Organic intelligence, artificially presented
How long before the first dystopian novel or movie about starving, frozen, homeless hordes storming data centres?
Perhaps it already exists.
And how long before it happens for real?
It can’t be long now.
It’s a weird future the AI gurus envision where people don’t need light or heat or energy to cook or, in some locations where houses are being seized via eminent domain or compulsory purchase, even their homes.
Let them eat data!
I’m not an especial fan of cats. Cats will be chewing your fingers and clawing at your eyeballs within minutes of your death. Cats are apex predators who devastate local wildlife. Cats are highly self-serving and have learned how to hack human attachment to them, in part with the assistance of toxoplasmosis, with which they infect us.
In short, I’m more of a dog guy.
But cats are also useful in many ways, providing company and comfort of a sort to the solitary, isolated or lonely. They keep vermin down. And their long history as domestic human companions can often be used to cast light on some social trends historically.
Take for example the ‘cat lady’ meme, which in its current popular mode may be said to have originated on The Simpsons, where the character of Eleanor Abernathy is depicted as being a demented old woman who shouts gibberish, hoards rubbish and clings to dozens of cats. Eleanor’s back story is that, as a highly intelligent young woman, she became overeducated, studying both Law at Yale and Medicine at Harvard, thereby foregoing romantic relationships and family and burning herself out intellectually, resulting in her fate as a ‘crazy cat lady’.
One does not have to ponder for long to see why this narrative appeals to the incels of the alt-right in their ongoing demonisation of feminism, female autonomy and what they perceive as the anti-family ramifications of educating women.
So the prevalence of cats as part of, or at least adjacent to, human domestic culture also means that they serve as bellwethers for cultural development. I am reminded of the 19th century viral practical joke, whereby people would place advertisements in newspapers, usually purporting to be from merchant sea captains, seeking to pay for cats which they wished to have on their ship to prevent rat infestations.
As a result, hundreds of people would flock to the docks of their city on the allotted day, only to find that no such captain or ship existed, and release the various strays and kittens they had gathered, thereby causing chaos (and one presumes amusement for the joker who placed the advertisement.) This joke ran for decades in various primarily British and American port cities, as my friend and former colleague Chris Smith has detailed in an essay on the matter.
As Smith points out, the originating event, an alleged cat hoax at Chester, never happened. But the fact that it was reported inspired copycat (sorry) events which definitely did. And the reason for this virality of what was originally an urban legend, the reason why people persisted in committing this hoax, was as Smith states to laugh at the poor, the uneducated and in particular the Irish.
So who do we use cats to laugh at today? Obviously women, in particular educated single women as I have already mentioned. But there are other targets too. Most recently a meme about the medieval papacy has gained a lot of traction on social media which features cats. It’s easiest to reproduce it here than describe it:
Now, the logic gap here may be obvious to anyone no matter how little they may know about Pope Gregory. If the papacy demanded the death only of black cats, surely all the cats of other colourings still existed and could have dealt with the rats whose fleas were the primary vector of bubonic plague into Europe? Someone with only the tiniest familiarity with medieval chronology might further protest that the outbreak of plague in Europe in the 1340s came at least a century AFTER it is suggested that Gregory launched his anti-cat campaign.
Vox in Rama does indeed exist. It is a Papal Bull which primarily discusses the alleged existence of a satanic worship ring in Germany and proposes its suppression. Killing cats is not proposed within it. Furthermore, it was directed only to a small number of German clerics, not to the clergy or Christian population of Europe as a whole. Now, this is not to say that Gregory is entirely innocent in all things. He was quite fond of instigating pogroms against heretics, of which Vox in Rama formed a part. But did his blindness to consequence and thirst to persecute inadvertently lead to the deaths of millions of people from the bubonic plague? Absolutely not.
So what are we really reading here? If the resurgence of the Simpsons Cat Lady is about male insecurity and condemnation of female outperformance in higher education and the workplace, and the 19th century cat hoax is about the lower middles of Britain sneering at the poor and the Irish simultaneously, then who is the target of the Papal cat genocide meme, and why?
Obviously the primary target is the Catholic Church. The meme trades on institutional Catholicism’s instigatory involvement in medieval persecution of heresy, from the Crusades to the Inquisition. But within that is a further layer of attack on male power and its concomitant stupidity, a failure to connect action to reaction, cause to consequence.
