THE tale is told of both Chou En Lai and Mao Tse Tung that when asked what were the long term consequences of the French revolution, the wily old Chinamen replied: "It's too soon to say."
One hundred and ninety eight years - minus a few weeks - after that revolution, in this year of elections in both the United Kingdom and Ireland, we can reasonably answer that question with the word:
None.
Across the globe, the last vestiges of the aftermath of the French Revolution are vanishing, as the state withdraws from central planning and economic activity of all kinds. In the British general election there was no ideological difference whatsoever between the three main parties. What divided them was political and class culture, not policies. Political parties in Britain have returned to being what they were before the French Revolution - clusters of individuals gathered around certain precepts of tribal loyalty and historical identity which present themselves before the electorate for approval. The Tories of today are Whigs, and the Labour party of today are Tories.
Ideological Divisions
Strangely enough, Ireland was - inadvertently - in the van in this matter. Our political life did not form around ideological divisions - something which people on the left have frequently deplored. Both main parties reflected the economic theories prevalent throughout Europe at the appropriate time. When statism was fashionable, both parties were statist, urging state involvement in the economy regardless of their alleged position in the left-right divide.
Like Tories and Whigs, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail drew on ancient and barely understood notions of caste and identity, which recruited largely on the basis of intuition. When you see that word "intuition" in connection with party identity, what you actually are reading is another word: tribe.
The Civil War confused people's understanding of this identity - and understandably. People took sides on that war often enough out of accident or peer pressure or personal loyalty, and the war and all its horrors were incorporated into the respective myths of the two parties. But in fact, the divisions within Irish life which go into the making of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail predate the Civil War.
They go back to the Confederation of Kilkenny and beyond. Fine Gael is the party of the caste of Anglo-Norman old Catholics, and Fianna Fail is the party of the Gael. Fine Gael's tribal roots mean that it is Jacobite; Fianna Fail's that it is Jacob in. The old Irish Parliamentary Party was Jacobite. The Easter Rising was merely a Confederation of Kilkenny Revividus. Plunkett was a proto-Fine Gaeler: so I suspect was Sean Heuston. McDermott and Ceannt were proto-Fianna Failers. A "natural" Fianna Failer was Michael Collins - only the accidents of history caused him to be become a patron of Fine Gael.
In culture, in habit, in political machination, he was every inch a Fianna Failer. Can you not see him in a Fianna Fail cabinet in the 1930s, fixing deals, giving government contracts to cronies, and laughing behind Dev's back at the latter's more preposterous gaelic fantasies?
Silly Insistence
Fianna Fail's truly silly insistence that it puts people before politics shows that, in our use of language, we still reflect some of the values of the French Revolution. True politics is about people, and nothing but; it was only the insanities of the French Revolution which gave us the heresies (and the words) of left and right, and which saddled us with the notions, the divisions, and of course the word, of ideology.
The French Revolution propelled the state into becoming a tool that" shaped people's lives, that actively participated in their day-to-day activities, that could direct them economically. socially, educationally, nationally, politically.
Up until this century. the people who seized control of a state and who used it as an instrument of policy were regarded as progressives, and those who opposed such seizures as reactionaries; but Mr Hitler and Mr Stalin, Mr Mao and Mr Pot, have shown us that those simple divisions, and the entire vocabulary of left and right, are merely hallucinations, which have very little practical application in a post-revolutionary world.
Finally, two centuries after the earthquake emanating from, France, we can see politics settling into patterns which pre-date the Revolution there. Party loyalties are shaped around a sense of shared history and affections for certain individuals, living and dead. Nobody argues any more for an increase in state authority.
The reverse is the case. The argument today is about the speed of withdrawal of the state from economic activities at which, generally speaking, it has not distinguished itself.
The French Revolution did not introduce the concept of liberty: that had been essential to the entire drift of western European thought since the Reformation. But it did introduce the notion of compulsory egalitarianism. That is the one strand which appears to have survived the counter-revolution which began in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, which took hold in the USA under President Reagan, and is now a norm throughout the anglophone world.
Seductive Creed
Egalitarianism is the most seductive of all of creeds, because it apparently conforms to so much of Christian thought. But just as the left-right division confused and confuses, so it is with egalitarianism, which is not always quite what it seems.
Much of what is done in the same of egalitarianism, for example, education, is in, fact anti-egalitarianism, since its intention is to create enormous and proper inequalities in skill and expertise. A plumber should not have plumbing skills equal to those of a hairdresser.
Alas, too often we lack the courage to say we embrace in egalitarianism. The reality is that we do. Two years short of the bicentenary, and as we go into an election in which there is diminishing ideological difference between Democratic Left and PD right, we will soon be able to assure our clever Chinaman: none, sir. None at all.