Culture

Immigrants in Grenfell Tower were forsaken, but the Irish have usually made it through

Failed ideas and premonitions from Marcuse, Kant, Plato and Nietzche find a tremendous home

A group of United States mental health professionals has expressed concern about the mental health of Donald Trump. Psychologist Dr John Gartner said: “We do believe that Donald Trump’s mental illness is putting the entire country, and indeed the entire world, in danger. As health professionals we have an ethical duty to warn the public about that danger”. But what about duty to warn about his philosophy? Let us imagine that four famous dead philosophers, Herbert Marcuse, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Plato, have been resurrected, and applied themselves to Trump. More unlikely, let’s pretend Trump opens himself to his philosophical side.     Herbert Marcuse is very, very worried In his famous 1960s book ‘One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society’, Herbert Marcuse described the Happy Consciousness, the amoral product of the technocratic age, in which “guilt feeling has no place”. A person with such a deficiency, Marcuse says, “can give the signal that liquidates hundreds and thousands of people, then declare himself free from all pangs of conscience, and live happily ever after”. Trump, No? In ‘One-Dimensional Man’, Marcuse explained how nuclear-war planners represented this Happy Consciousness. They weirdly mixed the business of planning death on a nuclear scale with ‘fun’ talk about playing interesting games so trivialising mass murder. Trump’s frivolous flippancy about the possibility of nuclear war between North Korea and its neighbours: “Good luck, Enjoy yourself folks”, and his failure to rule out using them in Europe reflect this. Trump is a product of what Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleagues called the Culture Industry – movies and TV. Despite its popularity the mass media is not democratic. The Culture Industry is an anti-democratic con job. As its Wikipedia entry says, “The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises”. Trump is a creation, Marcuse would conclude, of the fraudulent Culture Industry that perpetually dupes addict-consumers by conjuring up prefabricated fantasies about the endless promise of the American Dream. Donald Trump used his image as a wealthy celebrity showman to spread these fantasies and manipulate voters, who were desperate for a glimmer of success, glamour or fame, as well as for someone to bring them well-paying jobs. Marcuse claims that “advanced industrial society” creates false needs, which integrate individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought creating a “one-dimensional” universe of thought and behaviour, in which critical thought and oppositional behaviour dissipate. Philosopher Roland Barthes, quoted by Marcuse, speaks of “magic-authoritarianism” where “there is no longer any delay between the naming and the judgement, and the closing of the language is complete”. Examples of this include the casual way Trump declared to her face that he’d prosecute ‘crooked’ Hillary Clinton and his judgement of Barack Obama as “Bad (or sick) Guy”, after he decided the former President had had him bugged. Trump lies – and lies about his lies – because he is a One-Dimensional Man entirely severed from the Truth and its ascendancy over falsity. It is all just a narcissistic magic show, hypnotic entertainment – the Post-Truth Triumph of the Spectacle. But in our fractious and dangerous era of media-generated ‘false news’ supported by international strategic hacking, leaking and subversion his powers are politically lethal.       David Hume warns not only about Trump, but his followers too David Hume, the apostle of scepticism, might also have something to say about Trump’s dangerous personality cult. In Hume’s essay ‘That Politics may be reduced to a Science’, citing the political vagaries of humanity, he declared “should be sorry to think that human affairs admit of no greater stability, than what they receive from the … characters of men”. In other words, Hume as a professional historian, would declaim the folly of Trump thinking that only he – just one leader – could fix America’s problems – an assertion that history tends to mock. And being an astute moralist, and observer of human nature, Hume would also have questioned why Trump’s followers were gullible enough to be fooled by overbearing bombast into heralding him as the master problem solver. In another essay ‘Of Impudence and Modesty’, Hume remarked: “Such indolence and incapacity is there in the generality of mankind, that they are apt to receive a man for whatever he has a mind to put himself off for; and admit his overbearing airs as proofs of that merit which he assumes to himself”. Moreover, Hume forewarns not just about about Trump, but his indolent supporters.     Kant: Donald Trump is my worst nightmare Immanuel Kant would have been disgusted by Donald Trump, appreciating in him the philosopher’s worse nightmares. For Kant integrity, honesty and consistency were everything. Trump would be akin to a philosophical pornographic website (we assume that our reborn Kant is up-to-the-minute). Kant had a dim view of an exclusive focus on sex. In his lectures “Duties towards the Body in Respect of Sexual Impulses”, he notes: “Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry… Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature…”. Donald Trump, of course, engaged, as Kant would now be aware, in just such degradation: from beauty-contest-sponsorship to casual sexism and alleged real-life gropings. Kant might agree with Michael Moore, who noted that this predation explain why Trump rejects global climate treaties. Sexual predation against women and corporate predation against the environment are part of the same amoral game, which he characterizes as “crimes against humanity”. Yet what makes this even worse for Kant is that Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States of America, a nation for whose original revolution he had been an enthusiast, even though he denied the right of revolution. Morally, Kant invested every action with the importance of a universal action. But nearly all

