David Rieff: The Road to Hell is Paved

Let me start with some basics, however unpalatable they seem to me. Unless you are an adamant believer in either faith-based progress narratives or their penumbral secular prolongations like Marxism-Leninism, free market capitalism, or law-based human rights-ism, there is no hope in history, at least in its broad sweep, what the Annales School historians called la longue duree.

To claim otherwise is a category mistake, pure and simple. To paraphrase Trotsky’s wisecrack about the dialectic, you may not be interested in the geological record, but the geological record is interested in you!

For more than twenty years I have been puzzling over a phrase from Nietzsche’s essay on the use and abuse of history that says, “We need history, but not the way the spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.” One of the things I take it to mean (though doubtless other meanings can be derived from it as well—I remind you of another saying of Nietzsche’s: “there are no facts, only interpretations”), is that history looked at unflinchingly, and Theodicy properly understood, are in fact immiscible—again, I do not presume to speak for believers. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can be derived from history as a discipline, let alone from historicism as a mode of thought, to explain, let alone justify a disaster like the Haitian earthquake of January 10, 2010, in which at least a quarter of a million people are believed to have died.

Of course, there is a geological explanation. From that point of view, we know precisely how the earthquake occurred; indeed, papers written by the geologists C. DeMets and W. Wiggins-Grandison in 2007 warned of the likelihood of a quake occurring on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault off the Haitian coast—which is indeed where it did occur this past January. A team led my another geologist, Paul Mann, and including Wiggins-Grandison, presented a paper at the 18th Caribbean Geological Conference in March 2008, that was even more explicit, and that same year, Patrick Charles, an emeritus professor of geology at the University of Havana, had warned that “all the conditions now exist for a major earthquake to take place in Port-au-Prince. Residents of the Haitian capital need to prepare themselves for this eventuality. It will certainly occur sooner or later.”

What does hope mean in this context? As these predictions from the experts demonstrate, there was nothing geologically surprising about what occurred. To the contrary, the point they were making was precisely that while it was a major event it was not unprecedented, even if the last temblor in the region of that magnitude had taken place in Jamaica in 1692—a huge gap in historical time as we normally think of it, to be sure, but no more than the blink of an eye in geological time. Even if one is committed to the Christian and post-Christian narrative of human history as a (more or less) linear progress, natural disasters do not qualify. Indeed, it is surely the Greek understanding of history as an ever-repeating cycle that more accurately corresponds to the realities of geology and of the natural world. At least one hopes so. For if the climate alarmists are correct—and I am simply not competent to have the right to an opinion on this debate (my conventional social democratic views on the matter signifying less than nothing)—then the history of the natural world in this century and the one that follows it will be one of regress rather than progress, and perhaps even catastrophic regress at that.

Obviously, what I am trying to argue here is that geology and history are not two, autarchic, discrete categories. As the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile demonstrate, they bleed into each other—literally, alas, as well as figuratively. We might be better served thinking of micro and macro history instead. Where macro-history is concerned, the case against human agency having much relevance (at least positive relevance) surely is a strong one. Is such hubris hard-wired into us? Is that what the neuroscientists will eventually tell us? It would not surprise me. Where the phrase “human agency” does not constitute an oxymoron is at the micro level. Even there I am persuaded that it is exaggerated, though that, of course, is because I think the Greeks, and some of their Renaissance followers like Guicciardini, were right. I suppose if I believed more in progress and less in chance I might think otherwise—emphasis on the “might.”

Let me be clear. I am emphatically not arguing that there is not progress in human history. The history of slavery and of women’s emancipation, and the history of science itself, disproves that completely. Yes, as Benjamin said, “every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.” But the civilization part is no less central than the barbarism part—something people for whom the phrase resonates (like me) often fail to emphasize sufficiently. And the acknowledgment that there is progress does not require one to accept the very much more radical claim that history is a progress. At the very least the fine old Scottish legal verdict, “not proven,” which is now, alas, falling into desuetude, seems appropriate here. For in practical terms, what, if anything, could Professor Charles’ warning about the imminence of a devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince have led to? Would the rich nations have banded together to rebuild the Haitian capital along more earthquake resistant lines? Would the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who have flocked to the city from the countryside over the course of the past two or three decades in search of work of any kind have gone back to their villages? The questions answer themselves. There was, to come back to the question of hope, none whatsoever of that. To quote the great Marxist scientist, J. D. Bernal, “there is the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learned to distinguish between them.”

