Saving Ireland's Doll House

on the Women's Day referendum

With the ascent to management of (what is left of) the democratic franchise of the millennials, a new phenomenon may be transmogrifying the activity hitherto known as democratic participation. With previous generations, there was a tendency among the elders to speak of ‘apathy’, ‘cynicism’ and alienation’ as explanations for the recurring abstentionism of the young.  

There was a view—and some evidence to back it up—that this early tendency eventually usually gave way to varying degrees of engagement. But the new, post-millennial generations are of an entirely different character to those which preceded them. They are accommodated and acclimatised to engaging with what seems to them to be reality in a far more immediate way than democratic procedures conventionally allow—i.e. via Google, social networking and instant text and speaking connectivity via smartphones, iPads and laptops.

These technologies appear to older generations to be add-ons to the world and to the technologies which had been familiar to them through these second half of the last century. But to the younger generations they amount to something else: the means to build a mirror image of reality in which it is possible to live a different kind of freedom to that which their parents recognised. In this world, it is possible to recreate your identity as you please, to define yourself in accordance with your deepest desiring. 

You are not hidebound by facts or traditions or laws. This metaphorical world, unlike the real one, supplies its own ready-made meanings: friendship without the burden of intimacy and neediness, ideals that can be shared in short sentences with like-minded people, fame that cannot fade because it exists as a fantasy which the technology seems eternally capable of making come true.

In this new dispensation, referendums are, in a sense, games. They make no difference in the immediate moment, and yet can be the occasion of hysterical celebration by the victors, as occurred in the wake of the 2018 abortion-sanctioning referendum in the yard of Dublin Castle, as though Ireland had won the World Cup rather than sanctioning the slaughter of countless innocents. Now we can see the consequence of this game, in the mounting piles of the corpses of children who will never learn to walk or talk, never have a first day at school, never head a football, never dance a hornpipe, never have a first kiss and never take their own child by the hand and lead her up the pathway to her first day at school. No matter: the righteous won ‘the game.’

This ‘game’ was ‘played’ in a manner remarkably comparable to the way one might play a video game: a kind of detached involvement by citizens who had never before shown any great interest in the public realm, suddenly becoming animated about politics, and curiously tolerant of their far too shiny suits. Perhaps this is because they were not really participating in a public event, but in a kind of closed gameworld in their heads, in which the object of winning was the sole consideration — the point being the achievement of an arcane emotional satisfaction based on the triumph of received beliefs or self-insinuated ‘heroes.’ 

‘A game’, writes Chris Crawford in The Art of Computer Game Design, ‘must have a clearly defined goal. This goal  must be expressed in terms of the effect that it will have on the player. It is not enough to declare that a game will be enjoyable, fun, exciting, or good; the goal must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will engender in its audience.’

Doll play has been a feature of childhood since about the same time, and was at the time taken seriously as a means of introducing girls to the concepts of motherhood, childbirth and domesticity.  Now, this very day, we are at the point of unravelling this carefully-constructed culture, contemplating the removal of the words ‘mothers’ and ‘woman’ from the Irish Constitution. It is as though the crisis of life is being dismantled before moving on to a new town, even as the applause of the crowd still tings in the ears of the affable acrobats now rolling up the tarpaulins and loading them into the coloured wagons.

A game is a closed system, a safe space in which the player is able to enter into various forms of conflict without risking loss of comfort, warmth, security, gratification or personal safety. All games have common features, above all the ‘magic circle’ which defines the space and logic of the game and makes of it a closed world, to which entry is voluntary but subject to certain conditions. In the 17th century, following the ‘invention’ of leisure time as a result of the industrial revolution having drawn a line between work and social time, games acquired a new significance and popularity. 

Doll’s houses became a major leisure fashion in Europe, and not only for children: Grown women, especially those about to be married, offered a hugely lucrative market for such toys. In the Victorian era, paper dolls and scrapbook houses provided outlets for childish fantasies about adulthood, and these have been noted as being extraordinarily faithful to the actual lives of the children who played with them.

Gradually, in different parts of the civilised world, homemade dolls houses began to take on the role of reflecting the changing mōrēs and patterns of domestic life, became symbols of middle-class aspiration, helping subtly to drive forward the engines of American and European consumerism by getting to their targets’ hearts in the fast way known and at the earliest possible moment. In this way an ideal was created for domestic and familial bliss, facilitating fantasies about shopping, teas parties, bathing and dressing-up, upstairs-downstairs relationships, and so forth. 

Chris Crawford writes that a game is ‘a closed format that subjectively represents a subset of reality’. By ‘closed’ he means that the game on its own is ‘compete and self-sufficient as a structure’. As with a novel, no reference need be made to elements outside the game. ‘Some badly designed games fail to meet this requirement,’ he writes, however. ‘Such games produce disputes over the rules, for they allow situations to develop that the rules do not address. The players must then extend the rules to cover the situation in which they find themselves. This situation always produces arguments. A properly designed game precludes this possibility; it is closed because the rules cover all contingencies encountered in the game.’

We saw something like this in the same-sex marriage referendum also, when Yes advocates objected to issues like surrogacy and even parenthood being ‘dragged into’ the debate, even though it was quite clear that, in the context of putting same-sex marriage into the section of the Constitution headed ‘Family’, and extending marriage to couples who were incapable intrinsically of reproducing, these topics were highly germane.

A generation reared on video games had no capacity to comprehend the free-flow of a political debate; all that counted was what they wanted. To include elements like constitutional coherence and transparency would make the game too complicated, in computer game parlance a ‘dirty game’. Facts were inconvenient, as were inconsistencies and old-fashioned rules forbidding unpalatable behaviour by those on ‘their’ side. Their sense of self-righteousness trumped all that flopdoodlery. The ‘game’ had to be played within the narrow confines of a set of rules which deliberately excluded anything that might open up the argument in an unpredictable way.

