Fighting Irish

It's a plausible interpretation, buttressed by the queer neo-pagan nature mysticism of Riverdance-a plummy voice narrates between dances with irrelevant patter about eagles soaring high above the golden plain and thunder and lightning battling on the rocks-and by what some take to be the anti-Catholicism of Angela's Ashes. (McCourt makes fun of everything in Limerick, including the piety of its citizens. To the sort of Catholic who if he were Jewish would join the Anti-Defamation League, this will appear sinister.)

THE problem with the theory is that England plays only a modest role in these books, movies, and so on. The opposition that really leaps out is not between the Irish and the English but between Ireland and something much closer to home. Cahill gets it nearly right. At least as we picture them, the Irish are a pre-civilized, or rather a pre-modern, people. And nowadays, the distinction between modern and pre-modern can be crystallized in a word: passion.

In our minds, the Irish do nothing- say nothing, think nothing, drink nothing-in moderation. Their capacity to hate, for instance, is world famous: they hate the English, the Presbyterians (if you're Catholic), the Catholics (if you're Presbyterian). When Frankie McCourt's dad gets crashing drunk, as he regularly does, he comes home booming songs of Irish martyrs, yanks his little boys out of bed, and makes them swear they'll die for Ireland. The Irish are willing, even eager to die for their country-and to kill for it. The best moment in Michael Collins comes when Liam Neeson, as the revolutionary in a three-piece business suit, tells his men that they must now resolve, however reluctantly, to execute anyone who collaborates with the British. The Irish are brutally serious about their politics, no less than about their religion. In the moment before the trigger is squeezed, Collins's executioners permit him to say a prayer, and they respond, "May the Lord have mercy on your soul."

The contrast with our own lives, the paleness of our passions, breaks your heart. Americans feel strongly about some things: sports, physical fitness, personal convenience. "Road Rage" is how we describe the phenomenon in which a motorist flies into a violent pique at another motorist who has cut him off. We rage at little else. Not politics nor religion. Oh, the odd newspaper columnist will feign furious disgust at Bill Clinton's exploits. Generally, though, Americans regard events in Washington, D.C., with a mixture of cynicism and boredom. As for religious faith, at least in our big cities any expression of earnestness about G-d is met with polite embarrassment.

Embarrassment in the presence of passion may be the characteristic emotion of modern life. As Thomas Cahill explains of the transition from the classical to the Christian world view, Plato equated virtue, and thus salvation, with knowledge. Augustine overturned the equation, regarding salvation as an unmerited gift. For us, virtue consists of a certain unadorned sleekness: cool, aerobically shaped, blandly disinterested. The emblem of our emotional life is a bottle of imported spring water, ubiquitous totem of the yuppie as he migrates between gym and office. For the Irish, it is "the pint."