NilPerOs

DeirdredeBurca (deirdredeburca) is now following your updates on Twitter.

That was what was in my inbox this morning when I opened my Gmail. Who’s Déirdre de Búrca? Well, I had the same thought myself. If you’ve ever used twitter to any great extent, you’ll know a lot of the time people just follow you for spamming reasons, so you’re best to check their profile before following back. Which I did. Turns out Déirdre is a politician standing for the Green Party in the upcoming European elections on June 5th. It also transpires she’s been tweeting since January and does it quite regularly. She has a YouTube channel which she uses as a platform to espouse her policies, and she does not appear to censor negative comments either. Oh, and Déirdre is on Facebook too, not to mention Flickr. She also has a website called ‘What I Stand For’, which she claims is used to encourage a two debate between her and the electorate in an attempt to bring back grass roots democracy.

Hey, you know what? I think I like Déirdre. She gets it. She seems to know how to engage with people in the modern era. And despite the enormous FF drag factor that the Greens must be experiencing at the moment, I think I believe her. It’s rare for a politician to capture my attention for too long, as I’m usually too busy giving out about them. But Déirdre managed it. What does that tell you?

It’s a funny thing belief. I suppose I have cast it out to a larger degree in the last couple of years. I’ve been attempting to escape the rigors of a catholic upbringing (btw, it wasn’t that rigorous) and trying to embrace a puritanical Darwinist atheism. You can probably tell by the insecure language of the last sentence that I’ve had mixed results. It’s seems a reasonable ideal to push for though. But does that mean I’m trying to pursue a belief of non-belief? Wha’? I just made myself queasy with my own bullshit there.

Right, I’ll try and explain a bit better. I have a problem, as do most people I know these days, with organised religion for reasons that are far too wide, varied and numerous to go in to here. Fill in the gaps yourself. Chances are of you’re reading this or anywhere near this website that you feel pretty much the same. I have never read The God Delusion, but that’s not really that unusual. I haven’t read much really. But I did come to the conclusion that it’s not just religion I don’t believe in, it’s also the idea of a God. My grandmother lay on her death bed with an absolute unshakeable certainty that there was nothing whatsoever waiting for her. I was blown away by that. To have such a total belief in there being nothing, to be facing it right there and then, and to know, not to waver from a belief in a total lack of belief. Pretty fucking brave. Pretty amazingly brave.

Why I want that, I can’t really say. I expect that I don’t want to be judged. I’ve never liked being told what to do, always thought I knew better, and I think the impulse to be good in your life should not be on the basis that you’re going to get your just deserts in the end. Heaven, hell, karma, whatever you want to call it. I believe (there’s that word again) that it’s inherent in human nature to be good. People’s circumstances sometimes make the sway from that course, but all things being equal, sound of mind and circumstances, people are good.

So what makes that happen? I’ve had hard times in the last few years. Not really hard, just hard times like normal people have. The temptation to ask God for help is always something I’ve had to suppress at those times. One can’t pursue atheism and then ask for help when the chips are a little down. But it’s hard to shake the habit that was taught to you from an age when you were too young to know any better. I think the mistake that I made was that I also associated spirituality as the same thing. I’m not so sure it is now. It’s possible to believe in humanity, in spirituality and in yourself without having to tie that in to a belief in a God. Isn’t it?

Anyway, I note I’m still writing the word God with a capital G. But I’m trying.

I remember the first job I had after graduating from college was for a company called Dakota Print. As the name might suggest, it was a printing factory, but as the name might also suggest, it wasn’t in the central United States, but rather on Botanic Road in Glasnevin, Dublin. As I recall, the day I started I wore a luminous orange shirt with a luminous green tie that my mother & sister had convinced me we quite the rage in early nineties, pre celtic-tiger Ireland. They were of course wrong, and it clashed terribly not only with the psyche of the company, but also with the early eighties decor of chocolate brown carpets, cream painted walls and mock-mahogany desks. We had computers, but no real network to speak of, and I certainly don’t remember sharing any files across it. Tucked away in a dark corner, surrounded by shelves that ran from floor to ceiling bursting with cardboard folders, that in turn burst with computer printouts on pin-stripped green and white paper, was a rather unimpressive looking dumb terminal. The green CRT tube would singe and tarnish the air around it and doubtless emitted an array of electrons to make even the most experienced radiographer a bit nervous. The huge chunky pieces of plastic on the keyboard had a reassuring click akin to a light switch when you pressed them. It was on this majestic beast, and only here, that one could send electronic mail.

I think only myself and Cormac ever used it, being the only two people under the age of thirty in a clear two mile radius. It could only display text, and in a single unchangeable font and a single unchangeable green. I had a friend that was traveling in Australia at the time and we used to correspond semi-regulalrly on it. He once attached a photograph, which was sufficient to cause the whole system to come crashing down around our ears. We had to call an engineer to fix it. And I mean a proper engineer, with a blue boiler suit and a set of orange screwdrivers that swept in a neat row across his breast pocket. As he passed and disappeared into a room somewhere at the back of the factory, he cast a disapproving eye in my direction over the top of his bottle-bottom glasses. That, to me, was the internet. I used to think “Well, it’s all very nice for keeping in touch with Colm, but it’ll never take off”.

