In a fragment written in 1921, Walter Benjamin wrote that capitalism is “a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.” Spend an hour watching one of the cable business channels, whether CNBC, Fox, or Bloomberg, and you will likely come around to his opinion. The “Low Church” side of the cult is epitomized by Larry Kudlow’s evening show on CNBC. In the place of the Nicene Creed, “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible,” Kudlow, who is a practicing Catholic, begins every show by intoning what he himself has dubbed, apparently with no sense of its inappropriateness, “The Kudlow Creed.” “We believe that free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity.”

“One fool makes many,” Adorno liked to say. With his hysterical delivery and the pep rally shouts of “boo-yah” that he trades with his callers, Kudlow’s CNBC colleague, Jim Cramer, illustrates the truth of that to a tee. But while these men come across as cheerful buffoons (Cramer has something of the 1960s game show impresario, Monty Hall about him, while Kudlow often seems like Glenn Beck in a good suit), their insistence that one must believe in capitalism, and its equally important corollary, that a belief in capitalism and a belief in America are one and the same, is shared by people of considerably more quality and consequence. For example, the money manager Peter Lynch, who before his retirement from Fidelity’s Magellan Fund was one of the most successful investors in modern American business history, wrote in one of his books (it was presented in passing, as if almost too obvious to spell out) that “keeping the faith and stock picking are normally not discussed in the same paragraph, but success in the latter depends on the former.”

And lest it be thought that this language of belief in the binity of capitalism and America is restricted to figures on the political right, Warren Buffett, the third richest man in the world and a great supporter of President Obama’s, has said, in praising the president, that “he believes in the same things I believe in. America’s best days are ahead.” Interestingly, Charles Munger, Buffett’s longtime partner, is less sanguine and recently published a piece about American decline called, “Basically It’s Over: A parable about how one nation came to financial ruin.” But Munger is a professional curmudgeon (allusions to this have been a well-loved and better-rehearsed part of Buffett’s routine at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting for years). To be sure, there are those in the business commentariat who seem to have become almost professional doomsayers—Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, and Nassim Taleb come to mind. But among people who, as major participants in the markets, speak with real authority, Munger is virtually alone.

The Church Father Origen distinguished between an exoteric Christianity for the masses of the faithful and an esoteric Christianity for the elite. The same duality describes the practice of capitalism today—as illustrated by the old Wall Street joke about the retail customer who, upon his broker showing him the slip where the yachts of the great money managers of the day are moored, plaintively asks “but where are the customers’ yachts?” Those individuals who watch CNBC and cruise the blogs for stock tips may delude themselves that the game is not rigged, but such a belief is well and truly a case of mass delusion and manipulation (it’s probably both). The ancients understood this. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi—“What is legitimate for Jupiter is not legitimate for oxen.” Under sodium pentothal, I doubt George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein, or Carlos Slim would disagree. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even need the truth serum, just a dry martini or a glass of decent claret.

In “The Silver Blaze,” one of the best of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Gregory, the Scotland Yard detective, asks Holmes, “Is there any other point on which you want to draw my attention?” To which Holmes answers, “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” Gregory replies. And Holmes retorts, “That was the curious incident.” Where contemporary capitalism is concerned, the dog’s silence consists in the fact that, even after the crash, with its revelations not just of how rigged the system was—particularly, but certainly not only in its post-Reagan, post-Thatcher iteration—but how stupid, self-destructive (Lehman Brothers, anyone?), and fundamentally nihilistic it was as well, there is not as yet credible opposition to capitalism as a system. Egged on by Fox News and politicians like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, a sizeable percentage of the American public probably does believe that President Obama is determined at long last to transform the United States into a socialist state. But the reality is that he has no quarrel with the basic parameters of the system, only with what he has called its “abuses”—a view that, if it causes alarm in business circles can do so only because from Reagan and Bush senior through Clinton and Bush junior, they have not had to live under any constraints whatsoever. And after his inauguration the president confirmed the extreme modesty of his goals by naming a financial team that, with the possible exception of former Fed chairman Volcker, before taking up their present posts never evinced the slightest doubt about casino capitalism.

That is the fundamental change since the collapse of the Soviet empire and the transformation of China into an authoritarian capitalist tyranny: All debate has been stilled, or, anyway, all debate outside a few groups like professors in the humanities departments of U.S. universities (the stupidity of whose analysis and the utopianism of whose solutions makes them well worth not paying attention to), rural jacqueries in the developing world like the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Naxalites in India (one more unfit to rule than the other), and the anarchist anti-globalizers (about whom the less said the better, and who may be more interesting in terms of their views on music than globalization). If they are irrelevant, they richly deserve that status. And there are profound arguments within capitalism, of course, above all concerning the role of the state, and increasingly different models and experiences in Britain and America, continental Europe, and Asia. But while few people believe that history is at an end, despite the recent crash, the view that political economy is at an end, that, for all intents and purposes, there is only capitalism, remains overwhelmingly the consensus view throughout the world.

It is this fundamental transformation not just of our economy but also of our polity as a (misplaced) locus of faith that has caused me to harp on the subject of American exceptionalism, moral authority, and pay more attention than they otherwise warrant to self-evidently indefensible moral and intellectual solecisms as the claim that the American nation is inherently good. For in an important sense, the cruder the iteration, the more revealing it is—vox populi vox Dei, and all that. Once it becomes respectable to substitute belief for reason, or (in a way this is worse) make the dire category mistake of mistaking one’s allegiances and cultural prejudices for objectivity, one is all but boasting one’s ignorance of the world outside the United States. Again, I emphasize that I am talking about the language and mindset of faith tragically and inappropriately transposed to the political and economic sphere, emphatically not about belief in its proper context—that of faith. I am an adamant non-believer, no less firm in my atheism than any of the so-called New Atheists. But much as I respect the writings of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne on matters upon which they are indeed consummate masters of their brief, I find their version of atheism beneath them—petulant, ill-informed, and, at best, supererogatory.

My mother liked to say that in a piece of writing a failure of language was actually a failure of thought. The language of reason is no way incompatible with the language of faith when, precisely, we are thinking and talking about faith. But to imagine the language of belief has any proper role or can be appealed to for legitimation in considering the merit of one’s own country, let alone of global capitalism, is not thought but, coming back to another phrase of Adorno’s, nothing more than intellectual “piety, indolence, and calculation.”

In her edgy, ambivalent eulogy to her friend, the great British philosopher, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum wrote that, “he was never angry,” but “his attitude to the world was at some level without hope.” There were doubtless temperamental, as well as intellectual, explanations for this, as there surely must be for Nussbaum, who, on her own account of herself, is someone who is “angry more or less all the time”; and as there are for everyone, however much most of us prefer to think that temperament—which, though as adults we learn to ignore, suppress, or transcend, is fundamentally beyond reason—has little or nothing to do with how we arrive at our political and ethical views.

For all her admiration for him, much of what lies behind Nussbaum’s anger at Williams, and clearly it is profound (before reading her reminiscence, I had not thought it possible to write a rancorous encomium), is her sense that a man of his abilities should have used them to do some good in the world. His lack of what she calls “socially active compassion” deeply offends her even after his death. Nussbaum is not asking for a moment that Williams not be Williams. The activism she so strongly wishes he had undertaken (so much so that she is still angry at him for having failed to engage in it—an anger she continues to believe justified) would not have been of the kind that would have entailed “being duped by any teleology of progress.” Although certainly more sympathetic to progressive narratives than Williams, Nussbaum understands that for him, such a view was definitively out of reach. But she is adamant that a great deal can be achieved through anger, hope, and engagement, and tends to dismiss the intellectual bases of his rejection of activism in favor of a temperamental one.

Nussbaum has always put social justice at the center of her concerns: Those who thirst for justice and think it not only their—but everyone’s—moral obligation to devote themselves to the righting of wrongs rarely have much patience for those who despair of “doing good for a bad world,” to quote her quite accurate characterization of Williams’ view. Whatever its merits as an ethical stance, there still is something humanly more than a bit sere about Nussbaum’s dismissive tone. Perhaps her anger simply overwhelmed her, or perhaps she felt she was only following Harold Laski’s maxim that de mortuis nil nisi bunkum. But whatever its psychological and ethical sources, Nussbaum’s account of Williams’ stance and of her own rejection of it sheds a great deal of light on the much broader issue of what, when all is said and done, has largely been a dialogue of the deaf between those who think like political and social activists and those for whom such a baseline seems like one more utopian over-simplification of reality. Nussbaum writes that she felt her social and political commitments caused Williams to come to view her as someone akin to Shaw’s unworldly heroine, Major Barbara. For Nussbaum, the moral outrage that she deployed to such effect in her jeremiad against the feminist social theorist, Judith Butler (she called Butler’s work “hip defeatism” at best, if not in reality “a “collaboration with evil”), was also leveled at Williams, at least implicitly. For in their very different ways, each had failed to act in accordance with what Nussbaum clearly views as a commanding truth—that philosophers, in particular, and thinkers, generally, must be “lawyers for humanity.”

