A fragment of the Nobel lecture delivered by the Nobel Laureate David Trimble, Oslo, December 10, 1998

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1457.

Your Majesties, Members of the Nobel, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen!

The Nobel Prize for Peace this year goes to two politicians from Northern Ireland. But in one sense, the singling out of one or two persons must always seem something of an injustice. In Northern Ireland I could name scores of people, Unionist and nationalist, who deserve this Prize as well. Add to that the thousands of people, who I do not know, but who have born witness in their lives by carrying out what Wordsworth calls “those little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love”.

And since there thousands of such heroes and heroines in Northern Ireland, how many more millions of peacemakers must there be across the globe? Naturally, it is not possible to name each and everyone of these heroes and heroines who are at work for peace around the world. But even if is not possible to name them, we can note their presence on the peace lines of the world.

Having said that, I am anxious to allay any concerns that you may have that I would fail to pick up either the medal or the cheque. People of Northern Ireland are not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth. And it's imperative that I take the medal home, if only to prove that I've been to Oslo. And the way politics works in Northern Ireland – if John Hume has a medal, then I must have one too.

Now, there is no such thing as a free lunch. That being so, we are obliged to sing for our supper. Some expect us to speak as experts and hand out advice on how to make peace. Old hands say, that there are two ways to sing for your supper. The first and the safest course, they say, is to make a series of vague and visionary statements.

Indeed, are not vague and visionary statements much the same thing? The tradition, from which I come, and by which I am not confined, produced the first vernacular Bible in the language of the common people and contributed much to the scientific language of the Enlightenment. It puts a great price on the precise use of words, so much so, that our passion for precision is often confused with an indifference to idealism.

That is not so. But I am personally and, perhaps, culturally conditioned to be sceptical of speeches, which are full of sound and fury, idealistic in intention, but impossible of implementation; and I resist that sort of rhetoric. Instinctively, I identify with the person who said, that whenever he heard a politician talk of vision, he advised him to consult an optician!

But if you want to hear of a possible Northern Ireland, not a Utopia, but a normal and decent society, flawed as human beings are flawed, but fair as human beings are fair, then I hope not to disappoint you.

The second situation is that either John, or I, or indeed both of us might explicate at some little length like peace scientists so to speak, on any lessons learnt in the little laboratory of Northern Ireland as if we were scientists and the people were so much mice.

Now, speaking for myself, there are two good reasons to reject this course. First, I am not sure that I hold the status of scientist in the political laboratory of Northern Ireland. Indeed, there have been days, when I felt much less like the scientist, and very much more like the mouse!

Secondly, I have, in fact, some fairly serious reservations about using any conflict, not least Northern Ireland as a model for the study, never mind the solution, of other conflicts.

And if anything, the opposite is true.

And let me spell this out.

I believe that a sense of the unique, specific and concrete circumstances of any situation is the first indispensable step to solving the problems posed by that situation.

Now, I wish I could say that insight was my own. But it's not. That insight into the central role of concrete and specific circumstances is the bedrock of the political thought of a man who is universally recognised as one of the most eminent philosophers of practical politics.

And I refer, of course, to the eminent eighteenth century Irish political philosopher and brilliant British Parliamentarian Edmund Burke.

He was the most powerful and prophetic political intellect of that century. He anticipated and welcomed the American revolution. He anticipated the dark side of the French revolution. He delved deep into the roots of that political violence based on the false notion of the perfectibility of man, which has plagued us since the French revolution. He is claimed by both conservatives and liberals. He can be claimed by Britain and Ireland, by catholic and protestant and indeed by the world. For his belief in the rule of law and parliamentary democracy as not our monopoly, but the birthright of men and women in all countries, all colours, all creeds.

But of course he has special significance for us in Ireland. Burke, the son of a protestant father and a catholic mother, was a man who in word and in deed honoured both religious traditions, recognised and respected his Irish roots and the British Parliamentary system which nursed him to the full flowering of his genius. Today as we seek to decommission not only arms and ammunition, but also hearts and minds, Burke provides us not only with a powerful role model of the pluralist Irishman, but also with a powerful role model for politicians everywhere.

He is the best model for what might be called politicians of the possible, who seek to make a working peace, not in some perfect world but in this, the flawed world, which is our only workshop.

Because he is the philosopher of practical politics, because his beliefs correspond to empirical experience, he may be a good general guide to the practical politics of peacemaking.

I shall also be calling on two others, Amos Oz, the distinguished Israeli writer who has reached out to the Arab tradition, and George Kennan, the former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who laid the cornerstone of post-war US foreign policy.

All three are particularly acute about the problems of dealing with revolutionary violence – that political, religious and racial terrorism that comes from the pursuit of what Burke called abstract virtue, the urge to make men perfect against their will.

Now these negative notes do not mean that I have not good news at the end. I do. But, it would be a dereliction of duty if I only conjured up good and generous ghosts, and failed to specify the spectres at the feast.

For there are fascist forces in this world. And the first step to their defeat is to define them. And let me now, with the help of Burke, and Oz and Kennan, locate the dark fountain from which flows most of the political, religious and racial violence which pollutes the progressive achievements of humanity.

Burke believed that the source of the pollution is the Platonic pursuit of abstract perfection, the passion to change other people's views, other people's personal, political, religious or economic views by political violence. I say Platonic because that savage pursuit of abstract perfection starts in the Western world with Plato's Republic. It rises to a plateau with the French and Russian revolutions. It descended to new depths with the Nazis and is present in all the national, ethnic and religious conflicts current after the collapse of communism, itself the most determined and ruthless experiment in perfecting the economic system whatever the cost in human life.

Burke challenged this Platonic perfectibility doctrine whose principal protagonist was Rousseau. Rousseau regarded man as perfect and society as corrupt. Burke believed man was flawed and society was redemptive. The French revolution tested these theories and it was Burke's that proved the most progressive.

He had a horror of abstract notions. As early as 1781 he said, "Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found." Seven years later he opposed that revolution correctly predicting that the mob would be replaced by a cabal, and the cabal by a dictator.

At the end of Rousseau's road, Burke predicted, we would find not the perfectibility of man but the gibbet and the guillotine. And so it proved. And so it proved when Stalin set out to perfect the new Soviet man. So it proved with Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia. And so it will prove in every conflict when perfection is sought at the point of a gun.

Amos Oz has also arrived at the same conclusion. Recently in a radio programme he was asked to define a political fanatic. And he did so as follows, "A political fanatic" he said, "is someone who is more interested in you than in himself."

At first that might make him sound like an altruist, but look closer and you will see the terrorist.

A political fanatic is not someone who wants to perfect himself. No, he wants to perfect you. He wants to perfect you personally, to perfect you politically, to perfect you religiously, or racially, or geographically.

He wants you to change your mind, he wants to change your government, your borders. He may not be able to change your race, so he will eliminate you from the perfect equation in his mind by eliminating you from the earth.

htth://www.euronews.net, 10.12.1998,

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1998/trimble-lecture.html