between the rock and the cold, cold sea

On campus, one of the things one occasionally notices are the lists for the debate competitions held by the two largest student societies, the Phil and the Hist.

I've been spitting furious since I saw the two propositions that it is thought appropriate to debate for fun this week. This House Believes "That Gay Marriage Undermines Family Values" and "That Man Has Dominion Over The Animals."

I know that college debating societies are an old, old tradition. But is it really too much to ask that they practice their debating skills on propositions which do not require that one side (the Yes side, in this case) argue from hurtful, entitled, unethical assumptions?

Words mean things. Treating subjects which affect the lives of real people as topics for what is, essentially, a game, shows critical lack of empathy. Not to mention a critical lack of awareness of the harm done by repeating poisonous, unethically based arguments. Whether or not one actually believes them - whether or not one is only trying to score points - someone in one's audience might take this more seriously.

(As a point of principle, I believe that in front of an audience, one should never make an argument in which one does not truly believe.)

The first debate proposition is hurtful and poisonous to civil dialogue. No one's "family values" are harmed by committed loving relationships. Not unless one is a bigot, or a misogynist who finds the possibility of a relationship of equals threatening to his self-image. Emasculating, even! (But there's no virtue in dominance, merely constant insecurity.) To propose it as the subject of a debate suggests that both sides have potentially equal claim to validity. Which is to say, that one might with equal virtue and equal aplomb argue for and against the civil rights - the right to isonomia, as the ancient Greeks might say, an equal share in the law - of one's fellow citizens.

This is not right.

The second proposition is perhaps less hurtful, but no less problematic. The formulation of the proposition implies a religious or Victorian-progressive rational for "Dominion," and the use of the "Man" as shorthand for the entire human species is troubling. And as for the word dominion itself...

Dominion, as we all know, is derived from the Latin dominus, "lord," "master." The word dominate also derives from this root.

These words aren't just sounds. Each one carries a specific semantic significance, both in its bare dictionary definition, and in the evocative, implied overtones - the poetics of speech, if you will. "That Men have Lordship over the Animals" (if we interpret the proposition in terms of its implied, as well as its overt, meanings) is neither a neutral proposition, or a neutral formulation. That men may tame, train and kill at will - for as the proposition is formulated, it does not allow the question of ought to enter - is not a morally neutral position for which to argue. It is a position of entitlement, and ultimately, by semantic implication, a destructive one. To have dominion over is close kin to dominate, and dominate is an ugly, violent verb. One dominates through force, not through consensus, or negotiation, or live-and-let-live.

Words mean things. Treating these propositions - these statements - as a game severs them from their actuality, from the thing itself, the lived experience which the words signify. Detached from their living reality, to the debators they may have no actualised meaning, no true weight and freight and significance.

Just words. But words are how we explain the world to ourselves, how we articulate our understanding. By implying false equivalencies, equal ethical weight, when debate is treated as a game where words and statements have no true effect, that understanding is poisoned.

That's a good quarter of the problem with politics. But I suppose that's a rant for another day.

Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. And all this Easter weekend, Dublin celebrated.

As an Irishperson and something of a patriot, I suppose, where it comes to my country, I'm an anomaly. Why? Because I think it's wrong to celebrate something so bloody and thoughtless and ultimately futile as 1916.

1916.

Time and the pens of republican historians have given it a gloss it doesn't really deserve.

Let's examine the situation in Ireland with regard to independence circa 1916, shall we? In 1912, the House of Commons at Westminster passed a bill granting Home Rule - albeit limited, but still Home Rule - to Ireland. The House of Lords exercised its prerogative and caused the implementation of the Act to be delayed for two years. In the interim, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, David Lloyd George, the British PM, and the Unionist leaders Carson and Craig, sat down to hash out the status of the million Unionists who, under the Act, would become subject to a Dublin parliament where they would be outnumbered by Irish nationalists and would not be able to count on the protection of the British Crown.

(Events in the Free State during and after the war of independence would prove them right to have been worried, but the fledgling state's attitude to southern Unionists who remained after 1918 is, indeed, a topic for another day.)

In 1914, they were still talking when war broke out in Europe and caused their talks to be adjourned. Westminster, understandably, chose to delay the implementation of Home Rule until after the European war was over. (The fact that they had yet to find a solution to the Unionist problem probably made them glad they had an excuse to delay.) John Redmond, in order to demonstrate his good faith, called for Irish volunteers to join the British army. At this point in time there were paramilitary groups on both sides of the ideological divide: the Ulster Volunteers for the unionists, the Irish Volunteers for the nationalists. Many Irishmen, including nearly all the Ulster Volunteers and a majority of the Irish Volunteers, volunteered and went away to the war.

The Irish Volunteers remaining in Ireland were the most nationalist of the nationalists. The hardest of the hard-liners, so to speak, among them many members of the IRB. Of these, Thomas Clarke was to take the lead in planning an uprising to overthrow British rule in Ireland.

Let us recall that at this point Home Rule had been decided upon; all that waited was the end of the war and some kind of compromise with the unionists. Let us recall that many Irishmen were serving in the British army, sending home their pay - or their death benefits - to families at home. Let us recall that most Irish people did not want a rebellion.

Fast-foward two years to Easter Monday, 1916. The preparations for a rising have had the whiff of farce about them: expected arms never came; the British aware of all the preparations; McNeill tricked into calling out the Volunteers and, finding out that he'd been lied to, calling them off with a notice in the paper. James Connolly, bringing the Irish Socialist Army out with those volunteers who did go - not that many more than a thousand - is famed for saying, "We're going out to be slaughtered."

Reading out the proclamation at the GPO, Pearse is heckled by the crowd. In the week of fighting that follows, Sackville Street and the GPO are bombed from the Liffey and turned into rubble; over a thousand civilians are killed in the fighting. Afterwards, Dublin is furious - at the rebels, not the British. Until the over-reaction of the authorities - 4,000 people arrested and interned, 200 condemned to death; hardly anyone knowing who had been executed until the death notices were posted on the door of Kilmainham Gaol - turns the anger and resentment in a new direction.

It is to the credit of the 1916 dead - and those who survived it - that they were very brave.

But that does not change the fact that they had no real moral justification for what they did. To celebrate them as heroes is to venerate violence over reason.

We can't afford to do that. Not now, not ever.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart
O when may it suffice?
- W. B. Yeats, "Easter 1916"