“That the nation may live, the Irish life, both the inner life and the outer life, must be conserved. Hence the language, which is the main repository of the Irish life, the folklore, the literature, the music, the art, the social customs, must be conserved”
P.H Pearse, The Spiritual Nation
The aftermath of the latest attempt of social engineering has left the progressive project reeling. Two referenda were resoundingly rejected because people were not fooled by the linguistic Trojan horse of inclusion and progress.
As eloquent and knowledgeable opponents of the referenda came into the debate, it became clear that the fundamental issue was to destroy, in the eyes of the law, the most essential principles that the values of our society are based on: that of Motherhood and Family, and the cluster of biological relationships around that dyad of mother and child.
But the aim was not just to destroy these fundamental principles in both law and culture, it was to sublate them: to destroy them and yet to preserve from them something which, through a process of synthesis, would define a new standard. This process of destruction and preservation was dwelled over by the philosophers of modernism, and called Aufhebung by the German philosopher, Hegel. In our present post-liberal age it is a tactic that was further proposed as a means of advancing the dialectic of progressivism by such postmodernists as Jacques Derrida. It is now a stock tactic of the progressive left and the elites, to manifest change in culture throughout the west.
The trans issue, and the redefinition of “woman” as something which has no relevant connection with the biological reality of being a woman (as in a member of the female sex of the human species), is one very obvious instance of Aufhebung – the creation of “woman” (a new conception of woman that is, which will be argued is preserving the concept of woman) while simultaneously destroying the definition of “woman”.
The same thing happens in culture – and this, arguably, is the driving motivation in the craze for diversity and inclusion.
Patrick Pearse was fiercely critical of this process of Aufhebung in the systems of cultural transmission. He called the education system of Ireland a “murder machine” which, instead of building the Irish child up, stripped them of their culture. “This Nego is their Credo,” he said of the administrators of this ideology.
In his essay, The Spiritual Nation, Pearse said that the managerial elite who ran Ireland in the decaying days of the British Empire had an enemy, which was the spirituality of the nation. For the Irish nation to continue, the “Irish life” must continue, he argued.
“Irish nationality is an ancient spiritual tradition, and the Irish nation could not die as long as that tradition lived in the heart of one faithful man or woman. But had the last repositor of the Gaelic tradition, the last unconquered Gael, died, the Irish nation was no more. Any free state that might thereafter be erected in Ireland, whatever it might call itself, would certainly not be the historic Irish nation,” he wrote.
Pearse’s argument here was that an Irish spiritual nation transformed by Aufhabung would not be Ireland. Aufhebung is, after all, the paradoxical destruction of what “is,” while keeping some of the essence at the same time. This is the process that was embraced by the managerial mandarins of his day, as it is by the globalist managerial class of today.
Aufhebung is the destruction of old culture through the refinement of the absolute within it; the peeling away of what the liberal/left consider ‘the bad’ and the unperfected, to allow the pure spirit at its core to bloom into a new weltgeist (“world-spirit”).
Three simple recursive steps are employed: Take culture; find the seed at its core; get rid of everything else and allow that seed to bloom in a newly shaped form. In this way we find that culture is imminent not transcendent. That is why, in this leftist mindset, culture has to be moved to reflect the politics and demographics of the changing times. That is why official culture – at this point – according to the taste setters and funders must be multicultural, trans-supportive, etc.
Leftist culture warriors use this tactic incessantly to infiltrate, and then to seize, cultural organizations and cultural production. For example, an online knitting community is suddenly accused by members of being too focused on white women and not allowing black trans knitters to be heard. A computer gaming online community is accused of being systematically sexist and promoting a community of misogyny and of course (fill in the blank)-phobia. A Morris Dancing organization is charged with being too white and not having any Morris dancers of colour.
This is deemed proof of extreme white privilege and racism. In each case, examples are made of a handful chosen to be doxed and cancelled.
As a rule of thumb no situation is too ridiculous not too happen, and no community is too small to receive this Eye of Sauron treatment from the leftist cultural juggernaut. The result is to crush the cultural activity/organization and transform it into a woke, politically-controlled thing. All of this is congruent with the leftist position that the personal is political, and the political shall invade the private lives of everyone.
One of the ways to take over the cultural space and to turn cultural activity into a political statement is to publicly sponsor it and to tie that sponsorship to political social objectives.