After a couple of stuttering seasons, Season 6 of ‘Homeland’, which ended in April, pulled off a decently gripping story this time round. The writers make life difficult for themselves, as with its predecessor ‘24’, by making daring near-future predictions about the political reality that will be in place by the time the show airs. ‘24’, with its never-ending terrorist emergency, struck a lucky chord when it came to screens in the first week of November 2001, at the height of post-9/11 hysteria. That show ran for eight seasons, and in fact still produces the odd additional couple of hours of material, though the quality, always dodgy, really is inexcusable at this point. Many things appealed in ‘24’ – Kiefer Sutherland’s depressive charisma, Chloe O’Brian’s Aspergersy fixity of purpose, the sneering and maniacal baddies, and, a consistent ingredient, the palace intrigue surrounding the US President. Even before Barack Obama became the junior senator for Illinois, and while Hillary Clinton was the senator for New York, ‘24’ had two black Presidents and one female President, all establishment-liberals in exactly the Obama-cum-Clinton mode. These seem daringly prescient at this remove, though at the time they felt rather poorly paced. The black Presidents pre-dated Obama by too long and so seemed too far-fetched, and Clinton never even got her party’s nomination in 2008. ‘Homeland’ picked up where ‘24’ left off in several other respects. Although it has always positioned itself as a rather more intelligent version of things, it has continued the steady stream of terrorism-induced paranoid fear and sustained our fascination with the alternately high-functioning/highly dysfunctional US security apparatus. Its slower pace has always given it a more measured air, and its relatively considered depiction of mental illness (bipolar disorder) leaves ‘24’’s depiction of its array of gibbering misfits, Jack Bauer chief among them, look like the parts cut out for being too incoherent from the fantasy world of a Tom-Clancy-inspired 4channer who cannot make eye contact with anyone but his dog and his mother. ‘Homeland’ even has a tang of John le Carré-lite with its nostalgic sequences of good old-fashioned spycraft and face-to-face encounters between old rivals and enemies. In ‘24’, most of the time the connection between the good guys and the bad guys was mediated by a surfeit of fantasy surveillance technology, and when enemies met face to face they were usually in a homicidal mood, or at least they would be trying to cut each other’s fingers off or somesuch. In ‘Homeland’, we’re in a more interesting milieu of Russian agents who we feel are really idiosyncratic failed novelists, Iranians who are ruthless and entirely secular Realpolitikers, and Israelis who are weird self-deceiving liars, with the tanned unblinking vacuousness of hothoused transnational professional tennis players. With the first episode of season 6 coming out in the days running up to the inauguration of Donald Trump, ‘Homeland’’s bad luck was to forecast a Democrat-style woman as the brand new President-elect. It would have been great to see this drama unfold parallel to the first months of Hillary Clinton’s term in office, but instead it just felt like they’d backed the wrong horse, like most of the rest of the media. It would be interesting to know how much time and leeway the makers had in skewing the narrative to bring it into line with the phantasmagoria of Trumpism. Because one thing they get spot-on is the alt-right racists and America Firsters, whose tactics are borrowed straight from the Russian hacker playbook and whose vitriolic rhetoric (brilliantly ventilated by Jake Weber) blends elements of Rush Limbaugh, Stephen Miller, Bill O’Reilly, and Richard Spencer. In this story, these guys are on the losing side, and they do all they can to destroy the President and the Presidency from within. What the show did not dare to predict was victory for Trump. They can hardly be blamed – if they did have a Trump-style victor but with no corresponding real-world Trump victory, the show would come across as a rather dystopian paranoia-fest. Whatever the case, what their choices provide proof of, if it were needed, is that these shows are the dream of American Hollywood liberalism. This is not immediately apparent, especially to us politically anaemic Europeans, but these TV shows of political nightmares, permanent wars, state-sanctioned torture, the State on the brink of attack and its values under constant attack from its own security services, are ultimately stabilising for the American self-image and even for the American State itself. Clinton was more of the same dressed up as a change (the first female President!), Trump was something different (the first unpredictable President!). Despite their seemingly nightmare visions, these shows did not predict Trump. He has proved literally unpredictable. This is part of his uncanniness, narratively speaking. In the normal run of things, our fears, racisms and intolerances can be effectively masked by narratives about terrorism and intelligence and prediction, prevention and risk and probability, and that is part of the magic formula of ‘Homeland’. In the early seasons, we could hate the Islamic terrorist villain and fervently support the extraordinary reach of the security apparatus to catch him, all the while not feeling like racists because he was a red-haired, white-skinned American, played by an Englishman (Damian Lewis). What job is left for these narratives to do now? The Trumpian disruption could well provide yet another threatening obstacle that will provide the opportunity for shows like these to depict the ever-evolving deep-State establishment triumphant once more. This desperately needs to happen in order for things to carry on roughly in the same mode, both in the world of screen fantasies and in the real world of politics, which are not two separate realms. But the other danger is that the Trumpian disruption will, when it ebbs, leave behind the full normalisation of the extraordinary measures undertaken by surveillance (private and public) and by neoliberal economic reform (private and public), which got its great initial momentum with the election of George

