Latha math dhuibh, a chàirdean, agus fàilte air ais chun a’ Chomh-shrutha!
Good evening everyone, and welcome back to the Confluence!
Is mise an t-Ollamh Àdhamh Dàmaireach
I’m Dr. Adam Dahmer
And I have the great honor of filling in today for the incomparable Dr. Margaret Bennett, who has, sadly, found herself unable to deliver her planned keynote address.
Now I must confess, in the interest of modesty, that my gain in this regard is quite possibly your loss. Dr. Bennett is arguably the most renowned and highly respected Gaelic scholar currently alive, and was cutting her proverbial teeth in that discipline decades before I was cutting my literal ones.
Suffice it to say, therefore, that I have some ample shoes to fill, although, as we say in Gaelic, nì mi mo dhìcheall! (I’ll do my best!)
Although we may be bereft of Dr. Bennett’s company, we are blessed to find ourselves in the midst of numerous other intelligent, passionate and interesting people today. For instance, like many of you, I recently had the privilege of observing the earlier panel on Indigeneity, Autochthony, and Gaelic identity. It seemed to me to be a highly stimulating discussion that clearly displayed the expertise of the panelists, and in terms not only of their knowledge, but of their wisdom – a commodity perhaps all too often lacking in academe, and not only there, but in the world at large.
Indeed, although the sum of human knowledge is, by many metrics, greater than ever it has previously been, the means by which that knowledge is disseminated and applied seem, in far too many instances, to be little tempered by wisdom.
This is no secret. Apart from some few sanguine voices – the Stephen Pinkers of the world, who (like inverse Cassandras, or a certain dog in a burning house whose image is much beloved by millennial internet users) declare that, despite all evidence to the contrary, everything is fine – most people can perceive that something is very wrong with the civilizational status quo.
Ever-growing numbers of people throughout the Western World – and, indeed, throughout the world at large – are coming increasingly to the realization that the prevailing world order (the globe-spanning nexus of industrial, capitalist nation-states and corporations in which we all live, and into which most of those now alive were born), has proved to be neither ever-living, nor ever-young. Daily, it shows its age, and it has not aged with grace.
Though we increasingly depend on the institutions of modernity for our survival, we see more and more clearly that in giving us what have become the necessities of life, these institutions are quite literally killing us. The fossil fuels from which we derive the electricity with which we heat and brighten our homes is slowly and inexorably incinerating our planet. The various chemical derivatives of these same fuels – the plastics and other synthetic substances that allow, directly or indirectly, for fast cars, fast food, and fast fashion – are now found in a great many places they ought rightly not to be: not only in mariachi suits, but the Marianas trench; not only in our handbags, but in our heart-valves; not only in our Tupperware, but in our testicles; and not only in our brake pads, but in our brains.
It’s enough to make one think – even if one is perhaps otherwise little inclined toward thinking. For example, a certain uncomfortably powerful, orange-tinted man in a white-painted house has lately alleged that the very blood of his countrymen is being poisoned. As it happens, science bears out that assertion – although the culprit is not, as this gentlemen (and I use the term loosely) has alleged, undocumented immigrants, but well-documented industries.
And so it is that by blaming immigrants for the crimes of industry, all while giving the latter an increasingly free rein, this tyrant in tangerine, and all those like him, pour torrents of fuel on the very world-consuming fires they claim to be in the process of putting out.
But what, you may ask, have these observations – you might even uncharitably say ‘these polemics’ – have to do with minority languages at all, let alone the Scottish Gaelic which is allegedly the theme of this Confluence.
In answering that question in brief, I might reply, in a word, ‘everything’. In answering at length, I might turn instead to an emblem of industrial capitalist modernity no less odious to many than the earlier mentioned ogre in orange. You might recognize her as among the most strident champions of both free markets and fierce misanthropy; as the pauper who most vociferously hated (with exception of herself) the poor; and one of very few twentieth century women to have ever advocated, in print, for the right of heterosexual men to commit sexual assault. Failing that, you might have heard of one of her more popular books, Atlas Shrugged. Less famous, however, than her thesis that society would collapse into utter chaos without the constant meddling of venture capitalists and CEOs is the following quote:
The three values which men had held for centuries and which have now collapsed are: mysticism, collectivism, altruism. […] It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it.
