Fintan
O'Toole (F O'T) is an opinion writer for The
Irish Times.
He is one of Ireland’s best-known columnists, with a large
readership in Ireland and internationally. He is also a well-regarded
theatre critic. Writing on July 16th,
directly after the Bastille Day killings in Nice, F O'T defines the
line between civilised, democratic society and its nihilistic
opponents as the line between terror and pity.
Immediately F O'T
has waded
into
the language quagmire which conflates civilised with democratic and
describes certain perpetrators of violence as nihilists. The people
who mow down other people, with a truck driven along a sea-side
promenade
as citizens and
tourists enjoy a fireworks display, do not describe themselves as
nihilist, if nihilists are people who have no beliefs or who believe
in nothing. Like many of the people who fly fighter bombers, guide drone weapons and sit on the
boards of arms' manufacturers, they have beliefs of various kinds,
including, very often, religious beliefs.
According
to F O'T, it is all a matter of luck. Some of us (sic)
are
lucky enough to live in times and places where there are no warring
tribes, no marauding armies, no exterminationist ideologies, no
messianic cults, no megalomaniacal emperors, no young men convinced
that they can become immortal by preying like vampires on other
people's morality.
Who
does the 'us' refer to? Such lists always present problems of
'what is missing?' How about people lucky enough to live under the
protection of one of the great power blocs, in particular the ones
with weapons of mass destruction; lucky enough to live in a country
where the international arms industry is concentrated?; lucky enough
to live where what the state's army does is legitimate and not
terror, though it creates as much carnage as the lorry driver and his
fellows; lucky enough not to be made so desperate by economic and war
circumstances that you load your family onto makeshift vessels and
venture into the sea to face the gun-boats?
Using
'luck' in this opinion piece removes agency from human endeavours.
It's 'luck' then that a country has factories, colleges, schools,
material goods in excess, farms that produce food and money,
beneficial trade relations, sought-after currencies and gold
reserves, nuclear and other weapons, stock markets and hedge funds.
Globalisation
works, as you'd expect, across the globe, but unevenly, as within
benefiting countries such as Ireland. What hope then for deficit
countries, like, say, unlucky Bangladesh?
F
O'T offers us pity as a counterbalance to terror, from the ancient
formulation by Aristotle for understanding tragedy in theatre. F O'T
suggests that nihilists have only terror. But who are the nihilists?
The humans who plough lorries through festive crowds? The humans who
smile to see their share prices rising when they review the balance
sheets of the arms manufacturers?
Could
it be that there are no nihilists, simply hypocrites who manage to
hold beliefs in moral ideas of 'the good', often supported by
religious beliefs, while engaging in economic, political and military
acts, which others, on the receiving end of them, could not believe
as 'the good'?
F
O'T writes of 'our moral boundaries' without clarifying who he means
by 'our' and not making any attempt to pin down the compass and
extent of such boundaries.
Pity
complicates things,
as F O'T says, and
that's no
doubt the case. And vital. The use of the words 'we', 'us' and 'our'
further complicates matters. F O'T asserts that compassion
is a boundless as fear.
However,
with all this resting on 'luck' rather than human agency, how might
the largest possible compass of 'us' experience this compassion in
'our' lives? Get lucky?
There
is an opposite to terror – and it is stronger;
Fintan O'Toole, The
Irish Times,
Dublin, 16.7.2016
www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter
