Monbiot: Chasing “the center” is hopeless politics

George Monbiot writes:

... To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds [to win the 2020 general election] by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.

As the social philosopher Karl Polanyi pointed out towards the end of the second world war, when politics offers little choice and little prospect of solving their problems, people seek extreme solutions. Labour’s inability to provide a loud and proud alternative to Conservative policies explains why so much of its base switched to Ukip at the last election. Corbyn’s political clarity explains why the same people are flocking back to him.

Are they returning because he has tailored his policies to appeal to the hard right? Certainly not. They are returning because he stands for something, something that could help them, something that was not devised by a row of spadbot mannikins in suits, consulting their clipboards on Douglas Alexander’s sofa.

Nothing was more politically inept than Labour’s attempt before the election to win back Ukip supporters by hardening its stance on immigration. Why vote for the echo when you can vote for the shout? What is attractive about a party prepared to abandon its core values for the prospect of electoral gain? What is inspiring about a party that grovels, offering itself as a political doormat for any powerful interest or passing fad to wipe its feet on?

In an openDemocracy article, Ian Sinclair compares Labour’s attempts to stop Corbyn with those by the Tories in 1974-75 to stop Margaret Thatcher. Divisive, hated by the press, seen by her own party as an extremist, she was widely dismissed as unelectable. The Tory establishment, convinced that the party could win only from the centre, did everything it could to stop her. ...

The Labour mainstream likes to pretend that Blair’s only breach of faith was the Iraq war. The marketisation of the NHS, the private finance initiative, the criminalisation of peaceful protest, collusion in the kidnap and torture of dissidents from other nations, the collapse of social housing – I could fill this page with a list of such capitulations to greed and tyranny. Blair’s purges, stripping all but courtiers from the lists of potential candidates, explain why the party now struggles to find anyone under 50 who looks like a leader.

The capitulations continued under Ed Miliband, who allowed the Conservative obsession with the deficit and austerity to frame Labour politics. As Paul Krugman explains, austerity is a con that does nothing but harm to the wealth of this nation. It has been discredited everywhere else: only in Britain do we cling to the myth. Yet Miliband walked willingly into the trap. His manifesto promised to “cut the deficit every year” and to adopt such cruel Tory policies as the household benefits cap.

You can choose, if you wish, to believe that this clapped-out, alienating politics – compounded by such gobsmacking acts of cowardice as the failure to oppose the welfare bill – can capture the mood of the nation, reverse Labour’s decline and secure an extra hundred seats. But please stop calling yourself a realist.

Rebuilding a political movement means espousing what is desirable, then finding ways to make it feasible. The hopeless realists propose the opposite. They assemble a threadbare list of policies they consider feasible, then seek to persuade us that this package is desirable. If they retain core values, they’ve become so muddled by tacking and triangulation as to be almost indecipherable.

... the longer Labour keeps repeating the same mistakes – reinforcing the values it should be contesting – the further to the right it will push the nation, and the more remote its chances of election will become. The task is to rebuild the party’s values, reclaim the democratic debate, pull the centre back towards the left and change ... the soul of the nation.

Because Labour’s immediate prospects are so remote, regardless of who wins this contest, the successful candidate is likely to be a caretaker, a curator of the future. His or her task must be to breathe life back into politics, to recharge democracy with choice, to ignite the hope that will make Labour electable again. Only one candidate proposes to do that.

CUIR: put, send

Cuirim, vl. cur (smt. cuir), v. tr. and intr., I put, place, fix, set; plant, sow, bury; shed; send; cause or arrange (to have done, get done); chuir sé a chor i dtalamh, he got a good foothold, took up a firm attitude; cuirfir-se Tadhg, you will outlive (lit. bury) T.; c. péire bróg dá ndéanamh dam féin, I get a pair of boots made for myself: c. biadh dá thabhairt dhó, I have him served with food; chireas mo bhláth, I have wasted my substance; is olc a chireas mo chlann inghean (mo chuid airgid), I have ill-disposed of my daughters (my money); chuiris é! well placed (or put), often iron.; with nouns: c fuil, allus, fearthainn, sneachta, sioc, cloichshneachta, cfudh, faobhar, lorg, boladh, geall, cath, a n-ár, I bleed, perspire, rain, snow, freeze, hail, shoe a horse, sharpen, track, scent, wager, do battle, slaughter them; c. bun, I inquire, find out (Con.) with adverbs: c. a-bhaile, amach, suas, síos, isteach, I send or drive home (as an argument), eject or put forth, set up or build, pull down (al. anuas acc. to context) or set down (in writing or argument) or lay down (as law) I stave or push in or insert; c. suas baidhte, I bait a line; c. suas le, I tolerate; c. suas ar, I prevent; c. duine amach ar chluiche, I defeat a person at a game (Con.); with prepositions: c. le, I send by, charge or impute to, unite, add to, exaggerate, prop up, co-operate with, contend with, place against, abandon to, send to (a trade or profession); c. le dochtúireacht é, I send him to become a doctor; c. taca le, I place a prop against; c. cúl le, I contradict, turn my back on; ní ’gá chur leis é, not charging him with it; with ar: c. ar, I impose as an injunction on, ascribe to, accost, challenge, play on, overbear, interrupt, annoy (gnly., c. isteach ar); c. ort! I challenge you! leigim leat! done! cuireann mo chroidhe orm, my heart gives me trouble; with ar and noun: c. ar bun, siubhal, snámh, cíos, cáirde, ath-lá, crith, neamh-nídh, aghaidh, &c., &c., I establish, set going, launch, let (a house), postpone, id., set atremble, abolish, forward, etc., etc.: with noun and ar: c. (an) dligheadh, lorg, fios, comaoin, eagla, misneach, éagcóir, leigheas, cathughadh, moill, geara, &c., &c., ar, I proceed against, send in search of send for, benefit or oblige, fighten, encourage, wrong, cure or treat, challenge or tempt, delay, enjoin upon, etc. etc.; chuir sé nósa agus reachta agus athchóirighthe ar na h-easbhadhaibh, he drew up customs, laws, and reformations to meet these needs; with de, noun and ar: c. d’fhiachaibh, d’ualach, d’oibliogáid, de chúram, de bhreith, de choingheall, &rl., ar, I order, impose as a duty, as an obligation, as a charge, as a judgment or forfeit, condtion on, etc.; with iar (ar), c. ar gchúl, I put back, postpone, neutralise, reduce (as an abscess); with thar, c. tharm, I pass from, ignore, put round me, put over me (of time); cuir do lámh tharm, embrace me; with ó, c. uaim, I put away, give up; chuir sé litir uaidh, he sent a letter; bhi sé ag cur uaidh, he was in a state of terror, relaxing, exuding; c. ó oidhreacht, I disinherit; c. ó chóta, I unfrock; c. ó chion, I seriously injure; c. ó rath, id.; c. ó theist, I put out of court, discredit (F. F.); with ag: c. agam, I emit, utter; chuireadh sé agam, he used to attack me (Con.); chuir sé an madradh agam, he set the dog at me; chuir sé an gadhar liom, id.; with noun: c. liúgh, fead, geoin, scread, &rl, agam, I emit a shout, whistle, yell, scream, etc.; c. as ionad, áit, as a thalamh é, ag a riocht é, I dislocate, displace, evict him, distort it; ná bí ag cur ag dam, do not be upsetting me; cad tá ag cur ag dó? what ails him? with i and noun: c. i n-iúl (umhail), i dtuiscint (dtuigsint) do, I inform; c. i gcéill do, id., al. I pretend to; c. i gcár, I take as an instance; c. igcóir, i bhfearas, i ngléas, i n-oireamhaint, i bhfuirm &rl., I make ready, gear up, etc.; c. i leith, i dtairce, i n-iongantas, i bhfeidhm, i gcontabhairt, i n-éag, i ngníomh, I impute to, store up, wonder at, use or execute (as a decree, etc.), doubt or endanger, extinguish, relinquish (as a habit) practise, carry out; c. i suim, I take notice of; c. i neamh-shuim, I slight, take no notice of; c. i ndímbrígh, id.; c. grian i slánadh fá, I call the sun to witness regarding; c. i bhfaoistin, I tell in confession, confess; c. i gceann, I add to; with noun and i: c. spéis (suim) dúil, cearbh, sonnradh, contabhairt, i, &rl., I take interest in, desire, covet, notice, doubt, etc.; with tré, I mix: c. ola tríd, I mix oil with it; c. tré chéile iad, I confuse or mix them; with fá, I incite; c. fúm, I settle down, squat; with fá and noun, I bind, restrain, etc.; c. fá gheasaibh iad, I bind them (with taboos); c. fá smacht iad, I reduce them to discipline; c. duine fá choimirce, I place one nder the protection of; c. fá deara dhó, I compel or order him; c. fá bhreitheamhnas aithrighe, I enjoin as a penance upon; with noun and fá, I apply (as binding, grease, ointment, motion) to:; with de: c. díom, I disrobe, doff, shed, cease using, hearing, etc., pressed, pass my days; c. an cnoc aníos díom, I go up the hill; cionnas taoi ag cur díot? how are you geting on? cuir díot! give over! be off! bí ag cur díot! be off! bhí sé ag cur alluis um, he was sweating profusely; with um: c umam, I don; cuir umat! dress! c. suas de, I give up or cease; with roimh: c. sómhamI propose for myself, decide, underake, put in front of myself; with chum, I set about: ch. chum bóthair, I set off; c. chum siubhail, I send off or dimsiss; c. chum cíosa, I set at a rent; c. chugham, I appropriate, put in my breast, pocket, etc.; c. siopa chugham, I open a shop; c. buidheach, I please, make thankful (poet.).

—Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla, 1927, by Patrick Dinneen

Also see entry at: Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, 1977, by Niall Ó Dónaill, as well as: cuir amach, cuir aníos, cuir anuas, cuir ar, cuir as, cuir chuig, cuir de, cuir do, cuir faoi, cuir i, cuir isteach, cuir le, cuir ó, cuir roimh, cuir siar, cuir síos, cuir suas, cuir thar, cuir thart, cuir trí, and cuir um.

See also: Cuir & Bain.

Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington’s Statement: Her Husband’s Last Hours

The following statement was published by Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington respecting the arrest and shooting of her husband.

I last saw my husband on Tuesday evening, April 25, between 5.15 and 5.30 at Westmoreland Chambers. He had called a meeting there to stop looting (see enclosed poster), and was waiting to see if any people would attend same. On that and the previous day he had been active personally, with help from bystanders, at the same work, and had succeeded in stopping some looting by personal efforts and appeals. All this, there is independent evidence to testify. On Monday afternoon outside Dublin Castle an officer was reported bleeding to death in the street, and, the crowd being afraid, owing to the firing, to go to his assistance, my husband himself went, at imminent danger to his life, to drag away the wounded man to a place of safety, to find, however, that by that time the body had been rescued by some soldiers, there being left merely a pool of blood. This incident can also be corroborated.

