INTRODUCTION
Cuan and
Kant
This book sets out to compare two potential sources for understanding how life could and should be lived: the writings of certain philosophers about the good life; and an ethnography based in a small Irish town of people living what will be described as the good enough life. The discipline of Western philosophy is generally considered to have developed from the sixth century bce in classical Greece and its colonies with a focus on the question of how to live well, exemplified by Aristotle’s discussion of the term eudaimonia, generally translated as living well or a good life. Fortunately, eudaimonia resonates with an ambiguity in the English word ‘good’. When we say, I am living the good life, we mainly refer to happiness. But when we say, I aim to live a good life, we mainly refer to virtue and ethics. Early philosophers were concerned with the relationship between these two. Socrates stated that,
Seeing that all men1 desire happiness, and happiness, as has been shown, is gained by a use, and a right one, of the things of life, and that the right use of them, and good-fortune in the use of them, is given by knowledge – the inference is surely that everybody ought by all means to try to make himself as wise as he can?2
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, confirms both that eudaimonia is the ultimate aim of life (1097 15–21),3 and that the sound use of reason will allow us to flourish through aretē (excellence/virtue), demonstrated above all through thoughtful action by a harmonious, well-habituated soul.
These are philosophical ideals, but what of life as lived? Today, we might feel less confident about the relationship between virtue and happiness. Could a selfish and greedy person still be happy and is a virtuous person necessarily happy? As it happens, most of the people who contributed to this ethnography seemed to share the ideal of eudaimonia that a virtuous life was also the most effective route to personal happiness, though the examples of virtue discussed in this book come from activities such as grandparenting and environmentalism rather than through an abstract philosophical concept of ‘reason’. The people in my fieldsite do, however, make considerable use of the principle of ‘being reasonable’ as a foundation for being judged as wise. But it was a different observation that was the starting point for this comparison between philosophy and ethnography. From the very beginning of fieldwork, I was struck by the sheer love of this community for the town in which they lived and their identification with it – a sentiment reminiscent of the foundation of so much Greek philosophy, which took for granted that the good life was based on citizenship associated with a particular city-state, known as a polis. This volume is therefore constructed through juxtaposing chapters about well-known philosophers or schools of philosophy with other chapters drawn from an ethnography of the retired population of this small town in Ireland, people who would never consider themselves to be either philosophers or exemplars of the good life. Anthropological ethnography differs from most social research because the emphasis is on observations of what people do, rather than what they say. The portrait of these people’s good enough lives has been extrapolated mostly from their everyday actions, rather than interviews. It is the life they lead that provides our evidence. The premise for this book is that there may be advantages to considering a population that actually exists as against ideal models of what society might or should be. This gives ethnography a potentially important complementary role to certain philosophical questions. Within the discipline of philosophy, a consideration of the good life subsequently took its place alongside logic, epistemology, politics, and a multitude of other considerations as philosophy grew in breadth and depth. The concern of this volume is, therefore, with only a small element of contemporary and historical philosophy. A final unusual quality of this book follows from the use of ethnography to exemplify the good enough life; increasingly, social science seems to be dominated by critique, while this will be largely a book of praise.
The people presented in this ethnography are all Irish. This does not mean that they are necessarily representative of the population of Ireland. I spent sixteen months living amongst these retired people in a small town on the east coast of Ireland, which has been given the pseudonym of Cuan. I didn’t have a car and hardly ever left the town. I therefore cannot say how typical they would be of Irish people more generally, although my findings were generally consistent with a parallel and simultaneous ethnography by Pauline Garvey in an area of Dublin with a similar demographic.4 Furthermore, most of my informants were not born in Cuan but migrated from other parts of Ireland or in some cases from abroad. I will sometimes use the term Cuan as a convenience to describe the people I worked with, but the arguments apply only to my research participants, who were mainly retired, and not necessarily to the rest of Cuan.
The ethnography characterizes this population as an example of the ‘good enough’ life. The semantics are not ideal. The phrase ‘good enough’ might be seen to imply sufficiently good, which would make this a rather complacent exercise, as though we could not aspire to do a good deal better in achieving virtue. This is not the meaning of ‘good enough’ intended here. The phrase is mainly known in academia through the work of the psychologist Donald Winnicott in reference to good enough mothering.5 His point was that we could praise rather than condemn a mother who, under often difficult circumstances and faced by all the contradictions of parenting, manages to develop a reasonably sensitive response to her infant, creating a secure and nurturing environment. The phrase ‘good enough’ is also important as a means of differentiation from the way philosophers consider the good life in reference to how a society should ideally be. By contrast, anthropologists tend to comparison with other existing societies, rather than against some ideal. This book is therefore not trying to suggest that Cuan is ideal; rather that, for all the faults that will be described, it is hard to find another currently existing society that is demonstrably better.
Individual chapters of this book will focus on particular components of the good enough life. John Rawls (chapter 6) helps us to consider justice and fairness, when set against the inequalities and other problems found in Cuan (chapter 5). Socrates helps to explain the centrality of sports to the people of Cuan (chapter 8). Heidegger is contrasted with the way Cuan has been constructed as a place (chapter 10). The Stoics and Epicurus discuss what we should do
with our lives as we age, in comparison to these retirees (chapter 12). Other philosophers have been selected because of their commentaries on the nature of freedom (chapter 1) or affluence (chapter 3), both qualities of this population to which chapters have been devoted. The capabilities approach associated with both Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen is found to have some aspirations in common with this ethnography, as does the book After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. In the conclusion, Hegel is deployed to try to resolve some of the key differences between these philosophical approaches and what has been learnt from the ethnography. In every instance, it is only my attempted interpretations of these philosophers that can be offered in the course of these comparisons. I have no training in academic philosophy.
Why write a book on the good enough life right now? We live in a restless world. Over the centuries, hundreds of millions of people have migrated in search of a better life. Consider those who have over time colonized the lands of North America, reducing the indigenous people to a small remnant. Or consider the 250 million people who more recently have migrated to industrial regions of China and were the subject of a wonderful study by Xinyuan Wang comparing their migration from rural areas to work in factories with their simultaneous migration from offline to online.6 Many contemporary migrants are refugees from war and oppression. The most impoverished rarely have the resources to undertake such migrations. The majority, such as in the case of the vast Chinese migration, move in search of ‘a better life’. What this term ‘a better life’ implies is that they seek the security of a higher income or a better health service or the opportunities of education for their children, as well as escape from struggle and coercion. For many such migrants, the aspiration is to seek a largely middle-class and suburban lifestyle,7 which they hope to achieve over one or more generations.
This then raises some rather important questions. How should we regard this middle-class, suburban, settled life that most of the world now aspires to? Is this a perfectly reasonable ideal, the sort of life that pretty much everyone could and should emulate? Is there some plausible concept of the good enough life, or of life purpose, that this lifestyle corresponds to? Or is it an illusion or a trap, an image created by the wider political economy, these days often glibly termed ‘neo-liberal capitalism’, in order to sell us a lifestyle to which we sheepishly conform? Rather than reaching some ideal, have we
fallen into a muddy rut along the way? In the past, the only way of conceiving of an ideal life would have been through sketching out some version of a speculative utopia. But in the twenty-first century, quite a few migrants have largely achieved the life they sought, in countries where that is how much of the population now live. Instead of speculative utopias, we are in a position to appraise the very ordinary lives of millions of people, living in versions of a middleclass, suburban lifestyle within a welfare state. If this lifestyle already exists and can be observed, then we have reached the point where we can consider the value of such lives.
Ireland is a largely middle-class country with a centrist government and a welfare state. Cuan could be considered suburban in that it is within commuter distance from Dublin. The population who form the backbone of this book seem to correspond, then, to these migrant aspirations. One of the groups deliberately included within the ethnography were migrants from outside of Ireland who have settled in Cuan. There were not many such migrants because Cuan is a relatively expensive place to live, but those who became research participants regarded the town as a clear fulfilment of their ideals as migrants.
