Church principles are a distillation of elements of mankind's nature into principles meant to guide rather than compel, writes JOHN WATERS
THE GREATEST “sin” committed by Irish Catholicism was its failure to explain itself properly to the people. I have in mind not any recent reluctance to comply with demands for accountability or penitence, but something deeper: the failure to explain that Catholicism is fundamentally an understanding of human nature as it engages with reality, and that the “point” is not social control, but personal self-understanding.
For the benefit of an uneducated peasantry, the post-Famine Roman Catholic Church sought to reduce this mission to rules, many of which seemed arbitrary and punitive. Self-denial was presented as a virtue for its own sake, devoid of context. Sin was whatever people enjoyed doing.
Although the church became centrally involved in educating the population out of ignorance and innocence, it never sought to review these once-functional simplicities – a failure that unleashed a widespread reaction against the rules and a consequent rejection of their supposed manufacturer.
The “rules”, though, are not, generally speaking, the whims of a life-mistrusting authority, but the distillation of ineluctable elements of mankind’s nature into principles intended to guide rather than compel.
The “law” is not something imposed but something adduced from human experience. Obedience is required as a way of avoiding not punishment, but consequences. The Catholic view of contraception, for example, relates not to some intrinsic objection to rubber sheaths, but to a view of what best serves human dignity and happiness in the long run. The point is to become aware that, when we plunder one another on the basis of immediate desire, we store up costs for ourselves and those we exploit.
The “rule” draws our attention to the condom as a technology for cheating reality, and is therefore simply a memorandum that summons up all the potential consequences of an action that instinct or immediate desire may suggest as being without costs.
Whatever our view of the “rule” – and regardless of our willingness or capacity to observe it – it should be possible for us to look into this reasoning and see some sense in it.
Even if we think ourselves immune from the consequences against which the rule exists to warn, it is surely useful to become alerted to the possibilities, so that we may assess our experiences as we go along and become open to consideration of whether or not these tend to vindicate or disprove the “rules”. The “rules”, therefore, are a way of making other people’s experiences available as a form of collective memory for the benefit of those with an inadequate sense of how things tend to turn out.
The Nyberg report tells us not just that we had insufficient regulation but that we had lost the understanding of what regulation exists to achieve.
The story of the Celtic Tiger is of the triumph of instinct over memory, of the pursuit of immediate gain without any accounting for the likely consequences, of a collective loss of the sense of what human happiness really is.
In our desire to repudiate the failures of the past, we sought to dispense with all warnings that human nature has certain characteristics that do not change much in the short run. Nyberg tells us that we forgot not just the simplistic injunctions of the Catholic Church, but virtually the entire race memory bequeathed by our ancestors.
Sigmund Freud wrote that if you would understand what happiness is, put your foot outside the blankets on a cold night, leave it there for a few minutes and then take it back in.
Happiness is not something to be pursued in a linear, relentless way, but occurs as a relative phenomenon in a life of pain and pleasure, effort and reward, sacrifice and occasional satisfaction, ebb and flow.
Something Peter Nyberg does not emphasise is that, in a capitalist system, misunderstandings of happiness are both inevitable and essential. When people seek happiness by buying things, it is probably that they don’t understand, or have forgotten, how life really works. Capitalism depends on such misunderstanding.
Ireland is a relative newcomer to the capitalist mainstream, having for centuries been a dependency with no capacity to further its education by dint of hard experience of the kinds of risk involved.
Perhaps, then, we were not to know that growth is an illusion that does not satisfy, or that materialism does not deliver in a linear, exponential manner, or that bricks and mortar are not coherent repositories of material value, or that boom is always followed by bust. But, still, there is something unforgivable in the way we seemed to forget some of the earliest lessons we received.
Every Lent and Easter of our childhoods we were taught that self-denial is the best way of enhancing enjoyment of life, that the point of forgoing the things we immediately crave is not self-punishment, but achievement of an understanding of our desires. This is the lesson we awoke to every Easter Sunday morning, discovering that chocolate tastes better when you’ve had none for a while.
Because we had come to see such propositions as arbitrary impositions on our capacity to enjoy ourselves, it was probably inevitable that we would kick over the traces the first chance we got.