He stated to me that if none turned up to help on Tuesday at the meeting to prevent looting that he would come home as usual to his house at 11 Grosvenor place. He was afterwards seen by several friends (whose testimony I possess) going home about 6.30. In the neighbourhood of Portobello Bridge he was arrested, unarmed and unresisting. He never carried or possessed any arm of any description, being, as is well known, a pacifist and opposed to the use of physical force.

He was conducted in military custody to Portobello Barracks, wnere he was shot without trial on that night or early on the following morning. No priest was summoned to attend him, no notification was, or has since been, given to me (his wife) or to his family of his death, and no message written before his death has been allowed to reach me.

Repeated inquiries at the barracks and elsewhere have been met with refusal to answer, and when my sisters, Mrs. Kettle and Mrs. Culhane, called at Portobello Barracks on Thursday, April 27, to inquire they were put under temporary arrest.

HOUSE SURROUNDED.

On Friday night, April 28, a large military force surrounded my husband’s house at 11 Grosvenor place, fired without warning on the windows in front, which they burst through without waiting for the door to be opened. They put myself, my son, aged seven, to whom they shouted “Hands up!” and my maid (the sole occupants) under arrest, and remained in the house for over three hours. They found no ammunition of any kind, but burst locks, etc., and took away with them a large number of documents, newspapers, letters, and books, as well as various persona! property, such as linen, tablecloths, trunks, photograph of Mr. Keir Hardie and M. Davitt, a picture of the Kilmainham prisoners of 1882, a green flag, etc. Most of the books taken were German and Irish books (grammars, school texts, etc.) relating to my work as teacher of modern languages and to my husband’s journalistic work. One officer remarked that this was not a “very exciting search.”

On Monday, May 1, during my absence, the soldiers again entered the house and searched it, and took prisoner Margaret Farrelly (the only then occupant), a temporary maid whom I had engaged, my former maid having teen too terrified to stay. She was detained in custody until the following Saturday (May 6) in the Rathmines Police Station, and kept there in custody without the knowledge of her friends, without any charge being made against her. Finally, the authorities in Dublin Castle allowed her to be released, but without apology or compensation.

I demand the fullest inquiry into all the above circumstances, and desire, as my husband’s next-of-kin, to be legally represented at any inquiry that may take place.

(Signed) Hanna Sheehy Skeffington.
May 9. 1916.

PS.—Since the above was written my husband’s body was dug up from Portobello Barracks and transferred to Glasnevin Cemetery, again without my knowledge.

The following are details of his last hours that have reached me through various private sources:

He refused to be blindfolded, and met death with a smile on his lips, saying before he died that the authorities would find out after his death what a mistake they made. He put his hand to his eyes, and the bullet passed through his hand to his brain.

THE POSTER.

The poster referred to above and distributed in the city on Tuesday, April 25, when the police were cleared off the streets, is as follows:—

“When there are no regular police in the streets it becomes the duty of the citizens to police the streets themselves to prevent such spasmodic looting as has taken place.

“Civilians (both men and women) who are willing to co-operate to this end are asked to attend at Westmoreland Chambers (over Eden Bros.) at five o’clock on this (Tuesday) afternoon.

“Francis Sheehy Skeffington.”

—Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, 1917, Weekly Irish Times
(The report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry, Four Courts, Dublin, Wednesday, 23rd August, to Thursday, 31st August, 1916, into the circumstances connected with the shooting of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Thomas Dickson, and Patrick J. Maclntyre, on 25th April, 1916, at Portobello Barracks, is reproduced in pages 206-224 of the Handbook.)

Speech at the Grave of O’Donovan Rossa

Pádraig Pearse, August 1, 1915

It has been thought right, before we turn away from this place in which we have laid the mortal remains of O’Donovan Rossa that one among us should, in the name of all, speak the praise of that valiant man, and endeavour to formulate the thought and the hope that are in us as we stand around his grave. And if there is anything that makes it fitting that I rather than another, I rather than one of the greyhaired men who were young with him and shared in his labour and in his suffering, should speak here, it is perhaps that I may be taken as speaking on behalf of a new generation that has been re-baptised in the Fenian faith and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme.

I propose to you then that, here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows; that, here by the grave of this unconquered and unconquerable man, we ask of God, each one for himself, such unshakable purpose, such high and gallant courage, such unbreakable strength of soul as belonged to O’Donovan Rossa. Deliberately here we avow ourselves, as he avowed himself in the dock, Irishmen of one allegiance only. We of the Irish volunteers and you others who are associated with us in today’s task and duty are bound together and must stand together henceforth in brotherly union for the achievement of the freedom of Ireland.

And we know only one definition of freedom: it is Tone’s definition, it is Mitchel’s definition, it is Rossa’s definition. Let no man blaspheme the cause that the dead generations of Ireland served by giving it any other name or definition than their name and their definition.

We stand at Rossa’s grave not in sadness but rather in exaltation of spirit that it has been given to us to come thus into so close a communion with that brave and splendid Gael. Splendid and holy causes are served by men who are themselves splendid and holy. O’Donovan Rossa was splendid in the proud manhood of him, splendid in the heroic grace of him, splendid in the Gaelic strength and clarity and truth of him. All that splendour and pride and strength was compatible with a humility and a simplicity of devotion to Ireland, to all that was olden and beautiful and Gaelic in Ireland, the holiness and simplicity of patriotism of a Michael O’Cleary or of an Eoghan O’Growney.

The clear true eyes of this man almost alone in his day visioned Ireland as we of today would surely have her: not free merely, but Gaelic as well; not Gaelic merely, but free as well.

In a closer spiritual communion with him now than ever before or perhaps ever again, in spiritual communion with those of his day, living and dead, who suffered with him in English prisons, in communion of spirit too with our own dear comrades who suffer in English prisons today, and speaking on their behalf as well as on our own. we pledge to Ireland our love, and we pledge to English rule in Ireland our hate.

This is a place of peace, sacred to the dead, where men should speak with all charity and with all restraint, but I hold it a Christian thing, as O’Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression; and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them. Our foes are strong and wise and wary; but, strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation. And the seeds sown by the young men of ’65 and ’67 are coming to their miraculous ripening today.

Rulers and Defenders of Realms had need to be wary if they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death: and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and, while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

James Joyce Encounters Before and With the 1916 Uprising in Ireland

In Ulysses, the characters of Mr Deasy and the citizen are extreme representations of opposite obsolete political views. The uprising of Easter Week 1916 was directed by men and women very much in the 20th century. (Ulysses was written from 1914 to 1922, published before the civil war began; Finnegans Wake was written from 1922 to 1939, published after the establishment of the Free State and steps toward the modern Republic.)

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Mr Deasy drives away Stephen Dedalus, who was leaving anyway (end of chapter 2, Ulysses):

He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees, hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield. The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate; toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.

—Mr Dedalus!

Running after me. No more letters, I hope.

—Just one moment.

—Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.

Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.

—I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

—Why, sir, Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

—Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air.

—She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That's why.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

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The citizen drives away Leopold Bloom, who was leaving anyway (end of chapter 12, Ulysses):

Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.

—By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.

—Stop! stop! says Joe.

[...]

Gob, the devil wouldn’t stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he shouting like a stuck pig, as good as any bloody play, in the Queen’s royal theatre.

—Where is he till I murder him?

And Ned and J. G. paralysed with the laughing.

—Bloody wars, says I, I’ll be in for the last gospel.

But as luck would have it the jarvey got the nag’s head round the other way and off with him.

—Hold on, citizen, says Joe. Stop!

Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the sun was in his eyes or he’d have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old mongrel after the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and laughing and the old tinbox clattering along the street.

[...]

—Did I kill him, says he, or what?

And he shouting to the bloody dog:

—After him, Garry! After him, boy!

And the last we saw was the bloody car rounding the corner and old sheepsface on it gesticulating and the bloody mongrel after it with his lugs back for all he was bloody well worth to tear him limb from limb. Hundred to five! Jesus, he took the value of it out of him, I promise you.

When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling : Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry : Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.

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Archdruid Berkeley rages against Saint Patrick, who, with the magic of the triune shamrock, transforms shit into the sun of a new day for Ireland (in last chapter (17) of Finnegans Wake):

That was thing, bygotter, the thing, bogcotton, the very thing, begad! Even to uptoputty Bilkilly-Belkelly-Balkally. Who was for shouting down the shatton on the lamp of Jeeshees. Sweating on to stonker and throw his seven. As he shuck his thumping fore features apt the hoyhop of His Ards.

Thud.

Good safe firelamp! hailed the heliots. Goldselforelump! Halled they. Awed. Where thereon the skyfold high, trampatrampatramp. Adie. Per ye comdoom doominoom noonstroom. Yeasome priestomes. Fullyhum toowhoom.

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Patrick Pearse on education (“The Murder Machine”, 1913):

It seems to me that there has been nothing nobler in the history of education than this development of the old Irish plan of fosterage under a Christian rule, when to the pagan ideals of strength and truth there were added the Christian ideals of love and humility. And this, remember, was not the education system of an aristocracy, but the education system of a people. It was more democratic than any education system in the world to-day. Our very divisions into primary, secondary, and university crystallise a snobbishness partly intellectual and partly social.

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Proclamation of the Irish Republic (Easter Monday, 1916, assumed to be mostly written by Patrick Pearse)

In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the faces of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.

... the Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its reolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.

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The sun of a new day is proclaimed, to awaken Dublin (start of last chapter of Finnegans Wake):

Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!

Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array! Surrection! Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world. O rally, O rally, O rally! Phlenxty, O rally! ... Sonne feine, somme feehn avaunt! ...

The eversower of the seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the domnatory of Defmut after the night of the carrying of the word of Nuahs and the night of making Mehs to cuddle up in a coddlepot, Pu Nuseht, lord of risings in the yonderworld of Ntamplin, tohp triumphant, speaketh.

... Arcthuris comeing! ... As of yours. We annew. ... A flasch and, rasch, it shall come to pasch, as hearth by hearth leaps live. ... It's a long long ray to Newirgland's premier. ...

Oyes! Oyeses! Oyesesyeses! The primace of the Gaulls, protonotorious, I yam as I yam, mitrogenerand in the free state on the air, is now aboil to blow a Gael warning. Inoperation Eyrlands Eyot, Meganesia, Habitant and the onebut thousand insels, Western and Osthern Approaches.

... Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing.

Muta: So that when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on the diversity we shall have acquired the instinct of combat and when we shall have acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement?

Juva: By the light of the bright reason which daysends to us from the high.

