What is vital for us is to stay with the fact our hearts jumped at the way this man remained steadfast to the end, writes JOHN WATERS
THIS PAST week, the country has been distracted from its three-year litany of complaint about economic woes into a burst of mourning for, and celebration of, a man who throughout that time has been on the receiving end of the collective venting and lamentation.
It is easy for the unsubtle-minded to diagnose an inconsistency here, and indeed this has been a theme in some blogosphere fulminations I stumbled on during the week. The thrust of these might be summarised as follows: because Brian Lenihan was “to blame” for certain things, all attempts to praise him must be regarded as hypocrisy.
The convention of speaking nothing but good of the recently dead is a decent one, and it would be a skewed notion of “honesty” that demanded its suspension. But this train of thought might cause us to miss the meaning of these recent days.
There is no hypocrisy in being moved by someone you have argued or disagreed with. On the contrary, such feelings may, precisely on account of the argument or disagreement, speak of something much deeper.
The affection expressed in the past week has certainly seemed at odds with the venting and disillusion of recent times. But what are we to make of this? Are we to consider the recriminations of ideological street-fighting as the defining criteria which, now that Lenihan’s remains are committed to the ground, ought to reassert themselves forthwith? Ought we to dismiss our initial sorrow and acclamation as mere sentimentality, even insincerity, and allow the cynics to reorient us towards what they insist is “the truth”?
This question of whether distinctions ought to be drawn between the personality and policies of a politician implies that there are different tracks on which human beings may be encountered and understood. And of course there are. But the more interesting question is: why should it be an issue? Does the very assertion of the question not alert us to something distorted and reductive?
There will always be crude ideological outlooks to insist that technocratic questions of ideology and outlook be the defining elements of man. The problem nowadays is that such perspectives dominate the public consciousness, while remaining invisible, undetectable, in their arbitrariness. Their spokespersons seek to persuade us that success is always a matter of outcomes. And, since humans fail all the time, such reasoning implies that most human lives amount to pointless defeats.
Deep within itself, the human heart is made in a different way, desiring not “success” but knowledge of what really is.
Lenihan’s work required of him a deep immersion in the technocratic questions of national survival. But, while doing his job to the best of his ability, he did not allow himself to believe that it represented the absolute measure of his life. Many of us may think he made some serious errors, but what does any of that amount to? Who lives a life without serious errors? What day passes when each of us does not do something to make something worse rather than better?
Life is not about the “right” way of doing things, because nobody can know what that is. And if the day ever dawns when we insist that a man’s worth be measured by the formulations he adopts for describing how he thinks the greater public good ought to be maximised, then that will be the day to pull down the blinds on human endeavour.
It is how Lenihan lived and died, not what he achieved or failed to achieve, that will remain in a hundred years as the residue of his life and his lust for life. By then, the question of what happened in Dublin on September 29th, 2008, or November 18th, 2010, will be of fleeting academic concern. But human beings will still need to know how to be.
To watch Lenihan in his work over the past 18 months was to recognise the position of a man in front of the total circumstances of his life, and to see that the economic difficulties that currently beset out nation are but the stuff of human striving: challenging, taxing, but ultimately immaterial.
What would be the best outcome: that we be returned to the economic conditions of Ireland 2005 or that we might acquire something of the spirit Lenihan showed in his final months and days?
What do we want for our society, for ourselves? How should we judge what happens in the public realm: by the standards of some technical understanding or by the criteria of the human heart?
How do I deal with this apparent contradiction: this man failed in some ways and yet moved me beyond words?
What is vital for us now is to stay with the fact that our hearts jumped at the way this man lived his life and remained steadfast to the end – at the full stretch of human passion and possibility.
If we look back on this week and decide that what was expressed was a mere sentimental outpouring, an aberration from the “reality”, we have again in our public conversation denied the human heart in the true depths of its desire.