Whence does this actually stem? Most likely the inspiration is the success of a truthful meme, that of Mao’s war on sparrows as part of his ‘Four Pests’ campaign, which did indeed lead to the deaths of millions of Chinese people in the 1950s. The resurgence of this particular event as a meme on social media functions primarily as a cautionary tale against Communism, as well as a kind of Sinophobic warning against gullible and indoctrinated Chinese people. It would not be unfair to surmise that this meme has been primarily propagated by anti-Communist ethnonationalists in the West.
So what is the semiotic or cultural meaning of the Pope Gregory meme about cats? It is an attempt to respond to the popularity of the Mao meme by inverting and displacing it. Pleasant as sparrows are, human attachment to cats is much more significant culturally, and there is a general repugnance to the killing of cats in Western and other cultures. So Pope Gregory’s patriarchal, ignorant and cruel cat crusade (as depicted erroneously in the meme) is actually a response to what anti-Communist ethnonationalists find dear, that is, the Christian church via its primary institution.
We can expect the culture wars to continue apace, and it is likely that cats will increasingly be weaponised in this fashion as a mode of marshaling emotional responses on one side or the other. Smith’s illuminating and entertaining study shows how this is nothing new and is attested in history (and in media) long before the internet existed.
Mark O’ Connell, one of the better chroniclers of our lightning-paced transitions through tech-disrupted realities, had an intriguing mini-essay published in yesterday’s New York Times. His topic is the vampiric desire for immortality as expressed by the elites of this world, from the political despots of Russia and China to the posthumanist dreamers of Silicon Valley.
As O’Connell notes, the desire for immortality is nothing new. It is a by-product of human wrestling with our mortal condition and thus is itself immortal, switching up only its face, clothing and name as the centuries pass.
In this sense, the techbro quest for infinite longevity becomes, as O’Connell states, a contemporary analogue for medieval alchemy, and the kind of arsenic and mercury-based witches’ brews which seduced a series of Chinese emperors into a truncated rather than extended lifespan.
But O’Connell’s vampire metaphor, if it is best thought of as mere metaphor, put me in mind of another recent use of the term by one of his essay’s protagonists, Vladimir Putin.
O’Connell relates Putin’s overheard conversation with President Xi in Beijing, a forbidden topic in the Forbidden City, about how as septuagenarians they are still mere children. This amiable discourse between dictators should of course fill us all with an eldritch chill. Their shared desire to continue in power forever, like the dessicated cybernetic Emperor in the popular Warhammer 40k mythos, reminds us of just how impervious to traditional threat and opposition they believe themselves to be.
Yet of course, they are fully aware of the threat which they face. It is not you or I, or the hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens they preside over, of course. We – they – are mere meatsacks who exist in order to be ruled, to be leveraged in pursuit of endless political power. Mere mortal plebs are the threat they can marshall against others, be it Ukraine or Taiwan, or be it dissidents in England or Tibetan separatists.
The threat that they face is the civil war of the vampires, and they are fully aware of this. In March 2024, Vladimir Putin was engaging in one of his habitual polemics against the Western Powers in an interview with the journalist Dmitri Kisilev, when he made a revealing statement which O’Connell’s essay brought back to my mind.
Here is what he said in Russian, to avoid any accusations of misrepresentation: «В западных элитах очень сильно желание заморозить существующее положение, несправедливое положение вещей в международных делах. Они привыкли столетиями набивать брюхо человеческой плотью, а карманы — деньгами. Но они должны понять, что бал вампиров заканчивается.»
How might we translate this? Forgive me for falling back on the machines, as the posthumanists would have us do, but my Russian is too rusty to suffice here. Instead, let Microsoft’s translation software attempt to convey it: “In the Western elites, there is a very strong desire to freeze the existing situation, the unfair state of affairs in international matters. They have been accustomed for centuries to stuffing their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must understand that the vampire ball is coming to an end.”
There are a few things to note here. Firstly, Putin does not attempt to replicate the demonisation of entire peoples such as have been levied against the people of Russia by the media and institutions – banking, sporting, cultural, legal – of the West. His target is much narrower, the Western Elites. Secondly, what exactly is his accusation? That global geopolitics is a rigged game, designed to direct wealth and power to those Western Elites at the expense of everyone else. And what is his warning? That this era, which he alleges has lasted for centuries, is about to end.
