Individuals and communities…

England was merry this past week as bars, restaurants, cinemas, theatres and art galleries opened up – Church services had been available for weeks. But people were urged to be cautious. The message from the authorities was insistant: “don’t think as an individual: think of how your behaviour may affect others.”

Cultural nudge

In its way, this is an interesting little cultural nudge in a new – or rather, older – direction. Individualism has been king, queen and emperor of modern thinking since the 1970s. Personal choice has been the prevailing mantra in everything from advertising to medical ethics. But now the powers that be have been urging us to think in terms of community, society, even the common good.

The pandemic may have been an agent of change on mindsets and mentality.

Not that there isn’t sometimes tension and conflict between the interests and desires of the individual, and the good of the community. I choose to drive my car to see friends and family because it’s convenient for me. But when I found myself sitting in a snarl of traffic for 50 minutes, I was told that I should have taken the bus, instead of contributing to vehicle congestion!

These tensions have arisen over the ethical and moral debates we’ve seen in our time, and they are evident again in the current conversation about assisted dying.

It is understandable, in painful and distressing cases, that a person might wish their life to be brought to an end. People can get to a point in the last part of their lives where they really do want to die. And there have always been cases where ‘mercy-killing’ was compassionately regarded – it has occurred on the battlefield, when a mortal agony has invited quick dispatch, and the act forgiven, though not sanctioned. Thankfully, better medical care today can greatly ease terminal pain, and should be used to the full.

But once assisted dying becomes an accepted social practice, it gradually moves towards euthanasia, and the common good of care for the dying, and respect for human life is diminished.

Personal choice

It is my belief that assisted dying also promotes, even if unintentionally, the ideation of suicide as a ‘personal choice’. This is so dangerous, especially for young people who may make terrible decisions impulsively. In every case of suicide that I have known, the ripple effects have gone on for years.

Yes, maybe the pandemic has served to revive John Donne’s words: “no man is an island.” Everything we do affects others.

Grammatical games

Josepha Madigan Tweeted that she was pleased to have done a reading “at mass”, to which I cheekily responded “at mass what?” The increasing use of lower-case ‘mass’ for ‘Mass’ introduces confusion, where language should clarify (‘mass demonstrations: mass military manoeuvres’ describes a collective quantity: ‘Mass’ refers to the Eucharistic rite.) To her credit, she apologised.

Actually, I’m not a good grammarian and I make regular errors of syntax. But I like to learn, and I’ve had an entertaining email which illuminates much about the use of English.

“An Oxford comma walks into a bar where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

“A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

“A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

“An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

“Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

“A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall, but hoping to nip it in the bud.

“Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

“The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

“A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

“A synonym strolls into a tavern.

“A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

“The conditional would have walked into a bar, had it only known.”

Schoolteachers: please pass it on!

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Senior moment!  I referred last week to “the poet Augustus John” who spent holidays in Ennistymon in Co. Clare. Mr John was a famous painter, not a poet, as was his sister, Gwen. His frolics in Ireland are described in an autobiography by Nicolette Devas, Two Flamboyant Fathers, referring to Francis Macnamara, the local bard, and the painter Augustus John. It is now out of print, but I’ll gladly send my copy to Ennistymon local library – if they’d like this interesting glimpse of the 1930s in their locality, with its “active social life of dancing, singing, fiddling and story-telling”.