Socialism: ‘I slipped into it easily, as I had been born into Catholicism. I just swapped my vest’

“An endless retelling of the story of a garden, a fall and a restoration.” This is the story of the Bible, Dante and Marx. It’s also the story of Patrick O’Dea, a long-serving and dedicated social worker.

What shaped this curious boy into a utopian? Coming of age in the 1970s, a decade of awakening in Ireland, Patrick searched out utopian visions of social justice, psychotherapeutics and macrobiotics. Then taking his place as a social worker, he grapples with real lives, while trying to keep faith with a self and a social work that aspires to the “empowerment and liberation of people”. It’s a story of illusion, delusion and disillusion, as he reflects on the journey.

Here is an extract from that story.

The God that formed me

I began a life in 1955, with Baptism and immersion into Catholicism. Like the North Circular Road, Dublin, where I spent the first seven years of my life, it just was: it was our willow pattern and this country. It was not, for me, a personal relationship with a Divine, nor a transcendence, nor a metaphysical anything! It was a catechism of rote learning. The trail of incense smoke, wax candles, the tabernacle, the priest in liturgical vestments, and me in my altar boy’s white alb and surplice, tailor-made on account of my long arms.

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We breathed Catholicism, as did most, noticeable only in hindsight. The full suite: Mass on Sunday and each day through Lent, no sweets in Lent, and my mother off the cigarettes, except for a binge on St Patrick’s Day. Rosary was said at home: its glorious giggles and sorrowful mysteries. Benediction in school, clouded in incense, lots of Confession; occasionally I went twice daily just to miss class.

It wasn’t obvious that there was any other way of being in the world or looking at the world for the first 15 years of my life. This was the world.

[ Time for Socialism by Thomas Piketty: This is an essential thinker but not an essential collection ]

Long hair and the Papal encyclical Humanae Vitae opened a space between me and Catholicism. School – which was run by priests – did not want long hair and the Pope did not want artificial contraception. As the eighth of 12 children, two in Heaven, I agreed with him! With artificial contraception, I might not have been! That was my comedic stance; I went with the laughs! Mimicking Martin Luther, I nailed my petition, “Down with Contraception”, not to the door of the church in Wittenberg, but to a school notice board! It drew laughs and some concern. The Prefect of Studies described it as “fatuous”.

The year was 1968; the encyclical restated the Catholic Church’s opposition to artificial contraception, and Humanae Vitae became the thin edge of the wedge that wobbled an edifice!

As to boys’ hair, it was another battleground: that between long and short hair. It was a proxy war between tradition and progress. We schoolboys knew which side we were on, and a long healthy mane was its statement. The priests conflated short hair with virtue and punished long hair, and I lost some regard for them.

If I did take a step back from the Catholic Church, I carried forward its messages: concern for social justice and a love of neighbour. I distanced myself, without a well of anger or opposition, with some admiration, and not without criticism.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, crashed that ‘socialist’ scaffold in my head

I am open to the Divine, to the sacred, to silence, to sacraments, holy books, magic; to the therapeutic blanket that religion can be. I remain open to spiritual renewal, including mine, and alert to the trap of meeting a Buddha on the road.

Social work’s illusion and my disillusion

A decade on, as a junior freshman in Trinity College Dublin, 1974, I had begun to take my message from a different Church: that of socialism. I slipped into it easily, as I had been born into Catholicism. I just swapped my vest.

[ Slouching Towards Utopia: Paschal Donohoe on an exceptional economic history of the 20th century ]

John Irving describes societal transformation as “an endless retelling of the story of a garden, a fall, and a restoration. It’s the story of the Bible, Dante and Marx.”

The Fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, crashed that “socialist” scaffold in my head. My grandiose map, my lens on the world, my compass and my guardian angel were gone. My Holy Trinity of socialism, social justice and social work had come asunder.

I no longer had certitude.

Pity about me, but it felt like a bereavement. The left was shorn of its story. Prague opened a museum to communism. The old lady of East Berlin in the film Good Bye, Lenin, out of her coma, had to be protected from the shocking truth of communism’s collapse and her society’s endorsement of the market economy. Well, I never!

More sympathetically, historian Tony Judt explains that “progressives” had been shorn of their story.

I struggled without that Utopia! Was I that wrong, that naive, that blinkered, in my empathy for the political left? Had we idealists been so dangerous? How does one let go of beliefs to which one has become so attached? Is there a letting-go ritual? A funeral, a burial, a cremation? If so, I was not there, and feel the lack. Was my social work to become, as Mel Gray states, “concerned primarily with responding to immediate situations”? Had I confused social work’s romantic calling and its more modest purpose?

Prof Martin Krygier, writing of the dangers of unrestrained idealism, says, “Taken individually and taken whole, each of the traditions within Conservative-Liberal-Socialism has unacceptable elements, versions, interpretations and exemplars. None of them is without its weaknesses or blindnesses – sometimes tragic.”

And I, who had it figured, have since flayed about, in the quicksand of uncertainty.

Our dialogue about a refugee’s oppression, as a Jew in Romania, drove a wedge between my rose-tinted understanding of socialism and the reality of his testimony

The term postmodernism, reminiscent of a Greenwich Village dinner party, had entered social work’s vocabulary and practice. In our new and shiny postmodern era, the focus of social work had shifted away from the arc of grand theories, such as that of socialism, and on to smaller narratives: those of race, gender, age, health status, disability and multiple and mixed identities. I could put my shoulder with ease to any of these postmodern emancipatory causes.

On the other hand, I am also left with concern that the demise of modernism’s grand theory had emboldened the marketplace by the absence of an alternative socioeconomic narrative or existential critique of the marketplace.

Lest I get lost in concept and theory, a green ceramic plate has hung on my kitchen wall for 40 years. It was a gift from a Romanian refugee to Canada that I worked with at the children’s camp outside Montreal. He was a critic of socialism, with little regard for left-leaning politics in the West, least of all for a romanticised view of the egalitarian society that lay behind the then Iron Curtain. It had been brutal to his family.

Our dialogue about his oppression, as a Jew in Romania, drove a wedge between my rose-tinted understanding of socialism and the reality of his testimony. The truth does that – it unsettles.

I have separated from a fossilised socialism, but not from a search for social justice.