So even if the last dance is being played out at the vampire’s ball, what evidence is there that a vampiric civil war is set to follow? It’s worth noting that generally such series of events overlap rather than follow serially. The dancing and music continued on the Titanic long after the iceberg was first struck. Wars tend to build to a crescendo and recede rather than switch on or off in a binary fashion. Therefore, we must acknowledge that the vampiric civil war is already under way.
And what form does it take in these early stages? We can see the open gorging on human blood and flesh in a range of locations already, not merely the weeping wounds of conflicts like those in Ukraine, Syria, Sudan or Lebanon, but also in the uptick in various forms of terrorist violence all across the globe, often of an Islamofascist nature but also taking many other forms too of which the most likely to catch fire uncontrollably is the ethnonationalist one. But perhaps all of these can better seen as the jockeying of the minor vampires for a seat at the next feast.
O’Connell correctly links Putin’s overheard comments to Xi about tech-enabled longevity to the kind of warped vision quests of the Cali techbros, and in particular to Marc Andressen’s astonishing credo in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” that “We believe artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosophers’ Stone — we are literally making sand think.”
One wonders what the sand does think, and to what extent it will be happy to be yoked to the posthumanist longevity quests of the various vampiric cliques. We can be sure of one thing, however. Whatever genies or demons the vampires summon in order to pursue their immortality will not be shared with the meat masses. The posthumanist dream dangled before us is conversion to vampirism. Only the elites will be bitten. The rest of us will be consumed instead.
If mortality grants poignancy and meaning to human life, then what is immortality? Is it really infinite meaning and endless feeling, or instead a senile decline into static autocracy such as we see in Warhammer or Dune? Anne Rice encouraged us to have sympathy with the vampire, and we are still in her era of revisionism, of loving the cold dead predator as if it were merely cool and detached.
It is instead time for us to resurrect our historic loathing of the vampire, because the real victims of the vampiric civil war will inevitably be us mere mortals. Only by sharpening our stakes against the posthuman desires of the vampires can we hope to survive their civil war.
If you look up Jakob Ehrlich you’ll probably be directed by Wikipedia and other sources either to the biography of the nominatively anglicised Jack Earle, who was a carnival sideshow performer in the early 20th century known for his extreme height, or else the Viennese Zionist Jakob Ehrlich, who died in 1938, having been beaten to death in the Dachau concentration camp.
But in January 2025, another Jakob Ehrlich died, a man in his Nineties who had lived the latter part of his life in Florida. He left behind a life fully lived, which is detailed in his slender autobiography, which I had reason to examine earlier this week.
Ehrlich, unlike his Viennese namesake, survived the Nazis. Born in Sarajevo, he was a child when they came to power and with a degree of foresight his parents fled with their children to live for some years in refugee camps in Yugoslavia and Italy. Eventually, Ehrlich moved to South America and ultimately to the United States.
In his all-too-brief account of his life, the period of the holocaust takes up chapter two of ten chapters in the text. One imagines that to a young boy, displaced repeatedly during a terrifying war, it didn’t feel much like chapter two to him at the time. And yet there were still eight chapters of his life ahead of him.
Looking at the index of Ehrlich’s text thus becomes a numerical lesson in humility, resilience, and optimism in the face of darkness. I suspect many people who find themselves in similar dark periods of their lives, darkened either by personal or geopolitical or even global circumstances, often feel apocalyptic in the moment, and struggle to imagine a brighter future.
But a lot of life revolves around refusing to accept the Chapter Twos as endings or conclusions, and also refusing to allow them to prevent future chapters from being written.
It’s perfectly possible, as Jakob Ehrlich demonstrated, to allow such moments to permanently colour your life – indeed, how could they not? – without also allowing them to be the final word.
Like a lot of questions about history, this is both superficially straightforward and on closer reflection highly philosophical. I have a very straightforward answer for you, one that I have never seen referred to in print or pixel before, but let’s take the complex route first.
We’d need firstly to define what we mean by Roman Empire. The Ottomans, the Germans, the Venetians, the Bulgarians, the Russians and a whole host of other civilisations all considered themselves in one way or another to be true heirs of Rome. Should we consider them as true continuations or not?
