Hannibal, Cyrus, and lessons in followship

Back in 2003 Toni Morrison met Peter Olson, the then CEO of Random House, at that year’s Book Expo America, and mentioned having watched a documentary on the Mongols in her hotel after a flight which had left her unsettled. Olson lit up. “I wrote my college thesis on an anti-Soviet revolt in South Central Asia,” he said, continuing, “I would contend that military histories are better for learning about corporate strategies and management technique than any other books.”

Military history is one of those fields that lends insights, ideas, and examples aplenty to modern management discussions: given how it covers leadership, intelligence, logistics, tactics, strategy, and so much more, this probably shouldn’t surprise us, but the link wasn’t always so obvious.  Indeed, according to Peter Drucker, probably the twentieth century’s most influential management guru, strategy itself was seen as a military concept, largely irrelevant to business management, as late as the 1960s:

‘Managing for Results was the first book to address itself to what is now called “business strategy”. It is still the most widely used book on the subject. When I wrote it, more than twenty years ago, my original title was, in fact, Business Strategies. But “strategy” in those days was not a term in common usage. Indeed, when my publisher and I tested the title with acquaintances who were business executives, consultants, management teachers, and booksellers, we were strongly advised to drop it. “Strategy,” we were told again and again, “belongs to military or perhaps to political campaigns but not to business.”’

The situation wasn’t quite as stark as that, of course – just two years earlier, for instance, Alfred Chandler had published Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the history of the American industrial enterprise – but certainly it seems clear that the idea that warfare had anything to say to business was far from an orthodoxy at the time. Indeed, Drucker would later state that he had not written a book on leadership because an ancient Greek had made such a project superfluous. ‘The first systematic book on leadership was written by Xenophon more than 2,000 years ago,’ he told a student, adding, ‘and it is still the best.’

The book he had in mind, oddly, was not the extraordinarily instructive Anabasis, Xenophon’s memoir of the exploits of an army of 10,000 Greek mercenaries in the Persian Empire and their attempts to come home; neither was it his Hellenica, detailing the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent defeat of Sparta by the resurgent Thebes. Instead, he was referring to the Cyropaedia, the fictionalised biography of the Persian Cyrus the Great, which Drucker saw as a study in both leadership and followship.  The latter, Drucker felt, was too often neglected, to the detriment of any enterprise because it is impossible to be a leader without followers. ‘To lead, one must follow,’ he observed, ‘because it is only from the viewpoint of the follower that we can reflect on the basis of followship, which when turned around becomes the essence of leadership.’

I’ll talk about the Cyropaedia another day, but I think it’s worth saying that the point that the best leaders are willing to learn, to serve, and to follow wasn’t unique to Xenophon. Here, for instance, is the Roman historian Livy describing the Carthaginian Hannibal’s brilliance both as a commander and as a subordinate:

‘Power to command and readiness to obey are rare associates; but in Hannibal they were perfectly united, and their union made him as much valued by his commander as his men. Hasdrubal preferred him to all other officers in any action which called for vigour and courage, and under his leadership the men invariable showed to the best advantage both dash and confidence. Reckless in courting danger, he showed superb tactical ability when it was upon him.

Indefatigable both physically and mentally, he could endure with equal ease excessive heat or excessive cold; he ate and drank not to flatter his appetites but only so much as would sustain his bodily strength. His time for waking, like his time for sleeping, was never determined by daylight or darkness: when his work was done, then, and then only, he rested, without need, moreover, of silence or a soft bed to woo sleep to his eyes. Often he was seen lying in his cloak on the bare ground amongst the common soldiers on sentry or picket duty. His accoutrement, like the horses he rode, was always conspicuous, but not his clothes, which were like those of any other officer of his rank and standing. Mounted or unmounted, he was unequalled as a fighting man, always the first to attack, the last to leave the field.’

Much of this – perhaps all of it – should be seen as a series of rhetorical clichés, but things often only become clichés because they’re basically true. If these are conventional compliments, they merely highlight how Livy and his audience recognised that the best leaders are good followers, and that effective leadership demands a willingness to share the hardships of those being led.

Some things don’t change. 

Silos and synods

I was at a conference in Rome a few years ago where people from Google explained that Catholic websites tend to punch well below their weight compared to those of other religious groups for the simple reason that they don’t link to other sites; in the digital environment as so often in the world at large today, Catholicism is a siloed landscape. It doesn’t have to be, though. Even just thinking about Irish history, and the kind of lessons we might draw from our most influential period, those centuries between the coming of Patrick and the Viking attacks when we supposedly saved civilization – we didn’t, but we did a lot – it shouldn’t take long for us to realise just how important networks and networking were to ‘the land of saints and scholars’.

That won’t typically be our first thought, of course. We’re far more likely to think of the likes of the island monastery of Skellig Michael. Famously isolated, the stone huts on the pyramidal island are dramatically inaccessible, so much so that they were perfectly cast in recent Star Wars films as Luke Skywalker’s hermit hideout. This very inaccessibility, this remoteness – the monastery is high on a rugged rocky spike that arises from stormy waters that cut the island off from the south-western corner of the Irish mainland – defines the monastery, but can too easily mislead us into thinking that this kind of community was somehow typical of Irish Christianity in its earliest centuries. Anything but!

That’s not to say that there weren’t Celtic monks who went off into the wilderness to seek God through contemplation – the Cambrai Homily, written around AD700, speaks of this ‘green martyrdom’, as distinct from the classical red martyrdom of those who died for the Faith and the white martyrdom of those who left their homelands to become missionary exiles – but we go wildly astray if we ever think of this as the norm. On the contrary: in the first centuries of our recorded history the Irish countryside was dotted with hundreds, even thousands, of monasteries, and while some certainly were discreet centres of contemplation, many others had roles that were pastoral, administrative, scholarly, and evangelising. They were platforms for outreach, and they were linked together.

Clonmacnoise, established by St Ciarán where the river Shannon meets the great road that was the Esker Riada, is perhaps the most obvious of these, but even when we think of the ostensibly remote beauty of Glendalough, we should keep in mind that though St Kevin settled in a beautiful spot in the Wicklow Mountains, he hardly did so in an obscure one; the monastic city that grew up around him is, after all, barely a mile from the crossroads of Laragh. St Cronán is famously described in his medieval biography as having moved his community to Roscrea because people couldn’t find it in its original home. ‘I will not be in a desert place where guests and poor people cannot easily find me,’ he supposedly said, continuing, ‘but I will stay here now in a public place.’

Our early lives of St Brigid show her travelling around the roads of central Ireland by chariot, praying as she went like an efficient commuter, and even helping her people in the building of a road, designed to carry chariots and wagons even across bog and riverside swamps. They describe her too as paying careful attention to how Mass was celebrated in Rome, so the prayers could change in Ireland if they changed in Rome, while contemporary letters from the likes of St Columbanus underline how letters and appeals to Rome were indeed a real phenomenon for the Celtic saints.

Roads, rivers, and letters all served to bind communities together, and communities would be aware too of their familial links – not merely because they’d often be expressions of local tribes and kingdoms, but because they’d be part of loose familial federations, known as paruchia, deriving from particular founder saints and those with whom he or she had studied. These federations could cross the sea, or even straddle the continent. Not that all was harmonious in or between these paruchia, of course – families can be tricky things, after all – but there were links, and the links mattered.

What’s more, the monastic leaders would travel to meet with each and learn from each other, and could come together occasionally in gatherings called synods. One synod from AD 697 begot the Cáin Adomnán, attempting to ban violence in warfare against non-combatants and especially women, for instance, while another, known as the Synod of Patrick, issued more than thirty rulings, including ones banning the receipt of donations from pagans and  threatening excommunication against anyone who believed in vampires!

Coming from the Greek syn-odos, meaning a shared journey or even a common path, synods are things we hear a lot about in Church circles nowadays, with talk of synods, synodality, synodal paths, and synodal ways. In the end, though, we should realise that they are, above all else, antidotes to siloed landscapes, a way of helping give reality and life to the Church as a network of networks. If St Brigid helped build roads across bogs, it must in part have been because without such ways – without such common paths – our monasteries would have been isolated and ineffective. Like the proverbial lighthouse in a bog, they’d have been brilliant but useless.

If synodality does nothing more than keep people talking together and praying together and working together towards common ends, it will have achieved something. Networks matter, after all.

Coronation

It’s strange to read commentary on the Coronation when it wasn’t even on the radar for me on Saturday; a bit like missing the Biden visit and the indignant rantings about it from some elements of our neighbours’ fourth estate, I missed the Coronation entirely, as we had a First Holy Communion to celebrate in the family.

It seems strange to have passed over so rare an event - the first in the my lifetime, at any rate, and it only being a few years since I’d delighted my mum by meeting and shaking hands with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at a Great War commemoration in London. While I was indeed curious to watch it for historical interest, the immediate and familial won out. Why wouldn’t it, though? Kavanagh had it right, in ‘Epic’:

I have lived in important places, times

When great events were decided; who owned

That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land

Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.

I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’

And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen

Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –

‘Here is the march along these iron stones’

That was the year of the Munich bother. Which

Was more important? I inclined

To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin

Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.

He said: I made the Iliad from such

A local row. Gods make their own importance.

What’s that line in Gaiman and McKean’s Signal to Noise? ‘There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.’ I’m not saying that big far-off events don’t matter, not least as you not being interested in them doesn’t mean they’re not interested in you, but it’s too easy to focus on distant spectacles and miss what matters under our noses.

I may yet catch the highlights, if anybody has a good link.

Dignity

On the bus back from the airport yesterday I wasted the blue skies and glorious views that were surrounding me and would soon and suddenly be shrouded in an all-concealing fog by spending my time reading a frustrating essay from a few years back, a piece by Edward Feser who I used to rate, with a couple of decent books by him still on the shelves. Entitled 'Three questions for Catholic opponents of capital punishment', it's a long and obstructive piece that seems built in a way that it's hard to engage with in a comprehensive and reasonable fashion. He'd written it in 2019 in the aftermath of the previous year's change to the Catechism of the Catholic Church to the effect that the death penalty should be regarded as inadmissable, and the piece had been reposted the following year after this point was driven home in the papal encyclical Fratelli tutti.

Shorn of the undergrowth and the wood that makes it hard to see the trees, what Prof. Feser is asking can be summed up as follows:

1. Does Pope Francis’s teaching on capital punishment amount to a doctrinal change or merely a prudential judgment? Prof. Feser argues that when the Pope says capital punishment should never be used, he is either making a doctrinal change that contradicts the teaching of Scripture and Tradition, or he is merely making a prudential judgment. Either way, he claims, Catholics are not obliged to agree with him.

2. Do you agree with Pope Francis that life sentences should be abolished? Pope Francis, he says, has frequently said life sentences are objectionable, and are objectionable for the same reasons as are death sentences.

3. Do you agree with Pope Francis that executing a murderer is worse than what the murderer himself did? In a 2015 letter, Prof. Feser notes, the Pope wrote that the death penalty represents a failure for any constitutional state because it obliges the State to kill in the name of justice, and that justice is never reached by killing a human being. On this point, the Pope noted Dostoyevsky's observation that 'To kill a murderer is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by a criminal.'

Now, the second and third questions can be dealt with pretty easily, and seem to exist here merely to complicate the issue. Putting aside the merits or otherwise of the Pope's opinions -- and both seem utterly defensible, with the key point ignored by Prof. Feser in the third question being that when the state kills somebody it creates a situation where there is blood on a whole society's hands, not just on those of an individual killer  -- the crucial thing here is that these are just opinions, and thus not things Catholics are expected to accept as Church teaching. We might well reflect upon them, and doing so might help us to become better Christians, but still, they're not things we're expected to sign up to. Prof. Feser might ask these questions out of interest, but they're ultimately distractions.

