Replaying An Oldie For St. Patrick's Day

Thursday, March 17, 2016

St. Patrick Day

Some passages from Thomas Cahill's book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Patrick's gift to the Irish was his Christianity - the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the Irish scene.  Through the Edict of Milan, which had legalized the new religion in 313 and made it the new emperor's pet,  Christianity had been received into Rome, not Rome into Christianity!  Roman culture was little altered by the exchange, and it is arguable that Christianity lost much of its distinctiveness.  But in the Patrician exchange, Ireland, lacking the power and implacable tradition of Rome, had been received into Chirstianity, which transformed Ireland into Something New, something never seen before - a Christian culture, where slavery and human sacrifice became unthinkable, and warfare, tough impossible for humans to eradicate, diminished markedly.  The Irish, in any case, loved physical combat too much for intertribal warfare to disappear entirely.  But new laws, influenced by Gospel norms, inhibited such conflicts severely by requiring that arms be taken up only for a weighty cause.  Ireland would not again see a battle on the scale of the Tain till Brian Boru would rout the Vikings in the eleventh century.

The ending of human sacrifice was common wherever Christianity was introduced, which must have been a blessed relief to those who were at greatest risk of being selected for incredibly brutal, pagan, ritual murder.  I can only imagine it was through the force of personality and authenticity that Patrick was able to overturn that practice.  He seems to have had an enormous amount of courage in facing the brutality of the pagans in Ireland which, I would imagine, impressed them.

The ending of slavery in Ireland, the first place in Europe which I'm aware of it having ended, was, till the time of Patrick, unique.  There had been Chritians who called for the end of slavery,  St. Macrina the Younger and her brother St. Gregory of Nyssa had almost a century before Patrick but he got the powers in Christian Ireland to give it up until it was reintroduced by the English after they invaded and colonized Ireland.  You have to remember that Patrick was an escaped slave, himself, he knew what slavery was in only the way that a slave can know it.

Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.  There were no Irih martyrs (at least not till Elizabeth began to create them eleven centuries after Patrick).  And this lack of martyrdom troubled the Irish, to whom a glorious death by violence presented such an exciting finale.  If all Ireland had received Christianity without a fight, the Irish would have to think up some new form of martyrdom - something even more intereting than the wonderfully grisly store they had begun to learn in the simple continental collections, called "martyrologies," from which Patrick and his successors taught them to read.

Thomas Cahill gets to the subject of his book after that, first the establishment of monaisticism in Ireland and then the rapid transformation of a nearly totally illiterate nation into the scribal publishing powerhouse on the outer edge of Western Europe that, literally, preserved huge parts of classical and even pagan culture, as illiteracy ruled in the rest of Western Europe.  He notes how it was from Ireland that not only Christianity but literacy and the texts of classical and other texts were introduced into Scotland, England, Wales, France and elsewhere in Europe as the medieval period proceeded.  I might go into the ironies, given the popularity of the English "enlightenment" myth, pretty much invented by Edward Gibbon,  that Christians burned the Great Library at Alexandria  among atheists and online Pagans, that it was those poor, put upon pagans who ended the great period of Irish scholarship and intellectual missionary efforts when the Vikings pillaged and destroyed the Irish monasteries in Ireland and elsewhere.

As to how paganism in Ireland fared under Christianity,  Cahill says:

As these transformed warrior children of Patrick's heart lay down the swords of battle, flung away the knives of sacrifice and cast aside the chains of slavery,  they very much remained Irishmen and Irishwomen.  Indeed, the survival of an Irish psychological identity is one of the marvels of the Irish story.  Unlike the continental church fathers, the Irish never troubled themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences, which the tended to wink at and enjoy. The pagan festivals continued to be celebrated, which is why we today can still celebrate the Irish feasts of May Day and Hallowe'en.  To this day there is a town in Kerry that holds a fertility festival each August, where a magnificent he-goat presides like Cernunnos for three days and nights, and bacchanalian drinking, wild dancing and varieties of sexual indiscretion are the principal entertainments.  It is this characteristically Irish melange of pagan and Christian that forms the theme of Brian Friel's magnificent play "Dancing at Lughnasa" - Lughnasa being the harvest feast of the god Lug, still celebrated on August 1 in parts of Ulster.   Irish marriage customs remained most un-Roman.  As late as the twelfth century - seven centuries after the conversion of the Irish to the Gospel - a husband or wife could call it quits and walk out for good on February 1, the feast of Imbolc, which meant that Irish marriages were renewable yearly, like magazine subscriptions or insurance policies.  As lat as the last century naked men (and, for all we know, women) races horses bareback along Clare's beaches thorough the surf at high tide, looking for all the world like their prehistoric warrior ancestors.  But after Patrick the eviler gods shrank in stature and became much less troublesome, became in fact the comical gargoyles of medieval imagination, peering fearfully from undignified nooks, and the belief grew strong that the one thing the devil cannot bear is laughter.

I'd like to make a distinction between that and how the commercial, brewing industry inspired American style desecration of St. Patrick Day, though the distinction would be subtle.  I'm not exactly sure I agree with him about Hallowe'en, but I will agree with him, completely, about Brian Friel who was a wonderful playwright.

Edmund Campion, the Elizabethan Jesuit who was martyred at Tyburn in 1581 left us a description of the Irish that rings true to this day:

"The people are thus inclined:  religious, franke amorous, irefull, sufferable of paines infinte, very glorious, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with warres, great almes-givers, [sur]passing in hospitalitie...  They are sharpe-witted, lovers of learning, capable of any studie whereunto they bend themselves, constant in travaile, adventurous, intractable, kinde-hearted, secret in displeasure."

We can make out in this Elizabethan group portrait not only the Irish of our own day but the lively ghosts of Irishmen long past - Ailil, Medb, Cuchulainn. Derdriu. and, after a fashion, Patrick himself.  Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing:  the Irish will never change. 

I have often wished my grandparents had lived long enough so I could ask them what they thought about Freudian theories when they first heard of them, their lives included the period when those were translated into English and popularized.   I strongly suspect they'd have thought they were as ridiculous as, in fact, they are and that the many people who fell for that nonsense were ridiculous.  If that's a national trait of the Irish, I don't know.  I am at a loss for how anyone, anywhere, could have been so credulous as to believe in them, but, then, I'm at a loss to understand how much so much of the total nonsense that constitutes the equipment of an allegedly educated English speaker, much of it junk invented in the 18th century, is required to pass as respectable.

 

It Wasn't Only That One god Of Modernism That Failed

ALL OF THE gods OF SECULARISM have failed in the United States, just as the god of communism did.  The Constitution has failed.  If it had been what it was alleged to be, if it was the sacred document that our, to use the putrid phrasing of the corrupt Sandra Day O'Connor, "civic religion" requires be presented as infallible and holy writ, the Constitution, Donald Trump would never have been president.  Instead it was exactly the Constitution, in the forms of the Electoral College and the inanity of the lie-permitting First Amendment which produced exactly what those were supposed to protect us from, a despotic government voted into office by a minority who believed the lies spread by the entirely libertine "free press" as manipulated by billionaires, domestic and foreign to the edification of the corporate owners of the "press."   

Democracy requires that an effective majority of People know the truth that will make us free, pretending it's safe to allow lies is probably the most anti-democratic legal claim there could possibly be.  Yet the golden calf of our idolatry, the First Amendment does just that.

The courts, especially the Supreme Court, from hereon in honestly named the Corrupt Court, have repeatedly enabled Trump and the Republican-fascists during his criminal reign as they did during the previous record-holder of presidential criminality, Ronald Reagan, only far more boldly and blatantly than it did four decades ago.  Their latest move to hear a case that should never have been a question that it needed to be heard, that an American President has a carte blance to commit any crime he decides to, is a blatant attempt for him to run out the clock on his prosecutions to help him in the election this year.  That is so obvious that calling it a "ruse" is to essentially miss the meaning of what a ruse is, it's blatant Republican-fascist Corrupt Court partisan corruption to try to help install the idiot baby-man who will usher in blatant fascist rule in the United States.  There has not been anything as bald an attempt to do something that disgustingly immoral since the Taney Court's attempt to extend slavery throughout the country on the basis of "property rights."  

