Those readers with an interest in the history of thought will be well aware of the notion that at some point over the past 500 years, broadly speaking, we moved from seeing the world from a spiritual perspective to seeing the world from a material perspective. While this may seem an esoteric and irrelevant claim, I see in it something of an interpretive key for understanding the confusion our political elites, among others, find themselves mired in.
To draw this train of thought out slightly further, the spiritual perspective is defined by ‘why’ questions, questions of meaning: ‘Why did such and such a thing happen? What does this mean?’ On the other hand, the material perspective is interested in the ‘how’ questions, technical questions: ‘How does this aspect of the world work? What is it made of?’ They are not necessarily mutually exclusive perspectives, but they do result in two very different worldviews.
The Taoiseach earlier this week issued a reminder of how far we’ve wandered in that technocratic, material direction.
Simon Harris released a statement on Tuesday decrying the current state of affairs in which, he said, politicians have become a “regular target” of threats and abuse, a sentiment many of those involved in political life have expressed in recent months. The Taoiseach’s statement came just after the news that he and his family had received a threat over Instagram, which gardaí are currently investigating. It’s not the first he’s faced recently either, a bomb threat directed towards Mr Harris’s family home just six weeks earlier.
“The laws of the land apply to people online just as much as offline,” Mr Harris said, continuing, “there can be no hiding place for anyone seeking to threaten, attack or harm people or to incite others to do so”.
“Politicians have become a regular target and it is on the brink of being viewed as acceptable or a normal part of the job. It is not acceptable,” he said.
“Constant efforts to target us, demean us or dehumanise us should never be accepted, never be normalised and always called out.”
To use a favoured ministerial, tough-talking phrase, “let me be clear”: I agree with everything the Taoiseach said. It’s a poor state of affairs and ominous portent when speech threatening violence, especially speech threatening credible violence, becomes more commonplace at any level of society. We ought to figure out how to minimise it, ideally get rid of it altogether – without resorting to criminalising distasteful speech along the way, as some would advocate for.
To that end, though, and to tie this back to the point I made at the beginning of this article: A shift appears to have taken place at some point rendering the political class in Ireland – but abroad, too – unable to ask the question that would point them in the right direction in terms of finding a solution to the ugly new world they find themselves operating in. They never ask why: Why there are more threats, why there is more online abuse, why there are more protests, why the political landscape seems more contentious, and on and on and on.
Ireland’s politicians – who we know are aware of all of the above because they certainly speak about them often enough – never, ever stop to ask why things are the way they are, at least not publicly. Instead, faced with all of these different problems, they ask only how: how do we stop the threats, how do we limit online abuse, how do we shut down and prevent protests, how do we consolidate our political foothold, and on and on and on.
We’ve seen their answers to many of the how questions they’ve been asking in recent months: proposed hate speech legislation, an increased reliance on heavy-handed public order unit policing, slick, but ultimately empty, sloganeering and electioneering and attempts at cheap political wins such as the double referendums earlier this year.
Are these measures solving the problems? I’d venture to say that they aren’t proving particularly effective, and that based on the same commentary many politicians are seeing with displeasure on social media, it’s only serving to inflame those who were already angry.
Irish politicians aren’t alone in having fallen prey to this curious case of forgetfulness – we’re seeing it play out currently in Britain, too. It was reported yesterday evening that thousands of police across the UK were bracing themselves for a night of potential combat, the ongoing fallout of the Southport stabbings which saw three children murdered and a number of others hospitalised. It didn’t materialise, but fiery images from previous weeks set the authorities on edge.
At the same time, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been branded ‘Two-tier Keir’ by disaffected Brits (and Elon Musk) as a reference to his differing law and order approaches to the various “communities” in the UK. While the hammer is clearly being dropped on ethnic British protestors and rioters by politicians and media alike, mainstream sources are proving reluctant in the extreme to acknowledge that it takes two to tango.
Footage of non-ethnic British mobs attacking people in various places across the UK, and brandishing weapons in the streets, hasn’t garnered quite the same reaction, beyond the usual right-leaning and right-wing social media commentary.
Suffice to say, the situation there is also less than ideal, and as here, politicians have consigned themselves to asking only how questions rather than why. Were they to ask why, they might come up with something approximating the answer UnHerd’s Contributing Editor, Aris Roussinos, gave in his excellent article on the riots:
“Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies,” Roussinos wrote.
Decades of unchecked immigration have resulted in ethnic violence in the streets of Britain, which is becoming “commonplace, as in other diverse societies”. It isn’t a pleasant answer, but it’s reality, which politicians on these isles appear increasingly unwilling to face.
Of course, the great why question of recent times that many simply refused to face up to, and still refuse to entertain, is why someone as ‘repulsive’ and ‘loathsome’ as Donald Trump has received so many tens of millions of votes in the two elections he’s run in so far. Instead, how questions were employed once again: how could this happen? How can we ensure that it doesn’t happen again?
What all of this reveals to me is that the elite of our technocratic age have indeed become hard of hearing (or is it hard of heart?) when it comes to hearing the cries of their people. That never ends well.