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This essay is based on a paper given at the Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College, Dublin, in December 2005, and represents a purely personal point of view.

Aristotle defined as second nature those habits and customs which together make an identity, as distinct from the permanent attributes that go to make up human nature. Since the end of the cold war, globalization has taken off as a second human nature, even according to some theorists, the market mentality being intrinsic to the composition of the human being and capitalism being an essential feature of life on earth. This would no doubt upset Aristotle, but we do know, from our studies of other peoples and cultures, that some characteristics are more constant than others, and we have much to learn from each other. What is interpreted as temporary sometimes turns out to be a permanent, depending on your point of view.
It may be a good thing at this stage, after the Fall of the Wall, to have a look at the role of the intelligentsia, particularly as dissidents, from the positions of right and left, and to see how they have fared in the past, and how we will go forward, in a project of peace which yet acknowledges the diversity of the modern nation states, and to see particularly how Ireland fits into this remit.
The intelligentsia, traditionally, have transcended the boundaries and limitations of class, gender, and race, and in a stance of detachment, comment on and effect the power play and cultural policies of a nation – and so negotiate and reach the area of the desirable qualities which come to be defined as permanent aspects of human nature in a broader context.
Because the idea of nationality is first and foremost an emotional identification with a group who share language, social customs, but not always territory, it is by its very nature prone to warfare: as we have seen in the 20th century great wars were fought on the basis of nationality, fascism being the most emotive form of nationality, with its mystification of blood and brotherhood, which linked its symbols and paraphernalia to the methods of of modern communications. The progress is from the tribe, with its gods, to the nation state, with its heroes, to a wider arena. Therefore one of the roles of the dissident in the nation state is to be vigilant against emotional excess and over- identification with the nation, whilst promoting the welfare of the people not to go to extremes where hostilities are engendered. However because the nation state by definition shares an ideology with its members the dissident or intellectual must also watch out for the dangers of ideology, which are carried together like a capsule in the minds of the people. There are many well-recognized ways in which ideology works against the truth, where the group mind takes over to the detriment of honest self examination.
On the other hand, in the Western model of rationality and equality, there are specific problems, in that the rhetoric of equality cannot always find a match in an atmosphere of competition and self-aggrandizement that the nation state embraces and the market upholds at this point in history. Some political systems have tried to solve this problem – equality and power: the left socialist countries in their beginnings notoriously entered a duplicity of mind to keep these two balls in the air. What Noam Chomsky calls the bounds of the expressible had its historic moment in 1917 when the fabrication of necessary illusions for social management entered the 20th century. The Bolshevik revolution gave concrete expression to the Leninist conception of the radical intelligentsia as the vanguard of social progress exploiting popular struggles to gain state power and to impose the Red bureaucracy of Bakunin’s forebodings. This they proceeded to do, dismantling factory councils, Soviets, and other forms of popular organization so that the population could be effectively mobilized into a “labour army” under the control of supposedly far sighted leaders who would drive the whole society forward. We have seen in each of the great communist countries that this forceful rule of the intelligentsia resulted in totalitarianism and the banishment of consent. I am old enough to remember the dunce caps of China in the 1960s and 70s and how professors and academics had to walk the streets draped as fools to convince the masses of the omnipotent reign of Mao, who reached further into places even emperors couldn’t reach with the subjugation of the masses. So the failure of these communist revolutions has shown us there is the least tolerance for dissent in those countries which have espoused totalitarianism, the so-called dictatorship of the people, when in fact the new emperors and dictators killed unprecedented numbers and threw even vaster numbers into prison.
So we can see under the conditions of pure Marxism, when the proletariat were considered to be led by the intelligentsia, these intelligentsia became the conservative power at the heart of social control, banishing real dissidents to Siberia or the slave camps. Therefore it seems there has been a hiatus between the individual liberties enshrined by the state and the more fundamental values of a global view which have been held by the intelligentsia.
Has the rule of the people from the right fared any better? What is a state now when the people ARE the state, where the individual is held to be equal yet is vulnerable to enormous economic powers held by those who are richer and more adept and able – some are unable to access the media and leadership structures, others seem relatively powerless. Reagan and Thatcher tended to give new meanings to equality and liberty by superimposing additional rights, the right not only to own property absolutely but to make boundless wealth whatever the cost to the environment, in fact, during the Cold War the environment was regarded as a non-issue as both sides of the globe heaped up armaments; and laid waste the resources of the earth like an enormous party that the world was going to end and they were going to get as rich as possible on the proceeds before pulling the plug on it. At the European level there was a committee for the Environment in the European Parliament following the Jahn report in the ‘seventies. At national level, where were the intelligentsia during this crucial cold war period? Those at odds with the government were deprived, with few exceptions, through the power of the mass media, of having any foothold on public opinion since the media backed the consumer culture, save for a small number of literary, academic, and specialist journals and newspapers. There have been movements of the intelligentsia, such as the counter culture in the United States which have been largely absorbed as a sub culture, and which have been deprived of political nous by association, usually through the press of amorality, or as corrupted individuals who don’t even have the romantic allure they had in the 60s. Instead they are recycled as a superior form of garbage in the popular culture.
So in the western model, with the emphasis on individual liberty, it took no time at all before this became translated by ordinary people led by private company despots, into the unquestioned right to rule the earth more than any war lord of the medieval times. And the mass media backed them, there was hardly a colour supplement without its full complement of energy burning devices, cars being featured even as I speak (in 2005) without mention of the downsides of air pollution, carbon dioxide poisoning of the earth and global warming. During this time of economic expansion the mass media ruled and decided who was in and who was out. Since the enhancement of civil liberties and the incentives of endless wealth was the engine that drove the economic war between East and West, it would be rational to suppose, once the argument had been won by the West, that they could revert to better husbandry of resources in the light of the coming generations that had been saved by the avoidance of full scale confrontation and nuclear warfare. The intelligentsia could come back on stage, that generation of the 60s who had been demonized as lunatic protesters and lefties of the Vietnam war, and by draconian drug laws (and drug use, legislation and control remains a serious problem) could take their place in the body politic and dissent from the programme of endless profiteering and economic expansion. But that didn’t’ happen. Reaganism and Thatcherism, while they won the argument against communism, held little hope for the advancement of the human project and civilization because the primary focus was on a sort of preternatural greed, and that greed became normative in a media that was too lazy to react to the challenges at the end of the Cold War. The question of global warming was mooted, in fact, by Thatcher in the ‘eighties, but not addressed by society at large, and not taken up as environmentalists continued to be lampooned as tree huggers and ancient hippies. The BBC was notable in following its public service remit with excellent nature programmes by David Attenborough.
