INSULTING COLUMNS?

Some newspaper columnists refer to our politicians in Ireland - and indeed to us voters - as Neanderthals, that is to say, we are living about forty thousand or even ten times that much out of date.   This is one of a number of current  journalist  insults offered to readers, an even more considered insult  than, say, calling someone Rocket-man" or "pinhead".   Some of our newspaper columnists  seem to encourage  this abuse, some  not.   Maybe they insult people out of habit.  But is that  the only reason they do it? And how much insult are  we, the readers and customers, to  take ?

Our fellow citizens  are said to be humans thinking  "tribally" or not thinking at all.  Some columnists say we, whether politicians or voters, are  "idiots", a word which in decent modern journalism should not be used about anyone.  Calling people idiots  is offensive but  writers who would primly and coyly refer to the "n.....   word" and the "f...  word" and the "c...word" as if they would not sully their copy  with them nevertheless use the, let' s call it " the idiot word".   Just when psychologists and other professional health workers wouldn't dare use it.   Abuse  by word seems at times likely to overshadow the work of the majority of our journalists who reflect what is best because they respect it rather than the worst because it is politically or financially useful.    

So we read the opinion columns about political parties with" control freakery" rather than reason, about how one political party campaigns for something but the other "touts the notion....", such and such a political idea is dismissed  as  "a stupid  idea.....", that  in N.  Ireland  people are obsessed with trivial issues in a way that others are not......, about how Stormont "reeked" and if  Stormont (parliament building)  needed decorated it's unlikely the MLAs could agree a colour scheme beyond magnolia.....unionists here are still stuck in a time warp.....Mr.  So and So MP is reliably spluttery......nothing has changed, every year it springs to mind :  Time to give 'the dreary steeples '  their regular dust down and  repointing........"

But people think and vote  for reasons.  Writers and analysts have the wonderful privilege of revealing  reasons to readers who want to know them.   Calling people idiots, incompetents, lazy and gormless is not reasonable, it is as if we were afraid of looking for reasons or unaware that there are any.   Disdain aplenty.  Analysis short. 

We  criticise the policies of  our newspapers, politicians and churches, of course we do, we make and re-make our decisions, certainly we do .   But we do things for reasons.  It is for our writers to look for reasons and treat the people who have them with courtesy.  A prominent academic said about us in West Belfast, where I live, that we are solipsistic.  We are neither solipsistic ( always inward looking) nor selfish any more than other people, or if we are, let someone prove it, not just say it.    Nor are we, as one of our bishops has said of us, that we are  "opposed to authority and law and everything..." .    We may not, in the words of the Bible, have turned swords into ploughshares but we turned Bonfires into Festivals while many others built their  bonfires bigger and that was no mean feat. 

Publicly describing any of our neighbours as Neanderthal  or  stupid, as leeches sucking blood out of the treasury  or worshippers of  stale ideas because they are old ones does  not reflect us in our many views and choices.  It cannot represent  our opponents either.   

Years ago at a meeting in Dublin I listened to  people around a table saying again and again  that we in the North of Ireland voted "tribally".   When  my time came to speak I objected to this and said it  was a denial of the fact that we thought a great deal about why and how we should vote.  Accusing us of  simply being "tribal" is an easy way out, a refusal, perhaps an inability, to analyse our real thoughts and actions.  As we left  the meeting I was approached by one of the speakers who then accused me of being a racist because I objected to the term "tribal" being used to describe our thinking. 

I believe we are among the most aware of people regarding politics, having had plenty to think and talk about, and thinking and talking plenty .  Among my voting neighbours during my lifetime there have been nationalists, socialists, unionists, republicans and others ; our political choices  changed from time to time, otherwise there would be little point in canvassing at election time because canvassing  is based upon the idea that voters  can and do think, can and do change.  There was a time in N Ireland - I am old enough to remember such things  - when many local council seats went "unopposed"  in elections - this was not  because people did not think rationally about it, they did but  the electoral system was so rigged that it was  pointless to express  new choices or encourage observers to believe there could be any.  Changing possession of many of the council seats had been systematically rendered impossible.  This was not the voters'  fault, it was the fault of a system imposed by  government.    

Anyway, we don't necessarily do what our parents or our ancestors did.  My Father and Mother were Nationalists.   They were among the early buyers of a few  shares in a newspaper and this showed what side of the Nationalists they were on.   I inherited the shares, changed my political - and religious - views as I got older and sold the shares  because I wanted the cash more than the newspaper's  politics.   

Growing up we learned about the importance of difference.   In a dozen  neighbouring houses in the mixed area  where I grew up there lived Professor Savoury who spent many weekends preaching against Catholics - he was of Huguenot stock, a couple of doors from him lived a Nationalist family, divided between both nationalist sides following the Treaty, but  one of whom was arrested  "for wearing the Easter Lily of the Republic".  In a neighbouring parish people were advised from the pulpit - I remember this too - to vote unionist rather than for  a socialist republican.  My Father who came from Cavan favoured Mr De Valera, listened happily to  broadcasts during  elections down South when Fianna Fail won in 1932, but disapproved of some of De Valera's followers .  Friends urged him to enter the political arena  in Belfast on the Nationalist  side but my Mother persuaded him not to - it was a time when Catholics were targets and we were a growing-up family, so minds had to be made up not always between the good and the bad but  between the good and the better.   In adulthood one of my brothers joined the Anti-Partition League and became its Treasurer but resigned when they insisted on having a picture of the Pope on the wall of their Belfast Office.   He admired the Indian medical Service and those who joined it but he read more books critical of  the British Empire than the rest of us put together while my Father and his friends on their days off would take the  tram to Glengormley and walk and talk together about Labour in Irish History.   When the Orangemen marched down the Ormeau Road  my Father would ask us to come out and watch "the brethren" as he always called them.  Most of the time we said No.  We made choices, we did not always "follow my leader".  He was satisfied either way.

