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• Fundamentalists and Pragmatists

  March 29, 2010 @ 3:20 pm | by Bryan

  

  Delegates watch Green Party leader John Gormley’s speech on TV by candlelight to mark Earth Hour. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill.

  In a fascinating episode of Tonight with Vincent Browne, the Green Party, specifically Minister Ciarán Cuffe, were taken to task for what Browne sees as ethically dubious political behaviour. I seem to keep bringing up the Greens in a negative light. I have nothing against the party and my intention is not to unfairly pick on them. It’s just that they raise difficult questions about the nature of social and political change.

  On Vincent Browne’s programme, political scientist and Green Party expert John Barry suggested that what the party was faced with was the reality that politics is ‘the art of the possible’; that realisation leading to conflict between the so-called ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘pragmatists’. On this reading, what may be seen by some as the morphing of an activist party into the very entity it once stood against must be viewed in light of the payoffs that have come along the way. That is, to get things done, one must be a ‘proper’ party, and in order to become a ‘proper party’, certain traits that make the activist party what it is must be got rid of. The ‘fundamentalists’ will be unhappy and may even jump ship, they will hopefully continue to provide something of a moral compass as members of the broader movement, but only the ‘pragmatists’ will be able to effect legislative change. It should therefore come as little surprise that praise from the media that the Greens have matured into a ‘serious’ political entity and have outgrown their ‘quirky’ activist ways will hearten the ‘pragmatists’ while bitterly disappointing the ‘fundamentalists’.

  Maybe my problem is that I’m a ‘fundamentalist’ myself – something of a political purist – but I really don’t buy into the idea that politics is the art of the possible. Rather, I am more convinced by the view that Mark Haugaard ascribes to Foucault: that politics is a continuation of war by other means. And if that notion is coupled to the idea that identity is a crucial battleground in that war, then the morphing of a group, no matter how quirky, into something that sits more at ease with establishment groups represents a significant defeat for the once quirky body and their supporters. I just cannot see how you change the culture of a place by adopting it. Pragmatism may very well be the expedient route to power, but if the person who arrives at that destination is barely recognisable from the one who set forth, what’s the point?

  Which begs the question, should groups like the Green movement even get involved with formal politics? Conventional wisdom is that people should get involved. I give some of my ablest Irish friends a hard time for complaining about things without putting themselves forward as candidates for elected office. I’m not so sure any more. What if engagement necessarily leads to a Green-like metamorphosis? What if the social structure of the political process bends all who participate into the mould of the typical politician?

  Does anyone have George Lee’s number? I wonder if he came to a similar conclusion? I wonder if disengagement, or maybe mass disengagement, can be turned into a means of bringing about structural socio-political change?

  Comments (12)

• Identity crisis

  March 12, 2010 @ 10:07 am | by Bryan

  The following is part of a comment by Patrick on a previous post:

  I guarantee that if you started a thread tomorrow asking us to propose an agreed definition of “virtue ” or “happiness” you would get very few comments. The common reaction would be that such discussions are too “up in the air” “idealistic” ‘divorced from reality” “will never put butter on the table” etc.etc.

  It reminded me of Richard Pine’s opinion piece last week titled Greece is a real country – unlike Ireland. Making a similar point, Pine wrote:

  Ireland has ceased to have any discernible sense of purpose. It is hardly a real country at all. In 1986 an editorial in the Sunday Tribune expressed frustration with a debate on Irish identity … Drawing attention to the issues of poverty, the threat of national bankruptcy, and citizens’ alienation from the institutions of state (this was 1986, remember), [a Sunday Tribune] writer asserted that “at best the issue of identity has only a tangential relationship with any of these problems – no navel gazing is required.”

  …Nearly 25 years after the Sunday Tribune urged us to look outward rather than inward, the issues raised – poverty, national bankruptcy, alienation – have not gone away, nor have they been resolved, nor are they likely to be.