On occasion when discussing this book with other social scientists, the result has been a horrified expression. Why am I not studying people in poverty or the highly oppressed? Don’t I know how much people around the world are suffering? As it happens, most of my previous work has been with such populations. I have lived for considerable periods with people who had no toilet of any kind other than the fields, only intermittent electricity, and could afford just two meals a day rather than three. I have published a book about a hospice whose patients had received a terminal diagnosis and were dying.8 It is important to observe and report on deprivation, struggle, and suffering. But it is also important to write about lives outside of these conditions. One of the limitations of disciplines such as psychology and much social science is that, if we are mainly engaged with the problems and pathologies of modern life, in order perhaps to assist in such situations, the result is a strange perspective that sees so much in the world from the viewpoint of pathology. By contrast, the remit of anthropology is first and foremost to explore the cultural diversity of humanity and help all of us to understand empathetically what it means to be other than who we are. Anthropology is currently trying to make this a more egalitarian pursuit in repudiation of its
colonial and privileged origins. All populations should be equal in the possibility of becoming the subject of some inquisitive anthropologist and also in the possibility of becoming an anthropologist. This was another reason for embarking on a study of a population that is slightly more affluent than the UK, where I live.
Whenever I hear people tell me (as they often do) that, ‘Oh, they would be of interest to an anthropologist, you should study them,’ I sigh, because anthropology should regard no population as more authentic or interesting than any other. It is essential to anthropology that we, too, should be examined for our weird cultural beliefs and assumptions that other people find astonishing and in need of explanation. Otherwise, we will assume that somehow our beliefs are more natural and obvious, and it is only others who require such investigations. Like most of my research participants, I am middle class and suburban and I found many things that we held in common. But I also found people in Cuan to be remarkably different in their approach to life than those I had written about in a previous ethnography of a similar-sized population in a fieldsite just outside London.9 (I am myself a Londoner.) It is reasonable to see Cuan as the kind of society many people aspire to, but beyond that it is hard to regard it as typical. Often in contemporary social science, the context of neo-liberal capitalism is appealed to as the cause of some observation. But the populations who live within neo-liberal capitalism seem just as heterogeneous as those who don’t. If Cuan is remarkably different from the English settlement that I had recently written about,10 it could hardly be because of some fundamental difference between British and Irish capitalism.
One of the reasons for alternating the ethnography with discussions of sometimes analogous and sometimes contrasting philosophy is that the aim of this book is not just observation but also appraisal. Appraisal required some kind of yardstick against which Cuan could be measured, and this is provided by philosophy.11 There have been many previous attempts to juxtapose philosophical questions with anthropological approaches, and there has also been a recent growth of interest within anthropology in topics such as virtue, happiness, and ethics. The closest parallel is probably a recent edited collection by Harry Walker and Iza Kavedžija which explicitly addresses similar questions regarding the relationship between happiness and eudaimonia.12 As might be expected from an anthropological collection, there is no attempt to measure the good
or happy life. Rather, ethnographies demonstrate a plurality of values and priorities. Older Japanese people may be more concerned with tranquillity, seeking a balance between autonomy and dependence, and focus on modest aesthetic aims within everyday practices. That makes them very different from the association between happiness and excitement of young people in the US. Humanists link happiness more closely to virtue, while Chinese parents try to decide whether to focus on their happiness or that of their children. Most people see happiness as the by-product of other aims and not necessarily enhanced through explicit discussion, a conclusion that will be reinforced by the evidence presented in this volume. There are many other anthropologists concerned with various aspects of the good life,13 as well as works that examine different dimensions within the relationship between anthropology and philosophy.14 I am not aware, however of any that adopt the precise structure of alternate juxtaposition that is employed here. I apologize that this book only examines Western (itself a highly problematic term) philosophy and that I possess none of the knowledge that could permit venturing beyond this. Given that I have no formal background in academic philosophy, it already felt like an act of considerable hubris to try to engage with the range of philosophers who will be discussed, but at least these were mainly figures I had encountered during decades working in social science.
If anthropology has a record of engagement with philosophy, there are also movements in the other direction. A notable influence has been the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of previous attempts by philosophers to create a more general or universal approach to virtue.15 MacIntyre argues that our ideas of virtue are inculcated by our socialization into particular traditions and cultural values. This would give licence to anthropological approaches that extrapolate eudaimonia from studies of culture,16 and that analyse virtue through observing practices such as sharing.17 Similar arguments about the necessity of culture and comparison may be found in the writings of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, notwithstanding their own philosophical differences.18 By the end of this book, it will be apparent that the example of Cuan differs from some of the expectations that have emerged from this literature. Virtue for this population will turn out to have much less to do with tradition than might have been anticipated. The arguments of the conclusion lie closer to what will be suggested were Hegel’s arguments for virtue and freedom as
derived from the way society collectively creates culture and thereby creates itself.
In using the term ‘yardstick’, a curious other possibility arises. If a range of philosophical discussions are set against the ethnography, then it could equally imply an appraisal of these philosophers through examining how their ideas measure up against an actual population. This volume will pay equal regard to both possibilities. The ethnography will be employed to reconsider the contributions of some philosophers, while philosophers such as Rawls will be deployed to make judgements about Cuan. This is, then, two books in one. If you find yourself falling asleep when reading the sections on philosophy, you have the option of just reading the alternating chapters devoted to the ethnography, and vice versa.
It is possible that my research participants are going to be a little horrified at being employed in such a manner. Generally speaking, they are quite a modest lot. I can’t think of a single one of them who would see themselves as representing any kind of ideal life, let alone having the hubris to compare themselves to the great philosophers. As far as I could tell, they do not regard themselves as special in any way. But, of course, that is precisely why they serve this purpose so well. There was no search for an ideal society. The value of the ethnography lies in understanding a ‘good enough’ society that people might feasibly aspire to. I must apologize to my friends and research participants whom I am setting up here as Irish ‘Davids’ against the ‘Goliath’ of Philosophy. It should be crystal clear that this is entirely an author’s conceit exploiting their very modesty by making that virtue part of their qualification for being utilized in this fashion.
As already noted, it was an early but then sustained observation about Cuan that became the catalyst around which the ambitions of this book crystallized. This was the degree to which the people of Cuan seemed besotted by Cuan itself. There was not even the germ of a plan to write a book on the topic of the good enough life at the start of a very different research project. This book arose mainly from the evidence that while people in Cuan did not describe their individual lives in glowing terms, they constantly went on and on about how Cuan itself was the ideal place within which to live a good life. This seemed to correspond to the relationship between the good life and the polis in the Greek city state. This book is not a detective story; it can start with its conclusion: that to the degree to which these
research participants live the good enough life, the principal cause turns out to be the manner by which they have created the town of Cuan.
The Love of Cuan
I settled in Cuan for an entirely different purpose. I was running an international project, funded by the European Research Council, called ASSA: The Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing. As part of this comparative project, I would study this topic in Cuan, while my Irish colleague, Pauline Garvey, who teaches Anthropology at Maynooth University in Ireland, would carry out a parallel project in a Dublin suburb. Subsequently, we wrote up our findings, which turned out to be largely identical, in a book called Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland19 as one of a series of monographs that derived from the ASSA project. I apologize for the fact that in writing this volume it has been essential to reprise some of the themes already discussed in that earlier volume, but it is likely that book will mainly be read by those interested in either smartphones or ageing, while this volume is frying up some bigger fish.
