Hardcore for Nerds

Got a touch of déjà vu seeing this headline on the Irish Times website, even though I knew Michael D. was visiting London (his first international trip as head of state) and that he was making an address at the London School of Economics entitled “Of Public Intellectuals, Universities, and a Democratic Crisis”. So it was obviously going to be pretty much the same as his university speech, in Ireland, but for a moment I thought it would be a link to that original article that had somehow reappeared under the ‘most read’ column (albeit relatively briefly and lowly).

Still, even if it’s repeated (perhaps especially since it is so), what to make of the combination in this line of reportage?

“The power of the markets to declare that humanity is irrational, while the market itself is rational must be resisted, said Mr Higgins, who is on his first foreign visit as head of state.”

How can we - of the left, but I’d warrant it could apply beyond that in the sense of challenging people to be open and critical about current politics not just as mechanisms of government but as ideas and orthodox ways of understanding - not be inspired by this? How cynical, bounded and distrustful of establishment politicians do you have to be before you can dismiss a clear and cogent attack on that very establishment as insincere, misguided or even overly theoretical?

Of course, it’s not unproblematic that our head of state appears to be ideologically out of step with the major partner in the government coalition, an enthusiastically right-wing Fine Gael; and that the minor partner, who nominated Higgins for the presidency and as whose party president he served up until his electoral victory, is essentially abandoning the social-democratic ground which a Labour Party ought to occupy, for an equal if more outwardly equivocal purchase into the neoliberal orthodoxy of debt, austerity and ‘reform’. Yet that gives rise to a tension that could be productive rather than cynical, if we were perhaps to act on it (after all, in every way apart from the lack of actual presidential power, it echoes the long republican tradition in France and America of divided government).

Such tension that is perhaps most sharply illustrated by the fact that while in Dublin there is controversy over the privatisation of bin services, in London the President of the nation warns:

“On privatisation, Mr Higgins was blunt: “is the road back to autocracy, in which a hollowed-out state is bereft of anything meaningful to attract the support of the citizen – especially the marginalised, excluded from the mainstream of society.”

What’s perhaps most intriguing and illuminating is that the view expands out easily from the local and parochial (over which, by design, the President as separate from the mechanisms of government has no direct power) to a broader international view, which sees ‘Ireland’ not just as the apotheosis of its own national politics - cue the ‘vision’ of recovery, everything that makes up the quasi-religious faith in our country’s progress through the straitjacket of ‘bailout’ territory - but as a historical player on a broader scene:

“In so many ways the tragedy of modern Ireland’s recent difficulties is that it did what the founders of the LSE hoped. It was the first English-speaking country to decolonise, to walk in darkness down what would become a better lit road - a road illuminated by teachers and students at the LSE.”

“The problem for Ireland was the failure to achieve economic lift-off at the same moment as soon after. By the time the more recent economic boom began, leaders and people had all but lost connection with the cultural and political elements of national revival which might, if retained, have provided an ethical brake, made a critique that would have constituted the regulation that was needed,” he said.

The dream of a social Europe, he said, is being “undermined by the commodification of ever more aspects of social life, as European social capital, the strongest in the world, is monetized.

“It is clear we have arrived at such a crisis now as great or greater than that faced by the previous generation of political and social theorists at the end of the 19th Century. It is a challenge for all of us to craft our response to our crisis as they did to theirs in their time.

“We are experiencing now I believe an intellectual crisis that is far more serious than the economic one which fills the papers, dominates the programmes in our media,” said the President […]

To quote a horrible phrase that attempts to make a PR victory out of austerity, let’s make something of this crisis, shall we?

as the 9th President of Ireland.

[…]

“In preparing for my Presidency, I recognise that our long struggle for freedom has produced a people who believe in the right of the individual mind to see the world in its own way and indeed that individual innovation and independence of mind has given Ireland many distinguished contributors in culture and science, often insufficiently celebrated.

However, in more recent years, we saw the rise of a different kind of individualism – closer to an egotism based on purely material considerations – that tended to value the worth of a person in terms of the accumulation of wealth rather then their fundamental dignity. That was our loss, the source in part, of our present difficulties. Now it is time to turn to an older wisdom that, while respecting material comfort and security as a basic right of all, also recognises that many of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured.

Our successes after all in the eyes of so many in the world have been in the cultural and spiritual areas – in our humanitarian, peace-building and human rights work - in our literature, art, drama and song – and in how that drama and song have helped us cope with adversity, soothed the very pain which they describe so well, and opened the space for new possibilities.

Our arts celebrate the people talking, singing, dancing and ultimately communing with each other. This is what James Connolly meant when he said that: “Ireland without her people means nothing to me”. Connolly took pride in the past but, of course, felt that those who excessively worshipped that past were sometimes seeking to escape from the struggle and challenge of the present. He believed that Ireland was a work in progress, a country still to be fully imagined and invented – and that the future was exhilarating precisely in the sense that it was not fully knowable, measurable.

The demands and the rewards of building a real and inclusive Republic in its fullest sense remains as a challenge for us all, but it is one we should embrace together.

A decade of commemorations lies ahead – a decade that will require us to honestly explore and reflect on key episodes in our modern history as a nation; that will require us to draw on the ethics and politics of memory in such a way as will enable us not only to be sensitive to differing and incomplete versions of that history, but also to remain open to the making of reconciliation or to the acceptance of different versions of aspects and events of memory if required.

[…]

It is my wish to be a President for all of the Irish at home and abroad. We Irish have been a diasporic people for a great part of our history. The circumstances that have impelled – and that continue to impel – many citizens to seek employment and a better life elsewhere, are not ordained by some mysterious hand of fate. They challenge our capacity to create a sustainable and prosperous economy and an inspiring model of the good society. We, in our time, must address the real circumstances that generate involuntary emigration, and resolve that in the years ahead we will strive with all our energy and intellect, with mind and heart to create an Ireland which our young people do not feel they have to leave and to which our emigrants, or their children, may wish, in time,to return to work and live in dignity and prosperity. I invite all of the Irish, wherever they may be across the world, to become involved with us in that task of remaking our economy and society.”