Idir Dhá Chultúr: NAVIGATING PARADIGM CHANGE

By Peadar Kirby 

Idir dhá chultúr: I’m trying to grasp the challenge of a bilingual event that does not resort to instantaneous translation as if all languages are composed of equivalent meanings. 

• In choosing ‘idir dhá chultúr’ I presumed that all English speakers would get it, certainly speakers of French or Spanish would have no difficulties: entre deux cultures, entre dos culturas. 

• My intention is to bring you on a bilingual journey, refusing to allow the minority language be marginalised as happens so often when it defers again and again and again to the dominant language. So it’s an aspect of the constant struggle between monoculture and diversity. Indeed I’m more and more convinced that biodiversity requires linguistic diversity. In trying to model such diversity, some participants won’t understand everything being said so I invite you to savour the sounds as well as understanding the meaning, and hopefully learning some lessons about navigating paradigm change and what our native language offers us. Mar sin, ar aghaidh linn ar an mbóthar. 

• Trí mhór-théama agam: an teanga, athrú paraidíme, agus mór-acmhainní ó shaíocht na Gaeilge chun sinn a threorú ar an mbealach; I’ll begin with language, move on to paradigm change and end by proposing three major resources from our Gaelic tradition as guardrails for navigating paradigm change. 

Teanga/Language: 

I want to communicate something about living ‘idir dhá cultúr’, what it is to speak a language, the language of our place and people for millennia, but which has been forcefully marginalised, had its institutional life destroyed over 400 years ago, been driven underground and treated with derision and distain by the powerful, and to speak this language under the all-pervasive shadow of the world’s most powerful and dominant language which also happens to be the language of our colonisers. 

This is the experience of a lot of humanity, though a bit unusual in Europe. All so-called indigenous people live between two cultures and their songs, stories, dances all shout this out. This is why both the IPCC and the IPBES reports again and again emphasise the vital importance of indigenous languages and cultures, particularly their understanding and practices of community and environment. There is a consciousness of different worlds of meaning and desire, of feeling, that is unique to those of us who speak languages constantly under the oppressive and powerful shadow of a dominant language like English. For generations, Irish speakers have lived with the awareness, reinforced by the dominant culture all the time, that this is a dying language, and this is painful, making us feel very vulnerable. One of the great difficulties is that English carries the curse of monoglotism namely that many of its speakers presume that it is up to others to speak to them in their language rather than making any effort to learn the language of others. Furthermore, to borrow a phrase used by Tim Jackson, English ‘is stained with the blood of empire’. Many languages are so stained (French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, German, Russian). The experience of speaking a language that has been so actively and forcefully marginalised is that it takes us to very different imaginative spaces. So our daily experience is one of living ‘idir dhá chultúr’, we even write books about it. I suggest that as we become more and more aware that humanity itself is now living between two cultures, that of the dominant destructive paradigm and the new paradigm bubbling up in so many spaces and cracks, that our Irish experience of living ‘idir dhá chultúr’ takes on a very important significance.

 Tá aiste iontach ag Liam Mac Cóil nach eol do mhórán é: ‘Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na focail’. Ar ndóigh tá a fhios ag cách conas a mhaireann na daoine ar scáth a chéile, ach de réir Mhic Chóil sa Ghaeilge tá gach rud ceangailte lena chéile, athraíonn na focail nuair a cheanglaítear iad le focail eile. Ní féidir an duine ina aonar a shamhlú sa Ghaeilge, i gcónaí bíonn sí nó sé ceangailte le háit nó le daoine eile. Fiú maireann sé seo i mBéarla na hÉireann nuair a bhuaileann tú le duine don chéad uair agus is í an chead cheist ná ‘Where are you from? Do you know so-an-so?’ Is teanga éiceolaíoch í an Ghaeilge dá bharr, a deir Mac Cóil. The self-sufficient neo-liberalised individual is really very difficult to imagine in Irish, we are always connected. We don’t even have words for Yes and No, acceptance or refusal of something in Irish must always be connected to the subject being accepted or refused; nor a verb for possession: we may have the use of things but the exclusivity and individualism of possession is foreign to the language. These are some of the reasons why our leading Irish-language novelist Liam Mac Cóil calls Irish a very ecological language.In saying all this, of course, I’m not belittling English. We are very lucky in Ireland to speak English fluently, and the envy of many around the world. But I am convinced that the emergence of English as our vernacular language throughout most of the island a little over 100 years ago and the swift retreat from Irish, has left huge wounds, the healing of which we may just be beginning to undertake. 

