Three things Ireland can offer (to itself and the world)
An Meitheal, The Irish Mind, and The Archetypal Woman of Ireland
Life has been full of conversation lately.
Deep, rich conversation. Not superficial chats.
They can’t help but be about the current state of the world, both in Ireland and beyond. Words like apocalyptic, catastrophic, mad, and horrific appear with an odd regularity regardless of context or who I am talking to.
These are end-of-days-like conversations. We speak with nervous laughter, joking about how crazy it is that we are using such terms both in and about ‘this day and age’.
But that’s the reality we find ourselves in and it is in end-of-days stuff. I don’t know anyone who is not feeling it in some form, in their own way. There is a weight and a gravitas —an urgency— to how people I have encountered lately are talking about the world we all live in. It’s forcing us to look at it and the heaviness of it is putting everyone on their knees. What to do? Who to be? How to help? What is happening?
Questions, questions.
Few answers.
Uncertainty.
A void.
Avoid.
Likely in some vain attempt to escape the heaviness of it, my own thoughts seem to have been floating upwards, metaphorically speaking. Searching for a way to look across it all with some distance. To try and find the patterns and place the ‘end-of-days’ feeling in some historical context. Just find some sense.
And my thoughts keep returning to something I read a few years ago: Sir John Glubb’s The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. First published in 1978, much of the language and sentiment is (very very) dated but its central thesis has never felt more relevant. In a study of the rise and fall of key human civilisations in the last 4,000 years, Glubb concluded that:
“The same patterns [of behaviour are] constantly repeated under widely differing conditions of climate, culture and religion”, and so, if we want to understand or address the problems we face today, we need look no further than the patterns of human history, “for everything that is occurring around us has happened again and again before”.
From his study of key historical empires — what he called superpowers— ranging from the Assyrian to the Roman, Ottomon and British Empires (and more between), Glubb noted not only a consistency in the length of their ‘greatness’ (about 250 years, or 10 generations) but that their rise and fall seemed to pass through six stages:
Age of Pioneers
Age of Conquest
Age of Commerce
Age of Affluence
Age of Intellect
Age of Decadence
The Age of Decadence (the age before the fall) is marked out by increasing defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, loss of a sense of duty, selfishness, growing injustice and inequality, increasingly corrupt politics, the accrual of wealth by the few at the expense of the many, a culture of celebrity worship and the use of ‘shows and circuses’ to distract and placate the populous.
Sound familiar?
We are in the Age of Decadence. So many feel it, even if it’s not the name they give it.
No wonder we are having ‘end-of-days’ like conversations. Society, as we know it, is shifting dramatically. Its current system no longer seems fit for purpose and gaping divisions are taking on a greater intensity.
Yet, as we continue to march forward into the latter generations of ‘the decline’ new (or, in the cycle of life, old) ways of being, as Glubb’s study of civilisation suggests, will start to step in to fill the void and respond. Here, in that time of need, Ireland, I feel, has three things buried and inherent in its cultural toolkit that the world could do with right now.
The challenge is of course to remember them, update them for the needs of now, and protect them, before it’s too late.
1. Community — Meitheal
“Meitheal is a deep-rooted concept in Irish culture that emphasises community cooperation and teamwork… It refers to a work party or team…. in a collaborative effort to support and provide assistance to each other when needed”
Everyday life in Ireland is powered, not so much by the architecture of the state, but by an army of volunteers. Up and down the country, it’s a plethora of local committees, clubs and organisations that keep the whole place going. With Ireland’s colonial past, and its history of Church abuse, most people of Ireland have a root-level mistrust and cynicism about institutional-level powers. Whenever the government announces some new policy or sets out its aims and goals, the first thought to cross most people’s minds is ‘How are they going to screw this one up’? (and we express genuine surprise on the rare occasion they actually don’t).
Because of this mistrust and the lived experience of being repeatedly let down and failed by ‘them up/below/beyond/over in Dublin/Stormont/Westminster’, the space of the local in Ireland —parishes, estates, villages, townlands, and towns— have a strong ‘we’re better off doing it ourselves’ attitude.