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The river Liffey flows out past Dublin rising (end of Finnegans Wake):

Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long! ... You were pleased as Punch, recitating war exploits and pearse orations to them jackeen gapers. ... It’s Phoenix, dear. And the flame is, hear! ... Come! Step out of your shell! Hold up you free fing! ... You invoiced him last Eatster so he ought to give us hockockles and everything. Every letter is hard but yours sure is the hardest crux ever. ... But once done, dealt and delivered, tattat, you’re on the map. ... So content me now. Lss. Unbuild and be buildn our bankaloan cottage there and we’ll cohabit respectable. ... For the loves of sinfintins! ... Why I’m all these years within years in soffran, allbeleaved. To hide away the tear, the parted. It’s thinking of all. The brave that gave their. The fair that wore. All them that’s gunne. I’ll begin again in a jiffey. The nik of a nad. How glad you’ll be I waked you! my! How well you’ll feel! For ever after. First we turn by the vagurin here and then it’s gooder. So side by side, turn agate, weddingtown, laud men of Londub! I only hope whole the heavens sees us. ... Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given!

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James Connolly, Workers’ Republic, 8 April 1916:

In these days of doubt, despair, and resurgent hope we fling our banner to the breeze, the flag of our fathers, the symbol of our national redemption, the sunburst shining over an Ireland re-born.

Why the Insurrection Happened

From The Insurrection in Dublin, by James Stephens, 1916:

It happened because the leader of the Irish Party misrepresented his people in the English House of Parliament. On the day of the declaration of war between England and Germany he took the Irish case, weighty with eight centuries of history and tradition, and he threw it out of the window. He pledged Ireland to a particular course of action, and he had no authority to give this pledge and he had no guarantee that it would be met. The ramshackle intelligence of his party and his own emotional nature betrayed him and us and England. He swore Ireland to loyalty as if he had Ireland in his pocket, and could answer for her. Ireland has never been disloyal to England, not even at this epoch, because she has never been loyal to England, and the profession of her National faith has been unwavering, has been known to every English person alive, and has been clamant to all the world beside.

Is it that he wanted to be cheered? He could very easily have stated Ireland’s case truthfully, and have proclaimed a benevolent neutrality (if he cared to use the grandiloquent words) on the part of this country. He would have gotten his cheers, he would in a few months have gotten Home Rule in return for Irish soldiers. He would have received politically whatever England could have safely given him. But, alas, these carefulnesses did not chime with his emotional moment. They were not magnificent enough for one who felt that he was talking not to Ireland or to England, but to the whole gaping and eager earth, and so he pledged his country’s credit so deeply that he did not leave her even one National rag to cover herself with.

After a lie truth bursts out, and it is no longer the radiant and serene goddess knew or hoped for – it is a disease, it is a moral syphilis and will ravage until the body in which it can dwell has been purged. Mr. Redmond told the lie and he is answerable to England for the violence she had to be guilty of, and to Ireland for the desolation to which we have had to submit. Without his lie there had been no Insurrection; without it there had been at this moment, and for a year past, an end to the “Irish question.” Ireland must in ages gone have been guilty of abominable crimes or she could not at this juncture have been afflicted with a John Redmond.

He is the immediate cause of this our latest Insurrection – the word is big, much too big for the deed, and we should call it row, or riot, or squabble, in order to draw the fact down to its dimensions, but the ultimate blame for the trouble between the two countries does not fall against Ireland.

The fault lies with England, and in these days while an effort is being made (interrupted, it is true, by cannon) to found a better understanding between the two nations it is well that England should recognize what she has done to Ireland, and should try at least to atone for it. The situation can be explained almost in a phrase. We are a little country and you, a huge country, have persistently beaten us. We are a poor country and you, the richest country in the world, have persistently robbed us. That is the historical fact, and whatever national or political necessities are opposed in reply, it is true that you have never given Ireland any reason to love you, and you cannot claim her affection without hypocrisy or stupidity.

You think our people can only be tenacious in hate – it is a lie. Our historical memory is truly tenacious, but during the long and miserable tale of our relations you have never given us one generosity to remember you by, and you must not claim our affection or our devotion until you are worthy of them. We are a good people; almost we are the only Christian people left in the world, nor has any nation shown such forbearance towards their persecutor as we have always shown to you. No nation has forgiven its enemies as we have forgiven you, time after time down the miserable generations, the continuity of forgiveness only equalled by the continuity of your ill-treatment. Between our two countries you have kept and protected a screen of traders and politicians who are just as truly your enemies as they are ours. In the end they will do most harm to you for we are by this vaccinated against misery but you are not, and the “loyalists” who sell their own country for a shilling will sell another country for a penny when the opportunity comes and safety with it.

Meanwhile do not always hasten your presents to us out of a gun. You have done it so often that your guns begin to bore us, and you have now an opportunity which may never occur again to make us your friends. There is no bitterness in Ireland against you on account of this war, and the lack of ill-feeling amongst us is entirely due to the more than admirable behaviour of the soldiers whom you sent over here. A peace that will last for ever can be made with Ireland if you wish to make it, but you must take her hand at once, for in a few months’ time she will not open it to you; the old, bad relations will re-commence, the rancor will be born and grow, and another memory will be stored away in Ireland’s capacious and retentive brain.

CAITH: wear, wear out, consume, use up, spend, throw …

From Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla, 1927, by Patrick Dinneen:

Caithim, -theamh, caitheachtain, caith (Inishm.). p.a. caithte, v. tr. and intr., I pass (as a day, my life, a place, etc.), practice, make a custom of; use (as tobacco, etc.); wear (as clothes, etc.); carry (as a stick, etc.); consume, waste, wear away; spend; eat, drink; take part in (as a festival, etc.); I shed; I throw, hurl fling, cast; shoot (U., Con.); ó chaith an long an t-oileán, as soon as the ship cleared the island (Aran); tá sé ag caitheamh na hochtmhadh bliadhna, he is in his eighth year; c. mé féir suas ar, I throw myself on the mercy of; c. Corp Chríost, I receive Holy Communion (F. F.); c. as mo cheann, I give up thinking about; c. tharam, I throw away, give up (Conem.); c. uaim (M.), id.; caith tharad an caoineadh, give up lamenting; c. le, I behave towards (M. B.); mar caitheadh leo, how they were treated (id.); chaith an obair bliadhain ar bun (ar siubhal, &c.), the work lasted a year (Con. M. B., etc.); c. éadach, I wear clothes; c. biadh, I take food; c. mo shaoghal, lá, aimsear, I pass my life, a day, time, etc.; c. airgead, I spend money; I give premature or still-born birth to; c. gamhain, I give birth to a still-born calf; chaith sí leanbh mic, she gave birth to a still-born boy; c. amach, I throw out, evict; I throw out of the mouth; c. suas, I throw up, I vomit, al. I estimate, tot up, calculate; caithim cloch, &c., le, I hurl a stone, etc., at; caithimís uainn é, let us change the subject of conversation (see under cleamhnas); nár chathair do ghol, may you never cease crying; c. ciall le, I deal sensibly with; c. tuairimí, I advance opinions, guesses, etc.; c., id.; c. focal, cainnt, &c., I speak a word, a speech, etc.; I must, I am obliged to; c. bheith im shuidhe go moch, I am obliged habitually to be up early (more common in future than in present); caithfidh sé gur, &c., it must be that, etc. (Con.).

From Foclóir Scoile, 1998, An Gúm:

caith kah vt & i wear (out), consume, spend; throw, cast, shoot, píopa a chaitheamh to smoke a pipe, tá na blianta á gcaitheamh the years are passing, chaith sibh go maith liom you entertained me well, bhí sí ag ~eamh i ndiaidh an linbh she was pining for the child, léim a chaitheamh to take a jump, ag ~eamh ó thuaidh drifting north, tá an aíll ag ~eamh amach the cliff is overhanging, ag ~eamh anuas ar dhuine belittling a person, ~fidh mé imeach I must go

Also see entry at: Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, 1977, by Niall Ó Dónaill

Constans de Markievics against the ‘treaty’

Dáil Eireann Debate on the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, signed in London on the 6th December 1921, ratified by the Dáil on the 7th January 1922, 64-57: Sessions 14th December 1921 to 10th January 1922.

Tuesday, the 3rd January, 1922:

MADAME MARKIEVICZ: […] And what do the Southern Unionists stand for? You will all allow they stand for two things. First and foremost as the people who, in Southern Ireland, have been the English garrison against Ireland and the rights of Ireland. But in Ireland they stand for something bigger still and worse, something more malignant; for that class of capitalists who have been more crushing, cruel and grinding on the people of the nation than any class of capitalists of whom I ever read in any other country, while the people were dying on the roadsides. They are the people who have combined together against the workers of Ireland, who have used the English soldiers, the English police, and every institution in the country to ruin the farmer, and more especially the small farmer, and to send the people of Ireland to drift in the emigrant ships and to die of horrible disease or to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic. And these anti-Irish Irishmen are to be given some select way of entering this House, some select privileges – privileges that they have earned by their cruelty to the Irish people and to the working classes of Ireland, and not only that, but they are to be consulted as to how the Upper House is to be constituted. As a Republican who means that the Republic means Government by the consent of the people [hear, hear]. I object to any Government of that sort whereby a privileged number of classes established here by British rule are to be given a say – to this small minority of traitors and oppressors – in the form of an Upper Chamber as against all, I might say, modern ideas of common sense, of the people who wish to build up a prosperous, contented nation. But looking as I do for the prosperity of the many, for the happiness and content of the workers, for what I stand, James Connolly’s ideal of a Workers’ Republic—

A DEPUTY: Soviet Republic.

MADAME MARKIEVICZ: —co-operative commonwealth, these men who have opposed everything are to be elected and upheld by our plenipotentiaries; and I suppose they are to be the Free State, or the Cheap State Army, or whatever selection these men are, to be set up to uphold English interests in Ireland, to uphold the capitalists’ interests in Ireland, to block every ideal that the nation may wish to formulate; to block the teaching of Irish, to block the education of the poorer classes; to block, in fact, every bit of progress that every man and woman in Ireland to-day amongst working people desire to see put into force. That is one of the biggest blots on this Treaty; this deliberate attempt to set up a privileged class in this, what they call a Free State, that is not free. I would like the people here who represent the workers to take that into consideration – to say to themselves what can the working people expect in an Ireland that is being run by men who, at the time of the Treaty, are willing to guarantee this sort of privilege to a class that every thinking man and woman in Ireland despises.