If you think that comparison of Roberts et al to Taney et al, ia over the top,  remember, the Roberts-Republican-fascists have enabled him to escape responsibility for the most blatant and serious attempt at an insurrection since the one Taney et al moved on in Dred Scott, the Corrupt Court decision that led to the Civil War.  At the same time the Roberts Court has made sure that their potential invisible army, the Court clique clan, will be armed with automatic weapons with which to impose Republican-fascist rule on the country, no doubt with willing and enthusiastic mass murderers to put down any resistance.  I don't think even Taney would have done that, though he and subsequent courts did his best to do so when it would have been Black People and Native Americans who would have been the target for terror killings and de facto enslavement.  

That anyone would have nurtured any reverent faith that the Corrupt Court would save us from oligarchic dictatorship could only do so from a total and complete ignorance of the history of that corrupt organ of government. But our "civic religion" is nothing if not in the business of promoting pious lies and ignorance of things like that.

Lower courts have a more mixed record, though in far too many cases they have dallied and delayed even when their results FINALLY turned out to be sound.  That a "judge" like Aileen Cannon is still allowed to blatantly enable Trump to get away with what is probably the most serious give-away of U.S. national security secrets to whoever he figures will get him something OR TO A RANDOM AUSTRAILIAN BILLIONAIRE THE MAKE-BELIEVE BILLIONAIRE WANTS TO IMPRESS is absolute proof of the utter corruption of the judiciary.  No doubt even the good judges who believe in democracy and, some of them, maybe, even egalitarian government will trim their actions because of fear of being overturned by the more elite levels of that hierarchy.  The Corrupt Court is probably the ultimate source of most of the bad habits that persist in lower courts and on down throughout the lawyering racket though many of those practices have been endemic to the profession of lawyering back to the dawn of that more damnable of oldest professions.

That more of Trumps crooked, often law breaking lawyers haven't been kicked out of that cartel is just more of the same corruption,  I think, since most of the worst of the upper levels of the judiciary come from them, the Ivy League and Ivy equivalent level law schools, those have to share in the blame for producing what they produce.  Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, etc, credentials from those schools should carry a suspicion of being highly trained in how to lie for the deepest pockets and, if not that, then in training to come up with dishonest reasons to do awful things.  If they can get a "justice" Jackson to nullify a key provision of the 14th Amendment that would have saved us from Trump, through her Harvard Law training, it is rightly suspected of being the source of that corruption.   Though, the often vaunted credential that someone is an expert in the secular-theological "Constitutional scholarship" is largely based on studying what the Corrupt Court and lower courts of jurisdiction have held about that document.  The lies and distortions of that very amendment, alone, would comprise a huge index of folly so as to put the worst of scholastic theology in a better light.

I will point out that the Roberts Court nullification of that provision in the Constitution proves that the Marbury v Madison usurped power for the Corrupt Court to overturn duly adopted federal law has clearly now been expanded by that court to include the power to, without any Constitutional process, amend and nullify the Constitution, itself.  With that our expectations of a government of laws and not of men is made a meta-lie as whopping big as the one that Corrupt Court has over its doorway, "equal justice under law."  