End quote.
In concurrence with the quote, I observe that mysticism, collectivism, and altruism have little to no acknowledged place in the social gestalt of the modern West.
Mysticism, as defined as the belief that existence can transcend physicality and materiality, is almost nowhere to be found, even among the most ardently religious. For many an evangelical Christian, for instance, hell is place you could dig to if you had a big enough drill, and God is a magical old white man who sits on a throne in the sky, and who will reward His followers with bodily resurrection if they do whatever he says. For many an atheist, the contrary stance is simple materialism: there is no man on a throne in the sky, and so there can be no God. Despite their diametric opposition, adherents to either position could agree, essentially, that, ultimately, only matter matters – that consciousness and experience and being are necessarily tethered to, or even resultant from, their physical manifestations. Such beliefs reaffirm the existentialist aphorism that ‘existence precedes essence’ – that the nature of a thing is the product of its material circumstances, its physicality. So much, it would seem, for mysticism.
Collectivism, for its part, as defined as the willingness of people to cooperate in mutually beneficial ways, is similarly at a low ebb in our society. The individualism that pervades our culture peripheralizes or even forbids collective effort. All of our most iconic heroes and villains – from the lone ranger, to the lone gunman, to the lone survivor, to the lone genius – seem to have one attribute in common, and to otherwise eschew all efforts at commonality. Why should anyone cooperate for shared rewards when they could compete and win outright? Never mind that any competitive situation that produces winners necessarily also produces losers – an insight which brings us to our next point.
Altruism, which can be synonymized with the word ‘selflessness’, and described as the willingness to eschew personal pleasure in order to bring pleasure to others, is all but dead in much of the modern world. And no wonder, as its core components, empathy (that is, the ability, at some level, to feel other people’s emotions by imagining oneself in another’s situation) and equity (that is, equality of outcome, and the belief in the justice of that principle) have fallen so dramatically from official favor that both are under direct attack by the leader of the so-called free world: a world so named, it would seem, because, in it, even the most powerful are free – of all obligation to their fellow human beings. After all, in the absence of altruism, why should anyone be ashamed to enrich himself at the expense of others, so long as he does so happily? And why should he not do so happily, if he neither allows himself to evaluate his actions from anyone else’s perspective, nor believes that it is wrong, in any case, to self-indulge while others starve?
Uill, a chàirdean, sin mar a tha e.
Well, my friends, that’s how it is.
It looks as though a certain aforementioned novelist – and perhaps her old friend, Milton Friedman – have had their way with the world as graphically and thoroughly as certain of her male protagonists have had their way with her harridan heroines.
It is also – and here, perhaps mercifully, we finally reach the crux of my argument – a world wholly unlike that which indigenous and autochthonous peoples once inhabited, and which many of them inhabit still today.
In the Gàidhealtachd (that is, the Gaelic world), mysticism, collectivism, and altruism have prevailed since time immemorial. Although the Gaelic words that might correspond directly to their English counterparts in this context are somewhat obscure (fàidheantas, meaning literally ‘prophesy’, for mysticism; co-obrachadh, meaning literarally ‘co-working’ or ‘cooperation’, for collectivism; and fial-chridheachd, meaning literally ‘generous-heartedness’, for altruism), the ideas the English words represent are more faithfully expressed by the Gaelic words dùthchas, dualchas, and coimhearsnachd.
These words, much discussed in current discourse on the reclamation of Gaelic indigeneity, are notoriously difficult to translate. The first two, dùthchas and dualchas, are often both rendered as ‘heritage’ or ‘tradition’, whereas coimhearsnachd tends to be treated as meaning ‘community’ or ‘neighborhood’. A closer look, however, reveals a far greater depth of meaning. Dùthchas – a relative of the word dùthaich (that is, ‘country’) – refers to one’s connection to the land one stewards, including personal, communal, and hereditary obligations to that land.
