Old order changes, making way for disorder

JAPAN is as modern a country as you could find. But it has no epidemics of drugs or AIDS or single teenage mothers. Front doors can be left open, women can walk in safety where they like. The reason for this contrast with the West Ireland included, is that Japan has not rejected large chunks of its inherited civilisation, while the West, including Ireland, has done that.

A civilisation is a web of values rules and reverences elaborated by people over time and accepted by them as a mould for living.

Reject large chunks of it, in the name of liberation. Work powerfully to discredit many of its fundamental principles. Urge people, powerfully, to abandon them, and persuade many of them to do so. To plug the gaps, preach new values, rules and reverences, and try imposing them by legislation. Two direct consequences follow.

Word gets around that the old code of right behaviour and due reverence is cancelled, and that people may now do anything, so criminal behaviour, multiplies. Many, especially the most, sensitive people, the poorest, and the least educated, find their lives deprived of value and meaning, take to drugs, get pregnant, or kill themselves.

As night follows day, these two disorders, one of behaviour, the other of souls, follow from the radical disruption of the inherited order. But they are not foreseen, let alone provided for, by the powerful people who sponsored the West's operating breakouts from Western civilisation.

Perhaps they are transitional effects, necessary bad experiences we have to get through on our way to a satisfactory new order to which everyone willingly subscribes. But in the meantime, now, we have to deal with the threat they pose. And the same ideologues and rulers who sponsored the liberations find that to meet the threat they, must abolish or severely curtail civil liberties that survive from the old order.

THEY had imagined that these hard won liberal freedoms of the individual could be preserved. But it has become startlingly evident that the values, rules and reverences of the old civilisation were all of a piece. A partial replacement of them is impossible there must be a whole new order. And the immediate priority is stern new, illiberal rules, and more police and prison cells to stem the chaos.

Gradually, this has been dawning on us in Ireland, too, and we have realised it fully. The liberal rights of the individual, enshrined in law and Constitution, were part and parcel of that bad old world of de Valera's Ireland, when extra marital sex was immoral, and homosexuals were called perverts, and Latin was taught in all the schools, and Greek in some, and women were subordinate to men, and the young obeyed their elders, and most people, the priests and the heroes who died for Ireland were honoured with military parades.

We realise that with the rejection of all that, those liberal rights must also go or be greatly curtailed. Once valued by us, they now threaten us, because they protect the powerful criminal class that the overthrow the old order has engendered.

Our realisation of this is not a ground for useless lamentation. On the contrary, it is a summons to a more grown up understanding of what we have been about, and a more grown up handling of it. In particular, it requires this from the ideologues and rulers who in our republic, as in the rest of the American empire and as part of its programme, have brought us to where we are.

These sponsors of where we are and shapers of our lives must face up to the fact that their liberating rejections of the inherited moral order have murderous and oppressive, as well as liberating, consequences. They must grasp that their task is not to tinker frivolously but to put together, after smashing the old one, a coherent new Irish civilisation that embraces and satisfies all. And that means, for the present, a society characterised by freedom and by curtailment and deprivation of freedom.

Mass drug addiction is one result of depriving the sensitive, the young and the poor of the value and meaning which the old order have to their lives.

While the cause of it remains, the addiction will remain. The very imprisonment of the top dealers will merely cause the market and distribution systems take over. Only a spiritual antidote will end the drugs scene.

Another predictable consequence of the destruction of meaning is an increase in suicides. Thirty years ago our suicide rate was one eighth of the death rate from road accidents. Last year it equalled it, a sevenfold increase.

IF in addition a powerful campaign is conducted against the value and status that the old order gave to men, it is likely that many of the new suicides will be of young men. And that is the case the great majority of the suicides are of young men. Consequences follow causes.

The new civilisation that has been developing in the Western world, these past 50 years, is already characterised not only by liberation but also by prison building. The US now has three million citizens put away. No one calls it the New American gulag but that is what it is. Belatedly, we are realising that we need the same here in miniature. Once again, we must catch up.

In short, it is a matter of understanding that everything in our society hangs together, or hangs separately, as we fashion a post Western, post liberal Ireland and of acting wisely on that understanding.

One special factor renders this enterprise very difficult. Unlike many other Western countries, we have very little civil culture to fall back on when the values, rules and reverences of Christianity have been dismissed and denigrated, and have ceased to exercise their civilising force.