One of the joys of traditional anthropology was its aspiration to a holistic methodology. The method known as ethnography or participant observation consists of living with a population, in this case, as mentioned, for sixteen months, during which most days are spent in their company, engaging in activities alongside them, but also sometimes interviewing them directly. The anthropologist arrives with a topic that requires studying, in this instance ageing and smartphones. But an ethnography implies examining those topics as part of everyday life. In order to understand the consequences of smartphones, the vast majority of research has to be about people’s offline lives, since we cannot know in advance whether it may be family life, religion, education, gender, or something else entirely that will help us interpret what people are observed to do with these devices. We therefore need to investigate everything else that goes on in their lives in order to be confident about our explanations for smartphone usage and consequences. After all, no one lives inside an academic topic; they live all these things at once. I call our method holistic contextualization. Ethnography is unusual as perhaps the only academic research method that seeks to correspond to life as it
is actually lived. It is almost the exact opposite of hypothesis testing, which would reduce research only to variables already known about. Ethnography is also a qualitative method that refuses to reduce observations to data, or things which can be counted. As a result, it can have no pretensions to be akin to natural science, and indeed ethnography is often looked down upon by other disciplines because it has little that they would consider as hard data. What it contains instead is a grasp on life that is not a result of any kind of artificial parameter or encounter. We simply spend around sixteen months swimming in their sea. (As it happens, most people in Cuan do swim in the actual sea and considered me completely wimpish because I found it too cold.) For many anthropologists, even interviews are suspect as artificial research contrivances. Instead, we mostly trust observations based on life as it unfolds around us and overhearing conversations that are naturally taking place between others.
It follows that often the most rewarding part of an ethnography is the encounter with topics that could not even be envisaged. Ethnography then becomes a voyage of discovery. This book is full of topics that were never intended to be studied, not just the good enough life, but pet dogs, bingo, cocaine, sports, or where people choose to go on holiday, all of which came into the frame as general background. But none of these made quite as strong an impression as the observation that slapped me straight in the face within days of arrival: the love of Cuan felt by the people of Cuan. They were also pretty keen on the fact of being Irish. Most of the current inhabitants of Cuan are themselves migrants from other parts of Ireland. They are referred to as ‘blow-ins’. Soon after arrival, I heard many versions of ‘I didn’t know anything about Cuan when I moved here, but it turned out to be a magical decision.’ For the entirety of my stay, this sentiment dominated all others. Almost everyone wanted to make sure that I was aware of just how much they loved Cuan. Cuan has turned out to be such a perfect place to live that they could not now imagine living anywhere else. None of this was a response to any research question. It just seemed important to so many people to drop this sentiment somewhere into the conversation. Over time, it also became clear that this is something they frequently did amongst themselves and was not just mentioned for my benefit. The people of Cuan are simply besotted by Cuan; the term ‘heaven’ is not infrequently used. As in the initial quotation, a common refrain was that this was an example of simple good fortune, because they had
not known any of this in advance of moving there. They had just lucked out.
The praise took many forms. One of the most popular statements concerned the range of activities. The claim that Cuan has everything except a swimming pool, a hotel, and a cinema was heard at least a hundred times, always with those same three caveats. The iconic Cuan walk is along the seafront. This was felt to be an infinite pleasure as the sea presents a different aspect however many times one stares out at it from one’s walk. This particular walk would also inevitably lead to social encounters such that a ten-minute walk could take hours as people stop to chat. Other commonly cited virtues included the lack of crime, the suitability of Cuan as a place of retirement, and the weather relative to other parts of Ireland. Another popular refrain was that, if any individual wanted to develop some new craft or activity, there would always be others who would come together to help make this happen. The claim, however, that dominated to a degree that it ends up as the bulk of chapter 7 in this book was that Cuan is heaven because of the range of sports available.
The emphasis on sports was closely related to another heartfelt form of praise for Cuan. This was the hope amongst older people that their children would return. People living in small towns in every region face the fear that their children will one day leave in search of something bigger and better. The children of Cuan mainly do leave when they go to college or first obtain jobs. By the end of their teen years, they are bored to tears by the town and claim there is nothing to do there. But, in many cases, it seemed that once they contemplate having children of their own, then they wish to return to the town so that their own children might replicate their positive experience. Much of this rests on the success of sports as providing enjoyment and purpose for younger children. A silver lining of the economic crash in Ireland was said to be that children of Cuan were then able to purchase properties in the town that otherwise had become unaffordable for first-time buyers. My study of the newest housing estate suggested that, despite the expense, around a third of purchases were from people originally brought up in Cuan. This will not be the only example of the town’s virtuous circles. In chapter 9, we will see that this sense of positive community led to it being differentially favoured by government grants, which meant it was becoming a still better place to live.
The sheer level of praise for the place might have seemed extreme. But another piece of evidence made this still more strange. If Cuan as a very heaven was an almost universal view of those who had lived for some years in the town, it was not a view shared by anyone outside. Even today, Cuan is a largely disregarded place. On my rare forays to Dublin, people always expressed surprise that I should have chosen this out-of-the-way fieldsite for my research. It is not a place I have found referenced in tourist guides to Ireland. People are aware that it was a seaside destination in their parents’ day but can’t really see much reason to go there now, given the weather is so much better in Spain. There are plenty of good beaches and more swish-looking towns much closer to Dublin than Cuan. It is as though Cuan is surrounded by the river Lethe, so that only those within it are aware of its glories. No one ever suggested Cuan as the kind of place that would be ‘of interest’ to an anthropologist – which seemed as good as any reason for settling there.
How could a place be so well regarded internally and so disregarded externally? I confess that I, too, could have voiced these sentiments. My choice of Cuan as a fieldsite related to logistical convenience and the reputation of its age-friendly group, since I planned to be working mainly with older people. Yet I ended up liking the place just as much as everyone else and wondering which star to thank for my fate. At first, all I felt was some bemusement in the face of this enthusiastic self-love of Cuan. But as an academic it clearly required explanation. Not just why are people in Cuan besotted by where they live, but also, if this is clearly experienced as the good enough life, what does this tell us about the way people consider the meaning and purpose of life more generally? It helped that one of topics within our project on ageing and smartphones was also about life purpose – a topic that arose naturally from a project devoted to retirement, when people are more likely to be confronted by questions of what more they want out of life.
As fieldwork progressed, I realized that not only was I coming to share something of this fondness for Cuan, but I also shared many of the values and interests of my interlocutors. I am not Irish and have no Irish ancestry, though, being Jewish, I don’t identify with being English to the same extent as people in Cuan identified me as being English. I do have Irish grandchildren, which was one of the reasons I wanted to live there, to explore another part of my family identity. More generally, though, I am of a similar age to these
research participants. Perhaps bizarrely, I write books about being retired instead of retiring myself, but that seems to make me just as happy as retirement makes them. I come from a similar liberal leftleaning orientation, and most of my informants seemed sympathetic to the woes of the British Labour Party, of which I am a member. I am at a similar level of comfort and income, with common interests in taking holidays and the wider world. We watched the same TV series and the same Premier League football matches, and often read the same newspaper (The Guardian). I support my wife in her work with a project to help asylum seekers, which parallels the kind of philanthropic work common in Cuan. More than any other ethnography I have carried out, I could see myself mirrored by my research participants and increasingly could see myself living happily in Cuan. This obviously raises the question of whether I will be expressing the values and opinions of the people in Cuan or my own. My advice to the reader is that when the values and practices you encounter in this book are those you approve of, you should see them as emanating from Cuan, but when you cringe at what you regard as complacent naïvety, assume that is me.