When you think of any community in Ireland, no matter how small or large, I would argue you would be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t have something — a garden, playground, community hall, cycle path, nature reserve, recycling centre, bus service, youth club, sports team and on and on — created by a local committee. When people see there is something that needs doing in their locality, they invariably form a group to make it happen. They form a meitheal, coming together to pool resources, knowledge, energy and action. They come together for no other reason than to enable something they see their community needs.
But what is community anyway?
A common definition is a group of people with common interests. But common interests are rarely a strong enough glue. My generation (yes, I’m a millennial) has been lured down the ‘find your tribe’ path, usually ending up in dissatisfying echo chambers with people rarely willing to roll up their sleeves and get into the trenches with you. Interactions that are mere transactions.
When I look at the depth of community in Ireland — at the groups who really get stuff done — I see care and respect for people and place, but most of all I see duty.
For what is community if it is not duty-work?
And in Ireland we still (just about) know what that looks like and what it takes. That real-world community work is messy and imperfect and difficult, and there’ll always be one person on a power trip who wants to run the show, that people will fall out and bitch, and complain, that things will go awry, there’ll be more complaint than praise and that most people will end up giving more of themselves than they really want to. But people show up day-in and day-out and they do it, because they know there is no escaping the fact that ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine (it is in each other’s shadow that people live). And living in the shadow of another comes with duty — to the people and the place we each live in and reside.
Across much of the (Western, in particular) world, such duty-work has been outsourced to state-run or private institutions. But, in keeping with the age-old cycle of Glubb’s Fate of Empires, these darlings of human civilisation have reached the stage where they start to strain (and crumble) under the weight of their own complexity.
“The complexity has developed over many generations; eventually it becomes so cumbersome and expensive that the society can no longer maintain what it has created. Collapse happens quickly, within a few decades, marked by a significant loss of sociopolitical structures”
Margaret J. Wheatley, drawing on the ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ by Joseph Tainter
People are really feeling that. They are feeling how the colossi of enterprise and government are too encumbered by their own size and hubris to address what is happening right now and what is coming.
In his study, Glubb noticed this too. He described how in the end stages of the Age of Decadence (the final stage of civilisation before collapse) that:
“While despair might permeate the greater part of the nation, others achieved a new realisation of the fact that only readiness for self-sacrifice could enable a community to survive. Some of the greatest saints in history lived in times of national decadence, raising the banner of duty and service against the flood of depravity and despair”.
In the face of the daily avalance of human and environmental catastrophe, the only thing agile enough to respond is local community.
The only thing strong enough is duty-work.
The only thing compassionate enough are people who understand what it means to live in one another’s shadow.
In Ireland, we know that work. We know what that looks like and how to do it. We have that good soil. We have the concept of the meitheal to offer, and the world needs many meithleacha right now.
2. The Irish Mind of Both-And
“The Irish mind appears to have a universal, eternal quality that has enabled the Irish, not necessarily uniquely but to a greater extent than others, to think outside the standard box of Western logic of either/or. It is this ability, inherited through generations, which has been the foundation of Irish cultural difference. The Irish mind has enabled the Irish to balance and accommodate imagination and intellect, emotion and reason, poetry and science”
Tom Inglis: Are the Irish Different?
Either/Or thinking is on steroids right now. Pumped up on creatine and ready to fight (or indeed, fighting).
Them Vs Us. Us Vs Them. Pick a side. Polarity seems to pervade and underpin every discussion, decision, and action on the local and global stage.
This polarity, this either/or thinking, has its origin roots in Greco-Roman culture and the Platonic philosophy of dualism. Dualism constructs the world according to opposites and contradictions. Its logic being that order comes from separating things out, in linear fashion, into their opposite and contradictory terms. Mind and body become mind or body. Reason and emotion become reason or emotion. interconnections are separated, because order (it is said) is created by not letting them touch.
‘Them Vs. Us. Us Vs. Them. Pick a Side’ couldn’t exist without it. To create such divisions, such polarities, you first have to create a world where such things exist. Dualism provided the logic. Then the West, by adopting and enforcing it as the dominant logic paradigm, propagated it. Used it to ‘divide’ then ‘conquer’.
