Most political states are born in bloodshed, and rely for their legitimacy on the fading historical memories of their subjects, writes Terry Eagleton
I spoke recently at an anti-Iraq war meeting at which the speaker before me began with some remarks on the founding of the Irish Free State, before taking us gradually from de Valera to Sean Lemass. It was highly relevant stuff - a small historical survey of the shifting meaning of Irish neutrality, and its bearing on the current global crisis. But a casual listener might well have mistaken it for yet another parochial ramble down the by-ways of Irish history.
All that, however, is changing. The Irish, so often accused of wallowing morbidly in their past, are nowadays more likely to be chided for disavowing it. Quite a few of them look upon their turbulent history with the embarrassment of a small boy whose doddery old dad tries to amuse his schoolmates with cack-handed card tricks. It is not to the strains of The Croppy Boy that Temple Bar resounds at night. In the long march from Kevin Barry to Kevin Myers, the Irish are in danger of exchanging nostalgia for amnesia.
From Sigmund Freud's viewpoint, however, these come to much the same thing. The neurotic, Freud remarked, is someone "afflicted by reminiscences". Yet to repress the past is for Freud just as crippling. For him, the opposite of nostalgia is not amnesia but true remembrance. But since this is painful, we tend to take refuge in either idealising our history or demonising it.
It may be some comfort to the Irish that they are not alone in their galloping amnesia. Most bourgeois nations feel sheepish about their pasts, and with excellent reason. What bourgeois nations really want is to settle down to the prosaic, unheroic business of making money. It is stability and normality they crave, not bloody revolt or revolutionary drama. Yet to attain this modest goal, they usually need to free themselves from the dead weight of a feudal or colonial past. And this demands just the kind of high heroics and ideological zeal which will stick in the craw of their successors. The cool, pragmatic kids of the Celtic Tiger will feel mortified by their doddery, idealistic old dads.
This is true even of those natural-born revolutionaries, the French. In a sense, the French Revolution only succeeded once Napoleon had betrayed it, harnessing its energies to a stoutly bourgeois status quo. Indeed, the French middle-classes shed their erstwhile idealism with such gusto they sparked a second revolution half a century later. Writing of the French insurrection of 1848, Karl Marx scornfully contrasted the flamboyant revolutionary rhetoric of the French middle-classes with the sordid money-grubbing of their behaviour.
In literature, the radical idealism of Stendhal gave way to the materialist cynicism of Flaubert.
The English revolution was less eye-catching. It is said of the English that if they ever get round to driving on the right, they will do so gradually; and it was in this piecemeal spirit they ousted the old regime. It did, however, take a sanguinary civil war to see it off; and when that upheaval looked likely to lead not to the kingdom of heaven on earth, but to the establishment of the Bank of England and the restoration of the monarchy, it took the revolutionary John Milton to ask how that paradise had come to be lost.
Once again, noble ideals and mundane reality were at odds. To win stability and independence, middle-classes are forced into epic conflicts, civic rancour and wars of independence, which will return to plague them. Or at least return to shame their grandchildren, who want nothing more epic than the Range Rover in the garage and the cottage in Clare which their militant grandparents indirectly made possible.
It is hardly surprising, then, that a whole lineage of European thinkers should have urged their fellow citizens to embrace oblivion - at least when it comes to the dodgy question of the origins of the State. Most political states are born in bloodshed and usurpation, and rely for their legitimacy on the fading historical memories of their subjects.
The great French philosopher Blaise Pascal is candid about the need for this amnesia. "The truth about the [original\] usurpation must not be made apparent," he writes. "It came about originally without reason, and has become reasonable. We must see that its origins are hidden if we do not want it to end."
The greatest apologist for political amnesia, however, was the Irishman Edmund Burke. To look into the origins of power, Burke cautioned, was a kind of blasphemy, almost a sexual indecency. The illicit sources of authority - its revolutionary roots - must be cloaked in veils and shrouded in the mists of antiquity, if the power of the state was not to fall into discredit. As a loyal servant of the British state, it was British power which Burke had chiefly in mind. Today, it is his compatriots who seem to be taking his lesson to heart.
To remember that you were born is to acknowledge that you can die. This is one reason why nations like to imagine they are eternal. But to recall the radical idealism of the past is also to admit that the mountain has given birth to a mouse. If the street-wise kids find their fathers a pain, the fathers find the kids a crashing disappointment. But this is in the nature of bourgeois revolutions. It is in no way peculiar to the Irish - even though Irish literature is full of corpses which won't lie down, ghosts which refuse to be laid and images of the undead sucking the blood of the living. Dracula, after all, was a Dubliner.
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester