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If in doubt, Tolkien & Dorothy Sayers
And then I'll repost something I posted earlier in the year (post Brexit) as it seems even more relevant now:
This year especially (Trump being the most glaring example), it seems as if we are constantly asking ourselves what has happened to the world. Shouldn't we have learned something from the past, shouldn't we be better than this now?
Well, earlier in the summer I was reading a small book with a collection of addresses/speeches given by Dorothy Sayers, mostly at the beginning of the Second World War. This part especially struck a chord with me. For those that would like the current events to be placed within a Christian framework, I have transcribed the relevant passage, and hope it makes sense standing alone.
I have also broken it up a little, as the big block of words was rather awkward to read.
Creed or Chaos?
An Address delivered at Derby, May 4th, 1940, by Dorothy L Sayers
[Within the address she touched on 7 subjects/different dogmas. Have transcribed one of them.]
2. MAN. - A young and intelligent priest remarked to me the other day that he thought one of the greatest sources of strength in Christianity today lay in the profoundly pessimistic view it took of human nature. There is a great deal in what he says. The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behaviour at this time are those who think highly of Homo Sapiens as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the Totalitarian States, and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of Capitalist Society, are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe. The whole thing looks like a denial of all reason, and they feel as if they and the world had gone mad together.
Now for the Christian, this is not so. He is as deeply shocked and grieved as anybody else, but he is not astonished. He has never thought very highly of human nature left to itself. He has been accustomed to the idea that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very centre of human personality, and that you can never, as they say, ‘make people good by Act of Parliament’, just because laws are man-made and therefore partake of the imperfect and self-contradictory nature of man. Humanly speaking, it is not true at all that ‘truly to know the good is to do the good’; it is far truer to say with St Paul that ‘the evil that I would not, that I do’; so that the mere increase of knowledge is of very little help in the struggle to outlaw evil.
The delusion of the mechanical perfectability of mankind through a combined process of scientific knowledge and unconscious evolution has been responsible for a great deal of heartbreak. It is, at bottom, far more pessimistic than Christian pessimism, because, if science and progress break down, there is nothing to fall back upon. Humanism is self-contained - it provides for man man no resource outside himself. The Christian dogma of the double nature of man - which asserts that man is dis-integrated and necessarily imperfect in himself and all his works, yet closely related by a real unity of substance with an eternal perfection within and beyond him - makes the present parlous state of human society seem both less hopeless and less irrational.
I say ‘the present parlous state’ - but that is to limit it too much. A man told me the other day: ‘I have a little boy of one year old. When the war broke out, I was very much distressed about him, because I found I was taking it for granted that life ought to be better and easier for him than it had been for my generation. Then I realised that I had no right to take this for granted at all - that the fight between good and evil must be the same for him as it had always been, and then I ceased to feel so much distressed’.
As Lord David Cecil has said: ‘The jargon of the philosophy of progress taught us to think that the savage and primitive state of man is behind us; we still talk of the present “return to barbarism”. But barbarism is not behind us, it is beneath us.’ And in the same article he observes: ‘Christianity has compelled the mind of man, not because it is the most cheering view of human existence, but because it is the truest to facts.’ I think this is true; and it seems to me quite disastrous that the idea should have got about that Christianity is an other-worldly, unreal idealistic kind of religion which suggest that if we are good we shall be happy - or if not, it will all be made up in the next existence. On the contrary, it is fiercely and even harshly realistic, insisting the Kingdom of Heaven can never be attained in this world except by unceasing toil and struggle and vigilance: that, in fact, we cannot be good and cannot be happy, but that there are certain eternal achievements that make even happiness look like trash. It has been said, I think by Berdyaev, that nothing can prevent the human soul from preferring creativeness to happiness. In this lies man’s substantial likeness to the Divine Christ who in this world suffers and creates continually, being incarnate in the bonds of matter.
I bolded the key passages (for me), as they made me feel somewhat better, and helped me get a better perspective on everything.
Of COURSE we should still do everything humanly possible to make the world better. But also we should not be discouraged.
And finally, I read this article yesterday: Trevor Noah Wasn’t Expecting Liberal Hatred
What stood out for me was this:
"America is the place that always seems to treat the symptoms and not the cause. In South Africa, we’re very good at trying to go for the cause of racism. One thing that really never happened here, which is strange to me, was a period where white America had to reconcile with what it had done to black Americans."
"I wonder if one difference is that in South Africa, no one could deny that the root of it all was racism, whereas here, people think there’s more ambiguity. What’s scary is how many people don’t realize that racism is written into your system in America. We had a very simple, blatant system. You could see where the tumor was, and you could cut it out. In America, the tumor masquerades as an organ, and you don’t know which parts to cut out because it’s hard to convince people that there’s a problem in the first place."
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Oh and I've just started reading one of my birthday presents, Nisei Daughter:
With charm, humor, and deep understanding, Monica Sone tells what it was like to grow up Japanese American on Seattle's waterfront in the 1930s and to be subjected to 'relocation' during World War II. Along with over one hundred thousand other persons of Japanese ancestry - most of whom were U.S. citizens - Sone and her family were uprooted from their home and imprisoned in a camp. Her unique and personal account is a true classic of Asian American literature.
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*holds onto the words of wisdom*
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