John Waters on Ireland's transition from Catholicism to liberalism

so welcome everybody to the intellectual diversity podcast I'm John tang me and my guest today is John Walters who is an Irish journalist who has worked in Irish publications including the hot Press magazine the Sunday Tribune the Irish Times and has written nine books I think including driving at the crossroads beyond consolation and the most recent one is called bring give us back the bad roads and he's been a chronicler of Ireland's transition from predominantly Catholic country to a liberal one over the past 30 years and one of the reasons I was interested in having you on the podcast was because you've kind of been at odds with the the intellectual and cultural mainstream during the liberal era I feel and I've been interested in myself in intellectuals who operate as kind of outsiders and once upon a time you could count on all intellectuals to be Outsiders but Russell Jacobi wrote a book in in 1987 called the last intellectuals where he noted that in the neoliberal era it had become impossible for intellectuals to operate outside the university system and since the 1990s really intellectuals have become kind of domesticated and institutionalized within academia but you're somebody who's to whom that hasn't happened you've had an intellectual career outside of the Academy and you're interesting as somebody who actually I think didn't go to university is that correct not just the same thing applies I mean if you were to actually write down a list of the leading painters poets novelists short story writers in Ireland a and asked them they would all identify with the same set of issues now on for certain virtually if you got one who dissented shocking to me huh monolithic the whole thing and so I I kind of had been outside those loops all my life really I was outside the journalistic loop from the very start even with the press because I came from the country and I was actually writing from the West of Ireland for hot press which was very much a neoliberal I mean because it was about music predominantly that was somewhat concealed and it was possible to actually you know continue writing for quite a while on that basis without showing you you know the color up here this the tail of your shirt that is worried you know so I'd kind of did that but I kind of always been jockey in this side this thing I'm trying to stay as long as possible in the media while at the same time not abandoning my own kind of perception of things and of course though I failed I mean you call me a journalist I'm not sure I am anymore because I left the Irish turn about five years and I don't write for any Irish newspapers now I don't appear on radio or television in Ireland even though at one time I was never offered and I write for the American magazine first things and I've been working for them for the last couple of years and I wrote occasion for the spectator as well both their American version and the UK erection sometimes so that's kind of just keeping my hand in it you know and I've recently been doing quite a bit of stuff like you're doing you know the podcast thing and yeah and YouTube stuff and with various people not my own I don't do my own but I have various people that I do interviews with periodically and so but yeah you're dead right I mean the academia and yeah and the arts are now you know really monolithic in terms ideologically and a model it's an ideological monolith and and and that's really I think goes back to the 1960 that it was very attractive kind of cultural tropes that that he rolls in those those times you know the idea of being you know in favor in general of the greatest amount of freedom called it very simplistically and simply that became very attractive it was very attractive to me actually yeah yes it is you know I mean like this is not about I don't think conservatives in the in the normal sense at all it's not about progressivism and conservatism it's actually about what fits and what works both for the human person and for society and you know I recently started describing myself again somewhat mischievously as a progressive in the SI es lunes sense you know when you're on their own Pat everybody just wants to progress it's not an actor but when you're on the wrong part the natural the proper thing to do is go back yeah the point where you made the mistake and trace your steps are there and then go on again in a different direction that's the kind of progressive I am and I just think all the stuff that I think we're dealing with now is just completely bonkers yeah and will be deeply damaging not just to the human person within our civilization will actually will ultimately disintegrate artists civilization itself maybe and when I say ultimately that sounds like a long time I don't know if it's going to be that long to the other way things are going yeah I mean that's an important point you raised about progressivism and the way that it's that word has been co-opted by the left as if conservatives traditionally have not been into progress I mean I think the difference in a way between conservatives and liberals is that liberals want to break with the past and expunge the past whereas conservatives see themselves as making progress in continuity with the past and you know jaja Scruton so it describes conservatives as people who are interested in muddling through whereas liberals have a more and and left us to have a more kind of revolutionary energy but they don't have any very coherent programs for what they want to replace the things that they're tearing down with another way of putting that or a way of kind of giving some kind of broader dimensions to that will be to say that the kind of progress progressive that we have now is essentially like we all were when we were teenagers mm-hmm you want freedom you know the amount of freedom and there's a number going on behind that desire one is that you are rebelling against your parents you're rejecting things they because you have the luxury being young and being high degree dependent perhaps of simply rejecting their ideas and it is part of the parents responsibility in a sense to embrace that to you know freedom yeah not to let the child let the teenager rip for those few years until they find their own you know equilibrium culturally and personally and so on and I think that what actually happened is that you know basically we all become stunted in our culture if we you know Robert Bly talked about this and he's booked to sit in society about 25 years ago where he warned this imminent change in our culture whereby there would be no longer any adults variety of siblings no tearing each other apart well like that's exactly what we have now I mean I read that book in the early 90s and I thought oh this said this sounds like you know a dystopian fiction you know but it's actually now come true we are that society the siblings Society yeah and I remember reading in the past couple of years about leftist activists in Berlin and how many of them were like was something like 90% of them were people who were still living with their parents even you know those they were in their 20s and I donate where most people are leaving the nest and I think it does speak to the fact that there is an attitude on the left that people deserve to be given things without doing anything and there's there's one of the things that motivates a lot of the really resentful leftist activism is I know I kind of projection of some kind of deficiency that they feel about being among societies net takers and you