.
What I seem to be doing recently is filling in death certificates for hopes and dreams, writing obituaries for dying political movements and charting the terminal moral cancer of mankind.
We predicted how the establishment would sabotage the Corbyn project via Brexit and that the election of Keir Starmer as Labour leader would mark the beginning of a purge against the left. It has played out exactly as we said it would.
The Blairites and the Tories used Brexit to sabotage Corbyn’s electability, then used that as evidence for the inevitability of right wing ascendancy. That so many chose to swap moral discernment for ‘Getting Brexit Done’ was dreadful.
The slogan ‘For The Many – Not The Few’ marks the final tombstone of my naivety about the British electorate. How easily they were led into rejecting compassion and how little they seemed to care.
The news from Ireland is similarly dispiriting. The 2019 general election was an unambiguous demand for change: a clear majority were fed up with corruption, grotesque inequality, a crumbling health service, an escalating housing crisis and the right wing stranglehold of the establishment parties.
Fianna Fail leader Michael Martin reflected the public mood after the result:
“The message I’ve received loud and clear: people want a new government, they want a change of government and that involves Fine Gael out of government”
…. but their coalition with Fine Gael has been rebooted with Martin as the next Taoiseach. How did that happen? Incredibly it is the Irish Green Party who are propping up a new right wing coalition.
This is a moral inversion: the popular vote for change dishonestly overturned and neoliberalism enabled with opposition votes. The trade offs made by The Green Party are inherently immoral and will deliver no good outcomes. Untold damage has been done to the unity and moral authority of Irish environmentalism.
The Brexit election and the moral collapse of the Irish Greens underscore two linked trends. The first is the ongoing triumph of the neoliberal establishment. The second is a decline in political and moral literacy. Clearly the corporate stranglehold over the media is toxic – but worse is anti-intellectualism that hobbles moral argument.
Debating with Irish Greens has provided excruciating evidence of this. Their coalition ‘deal’ pivots around base utilitarianism and self-interest, but no attempt was made to disguise this. In fact many appear proud of it. That the Irish Green Party now mirrors the immorality of the establishment is either lost on them or they don’t care. Talk with many Tory voting Leave voters in the UK and you will hear exactly the same bullish indifference towards morality.
Moral standards are so yesterday: today’s reality is a zero sum game where everybody grabs what they can for themselves because genuinely good outcomes are impossible. The very concept of goodness folded into consumerism and Real Politik.
Useful debates are increasingly hard to prosecute. As western societies proceed helter-skelter down the spiral of development, the need for dialectic is chronic but the capacity for it very limited. As the consequences of moral illiteracy multiply exponentially, this is used as further evidence that morality is either unaffordable or a mugs game.
Pointing out the dysfunctions and lies of contemporary society isn’t enough, since this presumes the existence of a moral majority capable or interested in responding. This is why street protests leave me cold nowadays: the marchers are often as morally chaotic as the targets. I have even had left-wingers assure me that ‘morality is a trap’. By placing moral truth above tribal loyalties I am abused as a ‘traitor’ and a ‘faint-hearted dilettante’.
The only genuinely progressive path is a renaissance in moral / philosophical education: an effortful and slow process utterly at odds with the narcissistic distractions and crisis-riven nature of the zeitgeist.
Recent events prove there is no alternative; and that without it the death of our civilisation will be not merely inevitable, not just a merciful release for the rest of nature – but essentially meaningless…
… A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury: signifying nothing.
Since 2013 I have worked between 4-6 hours a day on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and uncovering truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.
I am a home schooling parent on a low income – paying for the domain, web hosting and security entirely out of my own pocket.
If you found this article useful and could spare us a few shillings to help keep our lights on, it would be very much appreciated.
Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.
Two excellent pieces ,the Irish greens have form on this of course.The last time it almost destroyed them,this time they are finished.
Thanks John. Debating Irish Greens in recent days has been a sobering and illuminating experience. It has proved beyond doubt for me that without moral literacy, environmentalism is lost and blind.