Friday 28 February 2020

General Election 2020: Come Out ye Black and Tans


Q: what was the theme song for the Irish General Election 2020?

A: Come Out Ye Black and Tans as performed by The Wolfe Tones

Q: Them again. And why?

A: Because of the R.I.C. (Royal Irish Constabulary) Commemoration proposed by the Fine Gael government. From 1919 to 1922 during the Anglo Irish war the R.I.C. were aided by the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries in the attempted containment of the Independence struggle. Many of those policemen were killed as they were now no longer involved in normal police work but identified with military repression. Why, asked a bemused populace, should we commemorate Black’n’Tans? The Anglo Irish War is also known as the Black’n’Tan war.

This was an indication of how removed the government were from, God help us, normal cop on and their disappearance into a void of pointless reconciliation and historical perspective. Sinn Fein reaped the benefit of this. They regard themselves as the true government of Ireland as the first Sinn Fein Parliament was never prorogued. They also did not until recently recognise the courts which prompted Myles to ask Dixon and Hempenstall the ophthalmologists to supply spectacles.

Q: Never mind all that, how did they do in the election?

A: They got the majority of First Preference votes and if they had put up more candidates would have won the most seats in the election and be in a position to form a government more easily. As the presiding officers at the count centres announced this they broke into Come Out Ye Black’n’Tans Given their free money economic policy and highly aspirational public housing programme the people of Ireland could now be singing Don’t Cry for Me, Venezuela .

Q: Where does that leave us?

A: Waiting on a coalition government which will probably include Sinn Fein. Some say let them in and they will self destruct. Interesting times. S.F. are having public meetings around the country to show that they are a force that must be recognised.

Q: And how did the pro-life supporters and candidates do?

A: I thought you’d never ask. Very nicely. All were elected and better still many of the more strident pro-abortion women candidates lost their seats.
strident voices
As I was saying in 2018 the Proportional Representation system would reflect the one third of the country who voted against repeal of the Eight Amendment. In my constituency I voted no 1 Aontu (pro-life party) knowing they would not get elected but that in the fullness of time the vote would pass to my 2nd. Preference Noel Grealish. My third was Eamonn O’Cuiv. Now when Aontu’s votes were distributed the vast majority went to Grealish and O’Cuiv both of whom had voted against repeal in the Dail (parliament). The Fine Gael whip running in this constituency lost his seat. I rejoice in his return to the private sector, a particularly mealy mouther maunderer on the Direct Provision asylum seeker issue.

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Black’n’Tans Lyrics. (Song was written by Dominic Behan brother of Brendan.)

I was born on a Dublin street where the royal drums did beat
And the loving English feet they went all over us
And every single night when me dad would came home tight
He'd invite the neighbours out with this chorus

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra

Come tell us how you slew them poor Arabs two by two
Like the Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows
How you bravely you faced one with your 16-pounder gun
And you frightened them natives to their marrow

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra

Come let us hear you tell how you slandered great Parnell
When you thought him well and truly persecuted
Where are the sneers and jeers that you bravely let us hear
When our heroes of '16 were executed?

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra




Wednesday 26 February 2020

Bridge Building on The One Road


Fascinating fact: the Irish Army has an official anthem since 1943 The One Road (written by Frank O’Donovan) which is never played in public by the Army No.1 Band. Why? Have its sentiments evaporated or is it that the more popular version by the Rebel rousing Wolfe Tones has supplanted it in the mind of the populace? It’s a horrible jangly noise as compared to the brassy jauntiness of the military march. The brother was a Commandant in the Army in the 80’s stationed at the Curragh Camp when the British ambassador came to call, Troubles bridge building. On his arrival the band struck up, yes, The One Road. All the officers looked at each other suppressing a smile and hoping that the ambassador did not recognise the tune.

The last verse goes:
Night is darkest just before the dawn
From dissension Ireland is reborn
Soon we'll all be United Irishmen
Make our land a Nation Once Again


Another fascinating fact. The rank of Commandant follows the French Revolutionary Army ranking, a tribute going back to 1798 when they invaded Ireland to support the United Irishmen. It is equivalent to the rank of Major.

