Desmond Fennell is well known to Irish Times readers as a fiery critic of modernism and a serial contributor to the Letters page, who shoots from the spleen at any deviator from nationalist orthodoxy or cultural traditionalism. An avid collector of conspiracies, he has discerned and targeted a wide range in his time - from historical revisionism to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, western liberalism to eastern communism. A staunch, if not always lucid, defender of his own personal take on the human condition, Fennell resists labelling. He has been dubbed a cultural conservative, but that is too precise to capture the range of his discontents. He is an intellectual best described as a pamphleteer of the old school, a moralist who inveighs against contemporary ills, one of which furnished the material for his interesting eyewitness account of the collapse of the East German regime (1996).
In The Post-western Condition Fennell aligns his sights on the evils of consumerism and on the capitalist motor which drives it (which he calls the "Ameropean system", located in somewhere called "Amerope"). He divides the book into two parts. The first chronicles the banes and woes of our age and the US's role in their construction.
Addressing what he terms "The Sense Problem", Fennell asserts that the condition of Amerope is one of "moral chaos", as evidenced by the fact that "people find life intrinsically senseless". They (we) have abandoned the old rules - among which he lists: homosexuality is abhorrent; bodily intimacies are not for public display; age has authority over youth - and conspired in the "demise of western civilisation" in favour of "post-westernism". After seven chapters of invective on the same theme, the battered reader might expect Part Two to offer a break, some development of the argument, a way forward, a clearer definition of terms, a pressed flower . . . it is five more chapters of the same.
Much of this book relates to important facets of our modern culture - consumerism, parenthood, community, religious commitment - and the author's disenchantment will surely resonate with his fellow-sufferers. The problem is not with Fennell's sentiments; it is that the book provides little more than a litany of generalisations unsupported by any convincing evidence, even by any apparent awareness that statements of significant fact require evidence and that concepts such as "post-western" and "Amerope" need clear delineation of their boundaries to be meaningful.
It takes time and effort to navigate this book: to locate a beginning, a middle, or an end of any coherent thesis: too much effort to warrant the inflated price. What appears to be a draft or a collection of apercus seems to have ended up as the finished text. This is taking anti-revisionism into new territory.
Bill McSweeney teaches in the International Peace Studies programme of the Irish School of Ecumenics