Introduction to Ireland20
This book is certainly not intended only for people interested in or knowledgeable about Ireland. This presents a problem since it would be hard to fully appreciate the ethnographic chapters without some knowledge of Irish history. Fortunately, a truly excellent account of that history was published while I was writing this volume. Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is enormously helpful equally for the degree to which it is the background to this ethnography and the degree to which the ethnography turns out to be so different from what this history might have presaged.21 It is a wonderful read because of the author’s facility in interweaving his personal history, the political and economic history of Ireland, and the more general shifts in the lives of the Irish. It is particularly important that this is quite a personal history, because the Irish who appear in my book are of a similar age to O’Toole. The life that is recounted in his book is in large measure the life that my research participants have lived through, with some of them born in a similar part of Dublin to O’Toole. You will therefore certainly
have a better appreciation of what follows in this book if you have previously read his book.
The Republic of Ireland, with a population of almost 5 million, shares the island with Northern Ireland, a part of the UK with a population of around 1.8 million. Ireland declared independence from the UK in 1919, and this was acknowledged in 1921. The capital city of Dublin has a population of around 600,000, while that of Dublin county is around 1,300,000. Cuan is within one hour’s travel from Dublin. Ireland became a member of the European Union (EU; back then the European Economic Community or EEC) in 1973. The lifetime of most of the research participants has been an economic rollercoaster. Younger people find it hard to comprehend the social and economic transformation that Ireland has undergone within living memory. At the time of independence, 58 per cent of employed men worked in agriculture.22 O’Toole points out that no one really expected this to change. Ireland was destined to remain a low-income agricultural backwater to Europe. Many of my research participants were born in rural locations and tell vivid tales of poverty both on farms but also in Dublin during that period. They couldn’t possibly have imagined becoming the people we encounter today. O’Toole also stresses the ubiquity of emigration as a hallmark of twentieth-century Ireland, creating a diaspora that is widely dispersed around the world,23 to the extent that there was serious discussion about the possibility that the Irish of Ireland might more or less disappear. A striking feature of the time in which these people were born was that since 1922, the newly independent Ireland under the tutelage of Éamon de Valera systematically replaced the colonial authority with the authority of the Catholic Church. The Church ran almost the entire education system and had such a strong grip over government and the everyday life of the people that the country could be considered an effective theocracy. For example, a marriage bar introduced in the 1930s meant that until 1971 women in the civil service were legally obliged to give up work on getting married, in order to encourage them to concentrate on rearing children and caring for families.24
Many respondents commented on the deeply conservative beliefs held by their parents, and often initially by themselves. Not infrequently, differences of opinion about religion led to rifts within families that spanned decades and left lasting scars. Catholic bodies such as the Christian Brothers oversaw their education and their
general behaviour. The Pope’s visit of 1979 seemed to reflect this degree of devotion. The explanation for this theocracy lay in the primary aim of the Independence movement to assert a complete break from British colonial domination. The Catholic Church was being granted power that it seemed to have earned from its relative suppression over the previous centuries of colonial rule by the Protestant English. Similarly, a huge effort was made, and continues to be made, to spread usage of the Irish language, though in this area to little effect. I never heard a single sentence uttered in the Irish language as part of casual conversation in Cuan, though I would have done had I been on the west coast rather than the east. My impression was rather that in Cuan the Irish language has become a kind of performative sacred language that is the effective replacement for Latin within modern secular Ireland.
What is astonishing is how quickly a rural theocracy, without even the expectation of change, has become something else entirely. The sociologist Tom Inglis argues that, in one generation, Ireland has transformed from being an isolated Catholic agrarian society to being a liberal-individualist, secular, urban society revolving around business, commerce, and high-tech transnational corporations.25 By the early 2000s, Ireland was identified as having an open global economy. The Church didn’t so much decline as abruptly collapse in its claims to authority subsequent to a series of scandals from the 1980s onwards.26 This perhaps reached its apogee during my fieldwork in 2018, with the convincing vote to repeal the constitutional ban on abortion.27 The scale of such change is evident in that as late as 1993, homosexuality was illegal in Ireland, but just twentytwo years later, in 2015, it represented the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote and was hailed as being in the ‘vanguard’ of social progression by the New York Times. 28
The term ‘rollercoaster’ is appropriate since the experience of Ireland was not simply one of consistent economic uplift. It included the boom years of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ but also the mauling of that tiger by the severe economic crisis after 2008. This recession, sparked by the economic freefall of the banking system, led to a bailout by the International Monetary Fund and EU.29 The period was characterized by high levels of unemployment, mass emigration, a collapse in domestic construction, and austerity measures imposed by the European Central Bank.30 By 2017, when the fieldwork began, the recession had largely passed but had left many scars. Austerity had
led to increasing levels of inequality and the proportion of the Irish population at risk of relative (if not absolute) poverty had risen to 21 per cent. Yet property prices in 2016 soared to rates of increase that mirrored the earlier ‘Celtic Tiger’ period. Economic growth for 2017 was among the highest in the EU (at 7.3 per cent). Economic figures for Ireland can be misleading, however, due chiefly to the distortions represented by the activities of the IT sector, which was flourishing thanks to the country’s low taxation rate for such companies. Domestic activity was also up 4.9 per cent and there was strong employment growth. A long history of emigration had been halted by the attractions of Ireland as a site of immigration during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ period. With recession, this was again reversed, only for the tide to turn once more as Ireland recovered its economic prosperity, such that by 2013 there were renewed invitations for emigrants to return.31 My fieldwork coincided with a new confidence, although the shadow of the recession was still present in many people’s lives.32 I heard about people who had committed suicide during the recession out of despair regarding their future prospects. Yet in the post-recession era, Ireland became the fastest-growing economy in Europe, while still dealing with the legacy of recession. This was their rollercoaster. Another important factor was that I was conducting fieldwork in a place where people received a higher pension than the English with whom I had previously worked. Whatever the past, today they were reasonably comfortable.
The shift from theocracy to modern, largely secular Ireland was equally dramatic. The clerical scandals in the 1990s and 2000s, including the sexual abuse of children, the treatment of ‘fallen’ women in the Magdalene laundries, and the deaths amongst children left in care, have all undermined the credibility of the Church. A reversal of past attitudes to same-sex marriage, divorce, and cohabitation have led to newly established norms.33 What is distinctive about Ireland is not these liberal values, but the fact that they developed later and faster than in most other regions.34 Yet here change should not be exaggerated. While there has been a growth in secular values and some forms of liberal individualism,35 the two-parent nuclear family is still the most typical environment in which children grow up in Ireland.36 Divorce rates remain low (6 per cent) when compared to trends in other European countries. While most countries in Europe are concerned with a growing aged population and low birth rates, Ireland’s population is relatively young and fertility rates are
among the highest in Europe37 at around 1.9 children per woman.38 Intergenerational ties remain strong.39
The period of fieldwork was one that reinforced a positive sense of European identity set against a dramatic decline in the international reputation of the former colonial power of Britain. The decline in any respect for the British that resulted from the Brexit débâcle is discussed in chapter 1.40 But this also meant renewed anxiety about the future of the Northern Irish border, and the potential economic slump of a no-deal Brexit. Additionally, fundamental state services such as housing had been cut during austerity, while health and welfare provision are still quite fragile. The word ‘crisis’ was a common adjective to describe both health and housing. Housing represents a particularly potent cypher for the state–citizen contract in Ireland41 and economic boom and bust seems to be measured in the popular imagination in bricks and mortar. The fact that Ireland saw the highest percentage increase in property prices during 2017 of any developed country, at 12.3 per cent, seemed reminiscent of the pre-recession unsustainable property boom. Accounts vary in discussions of income inequality in contemporary Ireland and I am not expert enough to judge between them. Chapter 5 in this volume will, however, describe in detail how such inequalities present themselves within Cuan itself.
By contrast, Irish politics had become relatively stable, with nearly a century of fairly predictable alternations between two parties that had origins in the bitter civil war that followed independence: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Despite these roots in savage conflict, they are today generally regarded as two sides of a centrist coin. Cuan, being mainly middle class, would be strongly reflective of this largely liberal consensus. The main political shifts concerned an oscillation between Labour, the Green Party, or Sinn Féin as people searched for a credible opposition; the specific ideology of these three parties may have been less important than their potential for this role.
