Sentiments of an Ex-Auditor

 

In the eight years which I spent as an Irish diplomat working in the United States I quickly became familiar with the American tradition of commencement addresses. An exuberant graduating class - and in America they were especially exuberant - were marshalled in serried ranks of academic drapery, often in the College football stadium. A visiting dignitary addressed them, administering by proxy the last viaticum of the college, to fortify their passage into what the speakers often called ‘real life’.

 

What I recall most from the commencements I attended, whether as speaker or as guest, was a sense of an almost absurd mismatch which lurked beneath the dignified conventions. How does one distil from past experience any fresh thought which could genuinely be serviceable to several hundred young people today? The graduates, for the most part, paid the speaker the tribute of their silence, but not that of their attention, already fast-forwarding to more congenial parts of their great day. A convention that was meaningful in a settled society, with predictable social contexts and traditional values, had become merely a liturgical interlude in a society where enormous discontinuity between one generation and the next is now the norm rather than the exception, and change is more pervasive than humanity has ever experienced heretofore.

 

I recalled the experience when Mark Hanniffy e-mailed me for a contribution to the Lit and Deb annual. I have a lively sense of the gap which must separate the Lit and Deb where I served as Auditor in the sixties, from that which now exists. It was encapsulated for me recently when I stayed in the Radisson Hotel in Galway, whose excellent amenities occupy a space which I remembered from my time in College as a wasteland in the vicinity of a slaughter yard, without my ever once having noticed the superb sea views which now look so glorious from the hotel.

 

I am not sure whether we fully realised it at the time, but my contemporaries and I in the Lit and Deb were then living out the end of an era. The pieties and assumptions of the generation which had led the Irish State to independence had come to the end of their shelf-life, and for many of us had grossly outlived their usefulness. It was easy to point to the tracts of dead wood, and for the most part we did so with gusto. We were less clear about the alternatives we wanted to put in their place. Some looked to a better, more committed nationalism. A few went for the magisterial pleasures of Marxism. More tended towards the distinctly less cerebral trends, then in the air, and now crystallised for posterity in the events of May 1968, and Woodstock the year after. For the most part, though, we were children of rural Ireland, convinced that our salvation lay in wider horizons and moving eagerly and pragmatically to embrace them.

 

Looking back, what I remember most vividly is not the various ideological props we used, or the poses we adopted to keep our youthful inner uncertainties from disgracing us in public. It was rather the conviction, which I think was warranted by the circumstances of the time, that the iconoclasm which, like every student generation, we found so congenial, was particularly timely and purposeful in our case. We sensed rightly that we were on the threshold of great social change in Ireland, and were at once both its agents and its objects.

 

The questions facing the student now are altogether more complex. They are not about opening Ireland to the currents of liberalisation. The challenge is rather to handle the tide of globalisation so that the diversity and individualism of particular societies, including our own, are not irretrievably washed away. It is no longer a question of just eliminating dead wood. The real challenge now is to devise ways to preserve some of the values and amenities of traditional societies, not just for the sake of quality of life, but because, without them, a globalised system which reduces individuals to the most manageable possible units of consumption will be dysfunctional in ways we are only beginning to think about. In our time we could enjoy a kind of empowerment through the goal of freeing our society from the sclerosis of our parents’ generation. We could invoke Yeats’  ‘mad Ireland’ with gusto. Our student posterity at the beginning of the new century have to write altogether more complex equations. Can any even half-way relevant message carry across the forty years or so which separate my experience in the Lit and Deb from its membership today? Ireland has changed so thoroughly in that period that a contemporary of mine proclaims that he has emigrated without ever leaving home, and that the Irish people are now in training to be Scandinavian - which, as I never fail to point out, would be following highly admirable and responsible role models.

 

Yet humankind is programmed on a rather narrow base, and in spite of changing circumstances, a lively debating society remains relevant to some constant social values.

 

A society such as the Lit and Deb derives ultimately from the classical theory of rhetoric - a belief that ideas matter enormously and that persuasive skills in the service of an idea are basic tools for the creation and operation of a democratic society. In my time UCG was a small University set in a small town. Interaction occurred spontaneously between students of the different faculties and between ‘town and gown’ - this latter mostly skirmishes based on mistrust, if not mutual contempt, as I recall. The Lit and Deb was then just another instance of a society which functioned, like Irish society as a whole at the time, overwhelmingly through personal interaction.

 

The essential value of rhetoric remains a constant in human societies - meaning of course rhetoric in its original sense as the art of persuading people, not as overblown discourse. I am sure the Lit and Deb offers the same total immersion training in a rowdy auditorium to its adepts today as it did in my time. I found it a very effective and valuable education. Its other dimension, that of an ethos of personal interaction and engagement is now I believe far more crucial than in the sixties. Galway is a larger city, and it is even more important now than it was then to have a focus like the Lit and Deb to draw people out of their assigned or chosen compartments.

 

The Lit and Deb, and other such societies in Ireland and Britain, were originally intended also to offer an opportunity for what would now be called ‘role-playing’ in relation to politics. The affinity of debating societies with the parliamentary tradition is clear. Rather as military science goes through offensive and defensive phases, democratic politics have their own cycles of greater or lesser ‘management’ of electorates. Looking at American politics, and assuming America is broadly predictive of future developments in other democratic societies also, the degree of ‘management’ of democratic opinion in our societies is likely to increase rather than otherwise. However, such management, through intensive opinion sampling, slick advertising and other such techniques, inevitably comes to confront its own limitations. It generates political indifference and a lack of real public participation. Moreover, since politics are essentially the art of dealing with problems which cannot be resolved by other means, the process sooner or later breaks out of the bounds which political managers seek to create and finds new and sometimes unpredictable channels - the political impact of the internet, for example, has yet to crystallise. For all the artifices of debate, the Lit and Deb was, and I assume still is, through its focus on direct human interaction, a kind of grounding in political authenticity. We in western democracies generally are in a phase of politics where authenticity is at a premium. I can think of no more valuable gift to a student today than a natural resistance to political artifice and manipulation. If the Lit and Deb serves that purpose, no further debate is called for about its abiding value.

 

Sean O’Huiginn

Auditor of the Literary &  Debating Society, 1965-1966

 

Sean O’Huiginn is Irish Ambassador to Germany, and formerly served as Ambassador to the United States and as Head of the Anglo-Irish Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs. He was the recipient of this year’s  NUI, Galway Award for Law, Public Service and Government at the annual Alumni Awards.