know your analogy of the the adolescent who's rebelling against the parents and the parents giving them scope to do that for a little while but of course what's really happening there is that adolescents have freedom to do that because there is a little kind of a liberal society within which that's permitted that is held up by the economic words that they're the parents that they're rebelling against are actually doing and as you say this is something that's become generalized now even among people who are passing the age you know we can all be rebels mm-hmm there is a stable structure yeah which to bounce them our balls as it were you know that's the problem I mean you know I remember Dylan Thomas years ago I'd very sardonic evaluation of this whole thing in a different slightly different context but he said the only so I ironically had sardonically he said the only proper politics for a conscientious artists is left-wing under a right-wing government yeah I haven't heard that before and that's it you know these people are all right this is great so long you have some kind of you know tyrannical your imagination stroke which is imposing itself on you and that doesn't exist what you do is you summon it up in your imagination and that's why Trump has become so useful to these people now again because I mean you know you didn't come fantastic you know I read it I at the headline an article in The New Yorker this morning and it was by a woman writer who was saying how you know it's terrible that we can't wake up in the morning now with all the Trump and enjoy a sense of freedom or in fact you know the experi thing is that actually the opposite is true almost that the people who supported Trump have woken up like that for about four years the tyranny of this pseudo liberalism you know proposal itself on them and a little bit of taste of what that might have felt like yes and it's not nice today but there are so many things one could say about all this you know that that we're now they're in a very weird situation where in a sense the people who are ruling the country are known in the world are pretending not to be pretending to be the opposition because that's their natural we think it's like the hippie chain it's like the 60s in ethic of you know being in a rock and roll band breaking your guitar yeah you know that's what you need to do we through that kind of mentality it's not congenial if you actually have power and the problem is they actually have had power for a very long time quite pretending not to be in power at all and this has been deeply confusing for everybody not least that if you might say the spectators who are the voters are the consumers of the citizens of our countries who are not sure any longer what the hell is going on because everybody's talking in in in in fork with forked tongues and and it's very difficult the media course being entirely on one side of this argument is now in terms of its own project its own calling its own vocation is cropped I mean it he's completely corrupted so it is absolutely useless in terms of the purpose for which it was intended that's really a problem because it means none of us can actually have open conversations in the mainstream of our society any longer it's not possible and as a result of that what you actually see is a you know a starting and start - firing of their own ordinary everyday conversations and relationships between people in their communities in their villages and their cafes you know that people who once would have had open conversations loudly across the floor of a bar or a cafe and you know talking into their chests for fear that somebody may hear and that it went around that they have a view you know for example that you know this guy Trump might not be such a bad thing at all you know you have that but they're afraid of their lives to actually give any indication I keep finding this out actually where I'm in a situation like that maybe and I'm will woman was not long ago in in a kind of a service station in the country in down near Longford and and you know an old guy who works there was kind of bantering with another guy who was stacking some bread on a shelf and his name was actually the guy who'd stuck in the chef's name was John Lennon you know and the old guy said Oh John Waters and John Lennon in the same place would you would you have you know what that's and then he said oh really now it's Trump - okay then we've got a song we got really yeah I said the guy said the John Lennon character said well oh no no a trump terrible you know whatever I said well I don't know you know you know when you think about maybe he's not such a bad guy and eventually within me he started to turn a little became clear I feit that he actually liked Trump and thinking now this isn't this isn't so bad this happens all the time I mean it's quite extraordinary actually that's that's our this is something that because we don't have any common training lower my definition we're not aware of culture because if we if this would imagine that the media was engaged was not this is complicated but if we're not doing the job that they're doing and something else was doing it then it will be telling us this is what's going on this Wow look at what's happening in our society we can't talk to each other anymore contains which are verboten which are too blue and people are paralyzed for fear of actually crossing the lines and what because we'd the media are the people who are supposed to tell us these things and allow us to say them to each other nobody knows about them so nobody knows what happen is unaware that there's something happening to him herself or herself or what the nature of that is maybe they have some feeling about it but they're not giving it any conscious thought and people by surprise if you were to point out to them you know an alpha Nara is a you know you are actually seriously circumscribed no and once you can say to me even in the privacy of our table in the cafe you're actually censoring yourself all the time people are shocked when you say things like that's them but it's happening all the time yeah yeah no you're right those the kind of left/right politics today are dividing friends and families and and people are predicting an oncoming civil war in America over this stuff and you know it does remind one in a way of the post of post-civil war Ireland and the ways in which families were were were divided I mean do you think that's a fair analogy or it is are these two very different circumstances given that one was happening in a kind of predominantly rural theocratic society and the other place modern society I don't think it's actually extreme to suggest the possibility of civil war in different just America possibly in Britain as well won't come up it won't come about in my opinion because of precisely this just these tensions I think that's not the trigger the trigger will be the reaction to these events by that establishment that I talked about that denies it is the establishment because they're already seeing is that these people in the vast majority of cases have no attachment to democracy at all mm-hmm you know you can see that in the brakes it's a meeting they lose their the referendum and they want to just simply a rerun it yeah and you know lots of us have lost referendums and we have to just stop it up you know and but they want to rerun it and they're there hold me media machine for like a year and a half goes about this you know in intensively arguing for this and trying to bring this about and in America you have the same thing