Don’t look back in anger

These are turbulent times, troubled and troubling, full of portents and angsts and dreads, very few of which are in any way natty. Change is all around, and not just in world politics. Many find technical change as threatening as economic or political change. Here, the cultural makeup of society is altering even as we look. That’s the way it is.

In such times, many find comfort in the past. One is not sympathetic to this, but one understands. The horror of watching planes crash into the World Trade Center changed the landscape totally. The future seems a more forbidding place.

Yet most of us have accepted that, changed though things are, we have to get on with it, that there is no way, and no point in trying to go, back. This is the post-modern world and we’re attempting to live with it.

But there is another view, and it finds many forms of expression. It harks back to a time when life was simpler. Medievalism, two vast steps back from the post-modern, past the modern, to when there were straight universal truths, strong hierarchical social structures and global religious observance. In those days, women knew their place, as did the Irish.

This view finds expression in Islam, Christianity and Judaism. It is heard all over the world. Cardinal Connell believes it, as was clear last week. So does the Mullah Omar. So does Ian Paisley.

In itself, this view is nostalgic, backward-looking, backwoodsy, even in the case of a self-regarding intellectual like Cardinal Connell. But coupled with religious fundamentalism it’s poisonous and pernicious. Add one more fatal ingredient, best called martyrism, that is, a philosophy in which older men encourage younger men to sacrifice themselves (and often many others) in pursuit of the fundamentals. They usually do so with promises of paradise… Well, then you have a brutal and lethal cocktail indeed.

So, as I type this, I am listening to a radio discussion of the failure to elect David Trimble and Mark Durcan as First Minister and Deputy First Minister to the Northern Ireland Assembly. The rear-view advocates have won the day for now. These are people who think that compromise is a dirty word, who want to stop all progress towards a peaceful Northern Ireland, and who want to return to the old days when roses bloomed, the kirks were full and the Irish knew their place.

Pathetic. But far from unique. As I said above, the bould Cardinal Connell also dirtied his bib and tucker in an interview for a book on the Irish spirit. Which is not whiskey. He apologised and clarified what he had said. But there is no getting away from what he said. Even if it were said in private, it showed a man who was intellectually arrogant, spiteful and not give to forgiving and forgetting. Hardly a role model for his flock. But certainly, consistent with the sense of self of out own home-grown Taliban who ruled in Ireland from the 1920s to the 1980s.

But this is revealing in other ways. Independent observers have often commented that Islam, far from being a hostile or militant ideology, is actually like the kind of Catholicism practised in Ireland in those years, or the kind of Protestantism practised and enforced in Northern Ireland between 1920 and oh, say, 1990.

This is what the likes of Pauline Armitage want to bring back. But just imagine, if the priests of Ireland from 1920 to 1990 had an armed militia to enforce their diktats. (I know they almost had, but not quite).

Imagine if adulterers and thieves and prostitutes and drug users were beaten or stoned to death, or body parts were hacked off for such trifles as wearing tattoos, and so on. Well, that’s Afghanistan these days. Never the most hospitable place, but now a genuine hell on earth .. and that was before this war.

Remembering how bad it was here might help to understand why it is necessary to do something to intervene. And let’s be clear – some months ago, most of us were bombarded with emails telling how awful it was for women in Afghanistan. What were we expected to do about it? Sanctions? But then the very same people would have circulated emails telling how the sanctions were hurting the weak and innocent, as in Iraq. Sometimes, there’s no easy option, and you can’t have it both ways.

Afghanistan has no Government as such, just a ruling clergy and their armed militia. Just the sort of vacuum to suit a fellow like Osama bin Laden. But of course, recent events have other triggers as well… like the present set of anthrax outbreaks that may have been set in motion by far right fanatics in the USA – the enemy within.

This, along with the truly appalling scenario of attacks on nuclear installations has created the greatest negative force of all, the fear of fear itself.

But we should also be remembering, as we are not yet, that bin Laden and the religious schools from which the Taliban emerged and which act as a supply line for the martyrs, are funded by Saudi Arabia, using oil money that we all give them. We should be making arrangements, as soon as possible, to get off the hook of oil dependence. Nitrogen fuelled cars, anyone?

The point is this – we mostly bother with the politics of the Middle East because we are totally dependent on its oil. Break that dependence and our interest can be a lot more honest and less self-serving. We can ostracise the anti-democratic regimes universally, rather than selectively, as we now do. I mean, Saudi Arabia is less democratic and has a worse human rights record than China .. by a long shot. We can give humanitarian aid without tying it to sordid economic goals.

But there I go again, thinking of the future, rather than harking back to the past. Silly me!! Forgetting me fundamentals?!

The Hog