Chris Crawford again: ‘A game that represents too large a subset of reality defies the player's comprehension and becomes almost indistinguishable from life itself, robbing the game of one of its most appealing factors, its focus.’

He continues: ‘A game creates a subjective and deliberately simplified representation of emotional reality. A game is not an objectively accurate representation of reality; objective accuracy is only necessary to the extent required to support the player's fantasy.’

A game, then, is ‘an artifice for providing the psychological experiences of conflict and danger while excluding their physical realizations.’

In short, a game is a safe way to experience reality. More accurately, the results of a game are always less harsh than the situations the game models. A player can blast the monsters all day long and risk only her quarter. She can amass huge financial empires and lose them in an hour without risking her piggy bank. She can lead great armies into desperate battles on which hang the fate of nations, all without shedding a drop of blood. In a world of relentless cause and effect, of tragic linkages and inevitable consequences, the disassociation of actions from consequences is a compelling feature of games.’

‘Dissociation’ is a good word to describe the conduct of recent-years discussions of Irish constitutional evolution. In all of the recent referendums, the defining tone was to suggest that the result was already written and had merely to be confirmed. It was, after all, the ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ thing to do. 

Of course the referendum game must eventually become serious when men and women in gowns and wigs set to unpicking the revisions and applying them to actually existing flesh-and-blood humans. One of the noticeable things about the ‘debates’ that preceded previous referendums — especially those of 2012, 2015 and 2018 — was that it was all but verboten to anticipate outcomes likely to arise from future legal actions. Such activity risked breaking the spell of the game by insinuating further problems when what was important was the dopamine-rush of count-day, rather than messy circumstances involving real people.

What is happening at the polling booths today is the playing out of a game, but only up to a point. That game, such as it may be, is between those who know and care and those who have been brought to believe that reality is a kind of room service which takes care of their necessities and leaves them only with time to kill, and virtue to exude.

For those of us who are old enough to retain the racial memory of struggle and hardship and grief, this is not, of course, a game. We know that what is in the Constitution matters, because of what it means in the greater scheme of things, and not what it most immediately delivers to our doors. We know that the Constitution is not a T-shirt, on to which we are invited to impress various slogans as to identity and perspective.

Our culture, which is to say the reality many of us still wish to live in, is being turned into a game — or an endless series of games — for the pleasure of generations who are unable or refusing to grow up. They are the rootless siblings of Alexander Mitscherlich’s theory of the Sibling Society which more than half a century ago he foresaw coming up around the bend.

They are more or less coterminous, also, with the Beautiful Nomads, those rootless, deracinated generations who bought into the consumer society while pretending otherwise, and now find themselves as though accidentally allied with the most sinister forces in the world.

For these ‘nomadic siblings,’ the object of everything is to be on the virtuous side of every argument, to reject anything smacking of tradition or inherited wisdom, and to manifest these anti-qualities in whatever ways suggest themselves: social media, Extinction Rebellion demos, toppling ‘racist’ statues, forging pat slogans with which to rewrite reality, and any opportunity to undo the allegedly ‘patriarchal’ past. All this amounts to chainsawing the pole that holds up the Big Top, or, more prosaically, sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.

The upshot of this is that this referendum is one in which these reckless airheads unwittingly or indifferently intend to deliver the final few sledgehammer blows to the document that undermines the meanings and aspiration and guarantees and acknowledgements of out together-love as a nation in history. In one they plan to dispense with the myth of motherhood and the idea that there is any difference between men and women; in the other they plan to split the atom that is the ‘fundamental unit group of (Irish) society,’ so that this island becomes, finally, a no-man’s-land upon which all may trample with equal indifference.

What will occur today, and which we shall know about tomorrow, will either be the final destruction of the ‘doll’s house’ of family and nation under God, or its last-minute rescue from the wrecking-ball of the quockerwodger vandals at the 11th house and the 59th minute.

What is happening today is a collision between the ‘sibling nomads’ and the last generations of Irish people who know and care for the past and seek to cherish it in a manner related to them from the time they could grasp the meaning of the word ‘nation.’ That would be us, you and me, and all those with whom we find common concern in these increasingly darkening times. 

For these Woke Nomads, these Beautiful Siblings, Ireland is so old and out-of-date that it is impossible for them to imagine it not being there. It is something to love (a little anyway), like a strict parent, or an eccentric granddad, but not in any way to be taken seriously as a factor connected to the future. They have broken ‘free’ of the ties of God, nation and, impendingly, family, and therefore constitute, so to speak, ideal citizens of the New Normal. 

They have not the faintest idea what might be the consequences of everything they believe, because they have never had to listen to anyone who was willing to tell them. In the heel of the hunt, they can take or leave Ireland — it depends on what it has to offer them, today or tomorrow - next week is too far ahead to think about. 

What is happening today, therefore, is about much more than rewriting a few sentences in the Irish Constitution. It is a perhaps last-gasp attempt by those of us who know and care to draw a line in the land and signal our determination to put a stop to what is being done to our country. This is why, although I agree with those who say that the political system is broken beyond repair, and therefore offers no way forward, I have here been moving towards making an exception. By the time you read this, I plan to have voted No, no, no, no more, no fucking way! 

This is the game that might put an end to the games, that has the potential for putting down a marker that could well be the starting line of a whole new phase in our national life. This may be the day we finally queer the quockerwodgocracy. I have never felt so positive about anything for a long time. But let us not tempt Fate too much, and instead mutter a prayer that tomorrow will dawn to a new era of common sense in this dear land of our hearts’ desiring.

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