  A surprising number of comments following Pine’s article are unflattering. I wonder if that is because, as Patrick pointed out, discussions about things like ‘identity’, ‘values’, ‘direction’ and other wooly, intangible concepts just don’t go down too well. I wonder if, in keeping with Neil Postman’s thesis in Amusing Ourselves to Death, we would simply rather be entertained than engage in a drawn out, boring debate about abstract issues. Or maybe, as Taylor argues in Sources of the Self, having ditched the values of the past, modern Europe just hasn’t figured out what it values? Maybe the reason why a blog post asking for a definition of ‘virtue’ would get few comments, and Pine got the response he did is that no-one really knows the answers to those questions?

  I could be wrong. Does anyone know how things like ‘virtue’ or ‘happiness’ or even ‘the purpose of life’ are, or ought to be defined in today’s Ireland? Was Pine right? Does the country suffer from a crisis of identity?

  Comments (19)

• Arbitrary citizenship

  February 12, 2010 @ 10:00 pm | by Bryan

  

  Pamela Izevbekhai was again in the news today. There is a good chance that she and her two children will be deported from Ireland in the not very distant future. Because neither she, nor her daughters were born in Ireland, or in an EU member state, the government has no obligations towards them. They aren’t citizens, so their fate isn’t the concern of Ireland Inc.

  My newborn on the other hand, is an Irish citizen. He was born in here, and his parents had legally resided in the state for the requisite period. Interestingly, had my wife and I had a baby a couple of years earlier, that child would not have qualified for Irish citizenship regardless of his place of birth. Because we waited, he can call himself Irish and the state will agree. That to me seems a little arbitrary.

  Similarly, my American friend who has diligently served his local community for years, leads something of an uncertain life in that every couple of years, he must ask the state for permission to stay put. Although he and his family aren’t reliant on public funds, a favorable decision is not guaranteed. His Irish born daughters on the other hand, are citizens. A day may come when he and his wife are denied permission to live here, while their three young children are allowed to stay. But who is more of a citizen, the parents who are involved with and concerned about their local community, or the children, who probably couldn’t spell the word ‘citizen’, let alone explain what it means?

  I like rules. I’m a fan of order. But I also think that order should be build on the back of rules that both make sense and are just. Pamela Izevbekhai is almost certainly more of a citizen of this country than my child or my friend’s children. She is probably a better citizen of this country than many native Irish people. Even if it were proved that she used dodgy papers and a made up story to get into the state, I’m not convinced that chucking her out while holding on to local criminals, addicts, undesirables of other kinds, my son, or for that matter, any other child in the state, is just.

  The concept of the citizen seems too arbitrary to me, to be entrusted with something as important as who gets let in, who gets to stay, and who gets kicked out.

  Comments (108)

• Culture, witches and unicorns

  February 8, 2010 @ 3:21 pm | by Bryan

  One of my favourite novels is Ngugi wa Thiong’s A Grain of Wheat. Even more powerfully than Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart, Ngugi lays out the complexities of colonialism and decolonisation. For both men, culture is the central locus of the political struggle against imperial domination. Culture is key because it is seen as central to the identity of the colonised; as what most crucially separates them from those who would conquer them. In the hands of these two novelists, as is the case with many other artists, philosophers and politicians before and after them, culture = identity, which in turn legitimates, even necessitates, resistance.

  But what is culture? I’m not so sure, and neither is Ngugi. In A Grain of Wheat, he convincingly suggests that the average person is more interested in their economic well-being than they are in collective cultural survival; that most politicians would happily adopt a new identity in pursuit of power – a charge which history seems to uphold. Which begs the question, is culture real and if so, does it really matter? Does it matter that contemporary urban Irish culture now tends towards that of the American urban setting as depicted by Hollywood? Does it matter that given the resources, supposedly ‘exotic’ peoples in the developing world would also probably go the same way?

