Celebration of `progress' mocks the millennium

I find it mildly promising that the millennium celebrations in Dublin have been deemed a damp squib

I find it mildly promising that the millennium celebrations in Dublin have been deemed a damp squib. This may be a good omen, in spite of everything. As in our individual lives, the big things do not happen as the result of planning or preparation, nor are they very often the subject of advance celebration.

The last time an important era began we did not know it was happening. Reports of the New Year welcome in Dublin's Christchurch Place at midnight on December 31st, 1959, told of a dull and uninspiring start to the decade we now regard as having started us out on the road to modernisation.

"Only a quarter of an hour before the arrival of the New Year," The Irish Times reported, "the streets surrounding Christ Church Cathedral were practically deserted . . . 1960 came in quietly. It could almost be said to have sneaked in."

The same can hardly be said for 2000, but perhaps in our inability to rise to the occasion there is some hope that this is indeed a beginning rather than an end.

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With most churches closed, most of the celebrations were confined to the temples of mammon. It is possible to be superficially irritated or pleased by this, but either way the conclusion is the same: we have not celebrated the arrival of 2000 because it marks the start of the third millennium of Christ's Word on earth, but for reasons which are at best utterly disconnected from - and in truth inimical to - that circumstance. What we celebrate is the extent to which we have become self-sufficient from God, His Son and all His works and pomps. For this is what we term "progress".

Progress is everything. Over the millennium period the newspapers, including this one, were full of nonsense about how far we had come and how far we have yet to go. We have become convinced that the scope of our self-realisation as human beings can be measured in growth figures and transaction speeds, and planned for accordingly, as though there is some perfect state of "development" towards which we must move as fast as we can and, on arrival at that perfect state, be perfectly happy and satisfied for ever more.

"The future," we were grandly informed in an article written by two "consultants" in a supplement to this newspaper on December 28th, ". . . is a process, not an event. We are living through that process right now, one that promises a further transformation of our society. We are only halfway there."

THIS is a succinct summary of the present ideology of this society and State. This is how, in many years of travelling home to the west, I used to think about a hump-backed bridge on the Ballymahon side of Mullingar. (Today, the halfway point is marked by a particularly interesting section of hardshoulder on the Mullingar bypass.)

This is the way, too, I used to think about my life when I was a railway clerk in the west of Ireland more than 20 years ago. If I could make it through the week, the weekend, with its beer and ballrooms, would make it all worthwhile. Gradually, I would put together the means to improve my lot incrementally: buy a car, get a flat, put a little aside for life assurance and pension.

Work was a process, not an event. I was living through that process right then, one that promised a further transformation of my life. I was only halfway there. The problem is that, two decades later, my life is still a process, not an event, whatever that means. If I had the faintest clue where I was going it is likely that I would consider myself still only halfway there.

Amidst all the humbug about "change" in Ireland, it is sometimes difficult to focus on what precisely has been the true essence of that change. Some things have changed, obviously, but usually the changes we get worked up about are mere superficialities, such as better roads and telephones. Far from fundamentally changing our lives, these developments don't even do what they're supposed to do.

I have found, for example, that the new roads westwards out of Dublin give the illusion of making the capital easier to access and leave, but in truth they have just moved the bottlenecks farther out into the country. Now you sit in Kinnegad rather than Lucan, but you sit nonetheless.

There is also a great deal of emphasising of alleged changes which, in truth, happened a long time before the organs of communications caught up with them - such as the decline in religiosity and the questioning of the role of the Catholic Church. Similarly, the alleged progress in social mores is greatly exaggerated.

By the same token, while we may have, for instance, abolished corporal punishment in schools, there are other tyrannies to fill the gaps, which few are anxious to acknowledge. This refusal to acknowledge is shaping up to be the greatest tyranny of all.

OUR idea of ourselves is dominated by our obsession with "progress". Our collective life has been made into something like a career, in which each new milestone invites pause for measurement. Change, however gratuitous or harmful, provides reassurance that we are not standing still. The fact that we don't know where we are going does nothing to reduce our craving for variety and renovation.

Human society has become an enormous processor of humanity. "Modern" living has taken away from us our most fundamental freedoms and aspirations in much the same way as an airport, once you enter its logic, takes away all elements of choice: we file past security and have our baggage checked, we take the escalator to the check-in area, we are transported by moving corridor to the departure lounge.

Everything is OK as long as we have space to move into, while there is still "progress" to be made. But then we arrive in the departure lounge and sit down, only to face the fact that there are no aircraft, that we do not believe in the sky, and anyway, all our pilots are in chains.

The main "achievement" of the past century of progress has not been any of our inventions, however wondrous or spectacular, but our uninvention of meaning. We have talked ourselves out of anything resembling a belief in transcendence and so have nothing to celebrate at this moment but our hubris.

My question is: when we finally arrive wherever it is we think we are going, how are these "consultants" going to earn a living?