On the whole, however, instead of enabling dissent, the mass media colluded with the giant economic multinationals as they took the planet a day at a time, and in that day, to waste and consume as much as possible. The intelligentsia or those that thought ahead, used to being side-lined, were largely silenced, with the result of the notorious dumbing down culture that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the concomitant rise of gangsters and drug warlords.
The role of the intelligentsia had been to call attention to these democratic deficits in the real politik , but they remained marginal figures at the time. On the broader front, the silencing of dissent from the intelligentsia has through the media emphasis on consumerism continued right until very recently. The result is that dissent and dissidence have become extremist, in the face of a seductive and powerful advertising presence; and for these dissenters, a wholesale rejection of the Western model of the nation state has developed. The extremists among the intelligentsia are given conditions in which they thrive, particularly those who oppose the images of the commercial West, as they have embraced not just consent to dissent, but a hard edged political programme against those they have cast as the enemy. The Al Quaeda are a case in point.
We could ask if there anything about nation states where the intelligentsia still have a role to play as dissidents in a way that moves forward the democratic processes of society instead of creating a climate of fear and terror with the usual outcome of hyper security, or should I say hyper insecurity. The threat to democracy is very large, as with the enabling of communications such as the internet, a whole culture also has grown up which aims to steal from this demographic group; stealing – from common larceny with credit card numbers, to high powered stealing of identity – and the infiltration of society where bomb makers can go undetected until the latest suicide bomber makes the ultimate bid for what he or she calls freedom. They have seen freedom defined as licence, and have opted for a genuine freedom of the will, a freedom he or she will not live to enjoy.
They are helped by ideologues who posit an idealized state as distinct from the real nation states of our time, as put by some Islamist radicals:
“So all creation issuing as it does from one absolute, universal, and active Will, forms an all-embracing unity in which each individual part is in harmonious order with the remainder.”
It would be another day’s work to see how this idea of unity, a single will, can be squared with the separatist and isolated acts of terrorism, such as the suicide bomber. The ethics of nationalist Islam, with its education for extremists who do not want the delicate balance between a fundamentalist state and modern states, and who embark on a progamme of destruction which is aimed at the western democratic states, need to be examined and dialogued with even more than the need for security.
The huge modern nation states are thus at a threshold where everyday events like writing on the internet can yield clues to a hostile intelligentsia many miles away, allowing them access to the culture in order to destroy it. How can dialogue be made between these fundamentalists and the core values of the nation state which have been with us since the Enlightenment, the appeal to reason and to individual liberties which are enshrined in the modern nation state? That is the challenge facing the modern nation state today, and for which we hope to find some answers.
The newer nation states, such as in Ireland, have not always proceeded along these rationalistic and cooperative means and measures of pan-Europeanism, the conflict in the North being paradigmatic in this case. However, the space and platform, with the possibilities of cooperation at national level, and the opportunity of Europe gave us was, in the end, crucial to the solution of this conflict.
The earlier modern nation states were not without conflict, indeed it was because of their warfare and the possibility of over-coming it that the idea of the European community had its genesis just after the Second World War, when that cataclysm propelled the participants to search urgently for peace.
The revulsion to killing, especially for political ends, is rooted deep in human nature, and while it has inspired the modern miracle of the European Union with its programme for peace, on the national stage in Ireland, for many years, it was still mired in the politics and extreme actions of the past. Since Ireland remained neutral during the war, this meant that the impetus for change was slower than in those countries which had endured the cataclysm.
The role of the intelligentsia is more clear-cut in nation states at the time of their emergence than at any time thereafter. They are to the forefront of the founding of nation states, especially the modern nation states and republics that have sprung up worldwide after the Enlightenment. Ever since that time there has been a class apart from government whom the government cannot fool, and the outcome, whether cultural or political, depends on the noise they make, but we have seen, with the advance of communication, this can be impeded through mass-media strategies.
The very word nation is etymologically rooted in the Latin word for birth, and since death is the mother of beauty, in those early days of the state, the intelligentsia are almost always bound up with death. Indeed, of the leading 1916 leaders who were executed, three were poets. What cannot escape us is their emotional identification with territory, the nation state.
Therefore, the first level of nationhood is the celebration of death and sacrifice and equating it with birth and fertility. The intelligentsia who first brought about the modern nation state were also romantics, some with an imperative to act out their ideas. They are responsible for the birth of what Yeats called a terrible beauty, nationalism.
Not only did the revolution against despots took place there over a century later than those of the nation states in Europe, but Ireland was revolting against colonial powers. More pertinently, after the revolution against colonialism, we had a civil war almost immediately. Therefore it took Ireland longer as a state to recover from the revolutionary ferment. A long extended wake is perhaps the first legacy of any revolution, particularly in Ireland where the tradition of the wake was already established with its funeral games and fertility rites all bound into ceremonial both tragic and comedic.
Our propensity for funeral-going has marked our first hundred years as a nation. By respecting the dead in a very ostentatious manner and never speaking ill of them we are creating conditions in which the bloody birth of the nation can be subsumed into a celebration of mourning.
Revolutionaries have looked on their projected nation state as a mother, and in some cases, as in Ireland, writings such as in Patrick Pearse’s “The Mother” have posited a state of sacrificial death as being more akin to or even superseding birth itself.
Perhaps the long extended wake was needed to mourn not only the physical deaths but the spiritual betrayals of the Civil War. The intelligentsia who brought about the revolution were soon silenced by a culture of complicity, mired in the betrayals of that war. Frozen in that historic moment, politicians are seemingly unable to transcend the divisions of gender, caste and class, but rely on covert and secret associations based on past loyalties and survival tactics as in a time of civil war, to do the business of everyday. In the fractured psyche of the new state, a consensus, largely anti-intellectual, arose – this being largely marked in the early period of the state, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. It may be that all bloody revolutions, for reasons of blood sacrifice and guilt, are unable to progress towards a reconciliation with the past, but this is much more the case with a new state that has endured a civil war.
In Ireland, the successors to this revolution are the heirs of families involved in the Civil War, so behind the familial pedigree is the shame that their ancestors who engaged in warfare may have had blood on their hands. In the day to day life of the new state, a quietism set in, and this recourse to silence in Ireland has resulted in a clandestine style of decision-making, which means that the loyalty is to a person and family rather than a more abstract idea of justice, and such loyalties exist even today having their origins in the early conflict of the state.
For example, it is noted that individuals who are corrupt on election, are discovered to be so, are re-elected – which would show that what matters in Ireland is not the rights or wrongs of any issue, but the number of your supporters you can muster. Core principles of justice are abandoned in the need to identify with power and success. So these local and provincial leaders of the former dispossessed are at the heart of governments who win elections bust lose future direction.