now with which Mueller and they attempt to basically take down the President and I think of course if that happens there could well be a civil war is there were deaths that so it's because that these people have no longer any recognition of democracy exactly gives the answer they want that which isn't of course democracy at all that that that would be the trigger I think that basically we will have arrived clearly at a post an incredible moment and you know we already are in danger in other respects the rule of law in a lot of cases I in our societies it's being suspended you can see this now Israel the me to movement you know that this is how in a profound effect on the the belief system which underpin our rule of law principles like you know presumption of innocence which were part of our civilization for centuries are know basically cast aside and then again that wouldn't contribute but is it so it's you know the rhetoric they see this is a very interesting thing that if you actually what you said about civil war you will pick that up in the mainstream media they mean the diametric opposite they mean this guy Trump will create a civil war yeah he's like a part no no no it's not Trump will create the civil war is you trying to destroy Trump and deny the validity of its election that is the problem and the same goes for exits so and and what we've seen now right across Europe a it's really amazing because you know again this is well I don't pay that close attention to the mainstream media anymore but it doesn't seem to me that there are fourteen what's actually going on in Europe at all because you know France is burning and you know if he is as fallen populism yeah Matteo Sardinia V is actually now basically you know almost you know universally acclaimed in his country initially having they spent I mean ten years basically on the floor economically psychologically culturally this one of the greatest countries the world has ever seen phenomenal a cultural powerhouse and they were reduced to which been a broken people I am by the European Union uh-huh they're rising again and Cellini is this is leading and now if this is you know contagion is carrying this to other places to Spain like which was you know ten years ago deeply left-wing and now you're Vox were now like escalating Lee you know increasing their their support like overnight by leaps and bounds and Sweden the same thing Sweden Democrats and then apart Eastern Europe is pretty much yeah rock-solid so in the end I keep telling me but the only place in Europe the will they will not know about this will be Ireland you know you know we will think you know terrible Briggs it's terrible you know all those populist all over the place and the whole world will have changed and nobody would have told us you know that's kind of the way things are going because I mean profoundly corrupt so when you say that the media is prob some people don't know what's going on anymore is that more extreme in Ireland or is that not the case everywhere I mean there is a like a constituency it seems to me in America in Britain and in other European countries as well as Ireland's that it was still kind of naively believes in the mainstream media but there's this off surge of alternative media sources that a lot of people are accessing through you know the things that are posted on their Facebook feeds and that are giving them alternative views of the world and you know the the mainstream media has lost a lot of its credibility everywhere and I mean you you're somebody who worked in the mainstream media for a number of years and you worked for a newspaper that used to be known as the Irish newspaper of record which suggests suggested that it was some kind of neutral Morgan that was representing you know the the the the spectrum of opinion within Ireland and clearly stopped being the case at some time in the past 20 years and you have a sense of when that stopped being the case that the Irish Times was something other than a a partisan liberal organ it's a very good question because I'd have to filter in there somewhere the possibility that I was actually missing tanks about the nature of the paper maybe it was never as solid as I thought it was you know there was a time like 20 odd years ago when like the other Chinese was regarded with huge reverence I found this broad it means another journalist like they knew about the Irish Times they read the Irish Times they thought it was one of the best newspapers in the world like that was really a kind of and Tang back then you know one when I came in I was kind of slightly left-leaning you know it was a song just you know in this coming up with that sixties thing I hadn't really taught me this stuff true and I didn't want to a number of experiences and where I began to think through what it talked about there were three fundamentally one was that J because I became an alcoholic Alcoholics Anonymous and there was you know forced to look at the question of what is called God saying yeah in my life and so on and then that opened my eyes to something about myself that I had completely not understood you know just walking around the place that actually to put it like this that you know this my structure as a human person was when you actually thought about it in terms that had been generated or was being generated by something else in the moment there was a created being but I was still being created but that actually tallied better with how I felt about myself all my life and seeing this experience of alcoholism it's highly much better than any other hypothesis that I'd ever come across and I started to explore and to ask myself well I've missed all this so what does that mean that was one of the key kind of awakenings from me the other one was when I went to Prague after the Velvet Revolution and started to report on that there and I met some people there it started to talk and of course I was bringing myself leftist ideas they're a stupid thing to do and I was having arguments with people there was one guy in particular you know who with he had got the job he had king of Elder wax from a shrine on the main on the Rodney Street for the revolution that started and he used to make these then bus kind of wax busts of the heads of Stalin and Lenin and Oswald who was the Czech equivalent of those guys and he made her a quite big heads no almost three life-sized only with wicks and everything to you could like you know on your dinner table he thought this was a very funny thing this the checks that were very weird that they absurdist I'm you know so he so and we were having all these arguments but when we were when I was going home and we still hadn't resolved the arc words because I was basically saying well you know socially time starting off well-intentioned and essentially it has that potential that was kind of my position and he said they were going to the airport he had a box on his knees in the taxi at the airport he handed me the box have opened the lids and there was all these heads and he says these candle heads and he said you must bring to Ireland the heads of the Socialists murderers and something about that statement just hit me in the solar plexus you know and I can't go this is this is no I hadn't got this at all I haven't I haven't known this map I haven't understood his experience that phrase now I I feel it I don't understand it completely but I feel it and that was another and then the third one was when I had a daughter I was were married in 1986 she's now 22 and I had written a play about fatherhood or blindly because I