  A West African friend asked me yesterday if my wife and I were planning on teaching our newborn chiShona, our mother tongue. Yes, I told him, for practical reasons, and even more importantly, to give him a sense of identity and an appreciation of his culture. But while I still hold to those sentiments, I’m not sure I know what culture even is, and I don’t know that it’s possible to swim against the current of the hegemonic global (read Hollywood) culture. Besides, Senghor and the other fathers of Négritude were quite possibly more French than most Frenchmen of their time in that they had a deeper intellectual appreciation as well as fondness for the French arts and philosophy. Garvey, Nkurumah and other giants of pan-Africanism never really got beyond Europe. For them, Africa would ‘arrive’ when it came to resemble Europe. And then there’s the political class, for whom it often seems as though the only aspects of culture that are tolerable are those which facilitate their stay in office. How else does one explain the fact that the postcolonial African state mimics its former European owner, or that today’s Ireland most closely resembles Britain?

  What is culture? I think it’s a lot like Julia Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman, who when asked what her name was, responded with, “Whatever you want it to be.” It’s not that she had no name of her own, she was just very amenable to the facilitation of her patron’s fantasies for a fee. And yet, even today, I think there is a lot of truth in the equation culture = identity, which is essential for and may even necessitate resistance – be that political, economic, social, religious…

  But going back to my son, I wonder if ‘our culture’ as a family or people group becomes whatever I decide to teach him it is. That may be the best I can do. And yet I can’t stop thinking about Alasdair MacIntyre’s pronouncement on the concept of human rights – essentially that because they are a political tool that becomes whatever you want them to be, ‘belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns’.

  I wonder if the same is true for a substantive portion of what we call culture? I wonder if it is only as real as witches and unicorns.

  Comments (8)

• We aren’t even cultural half-castes

  January 18, 2010 @ 8:40 pm | by Bryan

  We want to liberate ourselves politically so that we can express our négritude, our real black values.

  When we have reached what you call ‘equality’ … there is another problem, the problem which Wright brought up the other day: he is an American. Is he an American? Being an American, is he heir to European civilization or to African civilization or to American civilization?

  …Césaire and I have often asked ourselves this question. Many of us are Marxists. But Marx wasn’t an African. His ideas arise from the situation of men in Western Europe…

  …Today, we are objectively half-castes … much of the reasoning of French Africans derives from Descartes.
  - Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1965, ‘We are all Cultural Half-Castes’.

  Senghor fascinates me. He was one of the founding members of Négritude, a movement which sought to highlight what was positive in African culture, which also served as an intellectual pillar on which African decolonisation was built. At the same time, he was probably as French as one could be. While he was obviously proud of elements of his own cultural background, Senghor was very much taken by French culture. To use his own words, he was a cultural half-caste.

  I thought about Senghor as I was having a conversation with a friend about the differences between rural and urban life; especially our tendency to view modernity, exemplified by urban life, as some sort of lifestyle gold standard. My friend is of the opinion that there is nothing ‘ideal’ about the urban metropolitan lifestyle and that it’s wrong to think of people who live in places like rural Galway (or rural Zimbabwe for that matter) as being in some way inferior. It’s not at all clear that ‘progress’ – the drive towards greater technologicl and industrial advancement – represents anything more than an insatiable appetite for more, or an inability to find contentment.

  While I agree completely, I don’t know if it’s possible to resist the juggernaut that is modernity and postmodern culture. The Senegalese Senghor was overwhelmed by the beauty of the French language and the insight in Descartes philosophy. Today, most of us have to contend with an unrelenting advertising onslaught that points towards fulfillment in material acquisition. I don’t know if it’s even possible for the rural Galwegian, let alone the rural Zimbabwean, to resist that pull.

  In that sense, there aren’t very many cultural half-castes left. Most of us are on our way to becoming, or already are, postmodern cultural pure-breeds … whether we like it or not.

  Comments (8)

• Irritating, repellent, wounding

  December 1, 2009 @ 3:51 pm | by Bryan

  I have recently found myself exploring Africa’s colonial past and how that has influenced the identity of the various peoples and institutions on the continent. Perhaps the most pleasurable aspect of this research so far has been reading Ngugi wa Thiong’s A Grain of Wheat.

  In that radical piece of literature, Ngugi crushes the view that colonialism was a simple system of external oppression. He very powerfully animates an idea that goes back a long way: oppression can only be sustained by the assent of a significant proportion of members of the oppressed group. In Ngugi’s hands, the only real heroes of the colonial era are mythical figures who are so far removed from the here and now that it is impossible to know whether they ever really existed in anything like the way they are remembered. Those present are tainted, to various degrees, by some collusion with agents of the repressive past.