Dualchas – from the root dual, meaning ‘inheritance’ – means the connection to one’s ancestors. This is not, it should be emphasized, the intergenerational connection once imagined to inhere in bloodlines and now celebrated as deriving from one’s DNA. If culture were hereditary in that way, then we at this conference wouldn’t have to go to all the trouble of saving Gaelic, because almost everyone with a ‘Mac’ in their surname would already be merrily prattling away in it. Although, as earlier mentioned, the blood of such people is probably choc-full of phthalates and microplastics, it is seemingly devoid of Gaelic. Indeed, one’s dualchas is not in ones genes – although, with a slightly different spelling, it could be in ones jeans (that is, J E A NS – at least if one comes from a family of tailors). That’s because, just as dùthchas is the spiritual reservoir ones fills by learning the ways of the land to whom one belongs (like what plants to eat, and when to eat them; how much rain and snow falls, and in what seasons; the names and habits of the animals; and best paths to take from place to place at different times of year), dualchas is the spiritual reservoir one fills by learning the ways of the *people* to whom one belongs (like their songs and stories; their dances and games; their arts and crafts; and how they collect, clean, and cook their favorite foods).
Both dùthchas and dualchas are intimately connected to coimhearsnachd – a word which means literally ‘neighbourliness’. A coimhearsach – without that final ‘d’ – is a Gaelic word for ‘neighbour’. That term, in turn, is thought by some to derive from comh-àras-neach – a three word compound meaning, literally, ‘co-place-person’, or ‘one who shares space’. As such, one’s coimhearsnachd, or neighborliness, can be understood as the means by which one healthily cohabitates with those who share one’s dùthchas (that is, place heritage), and the way one cultivates coimhearsnachd is by sharing one’s dualchas (that is, one’s community heritage). Like most cultural nations throughout human history, the Gaels know, or at least once knew, that cultivating shared traditions and lifeways together is the essence of building community. Survival, even of the individual, is not achieved *through* the individual, but rather by collective effort, wherein many hands make light work, many voices share the same songs, many feet dance the same steps, and the life of one is the life of all.
Agus sin mar a *bha* an saoghal – agus, is dòcha, mar a bhitheas a-rithist e.
And that is how the world *was* – and, perhaps, how it will be again.
All we have to do in order to achieve that world is to re-indiginize, or at least to re-autochthonize: to thumb our collective nose at certain orange people in certain white houses, and at certain loud-mouthed emigrés who would close the door behind them – be they Russian, as in our earlier example, or, as it may be in a more recent instance, South African. We must accept that the poison in our collective blood is neither the work of immigrants nor empathy, but the result of our ever more lethal disconnection from one another and the natural world. We must realize that the very mysticism, collectivism, and altruism that some so have so despised and disparaged are not the cause of what ails us, but its only cure.
On the subject of antidotes, I feel that – having exposed you to the venom of that earlier Ayn Rand quote – I now owe you an equal and opposite quote, to balm the wound.
As such, I leave you with a message from another novelist who – though not only an Englishman, but a Commander of the British Empire – was often surprisingly insightful when it came to the diagnosis and treatment of societal evils. I share with you know an inkling – pun intended – of his wisdom:
Bless’d are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).
Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair,
and those that hear them yet may yet beware.
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have tuned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.
I would that I might with the minstrels sing
and stir the unseen with a throbbing string.
I would be with the mariners of the deep
that cut their slender planks on mountains steep
and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest,
for some have passed beyond the fabled West.
End quote.
That, my friends, is the very task before us: to pass beyond the gloaming of the West and emerge into the light of suns yet unseen, bearing with us the worthiest of the gifts bequeathed to us by our ancestors, so that we in turn may pass them on to our descendants, to whom they rightfully belong. On this great quest, we work together, and help one another, for we will arrive as one, or not at all.
And so I say to you, in classic Gaelic fashion, gus bris an latha – till the day dawns.
SPLANG! Gàidhlig ann an Ceanndachaidh | SPLANG! Scottish Gaelic in Kentucky 