And, in any event, we should be modest when we invoke the word hope, which is a complicated and highly problematic idea. Think about it: As the anger that has steadily built among Haitians since the earthquake shows, hope has an extremely short shelf-life, and is far more easily dashed as a ruling emotion than, say, hatred. And yet it is no mere sentimental reflex for a non-believer to insist that John Wesley was absolutely right when he said “hope abides.” We know it does, both individually and collectively. And the intuition of even the most pessimistically inclined among us is that, realistic or vain, foolish or sensible, without hope we would lose contact entirely with the better angels of our nature.

But this does not manumit us from the question of whether history is the best context for thinking about hope. Or hopelessness for that matter. This may not be a problem for a believing Christian for whom hope in the resurrection is a strong foundation for a theodicy, even if no serious Christian thinks the problem of evil will become less challenging, let alone disappear because of it (whatever Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins may choose to imagine). But the serious “old” rather than “new” atheist, and, of course, believers from traditions where there is no concept of progress or afterlife, or to put it another way, where the progress is a progress toward a desired non-being, history in general and disaster in particular may precisely be the wrong context in which to hope.

Think of the great post-Auschwitz lament, “Why did the skies not darken?” Without God, the question is at once agonizing and meaningless, and conjures up Nietzsche’s great phrase about nature being “cynical in her sunrises.” Indeed, there is a poem by the British communist poet John Cornford, killed in Spain in 1936 while serving with the International Brigades, in which he marvels at the fact that the sky is as beautiful over the Nazi concentration camp at Oranienburg as anywhere else. Viewed through the icy prism of history, the skies regularly darken, then lighten again, whether over Auschwitz or the smoldering missions of Rwanda. That is its truest, its deepest tragedy.

Perhaps the answer, even, or even especially when we are thinking about history, is that in order to hope—as we must do if we are to live alertly and with some approximation of moral seriousness in a world that, viewed historically, is every bit the charnel house that Hegel said it was—instead of the fool’s errand of trying to reconcile hope and history, we should instead sever the bond that seems to yoke them together. Hope outside of history: Why not? Why can they not be experienced separately, as two human worlds—like tears and laughter?

As Beckett said, “The old complaints, the old complaints are best.” In Victorian Britain, what social welfare that did exist was grounded in maintaining a fundamental distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. The Victorians thought this both the moral thing to do and that it was in the practical interests of the poor. In our own time, the conservative intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has favorably contrasted the Victorians’ success in combating social pathologies then rampant among the poor by steadfastly making morality “a conscious part of [their] social policy” with what she called the “de-moralization” of our own.

Both of Himmelfarb’s major works on the subject—The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984) and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (1991)—were meant as revisionist correctives to the consensus view among historians of Britain, which was that the deserving/undeserving distinction had been cruel and counterproductive. Jeremy Bentham, surely even by Himmelfarb’s exigent standards, cannot be thought of as a sentimentalist. And yet the father of utilitarianism essentially repudiated the Victorian consensus Himmelfarb supports so passionately. He understood character as being a product of people’s social environments. Unlike later British social reformers, like Charles Booth and, above all, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who provided the intellectual basis for the post-1945 British welfare state, Bentham had little sympathy for the poor, deserving or undeserving. But like the Webbs, Bentham, too, ‘de-moralized’ poverty, and emphasized its structural nature.

This argument between the moralizers and de-moralizers continues to rage on in both Britain and the United States. The leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron, has staked his political career on the claim that he incarnates a new brand of Toryism, repeating over and over that the Conservatives are no longer the “nasty party,” and that they are genuinely committed to helping the poor. But in reality, while there are elements of the British welfare state that he dares not criticize—above all, the National Health Service—Cameron has revived the neo-Victorian conception of how to give that help. Essentially, he has promised to shrink the British welfare state both on the assumption derived from US “trickle-down” economics that only lower taxes can generate wealth and enterprise, and, in the long run, break the cycle of poverty, above all urban poverty, and that the British welfare state had had the opposite effect, causing the atomization of society, breaking down the natural bonds of duty and replacing them with a dependency culture with its reliance on the state. Cameron concedes that this will create gaps, but these, he insists, will be covered by charity.