In the quietus that followed, in the 1930s, when the Constitution was written (1937), with its concomitant anti-intellectualism, the role of the intelligentsia is subdued – the conflict with the authority of a colonial power marked them as dissident, but they found themselves silenced by those who succeeded in that clandestine style of power became dynastic rulers with popular appeal to the people, based on past association and loyalties. The Irish Constitution, which places the family above the state, therefore plays on the loyalties of our fractured past, with a detrimental effect on the real process and cooperation needed in nation-building.
The territorial war waged in the North has only recently allowed us to bring to national closure the fact that our birth as a nation was one in which death was the preferred modus vivendi, which is a paradox because the succeeding people of the nation have both to deal with the waste of sacrificial death whilst ennobling it. This is an impossible aspiration, as the deaths in H-blocks in the eighties showed, while in the south of the state, the constitution itself was based on ideals which are at the same time life enhancing and death embracing- and a claim to the territory in the North which was only abolished by the Belfast Agreement in 1998, more than two hundred years after revolution broke out in Europe.
On the international front, there were many ideological battlegrounds during the Cold War period and Ireland became in some way the focus of a special attention because she was unique in the West – not only had she a colonialist past but also the best aspects of a pre-industrial society, so the negative effects of the industrial revolution in producing a mass culture had not yet taken hold, resulting in a high individualism along with, however a social conservatism. Ireland was ripe for the importation of new ideologies, such as Marxism and feminism.
Because we are a modern nation, we have been inundated with ideas and ceremonies from other cultures, and have found ourselves celebrated nationally as the first state to break away from the habits of colonial powers. Scholars and historians have written of us as a post-colonial state, noting sadly that no sooner have we dismantled the power apparatus of colonialism than we mimic it in our customs and observances. What we have seen in our short history of less than a hundred years is the dismantling of the past of imperialism, while the more revolutionary intellectuals, those who stayed revolutionary after the foundation of the state, have made it their life’s work to find imperialism at work in the heart of the new nation, found that the Catholic Church continued in its role of stifling opinion long after the birth of the nation. The meaning of the territory has shifted from the polemical aggrandizement of the state to the control, and thought control over different bodies, such as women’s bodies.
In the years of quietus in Ireland, the Constitution laid out the forms of government while both the Church and the Press and the government presented a monolithic face of Catholicism. This was broken in the 1950s by the Noel Browne affair, who sought to bring the family into the social sphere, so that it would no longer be a private institution, but a function of the state. The bishops, particularly Jeremiah Newman of Limerick, and John Charles McQuaid of Dublin fought to have the supremacy of the Church in the family, to the point of impoverishing families. Therefore the role of the first intellectuals of the nation state, its writers, was to dissect and criticize the role of the Church, and since Church and State were bound to each other as Siamese twins, often their criticism had to come from afar, as in the early days of the state when all intellectuals were per se banished from the land – O’Connor, O Faolain, Beckett, not to speak of the earlier émigrés Joyce and Yeats, who despite his nationalism, spent most of his years outside Ireland.
It seems the exile’s eye is sharpened by the experience of being alien in another country, all the better to feast those eyes on the homeland and because it is tinged with the fresh air of being an outsider, their criticisms are all the more pungent and powerful.
Indeed this “advance and return” of emigrants, who are raised in an alien culture – but with emotional identification with an Irish mother ,who then comes to symbolize the nation – is a pattern in Irish culture, and goes back to the revolution of 1916 in that those intellectuals who brought about the birth of the nation state follow this pattern. Not only is the identification with the mother and her passive state upheld by the Irish intelligentsia, and embodied in the constitution, it is a pattern of modern nation states founded on religion, and is the core of the present profound disagreement with Islam that all the western liberal democracies experience as they move away from the identification of nation and the mother, with its life/death antimonies in the past.
Since, with our accession to Europe it was possible for the first time since our beginning as a nation to move away from the stifling authority of Church and an inherited class who took power – we have been able to move in a wider brief towards a liberal agenda away from patristic concerns of death and history. As we approach the centenary of the founding of our nation state, Ireland, we have a richly documented past both from the early days of the nation state, since our emergence as a nation coincided with a huge increase in communication possibilities both nationally and internationally. This can have positive as well as negative effects.
In the countries of the EU, the role of the intelligentsia as critics is central to maintaining a good government, and the accord of nations which has brought about the birth of the European Union has always had the possibilities a free and questioning press, where intellectuals of different nations debate and discuss their priorities – even if this at times was stunted because of the polarized ideas of the Cold War. This mutual exchange is beneficial to the modern nation, because with the modern emphasis on purely commercial aspects, or globalization, where, we have seen, there is always the danger of an in-built elite who will take and maintain power without interrogation or specific direction, other than self-aggrandizement. The possibilities of integration with Europe also goes on hand-in-hand with the building of national consciousness, and therefore Europe holds, in its structures of legislative process, and the framework of dialogue, the possibilities reconciliation and ultimately peace at all levels.
The intelligentsia, from the time of their emergence to their existence as a fully equipped nation state, articulate the deeper longings for a new identity and a future based on justice, as against recidivist emotions such as clinging to the past. They in fact make the past dynamic, and the grounding of their search for justice.
This is all the more so for the intellectuals of modern Ireland, who must engage abroad, or with former powers, and move away from the dynastic style of nation we have inherited.
The basis of the EU political entity is not ideological, and what was imperative in the nation state of the past, has progressed through rational and legislative structures, to a community founded on common accord, which takes precedence over the ideology of the past. The challenge now is how to balance the demands of commerce with the need to protect the environment.
On the European stage, the maintenance of national identity and cultural difference such as language means that globalization will not subsume these important distinctions, which give to the whole a rich and sustainable model and fabric, based as it is on intelligent cooperation and rational ordering of legislation.
The common destiny of nations is to be bound together in those deep concerns affecting them which transcend national identities and national boundaries.
We are rich in perspectives. Indeed, the role of the intelligentsia was never more needed now that the market has become so dominant, the need for an objective critical voice which will guide us through the next stage, as we contemplate the need to address the damage such free for all policies have cost the environment.
We are a long way from the time Louis XIV declared “L’etat C’est Moi”, and found his descendants headless under the new regime of the Enlightenment. What the new modern states need is the detachment of its intelligentsia in finding away out of the artificial consensus which arose out of Cold War politics, and is now having its nadir through globalization. Globalisation is a custom, a second nature to which we have adapted ourselves, in the over-riding need for peaceful engagement after the War which had arisen out of nationalistic concerns. The engagement of these intellectuals, dissident though working towards a higher form of unified humanism will affect all the modern nations, including Ireland, in its on going and successful project of peace on earth.