You know the story.
Australian philosopher Val Plumwood referred to dualism as the ‘fault-line’1 running through the entire conceptual system of Western culture. For it’s a logic that has enabled many to argue for the preferencing of one thing over the other, and that one side is superior to the other. We could not ‘other’ without it.
Polarity requires this very Western logic of dualism, and polarity is ravaging the world.
But it’s not the only way of ordering and viewing reality. (It just seems like the only one because it is the dominant logic of the world we live in, especially in ‘the West’). Many other forms of logic exist, and Ireland has its own — one that offers an antidote to Either/Or thinking — in the logic of Both—And.
Irish philosopher Richard Kearney has written on this extensively, arguing that because Ireland was uniquely free, in the context of Europe, from the influences of Greco-Roman culture for such a long time, its cultural psyche evolved very differently:
“From the earliest times, the Irish mind remained free, in significant measure, of the linear, centralising logic of the Graeco-Roman culture which dominated most of western Europe. This prevailing culture was based on the Platonic-Aristotelian logic of non-contradiction which operated on the assumption that order and organisation result from the dualistic separation of opposite or contradictory terms…. In contrast to the orthodox dualist logic of either/or, the Irish mind may be seen to favour a more dialectical logic of both/and: an intellectual ability to hold the traditional oppositions of classical reason together in creative confluence”2
Numerous scholars, from those studying Ireland’s ancient myths to modern literature, have noted the capacity, and seemingly default position, of the ‘Irish Mind’ for double-think; an ability to hold (in the words of James Joyce) ‘two thinks at a time’. To make sense of the world, not by separating things out according to opposites, but hold those opposites in parallel and recognise the capacity for interconnection (not disconnection) between them.
What would ‘polarity’ look and feel like if we could hold ‘two thinks at a time’?
What would ‘Them Vs. Us’ become if Both-And, not Either/Or was the logic applied?
What would happen to calls to ‘Pick a side’, if both sides were held in ‘creative confluence’?
Ireland is no longer the remote rock on the edge of Europe it once was. Nor should it be. It has become part of and integrated with the wider continent, and has adopted the pre-dominant logic of dualism as its own. But dualism is the logic that underpins empire, and that ‘Western’ empire is in decline. Different logics will be needed, and Ireland — by fate of its very different cultural evolution — has a very different logic, deep in its cultural DNA, it can offer.
But it’s been allowed to slip away, devalued and eroded, and the damage of dualism has crept in. The challenge for us now is to remember and re-embody it.
3. The Archetypal Woman of Ireland
Cora, in her Women of Ireland Project interview, made reference to the work of environmental activist Joanna Macy, and the concept of ‘The Great Turning’ — a transformative moment in human history, were a shift is occurring from the ‘industrial growth society’ to the ‘life-sustaining society’. But for Cora, a key part of that shift is the voice of women — that women will be the ones to guide it in.
[What is really important for me now, as a woman of Ireland] “I would say [is] the voice of women. Because I feel like the tide is turning, and maybe like women have been so suppressed and silent and silenced, and as things change, and we kind of go through this, like I suppose, as Joanna Macy calls it, “The Great Turning” or this type of shift, that I think the voice of women is perhaps what's going to guide us, you know
Cora, Women of Ireland Project Participant
I think of this, what Cora said, often.
And I think of it with something another interview participant, Nat, stressed repeatedly in her interview. How she often hears others talk about what will happen when the women of the world wake (and rise) up, but for her, above all else, it’s about ‘What will happen when the women of Ireland wake up’?
“The women of this land, they are so special…. and it's not until the Irish woman….when the Irish woman wakes up. People always say when the Irish people wake up, the world will wake up, and it's not, it's when the Irish woman wakes up, then the fucking world will wake up”
Nat, Women of Ireland Project Participant
It is extremely easy for me to fall into terrible essentialisations of the women of Ireland. Because, quite simply, I think we are astounding. There is such a rich store of immense power, grit, toughness, love, empathy, capability, adaptability, and on and on (I can provide adjectives for days) in the women of Ireland.
