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Politics
6 min read

Northern Ireland’s imminent danger is distraction

Distraction damages much more than your concentration. Its consequences could cost Northern Ireland its future.
Smartly dressed politicians sit or mill around a round table.
Rishi Sunak with the leaders of the Northern Ireland Government.
Prime Minister's Office.

Should you be reading this article right now? Are you meant to be working? Perhaps you’re working from home with the glorious ‘freedom’ that brings? Forgive me for judging, but it’s just that I know myself all too well. Dear reader, I must confess to you that in the course of writing this article I have already ‘cut away’ to cricket scores or my fascinating chess match with covidchessfun34 more than a few times. We are an increasingly distractable people. But you’re here now, so whether you landed here through word of mouth or social media, welcome. Much as you would (I am sure) love me to deconstruct yours and my individual psychology and boundaries, my hopefully more important point here is that distraction also operates at a political level.    

It’s been a frustrating few years for the people of Northern Ireland. Which when placed on top of the devastating history of the last 50 years seems a tad cruel. Just when the Good Friday Agreement seemed to have pulled off a miraculous balancing act on the high wire of a divided island with contested history, Brexit came along to throw off NI’s centre of gravity. It was in fact thrown off to such an extent that NI was left just trying to cling on, balance and survive, rendering no forward progress possible. Sadly, the circus metaphor seems appropriate in more ways than one.  

Given that context, you can appreciate how the people of Northern Ireland felt this week when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak flew into Belfast and attempted to educate them. He urged the newly formed Northern Ireland executive to focus on ‘things that matter’ rather than constitutional change. With hospital waiting lists that rival Sierra Leone and some roads that rival, well, Sierra Leone, I think that folks in Northern Ireland get that ‘things that matter’ are the things that matter. Of course, what the Prime Minister is talking about is Northern Ireland’s obsession with the elephant in the room - the border, or the desired removal of it. We don’t just talk about the elephant in the room. We study her in minute detail. We build brand new scientific devices just to study her. So, to be fair to the Prime Minister, ‘Don’t get distracted by the border’ is at a surface level an important thing to hear. Especially as Northern Ireland’s new First Minister Michelle O’Neill has not been shy about putting a United Ireland firmly on the agenda in her first days in office. 

Condescension from someone that knows more than you is challenging, but condescension from someone who knows less than you do really grates. 

But what has grated the good people of Northern Ireland is that this sermon to not be distracted by constitutional change was delivered by one of the chief exponents of Brexit – the biggest constitutional upheaval for Northern Ireland in a generation. The time spent and the regulatory gymnastics involved in trying to do a job of Brexit damage limitation for Northern Ireland has sucked the political energy and life out of these last seven years in Belfast and beyond.  

None of us enjoy condescension. It is that annoying thing that happens when people know more about a subject than we do and lord it over us. But what the people of Northern Ireland have had to endure in this last decade is being lectured by the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world about the wonders of Brexit, when it became patently clear to most Northern Irish folks that not only had the particular challenges of NI not been fully considered but that even senior Brexit-supporting politicians didn’t actually understand the logistics how NI currently operated within the EU. Condescension from someone that knows more than you is challenging, but condescension from someone who knows less than you do really grates. And that’s only the nuts and bolts we’re talking about. Probably more detrimental was the ignorant blind spot around identity and psychology that was exposed. A palpable lack of knowledge was exposed regarding how the Good Friday Agreement combined with EU membership had created a remarkable ‘safe space’ in Northern Ireland where people who wanted to feel Irish could feel Irish and people who wanted to feel British could feel British. Condescension feels even worse when it seems that people don’t understand your circumstances or care about you.  

The force(s) of darkness are not idiots. They don’t waste time for most of us tempting us with the big stuff. In short, they try to distract us.

So, I put it to you that the consequences of distraction can be large. Those of us with Irish DNA need to hear the challenge that our obsession with the border has led to us not loving our neighbour as ourselves and stolen decades of healthy existence from our island. But might it be wise to at least consider that the distraction of Brexit has stolen and may continue to steal decades of focus on climate change, strengthening family life, healthcare, immigration, economic justice, international peacebuilding, and maintaining local service provision from local councils. In short, ‘things that matter’. 

The temptation is to see distractions as whimsical, temporary things. We think, “ah that quick scroll through Facebook or Instagram may make me less efficient, but it won’t kill me”. But that is exactly how temptation works. If you believe in an invisible battle between good and evil (and I do), then there are some dynamics that are worth considering. If there is a person or an impersonal force tempting me, then it is unlikely to tempt me to do things that are socially and culturally inappropriate in my world. I am not likely to be tempted to murder someone this morning. That would be an inefficient tempting strategy. But it would appear from the state of the world that whoever is in charge of tempting is actually quite good at it. 

That’s why I believe we are more usually tempted not to swing dramatically one way or the other but by a small shift of the needle. Just a little bit more than the day before. Not tempted to kill someone but tempted to score that point in a social media discussion. Not tempted to rob a bank, but tempted to ‘creatively’ adjust small increments in our tax reporting. Not tempted to commit adultery, but tempted to linger too long in a conversation or on a website.  

