gimlet feminist eye might accordingly issue a condemnation and set in train a prohibition, which is precisely the response that, of more recent interjection, has delivered us to our present and escalating demographic catastrophe. Bizarrely, one core element of the ‘freedom movement’ (feminism) managed to cancel out the other (free love). What leaps out from the photograph above all other subtexts, therefore, at least to the eyes of those initiated in the true gloom of the contemporary zeitgeist, 2025, is that, whereas the six Beautiful People in the photograph celebrate heteronormality, and thereby — implicitly — procreation, the opposite is what has transpired, and as a provable case of causation: in 1960 the total global fertility rate was c. 5.0 births per woman, it is today around 2.3 births per woman, i.e. bare replacement; moreover, the specifically Western context is far worse: the European average fertility rate in 1960 was 2.7, but by 2024 had fallen to 1.4. In Ireland, my own country, the fertility rate in 1960 was 3.58; today, that of the Irish indigenous population hovers just barely above 1.
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The ideal conditions for healthy human progress are some kind of fluid interaction of tradition and freedom. The defenders of each need to be conscious that absolutism is the enemy of everyone. Tradition needs constantly to be tested in the crucible of the present moment, to have its dead elements discarded and the healthy core preserved. Here, freedom is essential. But freedom is a deceptive word which, in its modern meaning, conveys a pursuit of desire without limit. Because of the structural limitations of the human mechanism, there is a point at which the pursuit of desire to its limit, in any direction, becomes destructive. One of the consequences of the disrespecting of tradition since the 1960s is that this consciousness of limits has been mislaid.
Since the 1960s, too, tradition and freedom have seemed to exist in separate channels, dissociated and mutually hostile. Each has had its advocates and defenders, who tend to band into warring tribes, claiming absolute virtue for a value that, in truth, can only properly flourish in a dialectical co-existence with that which is excoriated. Similarly, political culture has automatically divided its voices between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘progressives’, aka ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’, even though experience tells us that the only sustainable progress is arrived at when these opposing energies are combined.
In the 1960s, freedom was defined for a generation as the right to do as you please. The manifesto declared that only proscriptions and misantrophy stood between humanity and perfect satisfaction. This revolution changed our world, but without changing human nature. Human beings are now much freer, by these criteria, than before, but still no happier, perhaps less so. In Lapsed Agnostic, I wrote about my experiences of this freedom, using centrally the example of alcohol. My intention was not intended to be confessional, but to describe the discovery of the limits of my humanity. Having followed the recommended path towards freedom, I reached the precipice of my own capacity for satisfaction. From there I was able to glimpse, in the distance, beyond the culture, the absolute reality to which I was structurally related. It took some years of reflection on my before-and after-life to persuade me that there is another kind of freedom: the kind born of a truthful relationship with one’s own destiny. Those of us who, three or four decades ago, promoted youth to the centre of human meaning did not realise — not really — that we would one day grow old, and that, by continuing in the mode we had adopted, would have created a culture dedicated to denying our own humanity. Nor did it strike us that, in elevating our sense of youthful omnipotence to the highest altar of the culture, we were denying the larger truth about ourselves even then: because youth is not just a passing phase; it is also, even as I experience it, just a dimension of my humanity.
That revolution continues to define our cultures. For the moment at least, we accept that there are limits on human freedoms — but only, one sometimes suspects, by virtue of our sense of the as yet incomplete nature of the human scientific revolution. At the back of the Western public conversation for most of our lifetimes has been the amorphous idea that, at some unspecified time in the future, human progress would be capable of rendering freedom an infinite resource. Even when we acknowledged philosophical difficulties with this, we did so citing reactionary ideologies which stymied the progress project with backward thinking. We could not, it seems, distinguish between the dancer and the dance, between perceiving the hurts inflicted by a fossilised traditionalism as existing separately from the content of tradition. We sought to purge everything and to insist that our new culture of freedom be uncontaminated by anything held to by the old.
Nor did our outlook on such matters seem capable of countenancing the idea of a circular pattern in the drift of human understandings. We perceived progress as linear, as emerging from the primordial fog and stretching forward into the dispersible mists of the undiscovered future. We therefore saw fundamentalist ideologies, among which we included Christianity and Catholicism, as hangovers from an ignorant past rather than as carriers of abiding truths or wisdom.