had intended direct experience of being a father I thought I had been picking up for men around the place that the problem is particularly when marriage broke up or when there was no marriage in the first place the father was treated as if he was extraneous to the whole process now he kind of go to court and Sue to be given one was called contact with his own child and and you know contact with your child access if you could access your child and these lawyers and judges poring over these statements and destroying whether the man who was the blood the flesh and blood of this child would actually yell at be allowed to see him or her and so when I did that happened to me and I you know I when I started to really feel at an experience that I thought well you know I come from left-liberal position there was progress which is extremely a question for terms of you know human rights and so on and I'd been a juror of in Dublin which was a national the listings magazine at the capital city that was very left-wing and very good writing in this matter and when I'd be national McGill which was again a very left-leaning current affairs Mike's not a left-wing spectator in Finland you know I think I've been the equivalent of quality in terms of the rating but somewhat less generally Dustin and I thought well you know I just go back to my my compadres my fellow activists and journalists and you know belong dealing with this problem of the denial of rights to fathers and their children and when I started to tell them they just wanted to shut me up you know they'd be this been 20 years so that's kind of lonely of coming to the point that I didn't started in the Irish Times to write about these issues and I found that the hostility in the Irish Times towards me was really like extraordinary and you know there were clearly adore attempts to actually have me removed serious people like I was actually threatened on the tree I used to have a thing like that I did actually whenever the editor would sidle up to me and you women start having a general conversation as the guard the police used to call it one time when they were interrogating a suspect he would also had a general conversation you know and then I'd mop you know and then and so he was sort of you know news about you know was I happy as a columnist or maybe sometimes you know pop columnist might get Stables I think an expression that would be used or you know sort of Musil I must talk to you I think you'd have a lot to turn to talk to me about the way our television coverage you know I made sure I would have understand immediately what this meant that he was going to transfer me as soon as possible to the people and I would follow my John Stuart Mill volume on liberty and about freedom and about feed not speak another essay on John Stuart Mill and that would you know and I would also in the course take the precaution of praising the Irish Times as wonderful tradition of upload values of free speech and that was I managed to survive for years actually by just doing the same thing over and over again and so but but but it was pretty I mean increasingly because of all these things I was becoming more and more isolated with the air but I mean I was totally isolated I had two or three people that I wouldn't call them friends in the area shine but there were kind of people that I would occasionally talk to they were bringing me up maybe they were just looking for gossip maybe happy to see if they maybe they were sent to car talk to me to find out if there was anything any way into getting shot whatever so at least yeah okay from about the mid 90s I became aware that this was not what it purported to be it was some indication to that before when I would say replace to write about the countryside about rural Ireland about and that was kind of frowned upon culturally not corporately in their science but culturally within it now it's been frowned upon corporately and culturally and so I just continue doing that and I wrote about men and far and mailed suicide and men's health and domestic violence and the lie about that and all the lies and feminists told about men and again and it was pretty rocky right you know and and then of course what happened was that I made ice Lord a lot of negative equity in terms of my the affection that would have been forming in the areas times and then when eventually the LGBT crowd came after me in 2014 not because I had actually done anything because as I keep saying well I was a draft dodger on the gay issue you know I can't lead ducking and diving because I didn't watch this to me was so sordid when but they came after me anyway because I had been clearly and that was an awesome and there's one or two other factors as well I had intervened in certain things which were not about homosexuality per se but they involved homosexuals same very weird things about pederasty and mountain there was a couple of cake peril that you know you could see these ambivalence in the artistic community too interesting you know one of their own was accused in one occasion in relation to in involvement with minors in the foreign country and you know if that was a priest we would all of course have been kicking the head off the priest and therefore no no they wanted to kind of say oh no it's not such a big deal so I intervene in those things and start to say well no if this was a priest you'd be saying this so why don't you say this now and how long this went on you know and and so I supposed to make a very long story short I kind of came to see that the first times had ceased to be in any sense a big hill of fruit you know a conduit of of a proper conversation about the society longer serve that as regards the alternative media I mean on that I've been a kind of a late convert another I don't know if I'm a convert because I have a deep suspicions and Here I am on the Internet but I had deep suspicions about the Internet you know and continue to have them not necessarily because of technology not because of any particular element within a because of certain factors I mean theythey and we can see now with the ascendancy of the corporations but this is a deeply sinister development not just on the internet but in reality in the world you know that these people have are essentially totalitarian Google and some of the Mark Zuckerberg since you know all these these entities are actually of the same mindset as the others and they want to use the power they have to ensure to bring about the final victory of these ideologies and that's clear and it is you know and I suppose on a more micro level I just think that you know they did the Twitter is abysmal you know a platform it's it's disgusting you know what it has actually shown us or done I'm not sure whether is that is that showing us something about our society or done something to our society or maybe a mix of the two but it's not a pretty sight I mean that you actually have anonymous people you have people basically changing their personalities when they go on there and become rancid you know people that you will ever not want to meet and and but that that said I mean I now recognize that actually the only hope of salvation ironically is going to come via the city internet and PFF things like yours I mean that they're they gradually an alternative is being built yeah you know and and of course I've always known I've always thought well like the technology is that the Internet itself is neutral yeah it's what we we've been doing with it it's how it developed we haven't let because we weren't uncritical about the way it