Then we’d need to consider what we mean by where. Where is a subset of when in this instance. If we define the Roman Empire as ending with the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 CE, then obviously the empire fell at Rome itself. But Alaric was dead within a few months, and there was still an emperor in Rome over 60 years later.
And what of what we now call the Byzantine Empire, but which knew itself as the Roman Empire? Founded in Anatolia in the fourth century due to a split of the Empire into Eastern and Western administrations, the empire based in Byzantium (later Constantinople, later Istanbul) continued until it was overran by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century just as its Western twin was overrun by the Ostrogoths in the fifth.
For me, as for themselves, the Byzantines were Roman. Greek-speaking, yes, but Roman all the same, with a continuity of culture all the way back to the founding of Rome as a city state in the eighth century BCE. So if we consider the Byzantines to be the last vestige of the Roman empire, then surely it fell when Constantinople was captured by Sultan Mehmed II (known understandably as ‘the conqueror’) in May 1453 CE?
Close but not quite. Some of the Byzantine empire still stood even as Constantinople was sacked and burned. One standout was the Maniot territory in the Peloponnese in Southern Greece, which at the time Constantinople fell was under the command of the wonderfully named Despotate of Morea, which in practice meant two Byzantine leaders (who promptly fled.) The Maniot people did not flee however, and the Ottomans didn’t bother invading this mountainous and difficult territory until 1770 CE. But with the departing despots so also departed any vestiges of ruling Byzantine (and hence Roman) culture. This was a Maniot defiance of Ottoman rule, not a Byzantine one.
Then there was the principality of Theodoro, which was a sliver of Crimea under Byzantine rule sandwiched between the coastal Genoese colonies and the inland Khanate of Crimea. Technically again, this was Byzantine territory. But in reality, it was populated by Goths.
What? Yes, in fact the Ostrogoths had been in Crimea for over a thousand years, since the FOURTH CENTURY CE! Byzantine rule (following the fourth crusade) was merely yet another imperial vassalage for the Goths of Crimea. At various times they had fallen under the nominal rule of a bewildering range of imperial powers, including the Huns, Khazars, Mongols and Genoese. Ultimately, they were merged into the neighbouring Khanate in 1475 CE, and became part of the Ottoman empire. So, not exactly the last stand of Rome.
Which brings me to my own answer to the question, where did the Roman Empire end? The Empire of Trebizond was a secessionist state of the Byzantine imperium. Formed during the fourth crusade as an opportunistic power grab by a local potentate, the Trebizond empire sustained only a little longer after the fall of its parent state at Constantinople. The Trebizond secessionists were if anything even more aggressed by the combined threat from Turkmen and Ottoman forces than the Byzantines were. Throughout the 1440s and 1450s, they repelled repeated attempts at invasion.
The end finally came in 1461, a mere eight years after the fall of Constantinople. There is a wonderful, almost contemporaneous painting depicting the departure of the Byzantines from Trebizond following King David’s surrender to Mehmed II:
So what happened exactly? Mehmed swooped in from the west to isolate Trebizond and place it under siege, which continued for a month. To achieve this, his forces had to go into the high hills immediately behind the coastal city and outflank it, so that they would be unable to receive either reinforcements (which David hoped would come from Christian Europe) or supplies via the harbour.
Trebizond was a high walled city located between two freshwater sources flowing into the Black Sea, so a physical attack was ill advised. For Mehmed, it was easier to maintain negotiations while besieging the city. And the inhabitants were well aware of what had happened to Constantinople for refusing to negotiate.
This map, take from Wikipedia, gives a good sense of the geography of the time:
The formal surrender would of course likely have taken place in the citadel or the palace (both currently under archeological exploration at the time of writing.) However, this followed an agreement between David and Mehmed for a negotiated surrender. With their forces primarily located to the east of the city, adjoining the freshwater river that is now only a dry river valley in the modern city, it is possible that Mehmed’s forces first entered the city via the lower gate closest to the harbour and market, but more likely that they entered through the double gate closer to the citadel.
Amazingly, this gate is still standing, entirely unremarked upon, and can be found down a narrow cobblestoned alleyway strewn with graffiti and with children’s laundry drying at head height. There is no plaque or commemorative item of any kind to inform you that this place was the geographic spot where over 2200 years of continuous Roman culture came to its final end. And yet, that’s exactly what it is:
The inner gate of Trebizond’s double gate, where 2,200 years of Roman culture came to an end.