[…]

Now, personally, I being an honourable woman, would sooner die than give a declaration of fidelity to King George or the British Empire. I saw a picture the other day of India, Ireland and Egypt fighting England, and Ireland crawling out with her hands up. Do you like that? I don’t. Now, if we pledge ourselves to this oath we pledge our allegiance to this thing, whether you call it Empire or Commonwealth of Nations, that is treading down the people of Egypt and of India. And in Ireland this Treaty, as they call it, mar dheadh, that is to be ratified by a Home Rule Bill, binds us to stand by and enter no protest while England crushes Egypt and India. And mind you, England wants peace in Ireland to bring her troops over to India and Egypt. She wants the Republican Army to be turned into a Free State Army, and mind, the army is centred in the King or the representative of the King. He is the head of the army. The army is to hold itself faithful to the Commonwealth of Nations while the Commonwealth sends its Black-and-Tans to India. Of course you may want to send the Black-and-Tans out of this country. Now mind you, there are people in Ireland who were not afraid to face them before, and I believe would not be afraid to face them again. You are here labouring under a mistake if you believe that England, for the first time in her life, is treating you honourably. Now I believe, and we are against the Treaty believing, that England is being more dishonourable and acting in a cleverer way than she ever did before, because I believe we never sent cleverer men over than we sent this time, yet they have been tricked. Now you all know me, you know that my people came over here in Henry VIII.’s time, and by that bad black drop of English blood in me I know the English – that’s the truth. I say it is because of that black drop in me that I know the English personally better perhaps than the people who went over on the delegation. [Laughter].

A DEPUTY: Why didn’t you go over?

MADAME MARKIEVICZ: Why didn’t you send me? I tell you, don’t trust the English with gifts in their hands. That’s not original, someone said it before of the Greeks – but it is true. The English come to you to-day offering you great gifts; I tell you this, those gifts are not genuine. I tell you, you will come out of this a defeated nation. No one ever got the benefits of the promises the English made them. It seems absurd to talk to the Irish people about trusting the English, but you know how the O’Neills and the O’Donnells went over and always came back with the promises and guarantees that their lands would be left them and that their religion would not be touched. What is England’s record? It was self aggrandisement and Empire. You will notice how does she work – by a change of names. They subjugated Wales by giving them a Prince of Wales, and now they want to subjugate Ireland by a Free State Parliament and a Governor General at the head of it. I could tell you something about Governor-Generals and people of that sort. You can’t have a Governor-General without the Union Jack, and a suite, and general household and other sort of official running in a large way. The interests of England are the interests of the capitalistic class. Your Governor-General is the centre for your Southern Unionists, for whom Mr. Griffith has been so obliging. He is the centre from which the anti-Irish ideals will go through Ireland, and English ideals will come: love of luxury, love of wealth, love of competition, trample on your neighbours to get to the top, immorality and divorce laws of the English nation. All these things you will find centred in this Governor-General. I heard there was a suggestion – there was a brother of the King’s or the Queen’s suggested as Governor-General, and I heard also that this Lascelles was going to be Governor. I also heard that there is a suggestion that Princess Mary’s wedding is to be broken off, and that the Princess Mary is to be married to Michael Collins who will be appointed first Governor of our Saorstát na hEirennn. All these are mere nonsense. You will find that the English people, the rank and file of the common people will all take it that we are entering their Empire and that we are going to help them. All the people who are in favour of it here claim it to be a step towards Irish freedom, claim it to be nothing but allegiance to the Free State. Now what will the world think of it? What the world thinks of it is this: Ireland has long been held up to the scorn of the world through the British Press. According to that Press Ireland is a nation that lay down, that never protested. The people in other countries have scorned us. So Ireland can bear to be scorned again, even if she takes the oath that pledges her support to the Commonwealth of Nations. But I say, what do Irishmen think in their own hearts? Can any Irishman take that oath honourably and then go back and prepare to fight for an Irish Republic or even to work for the Republic? It is like a person going to get married plotting a divorce. I would make a Treaty with England once Ireland was free, and I would stand with President de Valera in this, that if Ireland were a free Republic I would welcome the King of England over here on a visit. But while Ireland is not free I remain a rebel unconverted and unconvertible. There is no word strong enough for it. I am pledged as a rebel, an unconvertible rebel, because I am pledged to the one thing – a free and independent Republic. Now we have been sneered at for being Republicans by even men who fought for the Republic. We have been told that we didn’t know what we meant. Now I know what I mean – a state run by the Irish people for the people. That means a Government that looks after the rights of the people before the rights of property. And I don’t wish under the Saorstát to anticipate that the directors of this and the capitalists’ interests are to be at the head of it. My idea is the Workers’ Republic for which Connolly died. And I say that that is one of the things that England wishes to prevent. She would sooner give us Home Rule than a democratic Republic. It is the capitalists’ interests in England and Ireland that are pushing this Treaty to block the march of the working people in England and Ireland. Now, we were offered a Treaty in the first place because England was in a tight place. She wanted her troops for more dirty work elsewhere. Because Dáil Eireann was too democratic, because her Law courts were too just, because the will of the people was being done, and justice was being done, and the well being of the people was considered, the whole people were behind us. You talk very glibly about England evacuating the country. Has anybody questioned that? How long did it take her to evacuate Egypt? What guarantee have we that England will do more than begin to evacuate Ireland directly the Treaty has been ratified? She will begin to evacuate, I have no doubt; she will send a certain number of troops to her other war fronts. Now there is one Deputy – not more than one, I hope – who charged that we rattled the bones of the dead. I must protest about the phrase of rattling the bones of our dead. Now I would like to ask where would Ireland stand without the noble dead? I would like to ask can any of you remember, as I can, the first time you read Robert Emmet’s speech from the dock? Yes, it is all very well for those who now talk Dominion Home Rule to try to be scornful of the phrases – voices of men from the grave, who call on us to die for the cause they died for. I don’t think it is fair to say what dead men might say if they had been here to-day. What I do think fair is to read the messages they left behind them, and to mould our lives with them. James Connolly said, the last time I heard him speak – he spoke to me and to others – a few phrases that very much sum up the situation to-day. It was just before Easter Week in 1916. We had heard the news that certain people had called off the Rising. One man wishing to excuse them, to exonerate them, said: ‘So and so does not care to take the responsibility of letting people go to their death when there is so little chance of victory’. ‘Oh’, said Connolly, ‘there is only one sort of responsibility I am afraid of and that is preventing the men and women of Ireland fighting and dying for Ireland if they are so minded’. That was almost the last word that was said to me by a man who died for Ireland, a man who was my Commandant, and I have always thought of that since, and I have always felt that was a message which I had to deliver to the people of Ireland. We hear a great deal of the renewal of warfare. I am of quite a pacific mind. I don’t like to kill. I don’t like death, but I am not afraid to die and, not being afraid to die myself, I don’t see why I should say that I should take it for granted that the Irish people were not as ready to die now in this year 1922, any more than they were afraid in the past. I fear dishonour; I don’t fear destiny and I feel at all events that death is preferable to dishonour, and sooner than see the people of Ireland take that oath meaning to build up your Republic on a lie, I would sooner say to the people of Ireland: ‘Stand by me and fight to the death’. I think that a real Treaty between a free Ireland and a free England – with Ireland standing as a free sovereign state – I believe it would be possible to get that now; but even if it were impossible, I myself would stand for what is noblest and what is truest. That is the thing that to me I can grasp in my nature. I have seen the stars, and I am not going to follow a flickering will-o’-the-wisp, and I am not going to follow any person juggling with constitutions and introducing petty tricky ways into this Republican movement which we built up – you and not I – because I have been in jail. It has been built up and are we now going back to this tricky Parliamentarianism, because I tell you this document is nothing else. Pierce Beasley gave us to understand that this is the beginning of something great and that Ireland is struggling to be born. I say that the new Ireland was born in Easter Week, 1916, that Ireland is not struggling to be born. I say that the Irish language has begun to grow, that we are pushing it in the schools, and I don’t see that giving up our rights, that going into the British Empire is going to help. In any case the thing is not what you might call a practical thing. It won’t help our commerce, but it is not that; we are idealists believing in and loving Ireland, and I believe that Ireland held by the Black-and-Tans did more for Ireland than Ireland held by Parliamentarianism – the road that meant commercial success for those who took it and, meaning other things, meant prestige for those who took it. But there is the other stony road that leads to ultimate freedom and the regeneration of Ireland; the road that so many of our heroes walked and I, for one will stand on the road with Terence MacSwiney and Kevin Barry and the men of Easter Week. I know the brave soldiers of Ireland will stand there, and I stand humbly behind them, men who have given themselves for Ireland, and I will devote to it the same amount that is left to me of energy and life; and I stand here to-day to make the last protest, for we only speak but once, and to ask you read most carefully, not to take everything for granted, and to realise above all that you strive for one thing, your allegiance to the men who have fought and died. But look at the results. Look at what we gain. We gained more in those few years of fighting than we gained by parliamentary agitation since the days of O’Connell. O’Connell said that Ireland’s freedom was not worth a drop of blood. Now I say that Ireland’s freedom is worth blood, and worth my blood, and I will willingly give it for it, and I appeal to the men of the Dáil to stand true. They ought to stand true and remember what God has put into your hearts and not to be led astray by phantasmagoria. Stand true to Ireland, stand true to your oaths, and put a little trust in God.

Ireland’s so-called treaty with England, patriotic recitation by Countess Markiewicz


Ireland’s dead leaders, patriotic recitation by Countess Markiewicz

The bull in the china shop

By courtesy of One Green Planet:

1. The majority of the world’s arable land is dedicated to livestock production. 26% for grazing livestock, 33% for livestock feed. (Worldwatch Institute)

2. We’re using precious land resources to produce food for our food. Not exactly efficient. 16 pounds of grain are used to produce 1 pound of meat. (Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat)

3. Only a small portion of all the grain grown in the U.S. actually goes to feed people. 70% is fed to animals in feedlots. (Global Issues)

4. If we fed these grains to people instead of livestock, it could make a huge dent in world hunger. If all crops used to feed livestock worldwide were redirected for human consumption, we could feed an additional 4 billion hungry people. (Gardeningplaces)

5. As the amount of land needed to grow livestock feed and graze cattle grows, the need to convert forests into agriculture land grows. This comes at a huge cost to native wildlife and plants. In the U.S., livestock grazing has an impact on 14% of threatened and endangered animals and 33% of threatened and endangered plants. (Center for Biological Diversity)

6. Animal agriculture has a similar record for water use. Agriculture uses 70% of the world’s freshwater resources. One-third of that (~23%) is used to grow feed for livestock. (Worldwatch Institute)

7. The bulk of our water footprints comes from “virtual” water in the meat we eat. 1 pound of beef uses 1,799 gallons of water, 1 pound of pork 576 gallons, 1 pound of chicken 468 gallons. (National Geographic)

8. In addition to land and water, fossil fuels are used to produce fertilizers for livestock feed as well as in transportation and processing of animal products. It takes 9 times the amount of fossil fuels to produce 1 calorie of meat than it does to produce 1 calorie of plant protein. (Worldwatch Institute)

9. Then there's other pollution. Animals raised for food produce 130 times more excrement than the entire human population. (Tufts)

10. When you combine the greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuel use, deforestation, and the animals themselves, animal agriculture has a huge carbon footprint. Global greenhouse gas emission attributed to livestock production: U.N. estimates 14.5%, Worldwatch Institute 51%. (UN FAO, Worldwatch Institute)

The Problem With Wind

1. Wind is a diffuse source that requires massive plant to collect any useful amount at an industrial scale.

The U.S. generates more than 4 billion megawatt-hours of electricity annually. At a capacity factor of 25%, that would require at least 1,826,500 megawatts of installed wind capacity. That's more than 27 times the amount currently installed. And it would require the use of more than 170,000 square miles mostly of currently open and wild land.