developed in the early stages we just grabbed all these baubles and so you know the smart which is a beginning deeply sinister I'm asking the trolls when I'll actually having to contemplate whether like I should just abandon my smartphone completely because you know because the capacity to basically track you all the time maybe when you have your phone and I have now on airplane mode they can still track yeah probably seen can listen to what I'm saying and of course we're we're guarantee that we're promised are told that that this doesn't and you know this this doesn't go any farther that it's purely technological monetary but I mean how do we know and and how long can we be guaranteed that that will last I mean as soon as it falls into the hands of a more malign if it hasn't already know it already is in the hand of then we're all in big trouble and and it can be used for blackmail it can be used for surveying people in the most intimate realms of their lives I mean if you said to us if you said to me or any person any sentient person 25 years ago hey you know I'm going to make you a deal I'd give you an instrument that will allow you to communicate in all kinds of ways like this tomorrow yeah but the downside of is that you will lose all your privacy and all your your personal you know right to protect your own data and you just say are you crazy are you absolutely crazy but we juiced pilots you know and they as all of this feed all of these freedoms to do they they appeal to our passions or instincts you know your sense of misplaced sense of freedom and so we we grasp them with both hands and now we're in this situation where like it's quite shocking both what they can know about this yeah and our own kind of like lazy these things become normalized solely and we forget how radically they've changed us although I will say there's the great utility of things like Facebook for me as somebody who works in predominantly liberal and left worlds like the Academy and for people I would think who work in journalism is that it puts you in touch with allies that you would never meet in the ordinary course of events if you were just confined here your your community in your geolocation I say that's probably true I've never done it because I almost kind of puritanical objection to it yeah and to mock superbugs face yeah so I I just couldn't bear to be involved in it I answered a Twitter challenge was on radio one time and this is quite a long time ago Twitter was relatively new at the time but he was on Twitter and I said well I'm not on Twitter he said they'd change the truth on Twitter yeah I said well yeah there are lots of shameful things in the world but that's not one of them yeah I mean like that's the kind of idea logic and cover fire that who's given to all this yeah blindly by people in positions of power of influence like the media or in the arts where people talked up these technologies without actually pointing out the downside I mean all of the there are several layers now of danger and the ones we've talked about the risk to young people the abuse they're getting suicides all of that but also the effect of the screen time on the human intelligence yes this is shocking I mean when you look into this it's absolutely we actually could be on the downslide of our civilization as a result of this yes I've even noticed in myself and sort of a loss in my ability to concentrate for long periods on books and the way that I once could my my connection to the internet you can retrain yourself okay I'm not saying give up everything I was thinking to get the knock here to 100 just really kind of you know total light you know but you don't necessarily have to do that well what I do say to people is you know pick up a book or a magazine or a pin no no don't read newspaper but a you know a good magazine yeah Spectator is pretty good at you you know and really for such a meet for a few nights or whatever and you'll finally get easier it gets easier and then you wait since that you're actually you remember what it was like to read I mean it is a reading as a contemplative activity it does kind of Center you and ground you in a way that's continually clicking on things that give you some kind of addictive rush on the internet doesn't prospect on my phone mmm about a guy who had been a judge in a fiction competition and he was talking about you know how is it possible for a judge to objectively assess it was very interesting you know but again if I was reading that in the magazine I would be quite relaxed mmm make a cup of tea I would sit back and I would leave it down look out the window I would think about each passage our turn and I would take pause when I'm on my phone and in an edgy state trying to what is the essence of this article you know what what what is he telling me what what is this single what are the three things I want to know of desire to get so I can smile put them somewhere of course what actually happened to the Internet you tend not to put them anywhere because one of the things before the shadows came out a few years ago Nicholas Carr was scare exactly and he was he said was that the core problem with the with video screens is that we don't transfer things to our long-term memories the way that we do with free info from a book or a magazine and of course you don't remember the thing you think you'll remember what's in this article I'm reading it but I won't remember tomorrow yeah and so whereas my the magazine and I know I can fold is there something about paper that is quite revolutionary in a way that you know no technology it's like I upset his numerous finest people and if we actually had experienced all of this the other way around yeah we lived all our lives with screens and buttons and all that knobs and acquired all our information in that way and then somebody invented the newspaper and we would think it was the most amazing thing we'd ever seen and we you know that you can actually fold it up and put it in your pocket and put it on if you're defrosting the fridge you can it's very use I call newspaper class I call the newspapers you can you can actually leave the newspaper down on the floor if your default in your fridge and you're taking out the ashes from your fire you can wick the paper and you know wrap it the action that I think they're extraordinary useful things newspapers the table nowadays there's nothing in them to read now so I mean this business of clicking on links I mean it's the latest form of consumer activity and it brings me back to what you were saying about the revolutionaries of the late 60s and the kind of sense of freedom they had that was combined with a diminished sense of what it means to be human and the Jew somehow woke up to this in the 90s when you went to AAA and you you embarked on some kind of spiritual program it's something I'm familiar with because I did the same thing myself and we were talking in that context about when it was that the Irish Times kind of stopped being representative of the broad spectrum of opinion in Ireland and became a partisan organ and I wanted to talk to you about one of the really important episodes in the cultural history of the last 20 or 30 years in Ireland that you wrote a book in response to and I think it was your Irish times colleague new loaf Islands death and she gave this really amazingly honest interview to Marian Finnegan just before she died and you know she was somebody who kind of came out of that eye that late sixties generation of intellectuals maybe she was a little bit younger than that but she was somebody who