A further conspicuous factor is the sheer size of the Irish diaspora, which dwarfs the local population as a result of the more recent emigration to the UK in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, along with the better-known and earlier migration to the US.42 By contrast, migrants from outside Ireland were rare in Cuan owing to high property prices, though women from Eastern Europe were increasingly evident within the local labour force, particularly in catering and childcare. A nearby town to Cuan reveals a sharp contrast. Its older
proletarian history is now overshadowed by extensive immigration, with migrants from Africa and Asia representing around 15 per cent of the population.
Today, there is a generally positive sense of Irish identity at home and abroad. An increasingly strong European identity was boosted not just by the decline in respect for the English but also by the sense of European support of the Irish position during the Brexit negotiations. There is a keen interest in travel abroad, where the Irish generally find they are regarded as genial and egalitarian. At the same time, many people either retained or were developing interests in icons of specifically Irish culture. These included Gaelic sports, such as hurling, alongside a substantial revival of traditional music. People in Cuan took pride in the fact that Irish music and literature punch well above their weight, with figures ranging from the novelists Sebastian Barry and Sally Rooney to post-punk musicians Fontaines D.C., alongside a generally positive, albeit romantic and often crudely stereotypical, American-Irish identity that has been disseminated through film and television and is much discussed by Fintan O’Toole.
The importance of O’Toole’s book lies just as much in what it does not presage. My research participants are of a similar age and lived through everything he recounts. Both tell a story of how conservative, theocratic rural Ireland could finally become my ethnography of secular, urban, and urbane liberal cosmopolitans. On the other hand, O’Toole pays a good deal of attention to the rise of mass consumption and the interest in wealth, status, and materialism that grew alongside this history. It is not a book that would predict chapter 3 in this volume, which claims that by far the most important measure of status in contemporary Cuan is environmentalism and anti-consumption. O’Toole’s book has extraordinary stories of veniality, corruption, and scandal, yet this ethnography is of a population of such probity and citizenship that Cuan would have garnered the approval of Weber.
More complex is the relation between the ethnography and the fundamental theme of We Don’t Know Ourselves. O’Toole’s book tells of a people who above all kept things swept under the carpet; a refusal to acknowledge what was nevertheless at some level well known. He argues this through case after case from the heights of politics to what people didn’t acknowledge in the streets around them. On reading chapter 5 of this volume, which examines deep
inequalities within Cuan and the incidence of cocaine usage and other problems, there is some continuity with O’Toole’s thesis. But I have never been to a place that didn’t turn something of a blind eye, for example, to lower-income housing within its midst. Instead, I would argue that, taking a more general overview, the people of Cuan have shown, if anything, an admirable self-perspicacity and an openness about (most of) their vices and virtues. In conclusion, there will be shown to be some remarkable contrasts between the portrait painted in this volume of Cuan and that of O’Toole’s entirely excellent and plausible rendition of the recent Irish history which my research participants lived through.
There is, also, an important point where our accounts converge, appropriately since O’Toole’s final chapter is dated 2018, the same year that I spent in Cuan. At this point, O’Toole is remarking on how Ireland both repealed the ban on abortion and granted same-sex marriage.43 He draws attention to the number of over-sixty-fives who voted for the repeal. This tallies with a wider claim that the contemporary Irish possess a legacy based more on embracing constant change, rather than just referencing back to any fixed indigeneity or their own historical narrative. This in turn explains why our accounts are ultimately quite compatible. Because while the focus of O’Toole’s book is on the refusal to acknowledge what was happening, this took place within a narrative of quite remarkable change over his lifetime. If much of the ethnography that follows in this volume contrasts with the Ireland that he has portrayed, it merely confirms that there has been no let-up in the pace of change. It follows that this book’s claim to be contemporary will also soon be out of date.
Cuan
Cuan was, for some periods of its history, an important fishing port, but this peaked in the eighteenth century. Towards the late nineteenth century, the boats were used to trade cargo such as coal. The surrounding area is fertile, but was dominated by English landowners under a tenants-at-will ruling that meant that they could be evicted without notice, making life more precarious. Generally, the area was poor, as was most of Ireland, but perhaps a bit less food-poor and so less impacted by the Famine in comparison to the west of the country. The historical record emphasizes the heroism of those who
supported Republican calls, for example, in the 1916 uprising, with streets named after associated martyrs. Less discussed were the splits, even within families, represented by that period and the subsequent civil war, which may well have led to the emigration of those who ultimately supported the losing side. This was combined with the destructive impact of the First World War.
The population before the modern expansion was around 2,300. When most of the research participants were born, Cuan had become mainly familiar as a holiday destination, where local people often rented out their homes for the summer and lived in a smaller dwelling built within their own garden. During that period, Cuan was known for its holiday camps, and the associated ballrooms and music scene. This proved highly significant when the first private estates were built, since many of the people who chose to purchase these houses knew of Cuan because either they or their parents had taken holidays there. The holiday industry was well developed by the 1890s but collapsed quite quickly when people in Ireland started taking cheap vacations abroad in the 1970s, resulting in this current situation of Cuan being largely disregarded and having practically nowhere where people can stay.
There was never much by way of manufacturing industry in Cuan. Its class identity was mainly a result of geography. People saw themselves as higher class than the more proletarian town on one side and lower class than the more upmarket towns on the other side, which continue to draw holiday makers from Dublin. This geography has a considerable impact on how the people of Cuan understand themselves. The feeling that they are middle class is partly derived from being literally in the middle between the posh and the proletarian. With respect to internal class divisions within Cuan, there have been two major state housing projects, the first built conspicuously outside what would have been the town boundaries at that time. Private housing really took off in the 1970s, and during this period the population doubled. From that time on, there has been almost continuous building of new estates, as remains the case today. The result is a major expansion of the population, which currently numbers around 11,000. Much of the state housing has been sold off, with fewer than 200 such homes remaining. It is common for adult children in Cuan to leave in their twenties but return when they want to have families in their thirties. Many people from the new estates commute to Dublin to work or study. Around 700 individuals
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hard striving to live according to the light that is in them, but admiration for their outer graces and decencies—in brief, confidence that they will always act generously and understandingly in their intercourse with us. We must trust men before we may enjoy them. Manifestly, it is impossible to put any such trust in a Puritan. With the best intentions in the world he cannot rid himself of the delusion that his duty to save us from our sins—i. e., from the non-Puritanical acts that we delight in—is paramount to his duty to let us be happy in our own way. Thus he is unable to be tolerant, and with tolerance goes magnanimity A Puritan cannot be magnanimous He is constitutionally unable to grasp the notion that it is better to be decent than to be steadfast, or even than to be just. So with the democrat, who is simply a Puritan doubly damned. When the late Dr. Wilson, confronted by the case of poor old silly Debs, decided instantly that Debs must remain in jail, he acted as a true democrat and a perfect Puritan. The impulse to be magnanimous, to forgive and forget, to be kindly and generous toward a misguided and harmless old man, was overcome by the harsh Puritan compulsion to observe the letter of the law at all costs. Every Puritan is a lawyer, and so is every democrat.
4.