The Tories’ rhetoric with its evocations of people who could work if they wanted to or were compelled to “sitting at home on benefits” (the phrase is Chris Grayling’s, Cameron’s shadow minister of employment and pensions) will remind many Americans of Ronald Reagan’s evocation (he never identified her by name) during his 1976 presidential bid of a “welfare queen” from the south side of Chicago who “has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."

Thirty-four years later, confronted by what they view as an all-out effort by the Obama administration to vastly expand the federal government’s role in the economy, and to in effect compel those who pay income taxes to subsidize the social benefits of the poor (who largely do not), the Tea Party movement is awash in the same kind of rhetoric. Reacting to a government plan to subsidize the refinancing of mortgages for homeowners in over their heads, the CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, a hero of the Tea Partiers, claimed on air that the government was “promoting bad behavior” by “subsidizing losers’ mortgages.” Or, in the words of a Tea Partier complaining about the misrepresentation of the movement in the media, “Why can’t you see that we are not against Government? We are just angry at supporting people who have never worked, never will work and therefore never paid taxes. We pay for their food and health care, they receive subsidized rent and usually free or reduced cost utilities.”

In conservative intellectual circles, many of these same analytical templates and moral intuitions hold sway. Fred Siegel, an urban governance specialist at the Manhattan Institute, has spoken of the welfare state’s encouragement of what he calls “dependent individualism” (a less loaded term encompassing the same ideas would surely have been “unconditional assistance”). Instead, Siegel, along with University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and writer Reihan Salam, have called for “conditional reciprocity,” defined by Wax as “the popular expectation [that those being helped] make a reasonable effort towards self-help.”

Salam explicitly acknowledges the similarity between this view and the attitude of the Victorians that Himmelfarb has extolled in her work. In a recent post on his National Review blog, The Agenda, endorsing Wax’s ideas, Salam approvingly invokes “the moralistic distinction between deserving and undeserving recipients of public aid,” which, he asserts, “most people” who accept society’s collective responsibility for the poor demand as a sine qua non of such support. Salam ties this view (in his post, he offers no support for that “most” but he is unquestionably right if all he means to say is that many people in America take this position) with the widespread popular opposition to programs many view as the Obama administration’s efforts to “effectively [expand] the freedom of one class of individuals at the expense of another.

And as a description of what many Americans (like their Cameron-leaning opposite numbers in Britain) feel and fear, what Salam says is undeniable. And his (and their) impatience with some of the politically correct pieties of the welfare state is understandable, even if their own pieties are hardly less vulnerable to similar scrutiny. But here, Salam is far too indulgent toward the Tea Partiers, and, in my view, far too uncritical of “conditional reciprocity”—aka dividing the poor into those who deserve

society’s help and those who don’t—in his failure to ponder the conclusion Bentham drew in the essays he wrote in the 1790s on the English Poor Laws and what he called the “management” of the poor. As Bentham saw clearly, the deserving/undeserving distinction is all about individual endeavor. In opposition to Dickens (who Himmelfarb uses frequently in her work as a club against Bentham), he thought such endeavors largely irrelevant since the environment in which the poor lived was far more likely to determine how they fared than any individual’s qualities and failings.

In our time, what can “conditional reciprocity” possibly mean for the poor whose early lives are shaped by lower birth weights on average, and who often receive neither balanced diets nor proper stimulation during the neurologically determinative period between birth and three-years-old? The neuroscience of nutrition and early child development is now absolutely clear: on average (though obviously there are many exceptions), if you are such a person, your cognitive abilities are impaired compared to those who are properly nourished. What can “conditional reciprocity” mean for people who are badly educated, suffer disproportionately from a range of preventable diseases, and have far less access to information than their more prosperous counterparts? In such circumstances, what can reciprocity of any kind possibly mean?