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Grammar, myth, prophecy and environmentalists

The understood definitions of public and private is of separate and mutually exclusive realms of operation where “public” includes what is common and general as well as commonalty itself, whether in the shape of a defined sector with specific rights and interests, or in the looser, more amorphous sense of community. The word “community” itself with its warm echoes, is usual where the political is not too defined and so can exclude or include. The rights of community are informal, and by association, but it is the association, with its benign accretions, that carries the edge of meaning. “Private”, of course, is what is not open or available to the public and in this sense it is restricted to an individual or groups of individuals and has privilege as well as rights attached to it.

From the Kantian point of view, the private world belongs to the a priori universe with its dangers of solipsism, while the public world belongs to the empirical and epistemological sphere with its burden of history and social development. Since the age of mass production, particularly of culture, what was once private and individual has crossed over, usually in the form of artistic or literary narratives, to the public domain. Under the inherited system of capitalism, however, the private musings of poets have become a public pop industry, while the skeleton frame of capitalism has remained to stalk the public with rights stemming from ownership, such as copyright and the profits adhering thereto. In the world of multinationals, mass marketing which is rooted in the private sphere of ownership by a few individuals has produced countless artifacts particularly of drinks containers which litter the public landscape and become the content and policy making decisions of public corporations who collect and process waste. Perhaps the motor car is the best example of a private space bought at the cost of public amenity – especially air – but as we note more and more people becoming addicted to the private space at a cost to the environment, it behoves us a little to look into what has become private, and public, in our culture.
The inheritance from the French revolution gives us ideas which can confuse the ground of our understanding. Since the revolution 200 or so years ago we are still not clear on the complementary categories of community and private ownership. Marx and his dialectical followers tried to exclude the private altogether, leaving the individual with no rights at all, not even to a private conscience, while in the West individual ownership rights were paramount and excluded any kind of responsibility. Ownership means that you literally have the right to destroy what is deemed your property. The West offered unlimited personal freedom, keeping areas like private property separate from the idea of stewardship. Hence in the western democracies, which are now categorized as globalization, we have the cultural freedom of the throw away artifacts whose cumulative effect is waste of resources, especially resources such as landfill, which have become a focus of child abuse in the poorer countries –as we see children grapple in these waste areas of dirt and contamination for a small left over which can help their parents survive, and waste products which are released into public areas such as air and water are common in the developed world.