Corruption Under Democracy
This moral compulsion of the Puritan and democrat, of course, is mainly bogus. When one has written off cruelty, envy and cowardice, one has accounted for nine-tenths of it. Certainly I need not argue at this late date that the Ur-Puritan of New England was by no means the vestal that his heirs and assigns think of when they praise him. He was not only a very carnal fellow, and given to lamentable transactions with loose women and fiery jugs; he was also a virtuoso of sharp practices, and to this day his feats in that department survive in fable. Nor is there any perceptible improvement in his successors. When a gang of real estate agents (i. e. rent sweaters), bond salesman and automobile dealers gets together to sob for Service, it takes no Freudian to surmise that someone is about to be
swindled. The cult of Service, indeed, is half a sop to conscience, and half a bait to catch conies. Its cultivation in the United States runs parallel with the most gorgeous development of imposture as a fine art that Christendom has ever seen. I speak of a fine art in the literal sense; in the form of advertising it enlists such talents as, under less pious civilizations, would be devoted to the confection of cathedrals, and even, perhaps, masses. A sixth of the Americano’s income is rooked out of him by rogues who have at him officially, and in the name of the government; half the remainder goes to sharpers who prefer the greater risks and greater profits of private enterprise. All schemes to save him from such victimizations have failed in the past, and all of them, I believe, are bound to fail in the future; most of the more gaudy of them are simply devices to facilitate fresh victimizations. For democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths, and those that fetch him in his political capacity are more than matched by those that fetch him in his rôle of private citizen. His normal and natural situation, held through all the vicissitudes of his brief history, has been that of one who, at great cost and effort, has sneaked home a jug of contraband whiskey, sworn to have issued out of a padlocked distillery, and then finds, on uncorking it, that it is a compound of pepper, prune juice and wood alcohol. This, in a sentence, is the history of democracy. It is, in detail, the history of all such characteristically democratic masterpieces as Bryanism, Ku Kluxery, and the war to end war. They are full of virtuous pretences, and they are unmitigated swindles.
All observers of democracy, from Tocqueville to the Adams brothers and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, have marveled at its corruptions on the political side, and speculated heavily as to the causes thereof. The fact was noted in the earliest days of the democratic movement, and Friedrich von Gentz, who began life as an Anglomaniac, was using it as an argument against the parliamentary system so early as 1809. Gentz, who served Metternich as the current Washington correspondents serve whatever dullard happens to be President, contended that the introduction of democracy on the Continent would bring in a reign of bribery, and thus destroy the integrity and authority of the state. The proofs that he was right were already piling up, in his day, in the United States. They were destined to be greatly
reinforced when the Third Republic got under way in France in 1870, and to be given impressive support when the German Republic set up shop in 1918. In 1919, for the first time since the coronation of Henry the Fowler, a German Cabinet minister crossed the border between days, his loot under his arm. The historians, immersed in their closets, marvel that such things happen, and marvel even more that democracy takes them calmly, and even lightly. Somewhere in “The Education of Henry Adams” you will find an account of the gigantic peculations that went on during the second Grant administration, and melancholy reflections upon the populace’s philosophic acceptance of them as inevitable, and even natural. In our own time we have seen the English mob embrace and elevate to higher office the democratic statesmen caught in the Marconi scandal, and the American mob condone almost automatically the herculean raids upon the Treasury that marked the Wilson administration, and the less spectacular but even more deliberate thievings that went on under the martyred Harding. In the latter case it turned upon the small body of specialists in rectitude who ventured to protest, and in the end they found themselves far more unpopular than the thieves.
Such phenomena, as I say, puzzle the more academic pathologists of democracy, but as for me, I only say that they seem to be in strict accord with God’s invariable laws. Why should democracy rise against bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale bribery. In place of a government with a fixed purpose and a visible goal, it sets up a government that is a mere function of the mob’s vagaries, and that maintains itself by constantly bargaining with those vagaries. Its security depends wholly upon providing satisfactory bribes for the prehensile minorities that constitute the mob, or that have managed to deceive and inflame the mob. One day the labour leaders—a government within the general government—must be bought with offices; the next day the dupes of these labour leaders must be bought with legislation, usually of a sort loading the ordinary scales of justice in their favour; the day after there must be something for the manufacturers, for the Methodists, for the Catholics, for the farmers. I have exhibited, in another work, the fact that this last class demands bribes pure and simple—that its
yearnings for its own private advantage are never ameliorated by yearnings for the common good. The whole process of government under democracy, as everyone knows, is a process of similar trading. The very head of the state, having no title to his office save that which lies in the popular will, is forced to haggle and bargain like the lowliest office-seeker. There has been no President of the United States since Washington who did not go into office with a long list of promises in his pocket, and nine-tenths of them have always been promises of private reward from the public store. It is surely not regarded as immoral, by the democratic ethic, to make and execute such promises, though statesmen of lofty pretensions, e. g., Lincoln, sometimes deny having made them. What is reproached as immoral is making them, and then not keeping them. When the late Dr. Wilson made William Jennings Bryan his Secretary of State the act brought forth only tolerant smiles, though it was comparable to appointing a chiropractor Surgeon-General of the Army—a feat which Dr. Harding, a few years later, escaped performing only by a hair. But if Wilson had forgotten his obligation to Bryan there would have been an outburst of moral indignation, even among Bryan’s enemies, and the collapse of Wilson would have come long before it did. When he blew up at last it was not because, after promulgating his Fourteen Points, he joined in swindling a helpless foe at Versailles; it was because he tried, at Paris, to undo some of the consequences of that fraud by forcing the United States into the League of Nations. A democratic state, indeed, is so firmly grounded upon cheats and humbugs of all sorts that they inevitably colour its dealings with other nations, and so one always finds it regarded as a dubious friend and a tricky foe. That the United States, in its foreign relations, has descended to gross deceits and tergiversations since the earliest days of the Republic was long ago pointed out by Lecky; it is regarded universally to-day as a pious fraud—which is to say, as a Puritan. Nor has England, the next most eminent democratic state, got the name of perfide Albion for nothing. Ruled by shady men, a nation itself becomes shady.
In its domestic relations, of course, the same causes have the same effects. The government deals with the citizens from whom it has its mandate in a base and disingenuous manner, and fails
completely to maintain equal justice among them. It not only follows the majority in persecuting those who happen to be unpopular; it also institutes persecutions of its own, and frequently against men of the greatest rectitude and largest public usefulness. I marvel that no candidate for the doctorate has ever written a realistic history of the American Department of Justice, ironically so called. It has been engaged in sharp practices since the earliest days, and remains a fecund source of oppression and corruption to-day. It is hard to recall an administration in which it was not the centre of grave scandal. Within our own time it has actually resorted to perjury in its efforts to undo men guilty of flouting it, and at all times it has laboured valiantly to nullify the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The doings of its corps of spies and agents provocateurs are worthy the pen of some confectioner of dime novels; at one time they were employed against the members of the two houses of Congress, and the alarmed legislators threw them off only by threatening to hold up their pay. As Mill long ago pointed out, the tyranny of the majority under democracy is not only shown in oppressive laws, but also in a usurped power to suspend the operation of laws that are just. In this enterprise a democratic government always marches ahead of the majority. Even more than the most absolute oriental despotism, it becomes a government of men, not of laws. Its favourites are, to all intents and purposes, immune to criminal processes, whatever their offences, and its enemies are exposed to espionage and persecution of the most aggravated sort. It takes advantage of every passing craze and delusion of the mob to dispose of those who oppose it, and it maintains a complex and highly effective machine for launching such crazes and delusions when the supply of them lags. Above all, it always shows that characteristically Puritan habit of which Brooks Adams wrote in “The Emancipation of Massachusetts”: the habit, to wit, of inflicting as much mental suffering as possible upon its victims. That is to say, it not only has at them by legal means; it also defames them, and so seeks to ruin them doubly The constant and central aim of every democratic government is to silence criticism of itself. It begins to weaken, i. e., the jobs of its component rogues begin to be insecure, the instant such criticism rises. It is thus fidei defensor before it is anything else, and its whole
power, legal and extra-legal, is thrown against the sceptic who challenges its infallibility. Constitutional checks have little effect upon its operations, for the only machinery for putting them into effect is under its control. No ruler, indeed, ever wants to be a constitutional ruler, and least of all the ruler whose reign has a term, and who must make hay, in consequence, while the sun shines. Under republics, as under constitutional monarchies, the history of government is a history of successive usurpations. I avoid the banality of pointing to the cases of Lincoln and Wilson. No man would want to be President of the United States in strict accordance with the Constitution. There is no sense of power in merely executing laws; it comes from evading or augmenting them.
