In my last piece on language I quoted Elif Shafak who wrote that wars arise over little more than semantics: “In a world beset by mistranslations, there is no use in being resolute about any topic, because it might as well be that even our strongest convictions are caused by a simple misunderstanding.” I hold in high regard such Buddhist equanimity. But not without question. To balance things out, let me dedicate this writing to the opposite movement in me, and juxtapose Shafak’s quote with one from Martin Luther King Jr., who once argued against impartiality in quite unambiguous terms: “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.”

This is the paradox between the bridge builder and the warrior, a paradox played out in this society, and one that I recognise as my own most poignant inner conflict.

 

Warriors of Ulster

Of all the words I’ve heard in my time here so far the words that have echoed in me most were about the young men of this country susceptible to recruitment by the still active paramilitary groups, because of a felt sense that they have “missed out on the war.” It rung in my ears not because of some self-righteous nose-wrinkling, but because of an honesty you wouldn’t readily come across in the moralistic circles I live my life amongst.

“Dulce bellum inexpertis” (war is sweet to those who haven’t experienced it), said the 15thcentury Dutch humanist Erasmus in response to the popular glorification of war. I never experienced war – though I doubt I won’t see it in my lifetime – and so there is glorification of the heroic struggle happening inside me. That, too, is why I ended up on a remote hilltop in Northern Ireland, giving months of my life in service to a peace and reconciliation centre in a postwar society. Conflict tourism is a concern in Northern Ireland, with nosy foreigners coming to gape at the wounds and scars of others’ suffering.

The young men’s honesty is this: They spoke directly into the natural fact of life that we are all, at the end of the day, tribalists, big monkeys wanting status, sex and power. The testosterone raging in pubescent boys (and girls) is a biological phenomenon that can’t be suppressed and moralised away without the risk of it resurfacing in dangerously cathartic forms down the line. The drug of revolution and galvanising ideals is potent, and tugs at all the human heartstrings of belonging, purpose, and identity. A fellow volunteer here said, “I don’t believe we have a natural propensity for violence, but we do have a natural craving for striving and overcoming.” We live in a dualistic universe, and we as individuals learn and grow in dialectics. We need an antithesis, a counterforce to struggle and grow against, to synthesise into an ever-evolving version of ourselves.

The young men also spoke directly from their ancestral legacy. In myth, the four provinces of Ireland were endowed with special gifts. Whereas the other provinces got gifts like storytelling and music, Ulster was endowed with the special gift of war. A fateful gift that was. Both in myth and history, Ulster has been a place of warriors since time immemorial, characterised by a zealous passion for their land, a trait by no means diminished in the Ulster of today. From pre-Christian times where a warrior cutting off his own hand in a mad frenzy of possessiveness to ‘win’ Ulster in a race was to be celebrated throughout the centuries to come by Gaelic earls and kings of Ulster from the O’Neills to the Magennis to the Clanna Ruadraige, up to modern times where his red hand flies defiantly on Loyalist flags who feel themselves as much ‘terrae filii’ (sons of the land) as the Republicans who would see Ulster restored as part of a Gaelic Ireland.

But the love of the Ulster warriors for their motherland translated into a fanatical notion of possession of their motherland that keeps them in perpetual strife with each other, whatever ways their divisive identity lines are drawn, to the grief of their mothers, women, children, and the land itself. This is an old, old problem. Once, in the times of the Ulster king Conchobar, the sons of Ulster were cursed for their self-absorbed competitiveness and subsequent disregard and neglect of the motherland they claimed to love so much, by the goddess Macha who avenged the humiliating, unaided, public birth of her twins in the mud by making the Ulster warriors be overcome by the pains of labour whenever they’d need their strength. The latest outburst of war among the sons of Ulster, the Troubles, was the resurfacing of the old pattern. Perhaps their struggle is not so much about ideological differences between two warring clans, who truly have everything in common from their Christian faith to the love of their land, but a struggle spawned by their misguided relationship with the feminine and the motherland.

The Troubles ended with a general denunciation of violence, and a commitment to finding other means to settle ideological differences. But with coming of age rites of passage having eroded in our contemporary societies, with an ongoing class war caging disadvantaged youth in shortsighted localised mentalities, and with feminine qualities of emotional intelligence and a caring disposition (finally) gaining cultural prevalence in a society that excludes young lads from socialisation into that culture, where do the young lads go with their inborn warrior vitality? What antithesis is still morally justified to strive and overcome in a postwar society? Why the shockingly high rate of suicide among young men in Northern Ireland? Why the spike in paramilitary recruitment among them? Why the radicalisation of marginalised Muslim youth in Europe? Why the rise of populist nationalism across the West? Why the polarisation towards militant rightwing and leftwing politics?

 

The times we live in

We live in times of great moral conflict. We have island nations facing Armageddon, an unending influx of refugees sitting at the fence of Fort Europa, the lifting of the veil off the ugly face of our centuries-old rape culture pandemic, hate speech modeled by our political leadership and normalised in mainstream discourse, the vast majority of human population under the yoke of poverty and in the iron fist of corporate oligarchy, the invisible marine world (70% of our planet’s surface and the majority of animal biomass) suffocating on our plastics and petrol if not fished up and tossed back dead as by-catch, the Doomsday Clock back to two minutes to midnight with superpowers waving their hydrogen bombs in each other’s faces, as we are freefalling towards the two existential crises facing our world today: nuclear war and anthropogenic climate change. Most of all, understandably, we have a rampant complacency and paralysis. These topics are an instant switch-off for most.

But we can’t look away and hope to love our world into wholeness, wistfully wishing for peace between all things. Not in a world half of whose nature is made up of intrinsic suffering. So who am I to judge any warrior for taking whichever stand has galvanised their craving hearts? And likewise, who am I to chide the paramount importance of holding the radical centre amidst the divisions in a frantic world? So where does the bridge builder with the warrior heart position herself? Who will the bridge builder allow herself to antagonise, and to whom does the warrior extend a hand?

 

The synthesis

This Martin Luther King Jr. said also: “Power without love is reckless and abusive. Love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” Adam Kahane likened the navigating of the balance between power and love to the narrow strait Odysseus had to sail between the jagged rocks of Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis. I can hold both certitude and humility, I can walk the line between power and love, navigate the strait between the rocks and the whirlpool. The resolution of the paradox of the warrior and the bridge builder is that they are each other’s antithesis, that they are the antagonists in me that evolve each other towards their greater synthesis.

Similarly, the warriors of Ulster would do well to dilute their ideological certitude with a healthy dose of humility. And the wishful peacemakers afraid of confrontation would do well to speak out sharply against the errors in the system. Marianne Williamson wrote, “It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us, but our playing small does not serve the world.” “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.” The hottest place in Hell Dr. King spoke of is the regret of failed fulfillment, failed self-actualisation once it’s too late and it’s all over. We must continue to grow into our own and take a stand. As individuals, institutions and as a global population, we mustn’t fear to shine our brilliant light on the darker corners of the world.