A COUPLE of years ago, a well known Irish politician with whom I was engaged in public debate informed his audience that I appear to have "a problem with modernity". He said it, not because that is what he believes, but because he knew there is no surer way of casting someone as backward and simpleminded in front of an audience for whom being at odds with modernity holds more dread than hell itself. I knew right then he was going to win the argument but, luckily, I didn't mind.
To set one's cap against what is called modernity is to invite, at best, condescension, but usually worse. To be opposed to modernity is surely to be opposed to the way things are, which is to be in opposition to the present moment. To do so must surely be to deny the validity of one's own existence and condemn oneself to a disgruntled life battling reality.
I am not opposed to modernity - only to those, who appoint themselves "modernisers" on the basis of a totally misconceived definition.
What is modernity? There are many different forms, but the concept can, I believe, be separated into three distinct phenomena. The first, which the model we are bombarded with daily, is an ideological concept. Like all ideological concepts, it is pitted against some other force - in this instance against what is called traditionalism. It is based on the belief that the present is intrinsically superior to everything that has happened before.
It believes, also, that everything that exists now, as thought, deed, word, action or substance, exists independently of history. It believes we are independent of our individual or collective pasts. The past is a wiped blackboard, a series of mostly failed experiments which holds no relevance for us now or in the future. All knowledge is taken for granted and presumed to exist without reference to any form of evolutionary process. We are all seeing, all knowing, and every day, in every way are getting better and better.
This is not true modernity, but a combination of hubris and neurosis resulting from an unhappy relationship with the past. It leads to statements like: "Do you not realise that these are the 1990s?", as though this ended all arguments.
THE SECOND, and I believe the true kind, is a modernity which regards the present moment as simply the playing field of an evolving historical process. This form is not an ideology, but a cultural response to the torrent of history. It is based as much on feeling as on thinking. It perceives life in the present as the spark at the contact point between past and future. It neither blames the past nor sets great store in the present, but it has a belief in the future based on knowledge and experience.
This form of modernity is impossible wherever the first kind holds sway. The best that is possible, then, is the third kind, which is a compromised version of the second, with a view perhaps to exposing and eliminating the first.
This third kind might be described as an attitude based on an alliance between the past and the future against the present state of enslavement to the false form of modernity. It would seek to expunge the present hubris and replace it with an attitude based on a correct appreciation of the past and a healthy set of aspirations for the future.
In Ireland, it is clear, we suffer from the first form. For an entire generation now we have spoken of ourselves as though our present state were utterly unconnected to anything that went before other than in the sense that we are the better for having escaped from the tentacles of primitivism. The past is a series of mistakes which we, in our superiority, feel free to patronise and denigrate. At every turn we assume that our present state is, ipso facto, better than anything that existed previously.
Any negatives are the consequences of a flawed past, while all positives are the result of progress". We refuse to entertain the possibility that the disastrous side effects of this syndrome are anything but minor teething troubles on the way to an even brighter and shinier future.
You can see this quite clearly in the official response to crime in "modern" Ireland. When talking, for example, about the phenomenon of attacks on elderly citizens in rural Ireland, we list various circumstantial elements - on the one hand poverty, alienation, drug addiction and violence, and on the other isolation, lack of services, absence of young people and the increasingly lock up character of rural society - as though they were merely inconvenient happenstances in an otherwise rosy picture.
But if you think about it you will surely find it strange that the process of modernisation has contrived an approach to the provision, of infrastructure which makes the elderly citizens of "isolated" rural areas remote from everything except crime. They cannot get their post delivered on time, but they can be beaten and robbed in their own home by thugs who, courtesy of the EU sponsored road network, can be back in Dublin in 90 minutes. This is surely progress.
IN KEEPING with the central belief that nothing could possibly be learned from something as primitive as the past, the only remedy given consideration is the band aid of extra policing, longer sentences, more prison places, etc. Never do we bring ourselves around to look at the full picture, which would show that all such phenomena as crime, depopulation, alienation and individualism are inter related elements of a failed project of modernisation. To invite discussion of more fundamental approaches would be to admit to the disastrous nature of something which we must, above all else, continue to believe in as overwhelmingly virtuous - and successful.
Thus the rash of celebratory comment of late about our "spectacular" growth rates which, in the case of more thoughtful commentators, are laced with a little hand wringing about the unfortunate growth in individualism. This, we are led to believe, puts a blemish on an otherwise rosy picture. It does not occur to them that the individualism they decry is the very engine of the process of growth that they celebrate. Growth and crime are branches of the same root, and the failure to confront this reality is perhaps the greatest crime of all.
The term "modern Ireland" is an oxymoron. True modernisation is impossible in a climate of pseudo modernity, for everything is built on lies. Without proper foundations, everything turns to dust. The worst instincts rule. We drift along at the mercy of the lowest common denominator. Almost everything is naff, imitative, low rent. A genuinely modern outlook is impossible, because the past is constantly denigrated and undermined. It is impossible to separate vice from virtue, to track a course through the minefield of change.
In such a situation, it is first necessary to denounce and destroy the false form of modernity before any attempt can be made to create a proper model. This is why it is the duty of the truly modern man and woman to oppose at every turn the self appointed pseudo modernisers who are destroying this society.