2. Wind is intermittent and highly variable.

But because the wind doesn't blow steadily at that average rate – let alone in response to actual demand – you'd probably need 3 or 4 times that much, with thousands of miles more of new high-capacity powerlines, to ensure some regular supply. Even then, you'd need complete backup to prevent brownouts if not outright blackouts.

And then there's increased electricity consumption to be considered, especially with charging electric cars and fuel cells.

When the Sleeper Wakes
AWEO

Anthropocentrism and the Technocratic Paradigm

Pope Francis writes (Laudato si’):

II. THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE TECHNOCRATIC PARADIGM

106. The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit. It is the false notion that “an infinite quantity of energy and resources are available, that it is possible to renew them quickly, and that the negative effects of the exploitation of the natural order can be easily absorbed”.

107. It can be said that many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.

108. The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same. Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic, and those who are surrounded with technology “know full well that it moves forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the human race”, that “in the most radical sense of the term power is its motive – a lordship over all”. As a result, “man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature”. Our capacity to make decisions, a more genuine freedom and the space for each one’s alternative creativity are diminished.

109. The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political life. The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated, and we are learning all too slowly the lessons of environmental deterioration. Some circles maintain that current economics and technology will solve all environmental problems, and argue, in popular and non-technical terms, that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth. They are less concerned with certain economic theories which today scarcely anybody dares defend, than with their actual operation in the functioning of the economy. They may not affirm such theories with words, but nonetheless support them with their deeds by showing no interest in more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations. Their behaviour shows that for them maximizing profits is enough. Yet by itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion. At the same time, we have “a sort of ‘superdevelopment’ of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation”, while we are all too slow in developing economic institutions and social initiatives which can give the poor regular access to basic resources. We fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth.

110. The specialization which belongs to technology makes it difficult to see the larger picture. The fragmentation of knowledge proves helpful for concrete applications, and yet it often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationships between things, and for the broader horizon, which then becomes irrelevant. This very fact makes it hard to find adequate ways of solving the more complex problems of today’s world, particularly those regarding the environment and the poor; these problems cannot be dealt with from a single perspective or from a single set of interests. A science which would offer solutions to the great issues would necessarily have to take into account the data generated by other fields of knowledge, including philosophy and social ethics; but this is a difficult habit to acquire today. Nor are there genuine ethical horizons to which one can appeal. Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology, itself viewed as the principal key to the meaning of existence. In the concrete situation confronting us, there are a number of symptoms which point to what is wrong, such as environmental degradation, anxiety, a loss of the purpose of life and of community living. Once more we see that “realities are more important than ideas”.

111. Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic. To seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system.

112. Yet we can once more broaden our vision. We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering. Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?

113. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer lies elsewhere. This is not to reject the possibilities which technology continues to offer us. But humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness.

114. All of this shows the urgent need for us to move forward in a bold cultural revolution. Science and technology are not neutral; from the beginning to the end of a process, various intentions and possibilities are in play and can take on distinct shapes. Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.

III. THE CRISIS AND EFFECTS OF MODERN ANTHROPOCENTRISM

115. Modern anthropocentrism has paradoxically ended up prizing technical thought over reality, since “the technological mind sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere ‘given’, as an object of utility, as raw material to be hammered into useful shape; it views the cosmos similarly as a mere ‘space’ into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference”. The intrinsic dignity of the world is thus compromised. When human beings fail to find their true place in this world, they misunderstand themselves and end up acting against themselves: “Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given, but, man too is God’s gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed”.

116. Modernity has been marked by an excessive anthropocentrism which today, under another guise, continues to stand in the way of shared understanding and of any effort to strengthen social bonds. The time has come to pay renewed attention to reality and the limits it imposes; this in turn is the condition for a more sound and fruitful development of individuals and society. An inadequate presentation of Christian anthropology gave rise to a wrong understanding of the relationship between human beings and the world. Often, what was handed on was a Promethean vision of mastery over the world, which gave the impression that the protection of nature was something that only the faint-hearted cared about. Instead, our “dominion” over the universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship.

117. Neglecting to monitor the harm done to nature and the environmental impact of our decisions is only the most striking sign of a disregard for the message contained in the structures of nature itself. When we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future a person with disabilities – to offer just a few examples – it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected. Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion, the very foundations of our life begin to crumble, for “instead of carrying out his role as a cooperator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature”.

118. This situation has led to a constant schizophrenia, wherein a technocracy which sees no intrinsic value in lesser beings coexists with the other extreme, which sees no special value in human beings. But one cannot prescind from humanity. There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself. There can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology. When the human person is considered as simply one being among others, the product of chance or physical determinism, then “our overall sense of responsibility wanes”. A misguided anthropocentrism need not necessarily yield to “biocentrism”, for that would entail adding yet another imbalance, failing to solve present problems and adding new ones. Human beings cannot be expected to feel responsibility for the world unless, at the same time, their unique capacities of knowledge, will, freedom and responsibility are recognized and valued.

119. Nor must the critique of a misguided anthropocentrism underestimate the importance of interpersonal relations. If the present ecological crisis is one small sign of the ethical, cultural and spiritual crisis of modernity, we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships. Christian thought sees human beings as possessing a particular dignity above other creatures; it thus inculcates esteem for each person and respect for others. Our openness to others, each of whom is a “thou” capable of knowing, loving and entering into dialogue, remains the source of our nobility as human persons. A correct relationship with the created world demands that we not weaken this social dimension of openness to others, much less the transcendent dimension of our openness to the “Thou” of God. Our relationship with the environment can never be isolated from our relationship with others and with God. Otherwise, it would be nothing more than romantic individualism dressed up in ecological garb, locking us into a stifling immanence.

120. Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties? “If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of the new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away”.

121. We need to develop a new synthesis capable of overcoming the false arguments of recent centuries. ...

[available in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese]

The thousand names of Greyhound

Whence comes the name Greyhound?

Webster: From Old English grighund and/or Old Norse greyhundr, the latter prefix from Indoeuropean ghru-, variation of gher-, to shine, whence also gray.

In other words, Webster ignores grig- and simply describes the derivation of grey-.

But the meaning to shine brings to mind the Irish for sun, grian.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED): “The etymology of the first element is unknown; it has no connexion with grey or with grew, Greek, nor with grey = badger.”

The OED does note that the Old English grig- or grieg- is equal to the the Old norse grey-.

It also notes that the variant grifhound is from variant pronunciation of grewhound (grew- being a corruption of grey with the idea of the breed having a “Greek” origin, i.e., an association with the origins of human civilization).

But perhaps the prefix grif- stands on its own. In French a griffe is a claw, as derived from the Frankish grif. In German, griff is a noun for catch. Both of these fit the greyhound.

Further possibilities are suggested in Irish. Gadhar (pronounced “geyer”) means hunting dog. Gaothar (“g’ee-her”) means like the wind. Gaobhar (“g’eer”) means near, which is applicable as the greyhound was the companion of chiefs and kings: The legendary warrior Fionn Mac Cumhail’s favorite dogs were the greyhounds Bran and Sceólan (who were his cousins); the name of the other legendary warrior Cú Chulainn, whose mythical cycle is that of the sun (grian), actually means the (grey)hound (cú) of Culann.

Rather than pinned to any of these, the name, and the creature herself, would seem to contain them all.

Irish provides yet another possibility with the word for hare: giorria (“giriyeh”). The word is geàrr (“gyarr”) in Scottish, from gearr-fhiadh, meaning short deer, which is the same in Irish and also means hare. It is pronounced “g’areeyeh” or “g’arig”, which is similar to the Irish pronunciation of grig-, “gurrig”. Since most hunting hounds take a name from their prey, this seems to suggest a likely derivation for greyhound.

Indeed, in French, the words for greyhound are lèvrier (masc.) and levrette (fem.), clearly in reference to hare, lièvre. (In English, a young hare is called a leveret.)

Gearg, pronounced “gyerrig” is the Irish word for quail, but greyhounds are not retrievers (nor were retrievers used in hunting back when the word was taking form).

And Webster says hare comes from the Indoeuropean root kas [or has (whence ashen)], meaning gray! However, the OED says it is not related to similar germanic words for gray.

Why had it to go on and on and on?

“Injustice. The police themselves. Dirty politics. It’s grand to say let it stop to people who have been the victims of it. What were they supposed to do? Say they’re sorry they ever protested and go back to being unemployed, gerrymandered, beaten up by every policeman who took the notion, gaoled by magistrates and judges who were so vicious that it was they who should be gaoled, and for life, for all the harm they did and all the lives the ruined?”

—Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark, 1996

An Milleánach

Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth is titled An Béal Bocht nó An Milleánach in the original Irish (and “edited” by Myles na gCopaleen). As noted in a recent Irish Times article about it by Mairin Nic Eoin, an milleánach means “the fault-finding one or the one from the land of fault-finding”.

Milleánach is the adjective form of the noun milleán, blame: i.e., blameful or censorious. In Patrick Dinneen’s 1904 Irish-English dictionary, milleánach is defined as “blaming, rebuking”. In the shorter 1938 edition for schools, it is defined as “blaming, finding fauth with”.

Technically, I think, it should be in the genitive masculine form, milleánaigh, because it describes an béal, which is masculine. But also technically, its use in the title is as a noun, which it isn’t. The solution is to imply the subject, i.e., “The Censorious [One/Thing]”, or follow the analogy of oileán (island) to oileánach (islander) to come up with the nonsensical “one who lives in (to?) blame”. Why not simply “The Censor”? Or perhaps, on the analogy of iasc and iascach (fish and fishing), “The Blaming”?

What is clear, however, as also noted by Nic Eoin, is that Brian Ó Nualláin’s primary intention was to echo the title of Tomás Ó Criothann’s classic memoir of life on The Great Blasket, An tOileánach.

My Irish teacher (who earned her certificate around the same time that An Béal Bocht was written) thought that An Milleánach meant The Millionaire (an milliúnaí in modern Irish; no entry in either Dinneen). That certainly makes more sense as an ironic comment on the main title instead of mere word play.