Traditionalist arguments against, for example, abortion, euthanasia or stem-cell research, are frequently presented in modern political discourse as evidence of obscurantism rather than as expressions of anything absolute or ineluctable in the equation of human potential. And, because the messages of traditionalists are invariably accompanied by strong dollops of human passion — rage, fear, piety and grief — our latter-day sense of rational superiority makes it easier to elide the idea that the clash between traditionalism and the cult of progress may be telling us something about the absolute nature of the human project. To suggest that there will always be a price to be paid for progress, and that the further science takes us the higher that price will become, is to join the ‘reactionaries’. To suggest that a necessary balance between the human will and the unknowable requires us to match each new human discovery or development with its own weight in humility is to surrender to dogmaticism and superstition.
Almost unbeknownst to itself, the culture created out of the entirely understandable and in many ways correct ambition to shake off literal traditionalism seeks at all times to protect its revolution. The devices aimed at achieving this are deeply embedded in the culture and its infrastructure of communication. The spectre of tradition is all the while kept at bay by a series of unconscious stratagems that are often invisible even to those who operate them.
A couple of years ago, I noticed on the front page of one of the Irish broadsheet newspapers a picture that drew my attention for reasons that I could not immediately express even inwardly to myself. It was in August, on the day after the celebrations of the feast of the Assumption at Knock Shrine, showing two elderly male stewards in their robes at prayer. One was seated in a chair, his head bowed, a hand to his forehead. The other, just behind him, was kneeling at a chair, his hands covering his face. The photograph was captioned, ‘Let us Pray: stewards at the Assumption service at Knock shrine’.
Photographically, it was, to be frank, no more than an mildly interesting image. But what I found most interesting was the effect created by its placement on the front of a publication priding itself on being a secular newspaper, above the fold, the chief visual ‘hook’ of the newspaper on the newsstands that day. On the front of a religious publication, it would have had a different meaning: a straightforward illustration marking an important religious event. But here it seemed to be saying something else.
Part of what I felt about it involves the idea that prayer is one of the most intimate functions in which a human being can engage. Of course, media frequently carry images of people at prayer, but usually in group-shots in the course of a public service of some kind. But, still, even allowing for the possibility that the photograph was to some extent intrusive, this in itself did not account for the odd feeling it gave me.
As I tried to think it through, it became obvious that the core of the issue had to do with context. The newspaper in question tends to carry fairly substantial amounts of coverage of certain aspects of faith and religion, though it does not cover things, or claim to cover things, from a religious perspective. It is sceptical about religion, as it is sceptical about all — or most — forms of power. Much of its content is implacably opposed to the religious outlook — for example its coverage of issues like abortion and divorce. A lot of practising Catholics may read the newspaper, but they do not do so as practising Catholics. The paper speaks to a secularised society, which it had no small role in creating. Its readers may sometimes pray, but they will rarely read anything in this newspaper to reassure them that this is a sensible thing to be doing. When the subject of the core meanings of religion is broached at all, it will be treated in a compartmentalised space, fenced off from the newspaper’s ‘rational’ content, a stratagem designed to protect the ideology of the newspapers by conveying that, although it is committed to its own principles of diversity, readers should not be alarmed by these occasional outbreaks of superstition. This is just one of the remarkable anomalies of being a secular newspaper in a society where a majority of citizens are still, nominally at least, believers. Secular newspapers seem often to divide their readerships against themselves, rarely carrying direct acknowledgements that their readers may have spiritual or religious dimensions, and yet treating faith and religious affairs as important phenomena in which their readers might be expected to show an interest.
Hence, in the context of its use, the incongruity of the photograph, served to appropriate the private prayerful moment of the two elderly stewards in a manner separating them from the readers of the newspaper and turning them into a spectacle to be looked at. Interestingly, there were several other pictures from Knock inside the newspaper, accompanying an excellent report by the paper’s religious affairs correspondent. ‘Pilgrims defy the rain as they flock to Knock’, was the headline on a measured and informative piece about the previous day’s celebrations. The message was that Assumption Day at Knock remains a vibrant element of the Catholic calendar, with attendance up on the previous year. An interesting feature, according to the report, was the numbers of young people and foreign nationals now attending, and this aspect was underlined by one of several other photographs accompanying the article inside. This photograph showed a young girl taking a photograph of her teenage friends as they posed underneath the large outdoors crucifix, with the Basilica towering in the background: a young man with a tweed cap, his arms around two girls. In the foreground of the image, an elderly man dressed in a striped sweater knelt in prayer, his back to the cameras of both the girl and the newspaper photographer. In many respects, it would have made a more effective front-page image than that selected by the duty editors that day. It said something, even if something ambiguous, about youth and faith, but also carried an undertone of the old era of Catholicism. It spoke of young people on a day out, and contrasted their gaiety with the piety of the more orthodox pilgrim. Had it been published on the front page, however, it would have conveyed something that, in truth, is anathema to the house ideology of the newspaper in question: that Catholicism may belong to the future as much as the past.