For instance, there are a proliferation of state-sponsored street festivals which push this objective. And there are a number of Arts grants which tie public funding to woke political agends such as climate-change or specially-favoured idpol groups. In another example of cultural control through funding, there is a traditional music street festival sponsored by the council in Dublin for the past few years. This is a curated festival, and it presents what the public may assume is a representation of the traditional and folk scene. But the public has no idea what priorities, biases, and objectives go into the curation of the festival.
Through the process of Aufhebung, administrators will take from what’s traditional, define what is “good about traditional and should be presented” and will reshape the perception of what is traditional at the same time while turning it into a multicultural dialectic.
The new realization that traditional music – often just lumped in with folk by these admins – is a celebration of multiculturalism might be a surprise to anyone who was intimately familiar with the world of traditional arts, and who perceived it to be a pretty homogenous cultural scene (even if it had some exchange with other ethnic cultural scenes) for all of their lives up until about five years ago.
The new Ireland is a multicultural dialectic, always reforming and rejecting the past. So the establishment would have you believe anyway.
What can people do about this? Those who are interested in art and culture should not give up on what they do or concede the ground of their cultural engagement to political ideologues and their political objectives.
The computer gamers who came under attack with bizarre accusations of sexism, could have folded to the social outrage of the cancel mob, but they didn’t. Gamergate was the first visible attempt of seizure and subsequent failure by social justice mass formation. The demands that the gamergate accusers made, which included having more representation within the journalism around gaming, would clearly have resulted in activists becoming dominant within the scene, and deciding how it was produced and discussed.. It would have undoubtedly have transformed it socially towards a political asset of the left. The gamergate controversy has something to teach others who find themselves targeted by this politically motivated tactic of “entryism”.
Gamergate unfolded in the exact opposite way to the Abbey Theatre’s reactionary apologia to feminists in 2016. Contemporaneously with the 1916 celebrations, “Waking the Feminists” arrived out of nowhere, but with the full support of the cultural media. It seemed that of all the Abbey’s plays, only one was written by a woman (assuming there were no secret “transwomen” amongst the other authors) and this was evidence of patriarchal male bias.
Fiach Mac Conghail, the outgoing director of the Abbey, voluntarily subjected himself to the struggle session, and apologized, acknowledged his own bias, and his own failure to see the gender imbalance.
Maybe submission to the humiliation ritual is proportionally dependant on dependence on public funding.
In the former soviet republic of Czechlovakia, where the cultural creation and cultural organizations were utterly seized and ideologically infested by the communist elite, an underground counterculture formed.
Away from the stultifying of the human spirit masquerading as art, people met in secret to discuss art and plays which were based on the tradition of exploring the human condition. In this atmosphere Vaclav Havel wrote great plays and essays, and later became the first president of his country after the fall of communism.
Seeing official cultural patrony being seized for political purposes, Havel kicked back against these institutions by focusing on where culture resides. Culture is in the heart. It is what is passed from generation to generation and it primarily follows the bonds between parents and children. Children practice what they see, and in a functional society, respect what their parents respect.
Havel and his renegade society created discussion and art for themselves, to enrich themselves. The secret underground activity was shared in samizdat writings, which in the end had far more influence than the official government-approved art. This is something anyone can do. Not wait for permission, but to create their own opportunities. Create their own places and platforms to perform. Create their own arenas to discuss, consume, create, and enjoy culture.
Perhaps this is the way for the Irish who don’t want to be ruled by the Aufhebung-ing of culture to their exclusion. For make no mistake, exclusion of the old tradition is the objective of the softly sounding ideas of “inclusion”.
Pearse promoted culture a means to inspire the nobility of the nation. That was the project of his boy’s school and of the aspiration that was condensed into the proclamation.
Read his rejection of the modern ideas of “safety,” a deplorable lie that is at the core of the proposed “hate speech” legislation.. In Ghosts he writes: “He who builds on lies, rears only lies. The untruth that nationality is corporeal, a thing defined by statutes and guaranteed by mutual interests, is at the base of the untruth that freedom, which is the condition of a hale nationality, is a status to be conceded rather than a glory to be achieved; and of the other untruth that it can ever be lawful in the interest of empire, in the interest of wealth, in the interest of quiet living, to forego the right to freedom.”
It’s as if he wrote it for this moment right now. Read it all for yourself and imagine what leaders this country should have.
‘Ghosts’, by PH Pearse. Republish series 1 of 4 – with CobhView.ie (thefuture..ie)