Is she right? Williams controversially and famously thought ethical theory an evasion of life, whereas Nussbaum—in my view piously and unrealistically—holds that a good ethical theory offers a paradigm that would, contra Williams, offer not a reality, but rather a morality check thanks to which people would be able to act on the best in themselves. But whether one agrees with Nussbaum or not, the question she asks is the one that must haunt the thinking of anyone who holds, as Williams did, that moral philosophy is not arithmetic, and who is skeptical of the claim that any philosophical paradigm can guide us reliably when we are confronted by the ethical challenges in which basic values turn out to conflict irresolvably, and in which the incommensurability in a given case of truth and justice, or of liberty and equality, cannot be evaded.

For Nussbaum, as for any Left or liberal (in the American sense) political activist, such a view may carry some weight intellectually, but it is morally barren when not out-and-out a dereliction of one’s obligation as a thinker, citizen, and campaigner. Instead, the basic task we should all be committing ourselves to on this account, at least to the extent we can, is precisely to struggle for justice, equality, and freedom. In that sense, at least, not to be idealistic, from the activist’s perspective, is all but morally indefensible. “Is despair possibly a sin, as well as a psychological problem?” Nussbaum asks at the end of her essay on Williams.

To frame the question in religious, or at the very least para-religious, language that modern secular politics inherited or has appropriated from religion (Marxism, liberalism, etc.) is in itself a form of moral legislation. Sin, for the Christian, alienates the sinner from God, just as, for the “Progressive” activist, despair, or even true pessimism (the two are related, but are not exactly the same), alienates those who give in to it from the obligation—whether as Kantian categorical imperative, or in some other ethical form like consequentialism or virtue ethics—to struggle for justice.

We all have our creeds; and in a lifetime of accomplishment, Nussbaum has more than earned hers. But the proper answer to her question is twofold. The first concerns activism and quietism, and is mainly practical. One may aspire to follow in the footsteps of John Brown or Thoreau, but it is extremely rare for even the most gifted people to do both equally well, and the overwhelming majority of us are likely to find ourselves at sea in one realm or the other, if not in both. One need not go so far as Winston Churchill and say that a person’s life must “be nailed to the cross of either action or thought.” But one can safely say that Nussbaum is wrong to speak of thinking harder and acting better as if they were like a pair of oxen yoked together behind the plough of our collective ethical duty for all eternity. 

The second part of the answer is, bluntly put, that if one believes that truth and justice are often in conflict, then one’s moral obligation is not clear-cut, as Nussbaum and the activists keep claiming, but extremely problematic. Thought is not a Sunday school class or a business deal in which pessimism or despair is to be rejected because it yields an insufficient return on the intellectual investment and has virtually no practical utility in the formulation of law and of domestic and foreign policy. Undeterred, Nussbaum rather cheaply chooses to link Williams’ despair with his bouts of psychological depression. It is a familiar American conceit: optimism as the only morally licit stance, and all other stances as pathology. And what Nussbaum cannot explain through psychology, she accounts for through moral condemnation: Williams’ despair is not a position with which she is in disagreement; it is a sin. Nussbaum is hardly the first thinker to characterize as a sin a way of being and thinking with which she cannot empathize, or even fully imagine (I am emphatically not talking about sympathy here). Such anathematizations are commonplace in the history of Christianity, but certainly not only Christianity. Sin, indeed!

