Look up into the night and watch a satellite pulse across the darkness. Think of the 80 tonnes of aluminium that lift you from Dublin to New York, or the marvel of scrolling through the streets of Timbuktu from your kitchen table. Wonder at the vast, audacious creative power of human beings.
The same awe is due to the vaccines saving tens of millions of children and adults from misery, deformity and early deaths from diseases like polio and smallpox. And to the cancers cured and prevented by the ingenuity of our species.
But these wonders share a fragile foundation: the ability of millions to feel safe enough to think boldly, and to trust their fellow citizens enough to sacrifice short-term comfort for the long, uncertain work of discovery. Neither Albert Einstein nor James Joyce could have realised their genius in a climate of fear. They needed the stability of cities like Zurich – safe, ordered places, because fear is the greatest corrosive of creativity.
That stability does not arise by chance. It is engineered – by human inventions no less significant than the printing press or the microchip. Elections. An independent judiciary. The rule of law. A free press. They may not quicken the pulse like a rocket launch, but they are essential to creativity.
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Each was designed for one purpose: to constrain the power of leaders. Because without limits, the human brain is neurologically vulnerable to the drug-like, distorting effects of power – warping empathy, dulling risk perception and fuelling an insatiable hunger for more.
Such dictatorships create fear-drenched societies that snuff out scientific, civic and artistic creativity. Vladimir Putin, for example, for a period before he turned to war, asked his officials why Russia didn’t have a Silicon Valley and set them off to build a new technology campus near Moscow that was to be Russia’s answer to San Francisco or Boston.
But you need independent judges, incorrupt officials, a free, critical press sniffing out corruption and a government looking over its shoulders at the electorate if you want centres of creativity and innovation. Putin had eliminated all of these preconditions and so his project failed and he turned to war – the almost inevitable default of the dictator.
Tánaiste Micheál Martin, in his preface to the forthcoming book The Taoiseach: A century of political leadership, edited by Iain Dale (Swift Press), states that Éamon de Valera’s governments of the 1930s saw the only recorded example in Europe of a defeated revolutionary group coming to power and then imposing rigid new limits on its own powers.
Part of the 1937 Constitution that enacted these constraints included the creation of the office of the President of Ireland. A remarkable feature of this role is how little tangible power is invested in it – it’s powers are similar to those of a constitutional monarch, albeit an elected one.
But, as the incumbent has shown all too well, there is considerable non-tangible power in the role – celebrity, symbolism and global audience included. This brought President Michael D Higgins a popularity that made governments shy away from reigning him in from his many politically controversial interventions – for example, a letter of condolence to the Iranian people when their much-hated and dissent-crushing president died in a helicopter crash.
For all that we might criticise President Higgins’s testing of the limits of his constitutional role, he symbolises the State and his popularity therefore helped reinforce popular trust in the institutions of state.
In France and the United States, the presidency merges symbolic authority with executive control. The result: fewer constraints and greater vulnerability to the corruptions of power. Witness how commonly ex-presidents in France end up in court and see what is happening across the Atlantic in the USA.
In Ireland, the division between taoiseach and president is a creative constitutional safeguard. It allows the presidency to remain above partisan battle, embodying values that bind rather than divide – or at least that is what we should hope for. The recent rise of social media hate mongers in Ireland is severely threatening our binding common values. Whoever is the next president should see it as a major part of their job to beat off this threat.
Democratic states depend on trust like nothing else, and that trust depends on the perception that leaders share the values of the citizens. Political leaders have to make tough but necessary decisions that may jar with popular opinion – raising the pension age or charging for water, for example.
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So, if presidents manage to stay above such political decisions, they can help maintain trust in the state by embodying values such as tolerance and respect, for example, that transcend the day-to-day political conflicts.
This is why, above all, the presidency is a moral role much more than it is a political one. Candidates should be seen as having acted according to values in their life, perhaps occasionally at the expense of their self-interest.
We trust each other to the extent that we perceive that we share the same moral values. The presidency is an opportunity to reinforce the values that are crucial to the survival of our mutual trust and hence of our democracy.
This is why presidential candidates campaigning on particular political issues or ideologies is such a terrible idea. It will inevitably divide the electorate and so destroy what is the essence of the power of the president, namely to bind the electorate together with a sense of common moral purpose and healthy national pride.
Ian Robertson is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin.
