Freedom at last to think for yourself

There is something unique and beautiful about walking into a polling booth on your own on election day, writes JOHN WATERS

There is something unique and beautiful about walking into a polling booth on your own on election day, writes JOHN WATERS

ONE CONSEQUENCE of the death of tradition is loss of memory. Sometimes we still do something but forget why. The pat on the cheek the bishop gives the child in Confirmation is the last residue in our culture of the tradition of male initiation, a daunting procedure in which boys were introduced to the responsibilities of manhood. Nowadays, we see it as a meaningless ritual, clung to as an alternative to doing nothing.

Sometimes, too, we stop doing things because, having failed in a particular moment to understand them, we assume them to be redundant exercises created by our meddling and perverse antecedents for no good reason.

I’m thinking here of the tradition of maintaining a moratorium on coverage of elections on the day before polling. I’m not telling tales out of school in relating that, as a member of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, I have recently had to reflect on this matter. Previously, the broadcasting moratorium was maintained throughout the eve of polling.

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Gradually, a new logic has encroached, resulting in the erosion of this “period of reflection”, which this time started at 2pm yesterday. The new logic is, in a sense, unassailable: given the amount of web-based media and non-indigenous broadcasting now focusing on Irish affairs, it makes less sense to tie the hands of locally regulated operators, especially for something that can appear a quaint residue of a different mentality.

The BAI operates on a collegiate basis and so I am party to the decision to roll back the moratorium. In a certain sense it was a no-brainer. But in another sense it represents the erosion of something vital to our democracy.

There are technical justifications for a moratorium, to do with balance and fairness, avoiding the misuse of broadcasting to create last-minute advantage for some powerful or manipulative political interest, etc. But there is a deeper strand to it also, deriving from the personal nature of the democratic franchise.

It is easy in our society to forget oneself, to be sucked into common ways of thinking. From dawn until after midnight we are bombarded with a menu of subjects and ways of thinking about them. This is a crucial element of democracy. But, precisely because of its communal dimension, it is easy to overlook the extent to which this process tends to fashion our thinking along fixed lines. We imagine we are absorbing an unlimited range of possibilities, but in reality are offering our intellects and imaginations for all kinds of ideologues and agenda setters to inhabit rent-free. This has been particularly noticeable since the onset of the present economic crisis, when broadcasters have followed a singular path, seemingly in response to public sentiment, recycling a narrow range of responses day after day and freeze-framing the public mood at a steady pitch of frenzy and hopelessness.

At any given moment, I can be trapped within the common mentality created by public conversation, or I can be free to think and feel for myself. Or I can flit between the two, now absorbing the content of a public discussion, now drawing it into myself to judge what it really means for my humanity. Unless I have some way of reminding myself, I may be unaware even of the existence of these different possibilities, never mind knowing which of them applies to me now. Unaware, I can be swept along by a communal outrage, convinced that a particular event is the most significant of the hour, persuaded that there is one way of seeing things.

Ultimately my citizenship is a communal thing, but it begins in the heart that is mine alone. And just as there is a part of the heart that the cardiologist cannot find – the part that opens back into the origin of being and knowing – there is a part of the democratic heart that should remain free from what everyone else thinks. Yes, that space needs to be informed from outside itself, but there comes a moment when it must be left alone to locate that human dimension of politics that goes beyond argument, policy, personality or opinion poll.

I’ll be honest: having listened to and digested as much of all this as I can bear, I come back to two basic questions: which candidates do I like and why? It seems superficial, but for me these questions contain everything that is to be considered about the election. You could, for want of a better word, call it instinct: the ultimate human response to another human being, the spark out of which a relationship might grow. It is based on trust and hope and, ultimately, the desire to love and be loved. Politics, in the end, comes down to one human being contemplating another in the fullest depth of his reason and reflecting his judgment with a pencil mark in a box.

There is something unique and beautiful about walking into a polling booth on my own. I love the freedom of it, the quietude that swells up from within, overwhelming the hubbub of the polling station, the feel of the pencil, the primitive essence of it. I am alone with my own hopes and dreams, a free man.