Vision for a better world

Lifestyle – Much of the suffering and isolation in the Western world stems from a belief that regards individuals as being separate from each other, in competition for resources, jobs and happiness.  Eilís Ward combines her background in social science with her Buddhist beliefs to offer a kinder way of living. She tells JUDY MURPHY about her new book, Self.

Eilís Ward was a curious child and she was always fascinated by human behaviour.

“As a young person I read an awful lot. I didn’t understand most of it but I read it anyway,” she says with a laugh.

Born in Dublin, to parents from Galway and Mayo, Eilís initially pursued a career in journalism before returning to college, to study philosophy at UCG, which “I thought would answer all my questions”.

Instead, it was just the beginning of a journey that would lead her from Western philosophy to Zen Buddhism, which regards each of us as being inseparable from everything else in the world, sentient or not.

Eilís’s Buddhist practice and her work as a lecturer in Sociology and Politics at NUIG has led to her new book, Self. It’s one of a series produced by University College Cork to explore controversial issues in contemporary Ireland and offer a better way of living.

Self came about for couple of reasons, Eilís explains.

One was a conversation with a graduate student a couple of years ago “that really struck home”.

This bright young student whom Eilís felt had every reason to be confident, was anything but. In fact, she and her friends were disillusioned by how little they had achieved. They were just about to leave college and already felt they were failures, because they were unlikely to launch a business or charity.

The fears of these students brought home to Eilís the damage that’s being caused to people due to neo-liberalism – an extreme version of capitalism that emerged in the 1950s and views all human activity through the prism of economics.

Neo-liberalism regards people as being in competition with each other for resources, jobs, houses, relationships and happiness. And we’re in competition with the environment too.

But this fractured approach isn’t working – more than that, it’s a threat to social democracy, says Eilís. And it’s so ingrained that young people aren’t even aware of how it’s affecting them.

“These students felt like failures because they weren’t social entrepreneurs. I thought it was a strange thing that they’d internalised the model of entrepreneurship as a way of describing their very beings. Being an entrepreneur is fine but it’s a career. It’s not at the deepest level of your being.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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