So in  West Belfast which has been my home now for many years, I have been able to  appreciate with great respect  the breadth of choices and decisions my neighbours make.   Somewhere in my cupboards there  is a beautiful banner in green and gold announcing, "Long Live Our Member for West Belfast ".   It must have been  for Joe Devlin, Hibernian and conservative Nationalist, certainly too early  for Gerry Adams the republican to whom so many voters turned in later years.  The banner  is a reminder of how people  adjust to changing times, adjust their genius for knowing what should come next rather than repeat what went before;  different choices people in West Belfast have made as they thought about what they should do to make politics different in a world different from that of their forebears. 

People change.  Some writers don't notice the change, perhaps imagining or pretending there is none.  They say their fellow citizens struggling to adjust their ideas to the  times and the times to their ideals are simply humans thinking  tribally or humans not thinking at all.  Some of our newspapers are reflecting this verbal abuse.   But since people think and do things for a reason a  wonderful  privilege journalist  writers and analysts have is to reveal and discuss reasons.  Calling people idiots and incompetents, lazy and gormless is a useful backstop only when we are afraid of reasons or ignorant of them .      

A new generation of journalists is emerging  now.  Our newspapers at best reflect this and  are helping young new journalists  to emerge.  It is a delicate and rewarding thing to do.  The new generation  need not  copy the style of those who for good or ill went before them.   But the depth and frequency of abusive journalism seems to cast a shadow on their future.   So can all of us, readers and writers, cooperate in refreshing and renewing our present and future conversation between neighbours, avoiding the worst of the past and encouraging the best in it? The  young ones emerging deserve the best, the best skills of analysis, expression, attracting  those who want to know and who enjoy  the excitement of knowing.  In my last years at school I wanted to become either a journalist or a scientist.   When circumstances changed  I changed my mind and did something else.   That's the kind of people we are.  We think.  We go ahead.  We change.   So often we find to our surprise that we love the things and people we criticise, so our criticism needs to have a culture, even a language of special quality that says what we need to say but does not damage our neighbours  and is so precious. 

Through the years we Oldies  changed our judgements on our once favoured writers.  Chesterton and Belloc and Wells were often laid aside and replaced by Connolly and lots of writers whom some of our betters despised because they appeared in Penguin editions.   There was sometimes disdain in the choice of literature  as well as in voting - but a  Penguin or a Pelican or a foreign  volume with uncut pages meant we no longer judged a sausage by its overcoat or a book by its cover ; of course at times we felt superior and amused at what otherwise sensible people had written abusively or flippantly about each others' religion  or politics  -  for instance  that Catholicism was better than Protestantism, or vice versa, because there were  less Catholic  prostitutes in London than Protestants - or vice versa.  Even  the greatly admired  Chesterton and Belloc  whom we  admired in days of youth were not above such stuff.  And  in Belfast our local  abusive preachers were not soloists, they belonged to an inglorious and permanent ensemble.  Read the things the reformer Martin Luther said about people ! We stopped being amused by them when we realised that  in the end the abusive  word, like crime, doesn't pay. 

Can we get rid of insulting  descriptions, accusations, labels in journalism, or should we ? Since I wrote a first newspaper column in 1952 and  made a first broadcast in 1954 many journalistic courtesies  have disappeared from  air and paper and  internet  communication.   Can we insist on  fresh ways of criticism that reflect  our own dignity and that of our friends and opponents ?  Or is there any need to try ? To recognise we are making a new world for ourselves, all of us ?

If my Mother, Father, Uncles and Aunts who  discussed politics and books about politics and changes in politics and desires in politics when we were growing up  were to come back to life on earth they could hardly have agreed  that nothing has changed when they saw Rabbi and Priest in the grounds of  Belfast City Hall praying for the city in Irish and Hebrew, people visiting their own City Hall for the first time because now they felt at home in it, when a republican shook  hands with a queen and you could publish books about Irish culture and unity without risking arrest ......  they would  remember but  forgive the days when Nationalists made a conciliatory gesture and became an official Stormont opposition  only to find they would never be allowed to do more than support an amendment to a bill for the protection of wild birds.  ......protection not for their civilised  voters but for wild birds. 

They might look on with wonder at a republican or a nationalist presiding over such change..............

At  very least they would quite rationally - not tribally, not unthinkingly or stupidly, conclude that some things have changed and some things are changeable, that our generosity has been and can be a catalyst for more to come, enriching  our lives, enhancing our ability to write and talk reasonably about it all. 

Saying all this may seem  airy, unnecessary and out of kilter with  modern ideas of freedom of speech.   But there is a new generation arising  for whom everything is possible and everything is for them and us and all the rest as well.    Journalists  are privileged to enrich the atmosphere, the discourse, the political air they breathe, the  things they  offer each other, our  conversations about what  we all have that are so richly ours ......honourable change, truth, courtesy, generosity, understanding  being among the most precious of the gifts we all in turn  give to friends and opponents  alike by what we say. 

And do. 

And write.