As one of the great Anglican archbishops put it, if an economic system ” is abundantly effective in producing and distributing material goods, but creates or intensifies divisions and hostilities between people, that system is condemned, not on economic but on moral grounds, not because it fails to deliver the goods, but because it is a source of wrong personal relationships”:
William Temple, Christianity and the Social Order (1942).
William Temple wrote that each individual was the child of God ” and destined for eternal fellowship with God… All life should be conducted and ordered with this dignity in view. The State must not treat the person as having value only so far as they serve its ends, as totalitarian states do; the State exists for its citizens, not the citizens for the State” , as people like the Nazis believed.
Christianity and the Social Order (1942)
“As we look at the continuous course of Evolution, we ought not to say: ‘ After all, it all comes from a nebula with no life or meaning, so it , too, is without life or meaning’. Rather we should say: ‘ See what has come from that dead nebula; how full of potentiality it really was”.
We cannot interpret the higher and more complex in terms of the lower and simpler; rather we must interpret the lower in terms of the higher, seeing in it the potentiality of the latter. Origin is not to be confused with either essence or validity. If people tell us that religion is the survival of natural magic, we reply: ‘ And so is the science that told you so; but that does not affect the validity either of the science or the religion’ “.
William Temple, The Nature of Personality (1915)
In one of his last works H. G. Wells wrote this:
” The writer sees the world as a jaded world devoid of recuperative power… The old men behave for the most part meanly and disgustingly, and the young are spasmodic, foolish and all too easily misled. Man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive”:
Mind at the End of its Tether (1945)
In 1939 Wells declared that Hitler was insane:
“But insanity has its advantages as well as its handicaps. It involves an abnormal concentration of purpose and nervous energy. In its phase of mania it abolishes or at least defers fatigue and sustains long spells of sleepless vigilance and penetrating distrust far beyond the compass of normal people”
The Fate of Homo Sapiens
See any parallels?
” It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours…. to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next”
Dickens, Hard Times, 1854
C.S.Lewis of Narnia fame explained his aim thus:
“[Mere Christianity] is like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors,not a place to live in”
[1952]
” Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous”
[Middlemarch, 1870]
This is Dawson’s historical overview:
” There is a general; feeling today that the Victorian compromise was wrong – that war is unchristian, that business is unchristian and that even the State is to a great extent unchristian also. We have lost both the optimism of the Victorian Liberals and the old Conservative acceptance of the State and the social order as a God-given order. We find it much easier to understand the attitude of the early Church with its uncompromising hostility to the world and to the power of Mammon… The whole Christian tradition, and the prophetic tradition which lies behind it, are a standing protest against the injustices and falsehood of that which is commonly called civilization… Wherever the city of man sets itself up as an end in itself and becomes the centre of a self-contained and self-regarding order, it becomes the natural enemy of the city of God”
[Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Modern State, 1935]
Christopher Dawson claimed that there had been a breakdown of corporate medieval society caused by the rise of capitalism. This had led to unrestrained individualism, which in turn led to the infamous evils of the factory system, rampant profiteering, slums, disease and chronic poverty. However the real cause of the evils of industrialism, Dawson felt, was not so much individualism itself as the spirit which sacrificed the individual to the economic process. Money, profit, economics became all. The old corporate sense of mutuality and cooperation had been lost.
[Religion and the Modern State, 1935]
Paul Crook 