The picture of the two elderly stewards, however, was on-message, though that alone would be insufficient grounds for objecting to its use. Additionally, through no fault on the part of the photographer, there was something voyeuristic, even condescending, about it. I struggled with this awhile before it came to me that, in addition to the written caption referring to the two stewards, there was another one, not spelt out in words where it could be seen but, still, clearly inscribed on the invisible and deniable cultural contract between the newspaper and its readers. That contract is a ‘rational’ one, a secular one. It has a certain view of religious matters, which is complex but nevertheless coherent as a mutual understanding. It is communicated in much more than words and pictures — in the surrounding radiation, the spaces and choices and priorities and omissions that comprise the material of a daily newspaper’s relationship with its readers. This relationship becomes as that between a long-married couple who no longer need any more than nods and signs and sighs to tell each other what needs to be told.
What these two men were doing, let us be precise about it, was opening themselves up to their infinite dimensions, which is to say they were engaging in the established ritual for acknowledging and communicating on what might be called the eternity channel. They were thus, from their own points of view, doing something as essential to their humanity as breathing or eating. Neither of these activities, of course, are private, but that is not the point. It was not any sense of a breach of privacy that bothered me, but they idea that this act, understood in a particular way by the two men engaged in it, was being presented in a context and to an audience for whom it would have, or at least be expected to have, an entirely different meaning. The idea of an infinite channel would not have communicated across the cultural chasm between the moment in Knock on Assumption Day and the newspaper rolling of the presses the following morning. No, what was being depicted, by virtue of the choice of photograph and its presentation, was something archaic, something slightly odd, something anachronistic. Deep in the subtextual messaging was the idea of an irrational practice, an outmoded cultural outlook and a dying belief-system. I looked at the photograph again and gradually the unwritten caption began to crystallise for me: ‘Look at these guys,’ it invited. ‘What are they like?’
I know this may seem like an extreme interpretation. Of course the caption doesn’t really exist, except perhaps in the half grin, or barely audible titter of the reader who looks at the photograph and is reaffirmed in his prejudices. I know that, if I were to name and accuse the newspaper in question, the editor and all those responsible for choosing this photograph would react with outrage, and I also know that this outrage would in a sense be justified. This is the thing: the culture operates beneath the surface of things. It is not merely that it is deniable, but that its existence is nowhere acknowledged, not even in the conscious thoughts of those who operate it. Nobody will have ‘chosen’ the photograph to create the effect I describe. The choice will have occurred, at least ostensibly, in an entirely innocent way. But the shared understandings between all those involved will have made any but the most perfunctory communication unnecessary, and would have set in train a wordless process leading inexorably to the ‘ping!’ of recognition in the consciousness of the reader as he or she, sitting in a coffee shop or on a Luas tram, idly glanced down at the front page and instantly absorbed what the photograph was saying.
All treatment of religion by secular newspapers is subject to this syndrome. On the day after the publication of a report of abuse of children by members of religious orders, a newspaper will publish a beautiful photograph of the pope kissing a child. The subtext will be clear but eminently deniable. Not a word will be identifiable as indicating what this subtext might be, but virtually everyone laying eyes on the photograph will immediatley understand that it is intended to trip off a feeling of unease in keeping with a deeper, unstated ideological agenda.
Even when they provide in-depth coverage of religious issues or occasions — as they did following the death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI, secular newspapers do so with something of the style of a vegetarian waiter serving up a medium-rare steak. Behind the qualities of the coverage which address and serve the cultural needs of those adhering to the residual belief-system is a note deliberately struck to signal unbelief, to convey the imminent obsolescence of the superstition. Religion may still have its place in society, this note communicates, but it is a dying phenomenon — outmoded but reluctant to fade away, interesting for its longevity and persistence, sometimes engaging for its spectacularity, but, most of all, to those of us of a more sophisticated outlook, a little quaint.
