For the most part, here in PP we try to review books that we think are worthwhile reading. I often find myself thinking, after reading a review here, “I’d love to read that book,” while knowing that I probably never will. Occasionally, books slip through that are clearly not worth reading, and on those occasions there is at least the satisfaction of thinking, “Well, thankfully there’s one book I won’t lament not reading.”
I have to apologise for the fact that PP this month contains two such books: Diarmaid McCulloch’s Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity and A. C. Grayling’s Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars. Both books are the work of very well-known academics—heavy hitters in the worlds of history and philosophy, respectively. Yet the academic credentials of both authors do not prevent the prejudices of each from distorting their work.
In the case of McCulloch’s Lower Than the Angels, it certainly seems from the review that the author “casts far and wide to sow skepticism” regarding the credibility of traditional teaching on sexual morals, ultimately falling into a kind of “gaslighting,” which does more to obscure truth than to reveal it. Similarly, Grayling’s personal antipathy to religion leads, “through some delicate sophistry and linguistic sleights of hand,” to an effort to “expunge religion, its institutions, and its values from any entitlement to rights.”
Affirming and defending the truth is no easy matter in what some describe as a “post-truth” society. We are overshadowed by many bizarre and grotesque dogmas—particularly in the sexual domain. Calling them out requires the candour of the boy in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. In fact, the need for such candid voices is noted in both Margaret Hickey’s review and Tim O’Sullivan’s review of Les Habits neufs du terrorisme intellectuel by the French historian and journalist Jean Sévillia. The habits neufs of the title, of course, refer to the new clothes of the naked emperor.
For Sévillia, the naked emperor of France is what he calls “intellectual terrorism”: “a forceful expression, which the author applies to the control of public discussion by ‘political correctness’ and the enforcement of a progressive consensus by the denial of any legitimacy to alternative views or to those who hold such views.” Tim O’Sullivan points out that Ireland could learn from the French experience in this regard.
I suspect that here in Ireland, the control of public discussion is much more tightly exercised than in France—perhaps because it is so much easier for a small coterie of public figures to dominate discourse in a small country with already low standards of intellectual debate.
One figure who did speak up with the candour of the boy in the story was Desmond Fennell. James Bradshaw reviews the recently published work: The Radical Thinking of Desmond Fennell. Bradshaw speaks of the ‘intellectual honesty’ of this remarkable writer, observing that ‘were he still among us, he would surely be controversial in all circles.’
It would certainly be interesting to have a thinker like Fennell freely critiquing the iron-clad groupthink that dominates Irish public life at present. This is not to suggest that Fennell would serve as the voice of a simplistic conservatism that merely reacts—or rather, overreacts—to the dominant ideologies of the age. As Bradshaw puts it:
Those who are concerned at the pace of recent change should view Fennell’s work as essential reading, particularly if we are to prevent the rise of an ugly, secular, and ethnicity-based nationalism, which cares neither for the democracy of the dead nor the dignity of the living.