In philosophical terms, any philosophically literate activist must subscribe to some version of neo-Aristotelean or neo-Kantian virtue ethics, or else of consequentialism—in the latter case, meaning that the moral theory to which one subscribes must be based on the assumption that the practical consequences of the actions of individuals and societies must constitute the basis for making valid moral judgments about those actions, and that it is reasonable to claim that an action is right if it promotes the best available consequences. But this can only be correct if, like Nussbaum and her fellow activists, one hews to the view that there is no such thing as truly incommensurable values. And yet one does not have to be of a despairing cast of mind to know this not to be true. Time and again, societies have had to choose between peace and justice at the end of wars, while in many other societies we have told consoling fictions about the past in the name of keeping the peace. Think, for example, of post-genocide Rwanda where the school books now mendaciously—but, from the point of view of preventing another inter-communal bloodbath, understandably and perhaps even necessarily—promote the idea that Hutu and Tutsi identities no longer matter.

At the end of her essay, Nussbaum sets down a number of questions she would pose to Bernard Williams if only she could. She asks, “Isn’t it perhaps all right to try to engage one’s philosophical energies so as to make things a little better in the world…?” Or: “Isn’t Kant’s sort of ‘good news’ worth working for, even if Hegel’s sort may indeed be a delusion?” To which the answer is yes, of course it’s all right. What is not all right, though, is to claim that such engagement is the only defensible position that a morally alert person may take. For that is not conscience, but self-satisfaction.

Those of us who are in the habit of railing at the historical illiteracy of these great times of ours (it borders on amnesia) should be careful what we wish for. For despite what Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason about those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it, historical memory is anything but an incontestable public good. Those who doubt this need only look at the Balkans in the 1990s. Despite the propaganda of the Serbs and their allies in Russia and in the West, the conflict was not principally about “ancient ethnic hatreds.” The fetishization of the historical grievances of the Croats and the Serbs unquestionably played a key role in providing the conflict with an ideological and propagandistic flag of convenience. And, in due course, the Bosnian side—which, despite the Muslim nationalist past of some of its leaders, was overwhelmingly Titoist at the beginning of the war—followed suit as well (those who still deny this cannot possibly have been in Sarajevo in the early months of the siege, but that is a debate for another day).

I remember going to Belgrade in 1993 to visit Vuk Draskovic, the nationalist politician and writer who was then leading the mass opposition against the Milosevic regime and in doing so had drawn liberal, as well as ultra-nationalist, support in Serbia. As I was leaving, my head still ringing with Draskovic’s romantic paeans of praise for the Chetnik leader, Draza Mihajlovic, one of his young aides pressed a folded bit of paper into my hand. It was blank except for a date: “1453”—that is, the year Orthodox Constantinople fell to the Muslim Ottomans. Friends of mine who worked in the former Yugoslavia during the Croatian and Bosnian wars had similar experiences in Zagreb and in Sarajevo. It seemed that the “sores of history,” as the great Irish writer Hubert Butler once called them, remained unhealed more than half a millennium later—at least in the desperate, degraded atmosphere of that time and place.

Butler himself suffered greatly from the anger of the official Catholic Ireland of the day (that he was a member of the Republic’s Protestant minority only aggravated the affront in the minds of his detractors). It began fairly innocently. Butler had traveled extensively in Egypt, the USSR, the Balkans, and Central Europe in the 1930s; and for a time in 1938-39, he worked with a Quaker group in Vienna helping Jews escape Nazi Austria. In 1952, he gave a public talk in Dublin about the Balkans, which was criticized in Ireland for not emphasizing the persecution of Catholics by the victorious Tito dictatorship. Butler had insisted—unfortunately for him, the Papal Nuncio was in attendance—that a far greater crime had been the campaign of the Nazi-installed Croatian regime of Ante Pavelic to convert the Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia to Catholicism and to murder those who refused to renounce their faith, and the complicity of Msgr Stepinac, the Archbishop of Zagreb, in this genocidal war against the Serbs. Butler writes about this in an essay he titled (the reference was to earlier memoirs of his public school) “The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue.”

In the debate that ensued, Butler—who, as a writer was very much a localist and, apart from his time in Russia, the Balkans, and Austria, otherwise spent most of his very long life in the country fastness of his native County Kilkenny—was excoriated by the Irish clerical and political establishment. A book defending Stepinac was published with a preface by the Archbishop of Dublin. Father R.S. Devane, a well-known Irish Jesuit of the day of whom, early in his career, it was said that he “had been known to confiscate British publications from unwilling newsagents in his native Limerick,” insisted that there had been no forcible conversions, while the Irish Minister of Agriculture in the De Valera government advised a group of Irish law students to model themselves on figures like Stepinac, Pavelic, and Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary—figures, he said, who had “so gallantly defended freedom of thought and conscience.” As Butler observed, “Those who knew Yugoslavia were aghast, for Pavelic…was the Yugoslav counterpart of Himmler.”