So, that leaves us with question one, and in looking at that it's worth noting that Prof. Feser begins his argument by saying that there are two possible interpretations of Pope Francis’s teaching on the death penalty, with him either intending to revise the relevant doctrinal principles or intending merely to make a prudential judgment about how best to apply existing doctrinal principles to current circumstances. Thing is, this -- and indeed the essay as a whole -- fundamentally ignores what the Vatican actually said when the Catechism was changed in 2019, that being that the change was an expression of doctrinal development.

In a letter explaining the change, Cardinal Ladaria wrote to say the Pope had asked for the Church's 'teaching on the death penalty be reformulated so as to better reflect the development of the doctrine on this point that has taken place in recent times', adding that 'this development centres principally on the clearer awareness of the Church for the respect due to every human life', with St John Paul II's letter Evangelium vitae being of great importance in this development. The CDF head went on to explain that the change was 'in continuity with the preceding Magisterium while bringing forth a coherent development of Catholic doctrine', and as such reflected 'an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium'. 

Curiously, Prof. Feser never even uses the terms 'development of doctrine' or 'doctrinal development' in his piece. This is unfortunate given how Cardinal Ladaria, on behalf of the Pope, had explained the recognition that the death penalty should be deemed inadmissable as a development of doctrine in relation to the Church's deepening understanding of human dignity, and the capacity of our world to realise that dignity. After all, that every single one of us is deliberately made by God in God's own image is as foundational a Catholic teaching that you're ever going to see, and the horrors of the twentieth century have helped underline just how precious that dignity is, and how easy it can be to rationalise its abuse.

I appreciate that Prof. Feser has argued extensively elsewhere that the Church has over the centuries taught infallibly that the death penalty is legitimate, but I'm not sure he does so with a suitable eye to how different magisterial levels operate, or indeed how Church teaching is structured around a hierarchy of truth, where some truths are based on other ones and are illuminated by them. In his article 'Capital punishment and the infallibility of the ordinary Magisterium', for instance, published several months before Church teaching was formally clarified in this area, the general tendency is to disregard the development of Church teaching on human dignity.

It shouldn't be hard to see that Church teaching on the legitimacy or otherwise of the death penalty relates to questions of how we can protect society, which in the end is about how we protect and recognise the dignity of human life itself; the key doctrinal question here concerns the dignity of the individual human being, made in God's image. I'm glad that the Pope, and the CDF -- or now the DDF, I suppose -- have their priorities right on this. 

The problem of England

I'm not sure there's anywhere in the world that annoys me more than Ireland, but England surely runs it a close second. One of the strangest English delusions — we all have our national delusions, and I spend far too much time talking of Irish ones, so indulge me here — is the conviction that nationalism is a disease that afflicts other countries, and especially the emotional Celts. I'm not talking of those English who openly recognise and parade their English nationalism, but those who identify, rather, as British, and who do so proudly and even condescendingly. Nationalism, for these, is for lesser countries and lesser peoples.

Viewed from outside, or even from the porch with one foot in the door, it seems very obvious that 'British' is itself a nationality, one that when embraced as an identification carries with itself all the baggage of nationalism. This might seem jarring, but as Orwell pointed out in his 'Notes on Nationalism', that's the deluding nature of nationalism: 'All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by "our" side.'

'In England,' he said, 'if one simply considers the number of people involved, it is probable that the dominant form of nationalism is old-fashioned British jingoism.'