The creation of private wealth through the acquisition of common resources has been at the heart of the Cold War. The progress of capitalism from the 19th century meant that this method of creating wealth came to be seen as normative. Individuals with capital could purchase resources in a particular country, and use the population of that country to manufacture goods which brought more wealth to that individual. After the Second World War the opposition between capitalism and communism became so marked that it defined the beliefs in the private and public domains as the Cold War.

The commonality of resources was largely ignored. The social contract in what was the Eastern bloc “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary it is the social being that determines consciousness” defined the tyranny of totalitarianism which disallowed personal responsibility in the former communist states. In communism, there was no perception of what private meant, everyone and everything was defined as belonging to the public sphere, even at some stages, private sexual relations. While the state took overall responsibility for the commonalty of resources, individuals were punished if they felt any responsibility in the private sphere, their very consciousness was defined as false if it did not embrace the concept of what was public. Property, therefore resources, was public, individual autonomy was seen as essentially corrupt and parasitic. The result was that the realm of objective reality, the Kantian categories of epistemology, experience, and society, were disavowed, and following Hegel, were all seen as a thing in itself, a power of itself which acted on society and history and took on the characteristics of a moral entity. This thing in itself, materialistically defined, took over the so called outworn categories of conscience and responsibilities, and while all people looked to the masses and the public for motivation, work and reward, in real terms they were rendered powerless to make any contribution to the common good, since all their actions were interpreted as being determined, fatalistic, and without any sanction save in the bureaucracies of the state. There were no personal values or virtues, therefore no incentive to preserve what was public. The waste created from centralized economies was only paralleled by the waste created by private ownership in the West. We must remember that one in every five persons were in the secret police, so people were afraid to risk the wrath of their co workers and neighbours and embrace any cause that would put their head above the parapet. . The result was, behind a veil of probity and public good, there were covert and secret agencies who behaved badly and were rewarded for corruption, and resulted in the deterioration of the environment that went along with state socialism.

Therefore, the former Eastern bloc fared no better than the West in protecting the environment. Just as existence precedes consciousness – what one would see as a Descartian reversal – consciousness cannot be generally understood without the articulation of language by self-conscious observers. No one in the West suggested at the time, or were allowed to suggest, that the commonalty of resources should be considered as the actual grounds of the social contract or construct which could be implemented by trans-national and international environmental organizations. This was the pivot of the East West divide, and explains the delay of a developing a consciousness towards the common resources or environment. This did not happen until much later, the Kyoto agreement did not take place until the early 1990s, and denial of common responsibility to the environment remained the hallmark of capitalist countries like the US. The public in America took a long time to convince just how much their addiction to the motor car and cheap oil was affecting the world climate. This has been as a result of the isolationism that has characterized politics since World War II.

Since that time, as capitalism advanced its remit of private wealth in the West, all resources were seen as being the property of certain powerful individuals. After the Second World War, the West embarked on an unparalleled technological development which deployed common resources, and made consumer goods available to the public at a reasonable cost. The world of throw- away came into being after the Second World War. Food, which had been tinned and packaged during the period of the war, now became the focus of more and more packaging. There was going to be no tomorrow, so throw-away was born. Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were at an impressionable teen age when the atom bomb was exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is conceivable that deep in their hearts they did not anticipate there would be a future for the planet at all. During the rise of monetarism with Reagan and Thatcher during the eighties, no individual responsibility was attached to matters in the public arena. Ownership was absolute, and resources could be used without their owner being held to account. During the Cold War, and especially with the rise of uncontrolled capitalism in the ‘eighties, the West polluted the environment with unprecedented waste and chemicals.

It was the continual success of technology, coupled with the political philosophy
of advanced capitalism, that caused the huge environmental crisis we have today. Finite resources were used and developed without a thought for the future, or the unborn grandchildren of this generation which grew up after the war, and for the first time in history, savored and enjoyed consumer goods which were expendable. With the aggregate power of each individual, each individual produced household waste which was unprecedented in the whole of human history. It wasn’t until the advent of the German greens in the early 1980s that recycling and re-usage appeared on the agenda as the greens were the first political party to articulate the dangers of unlimited waste production and link it to the economic systems of the time.

However, it was because of humanity’s need for freedom that the battle for capitalism was won, and unlimited consumer goods were part of the armory of propaganda for the capitalist cause. The deeply felt need for human freedom has almost cost us the earth.

However, because many of the moderate political parties proposed a golden mean between freedom and determinism, between the market and social responsibility, some countries in the west evolved a method which was inclusive of the public good, such as the National Health Service in the UK, initiated by the Labour party, and other initiatives such as social insurance which covered the remit of the social obligations of the community in, for example, the Scandinavian countries. So far this social remit towards the environment has been slower to develop.