Like many on the Left, but also many who come from the European Christian Democratic tradition, my own view is that the moral imperative of solidarity is more than justification enough for what, in Salam’s terms, could indeed be called the expansion of the freedom of the needy at the expense of the more prosperous classes. Better that than the patriotism without solidarity of the Tea Partiers. But, for the sake of argument, assume that the goal of social policy should indeed be “conditional reciprocity.” Given the realities of how the poor live, shouldn’t the emphasis be reversed—that is, first improve the education, health care, nutrition, and access to information of the poor and only then demand reciprocity? The day that the Tea Partiers are as willing to march against the indignities with which their fellow citizens who are poor cope every day of their lives as they are over the possibility that they may have to pay more to support them is the day I will believe that there is more at play here than good old-fashioned ressentiment.

During this year’s official commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, the senior chaplain of the Irish military, Monsignor Eoin Thynne, delivered a brave homily in which he largely eschewed the customary bromides of Romantic Irish nationalism, speaking, instead, about the ethical collapse that had taken place in Ireland during the economic boom. It is a moment of national trauma in Ireland—the consequence of the financial meltdown and the child abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. Combining, as he does, the duties of a priest and a soldier, it would have been unfair to expect Msgr. Thynne to address the pedophilia crisis and his Church’s cover-up. But on the economic crisis, he was unsparing. These days in Ireland, it often seems as if the morning papers do little but itemize one more insolvency of a former high-flying property company, or the further indebtedness of the major Irish banks—all of which have already had to be partly or wholly nationalized. The new glass and steel condominiums along the Liffey River stand largely empty, much like similar developments in Florida, Nevada, and Spain. And while Ireland is now also receiving immigrants from Africa, the Maghreb, and the Indian sub-continent for whom, of course, an Ireland in economic difficulty still seems almost unimaginably prosperous), it is also once again seeing many of its own young people—the best and the brightest, as immigrants most often are historically—leave the country in search of more promising futures in continental Europe, Australia. Canada, and the United States.

The story of the Irish boom has its particularities. Unlike France, or Britain, or Germany (not to mention the United States or Japan), Ireland had never been rich before the boom. To be sure, after entering the European Union it had grown more prosperous, thanks to generous subsidies from Brussels. But real, home-grown prosperity came only in the 1990s. Now, Irish people are waking to realize that it was not prosperity at all, but a combination of a banking system so leveraged that it had to collapse at some point, and an economy whose prosperity depended almost entirely on property prices continuing to rise. If the Irish economy in the boom years was not exactly based on a confidence game, it was not based on much that was solid either. And in a country like Ireland, with a small and inter-connected political and economic elite, the involvement of the major political parties in enabling the madness—while not yet fully illuminated—is virtually certain to have been deep.

In his homily, Msgr. Thynne called for forgiveness for all this, but left no doubt about how much there was to forgive. “Enlighten hearts,” he said, “with a willingness to forgive those who have been contaminated by the virus of corruption, selfishness, and greed. Those whose pride and arrogance have inflicted misery and hardship on our people…Give us the courage to improve ourselves and to shape a society built on a solid foundation of ethics.”

Listening to him speak, I found it hard not to be overcome by an unseemly envy. For what American figure with an equally important official role in this society has put what has happened in its proper moral context? And do not, please, tell me it is Barack Obama. Doubtless, the president means well. But one cannot appoint people to fix the crisis who come from the Wall Street firms that caused the crisis, or denounce the insurance companies while crafting a bill that will benefit the insurance companies (not to mention making a back-room deal with the pharmaceutical industry), and have the right to claim the moral high ground. Yes, if I have to choose between Obama and his enemies (whether the enemy in question is the Tea Party movement, the Republican Party, AIPAC, or, for that matter, the Jihadists), siding with the president seems to me the only sane choice. Sane, but profoundly dispiriting. The doctrine of the enemy of my enemy is my friend is not much more edifying than that of sauve qui peut. Why is it apparently impossible for the archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony, a man of immense power in America who is also a person with a genuine social conscience and a long history of activism on behalf of the poor, to make a speech about the selfishness, greed, and ethical collapse of American society during our boom years in a context as likely to draw public attention, and, in doing so, shift the terms of the debate, as the one chosen by Msgr. Thynne? And the same question should be asked of the Reverend Rick Warren and of the leaders of the North American Baptist Conference and of the American Association of Lutheran Churches when they pronounce—as they hardly have been shy about doing—on the moral condition of the Republic.

