By David Hayward from http://nakedpastor.com
Three Approaches to a Hard World
Most people I know and meet tend to fall into three groups when it comes to finding hope for the world:
- Religious Hope: If this world’s great mess is going to be resolved it will come in a religious way or by some sort of divine intervention. God will save.
- Political/Scientific Hope: If this world’s great mess is going to be resolved we will need to find political/scientific solutions.
- Personal Hope: the world is too big to save. I need to secure what is good for me and my loved ones in any way I can to get from 0 to death with a maximum of pleasure and meaning and a minimum of pain and suffering.
People aren’t purely one or another, most of us have all three rolling around inside of us, but it is often that one is central and the others more subdued.
The interplay of these approaches gets interesting.
People pursuing the “personal hope” usually begin to play with politics or religion as they get closer to death. They worry about their children. They wonder about an afterlife. A “personal hope” can get lonely, shallow and selfish in the long run.
Likewise the political/scientific hope can wear thin in time. The Twentieth century was a test case in both accomplishment and disaster. We had a number of astounding successes on a global scale:
- Antibiotics, vaccines, modern medicine have cured disease like never before
- Fixing nitrogen from the air allowed world population to soar beyond 4 billion, the natural carrying capacity of the planet without synthetic fertilizers
- Modern state’s social safety net: social security, public health care, etc.
While we did this, we also saw our new-found capacity gave us power to destroy
- Population has exploded to levels that threaten the natural ecosystems that all human life depends upon.
- Environmental devastation through CO2 and other forms of pollution and over production.
- The modern state was capable not only of giving stability to a population but also of massive war and genocide. Two world wars that killed millions of people directly and indirectly followed by a nuclear cold war. We don’t know if this is sustainable. Failed states are multiplying leading to terrorism and genocide.
The great story of political salvation imagines that perhaps all of this can be overcome. Perhaps we as a species can, as we have done before, surmount these obstacles. We keep rising and rising until, however, we can rise no more. CS Lewis articulated this myth well.
Man has ascended his throne. Henceforward he has nothing to do but to practise virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little bathetic. It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable. The last scene reverses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of all reach of human power, Nature, the old enemy, has been steadily gnawing away. The sun will cool—all suns will cool—the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished, without hope of return, from every inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness, and “universal darkness covers all.” The pattern of the myth thus becomes one of the noblest we can conceive. It is the pattern of many Elizabethan tragedies, where the protagonist’s career can be represented by a slowly ascending and then rapidly falling curve, with its highest point in Act IV. You see him climbing up and up, then blazing in his bright meridian, then finally overwhelmed in ruin.
Lewis, C. S. (2009-06-03). Weight of Glory (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (p. 125). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
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