And in fact the hero of An Béal Bocht does venture to Cruach an Ocrais and takes the horde of the legendary Maoldún Ó Pónasa, the lone survivor of the Deluge of Corca Dhorca, which he buries for himself (after fleeing the corpse’s reanimation into all-too-familiar storytelling).

Furthermore, na Gopaleen wrote in his “Cruiskeen Lawn” column in The Irish Times (as reprinted in The Best of Myles (New York: Walker, 1968; reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press [Normal, Illinois], 1999), “A lady lecturing recently on the Irish language drew attention to the fact … that, while the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000. … The 400/4,000 ratio is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it. There is scarcely a single word in the Irish (barring, possibly, Sasanach) that is simple and explicit. … In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time.”

Ó Criomhthain himself, whom na Gopaleen particularly praises, cherished that language given to him by his parents. For example, after his mother dies, joining his father, he writes:

Sin críoch leis an mbeirt do chuir sioladh na teangan so im’ chluasa an chéad lá. Beannacht Dé le n-a n-anam. (That was the end of the two who put the sound of this language of ours in my ears [on the first day]. May the blessing of God be on their souls. [Translation by Garry Bannister and David Sowby.])

One might also consider the suggestion of milleanna, bell flowers, and millteanach, terrible. Not to mention meilleanna, grimaces (poor mouths!).

Findtan is Bith is Ladra.

Roġab em ol int aingel fri Caillin cetamus, Cesair ingean Bethaḋ mic Noi, int oilen irisech aingliḋesi .i. Eri. L. ben umorro do riachtatar imaraon fria; triar fer imorro tancatar le .i. Finntan mac Labradai mic Bethaḋ mic Lamiach. Bith mac Noi mic Lamiach on ainmnigthear Sliaḃ Betha. Ladru luam on ainmnigther ard Ladrand. Is heside cetna marḃ hErenn rian dilind; atḃath do ḟurail banaich. Da fichet la rian dilind do rochtatar. Fuaratar huili bas rian dilind aċt Findtan nama, bai ina ċoḋlad fri ré na dilend.

Cesair, then, said the Angel to Caillin, the daughter of Bith, son of Noah, first occupied this religious angelic island, i.e. Ireland. Fifty women, moreover, came with her. Three men came with her likewise, to wit, Finntan, son of Labraid, son of Bith, son of Lamech; Bith, son of Noah, son of Lamech, from whom Sliabh-Betha is named; and Ladru the pilot, from whom Ard-Ladrand is named. He [Ladru] was the first that died in Ireland before the Deluge. He died of female persecution. Forty days before the Deluge they came. They all died before the Deluge, except Finntan alone, who was asleep during the Flood.

...

Findtan is Bith is Ladra.  Gabrat ar tus in banba;  Is ccoiggad ingen ngel ngrind,  Da fichet la re ndilind. In lucht sin huili ba marb,  Re ndilind, ba mor in plag,  Achtmad Findtan in fer seng,  Na cadlad re re ndileand. Finntan, and Bith, and Ladhra,  Occupied Banba at first,  With fifty fair, sprightly maidens,  Forty days before the Flood. All that band died,  Before the Flood—great the plague—  Except Finntan, the subtile man,  Who slept during the period of the Deluge.

—from: Leabar Fidhnacha, The Book of Fenagh, edited by W. M. Hennessy, translated to English by D. H. Kelly, published by Alexander Thom, Dublin, 1875

Climate science denial of environmentalism

There is great anxiety in certain quarters about convincing "nonbelievers" of the dire truth about anthropogenic climate change.

The desperation of that effort suggests that accepting climate science isn’t in fact the real issue. That’s because there is no reason to question the science, unless one has doubts about what is being done with it.

The fact is that most people in line with the science aren’t doing anything more meaningful about it than people who question the science. Climate science is used mostly as a cudgel to promote new businesses (that are just as harmful to the planet, such as nuclear power, or even more so, such as biofuel) or – perhaps even more importantly – as a distraction from other, usually more immediate, problems that have obvious – but politically more challenging – solutions (eg, climate change is probably the least serious of the threats to The Everglades, but since nobody is directly to blame, nobody has to worry about being forced to actually do anything about it).

A glaring example of the cynical use of climate change – in the win-win-win of politicians and businesses expressing concern while promoting each others’ purely venal interests and of environmental groups taking their cut and keeping membership numbers growing by making it easy to save the planet with mere symbolic gestures. The lack of seriousness regarding climate change is most evident in the acquiescence to animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is conservatively estimated to contribute as much greenhouse effect as all transportation (not to mention its being the leading cause of many other environmental effects, such as deforestation and water depletion and pollution). Furthermore, most of that greenhouse effect is due to methane (CH₄), which persists in the atmosphere a small fraction of the time that carbon dioxide (CO₂) does, so that decreasing it would have almost immediate climate benefit. In contrast, benefits from reducing CO₂ would not be seen for many decades, even centuries. Yet reducing consumption of meat and dairy – which is as easy as switching lightbulbs – is almost never mentioned by those who fight to defend the science of climate change.

Accepting climate science does not make one an environmentalist. It actually often seems to enable a denial of environmental concerns.

Most real solutions to social and environmental problems would also benefit the carbon balance of the atmosphere, so accepting climate science is not actually important. Analogously, one doesn’t have to accept (let alone understand) the science of biological evolution to support protecting species and habitat.

These are culture-war sideshows that only serve business as usual, not positive change.

As long as we exploit animals and kill them for food, we will exploit and kill each other.

Chris Hedges: www.truthdig.com/report/item/choosing_life_20150419

… I no longer accept that cows must be repeatedly impregnated to give us milk, must be separated immediately from their newborns and ultimately must be slaughtered long before the end of their natural lives to produce low-grade hamburger, leather, glue, gelatin and pet food. I can no longer accept calves being raised in horrific conditions before they are killed for the veal industry, developed to profit from the many “useless” males born because dairy farms regularly impregnate cows to ensure continuous milk production.

Once the right of the powerful to exploit the powerless – whether that exploitation is of animals by humans, other nations by an imperial power, other races by the white race, or women by men – once that right is removed from our belief system, blinders are lifted. …

Farmers often display genuine affection for the animals they abuse and send to slaughter. They do this by normalizing the abuse, believing that it is a practical and unquestioned necessity, and by refusing to emotionally confront the suffering and fate of the animals. This willful numbness, this loss of empathy and compassion for other living beings, was something I encountered frequently in the wars I covered as a reporter. Prisoners could be treated affectionately, much like pets – the vast disparity of power meant there was never a real relationship – and then killed without remorse.

A culture that kills, including for food, must create a belief system that inures people to suffering. …

“Because cruelty is inescapable in confining, mutilating, and slaughtering animals for food, we have been forced from childhood to be distracted and inattentive perpetrators of cruelty,” Will Tuttle writes in “The World Peace Diet.” …

The animal agriculture industry is an integral part of the corporate state. The corporate state’s exploitation and impoverishment of workers and its poisoning of the environment, as well as its torture and violence toward animals, are carried out because of the obsession for greater and greater profit. …

Scríobhann “Myles” na gCapaillín

Our correspondent Myles na Gopaleen writes:

The other day a writer on the leader page of The Irish Times referred to the revival of the Irish language, not, indeed, for the first or last time in our rough island story. He said:

Surely the Government has realised by this time that it is very far from an easy task to eliminate and extend the use of the Irish language [sic] [sic] in place of English. The task would be hard enough in normal years […] but at such a time as the present, when children all over the world are trying to keep pace with an influx of new words as a result of the war news bulletins, it becomes well-nigh impossible. Parents who confine the family meal-time discussions to conversations in Irish must find it very difficult to explain such words as air-raid warden, incendiary bomb, non-aggression pact, decontamination, and Molotoff bread-basket. […]

One can imagine the stormy philological breakfasts that obtain in the households of the Gael:

Mother: Anois, a Sheáin, caith do chuid bracháin.

Shawn Beg (peering into The Irish Times): Ní maith liom brachán agus ní réidhtigheann sé le mo ghoile. Cuir Gaeidhilg ar ‘Molotoff bread-basket’ le do thoil.

Mother: Anois, a Sheáin, bí suaimhneach agus caith do bhreicfeasta. Ní fhásfaidh tú aníos gan brachán agus bainne.

Shawn Beg: Ní dóigh liom go bhfuil aon Ghaeidhilg ar ‘Molotoff bread-basket’. Ní’l sa Ghaeidhilg seo acht sean chanamhain ghagach. Cad chuige nach dtig linn Béarla a labhairt sa teach seo?

Mother: Mura mbíonn tú ’do thost ní bhfuighidh tú do phighin Dia Sathairn. Caith do brachán!

Shawn Beg: But, Maw! What’s Molotoff bread-basket?

Mother: BI DO THOST, ADEIRIM!

Shawn Beg: Aw Maw, maith go leor. Ní chaithfead brachán go deo agus ní bheith aon mheas agam feasta ar Ghaedhlaibh.

Mother (leading with her right): Bhéarfad-sa Molotoff bread-basket duit, a thaisce, a aingilín léigheanta.

—“Cruiskeen Lawn”, The Irish Times, 4 October 1940

[[[ | ]]]
(A passable translation.)
—Now, Shawn, eat your porridge.
—I don’t like porridge and it doesn’t sit well in my stomach. Put ‘Molotoff bread-basket’ into Irish, if you please.
—Now, Shawn, be quiet and eat your breakfast. You won’t grow up without porridge and milk.
—I don’t think there’s any Irish for ‘Molotoff bread-basket’. This Irish is nothing but an old dried-up language. Why can’t we speak English in this house?
—Unless you be quiet, you won’t get your Saturday penny. Eat your porridge!
—But, Maw! What’s Molotoff bread-basket?
—BE QUIET, I SAY!
—Aw Maw, alright. I won’t eat porridge as long as I won’t have any more opinions about Irish.
—I’ll give you a Molotoff bread-basket, my dear, my learned little angel.

(ciseán aráin Mholotoff?)

Conservation vs. Climate Change

As long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on earth is safe. … Only an appreciation of nature as a collection of specific threatened habitats, rather than as an abstract thing that is “dying,” can avert the complete denaturing of the world.

By Jonathan Franzen, “The Other Cost of Climate Change”, The New Yorker, April 6, 2015

Last September, as someone who cares more about birds than the next man, I was following the story of the new stadium that the Twin Cities are building for their football Vikings. The stadium’s glass walls were expected to kill thousands of birds every year, and local bird-lovers had asked its sponsors to use a specially patterned glass to reduce collisions; the glass would have raised the stadium’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, and the sponsors had balked. Around the same time, the National Audubon Society issued a press release declaring climate change “the greatest threat” to American birds and warning that “nearly half ” of North America’s bird species were at risk of losing their habitats by 2080. Audubon’s announcement was credulously retransmitted by national and local media, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose blogger on bird-related subjects, Jim Williams, drew the inevitable inference: Why argue about stadium glass when the real threat to birds was climate change? In comparison, Williams said, a few thousand bird deaths would be “nothing.”

