The word that, following disastrous viewing figures for the live transmission of the party leader's address at the recent annual conference of the Progressive Democrats, RTÉ is trying to wriggle out of carrying such broadcasts in future provides simultaneously grounds for celebration and concern, writes John Waters.
The cause for celebration will be obvious to almost anyone who has sat through a party leader's address in recent decades, but the worry arises precisely from the immediacy of this common understanding.
One reason for growing public cynicism about politics is that there is plenty to be cynical about. The vapid outpourings of our apolitical political leaders, endowed at best with a technocratic competence to manage the national business, inspire little more than bored cynicism and party leaders' addresses to conferences have long represented an outstanding showcase of the tediousness of modern political rhetoric.
If W.B. Yeats had ever had to sit through a Fine Gael ardfheis, he might have come to regard that line about the best lacking all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity as a work-in-progress. A great standby of hungover colour writers when I was reporting on party conferences for various fringe publications was a Mylesian deconstruction of the party leader's address, reducing the great oration to a catechism of cliché.
What negative fraction shall never be afforded to terrorism in this democracy? No quarter. Etcetera.
But this tendency towards instant cynicism is also, probably for that very reason, corrosive and probably dangerous. The hard reality is that somehow or another, our prospects of any kind of collective future depend on restoring an effective connection between politics and people. At the moment, this notion may be saturated in tedium, but this does not help us to escape it.
Political rhetoric need not be boring, but a capacity to anaesthetise an audience is nowadays no bar to political success. Partly because political rhetoric has become almost exclusively bound up with economistic concerns and technocratic solutions, there is no longer room for genuine inspiration or breadth of vision. If you pluck at random a sentence or two from a speech by a political leader from the age of butter boxes outside chapel gates, you perceive that there has occurred a debasement, not just of the intensity of the message but of the language of political leadership.
"Our foes are strong and wise and wary," said Padraic Pearse at the graveside of O'Donovan Rossa, " but strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation . . . Rulers and defenders of realms had need to be wary if they would guard against such processes."
Whatever you may decide about such sentiments, they suggest an entirely different kind of relationship between speaker and listener to anything we can remotely imagine today. They do not invite cynicism. Disapproval or resolve maybe, but not indifference.
THIS RAISES the possibility that the latter-day tendency towards ironic detachment from politics - rather than being a function of increasing public sophistication - is a conditioned response inculcated in the populace as a means of controlling passionate responses. Perhaps the very quality of cynicism about which politicians complain and which fills those who practise it with a sense of self-satisfaction on account of indicating - they believe - their self-induced ironic detachment from politics, has actually been imbued in the public mind by a polity seeking to protect itself from public passion?
Our trading of ardour for apathy, far from a voluntary act of self-liberation, may be a form of acquiescence. There is, in such discussion as occurs about the collapse of public engagement with politics, a sense that it is some kind of temporary state, to do perhaps with either a - it is suggested - somewhat mysterious failure by politicians to inspire or the seductiveness of all kinds of distractions with which politics is for the moment unable to compete.
This sense is accompanied by a belief that public cynicism is some kind of intermediary stage on the road to a new enlightenment, that we will shortly break into a new compartment in which idealism and ironic knowingness will exist side by side. It is a vain hope, not helped by the fact that its advocates seem not to have the remotest notion of what such a new dispensation might, in practice, consist.
This is one of the great ironies (hah!) besetting post-modernism - that, whereas it clings to some flimsy notion of accidentally ringing a new set of changes, its very ideology acknowledges, as one of its central tenets, that cultural possibility is limited to the constant recycling of a finite number of existing elements.
This suggests that political passion is possible only in roughly the form it took in the past, and that political rhetoric will again become inspirational only if it strikes a note similar to that which, in the past, ripened in the hearts of young men the seeds of patriotic dissent.
It may appear purely coincidental that the principal threat to Western democracy emanates from quarters not noted from their grasp of irony. Perhaps though this reality is telling us something else: that human life, requiring a degree of passionate absolutism, even fanaticism, will find some way of turning these qualities on those elements which threaten their survival.
For the very elements - irony, relativism, apathy - which we in Western societies have nurtured to save ourselves from self-generated passions, have become the red rags which provoke rage in the hearts of outsiders who do not share our beliefs.