Song Lyrics:
On The One Road
Francis O'Donovan
We're on the one road, sharing the one load
We're on the road to God knows where
We're on the one road, it may be the wrong road
But we're together now who cares?
Northmen, Southmen, comrades all!
Dublin, Belfast, Cork or Donegal!
We're on the one road, swinging along, singin' a soldier's song!

Though we've had our troubles now and then
Now's the time to make them up again
Sure aren't we all Irish anyhow?
Now is the time to step together now

We're on the one road, sharing the one load
We're on the road to God knows where
We're on the one road, it may be the wrong road
But we're together now who cares?
Northmen, Southmen, comrades all!
Dublin, Belfast, Cork or Donegal!
We're on the one road, swinging along, singin' a soldier's song!

Tinker, tailor ­ every mother's son
Butcher, baker ­ shouldering his gun
Rich man, poor man ­ every man in line
All together, just like Auld Lang Syne!

We're on the one road, sharing the one load
We're on the road to God knows where
We're on the one road, it may be the wrong road
But we're together now who cares?
Northmen, Southmen, comrades all!
Dublin, Belfast, Cork or Donegal!
We're on the one road, swinging along, singin' a soldier's song!

Night is darkness just before the dawn
From dissensions, Ireland is reborn
Soon, will all United Irishmen
Make our land a Nation Once Again!

We're on the one road, sharing the one load
We're on the road to God knows where
We're on the one road, it may be the wrong road
But we're together now who cares?
Northmen, Southmen, comrades all!
Dublin, Belfast, Cork or Donegal!
We're on the one road, swinging along, singin' a soldier's song!

Sunday 23 February 2020

Fr. M. C. D'Arcy replies to Aldous Huxley


Published in 1957 The Meeting of Love and Knowledge, Perennial Philosophy by Fr. Martin Cyril D’Arcy (1888 -1976) is a response to Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley published in 1945. Essentially it recognises the magnificent contribution to the quest for wisdom that is inherent in all the great traditions but it resists what it sees as the assimilation of them that might be summed up as ‘many paths, one goal’. Particularly it distinguishes Christianity as being dedicated to a personal relationship with God via the Son. This D’Arcy claims is not a feature of Hinduism and Buddhism:

Huxley tells us that all the great religions advocate self-denial and charity and it is certainly true that in them the silver must be cleaned of its tarnish, the light freed from its smoky shade. But this is not enough. Personality must be stripped from us so that we emerge in our true godhead. Self-denial, therefore, is to be understood literally, and not in the Christian sense of subduing our lower nature to the purposes of the higher and then subduing our will to the will of God. Cui servire regnare est. In other words, there is this difference between the Christian and the Hindu or Buddhist conception of self-denial, that the former aims to keep the person, the latter to dissolve it.

I wrote before about the denial of ‘the personal touch’ in relation to Islam.
God and Allah
Perhaps this is a trope of Christian theological clerical formation that is founded on a limited acquaintance with the everyday practice of the religions in question. It tends to lean on a very narrow band of theory which blinds one to the self-evident. How could you miss Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana Padma Sambhava, Milarepa, Ramakrishna etc.? Devotional literature predominates in all the great traditions.

Tuesday 18 February 2020

Austin Farrer - Anglo-Catholic Thomist


As you read Wikipedia are you ever irritated by vexatious citation needed editor remarks? Here are examples of what I mean:

re Austin Farrer:

He went to St Paul's School in London where[citation needed] he gained a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.[2] Encouraged by his father to value scholarship,[citation needed] he nevertheless found the divisions within the Baptist church dispiriting,[15] and while at Oxford he became an Anglican.[16] Finding his spiritual home at St Barnabas Church in Oxford, his theology and his spirituality became profoundly Anglo-Catholic, although centred on the Book of Common Prayer. After gaining a first in greats,[citation needed] he went up to Cuddesdon Theological College where he trained alongside the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey.[17]

Austin Farrer is an interesting and somewhat anomalous thinker. He was a Protestant, sorry Anglo-Catholic, Thomist. Eric Mascall was another and he refers frequently in his book Existence and Analogy to Farrer’s Finite and Infinite. The latter is an attempt to justify the rational proofs of the existence of God. Depending on my personal metaphysical weather I am in and out on that. Beginning it last night I was struck by its briskness combined with a flurry of sidebars.

Later.