I was in Santa Cruz, California, and already not in a good mood. The day I saw the Williams quote was the two hundred and fifty-fourth of a year in which, so far, sixteen had qualified as rainy. To the injury of a brutal drought came the daily insult of radio forecasters describing the weather as beautiful. It wasn’t that I didn’t share Williams’s anxiety about the future. What upset me was how a dire prophecy like Audubon’s could lead to indifference toward birds in the present.

Maybe it’s because I was raised as a Protestant and became an environmentalist, but I’ve long been struck by the spiritual kinship of environmentalism and New England Puritanism. Both belief systems are haunted by the feeling that simply to be human is to be guilty. In the case of environmentalism, the feeling is grounded in scientific fact. Whether it’s prehistoric North Americans hunting the mastodon to extinction, Maori wiping out the megafauna of New Zealand, or modern civilization deforesting the planet and emptying the oceans, human beings are universal killers of the natural world. And now climate change has given us an eschatology for reckoning with our guilt: coming soon, some hellishly overheated tomorrow, is Judgment Day. Unless we repent and mend our ways, we’ll all be sinners in the hands of an angry Earth.

I’m still susceptible to this sort of puritanism. Rarely do I board an airplane or drive to the grocery store without considering my carbon footprint and feeling guilty about it. But when I started watching birds, and worrying about their welfare, I became attracted to a countervailing strain of Christianity, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s example of loving what’s concrete and vulnerable and right in front of us. I gave my support to the focussed work of the American Bird Conservancy and local Audubon societies. Even the most ominously degraded landscape could make me happy if it had birds in it.

And so I came to feel miserably conflicted about climate change. I accepted its supremacy as the environmental issue of our time, but I felt bullied by its dominance. Not only did it make every grocery-store run a guilt trip; it made me feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future. What were the eagles and the condors killed by wind turbines compared with the impact of rising sea levels on poor nations? What were the endemic cloud-forest birds of the Andes compared with the atmospheric benefits of Andean hydroelectric projects?

A hundred years ago, the National Audubon Society was an activist organization, campaigning against wanton bird slaughter and the harvesting of herons for their feathers, but its spirit has since become gentler. In recent decades, it’s been better known for its holiday cards and its plush-toy cardinals and bluebirds, which sing when you squeeze them. When the organization shifted into Jonathan Edwards mode, last September, I wondered what was going on.

In rolling out its climate-change initiative, Audubon alluded to the “citizen science data” it had mobilized, and to a “report,” prepared by its own scientists, that justified its dire predictions. Visitors to its updated Web site were treated to images of climate-imperilled species, such as the bald eagle, and asked to “take the pledge” to help save them. The actions that Audubon suggested to pledge-takers were gentle stuff—tell your stories, create a bird-friendly yard—but the Web site also offered a “Climate Action Pledge,” which was long and detailed and included things like replacing your incandescent light bulbs with lower-wattage alternatives.

The climate-change report was not immediately available, but from the Web site’s graphics, which included range maps of various bird species, it was possible to deduce that the report’s method involved a comparison of a species’ present range with its predicted range in a climate-altered future. When there was broad overlap between the two ranges, it was assumed that the species would survive. When there was little or no overlap, it was assumed that the species would be caught between an old range that had grown inhospitable to it and a new range in which the habitat was wrong, and would be at risk of disappearing.

This kind of modelling can be useful, but it’s fraught with uncertainties. A species may currently breed in a habitat with a particular average temperature, but this doesn’t mean that it couldn’t tolerate a higher temperature, or that it couldn’t adapt to a slightly different habitat farther north, or that the more northerly habitat won’t change as temperatures rise. North American species in general, having contended with blazing July days and frosty September nights as they evolved, are much more tolerant of temperature fluctuations than tropical species are. Although, in any given place, some familiar back-yard birds may have disappeared by 2080, species from farther south are likely to have moved in to take their place. North America’s avifauna may well become more diverse.

The bald eagle was an especially odd choice of poster bird for Audubon’s initiative. The species nearly became extinct fifty years ago, before DDT was banned. The only reason we can worry about its future today is that the public—led by the then energetic Audubon—rallied around an immediate threat to it. The eagle’s plight was a primary impetus for the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and the eagle is one of the act’s great success stories. Once its eggs were no longer weakened by DDT, its population and range expanded so dramatically that it was removed from the endangered-species list in 2007. The eagle rebounded because it’s a resilient and resourceful bird, a generalist hunter and scavenger, capable of travelling large distances to colonize new territory. It’s hard to think of a species less liable to be trapped by geography. Even if global warming squeezes it entirely out of its current summer and winter ranges, the melting of ice in Alaska and Canada may actually result in a larger new range.

But climate change is seductive to organizations that want to be taken seriously. Besides being a ready-made meme, it’s usefully imponderable: while peer-reviewed scientific estimates put the annual American death toll of birds from collisions and from outdoor cats at more than three billion, no individual bird death can be definitively attributed to climate change (since local and short-term weather patterns have nonlinear causes). Although you could demonstrably save the lives of the birds now colliding with your windows or being killed by your cats, reducing your carbon footprint even to zero saves nothing. Declaring climate change bad for birds is therefore the opposite of controversial. To demand a ban on lead ammunition (lead poisoning is the foremost cause of California condor deaths) would alienate hunters. To take an aggressive stand against the overharvesting of horseshoe crabs (the real reason that the red knot, a shorebird, had to be put on the list of threatened U.S. species this winter) might embarrass the Obama Administration, whose director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, in announcing the listing, laid the blame for the red knot’s decline primarily on “climate change,” a politically more palatable culprit. Climate change is everyone’s fault—in other words, no one’s. We can all feel good about deploring it.

There’s no doubt that the coming century will be a tough one for wild animals. But, for countless species, including almost all of North America’s birds, the threat is not direct. The responses of birds to acute climatic stress are not well studied, but birds have been adapting to such stresses for tens of millions of years, and they’re surprising us all the time—emperor penguins relocating their breeding grounds as the Antarctic ice melts, tundra swans leaving the water and learning to glean grains from agricultural fields. Not every species will manage to adapt. But the larger and healthier and more diverse our bird populations are, the greater the chances that many species will survive, even thrive. To prevent extinctions in the future, it’s not enough to curb our carbon emissions. We also have to keep a whole lot of wild birds alive right now. We need to combat the extinctions that are threatened in the present, work to reduce the many hazards that are decimating North American bird populations, and invest in large-scale, intelligently conceived conservation efforts, particularly those designed to allow for climate change. These aren’t the only things that people who care about birds should be doing. But it only makes sense not to do them if the problem of global warming demands the full resources of every single nature-loving group.

A little tragicomedy of climate activism is its shifting of goalposts. Ten years ago, we were told that we had ten years to take the kind of drastic actions needed to prevent global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius in this century. Today we hear, from some of the very same activists, that we still have ten years. In reality, our actions now would need to be even more drastic than they would have ten years ago, because further gigatons of carbon have accumulated in the atmosphere. At the rate we’re going, we’ll use up our entire emissions allowance for the century before we’re even halfway through it. Meanwhile, the actions that many governments now propose are less drastic than what they proposed ten years ago.

A book that does justice to the full tragedy and weird comedy of climate change is “Reason in a Dark Time,” by the philosopher Dale Jamieson. Ordinarily, I avoid books on the subject, but a friend recommended it to me last summer, and I was intrigued by its subtitle, “Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What It Means for Our Future”; by the word “failed” in particular, the past tense of it. I started reading and couldn’t stop.

Jamieson, an observer and participant at climate conferences since the early nineties, begins with an overview of humanity’s response to the largest collective-action problem it has ever faced. In the twenty-three years since the Rio Earth Summit, at which hopes for a global agreement ran high, not only have carbon emissions not decreased; they’ve increased steeply. In Copenhagen, in 2009, President Obama was merely ratifying a fait accompli when he declined to commit the United States to binding targets for reductions. Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama was frank about how much action the American political system could deliver on climate change: none. Without the United States, which is the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, a global agreement isn’t global, and other countries have little incentive to sign it. Basically, America has veto power, and we’ve exercised it again and again.

The reason the American political system can’t deliver action isn’t simply that fossil-fuel corporations sponsor denialists and buy elections, as many progressives suppose. Even for people who accept the fact of global warming, the problem can be framed in many different ways—a crisis in global governance, a market failure, a technological challenge, a matter of social justice, and so on—each of which argues for a different expensive solution. A problem like this (a “wicked problem” is the technical term) will frustrate almost any country, and particularly the United States, where government is designed to be both weak and responsive to its citizens. Unlike the progressives who see a democracy perverted by moneyed interests, Jamieson suggests that America’s inaction on climate change is the result of democracy. A good democracy, after all, acts in the interests of its citizens, and it’s precisely the citizens of the major carbon-emitting democracies who benefit from cheap gasoline and global trade, while the main costs of our polluting are borne by those who have no vote: poorer countries, future generations, other species. The American electorate, in other words, is rationally self-interested. According to a survey cited by Jamieson, more than sixty per cent of Americans believe that climate change will harm other species and future generations, while only thirty-two per cent believe that it will harm them personally.

Shouldn’t our responsibility to other people, both living and not yet born, compel us to take radical action on climate change? The problem here is that it makes no difference to the climate whether any individual, myself included, drives to work or rides a bike. The scale of greenhouse-gas emissions is so vast, the mechanisms by which these emissions affect the climate so nonlinear, and the effects so widely dispersed in time and space that no specific instance of harm could ever be traced back to my 0.0000001-per-cent contribution to emissions. I may abstractly fault myself for emitting way more than the global per-capita average. But if I calculate the average annual quota required to limit global warming to two degrees this century I find that simply maintaining a typical American single-family home exceeds it in two weeks. Absent any indication of direct harm, what makes intuitive moral sense is to live the life I was given, be a good citizen, be kind to the people near me, and conserve as well as I reasonably can.

Jamieson’s larger contention is that climate change is different in category from any other problem the world has ever faced. For one thing, it deeply confuses the human brain, which evolved to focus on the present, not the far future, and on readily perceivable movements, not slow and probabilistic developments. (When Jamieson notes that “against the background of a warming world, a winter that would not have been seen as anomalous in the past is viewed as unusually cold, thus as evidence that a warming is not occurring,” you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry for our brains.) The great hope of the Enlightenment—that human rationality would enable us to transcend our evolutionary limitations—has taken a beating from wars and genocides, but only now, on the problem of climate change, has it foundered altogether.