It’s why I’ve dedicated these last few years of my life (and how many more it takes) to understanding us better. It’s work that began when I woke up in the middle of the night with a line that came out of nowhere repeating in my head ‘The Women of Ireland are unique, and you are going to write a book about them’.
I’ve struggled with the use of that word ‘unique’ greatly. It feels far too exclusive and what does it even mean anyway? Unique compared to who or for whom? But it’s a word that just follows me with this work, and I’ve relented to a conclusion that while women of Ireland share the same experiences with their sisters of other cultures all across the world (and they with us), that the specific cultural soil our roots (personal or ancestral) connect back to really matters. That, ultimately, shapes us as women. How we behave, do, think, feel and act.
There is an Archetypal Woman of Ireland. She is strong, fierce, fiery, and tough. She wouldn’t call herself a fighter or an activist, but she has a strong sense of fairness and is not afraid to call out injustice. Rarely would she do that for herself, but woe betide anyone who wrongs those she cares for. She is a consummate doer, full of force and energy, quite often found powering forward her local community or a cause important to her. She is an experienced organiser and her doing, hard-working nature has earned her a vast store of respect. But her ‘force-of-nature’ demeanour belies a deep well of kindness, care and above all, compassion.
Writing that made me uncomfortable because it reminds me too much of the ‘ideal woman of Ireland’ type pamphlets written by many a man of the Church in the 1920s and 1930s. The kind of ones that made it clear that women were expected to be self-sacrificing, dutiful and modest.
But these are traits I see repeatedly in the women I have interviewed. These are the things that, if I am to use the word ‘unique’, define or underpin that uniqueness. This is the Archetype, the Archetypal Woman of Ireland whose well we draw water from. And what a powerful well that is.
I do not think it is a coincidence that there are so many books (I mean, bookshops are dripping with them) about women of Ireland from history and myth with words like fierce, fiery, defiant, extraordinary, and trail-blazing in their title. I do not think it is a coincidence that huge, significant, water-shed social change moments in Ireland have been achieved through the actions (and fight) of women. I do not think it is a coincidence that the disempowerment, subjugation, and control of women in Ireland runs so insidiously deep, because a cage has to be stronger than the force it is trying to contain.
Ireland (and I know I’m particularly biased here) has an exceptionally vast store of smart, kind, gritty, resilient, strong, brave, tough and compassionate women who embody that Archetypal Woman and draw from her well.
The world is going to need that.
“My perception of other women of Ireland [is that] they're forces to be reckoned with… Women are so strong. Like they've so much, life and force and capability, and it's really astonishing... I don't know, there is like this inherent power that I sense from most Irish women”
Erin, Women of Ireland Project Participant
Many name the ‘shift’ we’re sensing in the collective as a time of ‘The Feminine Rising’ or the ‘Age of Aquarius’, and in a variety of places and forms I’ve watched a growing sense of conviction that what the world is suffering from is a drastic case of the imbalanced or wounded masculine (that the traits associated with it like conquering, producing, defending, controlling, dominating, aggressing, doing, forcing etc. lie behind most of the natural, environmental and humanitarian catastrophes afflicting the planet). Ergo, the answer is to bring in more of the feminine (in an energetic sense) to counteract it and balance it out.
I get it. It’s appealing and makes intuitive sense. But I don’t trust us humans not to go to the extremes, to flip from the extremes of the energetic ‘masculine’ to the energetic ‘feminine’. Same same but different. Can’t we just do both? Hold them in creative confluence — have ‘two-thinks at a time’? What would happen then?
This is where I feel the Archetypal Woman of Ireland has a lot to offer the world right now; to be that guide during ‘The Great Turning’ and reveal what can happen when we ‘wake up’ to her. Because she knows how to do community and she knows how to hold the challenging tension of the both-and.