All this bears daily down on the individual who seeks to find some channel of expression for his infinite dimension. Perhaps, the culture being so degraded, he is not even aware that he has such a dimension. But he knows that he lacks something, that some desire deep within him remains unsatisfied. But when he pricks up his ears to hear, or peels his eyes to see, all that is there is this low-level mockery and dismissiveness of the perspectives and essences that might serve to open him up to the channel he so desperately seeks. The result is a population that desperately hungers for something but cannot imagine what that something might be.
A couple of years ago, I was invited to participate in an arts festival down the south of Ireland to take part in a debate about God and Irish society and read from my then recently published book, Lapsed Agnostic. It was an interesting experience because it enabled me to see up close the cultural consequences of this kind of representation of religion and its significance.
The debate involved me and a Catholic priest going head-to-head on the motion of ‘Spirituality and Creativity’ a catch-all topic that seemed capable of expanding in any conceivable direction. This struck me in advance as rather odd, since my sense of things would have been that, at this stage in my life and on the clear if complicated evidence of my book, we would find many more points of agreement than otherwise. The audience for our debate was about 300 middle-aged and elderly well-heeled people, mainly from the region, and a sprinkling of younger people. In this it seemed proportionately representative of the wider society in terms of interest in and engagement with the concept or institutions of religion.
The priest was a very nice man, a poet who came from the locality but had been posted abroad for many years. He had not been speaking very long when I began to realise why we had been pitted against one another. He was a deeply religious man but one who evidently thought it necessary to find frequent occasion to apologise for the record, if not the existence of Catholicism. He made frequent references to the dark history of Irish Catholicism, a couple of mildly disparaging mentions of the pope [Benedict XVI] , and seemed in general to be seeking to talk about religion without being in any way specific. It was clear that, in terms of Irish Catholicism in its histoical sense, if not in terms of Roman Catholicism in general, he saw himself as something of an oppositionist. I could see, too, that with this audience he seemed to be pushing an open door. They were lapping it up, nodding and clapping his every thought. They seemed particularly keen about his suggestion that there was a difference between ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’, although he did not spell out precisely what he meant by this. He said he felt the church needed to be apologising to the people for its stewardship of their spiritual lives. It was clear to me that his main purpose in speaking was to put clear blue water between himself and the institutional church, and to ingratiate himself with an audience he sensed to be of similar outlook.
I don’t have a set spiel for these occasions. What I say very much depends on the context — not because I have different positions for different occasions, but because the context invariaby insinuates the emphasis. If I am up against some smug cleric who seeks to deny there is any real issue of complaint with Irish Catholicism, I tend to become the attorney for the prosecution and seek to set out the true history of the Irish Church’s descent into a destructive moralism since the Great Famine of the 1840s. If I find myself up against one or more of the two-a-penny critics of religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, to be found loitering all over the culture, I tend to go back to basics, bringing the discussion around to the place of religion in the essential human structure. There is actually no inconsistency between these two positions, although conventional public discourse in Ireland holds that you must either be a ‘progressive’, which is to say opposed to religion in principle, or a ‘conservative’, which generally seems to involve defending the indefensible.
This was a slightly unusual situation, so I did neither of the above. Instead I confronted both the audience and my fellow panellist and asked them what they wanted. Did they want to be Catholics or not? Did they want to be Christians or not? I looked around the room and said they didn’t look like Hindus or Buddhists, that in general they seemed to be Irish people of a certain age, which probably meant that the vast majority of them had been born into the Catholic faith. I stressed that I was addressing them as a collective, as a cross section of the wider culture, rather than as individuals. As individuals, I might well argue, they could believe anything they liked and get away with it for as long as they lived. As a collective, however, they faced a different problem: the perpetuation or replacement of the culture from which they, as individuals, had gleaned their spiritual nourishment.
What did they want to be? What did they want their children to be?
It seemed to me that their demeanour at present represented a kind of search for something that was other than what was, something that was not what they had been, and yet was nothing else that you might call by a specific name.
I pointed out that we were standing or sitting in the heart of Christian civilisation. This is what had made us what we were, for better or worse, and most of it had been very much for the better. I explained that the systems we depended on, the economics, science and art that served as the walls and foundations of our culture were essentially of Christian construction. I read a short extract from Rodney Stark’s book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to freedom, Capitalism and Western success: ‘Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls. Without a theology committed to reason, progress and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800: A world with many astrologers and alchemists but no scientists. A world of despots, lacking universities, banks, factories, eyeglasses, chimneys and pianos. A world where most infants do not live to the age of five and many women die in childbirth — a world truly living in ‘dark ages’”.