The media which the relatively young Thomas Jefferson believed would provide  insurance against despotism has been, if anything, even more corrupt than the legal racket and the Corrupt Court. That media mounted god of secularism was a fraud from the start.  The more experienced Jefferson was far less naive about the corruption that the press, freed to lie with impunity embodied.  The media, including the most profitable, and so most powerful, part of it, entertainment, has enabled the corruption of the United States to an extent that puts the corrupt judiciary in the place of "also ran" us into fascism.  The freer they have been to lie, to lie about politicians, the more they have promoted the worst choices, starting with Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980, and the series of Republicans who have taken that party into its present fascism.  NBC, the parent of the ever less "liberal" MSNBC, is taking that same road that every other major network has.   Anyone who had a brain in their head in 1964 when the Warren Court took the greatest steps toward our lying media would have known it would be anyone who promoted equality and democracy that they would go after and not the enemies of equality and democracy.  Our media has always been, on balance, a bulwark of the oligarchs, millionaires, billionaires and our native tendencies towards facism.  That has certainly been the predictable result as the Republicans took in the native American fascists of white supremacy so as to get a majority for the billionaires and millionaires to fleece the country more than they had been used to doing so. America has never been without a dangerously large and ignorant and vicious wedge of People for whom hatred, envy and fear win out over any better angels that attend them.  And I'm not only talking about those on the so-called "right."

The American left, especially that part of it that are faithful to the "civic religion" of secularism, the de facto faith of the college credentialed crowd, have been total and complete suckers for this progress into fascism on the basis of "The First Amendment" and other such slogans.  As the fascists gulled ever more Americans they bought the ACLU line of "more speech" even though that "more speech" was never enough to protect equality and democracy from the reign of lies that were amplified through the billions of times "more speech" which the Supreme Court gave to the billionaires and millionaires when they declared that money was speech in Buckley v Valeo, another of the obvious outcomes of another daffy ruling in which a number of the "liberal" "justices" joined in on out of "principle."  The fifty plus years of descent from the high point of liberal politics in the early LBJ administration has proven that free speech absolutism hasn't done much of anything to protect us from the most criminal administrations and regimes* in our history.

The religion of secularism has failed on every count, that secularism, in its immoral "moral neutrality"  has no firm foundation on which to make moral judgements  and so always is in a neutral wash that enables the worst immorality.  So it's no great surprise that in the crisis we are in it is so impotent to protect egalitarian democracy.  The comedians who like to pat themselves on the back for in their opposition to Trump show that their highest value isn't egalitarian democracy, it's to get the laugh.  Even someone like Steve Colbert has contributed to the general attack on the last hope of even liberal democracy, Joe Biden, on the basis of his age.  That Joe Biden has been the most vigorous Democratic President, combining the moral centeredness of Jimmy Carter with the skill of Lyndon Johnson, while pulling us out of a hopeless quagmire instead of getting us farther into one, has not counted as much to them as the cheap laugh.  I strongly suspect that if Joe Biden got a second term with a really Democratic Congress, he could be the greatest president we have had.  And if he gets it, it won't be because Colbert and some other comedians support him, it will be because there are enough serious people in the country to out-vote the dupes and fascists.   

When we're this close to fascism, none of it's funny.  Comedy in the 1920s did nothing to slow down the Nazis and fascists.  

I am convinced that the reason that American democracy has failed isn't just because education has failed in the hopeless struggle for it to win out over TV and screen based entertainment, it has failed because the moral basis of democracy has been supplanted by Mammonism, the worship of money, which saturates  American life, human life, really.  The churches have certainly been effected by that, especially the ones you might think of first, the Southern Baptists and the Catholic Church.  The Southern Baptists, a denomination founded in support of first slavery then segregation and with some pretty dodgy theological ideas, is only one of a number of Protestant denominations that could be named.  Catholics, the denomination I'm most familiar with, is undergoing a billionaire-millionaire financed take-over attempt aided and abetted by the JPII-Benedict XVI era majority in the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops.  But going into details on that would get me into the moral disaster that the JPII papacy led to, a topic in itself.

But even with all of that, the fact that the ultimate source of Christian religion has to rest on the Gospel of Jesus, which is both radically egalitarian and economically leveling, will always leave sincere believers with a far firmer foundation on which to build egalitarian democracy than the mushy swamp of secularism.  

