THE Valley of the Squinting Windows is not an easy place for which to make an argument. By virtue of its pejorative designation, the very term signifies a beaten docket in a society with modern aspirations. And yet, there was something solid and interesting about this entity, which might have functioned as a description of most communities in Ireland up to 20 years ago.
We see modernisation as delivering us from this loathsome place. Another way of seeing it is that the blind surrender to market driven demographics is presenting us with a society over which we have less and less control while feeling more and more pleased with ourselves.
The Valley was a central feature of an Ireland without laws in which everyone felt able to believe. Social cohesion was rigorously policed in the intimate and often claustrophobic familiarity between citizens and families. Such communities were "traditional", in the sense of being culturally self regarding, depending for their cultural and social identity on an unwritten set of strictures and common assumptions.
The Valley had many unpleasant aspects, including narrow mindedness and a disregard for privacy, but it was not entirely the creation of unenlightened social control. It provided a useful unwritten code to define correct social interaction in the absence of formal laws which could be respected by everyone. We read every day now the evidence of its collapse.
In the country areas and small towns where this culture was strongest, politics had always been an intimate and vital element. Everybody knew that the ballot box was a fairly transparent device, and so what was expressed through it was a collective rather than a personal aspiration. The politician appealed for a vote not to the innermost notions of the individual, but to the pietistic public face, using the moral language which had developed for this purpose. On voting day, the individual remained silent within, while the cultural citizen made the appropriate and acceptable mark.
THIS, I believe, is the factor that led to such confusions in respect of the "moral" issues of abortion and divorce. The opinion polls said one thing, the ballot box another. In fact, opinion polls conducted in the safe haven of the citizen's own home became an infinitely more intimate form of political expression than the supposedly sacrosanct ballot box. Largely it was the public dimension, responding to the pietistic buzz words of the campaign, which determined the actual vote.
The undoubtedly conservative culture which this created existed not so much in the visible reality as in the heads of the citizens. Ireland undoubtedly believes itself to be a very conservative country, and this belief can sometimes lend conservatism a self fulfilling dimension.
Many of the misunderstandings are due to the nature of Irish public language, which has been based on the notion that if you pay enough lip service to a sufficient number of pious aspirations, everything will work out fine and dandy.
This is the language of the 1937 Constitution, which I described before as our greatest national work of fiction. It is also the language of those who spend their lives defending various of the articles therein. It is also, curiously, the language used in the main by those who have opposed both the Constitution and its protectors. It is a language full of moral piety, double speak and sanctimoniousness, based on fear of censure by the moral guardians who have invented this language and therefore own it.
It is the language of the Valley of the Squinting Windows. This language makes it impossible to think straight, because it does not allow for thoughts which are inherently sinful. In the Ireland of old, it wasn't so much that everyone though the same as that a crude pietistic language developed by which people could express their moral probity and reassure their neighbours that they would do nothing to upset the apple cart.
The survival at a public level of the language is the main reason for the widespread misunderstanding about Irish conservatism, and the liberal belief that large parts of Irish society are more conservative than they actually are. This language was developed so that people could say what they should rather than what they meant.
The phrase "family values", for example, fits snugly into this linguistic security blanket, even though nobody has the faintest idea what it means. Simply by proclaiming a belief in "family values", one signals the health of one's own morality. This mode of expression served to repress individualistic urges resulting in people subscribing publicly to notions which they privately regarded as pure cant, uttering in public only that which you had been led to believe would be acceptable. The real trouble is that we attach far greater importance to the way we describe ourselves than we do to the way we actually are. It is as though we believe that if we can preserve intact the verbal definitions, we will be able to resume some unspecified "correct" persona once the present turbulence is past. Hence the great constitutional battles of the past couple of decades.
In one sense, the obsession with constitutional definition is a symptom of moving from local certainties to post modem chaos, and seeking to enshrine in law some of the certainties that are slipping out of our culture. But, by a strange paradox, because the battlefield is a linguistic one, and because the language we use is itself the product of the old certainties, we risk trapping ourselves within new versions of old definitions.
THE fact that the destruction of the old culture is being carried out using the same language results in change being a neurotic response to the old rather than the Brave New Ireland we are promised. It is the need to safeguard rights without the cultural back up of "traditional" society that is making us so obsessed with the written version. And this written version is itself the product of a society which had much less need for legal definitions. Moreover, the moral certainties which such language presumes is forcing us to adopt either a "traditionalist" position based on safeguarding the written version, or discarding it in favour of a definition which, by virtue of opposing the old certainties, appears to be morally and culturally rootless.
And so, the only possibility for change is in bastardised versions of existing norms. Nobody is prepared to stand up and come out with a whole new reality, because the language does not allow such a vision to be articulated. And so, what we are creating is a "modern" version of the Valley of the Squinting Windows, a place where all the negative aspects of the old are being adopted and multiplied, while all the mitigating qualities are being left behind.
It is tempting to say "good riddance" to the Valley, but its loss becomes rather less a reason for celebration as it becomes clear that it is not being replaced other than by a depersonalised vacuum, where the word "progress" limps with a heavy irony and where intimacy is replaced not by tolerance, but by more public forms of invasion.