Navigating Paradigm Change: 

There are different access points to the realities of the dominant and the subaltern paradigms: some enter through the lens of post-colonialism but at this moment in human history, we are able to understand in a fuller way the nature and implications of the paradigm change now facing all of humanity as we address the realities of climate change, biodiversity loss and the urgent need for social transformation. This is my starting point into the issue of paradigm change: 

Tim Jackson in his talk at the end of March fleshed out some of the central elements of paradigm change, where we are at and how it may be blocking our advance to a new paradigm: 

• He quoted Mary Douglas asking what is the objective of the consumer and answering that it is to create the social world, and find a credible place in it. Tim adds that the problem now is that ‘we are locked into its social logic by our own symbolic attachment to stuff’ 

• But if society as Tim said ‘hangs on the gossamer thread of collective dreams’, the collective dream that dominates is a consumerist one. Isn’t that a big part of the problem? ‘Sé an fo-teideal a chur mé ar an gcaint seo ná ‘navigating paradigm change’: cén Gaeilge a chuirfeá air? Eolas an bhealaigh a aimsiú? Treoracha a fháil? Ach cá chuige? Cá bhfuil ár dtriall? Where are we going? From the collective dream of consumerism to a new collective dream, one that we see the contours of only very very vaguely right now. 

The best analysis of dominant paradigm I know comes from Laudato Sí (107):112: this ‘authentic humanity’ is where we need to go, ‘a new synthesis’ like ‘a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door.’ Osclaímis an doras.

It is relatively easy to describe elements of what the paradigm change is about: from growth to degrowth, from extraction to regeneration, from linear to circular. I don’t particularly see that Irish speakers bring anything unique to the consideration of these topics though of course we have lots to say in Irish about them. I gave a webinar recently on ‘dí-fhás’, indeed I coined the word and had to fight off the use of dí-fhorbairt which I argued misunderstood the concept. But that’s an aside. There are two dimensions to paradigm change that I want to focus on: from the individual to the community, and from the global to the local. It’s simply not adequate to treat either of these crucial dimensions in the universal, abstract, scientific and technological terms which are so central to English: these are dimensions that must be rooted in the particular, they need history, belonging, feeling, sensibility. So for the rest of this talk I want to offer three guard rails from our native tradition that to me are essential to navigating paradigm change for us in Ireland. 

An chéad cheann ná Dúchas: 

Tosóidh mé le dán ó Chathal Ó Seacaigh óna leabhar nua ‘An Tír Rúin’ ina iompaíonn sé a thírdhreach dhúchais, an ceantar as ar fáisceadh é ina dhúiche chruthaitheach agus samhlaíoch: tagraíonn sé ‘don ghaol idir ainm agus áit’ agus don ‘cleamhnas ceana seo a cheanglaíonn an duine le dúiche’ agus trí bhainne cíche na Gaeilge’ mothaíonn sé ‘na glúnta ginealaigh ag cuisliú ionam’. 

I won’t even try a translation of this beautiful poem by one of our leading poets, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, but instead I’ll offer a description in English which ends up flat and devoid of the emotional charge that it communicates in Irish. The poet transforms his physical native place of Donegal into a creative and imaginative space through exploring the relationship between name and place, the fondness that connects person and place which through the breastmilk of Irish allows the genealogical generations to pulsate in him. It verges on the sentimental in English; it throbs with profound resonances in Irish. 

Let’s apply this to the wellbeing economy. I’m sure many of us can contribute to a discussion of what it means. But if you ask me to translate it into Irish, I struggle because it’s too abstract for the Gaelic mind. I’m drawn to the rich and everyday word ‘slán’; we use it for goodbye but in essence it’s a word that is all about wellbeing. So it’s nothing new. The question is what do we need to live in a way that is slán, what might an eacnamaíocht slán look like, and the one dimension the Gaelic mind will instinctively know is that it’s intimately connected, as Cathal Ó Searchaigh expressed in his poem, to place, to ancestors, to tribe, to security derived from belonging, to health, and to spirituality. Those of us who pray and worship in Irish in the Catholic tradition meet it all the time, slánú. We can connect it also to a topic Máire Ní Annracháin finds in some contemporary poetry in Irish, echoes of the connection between the flourishing of nature and right kingship that was so strong in Gaelic Ireland. The flourishing of nature depends on the right use of power. Léargas é seo ar shaibhreas an dhúchais Ghaelaigh a bhfuilimid beag beann air don chuid is mó. Tá sé thar am dúinn filleadh air. 

What I’m suggesting here is that a deep engagement with place, with community - with uncovering the layers of meaning, feeling, desire that such an engagement can uncover - helps flesh out in a much fuller way what a wellbeing economy and society requires. And that this assists greatly the challenge of navigating paradigm change, of giving us some better sense of cá bhfuil ár dtriall, where are we going. 

