One of the most frustrating things about public debate in Ireland is its inability to acquire the colour and complexity of living discourse.
In everyday talk people agree, disagree, half-agree and agree to disagree. Everything is fluid, and presumed to be so by dint of nature. It is possible, for example, to favour divorce and still go to Holy Communion, without being confronted by cries of "hypocrite" on your way back down the aisle.
At the formal level of public discourse, however, everything must be fixed and consistent. Either you unequivocally endorse liberal principles or agree to be dubbed a reactionary. The only alternatives to supporting one extreme or the other are to be (a) eccentric or (b) confused.
This syndrome applies in particular to issues relating to what used to be called the National Question.
If you do not wish to be a diehard supporter of the Provisional IRA, you are expected to believe Ireland no longer exists (and a good thing, too), unionists are always right and, if we had any sense, we would have remained under the protection of the British empire, which pursued only the best interests of the thankless Irish.
This condition creates in us a state of almost perpetual opposition to our own best interests as a nation. Because, at some level, we have accepted that the barbarity of our history was a punishment for some innate failing, we seek all the time to change so that we become as dissimilar as possible from our sense of ourselves.
To be "European", we have to be less Irish. To be "pluralist", we have to be racist against ourselves. To "move on", we must forgive and forget and also agree that anything that happened to us was the consequence of our backwardness, ignorance and savagery.
I believe this syndrome is treatable only by the adoption of a wide-lens view of Irish history. This does not necessarily require us to adopt a perpetual victimhood, but it means we must be rigorously truthful about our innocence as much as our guilt. At the moment, our understanding of what constitutes rigour centres only on those elements of our past which can be interpreted as the consequence of our own failings.
But one aspect of our historical experience we have failed to grasp is the effect of what might be termed cultural ricochets. We perceive, in the immediacy of the moment, an element of behaviour which provokes in us a mixture of guilt and self-loathing. Then, oblivious of the extent to which these feelings are the result of colonial indoctrination, we construct from this an analysis of the reasons for our situation. To avoid doubt, and because this is what we have been trained to do anyway, we unequivocally blame ourselves.
The Christian Brothers' recent apology for the wrongs perpetrated on children in their care in the past provides an intriguing insight into this syndrome.
A most graphic illustration of what happened to Ireland - the promise, the failure, and the nature of that failure, as well as the subsequent myth-creation and polarisation of ideology to perpetuate the conditions which obscure truth - is to be found in the story of the Christian Brothers.
For my generation and others, the name of that order has become a by-word not simply for brutality in education but virtually all reactionary conditions associated with pre-1960s Ireland. Even the notion of a nationalist view of Irish history is regarded as synonymous with the Christian Brothers' version of it; the idea that Britain might have some responsibility for its past actions.
Most Irish males who attended one of the hundreds of CBS institutions have toe-curling stories to tell of the brutality they suffered there. Although there are those in Ireland who suggest that the reality was not at all as bad as it is painted, and who, briefly controlling their facial tics and twitches, inform us that the beatings they got never did them "a bit of harm", the truth is that it was probably far worse than we "remember".
The underlying sense that these stories are incapable of overstatement pre-empts any search for a deeper truth. But a deeper truth is there to be found, and the story of the Christian Brothers is instructive for those who try to see objectively the reality of Modern Ireland.
The Christian Brothers were founded in 1802 by a retired businessman, Edmund Ignatius Rice, whose philosophy of teaching was a response to what he perceived as the excessively violent nature of education.
Few seem to know that he set up the Christian Brothers to provide an education free of physical punishment. "Unless for some very serious fault, which rarely occurs," he wrote in 1810, "corporal punishment is not allowed." The Christian Brothers' Manual of School Government, published in 1832, laid great stress on the use of "mildness, affection and kindness" as pedagogic instruments.
"Blows," the Manual advised, "are a servile form of punishment and degrade the soul. They ordinarily harden rather than correct . . . and blunt those fine feelings which render a rational creature sensible to shame. If a master be silent, vigilant, even and reserved in his manner and conduct, he need seldom have recourse to this sort of correction."
One reading of the shift which occurred traces the change of policy to the immediate aftermath of Rice's death in 1844. But an event which may have had a more significant impact was the Famine of the 1840s. In the reconstruction which followed, the Catholic Church became a central agent in creating a moral and social framework to ensure that, by "civilising" itself, Ireland could contrive to avoid the repetition of such a calamity in the future.
By 1851 the Christian Brothers' Manual had begun to drop mentions of restrictions on corporal punishment. This trend was exacerbated in the 1880s by the passing of the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Bill, which provided for a direct connection between examination results and the funding of schools.
From this time on, while the Christian Brothers succeeded in providing education for many Irish boys who would not otherwise have received any, they also became more notorious for the brutality of their teaching methods. This became more pronounced in the years after Independence, when the Brothers became associated with the rather crude attempt to "de-Anglicise" Ireland and rid it of all "alien" influences.
The irony that in doing so they employed the ultimate "alien" remedy, corporal punishment, was perhaps as lost on the misguided men in black as it is today on their erstwhile pupils.
The moral of the story is perhaps that self-flagellation rarely yields the full answer.