Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey, than others, and detected faults and follies, which escape vulgar observation. And the pleasure of wantoning in common topicks is so tempting to a writer, that he cannot easily resign it; a train of sentiments generally received enables him to shine without labour, and to conquer without a contest. It is so easy to laugh at the folly of him who lives only in idea, refuses immediate ease for distant pleasures, and, instead of enjoying the blessings of life, lets life glide away in preparations to enjoy them; it affords such opportunities of triumphant exultation, to exemplify the uncertainty of the human state, to rouse mortals from their dream, and inform them of the silent celerity of time, that we may believe authors willing rather to transmit than examine so advantageous a principle, and more inclined to pursue a track so smooth and so flowery, than attentively to consider whether it leads to truth.
(from The Rambler by Samuel Johnson no.2 March 2nd. 1749)
Heresy is a collection of articles nailed to the door of the Church of Reason which is located in the mythical domain of Dublin 4. Fennell considers himself to have been cancelled avant la lettre by the minions and myrmidons of this statelet but if you check his Wikipedia page many a scribbler and intellectual manque would be pleased for such cancellation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Fennell
If you read the proem to that article you will see that the animus toward him still survives in the carrels of the liberal mind. Fintan O’Toole the accepted public intellectual does not get an advisory. Norms, normal normalling. Anyway my point is that D.F. published a lot of book, taught in many institutions of higher learning, appeared on national television frequently and was generally a figure on the intellectual landscape. The problem for him was that he wanted to be a public intellectual discussing the great ideas with his peers, if such there be, the great ideas that would revitalise the nation and help it find its soul. The nation for him was a core concept, not just the citizens granted by paper fiat.D.F. would probably not accept Bloom as part of the Irish nation being a second generation blow in.
“Do you know what a nation is”, says John Wyse.
“A nation is the same people living in the same place,” says Bloom. “Or also living in different places”
The present dilution of the concept and the practice of a sovereign independent nation is the salient feature of our modern European predicament. Bizarrely opposing this has become the attribute of the right wing, nay the 'far right’. Fennell wrote about the collapse in morale of the white nations leading to extinction. No one wants to breed into a senseless civilisation with norms cobbled together by liberals:
State sponsored abortion he saw as the massacre of the innocent by moral imbeciles...."simultaneously soaking millions of women and thousands of men in debilitating, personal guilt, so that they become incapable of resisting, or even protesting against, the use of their taxes and of the profits on their consumption to prepare the general massacre of mankind.” Our present drifting into the serious danger of atomic warfare is indicative of the connection to the death wish. Genocide, abortion, euthanasia are the commonplace phenomena of the 21st. century. Fennell’s last book About Being Normal covers the whole range of his oeuvre with extracts from all his major publications with autobiographical notes. It is available free to read on archive.org
That book is a fine summation of his life’s work and the consistent swimming against the tide of liberal hegemony. He could be wrongheaded too. His diatribe against the ‘famous Seamus’ Heaney is excerpted. A silly escapade.
Death has been good to Desmond. His ideas that were stifled by virtual suppression are now current among thinking ‘au contraire’ people. Worth reading.
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