History and current hot spots like Iran and Korea illustrate the false hope offered by dogmatic thinking, writes TONY KINSELLA.
DOGMAS, SETS of principles held to be incontrovertibly true, are fixed. Being fixed they become familiar, offering a level of comfort irrespective of their content. Reality, as we are daily reminded, constantly changes. As constant change is unsettling, the comfort of familiar dogmas, however flawed, can be extraordinarily seductive.
Ninety-three years ago a small group of men and women stormed a handful of buildings in Dublin in what they knew to be a militarily-doomed attempt to overthrow British rule. Their action would indirectly, with considerable assistance from a dogmatic imperial response, lead to the realisation of their goal.
Quite what their successors have achieved with that political independence remains both a moot point and a work in progress. Escaping from some of our more bizarre, partially supremacist, and less-than-fully democratic delusions could help us build a less painful future.
One of the more bizarre, and certainly the most toxic, dogmas to both inform and deform modern Irish politics is the concept of our “difference”. Although we bridle when the English call us “quaint” we revel in affirming our difference from pretty well the rest of the world. We are of course different, but then so is everybody. As Leitrim is different from Longford, so is Cork from Copenhagen. Difference makes our world attractive. Preserve us from one where everywhere and everybody is identical.
Universal laws like those of gravity, or supply and demand, apply in Ireland as they do elsewhere. People die from the same illnesses, and are tellingly conceived and born in the same way. Deluding ourselves that these universalities do not somehow apply to our island is, however unwittingly, to cross the fatal frontier between difference and supremacism.
Once across that frontier we are no longer merely different from others, we become in some indefinable and inexplicable way, better than them. On the far side of that frontier we should proudly stand aloof from the world’s conflicts in our unsullied neutrality, however flawed it might be.
Contraception and divorce, we were told, were unnecessary, dangerous and wrong – because we are clearly different and/or better. Experience has shown just how ridiculous and delusional those arguments were. The availability of contraception has neither produced mass public orgies, nor the decline of our population. Our divorce rate, although slowly increasing, remains below the EU average.
Many of those who so resolutely opposed those reforms, including a Fine Gael taoiseach who voted against his own government, employed inherently undemocratic logic. Finding that the proposed reforms clashed with their private religious convictions, they effectively argued that State power should be employed to impose those beliefs on all.
When Muslim, Hindu or Jewish figures argue for the use of state power to impose religious practices, we rightly decry it as fundamentalism, while tolerating it at home on the grounds of “difference”.
Our resolute attachment to difference created an economic bubble where square metres in Dublin’s Docklands became more valuable than ones along the Champs Élysées. A government in thrall to speculators with the banking and construction sectors bobbing happily in their frothy wake, has handed us a massive bill that may take decades to clear.
President Obama, although in office for less than three months, confronts us with the uncomfortable uncertainties of today’s realities and the structural flaws of familiar dogmas.
Last month for Nowruz, or the Iranian New Year, Obama broadcast a remarkable video overture to Teheran. He was the first US president to employ the correct name of the country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and said it should “take its rightful place in the community of nations”.
The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei quickly responded in a new year address from his country’s holiest shrine in Meshad. While much of his speech did recount, in less than flattering terms, the history of US-Iranian relations, he did stop the crowd’s ritual “Death to America” chants. He went on to add “We’re not emotional when it comes to our important matters. We make decisions by calculation . . . If you change, our behaviour will change too.”
This reads as an entirely rational response, closely echoing Lord Palmerston’s 1848 foreign policy statement “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
A week later Iranian deputy foreign minister Akhundzadeh offered full Iranian participation in “combating drug trafficking and . . . and reconstructing Afghanistan” during an international conference with Hillary Clinton in The Hague.
This has all the hallmarks of a positive response, of a long overdue intrusion of reality, yet most media coverage remained rooted in obsolete dogma, talking of Iran “dismissing” Obama’s olive branch.
In Prague the president threw the reality shutters wide open allowing daylight to reveal the lethal nonsense nuclear deterrence dogma has become, and setting out “an agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons”.
Hours later Pyongyang’s launch of its Taepodong-2 rocket, although marking progress in North Korea’s missile capabilities, was a partial failure. This coupled with the country’s partial 2006 nuclear test had a host of dogma-trapped commentators painting Obama’s reasonable reinvigoration of a 40-year-old US policy as hopelessly naive.
Can living in the shadow of over 22,000 nuclear warheads really be more comforting than attempting to eliminate them?
The comfort offered by familiar dogmas is only valid when they survive a reality check. We are now suffering the pain of so many failed certainties that only the uncertainty of our realities, however harsh, can offer us hope.