What is all this "modernity" nonsense? asks Desmond Fennell
I have just reviewed a Celtic Tiger book by a bunch of academics and here comes another of them, Engaging Modernity, published by Veritas. You know the sort of thing, I let it speak for itself. "Engaging Modernity provides a new appraisal of Ireland's engagement with the phenomenon of modernity. The path we have travelled from being a rural-based, religious, traditional, insular country, to a secular, highly prosperous economic hi-tech centre has brought in its wake both problems and advantages."
Two things cry out for saying. The first has to do with the notion - ignorant but it's in vogue - that during the Celtic Tiger decade Ireland finally stopped being "traditional" and became "modern". (The book I reviewed, called Reinventing Ireland, went on about "modernisation" as something that happened here in the 1990s.) I have just taken down off the shelf, to check the title, Joe Lee's book The Modernisation of Ireland 1848-1918 - and Lee writes as a professor of history and a careful user of language.
But I don't need any book to tell me that the Irish engaged with the French Revolution when that was the modern thing around and before that with the Protestant Reformation when that was, and centuries earlier encountered and adopted Norman stone castles, body armour and courtly love, and much further back Christianity, the latest thing from Rome, and a very long time ago, when the novelties first arrived from the Continent, iron swords and ploughs and pots and pans, to replace the bronze ones.
What is "modernity" but the latest thing in vogue in the power centres, which subsequently spread to the provinces and is eagerly adopted by the provincials, led by their fashionable elites? "Modernisation" has been happening in Ireland since prehistory. Far from its being a case, now or ever, of "modernity versus tradition", the Irish have a long tradition of modernisation; it is part of our traditional way of life.
A more recent Irish tradition is that in every generation since Daniel O'Connell, journalists and academics tell us that modernity has hit us and discuss the pros and cons. The Celtic Tiger academics will be followed in due course by others who will tell us how Dublin is modernising when, in expensive London and New York restaurants, people are eating prime al-Qaeda terrorist meat.
In short, with some historical awareness and care for language, Eamon Maher and Michael Böss, the editors of Engaging Modernity, might have added "in the 1990s". Granted, it would have sounded banal, but the truth is.
The second thing that cries out to be said is, yes indeed, we have "travelled from being a rural-based, religious country to being a hi-tech centre"; we have heard that before ad nauseam. But what happens now and who's discussing that? What do we do with our final achievement of that indistinguishableness from our neighbours which - with some deviation in the post-revolutionary decades - have been the aim of successive Irish elites for centuries?
Getting rid of "rural-based" and "religious" - actually "Catholic" was the trouble - has been only the tail-end of a process which, again, is illuminated by history. It began in the 16th century when our top people, with the rest following later, began abandoning Irish law, dress and cuisine for English law, dress and cuisine (there was such a thing then).
It continued two centuries later, when our new middle class, strong farmers and gombeen persons, feeling still too recognisably Irish because of the sounds that came out of their mouths, abandoned Irish language for English language and the lower ranks, trailing as usual, followed suit.
Finally came the 1960s and 70s and a new bourgeoisie felt uncomfortable that their country, by being "rural" and "Catholic", still stuck out on the surrounding landscape.
England wasn't rural or Catholic, nor was America, so those Paddy marks, too, were disposed of. Now at long last, the self-image we project abroad and like looking at in the domestic mirror, is Ameranglian to a T and free of Paddy marks.
But mission accomplished, we do not need to be told and told again, in self-congratulatory tones, that it has been accomplished and how free it makes us. Free for what?
Animals which change their natural colouring to adopt that of the surrounding vegetation have, so to speak, rational purposes. They wish to protect themselves from attack or to facilitate their own attacks.
Have we such purposes in mind? Or was stripping ourselves of our distinguishing clothing our particular, very daring and desperate way of becoming a rich country? And if it was, how will it serve us if we cease to be rich? Have we a project in mind for our post-national future? If there existed in the Republic a serious cultural debate, these are the issues to which our culture specialists would be attending.
Europe, or at least its anthropologists, will be watching what we do next. For, ironically, in making ourselves indistinguishable from our Ameranglian surroundings we have made ourselves unique among European nations. In Ireland alone, modernisation - to return to the theme - took this nationally self-obliterating turn and so resolutely that it continued after political independence.
Alone among the nations, we Irish have sufficient self-hatred and sufficient daring to transform our nation into a tabula rasa and post-Irish space on which something culturally quite new and post-European can be built. But only if we stop hating the notion of being different. Anthropologically speaking, we are an experiment.
Desmond Fennell's new book The Revision of European History will be published by Athol Books, Belfast, in June.