The force(s) of darkness are not idiots. They don’t waste time for most of us tempting us with the big stuff. In short, they try to distract us. Just a little wander off the main path. Won’t hurt anyone. Won’t take up much time. Except that habits form and unhealthy practices and opinions start to solidify, and ever-so-subtly the wheels may start to come off. Multiply that by a few million people and a whole country can end up hacking through gorse and bushes rather than driving on the track.   

Sure, a marriage can be patched up after innocent distraction becomes a porn addiction, but there will be wounds and scars. We need to acknowledge and repent to allow healing. The people of Northern Ireland know all too well that real reconciliation needs the hard yards of repentance and forgiveness. 

My prayer for the new Northern Ireland executive is that they can avoid further distractions and keep the main thing the main thing. At present only seven per cent of young people in Northern Ireland attend an integrated school. That means that the vast majority of people are growing up not getting to know kids from the other side of the religious divide. In that vacuum the fear, ignorance and prejudice can fester. Our own secret apartheid. That would be one place to start. 

Speaking of which. Get back to work. 

Review
America
Books
Culture
Politics
8 min read

James Davison Hunter: diagnosing America’s health

A great experiment is depleted, and nihilism slips into the void.

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London. 

Riot police stand guard outside a White House fence line.
The White House, June 2020.
Angela N., CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It was unsettling. Disturbing. And in the months since, it has proven to be a powerful and haunting image, etched in my memory. Thinking about it now has exactly the same chilling effect. 

So, it was earlier this year. I was at the cinema with a friend, sitting comfortably and waiting for our movie to start. Our shared love of Sci-Fi had taken us there that afternoon. Not unexpectedly, up pops the reel of trailers. Fast paced, dramatic and with loads of loud music, they’re either enticingly engaging or mercifully short. 

On this occasion the climax of the reel saw America engulfed in a modern-day civil war. And the image?  

A man is pleading, ‘There’s some kind of misunderstanding here, we’re Americans, okay?’  

There’s a pause. The music stops. Silence. It’s a long pause. 

Then the camera pans to a man in military fatigues, with sunglasses and a rifle sitting ominously on his hip, cocks his head and responds: 

‘Okay … [another pause] what kind of American are you?’ 

Guns cocked, the trailer explodes back into life. 

Our movie was really good. My friend’s company, as usual, was delightfully affable. But the image that remains echoes with that question, ‘what kind of American are you?’ 

I have to confess, I love America. I studied there. I have good friends there. I gorge on American food. I watch American football with my son, every week, on a pay-per-view live stream with real US TV ad breaks (‘Go, Pack, Go!’). In my personal experience Americans are some of the kindest, most thoughtful and most generous of people.  

Maybe that’s why I’ve found the image so troubling. Not that it was some kind of fantastical dystopian depiction, but rather that it portrayed something altogether more plausible. Especially in the light of the ‘storming of the Capitol’ on January 6, 2021, the epidemic of mass shootings and the ongoing violent rhetoric on both sides of the political divide. 

How do you square the circle of America? How do kindness and generosity sit alongside gun violence? Is the country on the brink of civil war? 

Back in 1991 the University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter’s book, Culture Wars: the Struggle to Define America suggested that cultural controversies would be increasingly significant in American politics. At the time not everyone agreed and some even pushed back against such an overblown prediction. Time, however, has vindicated Hunter’s reading of the runes. The ubiquity of his ‘culture wars’ epithet is the proof of his pudding. 

Hunter’s latest offering picks up the story once more. Using the present situation in America as a case study, his reflections ‘bookend’ his earlier thinking. However, Democracy and Solidarity is not an extended commentary exploring the rise of populism and the radical right, or the snowflake, woke elitism of the socialist left. Rather, it seeks to understand why the sentence that opens his preface is true: ‘Democracy in America is in crisis.’ 

Grievance and hurt issue in rage, the unchallengeable moral authority of ‘my personal experience!'

For Hunter, understanding what is going on in a culture requires diving deep into the sources it draws on. What forms it? What drives it? All too easily we focus on the observable and what we can see. The stuff that happens and the values, beliefs and institutions that comprise our common life.  

But that is to miss the deeper structures of culture that are formed by our tacit assumptions and the latent frameworks of meaning that nestle unseen and form the cultural architecture that surrounds us. The power of culture is demonstrated by how far it is taken for granted’. 

In an interview Hunter likened his approach to be the difference between weather forecasts and climate studies. Or, to put it another way, moving from ‘the politics of culture’ to ‘the culture of politics.’ 

Beginning at the beginning, Hunter goes to the origin story of the nation. Deeply influenced by the principles of the enlightenment the Founding Fathers of the United States set about their task of nation building. Proposed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in 1776, the national motto on the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one), summed up their political objective. The creation of solidarity. The glue that binds a society together. 