There are around 140 language families on the planet. Nearly half of all people speak a language from only one of those families as their native tongue, never mind all those who speak them as second or subsequent languages.
That family is Indo-European, and it includes English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian and some other very big hitters in terms of global speakers.
As the world continues to globalise, we will inevitably lose languages and even entire language families. Some projections suggest we might be down to only five or six major languages by 2500. Of those, only probably Arabic and Chinese stand a chance of being non-Indo-European languages spoken by anyone.
Once upon a time, I scoffed at learning my national language, Irish. What’s the use? Who gives a shit about old myths? Anyhow, it was all tied up with politics and my limited brain could only just about accommodate French.
Now I regret that decision, like I regret not maintaining my knowledge of Attican Greek and Latin, not properly learning Italian, Russian or Turkish, and being so scared by Hebrew and Arabic that I gave up on day one.
Because languages aren’t just interchangeable modes of communication. Each one expresses an entire culture, and even more, a wholly unique way of conceiving of the world. To speak more than one language is to see the world in multiple dimensions at once.
I envy my five year old his bilingualism. It’s a gift I intend to jealously defend for him, and no doubt on occasion even against his future wishes.
If you want to save culture and add literal dimensions to your brain, learn a language. Start today.
I’ve been researching the ‘discovery’ of the Americas recently, particularly the history of Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan, as well as the conquering of the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes.
What strikes me, reading the letters of Vespucci or the affidavits of Columbus, is their braggadocio of adventure. It’s all couched of course in careful obsequence to lordly funders and rulers, and pious devotion to the mother church, who one suspects had at best tenuous command in small, rickety ships traversing unknown oceans. But it’s easy to discern their sense of excitement, of being the first to see and claim terra incognita, to place the first footsteps on a new world.
They were, in short, adventurers who had little concern about the indigenes they encountered other than a kind of sociological curiosity to describe them as they might describe sea routes or the local flora and fauna, all filtered through their world view of manifest destiny and medieval Catholicism, and their barely-suppressed exhilaration.
But it was, as we now recognise, a somewhat dark and bloody history, replete with dehumanisation and erasure of the peoples who already lived in those locations, and interspersed with crimes of violence, atrocity and domination.
Much of the evidence of those times now exists as absence. In searching for the Taino indigenes of the Caribbean, one finds only their diluted bloodlines. Their civilisation, culture, language and polities are long since effectively vanished. Similarly, some 97% or so of Argentina today is of at least partial if not total European descent. In Uruguay, it’s just under 90%. In neither country is there a significant indigenous population remaining.
Somewhere, buried perhaps in the genetics of modern Turks, still echoes the bloodline of the Hittite empire too. But the Hittites were builders and the Taino were not. The Hittites left correspondence and monuments by which we can remember them. The Taino did not. In some ways, the Hittites are more current three millennia after their demise than the Taino are, who died out in only the past few hundred years.
Downstream over five centuries from those heady days, we might believe we are now in a position to consider them sanguinely, if you will forgive a pun in bad taste. We are now almost a century into the process, or thinking, of postcoloniality, of decolonisation. The spokes now speak to the hubs. The empires strike back.
Today, the flows of people which cause the most contention are those into Europe and the European-founded states in North America and Australasia. It’s unsurprising that this would be so. Firstly, those nations habitually top tables for metrics like income, quality of living and education, happiness, security and so on. Who wouldn’t like to live in countries with those qualities?
And of course those coming to them are by definition coming from countries which lack those qualities. They suffer poverty, war, poor educational standards, insecurity in general. They aren’t happy, or they wouldn’t be moving.
But also, they are adventurers like Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan. They are primarily desperate young men with little to lose and much potentially to gain. They travel embedded within their own cultures, religions and languages. The increasingly loud and paranoid concerns from European nationalists is that they may also come as conquerors like Cortes.
As a scholar of uchronia, or history which never happened, I am always intrigued by the what ifs. What if Ming China had not turned its back on the world in 1433, but had instead beaten the Europeans to colonise the Americas by over half a century? Would Admiral Zheng He now enjoy the oscillation between celebration and opprobrium currently offered to the memory of Columbus?
