Culture – sethlewis.ie

A Saint Patrick’s Day Selection Box

I’m posting a day early this week, in honour of Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s a national holiday here in Ireland, and rightfully so. I’ve collected this selection of links to help you understand and celebrate the man who brought good news to Ireland.

The Growing Power of Wilful Ignorance

She didn’t want to go to the dentist.

My friend already knew she had cavities, and she knew the dentist would want to do something about them. If she avoided seeing him, she could ignore the problem a little longer. It’s easy to ignore a cavity if the tooth is still functioning. Drills and fillings feel drastic when it’s entirely possible to carry on as normal with no intervention at all. The easiest way to deal with a little bit of decay is to apply a little bit of wilful ignorance to it. The trouble, of course, is that wilful ignorance is not an effective treatment for cavities. It only gives them time to grow. And as the decay grows, the wilful ignorance will have to grow with it. To keep a growing problem out of our minds, we must continually increase the capacity of our tolerance for it, slowly expanding the diameter of our blind spots to fit over its ugly edges.

The Other Side Of Human Rights

Some of the most common language in cultural and political debate these days (besides comparing people to Nazis) is the language of rights. In the Enlightenment era, philosophers began to lay a particular emphasis on the idea that humans have natural rights, and this concept has driven social change ever since. The idea was not invented by the philosophers, it was only rediscovered. It was already built in to the Christian foundations of their civilisation. As the U.S. Declaration Of Independence put it, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”.

Our ancestors’ emphasis on rights was a new and necessary correction to a social order that was terribly out of balance. Their culture needed to remember that every human is valuable beyond calculating because every human is made in the image of God himself, and because of this, every human has a right to be treated with respect and fairness by their fellow humans. We, the children of our enlightened forebearers, no longer find concepts like equality and fairness difficult to accept. These values are no longer revolutionary. They are the basic assumptions we grow up with. But I’m afraid our emphasis on rights has led us to a different kind of imbalance.

A Bridge Through Time (a poem)

This poem is inspired by a man I once saw on Charles Bridge in Prague.

Means With No Ends

I’ve only reached middle age, but I’ve already lived to see the world remade by the introduction of personal computers and then remade again as we brought the power of the internet into our pockets with smartphones. It’s now obvious that another transformation is underway in the development of AI. As it was in the early days of other technologies, no one knows exactly what AI will mean for us long-term, but no one can deny that our world and our lives are changing fast. Humanity is always grasping for more power and control over everything we see and touch, developing new and better tools for ourselves, and we’ve been quite successful: no generation has ever had tools as powerful as the ones we wield today. This sounds like it ought to be good news, but most of us aren’t so sure. Humanity doesn’t have a great track record in using our tools well. I came across an observation recently that cuts through our progress to one of our biggest underlying problems:

“The first great fact which emerges from our civilisation is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”; we do not know wither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere.” – Jacue Sellul

Transplanted

There’s an old Regency manor house near us that has been preserved as a heritage site, beautifully surrounded by manicured gardens that are faithfully tended by volunteers and open to the public. The gardens were planted and arranged over successive generations in the old English style—which means that the plants and trees were imported from all across the globe. This worked particularly well on the Fota estate because of its sheltered conditions. Even its name, Fota, is derived from the Irish “Fód te”, meaning “warm soil”. The arboretum is particularly impressive, boasting some of the finest specimens of pine, cypress and sequoia in Europe. There are also acers and eucalyptus, tasmanian tree ferns, acacia and magnolias that burst open with enormous flowers before the leaves even begin to appear. A walk through Fota gardens is a walk around the world, with the sights, smells, and colours of the Himalayas, Japan, Chile, China, New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest, and beyond.

Sometimes I’ve wondered how trees from California and Australia can grow so well in Ireland. I suppose they don’t have much of a choice in the matter, but they’ve certainly made the best of it. Their roots are deep in the fód te, and I have to strain my eyes to see some of their towering tops. They have not simply survived in a foreign land. They have made it their home, and thrived. When I wander among them, I am encouraged.

C.S. Lewis On The Danger Of Getting Too Much News

I recently came across this excerpt from a letter C.S. Lewis wrote to a friend. He wrote it in 1946, before the internet was invented, before the dawn of push notifications and instant news updates without pause every moment of every day, and yet the wisdom in these few sentences only grows more important the more our technologies and access to information increases. We’ve reached the stage now where we can hear of every new battle, every devastating famine, every natural disaster and celebrity scandal on the other side of the globe more quickly and easily than we can hear what is happening with our own neighbours in our own community. Here’s what C.S. Lewis said about it:

I’m Dated (and you are, too)

New Year’s Day, 2025. The day we all start having to pause to remember what year to write on forms and checks and such, or when we start writing it wrong and having to scribble it out and start again. What will this New Year bring? No one really knows. Looking back is easier—we know what the past is. For good or bad, it’s done. Before long, this past year that was so current, so vital and cutting-edge yesterday will start to feel stale and dated. Old. Has been. Whether we look back on it as the good old days or some kind of personal dark age doesn’t change the fact that we will look back on it. There was a New Year’s Day last year, too. Do you remember it? Or ten years ago, or twenty? Last Halloween I saw that they were selling ’90’s costumes, as if the ’90’s weren’t just last week. But they did look a bit funny.

A Christmas Selection Box 2024

One of the standard features of Christmas in Ireland is the chocolate selection box. It’s a great tradition—who wouldn’t like a box filled with a variety of different chocolates to enjoy over the holidays? I can’t give you chocolate today, but I’ve made it a tradition to collect and share a variety of Christmas treats every December from around the internet. Enjoy!

Some Of My Favourite Bluegrass

I grew up in the hills a couple of hours south of Nashville, in the heartland of country music. The radio played songs like Imagine That and Where The Green Grass Grows, but I never imagined that I would end up living in a place where the grass is as green as it is here in Ireland. I also married a girl from the mountains of Virginia, and her family helped me discover a world of music where the grass is not green—it’s blue. Bluegrass is a part of my cultural heritage (with deep roots in traditional Irish music as well), and my love for it has only grown with time. So today I’d like to share my favourite bluegrass tunes with you.