General election 2024 has produced one outcome but two contradictory narratives.
According to one version of the truth, anyone under 35 has been screwed over by their parents and/or their neighbours who are safely up the property ladder and watching the planet burn inside their air-conditioned SUVs.
According to another version, the outcome was a vote for stability at a time of much international turmoil. From this perspective, the electorate has made a “grown-up” decision, rejecting politically innocent policies and eschewing childlike, wishful thinking on the economy.
There is some truth to both interpretations – and this points to something perplexing about human reasoning: something that is right at one stage in a person’s life may be wrong at another. Moral truth appears to be age-dependent.
The topic has puzzled countless writers and theologians. In Christianity, there is a strong but paradoxical tradition of attributing wisdom to children. In Mark 10:15, Jesus says to the disciples: “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”
Age and experience take the edge off idealism. Not just that but your moral calculations get faultier as you get older. So I was taught by my philosophy tutor in college, the late Fr Fergal O’Connor, who declared – as much as a challenge to his students as a statement of fact – that when people hit their 20s they adopt principles and hold on to them, unquestioningly, through their lives.
I was reminded of his warning at a recent school graduation at which the officiating priest told the pupils present to look around at their parents and guardians. “When you grow up,” he continued, “try not to become cynical, like them.”
There is a balance here, however, and one shouldn’t romanticise about the moral judgment of young people.
“A seven-year-old child – he’d have cast the first stone,” writes Michel Houellebecq in Submission. I can vouch for that, having attended this year’s Gaiety Theatre Christmas panto, Peter Pan. As the denouement is reached, and Captain Hook’s pirates are pleading for mercy having been captured at knifepoint, a group of boys sitting in front of me were quickly out of their seats yelling “Kill them! Off with their heads!”
American political scientist Mark Lilla sees pluses and minuses to innocence in the public sphere. His latest book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (Hurst), is out this week – perfectly timed to capture the post-election market in the United States, not to mention Ireland.
With an eye to Donald Trump’s re-election as president, he writes: “Innocence is central to the American political mythos ... The idea that the human race was granted its second innocence at Plymouth Rock has coursed through American political rhetoric ever since the Mayflower landed there.” Allied to this folktale is a fear that the US is moving “with each passing year a stair lower from God” – a trend that can only be halted by resisting “tragic knowledge” about the state of the world.
We are poor judges of our own reasoning, and much quicker to critique others. This makes us resistant to knowledge that is ultimately to our benefit
Lilla, a liberal who has made enemies on the left by opposing identity politics, explores why people stubbornly prefer ignorance to knowledge in many facets of life. He quotes such thinkers as Houellebecq and the poet AE Housman, who wrote: “The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.”
People have always felt conflicted between wanting to know and not wanting to know “but there are certain historical periods – we are living in one – when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand”, Lilla argues.
You may be thinking: here’s another liberal mouthpiece, finger-wagging about climate denial and post-capitalism. However, Lilla’s starting point is not political but personal. Before reading the opinion pages of The Irish Times, he suggests, consult the temple of Delphi and that maxim carved in stone at its entrance: “Know thyself.”
We are poor judges of our own reasoning, and much quicker to critique others. This makes us resistant to knowledge that is ultimately to our benefit. “Evasion of the self inside our heads is really a training exercise for evading the world outside our heads,” writes Lilla.
He highlights Socrates’s radical alternative. The Greek philosopher practised a type of intellectual humility that was widely derided at the time for being politically immature and dangerously naive. “Socrates maintained that there is no shame in being wrong, just in doing wrong,” Lilla notes.
Bringing it back to GE24, what is dispiriting about the prospect of a Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael government – likely propped up by a few Independents – is the uniformity of view. Whatever you say about the Greens, they generated a considerable degree of self-reflection in the last government – on policies from international trade to childcare. You could call them political innocents. But that’s to their credit.
Is there anyone to provide a dose of childlike idealism in the next Cabinet? It’s doubtful. But, don’t stop dreaming, Michael Lowry could yet be a junior minister.
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