The news each day is astounding: it is as if every spook that has been haunting the bedroom is being exorcised. Peace comes slowly to the North. Worldwide prosperity grows. Fringe terrorism shrinks and dies. Ireland moves up the economic ladder. There is cross-party jubilation in Dail Eireann. This is truly one of the greatest periods in the history of the world, when we are no longer slaves to history; we should rejoice to be alive.
For this is the end of a century; and for once, the epoch just about coincides with the calendar, which after all, is an arbitrary thing. Centuries are calendral units in which we imprison disparate events and movements, regardless of what they have in common. Great movements generally do not fall neatly into the confines of chronological centuries, which are like halls in which different symphonies are begun at different times, the overture of one beginning just as the third movement of another is reaching a lilting climax, and the fourth and final movement of another is cantering towards the finale, even as a violin carries the melodic line from elsewhere . . .
Symphonies in time Bedlam. But there can be order in that bedlam; and, looking back from this particular vantage point, let us make sense of what we see. For the first time in the history of Europe, and maybe the world, a variety of different symphonies are closing together; and maybe a single, synchronised symphony is about to begin. Maybe it is not quite the end of history; but it does seem to be the beginning of something remarkably good.
There have been so many symphonies in the past two centuries - the American symphonies, for example, one of which began in 1776 and ended about 90 years later with the American Civil War. After that, the US grew into the industrial giant of the world, but remained a reluctant participant in world affairs until world affairs entrapped it - an entrapment which became permanent with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
From then until 1989, the world was locked in a global conflict which made bipolarity an intellectual norm, and within that conflict we have not seen as clearly as we might our own distinct century, beginning with the 1884 Home Rule Bill and ending, let us hope, with the 1998 peace accord.
During this period of largely simple bipolarity, it seemed so easy to classify problems into binary opposites and think that this was normal, as I admit I have done. But this version of history is very much an invention of the 20th century, foreshadowed by the beastly-Hun theory of history during the first World War, but transformed and hardened into ideological and psychological dogma by the emergence of post-1917 political totalitarianism.
Post-modernist world?
Minds set around the certainty that human problems are both species-threatening and insoluble and require an armed response and the defeat of the opposite pole. That was a worldwide norm which took indigenous form everywhere, and remained so until the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Differences during that period were treated with an infantile logic: different was opposite; and in defence of various opposites, peoples went to war.
Civilisation was nearly torn apart by this profound sense of oppositeness, which endlessly reinvented itself across the world, evolving differently like Galapagos finches. Violence, or the threat of violence, was a normative response to the complexities of life in countries across the globe. The terrorist movements which erupted from the late 1960s on were simply non-government organisations imitating how they thought governments behaved, but without the institutional restraints and the habits of inertia which make government tolerable (just about).
Maybe we live in a post-modernist world (I don't know: I have no idea what the term means), but we certainly are living in a post-muralist world. The Berlin wall is down, and the sun is rising everywhere. It is an extraordinary moment in our history, made all the more extraordinary by the happy chance that finally, finally, the Irish people are harvesting the rewards of their labours.
To see us ahead of Britain, Japan, Taiwan, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy and Australia in a table of economic competitiveness is almost as dizzying a sensation as hearing Gerry Adams congratulating David Trimble at a Sinn Fein special conference, and being applauded. Comets shoot across the skies, and fishes walk, and Bertie Ahern, triumphantly the right man in the right place at the right time, was spot-on when he told the Dail that it is now time to create institutions which make conflict impossible.
Common vision
It is more than that. It is a time when the common vision of the different and competing strands of Irishness, of the Redmonds and the Pearses, of the de Valeras and the Collins, finally meet. Yes, we are inclined to excessive self-congratulation. And yes, we tend to think we are more special than we actually are. But this spring of near-peace, as dole queues shorten; as the new generation of post-muralist Irish writers, playwrights and musicians, heady with post-muralist confidence and intellectual freedom, certain of the authenticity of their culture and their roots, are widely feted; as our cities are regenerated and our pubs and restaurants are alive with laughter and merriment, it surely not wrong to paraphrase the words of an Englishman in 1914, when the worldwide century from which we are emerging began: Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with this hour . . .