This society is in moral freefall, and it is idiotic to pretend otherwise. People of my political bent tend to blame capitalism in all its inherent nihilism and cruelty, while social conservatives tend to see the demise of any coherent social order on the collapse of what my father called Sacred Order. To say this is emphatically not to say that these are apocalyptic times. That is far, far too easy. The apocalypse, like the barbarians at the Roman city’s gates in Cavafy’s great poem, offer a kind of solution, a kind of consolation, just as the story of Samson is consoling only because it ends with him pulling down the pillars of the temple. But these are stories: There is absolutely no historical basis for thinking immoral societies cannot endure or flourish. Indeed, to believe so is, historically, a monotheistic conceit, and in its essence millenarian rather than historical.

How societies conceive themselves is another matter entirely. Most societies, whether they bowed before Baal or Yahweh, Jesus or Goldman Sachs, have thought themselves moral. Today, as anyone who can bear to read the The Wall Street Journal Opinion page, or Investor’s Business Daily will know, the rich once again believe they are rich not because they are lucky or because they are powerful and have created a system that largely serves their ends and their interests, but because they are deserving, and have worked hard. And to those who say that this was what American capitalism claimed in the Gilded Age or the Coolidge administration, the capitalist propagandists of our day like Amity Shlaes or Daniel Henninger indignantly demand: What was wrong with the Gilded Age? And perhaps they will even win the ideological battle, at least for a while. Nietzsche, cutting to the point as always, wrote that, “Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

But this does not mean there is no such thing as truth, or that it would not be a relief, if only once a year, say—perhaps during a national day of remembrance (after all, every country has one)—someone in a position of real influence and authority saw fit to tell the truth rather than spin it. The rest of the time we could go back to business as usual.

That Ireland is a country seeped in memory is a commonplace. The annual commemorations held in every year in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street in Dublin on the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising against the British seems like the embodiment of this consensus view. It is comparatively modest, unlike Bastille Day in Paris, or the greatest public military ceremony of all, the Beating the Retreat in New Delhi that is a celebration of India’s Republic Day, though like them largely military. But in its combination of modesty and sternness, the ceremony is deeply affecting. The crowds, while not enormous, are dignified and respectful, and at least on April 1st of this year, when I was in Dublin, this very much seemed to include people from what the Irish government calls “the new communities”—immigrants from the poor world. I saw a sprinkling of people from the Indian sub-continent and West Africa, and, from what I could see, they were a bit puzzled but also more than a bit engaged.

The entire ceremony seems beyond politics, as if it were inscribed on the DNA of independent Ireland and always had been. In fact, this is far from the truth of the matter. It is true that official commemorations, complete with a military parade, began soon after Irish independence. But it is anything but clear that these commemorations seemed of great importance to most Irish men and women in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Writing of his own childhood in the thirties and early-mid forties, the writer John McGahern insisted that “I think that the 1916 Rising was not considered to be of any great importance in the country I grew up in.” Because Easter 1916 was not that far away, he added, “it probably was too close in time for the comfort of mythmaking.”

But whether they appealed to a majority of the Irish people or not, commemorations of the Rising soon became a context for the mobilization of insurgent Republicanism, above all in Northern Ireland. Even today, when the IRA seems like largely a spent force in the Republic of Ireland, one still can read flat statements like the one posted by a Belfast blogger who wrote that the Easter Rising is traditionally “the most important time of the year in the Irish Republican calendar” and condemn the Irish government’s official commemoration, from the days of the Free State to today, as “tokenism.” And it is a fact that the Irish Republic banned official commemorations (not to mention IRA military parades in Dublin) for most of the three decades of the Troubles in the North. Military parades in front of the Post Office only resumed in 2006, which may have had more to do with the waning of Republicanism and the fact that Ireland, as a nation—and, more precisely, a nation in the midst of what seemed like a boom unseen in all of Ireland’s history, but turned out to be a huge property bubble, not to say worse (the full damage to the Irish economy of those mad years has still not been fathomed, but it is all but incalculable)—could afford such celebrations because the country had moved on.