I incline to think that this view of government as a group of men struggling for power and profit, in the face and at the expense of the generality of men, has its place somewhere in the dark recesses of the popular mind, and that it accounts, at least in large part, for the toleration with which public corruption is regarded in democratic states. Democratic man, to begin with, is corrupt himself: he will take whatever he can safely get, law or no law. He assumes, naturally and accurately, that the knaves and mountebanks who govern him are of the same kidney—in his own phrase, that they are in public life for what there is in it. It thus does not shock him to find them running true to the ordinances of their nature. If, indeed, any individual among them shows an unusual rectitude, and refuses spectacularly to take what might be his for the grabbing, Homo boobiens sets him down as either a liar or an idiot, and refuses to admire him. So with private rogues who tap the communal till. Democratic man is stupid, but he is not so stupid that he does not see the government as a group of men devoted to his exploitation—that is, as a group external to his own group, and with antagonistic interests. He believes that its central aim is to squeeze as much out of him as he can be forced to yield, and so he sees no immorality in attempting a contrary squeeze when the opportunity offers. Beating the government thus becomes a transaction devoid of moral turpitude. If, when it is achieved on an heroic scale by scoundrels of high tone, a storm of public indignation follows, the springs of that indignation are to be found, not in virtue, but in envy. In point of fact, it seldom follows. As I have said, there
was little if any public fury over the colossal stealings that went on during the Wilson administration, and there was still less over the smaller but perhaps even more cynical stealings that glorified the short reign of Harding; in the latter case, in fact, most of the odium settled upon the specialists in righteousness who laid the thieves by the heels. The soldiers coming home from the War for Democracy did not demand that the war profiteers be jailed; they simply demanded that they themselves be paid enough to make up the difference between what they got for fighting for their country and what they might have stolen had they escaped the draft. Their chief indignation was lavished, not upon the airship contractors who made off with a billion, but upon their brothers who were paid $10 a day in the shipyards. The feats of the former were beyond their grasp, but those of the latter they could imagine—and envy.
This fellow feeling for thieves is probably what makes capitalism so secure in democratic societies. Under absolutism it is always in danger, and not infrequently, as history teaches, it is exploited and undone, but under democracy it is safe. Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations. Thus he tends to be friendly to it, and to view with suspicion those who propose to overthrow it. The new system, whatever its nature, would force him to invent a whole new outfit of dreams, and that is always a difficult and unpleasant business, to workers in the ditch as to philosophers in the learned grove. Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both. That is precisely what happened in the United States after the late war. The danger that confronted capitalism was then a double one. On the one side there was the tall talk that the returning conscripts, once they got out of uniform, would demand the punishment of the patriots who had looted the public treasury while they were away. On the other side there was an uneasy rumour that a war Katzenjammer was heavily upon them, and that they would demand a scientific inquiry into the true causes and aims of the war, and into the manner and purposes of their own uncomfortable exploitation. This double danger was
quickly met and turned off, and by the simple device of diverting the bile of the conscripts against those of their own class who had escaped servitude, to wit, the small group of draft-dodgers and conscientious objectors and the larger group of political radicals, who were represented to be slackers in theory if not in fact. Thus one group of victims was set upon the other, and the fact that both had a grievance against their joint exploiters was concealed and forgotten. Mob fears, easily aroused, aided in the achievement of the coup. Within a few weeks gallant bands of American Legionaries were hunting Reds down all the back-alleys of the land, and gaudily butchering them, when found, at odds of a hundred to one. I know of nothing more indicative of the strength of capitalism under democracy than this melodramatic and extremely amusing business. The scheme succeeded admirably, and it deserved to succeed, for it was managed with laudable virtuosity, and it was based upon a shrewd understanding of democratic psychology.
I believe that every other emergency that is likely to arise, at least in the United States, will be dealt with in the same adroit and effective manner. The same thing has been done in other democratic states: I point to the so-called general strike in England in 1926, which was wrecked by pitting half of the proletariat against the other half. The capitalistic system now enlists the best brains in all the democratic nations, including France and Germany, and I believe that, instead of losing such support hereafter, it will get more and more of it. As the old aristocracies decline, the plutocracy is bound to inherit their hegemony, and to have the support of the nether mob. An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it. Thus the imponderable but powerful force of public opinion directs the aspirations of all the more alert and ambitious young men toward business, and what is so assiduously practised tends to produce experts. E. W Howe, I incline to think, is quite right when he argues that the average American banker or business man, whatever his demerits otherwise, is at least more competent professionally than
the average American statesman, musician, painter, author, labour leader, scholar, theologian or politician. Think of the best American poet of our time, or the best soldier, or the best violoncellist, and then ask yourself if his rank among his fellows in the world is seriously to be compared with that of the late J. Pierpont Morgan among financial manipulators, or that of John D. Rockefeller among traders. The capitalists, in fact, run the country, as they run all democracies: they emerged in Germany, after the republic arose from the ruins of the late war, like Anadyomene from the sea. They organize and control the minorities that struggle eternally for power, and so get a gradually firmer grip upon the government. One by one they dispose of such demagogues as Bryan and Roosevelt, and put the helm of state into the hands of trusted and reliable men—McKinley, Harding, Coolidge. In England, Germany and France they patronize, in a somewhat wistful way, what remains of the old aristocracies. In the United States, through such agents as the late Gompers, they keep Demos penned in a gilt and glittering cage. Public opinion? Walter Lippmann, searching for it, could not find it. A century before him Fichte said “es gar nicht existirte.” Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob’s fears. It is piped to central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured, and put into cans.
CODA 1.
The Future of Democracy
Whether or not democracy is destined to survive in the world until the corruptible puts on incorruption and the immemorial Christian dead leap out of their graves, their faces shining and their yells resounding—this is something, I confess, that I don’t know, nor is it necessary, for the purposes of the present inquiry, that I venture upon the hazard of a guess. My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology That simple statement of fact, I daresay, will be accepted as a confession, condemning me out of hand as unfit for my task, and even throwing a certain doubt upon my bona fides. For it is one of the peculiar intellectual accompaniments of democracy that the concept of the insoluble becomes unfashionable—nay, almost infamous. To lack a remedy is to lack the very license to discuss disease. The causes of this are to be sought, without question, in the nature of democracy itself. It came into the world as a cure-all, and it remains primarily a cure-all to this day Any boil upon the body politic, however vast and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote; any flux of blood may be stopped by passing a law. The aim of government is to repeal the laws of nature, and re-enact them with moral amendments. War becomes simply a device to end war. The state, a mystical emanation from the mob, takes on a transcendental potency, and acquires the power to make over the father which begat it. Nothing remains inscrutable and beyond remedy, not even the way of a man with a maid. It was not so under the ancient and accursed systems of despotism, now happily purged out of the world. They, too, I grant you, had certain pretensions of an homeric gaudiness, but they at least refrained from attempts to abolish sin, poverty, stupidity,
cowardice, and other such immutable realities. Mediæval Christianity, which was a theological and philosophical apologia for those systems, actually erected belief in that immutability into a cardinal article of faith. The evils of the world were incurable: one put off the quest for a perfect moral order until one got to heaven, post mortem. There arose, in consequence, a scheme of checks and balances that was consummate and completely satisfactory, for it could not be put to a test, and the logical holes in it were chinked with miracles. But no more. To-day the Holy Saints are deposed. Now each and every human problem swings into the range of practical politics. The worst and oldest of them may be solved facilely by travelling bands of lady Ph.D.’s, each bearing the mandate of a Legislature of kept men, all unfaithful to their protectors.