Or what if it had been Africans or Amerindians who had first embarked on transcontinental sea travel and had arrived in small boats at the shores of a frightened and uncomprehending European populace not unlike the fleets of dinghies which now traverse the English channel daily? Would the cities of Benin, Lagos, Accra now boast the wealth of imperial buildings and infrastructure we instead find in London, Amsterdam, Paris and Lisbon?
We would be in a very different world perhaps. Or more likely, we would not. The processes of colonialism would most likely have remained intact. The resulting erasures, atrocities and domination would likely still have occurred, only with the positions of the colonised and colonisers reversed.
What evidence for this is there, outside of my fevered imagination of the multiverse? Well, firstly one might consider the Bantu Expansions of the 11th to 17th centuries. On encountering the sparse populations of existing pastoralist and nomadic peoples of central and southern Africa, they largely either wiped them out or absorbed them, resulting in an African variant of what we might call the Argentina model.
And we don’t even need to look to history for examples of Chinese colonialism. It continues today, as Tibetans, Uyghurs and those in various South and East China Sea islands can testify.
In short, history teaches us that cultures do clash, and that all too often, if not indeed most of the time, one of those cultures is going to come off worse, often to the point of eradication. The process of cultural evolution, which exists both in isolation and in free associations via trade, commerce and technological development, continues ever faster in the globalised and techno-enabled world in which we find ourselves. Cultures do not atrophy by themselves. History indicates that when they die, it is not by suicide but more commonly at the hands of conquerors and colonisers.
The bafflement of the political class in Europe at the inexorable rise of ethnocentric, hypernationalist and insular right-wing parties is itself therefore baffling. History suggests that this is a manifestation of resistance to perceived colonial attack. The rhetoric on all sides illustrates this very clearly, whether it is assertions of Europe as being inherently white and Christian, and Islam an existential threat, or the counter-rhetoric of inflammatory Islamic preachers demanding Sharia law in Europe, and the misplaced triumphalism with which Indians proclaim ownership of London.
Is it a sense of folk guilt which fuels the suspicion of Europeans encountering the African Columbus or subcontinental Vespucci today? Postcolonial theory suggests as much. But perhaps it is also something more deeply felt – an existential fear that they are instead meeting columns of modern-day Cortes.
Diversity by definition is divisive. It is not inherently a strength, otherwise the late Roman Empire would have been stronger than its earlier iteration. But diversity could become a strength if we could somehow harness a collective expansion of in-group sensibilities, a magnification from the gigatribes of nations to the teratribe of humanity.
For that to occur, however, a sea change in perspective is required by everyone. Those intent on building fortresses around their cultures need to understand that no walls can stand against the march of human adventure and ingenuity. And those who set sail for new worlds must leave their small-minded cultural and religious preconceptions at home in the past.
Only then can we truly move beyond zero-sum colonial mindsets.
Sorry for the radio silence. I’ve been busy. There will be some updates about, inter alia, the Caucasus, the origins of wine, and the Religious Futurisms project imminently.
In the meantime, I hope you may be satisfied with this talk I gave on WW3 last November.
World War One started in July 1914, but when did it end? Conventionally, people assume it ended in November 1918, with the surrender of Germany.
But people were still dying many years later. My own grandfather suffered for decades with lungs rotted out by mustard gas at the Somme, and didn’t die for many years, gasping and coughing nightly.
The most recent victims, astonishingly, were as recently as March 2014, almost exactly a century after the conflict started. How is that possible? They were construction workers, who accidentally triggered an unexploded bomb buried beneath where they were working.
During WW1, a ton of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory along the front.
As a result, the French Département du Déminage (Department of Mine Clearance) recovers about 900 tons of unexploded munitions every year. They call it the Iron Harvest.
Unexploded ordinance is left behind after all conflicts. Children are maimed and killed every year as a result of uncleared mines and bombs in Asia and Africa.
The wars we fight today will kill not only us but our grandchildren and great-grandchildren too. It’s time to make war history.
How cosy and quaint do the petty sectarian bigotries of 20th century Irish writing seem today.
I’m not referring to the civil war in the North of Ireland, usually euphemistically referred to in a diminished manner as the ‘Troubles’. I lived through most of that, and it was extremely unpleasant indeed.
Rather I mean the slightly earlier period of the early and mid-twentieth century, when Irish writing bestrode the world in the forms of giants like Joyce, Beckett, Yeats and Behan.
