5. The Wasteland
5. The Wasteland
Then again, the going out of the Christian tide has left behind it a world of mirages. Pardon the mixture of metaphors, but “mirages" is the notion I need here. A mirage is the appearance of an oasis in the desert. The parched traveller takes heart when he sees it and plods groggily towards it, longing for water to relieve his thirst; but he finds there is nothing there. The mirage deludes, and so do the alternative prospects of human fulfilment to which men turn when they abandon Christianity.
Some today, for instance, embrace utopianism, the hope of achieving a perfect society, whether by social evolution, such as Western liberals envisage, or by social revolution such as card-carrying Communists anticipate and work for. Without disrespect to the integrity of Utopians, I have to say that George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 (which I urge you to read, if you have not already done so) really do seem to speak the last word as to what must happen when in a technological age an attempt is made to implement a utopian program. Power, which was used for selfish and brutal purposes before, may change hands, but after that it inevitably comes to be used for selfish and brutal purposes again. Power still corrupts, and absolute power still corrupts absolutely, and in that respect there is nothing new under the sun.
Others turn to aestheticism, that is, the policy of enlarging individual experience, maximizing sensation and tasting as many different activities and feelings as you can, in the belief that this is the way of happiness. It boils down to the maxim of Jerry Rubin the hippy: "If it feels good, do it." So we live life as a series of trips, some hectic, some relaxed, some planned, some on the spur of the moment, some with drink, some with drugs, some heterosexual, some homosexual, and so on. We join the aesthetic jet set, zooming from one expected pleasure (or should I say, antidote to boredom, or psychic pain-killer?) to another.
The formula sounds magically good; but what happens? Bitter experience confirms what has already been said—that you can fill your life with kicks of all sorts without fulfilling your nature or enlarging your joy in the least. Indeed, it is one of life's sad paradoxes, which aestheticists verify constantly, that by increasing the number and variety of pleasures you may actually decrease joy. Poor pathetic Marie Antoinette had everything a queen could ask for, and ended up bored stiff: her final complaint was, "Nothing tastes." Pleasure seeking, of whatever kind and at whatever level, is subject to the law of diminishing returns. The heartache of inner emptiness becomes more acute, and no contentment is found at all.
Can you see this? Can you distinguish between pleasure and joy? I hope so; you will not know what to do with your life otherwise. Joy brings contentment, pleasures as such don't, but joy makes life a pleasure even without those particular pleasures for which we might be tempted to envy others—such is the truth we need to guide us; but these are lessons which aestheticism forbids us to learn. The mirage presents itself as reality, the lie as truth, and many, one fears, are fooled.
Some who have seen through both utopianism and aestheticism settle for pessimism, which is in fact the only coherent possibility that remains when Christianity is given up. Human dignity, it is suggested, requires us to face the fact that there is no real hope for either the individual or society, and to be brave about it. Joy and fulfilment, in the sense in which we have been speaking of them, are themselves a mirage; there is really no such thing; it is not that we have lost the key of the door, but rather that there never was a door there.
In our time, anti-Christians like the late Bertrand Russell have settled for this kind of pessimism, and one cannot but admire their integrity and strength of will in doing so. But their view itself, so far from being a modern novelty, is in fact no more than a reviving of what the best philosophers, Stoic and Epicurean, were saying in the first century A.D., when Christianity was born. Life, they said, is inherently painful; the wise man's wisdom is to cut pain down to the minimum; that is the best we can ever hope to do. So the Epicureans counselled quiet retirement, and the Stoics taught men to be unfeeling in order to reduce their emotional vulnerability, and both agreed that the best option would certainly on occasion be suicide.
Similar pessimism permeates Eastern religion, which tells us that the best we can hope for is to come off the wheel of reincarnation and cease to exist personally at all. At the heart of pessimism is often the destructive reaction of hurt pride, the feeling that, having been disillusioned and let down by the optimists, one owes it to oneself to deny and try now to smash the hopes they entertain. It is like a person denouncing marriage as an evil because his own marriage has come to grief. But whatever the motivation, however murky and unreasonable it may be, pessimism itself is deeply tragic, for the state of hopelessness is in truth an antechamber of both death and hell.
Such, then, are the false hopes and the false denial of hope which we see growing like weeds in the wasteland of our present-day society.
Lastly, the going out of the Christian tide has left behind it a world of menace. The social discipline which Christian faith created and undergirded in the West is crumbling away into post-Christian indiscipline and disorder. Our heritage of Christian moral capital is shrinking, and some day we may wake up to find it all effectively gone. The peculiar hardness and frenzy which marks individual apostates from Christian faith has its counterpart in apostate societies, which achieve their paganism by directly rejecting a Christian heritage.
O. R. Johnston has written of Christianity in a Collapsing Culture.5 It would be hard to dismiss as unwarranted the judgment on our era which his title embodies. It is true that Britain today publicly purposes to be caring and compassionate in the same way that a century ago Britain publicly purposed to be Christian, but the steady increase in Britain of lawlessness, violence and anarchic self-indulgence, along with the weakening of home and family life and the breakup of social and economic restraints that operated before, are facts which will not go away, however much we act the ostrich and hide our eyes.
Yet the same realism which prompts initial alarm requires us also to note that for the moment British national life is on a kind of moral plateau. We are no longer publicly pro-Christian, but we are not yet publicly anti-Christian either. Though the boat has shipped a dangerous amount of water, it is not yet certain to sink. The law and the media still do as much to conserve the old values as they do to undermine them. The situation still allows Christians to act with some hope of arresting the anti-Christian pendulumswing of our time.