The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Why so serious?
- The Joker
I knew things were about to get pretty Serious when I saw Stephen Collins. The Irish Times columnist had written yet another piece explaining we’d better start acting like adults because our betters in Europe and the United States aren’t looking at us favourably right now. “What few people in Ireland appreciate is that our neutrality is widely regarded as a joke by outsiders, particularly as we spend such a derisory amount on defence,” he wrote last week – without citations. “It is time to get real about defence.”
Collins doesn’t need references – he’s a Serious Guy. If you’ve ever picked up a broadsheet you’ve encountered them. They’re usually male and middle-aged, wearing a solemn expression indicating anguish about the prospect of falling house prices in south Dublin. They say things like politics is the art of the possible and this budget should be sensible and at the end of the day, elections are about getting votes. Their mugshots next to the serif font. This is a Very Serious Publication.
Seriousness is a political sensibility that places supreme value on being perceived as serious. It fetishises mannerisms and tone that imply insight into complex matters but don’t necessarily demonstrate it. Business Post editor Daniel McConnell insisting Ireland can’t expect to be “taken seriously” without being in Nato. Institute of International and European Affairs chief economist Dan O’Brien warning the Occupied Territories Bill warrants serious debate. DCU political scientist Eoin O'Malley describing Sinn Féin's attempt "to become a more mainstream party, one that might be taken seriously as a prospective party of government”. Another issue, another Serious Guy, talking about it, Seriously.
It seems we’ve reached Peak Seriousness. Serious Guys control the broadsheets and have captured the airwaves. They host podcasts with names like Path to Power and Inside Politics. They cite each other’s work, nodding in agreement at how Serious they all are. These men share a single concern that eclipses all others: Seriousness itself.
On one level Seriousness is a form of gatekeeping engaged in by elite, political entities – media, think tanks, lobbying groups and consultancies – which impose certain customs and behaviours as a prerequisite for entry. Want to work with the Sunday Independent? Well, you’d better be Serious, brother.
The proliferation of Serious Opinion however relates to what publications really give their readers. In The Consumer Society, Jean Baudrillard wrote that under capitalism, consumption is about more than satisfying our material needs – it’s about identity. When washing machines emerged, he wrote, they represented modern living, not just devices for cleaning clothes. As televisions and cars arrived they too were associated with modernity. Consumer culture turns products into vast systems of meaning that influence how we view ourselves and others. We don't just purchase things for their utility but for what they signify.
Media adheres to this logic. Irish broadsheets sell more than news and analysis – they sell a variation of the identity of someone who reads serious newspapers. “Trusted journalism since 1859,” the Irish Times tells us on its front page. This isn’t just any old rag – this is the paper of record, offering you membership of a third-level educated, cosmopolitan intelligentsia with others concerned with international affairs, who revere the European Union, who worry about Ireland's standing in the world. Their rivals in the Irish Independent are pragmatic and industrious, interested in facts and figures rather than abstractions. And most Serious of all, the Business Post, is for the financially literate, those who read about grown-up things like the stock market and the airport cap.
Their shared audience: middle and upper-class types who use credentials and cultural markers to fortify their position in society. The press knows exactly who its customers are too. The Irish Times' rate card reports “1,523,000 Irish adults reached every week" of whom "808,000 (53 percent) are ABC1, 15 percent higher than the national average." If you’re selling Seriousness, signifiers for building an identity, you need a stable of Serious Guys on hand, each affecting Seriousness in their own way. This is why so many Serious journalists and commentators are fixated on appearances – their livelihoods depend on them.
Turning the Seriousness up to 11
Serious Guys’ desire for approval has them support anything the neoliberal consensus demands: abolishing Irish neutrality and embracing European militarisation; financialising the housing market; basing our economy on the tax receipts of a handful of US corporations. They pride themselves on their realism and realpolitik, on their understanding that things like building public housing on public land or ending the partition of Ireland can’t happen in the real world.
Seriousness has a specific function in the media: setting the boundaries of acceptable opinion and marginalising particular views by branding them Simply Not Serious. And its adherents, once vetted and sworn in by the institutions they serve, act as enforcers. Their job is to ensure that anyone seeking approval from establishment media circles proves just how Serious they are.