I praised the pope, describing him as one of the world’s most progressive thinkers. I said that Benedict XVI, by then three years into his papacy, had confounded his enemies and delighted his admirers in a pontificate that glittered beyond all expectations. Benedict had been, by the secular media analysis, a stop-gap and a throwback, a ‘reactionary’, a ‘rightwinger’, an obscurantist. But what had emerged was what had been implicit in his majesterial writings over several decades: a supreme intellect mounted in a most animated humanity, a man who in his lifetime had watched mankind lurch between great good and the greatest evil, and who as pope had sought to reconcile these observations with the truths he had inherited. I said that from the outset Pope Benedict had eyeballed the culture of the age, his first two encyclicals confronting the two most pressing issues of our time: the haemorrhaging from public language of, respectively, love and hope. Although preceded by a reputation as a theological traditionalist, he emerged, when listened to, as having comprehended the post-modernist impulse towards knowing emptiness even better than many of its adherants. He had brought an intellectual rigour to the core of Christianity in the public square, expounding and illuminating the core connections, and disconnections, between Christianity and modern culture. In truth he had been the most modern and radical of popes. When he spoke, he did so as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, but his overriding concern seemed to be for the soul of society. He faced an age in the throes of an identity crisis and sought to show it the way out. His project was the restoration to Western culture of an integrated concept of reason, the re-separation of the metaphysical from the physical. Benedict had succeeded in bringing Catholic legalisms back to their core significance, reaching out, in spite of the background noise created around him by a largely hostile and mischievous media, to the educated generations of young people who hungered for something to transform the lassitude invoked in them by a culture selling sensation and freedom but nothing approaching the kind of satisfaction they craved. This subtle and brilliant pope, I said, had struggled to be heard in a media climate characterised by sabotage and diversion. Repeatedly the media sought to distort or reduce his statements, to make them fit with prejudices unfurled on his election. But Benedict had emerged as a man of courage, grace and shimmering intellect, his message undiluted, his status enhanced in the human spaces beyond the newsdesks and the studios of the international media.
All this drove the audience close to madness. A man in the front row accused me of tribalism. He said he was sick of hearing this stuff. I asked him who had been saying this stuff lately. He didn’t answer. A woman at the back chimed in that she hadn’t come here to hear ‘dogma’. I said I hadn’t uttered a word of dogma but could do that as well. I asked her what she had come to hear. ‘I thought we were going to have a discussion about mysticism,’ she answered, and all she was hearing was ‘dogma’. The priest sought to stoke the fire while seeming to spring to my defence. In fairness, he pleaded, I hadn’t uttered any dogma, it was just that my tone was a little dogmatic. They loved that.
It seemed to me this audience was exhibiting what might be called the dominant characteristic of post-Christian Irish society: a searching for something other than what is. What is usually called ‘spirituality’ in our culture is mainly an evasion, an attempt to define itself by what it is not, which is to say that another term for ‘spirituality’ might be ‘Not-Catholic’. When I hear someone talk about ‘spirituality’ in a general context, I tend to reach for my coat. Far from thinking we need to duck around Catholicism, I believe that the only way our culture can approach matters of the spirit is via the language and culture of the faith we’ve been growing in for many centuries. Like the society they typified, they sought, having found Catholicism not to their liking, to tiptoe around it, marking out a new territory in those elements which appeared to be ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical’, but preferably not Christian, and most certainly not Catholic. I said that I didn’t think this would work for Irish society, that it might well work for any one member of the audience, for as long as he or she survived in this dimension, to create a spiritual life out of the remnants of a Catholic upbringing and the alternativism that enable an avoidance of this; but if applied at a cultural level it would result only in confusion and lead inexorably to despair.
‘What about Celtic Spirituality?’ a man asked. What about it? ‘Isn’t there a place for it?’ I said that Celtic Spirituality was like having yesterday’s dinner today. It was a perverse attempt to sidestep the reality of now. Faith was faith in the moment or it did not exist. Once you had it, you could adorn it with all manner of things, but if you didn’t have it to begin with, the adornments were reduced to kitsch and corn.
