THE THEME of the 32nd Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples is the concept of certainty, as conveyed in the provocative title: "And Existence Becomes an Immense Certainty". Since Italy has so recently joined us in the economic doghouse, I had half-expected to encounter here an unravelling similar to that experienced by Ireland since 2008. I have been surprised, writes JOHN WATERS
Here in Rimini, in harmony with the challenge of that uncompromising title, there is a recognition that a crisis is under way, but no sense of fatalism, no acceptance that what is happening is definitive for human aspiration or hope. Life is a process tangentially related to economic prospects, not married to them. Life goes on.
At the meeting this week, thousands of people have been turning out for all kinds of encounters: to hear philosophers and scientists speak about the nature of certainty; to peer at the exhibits depicting the extraordinary life of Blessed John Henry Newman; to learn about the thinking that led generations of physicists to gaze into the atom; to engage with journalists in discussion of the future of the printed word; and to attend some of the innumerable events marking 150 years of Italian unity. The Rimini meeting is essentially a creation of Catholicism, yet acknowledges no bounds within the conventional understandings summoned up by the word “religion”.
So removed are such phenomena from anything that might be imagined for the mainstream of Irish life that it is difficult to avoid the sense that some quite shocking impoverishment has descended on our own culture, and that this has arisen from the collapse of the religious dimension.
We live in an age when the desire for certainty seems to exist in inverse to its availability. But, instead of risking more to know more, we reduce the terms and ratchet down the framework of potential understanding so as to make it appear that we have come to know almost everything. Thus, present uncertainties seem to accompany an almost overwhelming desire that all matters be settled once and for all. And the more intense becomes our preoccupation with pinning everything down, the more the uncertainty grows.
One of the insights that surfaced again and again this week in Rimini is that human certainty is not what our cultures have decided: a definitive clarity concerning facts and meanings. Rather, it has to do with the determination of the stride along a particular path. Every understanding, every discovery, is contingent. Several leading scientists, including Lucio Rossi, who worked on the Large Hadron Collider, and John Polkinghorne, former president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, spoke about the tentative nature of scientific voyaging. Because science constantly contradicts itself, they seemed to agree, it is not possible to “arrive” anywhere, but only to move forward with a confidence that supplies its own, provisional, certitude.
If asked to put one word on the mood of Ireland, I might until this week have proffered “rage”. Now I glimpse that the point is really that the dominant emotion is reactive and negative rather than creative or constructive. What, for example, has been the most acclaimed political speech of the past year? Not some visionary call-to-arms or invocation of the Irish spirit, but the Taoiseach’s denunciation of the pope and the Vatican last month. The urge is to denounce everything rather than announce anything.
This goes a long way towards explaining the difficulty we experience throwing up a plausible successor to President Mary McAleese, who wowed the Rimini meeting this time last year. Our culture is too saturated in negativity and cynicism to yield a “leader” other than one who represents a two-fingers to itself.
I believe these deficiencies of Irish culture arise overwhelmingly from the nature of two key edifices of our culture: education and journalism.
The neglect of philosophy in our schools is one dimension of the problem. More serious is that our education system works on the development of retention rather than reason. The fragmented nature of what we call education, as Cardinal Newman diagnosed 150 years ago, imparts packets of information under various headings with no overarching code by which to join things up.
Journalism, itself the product of the stunted mode of education, reduces everything a little further so as to confine the description of reality within its control.
Dictating and informing the daily menu of mainstream thinking, our media commentary is overwhelmingly shallow, reactive and driven by simplistic and unacknowledged ideologies that work off citizens’ negative emotions to promote a sense of destination that is a mirage. Scepticism, the most vital element of a healthy journalism, has gone out of control, so that the dominant energies tend towards demolition rather than construction.
The culture thus nurtured is angry at, and uncomprehending of, its disintegration, but, lacking any solid ground to stand on, cannot summon up a coherent response directed at saving itself. Patriotism is inexpressible other than as a sideways attack on the unpatriotic actions of others; “values” means the denunciation of inherited ideals; “hope” is a circular sentimentality, expected to generate itself out of nothing.
Everything unravels, while the commentary implies a certain progress.