"As they demonstrated this week – warning that a left-wing government would face being overthrown by the gardaí and the army at the behest of the ruling class – they are deeply unserious about lots of things, including actually being in government" wrote perhaps the Most Serious Man in Ireland, Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy, in March 2023.
For Leahy, An Garda Síochána is a flawed but essentially benign organisation that would never interfere in politics – to think otherwise is to invite charges of recklessness and irresponsibility. It would never, for example, send its officers to commit perjury while testifying at the trial of activists accused of falsely imprisoning a minister.
Reporters and commentators applied this same level of analysis to our recent presidential election. Heather Humphreys was deemed Serious, maybe because as social protection minister she refused to meet disability activists appalled by her proposed “reforms” that would require quarterly interrogations to justify receiving state support. Maybe it was her promise to “never criticise our allies” and her attacks on Catherine Connolly for breaking taboos – our president elect’s refusal to genuflect to DC and her assertions of Palestinian self-determination.
The attempts at what lobbyist and political commentator Ivan Yates might call a “smear campaign” didn’t work. Because the world of Seriousness is insular. Its notions about what constitutes a scandal didn’t resonate with voters. To people outside their bubble – to the Unserious – it doesn’t matter if Connolly obeyed the law while working as a barrister or voted against the Nice Treaty.
An affront to sovereignty
Serious Guys associate power and money with intellect, which leads them to seek validation from the ultrarich and treat their pronouncements as inherently valuable. In an age of tech oligarchs, figures who have amassed more private power than almost any group in the history of the world, this reverence for wealth is an affront to both democracy and national sovereignty.
Stripe co-founder John Collison, who funds a think tank that has successfully lobbied for deregulation that will allow homeowners to rent out sheds to young people trapped in a cycle of renting, recently wrote a piece about “getting things done”. He said that Ireland lacks infrastructure because politicians are too accountable for their actions, without sufficient executive power to ensure large projects are finished. Communities, he suggested, should have less ability to object to things like build-to-rent apartment blocks that exacerbate the housing crisis or data centres that damage the environment. It was a call for more neoliberalism, for allowing capital to do whatever it wants – even implying we should repeal the freedom of information act.
For Serious Guys, the article was like an air raid siren across their offices. And they all turned, one by one, to declare in unison: “Now this – this is fucking Serious stuff.”
The Irish Times published a series of follow-ups from its staff about Collison’s “intervention”, all of which largely agreed with him, along with a few mild criticisms, mostly – and tellingly – about his naivety regarding how things really work. They were accompanied by letters to the editor, including one that said, “John Collison speaks for my generation.” The Business Post – which runs advertisements for property developers – ran a piece quoting Collison’s claim that “NIMBYs deserve our scorn.” The Independent issued its “view”, outlining how “we don’t just need to see change, we need to see progress.” And government ministers, including tánaiste Simon Harris, released statements praising the billionaire’s proposal to disempower communities across the country. Collison has now been invited to address an Oireachtas committee.
There are plenty of arguments against what Collison said but here is just one: Ireland has inadequate infrastructure because its development is led by foreign direct investment. For decades the state has prioritised luring multinationals with tax breaks and bespoke infrastructure over providing functioning public services. Acknowledging this would require the Serious Guys to admit that the Serious voices on economics – themselves included – have been fundamentally wrong about their purported area of expertise. So instead we arrive where Seriousness inevitably leads: PR for managed decline presented as “debate.”
It is pointless to expect Serious Guys to yield to reason. To accommodate alternative points of view or challenges to capital would be to negate their purpose for existing. They’re stuck in a perpetual loop, performing with increasing intensity as their purchase evaporates, having reached a singularity of Seriousness – a moment in which Seriousness collapses in on itself.
Catherine Connolly’s victory shows that turning away from Seriousness doesn't require frivolity or anti-intellectualism. Quite the opposite. It means ignoring the banalities of institutions that protect power. It means identifying that we can decide our future without permission from people who insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there is no alternative. A rejection of Seriousness is an earnest and unapologetic belief that a better world is possible.