The genius of the Enlightenment in America was that it facilitated this solidarity. What was created was a ‘Hybrid-Enlightenment’, fusing the insights of French and British intellectuals in a context deeply influenced by the faith of religious dissenters, with the Puritans chief among them. The blending of the secular and faith insights from the Enlightenment was what provided its robust inclusivity and durability. For Hunter, this proved key because: 

“In the end, the hybrid-Enlightenment in America was a broad enough and opaque enough amalgamation to encompass substantial diversity and the tensions that diversity implied.” 

This opacity enabled different groups to see themselves in the enterprise and gave wider American society an ability to absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions. A commitment to Enlightenment rationality also then provided the tools whereby differences could be ‘worked through’ in reasoned debate. Thus, the culture was a living thing, growing, evolving and developing. All the time maintaining the wider solidarity, the ‘buy-in’ from the different communities and constituencies that comprise America. 

Opacity also meant that tensions and contradictions were part and parcel of the endeavour from the start. There may have been a promise of freedom, equality and universal justice for all, yet historically these have been denied to large tracts of the American population. But still the centre held, and solidarity was maintained. As Abraham Lincoln presciently reflected in his Second Inaugural Address, given on March 4 1865, shortly before his assassination and the end of the Civil War: 

“[We] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. … [Yet] the prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.” 

The problem today, as Hunter discerns it, is that the elements of the hybrid-Enlightenment are unravelling.  He sees a number of contributory causes to this escalating collapse.  

Right at the centre is an amoral, materialistic and individualistic neoliberalism which reduces everything to economics and the market. This is deeply corrosive of community and solidarity.  

Then there is the fruit of postmodern scepticism that has filtered down from the intellectuals into the general population. Truth is deconstructed, experts are distrusted and misinformation, disinformation and fake news abound. 

Widespread immigration also plays a part. It intensifies American pluralism and brings into the country those who are unfamiliar with the legacy of the hybrid-Enlightenment and for whom the national mythos of America is either strange or incomprehensible. Far from being taken for granted, their worldview does not fit. 

The growth of identity politics further complicates the unravelling. Solidarity, rather than being found in the national vision, is achieved by defining ‘us’ over and against ‘them’. It doesn’t foster cohesion, it seeds division. Grievance and hurt issue in rage, the unchallengeable moral authority of ‘my personal experience!’ As with Nietzsche, this acts as a narcotic against the hurt, an anaesthetic for the pain.  

Of course, identity politics has no room for reasoned debate and mutual resolution. All that matters is the outcome of the zero-sum game where the justice of my position is both acknowledged and acted upon, and you lose. Whether that identity falls on the political right or left, it doesn’t matter. Family, sexuality, public education, the news media, the arts, the law, electoral politics, you name the issue the game play is the same. 

Solidarity always involves drawing boundaries. Even the hybrid-Enlightenment drew the line between what was acceptable and what was unacceptable. Who was a part of us, and who was not. Without boundaries there is no identity. It is just that now, identity politics require the boundaries to be much more tightly drawn. “What kind of American are you?” 

In all of this, America’s cultural resources for ‘working through’ these issues have been seriously depleted as the hybrid-Enlightenment has unravelled. Into the void, observes Hunter, a form of cultural nihilism slips in. It is far from being all-pervasive, and he maintains that few Americans are nihilists. Yet as a cultural reality he sees it in the prevailing tendencies towards ‘epistemological failure’, ‘ethical incoherence’ and ‘existential despair’. Then, deriving from these he adds a fourth, ‘political annihilation’ and the will to obliterate everything that obstructs acquiring power by destroying enemies completely. 

Does it all seem rather depressing? 

Hunter admits that he has neither proposals nor a plan to address the crisis he so eloquently describes and accounts for. Yet he concludes: 

“… truth be told, I myself am very hopeful – not because I don’t see the seriousness of the problem and its dangerous implications, but because I believe that the times are full of real opportunity if one has the eyes to see them. Sadly, my eyesight is not very good. … [but] without real images of a better world, without myths of a completion of the past in the future, without a world ordered towards goodness, truth, and beauty … We become something like Nietzsche’s ‘last men’.” 

I’m grateful to Hunter. I think I understand my American friends, their country and their present challenges better for his insights. As for the possibility of a civil war, he thinks it’s unlikely as the ‘red and blue’ are too intermingled and economically interdependent across the country. In the meantime, political violence will continue to be a very real threat. 

As for the future he hopes for, it requires a paradigm shift to imagine and articulate a new vision of public life. It needs the cultural resources of a reconstituted humanism, drawing on the rich insights available in a genuinely pluralist society. Resources that embrace the faith wisdom of exemplars like Martin Luther King, Mohandas Ghandi and Thích Nhất Hạnh. Resources that include a retrieval of the fundamental principle of forgiveness. Without the realism to accept that none of us are perfect, we’ll never be able to live together. As the influential political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition (1958): 

“Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.” 

Arendt’s insight is altogether more telling when seen in the light of her experience as a German Jew under the Nazis. And if forgiveness is too high a bar, at the very least we have to somehow learn to let things go and move on. 

Hunter is under no illusions, such a paradigm shift remains a long haul away.  

But he is hopeful.