Sinéad O’Connor’s warning about online pile-ons was prophetic in more ways than one

I will forever associate the Serenity Prayer with Sinéad O’Connor. I’d never heard of it before 1990 when she used those words to open her second album: “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

It’s the perfect meditation today for anyone doom-scrolling the news. The scale of the world’s problems can have a paralysing effect. One wonders what can a single individual possibly do?

O’Connor appeared to have an answer. Or at least she had a hunch about where the answer lay – and in this she found herself on one side of a major fault line in moral philosophy.

Her position can be traced to the 1993 full-page ad she took out in The Irish Times. Written in response to criticism of her failure to attend a benefit concert, it was part warning about the danger of pile-ons – a prophetic appeal as social media would take judgmentalism to new heights – and part theorising about the root cause of conflict.

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“Do you know that the Serbian leader’s parents killed themselves when he was only a nipper. And he is ‘acting out’ the rage and grief he has never dealt with,” O’Connor wrote, in reference to Slobodan Milošević who in 1999 became the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes.

In fact, Milošević was in his 20s when his father died and in his 30s when his mother died but O’Connor was accurate in identifying suicide as the cause in both instances. More importantly, she was following in a tradition of linking historical wrongdoing to spiritual damage and, inversely, progress to spiritual growth. “What have the other leaders been through?” she asked.

Today, we might ask whether Russia would have invaded Ukraine were it not for the insecurities of one man – a man now so terrified of his shadow he puts a boardroom table between him and his staff.

O’Connor’s view of history has support from philosophers down the ages from Aristotle – who believed the future of the state depended on the character of its leaders – to Mohandas Gandhi who argued that social change was best achieved by modelling virtuous behaviour.

Opposed to such thinkers are what can be called the consequentialists, those who disregard or downplay the significance of individual character and just look at the outcome of actions to determine what is ethical.

In his novel Black Dogs, Ian McEwan dramatises this tension between the virtue theorist and the consequentialist in the form of a couple, June and Bernard, who marry in the aftermath of the second World War. June views the horrors of nazism as “creations of debased imaginations or perverted spirits” and believes “without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless”. In contrast, Bernard is focused on new political schemes and social engineering. “As for the inner life,” he scoffs, “try having one of those on an empty stomach. Or without clean water.”

McEwan’s couple, June and Bernard, fight each other to a standstill. In the real world, however, consequentialism reigns supreme. Character is generally treated as a private matter.

There is a pragmatic reason for this. Today’s global challenges are so urgent we can’t wait for each individual to gain some kind of enlightened perspective on them. Policies are needed now to slow global warming. Trying to figure out what pains the conscience of climate deniers will have to wait. (As for what pains Vladimir Putin, even asking the question smacks of appeasement.)

At the same time, there is merit in exploring the “spiritual” dimension of such problems as the climate crisis. Why, one might ask, is self-destruction so much a part of human nature?

A recurring theme in O’Connor’s work was that the personal is political. More than that, she embodied the idea that revolution starts within. Here one can detect a resolution to the age-old tussle between the virtue theorists and the consequentialists. In each era, there will be new political schemes and ideologies but these can’t be divorced from flawed human beings.

Rather than seeing this as a cause for pessimism, it gives us reason to hope. At a time when political change in Moscow seems impossible, Putin faces the reality that his “Greater Russia” project is toast once enough of his compatriots gain the courage to speak the truth.

The Polish Solidarity movement provides a template for human rights campaigners in Russia and elsewhere. In an introduction to jailed democracy activist Adam Michnik’s Letters from Prison, American author Jonathan Schell wrote: “The classic formula for revolution is first to seize state power and then to use that power to do the good things you believe in. In the Polish revolution, the order was reversed.”

Schell summarised the philosophy in a manner that channelled Michnik’s thinking, but it could just as easily have been said by O’Connor too: “Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act openly. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.”