was kind of you know formed by the same group of I would say secular thinkers that most leftist academics in the 70s and 80s were formed by and you know it was extraordinary that the kind of philosophy that that they taught her didn't seem to prepare her for death in the way that philosophy is supposed to if you if you understand philosophy the way that say Socrates did I mean classically philosophy was something that was supposed to teach you how to die and somehow the the intellectual equipment that these leftist intellectuals had did not teach them that and and so her her her despair before her death was really striking and you know whether or not you believe in God know that it was clear that you know the intellectual resources that she had were just less effective in preparing her for that moment then say somebody like John Moriarty who died around the same time and faced his death with relative equanimity as somebody who had a lot of faith well I mean I think that's all pretty much correct as a way of describing it John we did say there was also a possibility that part of what at least the particle was going on there which is a part of what's going on with all other is that she was torn between what she felt permitted to say her identity as this person this mattock of this ideology hmm and what she would have loved to say hmm if only supposed to hear herself say it you know in that moment that that you know she couldn't recount she longed with all her heart to find the words to say something that would have given her comfort in that moment hmm and and that's kind of what fascinated me that if you looked at the rule answering the line she was almost like hinting at things that she would have because she was that kind of person actually you know that she was somebody who was very ideological in one sense but then every so often she would break out and become this kind of extraordinary normal person this normal modern of Ireland like your mother or your act and I mean I knew a relatively well and since that I we were colleagues from constantly for a long time talked hmm either on the phone or in person we would meet him the the newsroom and literally stand there for three hours yeah in the corridor around the stairs talking you know those weird thing and so I kind of but he had a way of kind of backing off tanks yeah and and if they got too close to that that carnal nerve which kind of alerted her to the problem that there might be if she was to kind of suddenly cross over that line a lot of people are like that I know a lot of artists and writers by definition they would be like that actually you know you know because because they deal with the stuff they have to deal what you have to face really real stuff you know like journalism it's not like you know accountancy it's not like architecture if you're a writer you have to go in there to the possibility of something if you do you believe and that's exactly right but nevertheless these are words to describe something that needs to be plumbed a matter of what where you do it you add not if you don't you're in big trouble yes and I don't you permit you to plumbers yeah that's kind of what she was dealing with more than anything else I think that she was this person who who would have loved to have the freedom to be an unencumbered Irish woman unencumbered by mean by ideology by history by my culture of the kind by our university training by her position by her feminist this huge neon Sun in over her head that says feminist he would not be able to say you know as I've seen lots of those writers do you know they just love to be able to go back and say you know speak as if they were nuns or speak as if they were parish priests you know without any angle to that and I I find that fascinating you know she was very like that anyway and then in lots of ways you know I remember actually when I started to write about the famine back in the mid-90s and I was talking to lots of people who had gone into this and a couple of people were talking to me about the way that the body remembers I found this fascinating you know that not known that is it possible for my body to remember but daddy my body can inherit memories yeah from my parents and whoever inherited so there that I hope you looked the possibility then for myself that it was possible that we had at some level in our in our beings a a memory um and I was writing about this and she came up with Indonesian she's absolute nonsense like she just was convicting her and I she could be like as nobody could be like her and then about a year but twelve year thirteen years later she actually a very friendly with a guy who was involved in they a spokes a famine Museum you know and she's gonna you know yeah you're writing the exact same stuff was I've been writing ten years before you know so she was like which is not a criticism of her at all it shows that she was actually open she could and that was a great gift as a writer that she could change and grow you know Corrections and and cuz that's see the way when you actually if you have a relationship or later I mean a readers I really in relation to put a writer what you want above them above all is truthfulness when there are shocked or changed by something that they tell you about it that's that's it you know there's no there's no value in being a writer there's no point in being a writer if you're not like that you know if you're just going to have the same view that you started that you left college with and just regurgitate last night one day I mean games but you know you just go on for forty years saying the same things well I mean what's the virtue in that for the reader except we affirm that's a different function that's not writing reading that's I don't know what that is so you know and you know it's it's it's it's just affirmation of your own prejudices as much as anything your perceptions at least anyway so yeah that that is you see that's the core of the time then that that happened in the in the sixties that a we were in a sense invited to vacate our own nature you know and in return we were given this thing called freedom ultimatum use diminished former freedom that really amounted to consumer choices rather than I don't know so the the freedom to choose the good over the consumer goods and also the full kind of you know exhaustion of our of our appetites mm-hmm you know a physically sexually all those that was defined as freedom and this is the paradox of one of them for many paradoxes of being human is that all of those promises that are inherent in those instincts are never perfectly realized yeah and the more that you chase them the dimmer they get yes yeah so that what what one learns as one grows older and as a human being is that actually the the equilibrium of the person is achieved by simply moving through those desires yeah I'm not seeking you I mean I think of Arthur Miller they playwright he had a placard that card in front of him as he wrote all the time and it will word on it and the word was for gold so then it was two for gold the temptation to realize to resolve the plaster to close down the narrative to finish the play right so the trick of the playwright was to continue the suspense as long as possible once it became exhausting for everybody and they said could all of us have that card in front of us as human beings or go because in foregoing the the desire to to to to satisfy ourselves to appease their selves to gratify ourselves that is where being that the life of the human is it is moving there's next possibility moving true love you