“We rise by lifting others”
Those glowing words popped in Piazza San Pantaleo and burned into my brain during a visit to Rome in early January 2024. When we got back to our accommodation in Trastevere, I wrote the words down – “We rise by lifting others” – and I’ve thought about them ever since. At the time, I didn’t quite know what the sentence meant, but it resonated with me. I assumed that it was part of a verse from the bible, given its location in front of a church, and initial Google searches yielded lots of those inspirational-quote-on-vaguely-soothing-generic-background images. However, it didn’t seem to exist in the bible and I began to worry that I had been duped by some empty meme that had torn itself from a random Instagram post and been ushered into the real world.
Eventually, Google’s choking algorithm spat out a longer paragraph featuring the line and it turns out that it can be attributed to Robert G. Ingersoll, a 19th-century American polymath, who was popularly known as ‘The Great Agnostic’. A formidable man who has perhaps been somewhat forgotten in recent times, Ingersoll was a passionate abolitionist who fought in the American Civil War, delivered rousing critiques of religion and advocated for women’s rights. There are a number of different instances of Ingersoll’s line, but the most commonly rendered version goes thus:
The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenceless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others.
Ingersoll’s words were spoken nearly two centuries ago, during a time when the scourges of racial, sexual, religious and class discrimination were much more pronounced in the United States (and western civilisation generally), but they continue to resonate today because they contain a universal truth about how we should try to live and the type of society we would like to build. Do we want compassion, fairness and a world where we build people up in pursuit of greater ideals or do we want a smaller world marked by cruelty, conflict and hate? As Bill Hicks put it, the choice is between fear and love.
The neon sign that etched itself into my memory that day was the work of Marinella Senatore and it formed part of a public art exhibition called ‘Luci d’artista per la Pace‘ (Lights of Artists for Peace) that was visible across different locations in Rome during the 2023-24 Christmas period. Given the societal degradation that is occurring in the U.S., which threatens to spread across the West, along with the seemingly perpetual wars strangling the Middle East, that message of peace and solidarity remains as important now. These ideas are powerful in themselves, but that is not enough; they need to be asserted again and again. They must be mantras. Indeed, there is much to be learned from consulting the wisdom of figures such as Ingersoll, whose creed urges us to love justice, assist the weak and make others happy.
Justice is the only worship.
Robert G. Ingersoll, ‘My Creed’
Love is the only priest.
Ignorance is the only slavery.
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now,
The place to be happy is here,
The way to be happy is to make others so.
Other things to consider
What happened in Ballymena?
Sarah Creighton cuts through the noise in the Guardian and gets to the heart of the issue of the violence that erupted in Ballymena and other areas in the north of Ireland last week. While Blindboy Boatclub rambled on about how it was caused by neoliberalism and landlords to Ash Sarkar, Creighton rightly emphasised the immediate and crude motivations of the gangs, which reportedly included members of loyalist paramilitary groups.
The riots in Ballymena are about racism and nothing more. Hatred smothers every brick and petrol bomb thrown. Nobody causing trouble cares about women or children. There are no legitimate concerns at the heart of this. Local Facebook groups with links to the far right are asking for addresses to hit – Roma people are the main target of their ire. Flyers posted around towns and cities call for people to take a stand to protect “our women” and “our Christian values”.
The trigger for the violence in Ballymena was the trauma and pain of a local family. Earlier in the week, two 14-year-old boys were arrested and charged with the attempted rape of a young girl. Romanian interpreters were required at court.
After the arrests, the alleged victim’s family asked for support and solidarity from their local community. Hundreds did so, peacefully protesting to show the family that they weren’t alone. Then came the violence. The chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said the victim of the alleged assault has been “further traumatised” by the rioting. Her family have publicly called for the violence to stop.
Additionally, Derry-based photographer Tyler Collins captured some scenes from the riots and documented it in a photo-essay for The Journal.
As I stood watching, a deep unease settled in me. Not just from the violence, but from the performance of it all. This wasn’t panic or collective outrage. It was a crowd eager to act out. The girl at the centre of it was not mentioned once. Not her name. Not a sign. Not a chant. She was not the reason. She was the excuse.
That is what disturbed me most. Her pain had been turned into a prop, then cast aside the moment the first brick was thrown.
‘The Mozart of the attention economy’
Mark O’Connell’s long read on Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, is compelling and I was even driven to watch the entirety of one of the YouTuber’s famous videos after reading, just to get a flavour of what the hell this guy was actually doing to get billions of views online. Inevitably, though, behind the vapid permasmile of MrBeast, there is a dark side.
Donaldson is not himself a political figure. He doesn’t tend to weigh in on party-political questions, or express much interest in them. But there is a politics to his content. It reflects a world in which people are isolated and helpless, subjects of vast and inhuman economic mechanisms. People spending months alone in supermarkets; standing in large circles for as long as they can endure it; competing for private islands, houses, deliverance from their personal financial torments. People in states of gruelling seclusion; people in vast and impersonal crowds, pitted against one another in a Hobbesian gameshow of all against all.
Loneliness, survival, isolation, and the divine intervention of an unimaginably wealthy and famous man: there is a politics to all this, all right, and it is the politics of our time. In its themes and preoccupations, its insistent motifs of financial precarity and arbitrary deliverance – its Lamborghinis and its private islands and its vast pyramids of cash – the oeuvre of MrBeast is like nothing so much as the dream of an entire culture. Donaldson might not be the genius we need, or the genius we want, but he may be the genius we deserve.
What I’m listening to this week
The Beach Boys – I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times
The death of Brian Wilson led me to listen to the entirety of ‘Pet Sounds’ for the first time. I wouldn’t class myself as a fan of The Beach Boys, but I enjoy a few of their tunes and the track ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ is one of Wilson’s most biographical. It also made for a perfect accompaniment to the iconic scene in Mad Men when Roger Sterling takes LSD at one of their high society parties.
Elton John – Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
‘Tiny Dancer’ is the Elton John song that is probably most associated with the film Almost Famous thanks to the classic bus scene, but ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’, which accompanies a key scene featuring Kate Hudson’s character Penny Lane, is much more powerful. “I thank the Lord for the people I have found.”
Nothing is written 