The term 'British', it's worth remembering, is rarely used to mean simply 'from Britain', but instead comes with a whole host of connotations and tropes: the flag and the anthem; the monarchy and all its pageantry; the pound; the army, navy, and airforce; Remembrance Sunday and the sanctification of wars just and unjust; 1066 and all that; Magna Carta; Bloody Mary and Good Queen Bess; the bloodless Glorious Revolution and the supremacy of Parliament; the Mother of Parliaments; Rule Britannia, ruling the waves, and never being slaves; Cool Britannia, Britpop, and British is Best; British values; stiff upper lip; Land of Hope and Glory; the National Health Service, whether loved or hated; WW2 as myth, whether in films, 'Britain stands alone', the spirit of the blitz, Churchill, 'keep calm and carry on', or 'don't mention the war'; the language of Shakespeare; you can't be educated unless you read the KJV; the established Church; a suspicion of and antipathy to Catholics and Catholicism; bloody foreigners; John Bull; Britannia; the British Bulldog; fog on the channel, continent cut off; 'British exceptionalism'; Zulu; 'look what happened to them when they left the Empire!'; Britain as a synonym for UK, and British as an adjective to describe the monarch's Irish subjects; lists of great Britons coopting Irish people whether subjects or not; claiming sportspeople as British when they win and Scottish or whatever when they lose; Tebbit's cricket test; fish and chips; as British as Finchley; Our Island Story; Team GB; the workshop of the world; the British Isles; ex-pats not migrants, and a refusal to assimilate abroad; the insistence that Britain is not part of Europe; Ulster Unionism, the Orange Order, and the BNP; the belief that there's no such thing as British nationalism.

Even look at the great post-imperial popular fiction exports James Bond, Harry Potter, and Doctor Who, all of which set up Britain as the centre of the world, whether as the real heroes of the Cold War, the decisive battleground in the wars of good and evil wizards, or the place where if you can fight off invading aliens in your beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets, hills and indeed quarries you can save the world — a thesis memorably expounded by HG Wells at the height of the Victorian empire.

This is nationalism by any reasonable definition, and it might be rather healthier if it were acknowledged as such, not least because it's overwhelmingly an English nationalism, one that has no space for statues of such great parliamentarians as Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell in Parliament Square, let alone a national famine memorial to recognise the single most lethal event in the history of the UK: the 'Great Hunger' that ravaged mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.

In some ways weight of numbers alone ensures this English emphasis: while the English made up only slightly more than half the population of the UK a couple of hundred years ago, now it's about 85% of the UK population, and in practical terms that means that what England wants goes. No law can be passed in the UK without the direct or indirect support of at least 40% of English MPs, whereas in principle there's no limit on the number of laws that could be passed without any Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish support whatsoever. A big problem of these islands — perhaps the big problem — is how to deal with the fact that while there are several nations here, the biggest one by far has a long history largely defined by dominating its neighbours, often through force and the threat of force, whether implicit or explicit. And part of this tendency towards domination has entailed the suppression of others' national feelings and aspirations combined with the denial and concealment of its own.

A healthier British nationalism — call it patriotism if you want, but that'll start a whole fresh row — would be one that acknowledged that British nationalism is real, no more and no less aspirational than other nationalisms, and just like other nationalisms far from simple, a nationalism that recognised overlapping circles of nationalisms within and without the UK. Such a nationalism, engaged with properly, would embrace these facts, and heed others' grievances, accepting that the victims of empire and their descendants may be in a better position than those in England to judge the realities of English and British imperialism. Because, as Chesterton put it so well in his 'Paying for Patriotism', if we want to boast of our best, we need to be willing to repent for our worst.