From the onset of the controversy, Butler seems to have understood very well the risks he was running. But he felt he had no choice, above all precisely because he was an Irish Protestant. Convinced that for all their mistakes and derelictions, the demonization of the Irish Protestant community in De Valera’s Ireland was a gross falsification of history, Butler was adamant. “If we agree,” he wrote, “that history should be falsified in Croatia in the interests of Catholic piety, how could we protest when our own history was similarly distorted?”

In the early 1950s, unlike our own time, there still was a difference between celebrity and notoriety, and Butler paid dearly for his effort to set the historical record straight. Though, as an Irishman, he understood better than most what the cost could be of tearing the scabs off historical wounds. He was the subtlest of writers, and never confronted the question head on. But from what he did write, it seems evident that for Butler any decent politics had to be a politics of truth in which even inconvenient, unwelcome, or, to use a term much favored by generations of engineers of the human soul whether religious or secular, “unhelpful” facts needed to be aired. As he put it, “If you suppress a fact because it is awkward, you will next be asked to contradict it.”

This is that most old-fashioned of things: a noble sentiment. But as Butler himself would certainly have understood, the question of historical memory is more vexing, and the binary conceptions of truth vs. lie and the concealed vs. the revealed only get us so far. What do we actually mean when we speak of historical memory? It cannot be what individuals remember. As any police investigator will tell you, the longer the period that elapses between a person being in an accident or being the victim or witness to a crime, the less accurate his or her testimony is likely to be. And the historical memory of an event, by which we usually mean the collective memory of people who did not themselves live through it but have had it passed down to them, whether through family stories or public education and ceremonial commemorations, is not just flawed but impossible, for we remember as individuals not as collectivities, and collective memory is as absurd a category as collective guilt.

And yet, whether we are speaking of the Irish memory of the Great Famine of 1847—by which we do indeed mean collective memory, since, self-evidently no Irish person has any actual recollection of the catastrophe—or of the Armenian Genocide, or the Rape of Nanjing, or the Shoah, we are not talking about memory in any proper sense, but morality, ideology, and, more often than not, cultural and political organizing principles; and, as such, they are not—or should never be—beyond challenge or revision, no matter how (justifiably) sacrosanct they may appear at a given time.

For if ever Nietzsche’s terrifying insight that “there are no facts, only interpretations” seemed undeniable, it is where historical memory is concerned.

None of this would matter so much were historical memory as hospitable to peace and reconciliation as it is to war and enmity. I once heard the Irish writer and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien observe during a particularly dark period of the conflict in Northern Ireland that, at times, it seemed as if Republicans and Unionists might be close to coming to terms; but then, he said, one side or the other would remember one of the great militant songs of martyrdom—“The Rising of the Moon” or “The Sash My Father Wore”—and any such hope would quickly evaporate. And the pathology is in no way unique to Ireland.

But we would live in a better world if we could, no, if we would forget. 

That Ireland is a country seeped in memory is a commonplace. The annual commemorations held in every year in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street in Dublin on the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising against the British seems like the embodiment of this consensus view. It is comparatively modest, unlike Bastille Day in Paris, or the greatest public military ceremony of all, the Beating the Retreat in New Delhi that is a celebration of India’s Republic Day, though like them largely military. But in its combination of modesty and sternness, the ceremony is deeply affecting. The crowds, while not enormous, are dignified and respectful, and at least on April 1st of this year, when I was in Dublin, this very much seemed to include people from what the Irish government calls “the new communities”—immigrants from the poor world. I saw a sprinkling of people from the Indian sub-continent and West Africa, and, from what I could see, they were a bit puzzled but also more than a bit engaged.