Generally in the western liberal democracies, what has taken over community today is not the agreement on what rights they must hold to be a moral entity, but rather the aggregate of individual rights, known as the public. If the public are misinformed or misled by advertising, then authorities feel no obligation to keep checks or balances based on actuality. Common resources like air and water are polluted shamelessly. In Ireland, the advertising industry is self regulated, so there is no established public body with executive powers which could counteract advertising. For example, although we now in the past two decades have an information centre dedicated to giving the public information about the environment, and it has had some successes, such as the encouragement of recycling, in actual fact there is no statutory or legislative body to counteract the claims of advertising and how it impacts on the social or public sphere. There are now protective agencies for the air and water, but no agreement on how common resources should have the effect of stopping waste being poured into water and air. We have legislation against pollution, but it tends to be post-hoc and piecemeal. Manufacturers consider these natural essentials as waste receptacles. Ireland obtained a derogation on the Kyoto agreement whereby it agreed to limit the aggregate growth of carbon emissions, but it did not have to agree on reducing the limits to match the real dangers which are evident today. The biggest job has been persuading the media to take the threat of global warming seriously. All the media at this date, November 2006, carry large advertisements for cars which are carbon polluting, and adding to the danger of a catastrophic situation when the polluted air, treated as a waste receptacle, becomes so full of carbon that it precipitates global warming. The ownership of resources considered to be private, such as the ownership of a car, means not only has an individual bought a vehicle, but right to a private space, and a commensurate right to pollute public areas, such as the air we breathe. The Irish government not only gains import tax on cars, but also what is known as vehicle registration tax, then value added tax on the price of the car, and every time the consumer buys petrol. In the eighties, Ireland obtained a derogation from the EU on lead being added to petrol for a five year period, a time when carbon emissions were growing, but also children were exposed to the high lead content of petrol. A study published in Edinburgh in the ‘eighties and which was the basis of the EU legislation phasing out lead in petrol, showed that inner city children’s IQ in some UK cities dropped to more than 70% of what would be considered normal. However, the specific nature of anti pollution legislation (banning chemical components stage by stage rather than an outright embargo) is still piecemeal and the dangers arising now of carbon emissions from the private space and private ownership of the car have become more acute in the overall common problem of air pollution with its attendant dangers for people, and the planet.

During the capitalist expansion during the Cold War, the line between private consumption and public good was rarely drawn. Even where there were developments of social responsibility, they tended to take expression in the private sphere. Each member of the public can be said to hold rights but these rights are often vested in individuals seeking empowerment for themselves, so an unofficial private agenda could decide the outcome for the common good or ill, depending on how much power an individual has. For example, the trade unions became powerful and the privilege of trade union membership became more important to the bus workers than responsibility to the public or planet, hence their frequent resort to sudden strikes meant the public lost confidence in bus transport with the result that car ownership increased hugely, thus facilitating the oil companies. The electric car was a feasibility as far back as the ‘Sixties, and bio fuels are today a reality, but the grip of the oil companies has been so powerful that these environmentally friendly alternatives were little publicized and are only now at this stage being considered as oil resources are being depleted.

So we have seen that, even when a commonality of resources is identified, and virtue created in a commonwealth of interests, the power play of aggregate individuals masquerading as the public view can be far from true and it can actually be dangerous to the commonalty of humankind.

We know, like in the case of the oil companies, wealth in the hands of a few multinationals can hold the entire world up to ransom. The Coca Cola company can make unlimited cans, but they themselves take no responsibility for recycling them. This is most noted in so called third world countries, who having had a pristine environment after the war, a mere fifty years ago, now are dotted with dumps full of waste. Even the rural areas are littered with packaging and throw away drink cans. The EU philosophy of making the polluter pay is wise only after the event, when in fact, it would be much better to have environmental protection matters built into the actual manufacturing and distribution stage, and not make the polluter responsible only after the harm has been done. For harm is not always reversible. The manufacturers should be responsible for collecting and recycling their waste cans and containers.

Social change can be brought about by pressure groups, but behind these groups often lies the idea of the amorphous masses, and there is the danger that the politically powerless can become uncritical of their own image of powerlessness. The root problem is that the individual is unable to contribute to the community in a way that is meaningful for him or her, since in advanced capitalism there is no real responsibility to anyone or anything in the public sphere, especially at the manufacturing stage. Individual recycling is not cost or waste-effective as much as if it were a manufacturing responsibility.

For the moment, it is this division at the centre of our thinking which allows a certain kind of community, but one without responsibility. Private wealth knows no bounds, and the owners of supermarkets, car manufacturers and arms manufacturers have the sanction of the law to promote throwaway policies, and waste and pillage of the environmental resources we all have as a people.

Because no agreement (Save Kyoto) was made until recent years on the basis of our common ownership of the planet, the environment has only recently been taken up in the language of our rulers and it is now only slowly being negotiated, while we need it more urgently as spoilage and pollution is happening all around us. The earth is our own, yet people have won the right to despoil it as there are no conditions attached to ownership, just rights. Hence, in our day, the tragedy of the commons. Our common inheritance, the air, sea, and countryside is being used as a dump for private individual and corporate waste. The air and the sea “belong to no one” so people dump everything into these precious and finite resources. The limited agreements which are in place need to be much expanded, and the European Union is now inviting submissions from the public and interested parties to draw up a new agreement for the marine environment which will protect resources and species. It is encouraging to see these developments, but one has to wonder as to how long it took before the wake up call was heard.

In the past, our society had felt no sense of obligation to pass on these resources as they are in the state of nature. Water is being privatized so that a resource which is essential for life itself is being used as an expendable commodity. Pollution means that there may be serious water shortages in the future. It is a further insult when we see water sold in plastic bottles. If sold at all, it should be in glass bottles. There are some indications that plastics leaking into water have become part of the food chain, and may be responsible for the rise of cancer. But because of absence of absolute proof, the connection is not made.

People have lost completely the idea of common resources. “Common” now means “what belongs to nobody”. British Nuclear Fuels can discharge radioactive waste into the Irish Sea, the atmosphere itself is now the waste repository of pollutants and streams and rivers are the dumping ground of poisonous effluents of pig farms, pesticides, slurry and factories. The anti-pollution legislation has attempted to deal with this, but as long as we have social “double-think” – advertising with its appeal to private irresponsibility – we will have the common resources abused. The claim of advertisers to our consciousness and time must be debated and challenged. The cultural freedoms we enjoy must not give us a licence to waste earth’s resources.

