Looking at the essays I wrote in the 1970s, I now think: how young, how naive we were, so innocent in our aspirations, uncontaminated by reality. We were uttering gross acts of faith, and today faith is both unfashionable and unprofitable, in a world without signposts to meaning. Issues such as media ownership and the right to communicate are as vital, and dangerous, today as they were in the 1970s.
It is a daunting, and sobering, fact that so many of the social, political and cultural changes we considered essential for our survival remain aspirational. I can easily understand the frustration of young people today – especially those without an occupation or who have lost their roots or connections – at the poverty of politics, the lack of statesmanship and, indeed, leadership and the diminishment and cheapening of cultural values, the globalisation of anonymity.
Writing about the “communications debate” and cultural democracy when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, almost in the same breath as I was exploring contemporary Irish drama, brought together ideas about relationships, metaphor and translation. Greece (my second home after Ireland) gave these topics a new perspective because I was not only seeing Europe from “the other end” but also encountering a culture which was in many ways similar to what I had known before. Like the Greeks, the Irish have tended to think of the future in terms of the past. They both rely on mythologies old and new and carry a burden of post-colonial angst. Both societies are paradoxically in deep change yet remain profoundly conservative.
It is my concern for the “quality of life” in all its aspects – social, political, cultural, economic – which encouraged me to collect some of my essays. “Cultural politics” is my codeword for the convergence of our personal and public lives, the interaction of what FSL Lyons called “the furniture of men’s kitchens and the furniture of their minds”. In all departments, we seem to have lost our way.
Having no scientific understanding, the one absence in my writing is the environment and the mindless way we are destroying the world which our children’s children will inherit. But in another sense, everything I have written about “quality of life” implies an environmental responsibility and a respect for the oxygen of others. We are avoiding the fact that the future is our legacy; “criminal damage” will be inscribed on our collective tombstone – not only because we are polluting the planet to death but because, culturally, we are joyriding the universe. We seem to have no idea who we are, or why.
But we have to be very careful about “identity”. In 1989 I brought a group of speakers, including Michael D Higgins, Luke Gibbons, Dorothy Cross and Anthony Roche to Berkeley for an Irish Studies seminar. We also visited San Francisco State University where one of our discussants queried our focus on identity: he said it was like circling around an empty hole, and urged us instead to pursue social change. It was a blow in the intellectual solar plexus, because that concern for “who we are” characterised – indeed preoccupied – our thinking at the time. And, due to a blip in the culture of politics, it made Michael D into a minister for culture and communication and then President. But it helped me to focus on practical topics of identity in, for example, the plays of Brian Friel. That “empty hole” has always admonished me to be practical about “who we are”.
So all the topics I have addressed over the past 40 years have been forward-looking in as much as they ask “How can we carry our experience and perspective of the past into a newer and better world?” (those aspirations again!). Even as we lose our grasp on literacy, we are also losing our connection to the orature which suplied us with the still-potent myths and sense of ritual that powers both the primitive and the sophisticated social networks.
Yet we can descend to mind-numbing bickering on such issues as the “Zappone affair” which suggests that a government could be brought down due to a misplaced comma or a purloined paperclip. The lack of creative intelligence in government is truly disturbing. Any taoiseach who could appoint Heather Humphreys as Minister for Culture is severely lacking a sense of humour.
My essays remain acts of faith which I consider important not only for myself and my family and associates but indicative of the fact that all the writers and composers whose work it has been my privilege to discuss regard these as necessary faiths, linked to necessary imaginations.
What I have written across the territory of music, drama, literature and communication represents the crucial interface between our cultural lives and our political lives. They are a retrospect that affirms – if we can use such an old-fashioned term, with its resonance of positive, passionate commitment – the importance of exploring issues of identity, expression and imagination. And it is this latter factor, imagination, which is so much at risk, because it threatens the identity and means of expression of those who lack it, or who would like to deny it. To contradict Goya, it is not the sleep of reason that breeds monsters, but the sleep of imagination.
If we diminish another’s quality of life we diminish our own. It is this need for cohesion in our thinking – an adult form of joined-up writing – that characterises the contemporary debate, as it did back in the 1970s. The great theatre director Sir Tyrone Guthrie (and Friel’s mentor) said that all we can hope to achieve is to keep the bush from encroaching on the yard – become “bushwackers”, sweeping the intellectual weeds from our foyer, and in “cultural politics” in the harsh light of the 2020s, that is maybe all we can do. But we should, like the butterfly and the moon, subscribe to a greater responsibility than we can fulfil. Faith is no longer blind.
Richard Pine’s The Quality of Life: essays on cultural politics 1978-2018 is published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