know and understanding that there's something else and if that doesn't want to meet we become a religious idea because where are you going what you're moving towards the horizon that is the dynamic I'm not saying that that's a rule I'm not saying that that's the law of the church or I'm saying that's the nature of man and woman and so when you actually pursue that line you towards the horizon if you feel peaceful mm-hmm you know your life is suddenly meaningful I don't know why but it is you think oh this is I feel okay you know that's why when we're out walking you know I think we feel good even if we have a lot of stress in our lives and you go for a walk at a certain point you walk you kind of turkey-lurkey shake off a lot of distressed it's a good feeling and you feel oh it's okay I have perspective I have balance I have you know understanding of things at a deeper level so I think that that that's kind of the trick that sixties played on us that it took away that car that we would have had in front of us would that work for Gowanus and so ii mean roofers a you know what is that thing that Aleister Crowley like which is you know do what thou wilt shall be the whole below yeah and and that has been a great disaster for the human species in the last the second half of the second mid 20th century and into the 21st just God it has just gone you know absolutely viral like that so yeah I mean III I think I agree with nearly everything you just said there and yet one of the things that I find interesting about your particular response to these circumstances is that you have as far as I know kind of gone back to the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church kind of you know every when I was growing up in the 80s and the seventies everybody went to Mass every Sunday and it was a significant act of rebellion not to go to Mass and then that the whole thing fell apart extraordinarily quickly and there were all these revelations about things that had gone on in in Catholic run institutions around the country and there's know a huge amount of anger still against the Catholic Church in Ireland and it really seems to be just very diminished and and almost without hope for the future and I wonder why you that you wanted to go back into Catholicism as a response to the shallowness of liberal culture rather than looking for some you know it's not entirely different food but I've gone back yeah since that sometimes I'm more aware of the deficiencies of for example Irish autism I did any of the critics people on the other side you know I think Holly pretty much you know really it's really shockingly bad and so it's not that I mean and you know I very often don't have any inclination to go to Mass at all because I know wake me there I will come out feeling reduced as important or exalted and lifted and but there's something about cathartic Catholicism the attraction for me if the Catholicism is as were displayed they a storehouse of the ages more than anything else I mean you know there's no bank no library in the world that you could say is equally you know has has retained the sense of what the history of the human person has been metaphysically physically psychologically spiritually all those categories which are kind of now kind of being pushed to the margins of our culture and I find that profoundly interesting and I find people and in like you know like Ratzinger okay for example just to give one example with incredible people I mean intellectually I think he you know he was amazing and he's amazing I think it was a mistake for him to become Pope because then he decided over this deeply a rickety and corrupt organization and that's a real problem for him I was you know I mean he's continued to write and so on if he had remained the theologian I think it would have been probably better and that kind of define that talk defines my own sense of what this is about I suppose I mean I came to back to this sure that colleagues anonymous and to the idea of God as I understand and there is a kind of a principle in in Alcoholics Anonymous which I fought for a long time which is that you will eventually more than likely return to the the faith of your youth yeah and I can I can understand now why that they would say that because that's where you've learned that's where you have bought your furniture as it were or your spiritual be and and you know it's still there you know it's it's a bit dusty and it's a bit of a lick of paint or whatever but that's kind of when you start becoming interested it again and resuscitating this dimension of yourself it's natural that you would go back to that place and I did that and sometimes it was good and sometimes it was very bad at the moment was pretty dismal and and you know I know people who have left the church I mean I'm speaking recently toward rewrote the Benedict option and there are couple years ago and he's become a Russian Orthodox or something you know yeah I find that in a strange way tempting but also weird you know I and because I'm not Russian know not for your Orthodox and but at the same time I kind of know why you would want to make a gesture like that sometimes when I hear your gibberish coming up with the mouths of Bush bishops and priests and but so I don't have an easy there's another level to this thing you see people say to me well you know you know I can I don't need a church for my spiritual welfare for my spiritual I can look into myself I can become a Buddhist and whatever and that's not very true and I'm very interested in that as well I mean that you know I'm interested in say someone like Michael Harding's journey like yeah and I like Michael and you know he's an interesting guy I mean we don't agree about everything but that's what everybody says to me you know I don't agree whatever did you say yeah you know there's that would be expected that you would agree at everything is and you know I there is another dimension which is we have to take responsibility for the cultural transmission of the ideas that have allowed us to breathe mm-hmm and if you don't take an interest in how that is done then you you know I think that's a you know it's a bit like paying your taxes or something you know okay if I opt out and just become a Buddhist I can do that and have a spiritual life but what what am i giving back to replicate what I was able to save my life yeah you know what am i giving to that yeah that's the question and so that's the straw I think that you know there's a different question then I mean that it's it's not just that I am a Christian interested in my own salvation I'm interested in the survival of Christendom hmm not because it is an institution worth saving not because you know it was it is you know by definition the one true church maybe I don't know if that's necessarily I've had fun way of looking at things anyway but it's because a Christendom is basis is the bedrock of our civilization of our what has allowed us to function at all I know from savages again and and you know these are big things you know and and so it's at that level but it is I agree it's it's deeply unsatisfactory I mean but probably not in my mind for the same reasons and other people might regard to some satisfactory I mean you know and I would put if I were start describing the chaos of the church my party described it quite differently to most of the people who read the Irish Times for example I guarantee you I would because they would have a different impression entirely of what's happened yeah I happen to know what happens and they will read it in the air in stones