Lecture title: Making bad, making good: Educating for identity from local to global
Speaker: Professor Michael Howlett
“This country is dead or dying of its false materialism. Where the mistake is made is in seeing life as a purely material thing” wrote the poet Patrick Kavanagh in his short-lived Kavanagh’s Weekly in April, 1952. Included in the list of symptoms of death are: an inability to think and the depreciation of thinking and reflecting, financial greed, emigration, sensational vulgarity, romanticized Irishness, the stupidity and mediocrity of politicians who offer no integrative vision, and a religion that has not the energy to carry meaning because its core, spirituality has run dry. His comments remain as valid, maybe even more so, in 2015.
True materialism, for Kavanagh, on the other hand, is that “which is based on realities, which brings an enthusiasm for life, (which) ... itself is a sort of madness, something out of a transcendent imagination”. The energetic reality of life comes from the imagination. Allowing it to roam through our being gives us a new perspective on reality and identity. What does this mean and how does Kavanagh understand imagination, and through it, develop and grow identity?
For Kavanagh, reality takes shape in a network of relationships in which every human being is involved with their environment. Its centre is “man-in-this-world”. Each human being relates firstly, to other human beings in this network, secondly, to the material environment, and thirdly, to the source of material and human creation which the believer usually names as God. Using this network of relationships, Professor Howlett's lecture explored, through the inspiration of writers of poetry and prose, such as Kavanagh, Joyce, Heaney, Dunne, and many others, the crises of identity in contemporary civilisation and culture, and how educating for identity can help imagine a better quality of life that is both stable and sustainable.
This was the second lecture of the WIT Professorial Public Lecture Series.