The thing is, Britain as a whole has lots to boast about, and the part of Britain I know best has lots to boast about: England is brilliant. I mean, even aside from my family and friends, anywhere that can give us the Lake District, Hadrian's Wall with its accompanying magical pubs and the spectacular shift in dialects marked by the river Irthing at Gilsland, Turner, Shakespeare, George Herbert, Jane Austen, Chaucer, Le Morte d'Arthur, York Minster and Durham and the other great cathedrals of English Catholicism, Isaac Newton, Cornish pasties and the general pathological conviction that if a thing can be cooked it can legitimately be encased in pastry, Avebury and Stonehenge (even if the latter was magically stolen from Ireland), the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens, PG Wodehouse, TH White, MR James, GK Chesterton, Keats, Wordsworth, St Margaret Clitherow, the Chartists, ending the Atlantic Slave Trade (even if that doesn't cancel out having so murderously dominated it for a century and a half first), St John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Box of Delights, Five Children and It, George Orwell, Bletchley Park, Leonard Cheshire and Sue Ryder, Cecily Saunders, Jennings, James and the Giant Peach and Danny the Champion of the World, The Dark is Rising, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Terry Pratchett, 2000AD and even its spin-off Crisis, Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid, the films of David Lean and especially those of Powell and Pressburger, The Third Man, Hitchcock, Ealing Comedies, Quatermass and the Pit, folk horror, Kes, Withnail and I, The Beatles, Kate Bush, Thea Gilmore, All Creatures Great and Small, Cold Comfort Farm, the writings of John Le Carré and by extension Alec Guinness's magical performance in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Alan Bleasdale, Michael Palin and Monty Python's Flying Circus, the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment, the glorious charred skeleton of Brighton's West Pier,  Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Wombles, Paddington, Roobarb, Oliver Postgate, Floella Benjamin, Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes, When the Wind Blows, Everton Football Club, Westminster Cathedral, Brixton, Preston, the Olde Cheshire Cheese pub and the Cittie of Yorke on High Holborn, Goodness Gracious Me and The Fast Show, the fantasy Britain of the 2012 Olympics, Olivia Coleman, and above all Wallace and Gromit has to be a place worth loving, right?

Pausing to preserve ourselves

I’ve used the ‘take a break’ function on Facebook for the first time today, not even knowing about it before this morning, reducing what I can see from someone I’ve considered a friend for years. Some things he did and then doubled down on some weeks ago left me feeling deeply betrayed and profoundly upset, and though I’m not angry with him, being reminded of it through Mr Zuckerberg's algorithms is scraping at the wound and keeping the grief alive.

I’m not great with trust, to be blunt; people who know me well know that, and know why, and know too how hard I’ve worked to make trusting easier for me than my more instinctive suspicion, such that realising that confidence in a person’s judgement and character has been misplaced hurts maybe more than it should. It doesn't help, I suppose, that it comes no time at all after being let down by others, folk in positions of responsibility and care, who seem more inclined to be guilty of oversight than to engage in the oversight that they're called to.

It’s tricky. We’re meant to forgive; it’s not just that it’s what’s expected of us, but it’s what’s good for us. I don’t think this is about forgiveness, though, so much as about self-preservation; it’s about realising that I’d put someone a pedestal and invested a foolish degree of hope in them, that they’re not very special after all, and that it’s better to keep a certain distance from people we no longer trust.

And maybe, if we’re going to be exposed constantly to the thoughts and ideas and news of others, we should take care to curate such exposure to those who feed us, and those who we feed in turn. If we can’t be sure others will look after our hearts, maybe we should guard them better.

Maybe.

A decade after coffee

Ten years ago today, in a London week that saw friends married, a clerical funeral, an emergency noctural visit to hospital, a shamefully late lunch rendezvous, and me turning down an ill-considered proposal to commentate on the papal installation Mass, I met up with someone I’d only known through Twitter at the recommendation of a mutual friend. It would be good, he said, if his two historian friends who were in London could meet each other.

And so we met for coffee in a bookshop, and talked of cheesehats and sports and history and books and faith and friends, and had a great morning. And then we went our separate ways, she to complete her doctorate like a proper person, and me to try my vocation as a Dominican friar.

Time passed.

Reader, I married her.

Somewhere on screen

There’s a passage in The Moviegoer where Walker Percy has the narrator muse on what he calls ‘certification’.

‘Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighbourhood, the place is not certified for him,’ he observes. ‘More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighbourhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighbourhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.’