and so you know I'm very aware of how bad things are and I do think that the church could disintegrate completely hmm and culturally what I think it will always have the possibility of recovery in some way but it could be very small and it was what but I suppose against that it's the question of human beings and Twitter disses you know I eat either true or it's not and I don't mean that what it's called is exists or not that's a different question what the human being is either something like we've been talking about or he or she is not yeah and if not then well then evolution will take care of everything and we'll either from the stage or will changes so that we can continue survived in to exist but if we are like this then we can't just jettison these cultural instruments that have enabled us to survive as we are to build a civilization that we have built and I think that's in serious doubt now for all kinds of reasons I mean Europe is the heart of the Christian civilization and here this danger of absolute extinction yeah okay so um we've talked about a lot of different things here perhaps I could ask you as a closing question what you plan to write her do in the next few years well all of my life I've wanted to be a fiction writer hmm cuz I'm fascinated by fiction and I'm fascinated by you know when a great writer writes a book that lives in history because it's hatched managed to capture the essence of a time in a place you know the Russians did that and Joyce did that and Beckett did that Kafka these are you know I so but all my working life I keep getting waylaid from concentrating on that I mean back in the early 90s I wanted to give up germs and then started and I started writing plays and I had a complaint but I was moderately successful at that and then life to war excited to you know what my daughter came along when I started write more about that and well I was drawn into journalism per se and now I I hesitate to say that that I won't be really it again because there are so many things that could be made a danger but I would like to go back to writing to try and to write fiction and maybe maybe a novel today I have draft I have tried it and something there's there's something there a draft of some kind there but I'm particularly at the moment interests in short stories and and in the idea that actually short stories in this era of the short attention span it's probably a medium that is probably coming back into its own and that there are ways of dealing with the short story that are you know I this struck me reading a book by M name of it was it become the George Saunders called the 10th of December and what struck me about that book was it's a book of short stories isn't there about 12 stories and when you read their old stories are like different stories obviously different characters different places different times but there's a kind of a music of continuity that you feel in the stories and then since all I think when you've read the book it's actually like the region sequence this is my experience of it it is like you've read a novel oceany you're ready long novel much you've read short stories I'm interested in that idea because I think it may have actually something to do with this moment to Iraq you know that that we talked about area you're going back to that question of the attention span on the internet and Nicholas Carr and the shallows and all of them and I I'm interested in that I would look there at the time to just go and be that kind of writer for a couple of years and see what would happen but every time I tried to do it somebody my phone rings and I'm suddenly find myself in Samoa I met you know so and I mean then there are times when I am so in despair about the state in my country that it's very tempting you just chuck it all in and go somewhere and just forget about it say because nothing I can do you know and like my current book is in a certain sense a little bit like that what I just described but it's a nonfiction book obviously it's a story my recent travails what it's told in a particular way in a context in the context of Ireland as I remembered as I grew up in it and as I as I came to to reason and to understand all of these things so it's an attempt I and so this book I mentioned there it gave us back the bad note is called which is like an invocation of an Ireland that is now disparage and almost gone you know when we were growing up you like all the rules from you said it was likely the bad roads you know where you had rules down there you know and but there was a great joy in being in those places for there was bad roads yeah and I mean I have that fee now if I go back to on the west are you know there's a back road I can go you know yeah motorways there's no jr. it's Mullingar true to lock 2 lanes were true belly man and it's a very narrow road I'm like well down there it's like its pristine and I could feel I am back in 1978 or in 1982 and I'm like to Dublin to go and see Roxy Music in the RDS and so so in a sense this is my questions like do I have to do I you know do I have to become a fiction writer to achieve something that I think see I'm kind of haunted by that idea I think that I'm not really I have not really been a proper writer but I've been distracted into into a form that is you know of itself incapable of longevity yeah you know that it will not be around the people in the future will not be able to gain from work any sense particularly of the time because I'm using references that are to particular unit time and the place hmm that's the nature of what you know nonfiction that's what happens I'm interested another year I'm not sure that it's necessarily the case I mean I think sooner two of my books with will arrive in that sense I think driving at the crossroads even though I regarded as a flawed ways people an awful people right there's not one two people bother them and that's it that was my first book and you know it really shocked me that became a book at all or you know that the people actually liked but people still talk to me and I can't I have to honor that you know I mean I've written lots of books and dream that nobody knows I read you know and but this one I think it's a little bit like it's the most like the giant across from that I've done since and but of course is teams and it's it's it's characters are very different to the most you know by definition so but I so I'm not sure I I also worry that I'm 63 now and I worry you know I mean that you know how long do I have left I don't mean how long I live but how long will my mind remain capable of daily work at all I mean things happen to your mind as you go and you can see this with writers you know yeah some of the greatest writers that I've read I mean I've seen them when they hit 70 run they started disintegrate you know and that's a straight septum to see people just to be even sadder just to be at the center of it you know but III think it's now or never if I want to do this thing with fiction I think I should yeah to be out pretty soon and I do intend to start so this year is my best my resolve to try and find the time to do that again I like it was basis okay alright well I look forward to seeing the results of that and thank you very much for for taking part in this writer thank you very much i stalky nice

Channel: The Intellectual Diversity Podcast

Views: 6,588

Rating: 4.878788 out of 5

Keywords: Ireland, Catholic, Liberal, Media, Politics, Irish Times, John Waters

Id: gngB3zZnxFI

Length: 71min 2sec (4262 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 18 2019