What’s interesting, considering just these four (though we could add many other lesser names), is the varying personal reactions to the sectarian divide in Ireland. For the Protestant-raised, middle-class and cosmopolitan Beckett and Yeats, minor distinctions in flavours of Christianity was an irrelevance at best.
Yeats in later life veered into mysticism, theosophy, magick and the occult. Beckett by contrast tended to dismiss Christianity if not all religion entirely, referring to it as “all balls”, though conceding that it amounted to more than merely “convenient mythology”. Raised in the era they were, both Yeats and Beckett imbibed plenty of Christian dogma in school and wider culture however, and both demonstrate in their writing an easy and deep familiarity with Christian writings and the Bible.
By contrast, the Catholic, lower middle-class/working class Joyce and Behan seemed unable entirely to shake off the tribal Catholicism of their backgrounds and education. I was reminded of this recently when I re-encountered Behan’s hilarious take on Anglicanism:
Don’t speak of the alien minister,
Nor of his church without meaning or faith,
For the foundation stone of his temple
Was the bollocks of Henry VIII.
Behan was a self-described “daylight atheist”. This is often presented online in the form of a quote: “I’m a communist by day and a Catholic by night”. However, I’ve not found a reliable source for this variant. Anyhow, Behan clearly had not managed to transcend the petty sectarian rivalries which beset Ireland, and in this he echoes Joyce, who in the highly autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes his alter-ego protagonist Stephen Dedalus refusing to consider conversion to Protestantism:
– Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a Protestant?
– I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?
We might consider this passage as a depiction in mature adulthood of his prissy adolescence were it not that it is echoed elsewhere in his work, such as the short story ‘Grace’ in Dubliners.
It’s worth remembering too that Joyce and Behan both escaped the confines of petty Ireland if anything more completely than Yeats ever did, the latter becoming a senator in the newly independent Ireland whereas Joyce relocated permanently to Europe, while Behan spent much of his time in London and America. (Beckett like his mentor Joyce went to Europe and never looked back.)
So then, what fuels this seemingly pointless animus? The grounds of objection from both Joyce and Behan relate to an apparent illogicality inherent to Protestantism. Notably in both instances, there is no defence of Catholicism offered, merely a snide (and in Behan’s case, very funny) dismissal of Ireland’s second-largest faith.
And unlike Yeats, neither sought to construct a religious faith of their own, though in Joyce’s case at least there was an astonishing attempt to replace the religious impetus with an aesthetic one, succinctly underpinned as Joyce said, by “silence, exile and cunning.”
I think Behan’s piece (a translation as it happens from 16th century Irish) gives the game away here. In many locations, the first line of his translation is misquoted as referring to “your Protestant minister”. But Behan like his source material makes clear that while Anglicanism is being referred to, the issue is less the protest against Catholicism underpinning it than its alienness, that is, the fact that it was the faith of the foreign (ie English) overlords who governed Ireland from the time of bebollocked Henry to their present day.
In other words, it was an atavistic political tribalism rather than a theological objection. We still have those tribalisms in Ireland today, primarily in the North where those overlords remain in position, likely against their will and desire, due to the complexities of establishing a permanent and lasting peace. In the 26 counties of the Irish Republic however, these passages stand out as glaring anachronisms now.
And even in the North, the late great “famous” Seamus Heaney (like Yeats and Beckett a Nobel laureate) is best described as sociologically post-Catholic rather than a devotee of the creed of his birth. This runs counter to the opinions offered by some of his most astute critics, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edna Longley in particular of course, but is it unfair to point out that both critics came from Protestant backgrounds and hence saw the cultural references to Catholicism in Heaney’s work as more significant than it was simply because those references were alien to them in the same way that Protestantism was to Behan?
In other words, the sensitivities may be reversed here. Perhaps it is as readers that we detect these curious emphases. Perhaps we misconstrue the petty cultural rivalries of sectarianism in mid-20th century Ireland because religion played such a larger role in cultural life in those days, in ways that anyone under 50 is unlikely to recognise in Ireland today.
The great Irish writers never stop teaching us, and one of their lessons is that we must challenge ourselves as readers with regard to what we find striking in their writing. What we notice and what we do not says perhaps as much about us as it does about them. They hold a mirror to our souls, even if, like Behan, we are daylight atheists.