I got to thinking of that over the last week, with the Oscar attempts of The Banshees of Inisherin and the almost impossibly good An Cailín Ciúin, and me remembering how excited we used to get about any films at all being shot in Ireland. They were rarities, or felt to be so, and just as we all knew that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold saw Smithfield standing in for Berlin, Excalibur was filmed in Wicklow, and Educating Rita was shot all over Dublin, so we were doubly thrilled to see films that were set here. I mean, Eat the Peach was a film people seemed to talk about endlessly when I was small. ‘Eat the Peach’, I tell you, about a couple of lads in Kildare building a ‘wall of death’ for motorbikes.

This was long before Tom Hanks was storming the beaches at Enniscorthy, mind, never mind Luke Skywalker living his best hermit life off the Kerry coast.

I wonder if it’s related to something a friend of mine from Pittsburg used to notice in his years studying in Dublin. He’d find it baffling that Irish people would be proud of things he’d take for granted. ‘How do you know that?’ he’d ask. ‘Irish people always do this -- I’ll mention Jaws or something, and somebody will always throw me that an Irish person was second-unit cameraman on it or something. How do you know this? And why do you care?’

We’re a small country, one that’s somehow got both a village mentality and a exile one, where there’s a sense that everyone knows people and should be able to connect with people, but also an awareness that we’re scattered all over the world. I think that twin mentality may probably be combining with a desire to be able to prove that somehow we matter -- that we have gone places, and that we have done things. A big chunk of our history, after all, is a history of things being done to the Irish more so than by the Irish, with culture, language, religion, and even the basic necessities for sustenance all having been attacked. I suspect that in any society where there’s a sense of somehow having survived with just shadows of your heritage, an excitement about being recognised globally as Somewhere is probably inevitable.

Triumphant imposters

Flicking through Herodotus over breakfast, as you do, it occurs to me again that it’s interesting how the first historian implicitly but clearly rejects the notion that history is written by the victors. ‘Winners?’ he effectively says time and again. ‘Maybe, but for how long?’

Mind, this is something I often return to, and was at the heart of the thesis I eventually laid aside, albeit in the hope I could pick it up again someday: Herodotus, as a good student of Homer, knew victory was a profoundly suspect and temporary phenomenon, and not something that was necessarily clear even on the battlefield.

Intersecting destinies

 It’s strange to think it’s 27 years today since Krzysztof Kiéslowski died, leaving behind a marvellous, tender, profoundly humanising but all too small body of work; had he lived he’d only be 81 now, so imagine how much he could have blessed us with.

“My message is 'Live more carefully',” he said once. “Because you don't know what the consequences of your actions may be. You don't know what they will do to people that you know or don't know. You simply don't know how your actions may influence them. Live carefully, because there are people around you, whose lives and well-being depend on your actions. This concerns all of us because the paths -- these people and their destinies -- cross each others all the time, whether we are aware of it or not. That's what responsibility means to me : to live carefully and attentively. We should observe people around us and, most of all, ourselves.”

I often think Red and Blue may be the greatest films of my lifetime, though when pondering Kiéslowski’s films I tend to turn to something he said when his Decalogue was being seen in New York back in 1989. Asked what ten words he would keep if all other words were taken from him, he said: “Love. Hate. Loneliness. Fear. Coincidence. Pain. Anxiety. God. Responsibility,” and then added: “Innocence.”

I’m not sure what words I’d pick. I think ‘hope’, ‘truth’, and ‘mercy’ would be among them, though. You?

What doth it profit a man...

I’ve been wrestling recently with questions of means and ends, and whether desirable ends ever justify dodgy means. Discussions around this tend to get framed, I think, as a choice between failing while keeping your hands clean or succeeding while compromising your values. I’m not sure this is right, though, since in this scenario I think both options are failures, the main difference being that one is failing while being true to yourself, while the other is failing at being true to yourself.

I don’t think we ever win at anything if we have to lose ourselves in the process.