Rite and ReasonThe competitive economy is a restless, even violent place where 'only the paranoid survive', writes Fergus Armstrong.
A few years back my son was laid flat on a Leeson Street pavement after an assault outside a Dublin night club. My daughter left Club Anabel early on the night Brian Murphy died.
An event that affects us deeply prompts an anxious search for causes: alcohol or other substances, abandonment of rules, restraints or religious values, a "rugby culture". But perhaps we must undertake a review of a whole ecology and constants in the human condition.
Change brings anxiety. Rapid economic advance brings a level of fear which, in measure, is directly related to the pace of change. The strongly competitive economy is of necessity a place of conflict, advancing winners, rejecting losers. In the zone of insecurity we may not measure up, peer group means pressure, not community, not relationship. "Only the paranoid survive", as the chairman of Intel famously said.
Some political measures at the onset of the Irish boom gave momentum to a zero-sum game of comparison between families. Residential property tax - makeshift lid on spiralling house prices - was lifted off to feed a trade-up frenzy. The 04 reg asserts success.
There is more of Boston than Berlin in this, more competition than co-operation. A low-tax corporate regime works - just so long as Berlin is not free to follow suit. What we do take from "core Europe" does not suit the case - low interest rates push Irish asset prices to the sky.
Strident voices of attack and ambush pervade morning interviews, tribunals of enquiry and the adversarial legal system. To acknowledge error, show vulnerability, confess, is to court annihilation.
The need to hold your place, to mind your back, diverts resources of attention-giving that sons and daughters need but will not ask for. They have had their own hellfire, intensities of competition in the narrow race for points.
The economic miracle saw the full maturing of another revolution. Its aspect is post-Christian or, what is worse, post-Catholic. Worse, because the Irish Catholic tradition held its members in a close bind. Clerical scandals swept legitimacy from rules of conduct expressed in the idioms of reward and punishment. Average souls had spent their vibrant years in celibate obedience to warnings of damnation. The generation that succeeded turned a deaf ear. Yet the sky did not fall in.
Parents began to ask whether it was even right or good to send the uninitiated to the altar. A generation that had sown an insufficiency of wild oats was left confused. It did not care to preach to children who lived it up a bit.
Competition is no ultimate good, it can go toxic. Gil Bailie, in Violence Unveiled, reports the anthropology of a fundamental, rivalrous, quality in the structure of the human. A recurrent theme in the founding of cultures is that when rivalrous energies get pent up in a group, they may be discharged in violence on a scapegoat. Dark negative energies demand an outlet.
Before the Christian era, the scapegoat invariably got forgotten in the new peace that was forged with his death. In the Jesus story, uniquely, the forgiving victim is the one raised up. We do not forget victims any more.
Bailie warns, moreover, that in so far as this ancient bonding mechanism has lost its efficacy, societies are the more at risk, unless habituated to the saving gospel of the crucified one.
The philosopher Charles Taylor asserts that the best things in our modern liberal culture, the affirmation of universal human rights - to life, freedom, citizenship and self-realisation - find their basis in this same gospel.
He suggests, however, that their fullest realisation could never have been achieved without a dethroning of what he calls "the project of Christendom": the attempt to marry faith with a form of culture and a mode of society (surely the former Irish project).
He adds a warning: affirmations of ordinary life can pale if we don't recognise an ineradicable bent to respond to something beyond life. If there is nothing higher than life, then life-force becomes all and a dangerous, restless, "will to power" can take over. This is a macho kind of energy; its nature may be thirsty.
Ken Wilber, Buddhist scholar, suggests that religion performs two functions. The first is to give meaning to the separate self, helping it to make sense of, and endure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - all this he calls translation or the horizontal dimension.
But in the vertical dimension, religion points the way towards radical transformation and liberation. In this, the self itself is undone.
Spiritual teachers that draw the young - men or women, ordained or not - will evoke the vertical dimension. Shock tactics from Mel Gibson belong to the old school.
Each of us is capable of the worst, destined for the best. In time we may revert to habits of worship, seen as counterpoint to competitive striving and idolatories of the self, and retrieve space for prayer and silence, sources of restoration and forgiveness.
Fergus Armstrong is a lawyer practising in the field of dispute resolution. His e-mail address is ffa@indigo.ie