The discussion was heated but without much sense of a common language. Anyone observing the drama of the event with an objective eye would have concluded that it was a discussion between an audience seeking a new and progressive outlook on spiritual affairs, against a rather unlikely looking representative of some reactionary tendency seeking to take Ireland backwards to some near obsolescent form of behaviour. I saw it differently: as a battle between the ideal, represented by the poet-priest, and the possible, represented by myself. The audience, virtually to a sinner, was with the priest. At the end, he approached me and asked if I wouldn’t mind him giving me a bit of advice. I said to fire ahead. He mentioned the name of a well-known Irish journalist who, having been a bit of a raver when younger, had become famous for adopting reactionary positions in middle-age. He said it wasn’t a question of my turning out the same, but that people might begin to see it like that. I told him he was probably right but that there was nothing much I could do about how people decided to see things.
But the next day was interesting in a quite different way. This time I would have an opportunity to present my own thoughts without having to follow anyone’s else’s agenda or angle. I would read from my book and afterwards be interviewed by a beautiful female novelist. After the previous day’s antagonisms, I was a little nervous, and my state was not improved by the well-known poet who approached me outside the venue just before the reading and muttered, ‘This had better be good!’. It was the kind of cryptic remark Irish poets like to make to maintain their sense of enigma: it implied a willingness to give me a fair hearing, but also suggested a diminishing reservoir of tolerance for any further heresy or error.
I was surprised to find that at least as many people had turned up as for the previous day’s debate. This hinted at an openness I hadn’t detected in that encounter. I noticed a number of cultural icons in the audience who had not been there the day before and they all either eyed me in a steely fashion or avoided eye-contact altogether.
It is a strange thing to have ‘crossed over’ in one of the central cultural battlefields of modern Ireland. There is very little allowance made for the possibility that you have made an honest reappraisal of things. The standard assumption is invariably that you have been ‘got at’, or have become frightened of dying, or perhaps that you must have been prone to stupidity all the time except that this tendency had somehow escaped notice hitherto.
Once I had finished writing Lapsed Agnostic, I next had to reconcile myself to the fact that almost all those who would be asked to review it would rubbish both the book and myself. This is because reviewers were likely to be other writers/journalists or clerics or other quasi-religious figures. The first category would rubbish it because religion is deeply unfashionable in the media and 99 per cent of journalists/writers are terrified of signalling that they have anything but contempt for it. The second category, the ostensibly religious one, would rubbish Lapsed Agnostic because it explores a way of thinking about religion that none of these professionals has once alluded to in public.
Lapsed Agnostic therefore tells elements of my own story to illustrate how the twin forces of religion and culture came into conflict in the Ireland of the last 20th century. It tells the story of Irish Catholicism from the perspective of one half-awake citizen. It looks through the eyes of a boy at the immense cultural and social connections between the civic and religious realms. It describes how this edifice of belief began to disintegrate in the mind and heart of one most devout young Irish male. Through the story of a descent into alcoholic addiction, the book explores how that now grown-up boy began to discover the limits of the material world and found himself running out of road. Finally, it explores the possibilities of faith in the correct functioning of the human personality.
Remarkably, the beautiful young lady novelist had read my book and liked it. She was therefore in a position to inform the audience what was in it, as opposed to what they imagined might be in it, or what they had gathered from the several mischievous and one or two poisonous reviews in the national newspapers. She saw it for what it was: an attempt to slide underneath the language of the conventional discussion about religion. She gave me a build-up unlike anything I had received since Brendan Flynn, the force behind Clifden Arts Week, in 1992, introduced me with a series of gratuitous references to Dostoyevsky, Kavanagh and Kafka, and then departed the stage leaving me gasping for breath.
I read a few sections of Lapsed Agnostic. And because these immediately resonated with the experiences of many people in the audience, I began to feel that I was being listened to in a different way.
When I had finished reading, the lady novelist asked me some questions, which, again because they were formed out of the new thoughtspace created by the book, enabled the discussion to avoid the trampled thoroughfares and enter into the odd little cavities of thought that people think are unique to themselves and become quite astonished to discover are part of some mysterious shared consciousness. Instead of talking about morals and sin, we talked about desire, about what it is and how it can deceive you. We talked about shopping. We talked about drink. People began to get it. I briefly revisited some of my statements of the previous day, in particular the need for religion to have some kind of a structural specificity in the cultural context. They got this too. In the end a queue of more than a hundred people formed to buy my book and have it signed by the author. Even the priest I had locked horns with the previous day was effusive. He shook my hand and said I was a mighty man.
Part 2 of this series will appear later this week, and Part 3 on Christmas Eve.
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