Something un-Irish in this youthful optimism

The boom never quite seemed real to us of a certain age – unlike those getting Leaving Cert results today, writes DONALD CLARKE…

The boom never quite seemed real to us of a certain age – unlike those getting Leaving Cert results today, writes DONALD CLARKE

IS THE glass of water half empty or half full? Might the rough edges on the vessel’s rim be harbouring the sort of viruses that cause flesh-eating diseases? What is that stuff in the glass anyway? There’s a slightly metallic odour to it. I read somewhere that such smells indicate the presence of toxic lanthanides. Get that bleeding glass away from me. Oh, I’ve come over all peculiar.

This pondering of the hoary old glass conundrum is triggered by (among other things) the recent publication of two books dealing with the human animal’s struggles with hope and expectation.

Roger Scruton, fox-hunting, feminist-bashing, Tory philosopher, calls his work The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope. Matt Ridley, zoologist, journalist and all-round polymath, offers the reading public The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

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The writers’ complementary approaches are apparent from the titles alone. Scruton singles out Utopianism – doctrinaire optimism in the form of socialism, fascism or whatever – as the great evil of the modern era. Ridley (who manages to stay cheery despite having served as non-executive chairman of the doomed Northern Rock bank) thinks we greatly underestimate how western society has improved over the last 100 years.

If Matt is correct, his book will serve as a useful spur to continuing progress. If Roger is on the money then remaindered copies of his tome will serve as easily flammable fuel when civilisation declines into baby-eating, post-historic dystopia.

The debate has particular relevance for contemporary Ireland. Think about it. The generation that receives its Leaving Cert results today is the State’s first to grow up in an atmosphere of undiluted optimism.

If you are among this happy band, then you will have been born just a few years before the economic miracle set in. You were raised to expect jobs, homes, cars and unlimited access to food that tasted of something other than boiled leaves. Shipped with operating system Optimo 2.04, you haven’t even allowed the 2008 banking apocalypse to quell your spirits. What a ghastly bunch you are.

In his book, Matt Ridley explains how, growing up in England during the 1970s, he was constantly told that the irresistible drag of entropy was propelling the world – and western society in particular – towards hunger, ignorance, indolence, decay and, ultimately, annihilation. If overpopulation didn't get you then the nuclear holocaust certainly would. The worst predictions of George Orwell began to seem unimaginably optimistic. Heck, society in Nineteen Eighty-Fourmay have been overseen by an inhumanely dictatorial state, but there was, at least, still a civilisation left to oppress. Better that than the lifeless wasteland Matt was being invited to anticipate

Well, at the risk of sounding like one of Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen, you, Mr Ridley, don't know you were born. For all the pit strikes, three-day weeks and Man About the Housereruns England endured, that country still seemed, when set beside Ireland, like a furnace of forward-thinking sanguinity.

Attending a very respectable, largely middle-class school in Limerick, my pals and I were constantly told that we were not going to get a job, that society was in decline and that we should prepare for hardship and exile. We might as well struggle to get into university – after all, what else were we going to do? – but we shouldn’t expect our degrees to be useful for anything other than mopping up minor spillages.

“There aren’t even jobs for doctors now,” hooded teachers clutching scythes would say to us. “Most medicine graduates are having to sign on. It’s the same with lawyers.”

The years drifted on and, though starving doctors remained conspicuous by their absence, many of us never quite shook off early exhortations to continually lower our expectations.

As a result, when the boom years came, it never quite seemed real to us. The recent popping of the balloon has caused catastrophe for too many unfortunate families, but by re-establishing a condition of fear and unease, it, at least, dispels the disturbing impression that, like characters in a Twilight Zoneepisode, we have been transported to a weird alternative universe.

The kids opening their results today have been tutored to expect something a little more than misery, emigration and spaghetti hoops.

One must, I suppose, grudgingly acknowledge that such positive attitudes should help these youths extricate the country from the hole that our lot – still not entirely sure tomorrow would come – carelessly and selfishly dug.

There is, however, something inherently un-Irish about optimism. Such diverse talents as Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kinsella, Roddy Doyle and Brendan Behan have made an art of celebrating the doomed life, the faded aspiration, the decaying hearth and the fried potato that comes without fish.

Maybe we’re better off expecting the worst.

Jesus. What isin that filthy glass?


Vincent Browne is on leave