The entire ceremony seems beyond politics, as if it were inscribed on the DNA of independent Ireland and always had been. In fact, this is far from the truth of the matter. It is true that official commemorations, complete with a military parade, began soon after Irish independence. But it is anything but clear that these commemorations seemed of great importance to most Irish men and women in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Writing of his own childhood in the thirties and early-mid forties, the writer John McGahern insisted that “I think that the 1916 Rising was not considered to be of any great importance in the country I grew up in.” Because Easter 1916 was not that far away, he added, “it probably was too close in time for the comfort of mythmaking.”

But whether they appealed to a majority of the Irish people or not, commemorations of the Rising soon became a context for the mobilization of insurgent Republicanism, above all in Northern Ireland. Even today, when the IRA seems like largely a spent force in the Republic of Ireland, one still can read flat statements like the one posted by a Belfast blogger who wrote that the Easter Rising is traditionally “the most important time of the year in the Irish Republican calendar” and condemn the Irish government’s official commemoration, from the days of the Free State to today, as “tokenism.” And it is a fact that the Irish Republic banned official commemorations (not to mention IRA military parades in Dublin) for most of the three decades of the Troubles in the North. Military parades in front of the Post Office only resumed in 2006, which may have had more to do with the waning of Republicanism and the fact that Ireland, as a nation—and, more precisely, a nation in the midst of what seemed like a boom unseen in all of Ireland’s history, but turned out to be a huge property bubble, not to say worse (the full damage to the Irish economy of those mad years has still not been fathomed, but it is all but incalculable)—could afford such celebrations because the country had moved on.

Bertie Ahern, the prime minister who reinstituted the military parade is now infamous in Ireland for having said, “the boom is just getting boomier,” which led an Irish finance official to joke recently that today “the bust is just getting bustier.” But what all this illustrates, as McGahern well understood, is that mythmaking is good for political mobilization and when it poses no risk, but that it is anything but an inherent part of a nation’s soul—if, indeed, it is not pure Romantic twaddle even to claim that nations have souls. Echoing the great French scholar of Ireland, Maurice Goldring, McGahern thought that it was only the political defeat of the pragmatic Irish nationalism of O’Connell and Parnell that turned the Irish independence movement toward Romantic nationalism. Only in the context of that turn can the cult of political memory in Ireland be understood.

The mythical Ireland is no more a real place than the mythical America, the mythical France, or the mythical China. Instead it is a political idea and serves specific interests and specific ideology, though of course its genius is to put itself beyond ideology—a fact of nature, rather than a politics that is fair game for attack (the contemporary human rights movement plays a rationalist version of the same self-manumission from believing any critique of its principles to be legitimate). In the Irish case, there is also the Romanticism of the Diaspora—a powerful force, even today. In Miami a year ago, at the wonderful Coral Gables bookshop, Books and Books, the Irish writer Sebastian Barry gave a reading followed by questions. A (self-identified) Irish-American questioner asked Barry if he worried that Ireland’s new prosperity would ruin the Irish soul. To which Barry smilingly responded that “well, we in Ireland don’t have to worry about that anymore!”

Perhaps we will one day learn to “remember in a different way,” as a very smart friend of mine put it in reacting to my last blog post. The problem with historical memory, as exercised by groups, anyway, is that it tends to be high on grievance but low on forgiveness. As the great Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote, “it is possible that there is no memory except the memory of wounds.” And that is the problem.

During this year’s official commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, the senior chaplain of the Irish military, Monsignor Eoin Thynne, delivered a brave homily in which he largely eschewed the customary bromides of Romantic Irish nationalism, speaking, instead, about the ethical collapse that had taken place in Ireland during the economic boom. It is a moment of national trauma in Ireland—the consequence of the financial meltdown and the child abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. Combining, as he does, the duties of a priest and a soldier, it would have been unfair to expect Msgr. Thynne to address the pedophilia crisis and his Church’s cover-up. But on the economic crisis, he was unsparing. These days in Ireland, it often seems as if the morning papers do little but itemize one more insolvency of a former high-flying property company, or the further indebtedness of the major Irish banks—all of which have already had to be partly or wholly nationalized. The new glass and steel condominiums along the Liffey River stand largely empty, much like similar developments in Florida, Nevada, and Spain. And while Ireland is now also receiving immigrants from Africa, the Maghreb, and the Indian sub-continent for whom, of course, an Ireland in economic difficulty still seems almost unimaginably prosperous), it is also once again seeing many of its own young people—the best and the brightest, as immigrants most often are historically—leave the country in search of more promising futures in continental Europe, Australia. Canada, and the United States.

