A most worrying thing about our hyper-communicating society is its inability to make connections, writes John Waters
The construction of our public thinking apparatus, the way we dispense and acknowledge "expertship", our compartmentalisation of public discussions, are all suggestive of a desire to hide meanings from ourselves. Each discipline of public thought has acquired an excluding language, further hindering a conversation in which the threads of meaning might be drawn together.
Here, we have the priests, sermonising about sanctity and grace; there, the sociologists, discursing about technocratic solutions. It is left to the opinion columnist to make sense of it all, and in a climate of hostility from "experts"of every hue, resenting the intrusion of the amateur on their turf.
This hostility goes beyond protectionism, being an expression of the societal desire to deny the interconnectedness of things. Thus, the vested interest of the professional in maintaining the exclusivity of his practice becomes the mechanism by which society prevents a decline into a chaotic argument which might, in approaching sense, undo the commodification of knowledge on which both the economy and conventional wisdom depend.
The clearest example is provided by the difficulty in proving a connection between, on the one hand, the decline of Irish society into drunkenness, violence, obesity and general moral decay, and, on the other, its loss of the knowledge of God.
In relation to the first, we have no end of experts prepared to testify that things are bad and getting worse. Even the national drink problem, long the subject of a determined denial, is getting something like the attention it deserves.
Similarly, the decline in religious observance is widely acknowledged. And since there is no shortage of finger-wagging clerics prognosticating about the baleful consequences of disobeying the Commandments, it may seem far-fetched to suggest the moral decline of Irish society is not being diagnosed.
The trouble is that it is being diagnosed only in the specialised language of the determinedly converted. Most of us no longer hear this language as we did a generation ago. Then, we were inside the tent of whatever logic pertained; now, most of us are outside. The relationship of the general public to the church and its personnel is ambivalent at best, and increasingly hostile in the main.
Today, when we hear a priest complain about the loss of the faith, we hear only a self-interested lamentation or an admonition of the ebbing tide. When he makes a connection between Godlessness and public decadence, we detect moral blackmail: "Reject the church and you will rue the day!"
Those still inside the tent nod sanctimoniously and cast their eyes upwards; the rest shrug complacently, sensing the dismay of a cleric at the decline of his business.
The general neurosis and Schadenfreude about the church leads us to reject the message or apprehend its delivery in a childish way: "Serves you right, you bunch of paedophiles!" If the speaker wears mufti, we look for signs to indicate where he or she is "coming from" : does the psychiatrist look like a Knight of Columbanus? We hear in any attempt to invoke religious or spiritual values, or warn of the consequences of their decline, only the vested interest of a vanquished institution seeking to bring us back to our knees. That we are brought to our knees in manifold other ways (not least by drink at two in the morning) is regarded as inevitable collateral damage or as a dissociated phenomenon of ambiguous meaning. Our dominant sense is not that we have lost control of ourselves, but that they have lost control of us.
There exists no neutral voice to assert that what we are becoming is an inevitable consequence of the loss of God, which has deprived us of a view of any absolute horizon of human capability, or to tell us that this is primarily an issue of societal mechanics.
Our hostility to Catholicism leads us to reject the thought that we have lost something of practical use to ourselves, or to acknowledge that the pietistic language of Catholicism is just one of many ways of invoking a deity upon the knowledge of whom the human species depends in manifold ways.
By dispensing with the voices of sanctimony we have cut off our noses to breathe more freely. But we urgently need to place God in a new context, to comprehend that, although no longer a bearded, angry man on a fluffy white cloud, He remains a technocratic necessity for society and was never as necessary as now that we imagine we have outgrown Him.