Thursday 13 February 2020

Parmenides and Satkaryavada


((repost from 2011)

In A History of Philosophy Vol.1, Greece and Rome, Part 1 by Frederick Copleston S.J. the theory of Parmenides is described succinctly and with admirable clarity:

His first great assertion is that "It is". "It", i.e. Reality, Being, of whatever nature it may be, is, exists, and cannot not be. It is, and it is impossible for it not to be. Being can be spoken of, and it can be the object of my thought. But that which I can think of and can speak of can be, "for it is the same thing that can be thought and can be". But if "It" can be then it is. Why? Because if it could be and yet were not, then it would be nothing. Now, nothing cannot be the object of speech or thought, for to speak about nothing is not to speak, and to think faout nothing is the same as not thinking at all. Besides if it merely could be, then, paradoxically, it couldnever come to be, for it would then have to come out of nothing, and out of nothing comes nothing and not something. Being, then, Reality, "It" was not first possible, i.e. nothing, and then existent: it was always existent - more accurately, "It is".


In the Sankhya-karikas of Isvarakrishna we have this expression of the doctrine of Satkaryavada also known as the doctrine of the non-difference of cause and effect:

The effect already exists in the cause for the following reasons: what is nonexistent cannot he produced; for producing a thing, a specific material cause is resorted to; everything is not produced by everything; a specific material cause capable of producing a specific product alone produces that effect; there is such a thing as a particular cause for a particular effect.

As in the injunction frequently encountered on Irish building sites Think of the next man, this doctrine leaves much to be done in the way of ingenious exegesis by subsequent sages. We can however discern through the fog something of the form of a like insight to that of Parmenides. What is, is, and what is not has no traction on reality in order to come to be. It can't get started.
As mentioned in a previous note on this topic advaitic causality
this idea of causality comes from the narrow focus of what in the Aristotelian system would be termed material causality. In a curious way the materialist monism of Parmenides throws a light on the Satkaryavada doctrine which bundles together material and efficient causality and treats them as one. Because potential is wrapped up in the nature of the material which is then what is to be formed out of that material must somehow be in existence. Otherwise it could not come to be because it would be nothing and as we are told nothing cannot gain traction.

Satkaryavada is a confused likeness of the doctrine of the impossibility of change espoused by Parmenides in that it accepts change but only as mithya i.e. real as an appearance.

By knowing a single lump of clay, everything that is made of clay would become known. A modification begins with speech, it is a (mere) name. The clay alone is true i.e. real.
Commentary on Chandogya Upanishad VI.i.4

In the commentary of Shankara on the Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya the impossibility of something coming out of nothing is unequivocally stated.

Existence does not come out of non-existence. If something can come out of nothing, then it becomes useless to refer to special kinds of causes, since non-existence as such is indistinguishable everywhere.
(from B.S.B. II.ii.26)

This general principle is used extensively both in the discussion about material causality and the possibility of change and also as a method of refutation of the Buddhist doctrines of Annata and Annica. In this note I am concerned with material causality. An important citation on this topic is B.S.B. II.i.18 in which he states his views on potency:

Again, when some potency is assumed in the cause, to determine the effect, that potency cannot influence the effect by being different (from the cause and effect) or non-existent (like the effect), since (on either supposition) non-existence and difference will pertain to the potency as much as to the effect. Therefore the potency must be the very essence of the cause, and the effect must be involved in the very core of the potency.

Grasping these ideas is like lifting mercury with a fork because we are so primed with the Aristotelian concept of Cause & Effect. I'm not even sure that they conflict with Aristotle's views because they are more onto-theological than ontological. Brahman in the Vedic schema is the material cause of the universe. Brahman as pure act is the cause and the effect of all manifestation. Just as all the potential for items made of clay is in the clay, all the potential for what is, is in Brahman. There is a unity of act and potency in Brahman and because Brahman is the reality of anything whatever this non-difference of cause and effect is reflected in matter of all kinds.

It is not the case that Shankara ignores the idea of efficent causality claiming that everything just happens. He accepts the role of actors but still subordinates their causal importance to the material cause or the nature of things. That is the supervenient reality.