The story of the Irish boom has its particularities. Unlike France, or Britain, or Germany (not to mention the United States or Japan), Ireland had never been rich before the boom. To be sure, after entering the European Union it had grown more prosperous, thanks to generous subsidies from Brussels. But real, home-grown prosperity came only in the 1990s. Now, Irish people are waking to realize that it was not prosperity at all, but a combination of a banking system so leveraged that it had to collapse at some point, and an economy whose prosperity depended almost entirely on property prices continuing to rise. If the Irish economy in the boom years was not exactly based on a confidence game, it was not based on much that was solid either. And in a country like Ireland, with a small and inter-connected political and economic elite, the involvement of the major political parties in enabling the madness—while not yet fully illuminated—is virtually certain to have been deep.

In his homily, Msgr. Thynne called for forgiveness for all this, but left no doubt about how much there was to forgive. “Enlighten hearts,” he said, “with a willingness to forgive those who have been contaminated by the virus of corruption, selfishness, and greed. Those whose pride and arrogance have inflicted misery and hardship on our people…Give us the courage to improve ourselves and to shape a society built on a solid foundation of ethics.”

Listening to him speak, I found it hard not to be overcome by an unseemly envy. For what American figure with an equally important official role in this society has put what has happened in its proper moral context? And do not, please, tell me it is Barack Obama. Doubtless, the president means well. But one cannot appoint people to fix the crisis who come from the Wall Street firms that caused the crisis, or denounce the insurance companies while crafting a bill that will benefit the insurance companies (not to mention making a back-room deal with the pharmaceutical industry), and have the right to claim the moral high ground. Yes, if I have to choose between Obama and his enemies (whether the enemy in question is the Tea Party movement, the Republican Party, AIPAC, or, for that matter, the Jihadists), siding with the president seems to me the only sane choice. Sane, but profoundly dispiriting. The doctrine of the enemy of my enemy is my friend is not much more edifying than that of sauve qui peut. Why is it apparently impossible for the archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony, a man of immense power in America who is also a person with a genuine social conscience and a long history of activism on behalf of the poor, to make a speech about the selfishness, greed, and ethical collapse of American society during our boom years in a context as likely to draw public attention, and, in doing so, shift the terms of the debate, as the one chosen by Msgr. Thynne? And the same question should be asked of the Reverend Rick Warren and of the leaders of the North American Baptist Conference and of the American Association of Lutheran Churches when they pronounce—as they hardly have been shy about doing—on the moral condition of the Republic.

This society is in moral freefall, and it is idiotic to pretend otherwise. People of my political bent tend to blame capitalism in all its inherent nihilism and cruelty, while social conservatives tend to see the demise of any coherent social order on the collapse of what my father called Sacred Order. To say this is emphatically not to say that these are apocalyptic times. That is far, far too easy. The apocalypse, like the barbarians at the Roman city’s gates in Cavafy’s great poem, offer a kind of solution, a kind of consolation, just as the story of Samson is consoling only because it ends with him pulling down the pillars of the temple. But these are stories: There is absolutely no historical basis for thinking immoral societies cannot endure or flourish. Indeed, to believe so is, historically, a monotheistic conceit, and in its essence millenarian rather than historical.

How societies conceive themselves is another matter entirely. Most societies, whether they bowed before Baal or Yahweh, Jesus or Goldman Sachs, have thought themselves moral. Today, as anyone who can bear to read the The Wall Street Journal Opinion page, or Investor’s Business Daily will know, the rich once again believe they are rich not because they are lucky or because they are powerful and have created a system that largely serves their ends and their interests, but because they are deserving, and have worked hard. And to those who say that this was what American capitalism claimed in the Gilded Age or the Coolidge administration, the capitalist propagandists of our day like Amity Shlaes or Daniel Henninger indignantly demand: What was wrong with the Gilded Age? And perhaps they will even win the ideological battle, at least for a while. Nietzsche, cutting to the point as always, wrote that, “Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

But this does not mean there is no such thing as truth, or that it would not be a relief, if only once a year, say—perhaps during a national day of remembrance (after all, every country has one)—someone in a position of real influence and authority saw fit to tell the truth rather than spin it. The rest of the time we could go back to business as usual.