The Hard Winter

"Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things - so do instincts. Our instincts are often at war.

If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed, from where do we derive this rule of precedence?" C S Lewis - The Abolition of Man.

"They then became filled with all manner of evil - envy, murder, pride, deceit... ruthless inventors of wickedness" Paul -Romans 1.

"Where did it all go wrong?" is a question as apt today as ever. We ask it in the hopes that we re-trace our steps back to the moment of failure and then, perhaps, amend the situation so we can commence a better time. The problem, of course, is that when it comes to the greater troubles we face, it isn't just our own actions that are in question - contributive though these may be - but those of everyone over each and every generation.

The modern world derives its 'drive' from the Victorian marriage of 'science' with the necessity for a 'better story' about ourselves, hence the birth in that age of Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism - supposedly contemporary 'myths' which would allow a launch into strident modernism, but they are not so. The likes of Nietzsche and Wagner understood that these notions are found much earlier - in the driving myths of both the Greeks (Epicurus) and the Romans (Lucretius), and given their full voice in the bloody streets of the French Revolution, where man's own definition of himself verifies the particular, supposedly righteous cries of the Enlightenment. Notice, however, how all these sentiments marry to a far earlier diagnosis of our estate - that referred to in the quote above by the Apostle Paul in the opening chapter of the book of Romans.

The tragedy is that we are a generation birthed in a sea of death that has been seeded continually in each age, but especially since the rise of modernism - ours is now a world literally killing itself in respect to any persons right to life.

The consequence of the expectancy of a golden age at the end of the 19th century was the worst age of war in human history, but that was just the beginning of the 'birth pangs' of our contemporary demise. After the horrors of global conflict, atomic weapons and the Cold War, we are now destroying ourselves entirely, murdering any semblance of civil society and order and replacing this with a rage against the very notion of 'normal' life and behaviour. We have reached a point where even those in leadership wish to exterminate any and all attitudes and activities that would have been deemed as appropriate and healthy a few short years ago.

Our instincts, noted Paul, lead to our own destruction. Left unchecked, they will doom us to become so inverted that we can no longer even consider something better than our own selfish ends - that is the tragedy of unending death.

If we are to become more, then we have to look elsewhere.

This is a most helpful saying, noted Paul - Christ came into the world to save sinners.

That is indeed where we should turn our gaze.