I’d expected to be depressed by “Reason in a Dark Time,” but I wasn’t. Part of what’s mesmerizing about climate change is its vastness across both space and time. Jamieson, by elucidating our past failures and casting doubt on whether we’ll ever do any better, situates it within a humanely scaled context. “We are constantly told that we stand at a unique moment in human history and that this is the last chance to make a difference,” he writes in his introduction. “But every point in human history is unique, and it is always the last chance to make some particular difference.”

This was the context in which the word “nothing,” applied to the difference that some Minnesotan bird-lovers were trying to make, so upset me. It’s not that we shouldn’t care whether global temperatures rise two degrees or four this century, or whether the oceans rise twenty inches or twenty feet; the differences matter immensely. Nor should we fault any promising effort, by foundations or N.G.O.s or governments, to mitigate global warming or adapt to it. The question is whether everyone who cares about the environment is obliged to make climate the overriding priority. Does it make any practical or moral sense, when the lives and the livelihoods of millions of people are at risk, to care about a few thousand warblers colliding with a stadium?

To answer the question, it’s important to acknowledge that drastic planetary overheating is a done deal. Even in the nations most threatened by flooding or drought, even in the countries most virtuously committed to alternative energy sources, no head of state has ever made a commitment to leaving any carbon in the ground. Without such a commitment, “alternative” merely means “additional”—postponement of human catastrophe, not prevention. The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy. We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe. One advantage of the latter approach is that, if a miracle cure like fusion energy should come along, there might still be some intact ecosystems for it to save.

Choosing to preserve nature at potential human expense would be morally more unsettling if nature still had the upper hand. But we live in the Anthropocene now—in a world ever more of our own making. Near the end of Jamieson’s chapter on ethics, he poses the question of whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that the arcadian Manhattan of 1630, lushly forested and teeming with fish and birds, became the modern Manhattan of the High Line and the Metropolitan Museum. People will give different answers. The point is that the change occurred and can’t be undone, as global warming can’t be undone. We were bequeathed a world of goods and bads by our forebears, and we’ll bequeath a world of different goods and bads to our descendants. We’ve always been not only universal despoilers but brilliant adapters; climate change is just the same old story writ larger. The only self-inflicted existential threat to our species is nuclear war.

The story that is genuinely new is that we’re causing mass extinctions. Not everyone cares about wild animals, but the people who consider them an irreplaceable, non-monetizable good have a positive ethical argument to make on their behalf. It’s the same argument that Rachel Carson made in “Silent Spring,” the book that ignited the modern environmental movement. Carson did warn of the dangers of pollution to human beings, but the moral center of her book was implicit in its title: Are we really O.K. with eliminating birds from the world? The dangers of carbon pollution today are far greater than those of DDT, and climate change may indeed be, as the National Audubon Society says, the foremost long-term threat to birds. But I already know that we can’t prevent global warming by changing our light bulbs. I still want to do something.

In “Annie Hall,” when the young Alvy Singer stopped doing his homework, his mother took him to a psychiatrist. It turned out that Alvy had read that the universe is expanding, which would surely lead to its breaking apart some day, and to him this was an argument for not doing his homework: “What’s the point?” Under the shadow of vast global problems and vast global remedies, smaller-scale actions on behalf of nature can seem similarly meaningless. But Alvy’s mother was having none of it. “You’re here in Brooklyn!” she said. “Brooklyn is not expanding!” It all depends on what we mean by meaning.

Climate change shares many attributes of the economic system that’s accelerating it. Like capitalism, it is transnational, unpredictably disruptive, self-compounding, and inescapable. It defies individual resistance, creates big winners and big losers, and tends toward global monoculture—the extinction of difference at the species level, a monoculture of agenda at the institutional level. It also meshes nicely with the tech industry, by fostering the idea that only tech, whether through the efficiencies of Uber or some masterstroke of geoengineering, can solve the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions. As a narrative, climate change is almost as simple as “Markets are efficient.” The story can be told in fewer than a hundred and forty characters: We’re taking carbon that used to be sequestered and putting it in the atmosphere, and unless we stop we’re fucked.

Conservation work, in contrast, is novelistic. No two places are alike, and no narrative is simple. When I travelled to Peru last November to see the work of a Peruvian-American partnership, the Amazon Conservation Association, my first stop was at a small indigenous community in the highlands east of Cuzco. With Amazon Conservation’s help, the community is reforesting Andean slopes, suppressing forest fires, and developing a business in a local legume called tarwi, which can thrive on degraded land and is popular enough in Cuzco to be profitable. In an old and dusty and dirt-floored building, women from the community served me a lunch of tarwi stew and dense, sweet tarwi bread. After lunch, in a neighboring courtyard, I toured a nursery of native tree saplings that the community will hand-plant on steep slopes, to fight erosion and improve local water quality. I then visited a nearby community that has pledged to leave its forested land intact and is operating an experimental organic farm. The scale of the farm is small, but to the community it means clear streams and self-sustenance, and to Amazon Conservation it represents a model for other communities. The regional and municipal governments have money from petroleum and mining royalties, and could spend it revitalizing the highlands according to the model. “We’re not jealous,” Amazon Conservation’s Peruvian director, Daniela Pogliani, told me. “If the government wants to take our ideas and take the credit, we have no problem with it.”

In an era of globalism of every sort, a good conservation project has to meet new criteria. The project has to be large, because biodiversity won’t survive in a habitat fragmented by palm-oil plantations or gas drilling. The project has to respect and accommodate the people already living in and around it. (Carbon emissions have rendered meaningless the ideal of a wilderness untouched by man; the new ideal is “wildness,” which is measured not by isolation from disturbance but by the diversity of organisms that can complete their life cycles.) And the project needs to be resilient with respect to climate change, either by virtue of its size or by incorporating altitudinal gradients or multiple microclimates.

The highlands are important to the Amazon because they’re a source of its water and because, as the planet heats up, lower-elevation species will shift their ranges upslope. The focal point for Amazon Conservation is Peru’s Manú National Park, a swath of lower-elevation rain forest larger than Connecticut. The park, which is home to indigenous groups that shun contact with the outside world, has full legal protection from encroachment, but illegal encroachment is endemic in the parks of tropical countries. What Amazon Conservation is attempting to do for Manú, besides expanding its upslope potential and protecting its watershed, is to strengthen the buffer on the flanks of the park, which are threatened by logging, slash-and-burn farming, and a boom in wildcat gold mining in the region of Madre de Dios. The project aspires to be a protective belt of small reserves, self-sustaining community lands, and larger conservation “concessions” on state-owned land.

On the fifty-five-mile road down from the highlands, it’s possible to see nearly six hundred species of bird. The road follows an ancient track once used to transport coca leaves from the lowlands to pre-Columbian highland civilizations. On trails near the road, Amazon Conservation researchers peaceably coexist with modern-day coca traffickers. The road bottoms out near Villa Carmen, a former hacienda that now has an educational center, a lodge for ecotourists, and an experimental farm where a substance called biochar is being tested. Biochar, which is manufactured by kiln-burning woody refuse and pulverizing the charred result, allows carbon to be sequestered in farm fields and is a low-cost way to enrich poor soil. It offers local farmers an alternative to slash-and-burn agriculture, wherein forest is destroyed for cropland, the soil is quickly exhausted, and more forest has to be destroyed. Even a wealthy country like Norway, seeking to offset its carbon emissions and to assuage its guilt, can’t save a rain forest simply by buying up land and putting a fence around it, because no fence is strong enough to resist social forces. The way to save a forest is to give the people who live in it alternatives to cutting it down.

At the indigenous village of Santa Rosa de Huacaria, near Villa Carmen, the community’s cacique, Don Alberto, gave me a tour of the fish farm and fish hatchery that Amazon Conservation has helped it develop. Large-scale fish farming is ecologically problematic in other parts of the world, but smaller-scale operations in the Amazon, using native fish species, are among the most sustainable and least destructive sources of animal protein. Huacaria’s operation provides meat for its thirty-nine families and surplus fish that it can sell for cash. Over lunch—farmed paco fire-roasted with yucca inside segments of bamboo, with heliconia-leaf plugs at each end—Don Alberto held forth movingly on the effects of climate change that he’d seen in his lifetime. The sun felt hotter now, he said. Some of his people had developed skin cancer, unheard of in the past, and the larvae of a palm-tree parasite, which the community had traditionally eaten to control diabetes and stimulate their immune systems, had vanished. Nevertheless, he was committed to the forest. Amazon Conservation is helping the community expand its land title and develop its own partnership with the national park. Don Alberto told me that a natural-medicine company had offered him a retainer and a jet in which to fly around the world and lecture on traditional healing, and that he’d turned it down.

The most striking thing about Amazon Conservation’s work is the smallness of its constituent parts. There are the eight female paco from which a season’s worth of eggs are taken, the humbleness of the plastic tanks in which the hatchlings live. There are the conical piles of dirt that highland women sit beside and fill short plastic tubes in which to plant tree seedlings. There are the simple wooden sheds that Amazon Conservation builds for indigenous Brazil-nut harvesters to shelter the nuts from rain, and that can make the difference between earning a living income and having to cut or leave the forest. And there is the method for taking a bird census in a lowland forest: you walk a hundred metres, stopping to look and listen, and then walk another hundred metres. At every turn, the smallness contrasts with the vastness of climate-change projects—the mammoth wind turbines, the horizon-reaching solar farms, the globe-encircling clouds of reflective particles that geoengineers envision. The difference in scale creates a difference in the kind of meaning that actions have for the people performing them. The meaning of climate-related actions, because they produce no discernible result, is necessarily eschatological; they refer to a Judgment Day we’re hoping to postpone. The mode of meaning of conservation in the Amazon is Franciscan: you’re helping something you love, something right in front of you, and you can see the results.

In much the way that developed nations, having long contributed disproportionately to carbon emissions, now expect developing nations to share the burden of reducing them, the rich but biotically poor countries of Europe and North America need tropical countries to do the work of safeguarding global biodiversity. Many of these countries are still recovering from colonialism, however, and have more urgent troubles. Very little of the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon, for example, is being done by wealthy people. The deforesters are poor families displaced from more fecund regions where capital-intensive agribusinesses grow soybeans for Chinese tofu and eucalyptus pulp for American disposable diapers. The gold-mining boom in Madre de Dios is not only an ecological catastrophe but a human disaster, with widespread reports of mercury poisoning and human trafficking, but Peruvian state and federal governments have yet to put an end to it, because the miners make much better money than they could in the impoverished regions from which they’ve emigrated. Besides tailoring its work to the needs and capacities of local people, a group like Amazon Conservation has to negotiate an extremely complicated political landscape.

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