Hot Press 40th Anniversary: Michael D. Higgins Writes Once Again

Hot Press is a very important publication – and certainly it’s been a very important part of my life. I began writing my fortnightly column in 1982, and I did it for more than ten years. I actually miss doing it and so, although I’m extremely busy nowadays, I’m very grateful for this opportunity to contribute a special column to the 40th anniversary issue.

Niall Stokes, as Editor of Hot Press, was very accommodating to me. I was always told that, “as long as it’s between 800 and 2500 words, it’s grand! But do let us know if it’s going to be over 2000!”

To have that freedom was a great privilege, and allowed me to use my column as a moral, intellectual and personal diary of the ‘80s. A feature of my writing back then was that Niall Stokes allowed me to write about issues that were not only current, but complex as well. It was a time, remember, when you were coming out of the last vestiges of Keynesianism – the acceptance of the idea that the State should play an active role in shaping society – and we were moving into an era of rampant individualism.

I was acutely aware of the impact of Ronald Reagan through his foreign policy in Central America, and I often wrote directly from Central America about that. Equally, I was able to write in a direct way about the famines in Somalia and Ethiopia, and human rights issues. In the pre-digital era, conveying the material for the column to Hot Press from far-flung places was not without its difficulties. One had to be creative.

So, what are the issues now? I thought very carefully when I got Niall’s invitation to write a special column for the 40th anniversary and decided that I wanted to discuss what is a very big issue for people of all ages in 2017: how are we to come to understand, discuss and create options that will allow us to participate in facing the new challenges of our time, as well as the unresolved issues that have been given to us as legacy? I also wanted to highlight the importance of taking the opportunity, feeling a sense of urgency and getting the space for a discourse that would be adequate to the challenges we are now facing such as climate change, exclusion, conflict, sustainable development and global poverty.

I think that, in recent times, we collapsed into a form of post-modernism, which left us unable to properly understand the main features of what was influencing our lives. As a result, we have become the consumers of a massively extended set of monopoly tendencies in the communications sphere itself – particularly in the suggestion that all we’re left with, or going to be left with, is social media. Is that really what we want in the future?

Social media can be benign or malign, depending on how it is used. That is a huge debate. The dissemination of information can be a most valuable contribution to solving our global problems. It has created an information base, where you can find anything, which is marvellous. But also, it can be destructive personally; and it can be destructive socially. Most worryingly, in relation to this, it is operating outside of any frame of responsible citizenship. In other words, its peak impact comes at a time of a highly individualised culture.

There are exciting things about this to an extent, especially if you’re at the high end of rock ‘n’ roll, and you’re releasing enormous energy from a stage, and fans are reacting not just in the arena but also via social media. Messages of all kinds can be disseminated with remarkable speed. But in relation to the general population, and how it impacts on them, there are serious problems with schoolyard bullying, the number of suicides, the destruction of self-worth, the erosion of self-esteem, and so forth. In seeking to understand how to harness the opportunities and avoid some destructive consequences I have come to the conclusion that a very high price has been paid for anti-intellectualism.

If I were writing regularly for Hot Press today, I would definitely be commenting about population growth and the extraordinary challenges it creates. People don’t realise that 50% of the population increase on the planet is going to take place in just eight countries, and six of them are in sub-Saharan Africa – countries with weak capacity for such population expansion. 40% of the young people on the planet are going to be in Africa by 2050, and 24% of the population globally. How are they going to live? That gives a very immediate urgency to what was agreed at UN Headquarters in New York recently, about sustainable development. Will technology and science be allowed to reach over borders, or will people who live there have to wait until some corporate executive says that there’s money to be made in Africa?

As an alternative, should we create the platform for the relevant science and technology – solar energy and wind energy, and new forms of ICT, biotechnology, and so on – to start afresh in the places most at risk, with five or six scholars showing people how to do things with technology that is appropriate to the circumstances, and that works? That would give meaning to sustainable development.

You also would have to empower them to say that you cannot allow the exercise of unrestrained power by those who already hold a great deal of power. Can we rely on the market to address issues on this scale? I think that would be a great mistake. This is part of the discourse we need. More practically, and by way of example, in a Hot Press column now, I would be writing about the impact of foreign fishing fleets on the coastal communities of places like Senegal. Years ago, people came down from the hills there to say “the shoals are in!” – and people put out in their small crafts from the shore and fished. Now there are no shoals, because the number of Chinese vessels on the high seas has gone from a couple of hundred to about four or five thousand, and these huge ships are sucking up all the species from the ocean.

So I would be writing about Africa. I would also be highlighting the crucial issue of climate change. Our situation is too urgent to be repeating our arguments against climate change deniers. We must all move on.

The truth is that climate change has already happened. It is ongoing. And it is deeply affecting the lives of people in the places that are producing the least carbon – which, of course, is desperately unbalanced and unfair. We can see it in the desertification of Africa. In the reports of a new famine in Somalia. In what is happening in Mali. In what is happening in Southern Sudan – and elsewhere on the continent of Africa.

The potential ramifications of this are enormous. This is something that we all must become aware of, especially young Irish people. We cannot afford to be immersed in our own little bubble, either as individuals or as a nation. There will be 1.3 billion Africans aged between 18-25 by 2050. Do they migrate from rural areas to inadequate cities, that aren’t able to handle the influx? And where do they go from there?

Now these are what we might call practical, empirical things that we can see coming. We can see the population change, we can see the climate change – it’s already happening – and we can see the urgent need for sustainable development.

Sadly, we can see it in relation to the recurrence of famine. So we simply must engage with this both locally and globally. Is it not an inspiring ambition that Ireland might lead the way in all of this? There’s another deeply-rooted, hidden issue, which the Pope mentioned to me when we met, and that I want to touch on here. He spoke about the neglected problem of loneliness. One of the consequences of extreme individualism is that you peak personally at the time of your greatest consumption capacity, with all its related neuroses. It is very difficult to have a cheerful conversation about death, but given the kind of sensed, reflective, upright animals that we are, it behoves us to recognise that while we have infinite imagination, we have finite lives. The fact is that you cannot accumulate infinitely, and yet some people structure their lives on wanting exactly that. It’s a very significant moment in any culture, when it moves beyond sufficiency and into insatiability.

The result is that you get a very phony celebrity culture, where people who are vulnerable are offered a diet of endless voyeurism, via mere glimpses into the insatiable activities of a very small number of usually very wealthy people. I think there is an incredible decadence in all of that vicarious consumerism. I would prefer to buy a new book, than to be invited to see how someone is handling their neuroses, in relation to purchasing yet more… and more.

I’ve quoted, in a number of my speeches lately, a phrase that I picked up in Kerry. A man spoke to me about a fellow who was endlessly buying farms around the place, and he said, “You’ve never seen a trailer after a hearse!” It was a humorous way of putting it, but it’s certainly a thought well worth considering.

As a society and as individuals, we need to move on from the obsession with accumulating wealth and trinkets we can show off, and instead begin to create together the kind of genuine sense of community – both locally and globally – which might allow us to forge a safer, better, more egalitarian and more sustainable future.

That challenge is now. There is no time to waste.