Ireland is known for its literature, but not for its science fiction. There is not a great number of Irish writers in the genre, but it is a puzzling fact that major international authors such as James White and Bob Shaw are barely known in their native Ireland. Science fiction often imagines alternative life-worlds, which give writers the chance to assess the present by composing thought experiments that explore the implications of a new technology, new social structures, or encounters with alien others. It might be a good idea, then, to look to Irish science fiction as a source of incisive critical comment on all aspects of Irish life.     The first published catalogue of Irish science fiction came out as recently as 2014. ‘Irish Science Fiction’ by Jack Fennell of the University of Limerick traces the genre as far back as Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘The Diamond Lens’ (1858) and Robert Cromie’s ‘A Plunge into Space’ (1891) all the way through to what he calls “the shape of Irish science fiction to come”. Fennell lists many strange and wonderful pickings from the Irish science-fiction tradition, such as Tom Greer’s ‘A Modern Daedalus’ from 1885, which outlines the invention of flying machines by a Dublin man and his inner conflict at using the technology to gain independence for Ireland, and James Creed Meredith’s ‘The Rainbow in the Valley’ (1939), in which Martian contact becomes a trigger for philosophical speculations and reflections on the War of Independence.     Fennell also uncovers science fiction in Irish. The four Captaen Spéirling novels by Cathal Ó Sándair were space-going adventures written in the early 1960s for children. Fennell points to the optimism engendered by an economic upturn in Ireland in the period as crucial for understanding the stories, with Spéirling described as “nothing more than a gaelgeoir Buck Rogers or Dan Dare”. Fennell also points to an imperialist theme throughout the Spéirling series, with the suggestion in the novels that Ireland’s history as a colony will ensure that aliens on any inhabited planets will be treated with the utmost respect when an Irish interplanetary imperialist project is established. One author not covered in Fennell’s volume is Joseph O’Neill, whose ‘Wind from the North’ (1934), ‘Land Under England’ (1935) and ‘Day of Wrath’ (1936) arguably also belong to the genre. A friend of W.B. Yeats, O’Neill was the Secretary of the Department of Education in the early Irish Free State. In The Irish Press in 1944, O’Neill reminisced about his younger days as a member of the Gaelic League, travelling the countryside with his boyhood friend, Pádraig Pearse, collecting stories and handing out cash prizes to anyone who could speak Gaelic. However, O’Neill’s interest in Gaelic antiquity never translated into political action. The O’Neill expert Kelly Flynn Lynch writes that at Easter 1916, the author was “incapable of evincing a passion or even an enthusiasm for popular Irish causes”. But O’Neill did have a passion for the science fiction of H.G. Wells. Upon publication of ‘Land Under England’, he sent the father of modern science fiction a copy of the book with a letter telling him that “‘Land Under England’ in so far as it has value, owes it to you more than to all other writers put together, because it is your works, the early ones as well as the later, that kindled my imagination to the point at which I felt that I wanted to create”. ‘Land Under England’ provides a fascinating inverse view of the newly independent Ireland. The novel details the adventures of a young Englishman who follows his father into a secret cavern beneath Hadrian’s Wall. His father’s obsession with the ancient Romans has led to the discovery of a hollow beneath the historic wall into which Roman civilisation has retreated. In their isolation, the Romans have evolved telepathic mind-control techniques in order to control their subjects and exist as a society of automatons. The novel is usually connected to the rise of fascism in Europe, but it also echoes events closer to home, in what Diarmaid Ferriter calls the “frenzied and paranoid” atmosphere of 1930s Ireland. Indeed, after its publication, reviewers wondered whether its depiction of Roman automatons was a sly critique of Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil party, or his rivals in the fascist Blueshirts. In his role in the Department of Education, O’Neill was said to have been one of Archbishop McQuaid’s favourite civil servants, and O’Neill’s official writings on education and the church certainly bear this out. However, O’Neill’s final novel ‘The Black Shore’, published posthumously in 2000, reveals a more sardonic take on the relationship between church and State in Ireland, and perhaps adds a new dimension to the metaphorical significance of O’Neill’s Roman automatons.     The bulk of Irish science-fiction literature has been produced by three Belfast writers: Bob Shaw and James White, who both wrote from the mid-twentieth century to its end, and Ian McDonald, whose career spans from 1989 to the present. Science fiction is a genre that tends to arrive with late modernity, so it is probably no surprise that a science-fiction tradition would take root in Belfast, given the history of industrialisation in the city. Bob Shaw and James White were friends who worked together at the Shorts aerospace company. White set up the Irish science-fiction group Irish Fandom in 1947 with his friend Walt Willis, with Shaw joining the group soon after. White and Willis met through the pages of the British speculative fiction magazine Fantasy, when White noticed a Belfast address in one of the letters to the editor and tracked Willis down. Irish Fandom was nominally a non-sectarian grouping, although White remained the only Catholic member throughout its existence. The group self-published the science-fiction fanzine Slant, which was printed using a hand-levered flatbed printing press. White made prints using woodcuts of rocket ships, astronauts and planets for the illustrations.     White saw his science fiction as an antidote to the violent and