Our public conversation has reduced the broad scope of human life to a balance sheet, writes JOHN WATERS.
IT IS strange to note the extent to which our public discussion is monopolised by what is called the economy. In all the present circumstances, this may seem a natural and proportionate response, but is it really?
Does the fact that the content of Morning Irelandon any given day is 90 per cent fiscal/financial really reflect our lives? Hardly. People are concerned about the economic outlook but not every waking hour. This saturation economic doom-smooching has to do with choices made by those who design and host our public conversation, and is dictated not by authentic human needs and responses but by the commodification of fear and insecurity in media dependent on the commercial sector.
If economics is about confidence, we are already sunk, because it is surely impossible to feel confident while fighting nausea brought on by a daily diet of rage and sanctimony, and the hypocritical outpourings of those who demand the punishment of “the rich” by way of distracting the mob’s attention from their own nice little earners. And this is just the beginning of – at a minimum – a five-year national exercise in wallowing in the misery of not being as rich as we wrongly thought we were.
Anyone listening to our public conversations might think we had forgotten about the stars and the moon, about death and birth, about love and loss and beauty and passion. It is as though our collective life has been reduced to a balance sheet, and the mystery of our human journey crudely translated into marginal rates and pension levies, with all the great questions of human existence treated as bad debts which have been written out of our collective consciousness.
It struck me on Wednesday, turning off the radio to wade through the acres of Budget coverage in the newspapers, that recent events have placed an ironic exclamation mark on the description of reality writ large on the national blackboard for half a century. This national mantra now reads: “Progress will one day meet all our needs!” We have a choice: to see the exclamation mark or not. We can spend the next five years trying to remove it, self-pityingly contemplating the implosion of man-made nirvana while simultaneously conspiring to make the same errors again; or, instead, we can reinvent our perspective to take in a broader sweep of the real.
In my childhood, into the second half of the 20th century, there were many reasons to be fearful about the future, and yet these fears did not contaminate every snatch of public conversation, every greeting, every waking thought. The economic dimension was enveloped within a balance of concerns embracing all human aspiration. Back then, the public square held to an explicit connection between affairs of state, economy and government, and the absolute, eternal dimension of mankind’s relationship with reality.
Understanding of this connection was crude, simplistic and blighted by agendas of power and social control, but it created, nevertheless, a context in which the ordinary citizen functioned with a general sense that what happened either in the economy or in his day-to-day circumstances was not the last word.
There was something else beyond, something that mattered far more, and something, moreover, that could influence the day-to-day realities for better or worse. There was an abiding sense of hope that, beyond the problems of the public or private spheres, a more enduring process operated, and that this was fundamentally linked to the human structure, to the spirit, intellect and physical manifestation of each citizen, and to the collective endeavour as well. This enabled our parents’ generations to maintain an upbeat attitude to times that were, by all objective criteria, much worse than anything facing us now. They believed in Providence, in the idea that underneath everything is a divine plan that may be lamented or complained about, but ultimately, in its ineluctability, offers the only hope there is.
A society that talks without hope cannot long endure. This week’s Budget is not the crucial factor in our futures. We may have opinions as to whether it may attain or miss its stated objectives, but if we place our hope in it and its architects, then we are truly doomed. Hope lies not here, but in the potential of reality to transform itself without notice, and in our own relationships with the Mystery from which we emerged.
I wonder if any official thought was given to the fact that the supplementary Budget would be delivered in Holy Week. Did Brian Lenihan wryly anticipate the deluge of crucifixion jokes from reporters and subeditors with over-taxed imaginations and dwindling creative resources? It is odd and sad that this laboured punning is the only way this apparent happenstance has been marked. For who, no matter how bowed down by the ceaseless talk of economic doom, could miss the note of benign irony in the fact that, nursing our wounds on this darkest of days, we await the deliverance of the brightest dawn in history?