Secularism should never have been an excuse to refuse to name and state moral absolutes, even though ADMINISTRATIVE secularism is an essential practice of a government in an egalitarian democracy.  But it has been used to refuse the most basic of moral foundations of egalitarian democracy as an absolute list of things agreed on by anyone who is allowed to participate in it.

1. That all People have inalienable rights, to material sustenance sufficient to have a decent life.

2. That they have an obligation to accept and act out and promote the basic level of equality to everyone, whatever their ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sex, level of intelligence, etc.  That does not include those who hold an ideology, religious or other belief in their superiority over others which allows them to negate or violate the basic rights of everyone.

3. One person, one vote in determining who governs the country, the state, the locality.  The right of every person to cast a vote and to have that vote count EQUALLY.  I will point out that the Constitution violates that on the most basic level in the Electoral College (if it is not abolished it will destroy democracy) and the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate in which the People of Wyoming, the Dakotas, Vermont, my home state, Maine, etc. have far more representation than the People of California, New York, etc.  

4. That anything that violates equal rights, any ideology OR RELIGION that denies or rejects that can be allowed to propagate through the media or through organized efforts.  WE ALL HAVE A RIGHT TO THE PROTECTION OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY THAT OVERRIDES THE 'RIGHT" TO PROMOTE FASCISM OR MARXISM OR ANY OTHER ANTI-EGALITARIAN DEMOCRATIC IDEOLOGY.

The idea that American democracy had an obligation to allow anti-egalitarian, and so anti-democratic ideology to have a chance to destroy egalitarian democracy would have, certainly, been against the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic financial interests in the framers of the corrupt Constitution, which leads me to the fifth point:

5. WE, LIVING TODAY, HAVE A RIGHT TO EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY THAT THE "FOUNDERS" OR "FRAMERS" CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO PREVENT OR THWART.  Nothing that they said or did which goes against equality and democracy has any moral standing which succeeds our right to egalitarian democracy from here on out.  They weren't all-wise, they weren't even particularly honest, though they may have been marginally more honest than the amoral slime that rules us under the Constitutional order.  The virtue of history honestly considered is it gives us a basis for trying something better than would have occurred to those aristocratic white men who wrote the Declaration of Independence (the founders) and those who wrote the Constitution and its amendments (the framers) who were obviously corrupted by their practice of slavery and their activities as sharp businessmen, land speculators.  That they came from a particularly bad time as the amoral pseudo-scientific "enlightenment" was the fashion didn't help much in them feeling a need to sacrifice their personal wealth and the sleazy sources of it in favor of equality and democracy.  That the sleazy practice of our Corrupt Court is based in their pretenses of "originalism" and "textualism" should be the final nail in the coffin of that particular god of American secularism.   

I may share Charlie Pierce's and others' fear of a new constitutional convention, considering how billionaire-millionaire money corrupts everything now.  But the fact is that it is already corrupting it, not only against BUT THROUGH the Constitution we have now.  I think it will become ever clearer that we have no choice but to largely renovate it if not tear it up and start over.  In that case all of the well-esteemed Constitutional Scholars may lose their specialty's relevance.  I'm not sure I'd trust a lot of them to be in on writing a new one, certainly none that have a history of speaking out against equality and democracy and, most of all, asserting that lies must be protected by the Constitution.  All the evil we have is based in lies told through the media and the worship of that most dangerous of all secular gods, money.   Unless we have a. "First Amendment" that a. makes it clear that lies don't enjoy any legitimate protection and, b. that  organizations, "the press," "religions," corporations cannot possess rights and, so, don't have rights under the Constitution, we may as well not try because that's the major source of the corruption we have now.   Trump, like Reagan before him, were creations of the media, the free press.  They, as politicians instead of just media created false fronts, were a product of the First Amendment, Corrupt Court permission to lie with impunity.  

* Only a presidency which gets a majority of the vote should be given the name of "administration."  Those which are produced by the anti-democratic Electoral College without a majority vote or by the Corrupt Court working on concert with a corrupt family run state government, such as Bush v Gore, are regimes like any other banana republican regime.