This brings me to my second theme: Pobal: 

Back to Jackson’s gossamer thread of collective dreams: let’s put the emphasis on the collective for a moment. What collective? Again we are back to the connectivity, what connects us and how might it open us to look anew at the familiar, chun eolas an bhealaigh a fháil, a chabhródh linn cur chun bóthair. Partly because it was driven underground, Irish is a much more collective language than English and its culture flourishes collectively. It is very interesting to see the liveliness of poetic composition in Irish today, including rap, and the re-emerging of collective spaces for poetry-making akin to the éigsí of the 17th and 18th centuries. 

Ar ais go Liam Mac Cóil: úsáideann sé focal an-shaibhir ‘béascna’ agus is dóigh liom gurb ionann é agus paradigm an Bhéarla. ‘Séard is brí leis, dar leis ‘gréasán teibí a mhúnlaíonn agus a cheanglaíonn rólanna sóisialta, réimsí eolais, agus luachanna rangaithe. Fágann an bhéascna a lorg ar an duine aonair, ar an bpobal, ar a n-iompar agus ar an gcaoi a smaoiníonn siad’. Mar sin, chun teacht ar bhéascna nua, baineann sé le réimsí eolais nua, luachanna nua agus gréasáin nua a cheanglaíonn le chéile an duine aonair, an pobal, agus a n-iompar. 

I’m arguing that we have a word in Irish for paradigm that helps to identify what is involved: values in a ranked sense, social roles, fields of knowledge and the ways these link and connect the person with the wider society, the ways of thinking and acting that dominate. It’s a bit more grounded than Pope Francis. Of course, any language can provide alternatives but in Ireland the lens that Irish gives become essential. ‘Sort súile na hintinne iad focail na teanga’ a deir Micheal Cronin, the words themselves open our eyes to see our surroundings in a new way, to see new possibilities and this endeavour is essentially a collective one. Irish does not allow, cannot conceive of this as an individual endeavour. Impossible. 

Aisling: 

Gregory Glaeys’ wonderful book traces the imposition of the collective dreams of consumerism on society, and locates the greatest challenge for humanity as being how to foster a culture of sociability that alone can wean us off our intense consumerism, conas pobal a chothú. But what Glaeys doesn’t advert to is the linguistic dimensions of this dominant culture: the advertising industry, the development of the shopping mall all happened first in the US and the UK. Tá cultúr an tomhaltachais fite fuaite leis an mBéarla go príomha cé go bhfuil a thionchar le haithint ar fud fad na cruinne anois. 

Glaeys advises a return to the utopian tradition which for 500 years has been the principal source of critiquing luxury and the inequality that fuels it, and seeking a society that lives simply in equality with one another and with nature. 

What most people, such as Glaeys and indeed even many Irish speakers don’t realise, is the rich utopian tradition that exists in Irish poetry and song, what we call the aisling, vision poetry, an aisling pholaitiúil: the political vision. Ceapann an-chuid Gaelgeoirí go bhfuil traidisiún na haislinge an-choimeádach ag féachaint siar ar na Stiobhartaigh a thiocfadh chun na Gaeil a fhuascailt, rud nár tharla ar ndóigh. Ach, an amhlaidh atá? Cabhraíonn taighde Bhreandáin Uí Bhuachalla linn an traidisiún seo a thuiscint ar bhonn eile, mar go gcothaíonn sé cumas maireachtáil as domhan samhlaíoch eile, gan bheith gafa ag an gcóras mar ata sé faoi láthair ach dóchas a bheith againn go bhféadfaí é a athrú ó bhonn chun saol I bhfad níos fearr a chothú don phobal. Léiríonn Ó Buachalla gur chothaigh sé tuiscint pholaitiúil forleathan i measc na nGael I bhfabhar réabhlóid na Fraince nuair a tharla sé. As I say, the aisling tradition of seeing Ireland as a beautiful woman seeking a prince (Bonnie Prince Charlie) to come to free her from the oppression of the Protestant English rule has been seen as a very conservative tradition but as interpreted by Breandán Ó Buachalla, who has done extensive work on it, we can now see it as the capacity to live outside the dominant system. Indeed the scathing critique of that dominant system that characterises the aisling is something from which we could learn, while keeping alive the expectation of transformative and liberating change. So, I suggest we need a similar capacity in our times for the transition we are undergoing. 

Mar fhocal scoir 

I am proposing here that essential aspects of paradigm change require a deep engagement with place and with community in all its many dimensions. For those of us who live on this little island, this cannot happen with any depth if we don’t reengage substantially with the possibilities offered by the language spoken here for over two millennia, a language showing rude signs of vigour and health today even as many dismiss it as useless and irrelevant. I sum up three of the contributions it can offer as: 

Dúchas; Pobal; Aisling – these are the guard rails Irish gives us for the transition. I hesitate to translate these words because to do so is to lose a lot of their rich particularity. So I have opted more to describe them and open them up.

Let the journey begin, cuirimis chun bealaigh…