The National Interest
Winter 2000

Extracts from Subverting Cant

by John O'Sullivan

 

Clarissa Eden, the Prime Minister's wife, once complained during the 1956 crisis that the Suez Canal flowed through her drawing room in 10 Downing Street. Far more turbulent waterways–the Bann, the Liffey and the Shannon–coursed through the parlor and dining room of the distinguished Irish family into which Conor Cruise O'Brien was born in 1917. As the first chapters of his memoir reveal, the young Conor was very early made aware of the gulfs separating some Irishmen from others. These naturally included the antagonism between Catholic nationalists and Protestant Unionists. But the divisions within Catholic nationalism were perhaps at least as powerful and probably more bitter. Dr. O'Brien's family was divided in particular by two deep gulfs: that between constitutional nationalists and "physical force" republicans, and that between nationalists who welcomed Catholic social power and those who resisted it.

His maternal grandfather, David Sheehy, was a leading figure in the dominant Irish Parliamentary Party in the British House of Commons from 1885 until 1918. And both of his parents were firmly in the same camp of constitutional nationalists. During the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, however, a deranged British officer murdered his uncle, Frank Sheehy-Skeffington, a pacifist with strong republican sympathies who had come to the aid of a Catholic youth returning from Mass. Thereafter, Frank's formidable widow, Hanna, became both a symbol and propagandist for Irish republicanism, touring the United States after 1916 and lecturing on "British Imperialism as I have known it."

As Dr. O'Brien dryly notes, this lecture probably did not include the contextual details that her father was sitting in the Imperial Parliament at the time and that her brother was legal adviser to the governor of St. Kitts in the West Indies. In the independent Ireland that emerged from the Troubles, however, the fact that the Irish had been "among the ruling peoples of the Empire" was conveniently forgotten. Constitutional nationalism was the first of many post-imperial losers. It was Hanna's republican side of the family that enjoyed social prestige and closeness to power, and the constitutional nationalists like the young Conor's parents who were out in the cold.

As if that were not enough, O'Brien's father was an agnostic who specified that his son be educated in non-Catholic schools–a stipulation that his Catholic mother faithfully carried out after her husband's early death. With the Irish Catholic Church busily reshaping society in its own stern image at the time, the young Conor found himself twice suspect in unsmiling Irish eyes–once as insufficiently nationalistic, the second time as dubiously Catholic. And since his Catholicism was indeed dubious and destined to become more so, it was all the more important to him to assert his nationalism. So at his school and at Trinity College (institutions both Protestant in their foundation and Unionist in their sympathies), he went in for such gestures of Irish patriotism as remaining firmly seated when "God Save the King" was played.

There was scant relief from such ideological turmoil at home. The young Conor seems to have been more plagued by aunts than any man since Bertie Wooster. His devoutly Catholic Aunt Mary sought to save his soul, hinting that his mother might be prolonging her husband's stay in Purgatory by educating Conor in accordance with his wishes, and his devoutly republican Aunt Hanna sought to direct his political loyalties into republicanism. Both influenced his upbringing, Hanna especially, but there seems to be a rooted impulse in O'Brien to react against any strong influence and in particular against any strong intellectual influence. As a result, the adult Conor emerged from these family quarrels neither in thrall to his aunts' fiercely held views, nor neurotically torn between them and the more tolerant nationalism of his parents, but with an independent-minded political outlook that combined a clear commitment to modern political liberalism with an analytical curiosity about the interests and justifications that all parties, not excluding liberals, bring to any dispute.

The main aspect of this outlook consisted of a hostility to arbitrary power together with a suspicion that any excessive power is likely to degenerate into the arbitrary kind. (Surely not coincidentally, such hostility was the theme that animated Edmund Burke in Dr. O'Brien's thematic biography of the statesman.) But a regime that places chains on power needs to be defended where it exists or established where it is resisted. And that implies a willingness either to conciliate or crush its enemies and, for either purpose, an ability to understand them and the powers at their disposal. Thus a liberal regime should not disdain the help of authority, or of tradition, or of religious belief, or of prudence, or of any of the ideas and interests that are usually supposed to rest at the right end of the political spectrum. It will always respect such aids, since they may well be rooted ultimately in popular opinion, and it will sometimes seek to seize them from the hands of its opponents. . . .