Democracy becomes a substitute for the old religion, and the antithesis of it: the Ku Kluxers, though their reasoning may be faulty, are not far off the facts in their conclusion that Holy Church is its enemy. It shows all the magical potency of the great systems of faith. It has the power to enchant and disarm; it is not vulnerable to logical attack. I point for proof to the appalling gyrations and contortions of its chief exponents. Read, for example, the late James Bryce’s “Modern Democracies.” Observe how he amasses incontrovertible evidence that democracy doesn’t work—and then concludes with a stout declaration that it does. Or, if his two fat volumes are too much for you, turn to some school reader and give a judicious perusal to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, with its argument that the North fought the Civil War to save self-government to the world!—a thesis echoed in falsetto, and by feebler men, fifty years later. It is impossible, by any device known to philosophers, to meet doctrines of that sort; they obviously lie outside the range of logical ideas. There is, in the human mind, a natural taste for such hocus-pocus. It greatly simplifies the process of ratiocination, which is unbearably painful to the great majority of men. What dulls and baffles the teeth may be got down conveniently by an heroic gulp. No doubt there is an explanation here of the long-continued popularity of the dogma of the Trinity, which remains unstated in plain terms after two thousand years. And no doubt the dogma of Transubstantiation came under
fire in the Reformation because it had grown too simple and comprehensible—because even the Scholastic philosophy had been unable to convert its plain propositions into something that could be believed without being understood. Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. One cannot discuss it without colliding with preposterous postulates, all of them cherished like authentic hairs from the whiskers of Moses himself. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God—that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved. There are corollaries that are even more naïve. One, for example, is to the general effect that optimism is a virtue in itself—that there is a mysterious merit in being hopeful and of glad heart, even in the presence of adverse and immovable facts. This curious notion turns the glittering wheels of Rotary, and is the motive power of the political New Thoughters called Liberals. Certainly the attitude of the average American Liberal toward the so-called League of Nations offered superb clinical material to the student of democratic psychopathology. He began by arguing that the League would save the world. Confronted by proofs of its fraudulence, he switched to the doctrine that believing in it would save the world. So, later on, with the Washington Disarmament Conference. The man who hopes absurdly, it appears, is in some fantastic and gaseous manner a better citizen than the man who detects and exposes the truth. Bear this sweet democratic axiom clearly in mind. It is, fundamentally, what is the matter with the United States.
As I say, my present mandate does not oblige me to conjure up a system that will surpass and shame democracy as democracy surpasses and shames the polity of the Andaman Islanders or the Great Khan—a system full-blown and perfect, like Prohibition, and ready to be put into effect by the simple adoption of an amendment to the Constitution. Such a system, for all I know, may lie outside the farthest soarings of the human mind, though that mind can weigh the stars and know God. Until the end of the chapter the ants and bees may flutter their sardonic antennæ at us in that department, as they do in others: the last joke upon man may be that he never learned how to govern himself in a rational and competent manner, as the
last joke upon woman may be that she never had a baby without wishing that the Day of Judgment were a week past. I am not even undertaking to prove here that democracy is too full of evils to be further borne. On the contrary, I am convinced that it has some valuable merits, not often described, and I shall refer to a few of them presently. All I argue is that its manifest defects, if they are ever to be got rid of at all, must be got rid of by examining them realistically—that they will never cease to afflict all the more puissant and exemplary nations so long as discussing them is impeded by concepts borrowed from theology As for me, I have never encountered any actual evidence, convincing to an ordinary jury, that vox populi is actually vox Dei. The proofs, indeed, run the other way. The life of the inferior man is one long protest against the obstacles that God interposes to the attainment of his dreams, and democracy, if it is anything at all, is simply one way of getting ’round those obstacles. Thus it represents, not a jingling echo of what seems to be the divine will, but a raucous defiance of it. To that extent, perhaps, it is truly civilized, for civilization, as I have argued elsewhere, is best described as an effort to remedy the blunders and check the cruel humours of the Cosmic Kaiser. But what is defiant is surely not official, and what is not official is open to examination.
For all I know, democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be. There are obvious paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack. It offers John Doe a means to rise above his place beside Richard Roe, and then, by making Roe his equal, it takes away the chief usufructs of the rising. I here attempt no pretty logical gymnastics: the history of democratic states is a history of disingenuous efforts to get rid of the second half of that dilemma. There is not only the natural yearning of Doe to use and enjoy the superiority that he has won; there is also the natural tendency of Roe, as an inferior man, to acknowledge it. Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them. The baron has departed, but in his place stand the grand goblin, the supreme worthy archon, the sovereign grand commander Democratic man, as I have remarked, is quite unable to think of himself as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear and loneliness—and the group, of
course, must have its leaders. It would be hard to find a country in which such brummagem serene highnesses are revered with more passionate devotion than they get in the United States. The distinction that goes with mere office runs far ahead of the distinction that goes with actual achievement. A Harding is regarded as genuinely superior to a Halsted, no doubt because his doings are better understood. But there is a form of human striving that is understood by democratic man even better than Harding’s, and that is the striving for money. Thus the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different. It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage—above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob only yesterday—and from the mob they bring all its peculiar ignobilities. As practically encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the honnête homme as it stands from the Holy Saints. Its main character is its incurable timorousness; it is for ever grasping at the straws held out by demagogues. Half a dozen gabby Jewish youths, meeting in a back room to plan a revolution—in other words, half a dozen kittens preparing to upset the Matterhorn—are enough to scare it half to death. Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins, bugaboos. The honest, untroubled snores of a Percy or a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it.
The plutocracy, as I say, is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men: it is not by accident that Christianity, a mob religion, paves heaven with gold and precious stones, i. e., with money. There are, of course, reactions against this ignoble ideal among men of more civilized tastes, even in democratic states, and sometimes they arouse the mob to a transient distrust of certain of the plutocratic pretensions. But that distrust seldom arises above mere envy, and the polemic which engenders it is seldom sound in logic or impeccable in motive. What it lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the strictest
sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another—which is to say, men chiefly marked by their haunting fear of losing their jobs. Living under such terrors, with the plutocracy policing them harshly on one side and the mob congenitally suspicious of them on the other, it is no wonder that their revolt usually peters out in metaphysics, and that they tend to abandon it as their families grow up, and the costs of heresy become prohibitive. The pedagogue, in the long run, shows the virtues of the Congressman, the newspaper editorial writer or the butler, not those of the aristocrat. When, by any chance, he persists in contumacy beyond thirty, it is only too commonly a sign, not that he is heroic, but simply that he is pathological. So with most of his brethren of the Utopian Fife and Drum Corps, whether they issue out of his own seminary or out of the wilderness. They are fanatics; not statesmen. Thus politics, under democracy, resolves itself into impossible alternatives. Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other. One must either follow the New York Times, or one must be prepared to swallow Bryan and the Bolsheviki. It is a pity that this is so. For what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into a workable system. What it needs beyond everything is a party of liberty. It produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, just as despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them in the same drum-head way. It will never have a party of them until it invents and installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them.
Last Words
I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It
is based upon propositions that are palpably not true—and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter, which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters—which is what makes United States Senators, fortune-tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done—which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.
All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don’t last. The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God, is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naïve delusion—so beautifully Christian!—that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too, in the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise, even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against its fulfilment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula. Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the
spectator That spectator, it seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false pretences! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than any other—more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion. Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If you don’t come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulæ, and they leap into interstellar space with roars of joy.
I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very corner-stone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic
possibility is a commonplace of every day All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws—but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state—but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.
I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself—that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?
THE END