Probably, of all the women I interviewed, it’s women in their middle and elder years who I look to as the strongest embodiment of this Archetype. They have been apprenticed in resilience and grit. They are tough, unrelenting and have a strong sense of fairness. They are willing to fight and stand up for what they believe is right, and they ‘take no prisoners’; they are ‘no holding back’, forces to be reckoned with once they have been ignited with a spark of righteousness. They are also deeply caring; worrying for and about others, rich with juicy feminine empathy and compassion, as much as they are with stoic masculine action. These are the women found at the heart of community meithleacha up and down the country, powering everyday life with their desire for better, a strong sense of duty and an immense capacity to organise and get stuff done.
They are the ‘Both—And’ Women. Tough but compassionate. The world needs that right now.
The world needs those qualities right now, not just because compassion seems to be in ever shorter supply, but because compassion alone might not be enough.
Compassion needs insulating. It needs a strong, steely, gritty, tough vessel to protect it, to first create the space for it and then shield and safeguard it. I see that in action in the Archetypal Woman of Ireland, and I notice in the stories of women I’ve interviewed and women I’ve known my whole life. To put it simply through idiom: ‘They don’t take any sh*t but they’d still give you the shirt off their back’.
They make me think of Margaret Wheatley’s concept of the ‘Warrior of the Human Spirit’:
“A Warrior of the Human Spirit is a decent human being who aspires to be of service in an indecent, inhumane time”
“The Warriors are armed with only two weapons: compassion and insight. They are peaceful warriors, vowing never to use aggression or fear to accomplish their ends”
Margaret J. Wheatley: Who do We Choose to Be? (page 252).
They have long been serving as decent humans in indecent times, armed only with their compassion and insight.
Warriors of the Human Spirit are the individuals prophesised to rise up at a time of great need, when humanity and sentient life on this planet hangs by a thread. We’re there now. And the middle and elder aged women of Ireland — with their lived experience of what community really takes and their capacity to be ‘both—and’ (tough and kind, fierce and compassionate) not either/or— have a lot to offer us right now.
But what we must not do is do what we have always done in Ireland; shirk the weight and the responsibility of all that is too hard to bear right now onto those women, because they are resilient and strong and compassionate enough to bear it all. As I’ve touched on in probably every other post I’ve written, the expectation on women to ‘carry it all’ and ‘fix things for everyone around them’ is a deep wound that runs deep in Women of Ireland. The question and the challenge is how best to support them?
In writing this piece, I am fully aware that I have presented an overtly positive account of Irish culture. I’m the kind of person who always has hope, and where I see goodness, I want to name it — and I see a lot of goodness in Ireland. But it’s also just as messed up and screwed up as everywhere else, full of anger and division and cyncism and racism and violence. So let’s not give ourselves a pat on the back and let ourselves off so lightly — we’ve a lot of work to be doing.
We have, I truly believe, this good, supportive, nourishing cultural soil I’ve spoken of here, but it is not always actioned with the necessary compassion or openness. Its community mindset more often employed to ‘other’ rather than welcome, the capacity of the Irish Mind to hold opposites in creative confluence used to confuse and deflect, while the power of the Archetypal Woman of Ireland has been siphoned for centuries to fuel society at the expense of women.
And yet, I repeatedly return to a sense that when all the strucures that prop up this thing we call ‘Western Civilisation’ succumbs to its final death-throws and crumbles under the weight of its own unsustainable complexity, the people of this good cultural soil in Ireland will have all the necessary, right there in their fingertips, to pick themselves back up and start again; that they’ll be well placed to do it for all the things I’ve attempted to articulate here.
There is so much in all that goodness that we can offer.
Page 42 in Plumwood, V. (1994). Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Taylor & Francis Group. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=168813
Page 9 in Kearney, R. (Ed.). (1985). Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions. Wolfhound Press.
P.S. This will be the last Women of Ireland Project post for 2023…
…as I take a bit of a hiatus from producing ‘output’ and focus more on ‘input’ for the remainder of the year. Thank you so much for your support and for reading, sharing, commenting and following along with these posts and this work. I couldn’t do it without you.
I’ll be back soon.
Much love and appreciation, Belinda xx
Loved this... so relevant and perfectly aligned astrological also!!
Enjoy your well earned break and already looking forward to reading more in 2024! Thank you for sharing so much of your work with us as you journey through your book writing !!