Today, the idea of the public calls to mind a group of people with interests in common, such as a nation or a reading population, who informally receive information based on social prediction, or a constituency. They may have no status or recourse in law, save in vague generalities. For example, if advertising misinforms or misleads the public, there is no legal obligation to redress the harm, just a system of self-regulation which is inadequate to the problem, based on a very often misinformed public. So if the public are misinformed or misled by advertising which pollutes, there is no immediate access for the public, save in piecemeal legislation and in ad-hoc principles such as making the polluter pay. The actual pollution rather than being stopped by law at source from even being embarked upon, is often recognized too late.

What the public interest needs, as well as reclaiming community and the common, is an open examination of the notion of public and private. If people must have status, it should not be based on their material possessions. Primitive society relied on decoration, or reputation as a social marker. Now the only social marker is money. The private and the public good are confused. Sometimes journalists undertake to solve this, but in piecemeal fashion. In Ireland, we could ask, as journalists sometimes do, how the Industrial Development Authority justify the creation of personal wealth for individuals from public funds, simply in the name of job creation for multinational companies who close down when it suits them, having received tax free trading concessions and having polluted the air and water supply. The discretion at the IDA is in contrast to the public humiliation at the dole queue, the pollution arrived at is in contrast to the frugal lifestyle on the dole. The political language we speak, the very syntax shows the gap in understanding, and shows just how mixed up our paradigms for success and survival are.
Now with the advent of the Celtic Tiger the Irish are experiencing wealth at an unprecedented scale, and are investing hugely in private property, taking out loans up to eight or ten times their actual annual income. The wealth generated and saved by their elders, particularly in countries like Germany, have enabled a huge expansion in credit since the advent of the Euro, but the actual investments, the property bought inside and outside in Ireland, is vastly overvalued, and may result in serious hardship later on if interest rates rise and houses to not keep the high prices they command at present.

However it is probably in the area of sexual activity that private and public are more confused than ever. Sexual activity was once the exclusive domain of the private sphere, now sexual activity is part of public experience and public discourse. The private area of sexual morality now receives its affirmation from multinationals who exploit the young. The banks have appropriated the language of love friendship and romance to carry out their often non friendly business. Their invisibility, on the one hand, has allowed all powers of discretion to wane, so we have, along with the language of love in actually alienating circumstances, the complementary incidence of pornography, leading to enormous suffering by children, women, and men. Sexual morality is considered to be irrelevant yet headlines about leaders and pop stars show and their “shocking sex lives” show there is a more sinister “morality” going on, the doublespeak and newspeak written of by George Orwell. “1984” is actually happening, but the surprise is that it is happening in the capitalist western democracies. We have failed to arrive at a correct social grammar – the freedoms we enjoy culturally do not allow us to reach into a public arena of responsibility. Understandably, after the experiment with communism, our political leaders are unwilling to embark on a new ideology which might lead to a different form of totalitarianism. Even if the experiment with communism failed, we must not use it as an excuse to deny our responsibilities to our commonalty, the planet.

Social prediction and myth embody the wholeness of the community, and now the world is community. If we think of how “primitive” societies held land in common, we can see the land preceded the social contract. And in those agrarian early societies there was no private abuse that led to public waste and littering. There was not a single sweet wrapper thrown away on the Great Plains when the Native Americans roamed that continent. Individualism had to be negotiated in the tribe through proper role models , using example and ritual such as dance. Virtually all primitive people have used a system of encouraging social virtue, while our society encourages greed and waste. In small communities people lived by their reputation and a regard for all was the hallmark. It was possible for the individual to become an integrated autonomous individual with self knowledge and self respect, often linked to non-monetary tokens of wisdom, practice, and decoration which had an echo in the beauty of nature surrounding them. The myth recreated their wholeness through their participation and witness of their truths and responsibilities. The myths we have at present are in advertising, which promote greed and waste endlessly. We have confused ownership and stewardship with self indulgence and irresponsibility.

Ownership in tribal society was community based, even the future of the land. The Indians regarded land and the common ownership of land as a sacred trust, and handed the land back to each new generation in a clean, healthy unpolluted way. No “savage” tribe ever put human or animal waste into the water. Before the whites came to America, the whole continent, its water and air, were unpolluted. The Indians were not saints, they were meat eaters, but said ritual prayers for the animal, realizing they themselves would become part of the cycle of nature in due course. They certainly would not have treated animals as animals are treated today – in battery factories, in narrow pens, in force-feeding with chemicals. With all the poisonous waste being dumped into rivers, we can see how the faults in our thinking have resulted in huge harm to the environment, our common and public responsibility. The legacy of the industrial revolution need not necessarily be one of waste.

Some modern myths create artificial needs simply in order to sell new products. Myths can provide good models, or false ones. Parties based on the left and right, as we have seen, make social predictions into determinants. The minds of our young people are polluted from advertisers who see them as stereotypes and making profit from it. The older people are failing young people by not passing on survival tactics – they have been seduced by consumerist cold war propaganda which promoted greed and the aggrandizement of the individual with no personal responsibility whatsoever.