  Though it’s an incredibly sensitive topic, so sensitive that an outsider might be best advised to leave it alone, I can’t help but wonder whether Ngugi’s observations apply to last week’s revelations. And not just Ngugi, I wonder if there is also room here for Milan Kundera, who in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting suggested that we have a tendency towards rewriting the past in order to escape its ‘irritating, repellent, wounding’ nature.

  My country refused to have a completely honest and transparent look at the past, chosing rather to simplistically cast some as villains, others as heros, and the great majority as the backdrop against which history took place. South Africa followed suit, sweeping most things under the carpet of peace, reconciliation and the idea of a ‘rainbow nation’. Don’t get me wrong, South Africa did much better than most – victims publicly shared what had happened to them. Some perpetrators confessed their wrongs. But there wasn’t very much in the way of the vast majority collectively acknowledging and revealing the ways in which they had colluded with apartheid.

  What if Hobbes was right? What if our nature tends towards a state of “war of all against all”? And if he was right in suggesting that in order to escape that nature, people will even submit to “a common power to keep them all in awe,” even if that power is an abusive institution?

  I often get a sense of déjà vu in Ireland, and the scandal that is the abuse of the Catholic Church, with the complicity of the state, is a case in point. The great majority are simply taken as having been a passive backdrop which played a negligible role in the propping up or bringing down of that old order. I’m not so sure anymore. I can see why we all like the simple ‘hero-villain-passive everyone else’ narrative, but Ngugi’s uglier picture seems much more realistic to me. But that means that oppression isn’t something that is done to us, but a process in which, to varying degrees, we participate. If that really is the case, the Kundera was much more right than I gave him credit:
  We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and histories.

  Comments (24)

• Sharia good, religious dress bad?

  November 19, 2009 @ 11:13 pm | by Bryan

  This story is hilarious! Talk about money making the world go around!

  The French are unapologetic about not having much time for that silly concept that others call multiculturalism. If you’re an immigrant who is granted the privilege of living in France, they by golly you will assimilate. And they’re pretty consistent. While the British liked to keep a safe distance from their colonial subjects once upon a time, the French bandied around the concept of assimilation. Not only where they on a mission to plunder and enlighten like their British counterparts, the French were also determined to create mini Frenchmen and women in distant lands.

  True to this insistence on assimilation, France has been particularly hostile to the idea of religious dress in public. This hostility, stems in part, from fears that one day the country may be overrun by cultures that are distinctly non-French, and with catastrophic results – like the imposition of Sharia law. With one exception … money.

  Islam, like the other monotheistic religions, frowns upon the idea that greed is good. Sharia law institutionalises the belief that exploitative money-lending is bad. So much so, there are investment products know as sharia-compliant assets. Unsurprisingly, these are doing really well in the current economic climate. Also unsurprisingly, like most countries today, France would be more than happy to host and facilitate profitable enterprise. So guess what assimilationist France decided to do?

  That’s right, the country has made room for enough sharia to be introduced into its own law in a bid to secure ‘Muslim money’. I probably shouldn’t be surprised. Cash is universal. A multicultural law that facilitates the inflow of cultureless cash is harmless. A veil in a public university on the other hand, is a completely different story. That could lead to Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’, couldn’t it?

  So the moral of the story is introduce bits of sharia, but whatever you do, don’t allow the ‘exotic’ religious dress? Wow.

  Comments (48)

• Let’s all join the BNP?

  October 16, 2009 @ 12:57 pm | by Bryan

  

  British National Party leader Nick Griffin.

  Great news! Progress, tolerance and all of that. It looks like the British National Party (BNP) will finally start accepting non-whites! It makes perfect sense. What could be more convincing than a black guy or Asian woman telling other racial minorities that they are wrecking the lives of decent, hard working Anglo-Saxons and Celts, and that said minorities should leave Britain? Nick Griffin must be kicking himself for not coming up with the idea.