Bertie Ahern, the prime minister who reinstituted the military parade is now infamous in Ireland for having said, “the boom is just getting boomier,” which led an Irish finance official to joke recently that today “the bust is just getting bustier.” But what all this illustrates, as McGahern well understood, is that mythmaking is good for political mobilization and when it poses no risk, but that it is anything but an inherent part of a nation’s soul—if, indeed, it is not pure Romantic twaddle even to claim that nations have souls. Echoing the great French scholar of Ireland, Maurice Goldring, McGahern thought that it was only the political defeat of the pragmatic Irish nationalism of O’Connell and Parnell that turned the Irish independence movement toward Romantic nationalism. Only in the context of that turn can the cult of political memory in Ireland be understood.

The mythical Ireland is no more a real place than the mythical America, the mythical France, or the mythical China. Instead it is a political idea and serves specific interests and specific ideology, though of course its genius is to put itself beyond ideology—a fact of nature, rather than a politics that is fair game for attack (the contemporary human rights movement plays a rationalist version of the same self-manumission from believing any critique of its principles to be legitimate). In the Irish case, there is also the Romanticism of the Diaspora—a powerful force, even today. In Miami a year ago, at the wonderful Coral Gables bookshop, Books and Books, the Irish writer Sebastian Barry gave a reading followed by questions. A (self-identified) Irish-American questioner asked Barry if he worried that Ireland’s new prosperity would ruin the Irish soul. To which Barry smilingly responded that “well, we in Ireland don’t have to worry about that anymore!”

Perhaps we will one day learn to “remember in a different way,” as a very smart friend of mine put it in reacting to my last blog post. The problem with historical memory, as exercised by groups, anyway, is that it tends to be high on grievance but low on forgiveness. As the great Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote, “it is possible that there is no memory except the memory of wounds.” And that is the problem.

Those of us who are in the habit of railing at the historical illiteracy of these great times of ours (it borders on amnesia) should be careful what we wish for. For despite what Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason about those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it, historical memory is anything but an incontestable public good. Those who doubt this need only look at the Balkans in the 1990s. Despite the propaganda of the Serbs and their allies in Russia and in the West, the conflict was not principally about “ancient ethnic hatreds.” The fetishization of the historical grievances of the Croats and the Serbs unquestionably played a key role in providing the conflict with an ideological and propagandistic flag of convenience. And, in due course, the Bosnian side—which, despite the Muslim nationalist past of some of its leaders, was overwhelmingly Titoist at the beginning of the war—followed suit as well (those who still deny this cannot possibly have been in Sarajevo in the early months of the siege, but that is a debate for another day).

I remember going to Belgrade in 1993 to visit Vuk Draskovic, the nationalist politician and writer who was then leading the mass opposition against the Milosevic regime and in doing so had drawn liberal, as well as ultra-nationalist, support in Serbia. As I was leaving, my head still ringing with Draskovic’s romantic paeans of praise for the Chetnik leader, Draza Mihajlovic, one of his young aides pressed a folded bit of paper into my hand. It was blank except for a date: “1453”—that is, the year Orthodox Constantinople fell to the Muslim Ottomans. Friends of mine who worked in the former Yugoslavia during the Croatian and Bosnian wars had similar experiences in Zagreb and in Sarajevo. It seemed that the “sores of history,” as the great Irish writer Hubert Butler once called them, remained unhealed more than half a millennium later—at least in the desperate, degraded atmosphere of that time and place.

Butler himself suffered greatly from the anger of the official Catholic Ireland of the day (that he was a member of the Republic’s Protestant minority only aggravated the affront in the minds of his detractors). It began fairly innocently. Butler had traveled extensively in Egypt, the USSR, the Balkans, and Central Europe in the 1930s; and for a time in 1938-39, he worked with a Quaker group in Vienna helping Jews escape Nazi Austria. In 1952, he gave a public talk in Dublin about the Balkans, which was criticized in Ireland for not emphasizing the persecution of Catholics by the victorious Tito dictatorship. Butler had insisted—unfortunately for him, the Papal Nuncio was in attendance—that a far greater crime had been the campaign of the Nazi-installed Croatian regime of Ante Pavelic to convert the Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia to Catholicism and to murder those who refused to renounce their faith, and the complicity of Msgr Stepinac, the Archbishop of Zagreb, in this genocidal war against the Serbs. Butler writes about this in an essay he titled (the reference was to earlier memoirs of his public school) “The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue.”

