The Dead Hand of Conventional Wisdom

Last week Brian Cowan made a speech. It was a mediocre speech. Nonetheless, he got a standing ovation for it. The reason for this is clear: He made the speech to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, surely a disproportionally FF-supporting crowd. They’d have given him a standing ovation if he’d turned up and made armpit farts for 20 minutes. As it happened, the speech was competent, no more.

The political journalists decided that this represented a resurrection, the emergence of a new Brian Cowan, energised and ready to lead his party and nation. Cowan, the consensus went, “had a good week” A week later an opinion poll suggests that Cowan didn’t have a good week, not at all.

This is how conventional wisdom develops: A press officer or party hack manages to persuade a single journalist that black is white. The journalist mentions in his column, in that knowing tone that journalists are so fond of, that (“of course”) black is white. He says it to his colleagues over drinks too. His colleagues like the confidence, the smug aplomb with which he was made this statement. It has all the trappings that attract journalists: it is the kind of thing which can be attributed to “seasoned observers of the political scene”. It carries the tang of insider knowledge. The very fact that it is plainly untrue works in its advantage: “Seasoned Observers” are no fools. We know they are no fools because that would make us fools too. Why would they believe that black is white, unless it was actually true? They must know something that we don’t, which is an intolerable notion – what’s the point in being a journalist if you can’t know things that other people don’t?

That settles it. Black is White is the new journalistic line, and it appears in every newspaper. Serious People, people who read too many newspapers and believe what they read therein, people who think they know a lot about politics, begin repeating it, because to state the obvious, that black is black, is to sound naïve and out of the loop.

The circle is closed when politicians begin repeating that Black is White, as if it wasn’t a political message, but a universal and eternal truth. The press has made it seem so by turning it into a cliché, something so uncontroversial and so obviously true that to question it is to look like a madman. “Well John”, Dick Roche says on Questions and Answers, “As we all know, Black is White”. John Bowman nods sagely, because he’s as bad as any of them, and would die rather than point out the truth. Conventional wisdom is what happens when fiction is more respectable than the truth. Pointing out that black is not and could never be white marks you as a frivolous person – Serious People prefer the respectable fiction of the conventional wisdom over the disreputable truth.

This is the conventional wisdom factory that gave us such hits as “Of course, Bertie Ahern isn’t interested in money” and “Ireland is a firm believer in the European Project”. Sometimes, people are so wedded to these delusions that they hang on to them even when they have been proven to be untrue. Thus it was today when a new opinion poll confirmed what was obvious to anyone outside the conventional wisdom feedback loop: Brian Cowan had an absolutely terrible week, one of the latest in a series of terrible weeks. His speech was mediocre at best, and the notion that he or anyone else in his party is somehow rejuvenated is so much hogwash. So what’s this Fionnán Sheehan of the Irish Independent has to say? “the opinion poll was taken after a relatively good week for the Taoiseach. There was a widespread perception of a “lift” in the public mood after his impassioned speech last Thursday.” * It’s worth pausing for a moment to examine this assertion.

Firstly, was there in fact, a “lift” in the public mood? I saw none. But what would I know, being merely a member of said public, and sharer of said mood? I am not a journalist, and lack their mystical ability to divine the mood of the nation. Secondly, how “widespread” was the “perception” that such a “lift” did indeed occur? Not very, for I met no-one who shared it. Who did the perceiving, and with what senses? Was it a matter of smell or one of touch? Perhaps granny felt it in her dodgy hip.

This non-existent lift, having been “perceived” by who knows who, is presumably what gave Cowan his “relatively good week”. So wedded is Fionnán Sheehan to his “relatively good week” fiction, that he states it as fact, even as he admits that the moods and perceptions underpinning it were illusory. It is like asserting without evidence that it’s been snowing all night, looking out the window to see no sign of any snow, and saying “how odd that I can’t see any snow. After all, it has been snowing all night”.

One of the reasons nothing ever gets done in this country is that the dead hand of conventional wisdom weighs down on anyone who dares even imagine things might change. “Can’t be done” says the conventional wisdom. Reply that a quick consultation of reality will show that it can, and you have excluded yourself from the ranks of respectable delusionists. But with Fianna Fail, ordained by convention to always be the largest party in Ireland, now languishing third in the polls, it is surely time to ditch convention and deal with a reality that is rather more radical than many are prepared to admit.

*Despite it being there this morning, and being the front page story on the print edition, I can find no sign of this article on inedependent.ie