We are in danger from the myth of infinite resources and the idol of our personal greed. Montezuma, the Aztec king, saw a fair form on the horizon and presumed it was the return of the god – predicted from the myths of the tribe. Psychologists tell us we need social prediction in order to survive, that we cannot tolerate unpredictably. The cosy world created by advertising despoiled the natural resources and was as far removed from nature as the Aztec prediction of the return of the god. Prediction is necessary for survival, but we have to respond consciously, and with conscience, to it. Montezuma and his tribe were wiped out by the Spanish conquistadore, just as we are in danger of being wiped out by the social predictions of advertisers who pollute and take no responsibility. Myths create belief systems, but unless these beliefs are rigorously examined, we can fail the reality test and be wiped out by the myth.

On the other hand, a myth can create a private distinction without laying waste what is common or public. It must be based in reality, and have a relationship with the natural world. Myth also has a public input, it can mean that a meta-reality is accepted, that a person can accept a role or stricture for the sake of a perceived greater good. In our society sometimes the reality is not understood, or the reality itself eludes the experience of a people, but the myth can convey a model, a pattern, and the right behavior.

We can all remember, as students, that we had to learn the paradigm and only in practice discover its meaning. If children can learn the correct social and legal grammar, we can tie stewardship into ownership. Just as myth was translated into ritual and understanding, we can translate our community wholeness into practical paradigms of conservation and responsibility – by practices such as recycling and the proper use of technology. We can learn environmental lessons from those societies like the Native American. Or we can make serious mistakes from the disinformation we receive about resources, about need, from advertising when crucial aspects of the truth are omitted.

Language can be hidebound in the past and as advertising so far has concentrated on greed, it does not create the solutions we need for the future, just short term gain. Teaching children positive role models, wherever they come from, the cinema, art, or people we know can counteract some of this damage which takes place in the public sphere but makes its way into every home.

We could teach that common ownership of public spaces should lead to stewardship and responsibility for them. The negotiation of human rights has gone along without defining these kinds of obligations for the world community. The idea of ownership at present is that a person can own without having responsibility, to the point where they can destroy a property of any kind. Those who have thought about obligations are often working in a vacuum, but our mutuality and intrinsic inter-action must be emphasized if we and the planet are to survive in a healthy state. Each member of the community should have the right to act as guardian of present and future resources, upheld in the law, and carried out in practice. We can start with proper education, and restrictions on advertising. We should not have to wait until the crisis comes and vigilantes take the place of informed action and debate, but given the present scenario, this may be quite likely to happen.

Territorial disputes continue. Raw tribalism and revenge has been the counter side of aggrandizement and greed, now we need more than shadowy figures and puppet play to understand our rights. Our rights mean more than being a figurehead, it means giving people the opportunity to interact meaningfully with the environment. The people, if they have the possibility, cannot make the mistakes of our consumerist past. The rhetoric of the state, disguised as backhand, must give way to honesty.

It is now a commonplace that colonialist kingdoms beget neo-colonialist ones,
that government by the people and the enfranchisement of millions leads to bleary tyrannies, or dreary ineffectual government, that the withering away of the state and the restoration of the people, a dream which has been with us since the eighteenth century, has not been achieved. I think if we research rigorously in our language for the social constructs necessary to the commonalty of the people of this earth, we can do away with the short-term and hold what binds us together. Between the national and the international, the rational and the mystical, there is the real world of land and common resources, which belong to all of us by birth-right, we must construct a correct social grammar.

The private ethos which endorsed unprecedented greed without community responsibility and left us in a society where waste is paramount must be made to end. In other words, the air, seas and water belong to everyone and should have stewardship agreements. There should be a common understanding, backed up by law and custom, that these precious resources guarantee life and are to be respected. Our society looks upon these resources as a dump. In short, we need a Universal Declaration of Protection for the Environment. It would put all air and water under stewardship, design land agreements based on justice which would include care for the environment. If we do not take stringent measures against non-biodegradable packaging, monitoring supermarkets for selling plastic-bottled goods and any non biodegradable materials, the whole of earth will gradually turn into a dump.

The Earth Summit in Rio was the beginning of negotiations of the responsibilities we bear towards the planet, but we must complete the work by creating an awareness of how urgent such work is. This will bring into play the interrogation of myths of our time, and our task to separate what is good from that which is bad for us and the planet. Even as I write, with global warming now being recognized by the public as a serious and actual danger, the advertising of cars continues unabated in our newspapers and television.

Burke believed that there was no right in the state of nature, just agreements. We have learnt that there are other things besides the rights of agreements and corporations. Territory can be understood to extend both in space and time, in space with possession and in time with history and inheritance. These rights all have responsibilities attached. We must make laws that respect both individual and common responsibilities, we must share both caretaking for the large resources of the planet, which belong to us all, in particular, air and water.

When we look at the world we must be careful to distinguish whether it is a private adventurer, or indeed the god Quetzalcoatl on the horizon. Montezuma failed to do so, because he thought the approaching stranger was like him.

I will leave the American Indian Chief Seattle to have the last word. “Only when the white man knows that he cannot eat money will his ways change.”

Do we have to wait until then? Are we at that point now?

Bibliography

The God that Failed, ed Richard Crossman, Gateway editions, 1983
Ecology as Politics Andre Gorz (trans) Pluto Press, 1975
Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher, Abacus, London, 1973
A History of Political Theory, George H. Sabine, reprinted Harrap & Co., 1960
The Windscale Experiment (Sellafield) Dr Rupert Blackith and Dublin Clean Seas Campaign, 1984
Writers and Politics, Edith Kurzweil & Wim Phillips, eds, RKP London 1983
Blueprint for a Green Planet, J. Seymour and H. Girarder, Dorling Kindersley, London 1987
Thinking Globally and Acting Locally Rosemarie Rowley, in Across the Frontiers, ed Kearney, Wolfhound, Dublin 1988

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