Moreover, if it be admitted that something can come out of nothing, then on the same ground even the indifferent people who are inactive should attain their desired results, for non-existence is clearly evident even there, and so a husbandman who does not engage in cultivation should get his crop, a potter who makes no effort for preparing the clay should get his vessels ready, and a weaver who does not make any effort for weaving the yarn should get a cloth just as much as one that weaves. And nobody need in any way strive for heaven or liberation. But such a position is neither reasonable nor is accepted by anybody. Therefore the assertion of something coming out of nothing is unjustifiable.

These topics of substance, identity and change refracted through a vedic medium are puzzling and pondering on them gives one a sense of how Plato confronted by Parmenides tried to save the appearances.

Wednesday 12 February 2020

Flash Philosophy


I have been wondering for the last week why the anatman/annica doctrine (no-self/momentariness) doctrine is proffered by Buddhists when it is so obviously senseless and self-contradictory. Crazy ideas coming from philosophers are generally preceded by an intuition that they experience as a eureka moment whereby a field of thought becomes crystallised and an intelligible pattern is discerned. This flash is like the M.I.B.s but it destroys not the memory of ever having seen aliens but the fibrillating antennae of the illative sense. Conclusions are missed that ought to be obvious and the reductio ad gibbering folly follows not. No, our philosopher receiving the spark from heaven remains complacent.

Friday 7 February 2020

Really Voltaire?


The benefit of a translation is that it can disclose the banality of its original without the disguise of fine prose giving it a specious significance. I’ve been reading Voltaire’s Letters on the English (Lettres Philosophique). My first thought was ‘this is just persiflage, there is no attempt to go into any depth on his topics’. Higher journalism even when you’re the first to have done it does not make it worth ever having been done. His articles on religion are a clear nod to his constituency to allow them to feel superior to unenlightened believers.

About this time arose the illustrious William Penn, who established the power of the Quakers in America, and would have made them appear venerable in the eyes of the Europeans, were it possible for mankind to respect virtue when revealed in a ridiculous light.
(from Letters no 4)

So much for the Quakers, wigless babblers. Reading the French wiki on the book I noted a strange omission. The burning of the book by the Royal hangman and the controversy raised by its article on Locke made Voltaire that most delicious of criminals, the intellectual outlaw. No mention of that nor the materialist tendency of his letter on Mr. Locke. French wiki offers the blindingly obvious:

Cet ouvrage est destiné à un peuple plus ou moins cultivé, capable de lire mais nécessitant une certaine éducation poussée, par la façon dont il est écrit. Il s'agit d'une suite de lettres, et donc de destinataires.

In fact the whole tendency of the letters was an invitation to indulge in invidious comparison or to take a rise out of the French. The matter of English food is passed over.

Voltaire has a breezy way with history. He summarizes the history of Europe from the time of Louis the Feeble till the reign of Charles V in England:


The field and the scaffold ran with blood on account of theological arguments, sometimes in one century, sometimes in another, for almost five hundred years, without interruption; and the long continuance of this dreadful scourge was owing to the fact that morality was always neglected to indulge a spirit of dogmatizing.
(from Essays on the Manners and Spirit of Nations)

To think that transubstantiation could cause so much conflict. Pick your enemies carefully from amongst those despised by right thinking people and your observations about them will not be scrutinised too carefully.

B:It was forbidden to marry one’s sister in Rome. It was allowed among the Egyptians, the Athenians and even among the Jews, to marry one’s sister on the father’s side. It is with regret that I cite that wretched little Jewish people; who should certainly not serve as a model for anyone, and who (putting religion aside) were never anything but a race of ignorant and fanatic brigands. But still, according to their books, the young Tamar, before being ravished by her brother Amnon, says to him: “Nay, my brother, do not thou this folly, but speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee.”

A: All that is conventional law, arbitrary customs, passing fashions; the essential remains always.
(from Natural Law in Philosophical Dictionary)

Proleptically speaking, he would say that when we know that his last mistress, Madame Denis. was the daughter of his sister.


Thursday 6 February 2020

Odd Conversation


 “On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s campus.”
- Martin, I said to my companion, what..
He broke in:
- Ah indeed the whatness of things, that they are and are something and also the surroundness of the question that is also without a limit. We are all answerable to that. And by the way I never said ‘nothing nots’. What I said was ‘no thing nots’. Presence is an unalterable fact that cannot negate itself.
- Martin you have a way of bringing silence into speech.
- It has to return to that out of which it emerged.