In the debate that ensued, Butler—who, as a writer was very much a localist and, apart from his time in Russia, the Balkans, and Austria, otherwise spent most of his very long life in the country fastness of his native County Kilkenny—was excoriated by the Irish clerical and political establishment. A book defending Stepinac was published with a preface by the Archbishop of Dublin. Father R.S. Devane, a well-known Irish Jesuit of the day of whom, early in his career, it was said that he “had been known to confiscate British publications from unwilling newsagents in his native Limerick,” insisted that there had been no forcible conversions, while the Irish Minister of Agriculture in the De Valera government advised a group of Irish law students to model themselves on figures like Stepinac, Pavelic, and Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary—figures, he said, who had “so gallantly defended freedom of thought and conscience.” As Butler observed, “Those who knew Yugoslavia were aghast, for Pavelic…was the Yugoslav counterpart of Himmler.”

From the onset of the controversy, Butler seems to have understood very well the risks he was running. But he felt he had no choice, above all precisely because he was an Irish Protestant. Convinced that for all their mistakes and derelictions, the demonization of the Irish Protestant community in De Valera’s Ireland was a gross falsification of history, Butler was adamant. “If we agree,” he wrote, “that history should be falsified in Croatia in the interests of Catholic piety, how could we protest when our own history was similarly distorted?”

In the early 1950s, unlike our own time, there still was a difference between celebrity and notoriety, and Butler paid dearly for his effort to set the historical record straight. Though, as an Irishman, he understood better than most what the cost could be of tearing the scabs off historical wounds. He was the subtlest of writers, and never confronted the question head on. But from what he did write, it seems evident that for Butler any decent politics had to be a politics of truth in which even inconvenient, unwelcome, or, to use a term much favored by generations of engineers of the human soul whether religious or secular, “unhelpful” facts needed to be aired. As he put it, “If you suppress a fact because it is awkward, you will next be asked to contradict it.”

This is that most old-fashioned of things: a noble sentiment. But as Butler himself would certainly have understood, the question of historical memory is more vexing, and the binary conceptions of truth vs. lie and the concealed vs. the revealed only get us so far. What do we actually mean when we speak of historical memory? It cannot be what individuals remember. As any police investigator will tell you, the longer the period that elapses between a person being in an accident or being the victim or witness to a crime, the less accurate his or her testimony is likely to be. And the historical memory of an event, by which we usually mean the collective memory of people who did not themselves live through it but have had it passed down to them, whether through family stories or public education and ceremonial commemorations, is not just flawed but impossible, for we remember as individuals not as collectivities, and collective memory is as absurd a category as collective guilt.

And yet, whether we are speaking of the Irish memory of the Great Famine of 1847—by which we do indeed mean collective memory, since, self-evidently no Irish person has any actual recollection of the catastrophe—or of the Armenian Genocide, or the Rape of Nanjing, or the Shoah, we are not talking about memory in any proper sense, but morality, ideology, and, more often than not, cultural and political organizing principles; and, as such, they are not—or should never be—beyond challenge or revision, no matter how (justifiably) sacrosanct they may appear at a given time.

For if ever Nietzsche’s terrifying insight that “there are no facts, only interpretations” seemed undeniable, it is where historical memory is concerned.

None of this would matter so much were historical memory as hospitable to peace and reconciliation as it is to war and enmity. I once heard the Irish writer and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien observe during a particularly dark period of the conflict in Northern Ireland that, at times, it seemed as if Republicans and Unionists might be close to coming to terms; but then, he said, one side or the other would remember one of the great militant songs of martyrdom—“The Rising of the Moon” or “The Sash My Father Wore”—and any such hope would quickly evaporate. And the pathology is in no way unique to Ireland.

But we would live in a better world if we could, no, if we would forget.