I have to give a presentation to management next week on an internet related subject, and as a consequence I’ve been sort of forced into thinking about what the internet is to me now. So where do you start? Available to me now is a satellite image of more or less the entire surface of the planet. I can zoom in and see my own house. I can look at a 360 degree photographic view from a good proportion of the earth. There’s a 3D rendering that makes it possible for me to fly through the Grand Canyon or walk down the Las Vegas strip. This is all over-layed by every motor-way, road, street and lane name and number. I have at my fingertips a encyclopedia more detailed and vast than the very best leather bound edition of Britannica ever, and it changes and updates constantly. That same friend is back in Australia now, and he can turn on his computer and time and see me sitting at my desk and chat as if he were beside me. He only has to think to do it and he can. I’m constantly updated on what my friends and family do and where they are doing it. I can get any song I can think of, that’s ever been recorded and achieved some modicum of popularity, and have to keep forever in a matter of seconds. Films. News. Books. Opinions. Videos. Education. Politics. Communication.

Stephen Fry is one of the best human beings alive for reasons too obvious to go into. He’s one of those people that if you could have any four people to dinner… He’s a keen user of technology, has an amazing blog and fantastic podcasts. He’s also a dedicated and regular user of Twitter, and I follow his tweets. If I were to go into my local coffee shop this morning and see him there, I imagine the conversation would go something like this; ‘Oh, hi Stephen. How are you? Fine thanks, all fine. So just back from Madagascar then? Saw the video of the baby chimps. Very cute. And the photos of the spiders. Arrrgh! How did the speech go at the V&A last night? Good, good. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?! So you’re out to dinner with your producer tonight, right? At The Ivy? Excellent. Well do enjoy. Must dash. Up to my eyes at the minute. Toodles!.’ Because of the internet, I think I’m mates with Stephen Fry. Ridiculous.

If someone had told me all this as I sat there having my head x-rayed some twelve odd years ago, I would have laughed in their face. The internet is unbelieveable, incredible and amazing. And yet we find in believeable, credible and are continually not amazed by it. The phenomenal is normal.

Why is that?

What’s the most important thing to you about last night’s election result? To you, individually, what’s the most important thing? What put that spring in your step this morning? What kept you up until 3.30 am, watching the results roll in and afterwards sleeping the soundest 4 hours you have in a long time? What was it that made you smile a little broader at the person who served you your coffee on your way to work? And what is it that now has you pouring over the newspapers and websites that all confirm something that your barely allowed yourself to believe?

There’s no doubt that Barack Obama is an incredible orator and his ability to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck is a gift bestowed on few, especially politicians in the modern age. As Europeans (a more relevant context than Irish, considering the impact such a result has on the world) I think most people were convinced that he was the right choice for the American people to make. And as Europeans, we tend to have this somewhat patronising attitude towards the American electorate, feeling that we know what’s best for the world as a whole. The fact of the matter is that Americans, like every other citizen of every other democratised country on this earth, vote for a candidate based on domestic issues, not a wider world view. I’m not saying that foreign policy is an irrelevance, it’s just that it’s the effect that a country’s foreign policy has on domestic issues that’s important to the electorate, or at least more important than the wider consequences. And why should it be any different?

To me, the most important thing about last night is that it brings us one step closer to the immanent departure of the incumbent administration, and I say that as a European as well as an individual. The last 8 years of Bush, Chaney and Rice has been a fairly miserable experience for everyone, American citizens included. I think we Europeans were much less inclined to separate John McCain from that administration than the American electorate were, especially after his questionable choice of running mate which succeeded only in reinforcing a Republican stereotype in our left of centre minds. Perhaps if he had not chosen Palin we would be looking at a different result today, and perhaps that may not have been a bad thing. I believe John McCain to be a good man, and I believe he was sincere in his wish to turn America away from the route it had adopted under Bush. But the fact remains, not one of us was comfortable in the knowledge that we were a 72 year old’s heart beat away from that remnant of neoconservatism taking the highest office in the free world. 

So was Obama’s victory a good thing? Yes, absolutely and without doubt, for both America and the rest of the world. But remembering that I say that as a left-leaning, bleeding-heart liberal, was it as much of an open and shut case as we had it in our minds? I’m not so sure. I long for this presidency to deliver everything that we were hoping for and that it does not turn into the sort of disappointment that Jimmy Carter’s election in ‘77 did. But there is no doubt, outside of what happens from this point forth, that there has been a sea change in American attitudes towards what can be considered and eligible candidate for the presidency. Obama’s victory speech was as spine tingling as ever, but perhaps John McCain’s was more telling as a representation of how far America has come on the race issue. He accepted the result with good grace and humility and seemed proud that the country he lives in could elect a man regardless of race, rather than as a consequence of. As Europeans, we can no longer look down our noses and trump out the tired old cliches that America is inherently and institutionally biased in favor of the white Anglo-Saxon male, supported by a red-necked & ignorant majority. The fact now remains that America has proved itself to be the least racist country in the western world, and that we have some catching up to do.

Good for them.