  Seriously though, that the BNP have been forced to remove their racial restrictions to party membership is good for progress. Granted, the first non-whites who join may have to tolerate all manner of verbal abuse. Personally, rational or not, I would be worried about a party zealot following me home and leaving me a welcome to the club gift, like a burning cross. But despite those challenges, I can only imagine that there will be no shortage of people previously excluded from the BNP, who will choose to join the group and ‘change it from the inside’.

  A multicultural BNP can only be less venomous than today’s version of the party. The worst elements of the group will leave when faced with prospect of sitting down with those they perceive to be the source of their troubles. And who knows, in time, the party may change beyond recognition, if it doesn’t shrivel up and die.

  Welcome to the mainstream BNP.

  Comments (13)

• Adichie, Ballantine and the chip on my shoulder

  October 14, 2009 @ 2:16 pm | by Bryan

  I’ve been accused, perhaps accurately, of having a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the ‘ownership’ of the developing world in general, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular. That’s not how I would describe it.

  I would say that I share the sentiment frequently expressed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun. Like her, I think that if you really want to know about a continent, ask its inhabitants. More than that, if its inhabitants only play a relatively minor role in telling their stories, the audience is bound to get a distorted picture. It largely comes down to what I think philosophers call ‘ontology’ – the way we see the world. One’s view of the world colours one’s interpretation of ‘facts’.

  That said, I’m not an ‘absolutist’ (if that’s even a word). I wholly believe that different perspectives can enrich everyone’s understanding. One of the non-African perspectives on the continent that I find most enriching, is that of Carol Ballantine. I don’t always agree with her take on things, but if you want to learn about development from an Irish development practitioner’s perspective, I don’t think you’ll find a more honest, considered and rounded view than this:

  …In Sierra Leone and Rwanda, I met with so many people, and I tried not to stare at their visible scars. I am a lousy reporter, because I can’t dream of asking people about their experience during the war: I have no right to. After years of doing this work, so that now I’m introduced in meetings as the “expert” (on governance, or democracy, or monitoring and evaluation), I still have no idea how to fathom collective trauma …

  When I came home, some of my friends asked me if I would blog about my experiences. But there’s so much about the countries I have visited that I don’t understand, so little that I saw and could report back fairly. I look through the window of a 4×4, and I’m looking through the lens of countless newspaper articles, tv documentaries, prejudices and assumptions. I simply cannot fathom what life is like, even for the middle class colleagues that I visit in some traumatised countries… (Read on)

  I hope she continues to blog.

  Comments (11)

• Belfast riots

  July 14, 2009 @ 12:42 pm | by Bryan

  

  A rioter in Ardoyne last night. Photo: Charles McQuillan/Pacemaker.

  When I was growing up in Zimbabwe, Belfast seemed like some virtual war zone where people blew things up over religious differences. It made no sense to me at all. Now that I’m older and have moved to Ireland, I can honestly say that frosty relations in the North still make no sense to me.

  Here are some of the specific things that confound me. First of all, these marches. It’s simplistic, I know, but if after every parade there are going to be some skirmishes, why not just stop having them? I’m serious. If you live in a highly divided society, do you really want to celebrate things that emphasise those divisions or those that point to areas of common ground? Why not replace some of the events celebrated by just one side with new, joint ones?

  Another thing I don’t understand is this phenomenon of young people, teenagers even, who throw petrol bombs and stones at ‘the other side’ and set cars on fire. Are their grievances real, or are they just a cohort of kids who have nothing else to do and have stumbled onto a way to express their disillusionment? I understand why Palestinian teenagers engage in that sort of activity when confronted by Israeli police or soldiers. But I thought Northern Ireland had come to a political agreement that is largely acceptable to both sides.

  What confounds me most though, is how far removed the goings on in the North seem to the day-to-day lives of people in the South. Living in the West of Ireland, I feel closer, or more connected to London than to Belfast or Derry. Apart from the odd Gerry Adams speech with a reference to ‘a united Ireland’, Northern Ireland seems like a completely different entity. Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why it seems as though the North is still, at some level, at war with itself.

  Comments (14)