Evil, secularism and denial

I had not until today come across this quote from former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

"‘But there was one sense in which the Holocaust changed the whole human equation,’ Sacks added. ‘The culture that produced the Holocaust was not distant. This colossal tragedy and crime took place in the heart of the most civilised culture that the world has ever known. A culture that had achieved the greatest heights of human achievement, in science, in philosophy, in rationalism – this was the culture of Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the culture of Goethe and Schiller and Bach and Beethoven. Half the signatories of the Wannsee Declaration [authorising the ‘Final Solution’ from 1942] carried the title of Dr. And that was just Germany. France: the country that gave us the Revolution and The Rights of Man had an astonishing history of anti-Semitism. As for Vienna: the cultural capital of Europe was also the epicentre of anti-Semitism. After the Holocaust some people lost their faith. Some people kept their faith and some people found faith in God. But after the Holocaust it is morally impossible to believe in man. The Holocaust is the final, decisive refutation of the idea that you can have a humane civilisation without fear of heaven and without belief in the sanctity of life. The Holocaust may make some lose their faith in God, but it must make all people lose their faith in humankind. After Auschwitz you have to be either very ignorant or very naive to believe in secular humanism. The real challenge of the Shoah is not to faith, but to lack of faith.’ (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks)"

That's very incisive. The reality of profound cosmic evil permeates our existence. To deny it is madness and is to choose to live in a fantasy world that has no real overlap with the one we are actually situated in.

This doesn't stop many people from doing so, from living in the fantasy world of post-war secular humanism, prioritising their personal career, entertainment and comfortable retirement. Evil, though, by its nature, can't stop rearing its head, whether at the personal, familial, national or other levels. The human capacity for evil - both to commit, and to pretend not to notice it going on right in front of our noses - is astonishing.

Denial is the preferred option in the West for those who have no answers. If you don't admit the problem, then you don't need to offer a solution. And if you can't offer a solution, then pretending that there is no actual problem that needs a solution is about the only option left (inasmuch as living in a permanent state of complete self-delusion can be called an option). And that is where we are. Secular humanism can't admit any concept of cosmic evil. Problem can only be failures of proper technical process. More training, more funding, better processes, and we'll lick the problems! Except, they keep conspicuously not doing so. Or rather, they would, if they were possible. But the human problem keeps intervening and corrupting the purity of the utopian vision (or rather, of the day-dream). It turns out that failing to factor original sin and our need for God's grace and our repentance into your thinking just makes things worse. 

Here's the secular paradox once we leave behind confident declarations of ideology and enter experienced reality: leaving out all the "irrelevant" supernatural realm leaves us with no tools to even understand the resulting mess in the natural one. Telling oneself that God needs to keep himself strictly to the realm of theory and not intervene in practice results only, time and time again, in practical catastrophe.

Jesus took the evil upon himself. He died and lived again, and teaches us to similarly give away our lives so that others might experience his life. It's not better processes, funding programmes or improved managerial oversight that can deal with cosmic evil. It's the risen life of the innocent one who freely took it all upon himself.

On national consciousness

National consciousness is an interesting thing, which we take for granted. As Christians, though, we should seek to examine and understand it, as part of loving God with all our minds.

By "national consciousness", I mean our awareness of ourselves as members of a particular nation, and that nation's corporate life, including its history, culture, conventions and the sense of belonging to a particular space as part of it.

Recently I was gifted, and read, Robert Massie's very informative biography of Peter the Great. (The whole series is currently on special offer on Kindle). One fascinating section explained the life of the typical Russian at the start of Peter's reign. I was struck by the fact that the typical peasant (which was the great bulk of the people) could, and did, pass their lives without knowing what was happening anywhere more than a few miles from their homes.

How different to today that is. How different to ours the thought-world of such people must have been. How different their relationships, and sense of what was going on and connection to not only those far away (almost no connection at all) and those near at hand (surely much heightened).

Today, it is common for us to know about events happening thousands of miles away, within hours or even minutes of their happening. And then, rapidly, the whole current "conversation" of entire countries is re-shaped by those events: people quickly begin to think "what does this mean for us, how does this change things?"; and commentators, partisans and those searching for followers after their cause (or just after themselves) begin to calculate how they can "weaponise" the event to aid them and promote whatever narrative they're promoting. We're so accustomed to this, that most of us probably only reflect upon the dynamics of it very rarely.

Encountering the 17th century Russian peasant reminds us not only that this has not been the universal experience of human beings, but also whispers the thought that it is actually in large point a choice for us today also. The fact that it's quite normal in the West to feel more familiar with a whole range of characters that we've only actually seen or heard through the mediation of LCD or OLED screens and speakers, than we do with the people who live in our streets, estates, villages and towns, is generally a decision of some sort (even if only the decision to lazily "go with the flow").

It's widely observed that a society in which everything is politicised is not a healthy or strong one. Speaking personally, it was really only with the "Brexit" referendum in 2016 that the new phenomena of specifically national politics being a constant topic of conversation entered into my experience. Brexit, Covid, BLM, Ukraine: a "new normal" arrived in which people's primary consciousness seemed to all be tuned into the "national conversation", by default, becoming the default setting in which they moved and discussed and evaluated life and their place within it.

To be sure, all my life we've been aware of what's going on nationally; the radio and newspapers were a normal part of life long before. But from 2016, something seemed to come to fruition, with Brexit being not the cause, but the final trigger.

In this post I want to just highlight the fact that this pervasive, default "national consciousness" does very much remain a choice. And as Christians, it's a choice we should evaluate, and consider how it relates to serving our Master. There is no law of our existence which requires anyone to be continually plugged into the ebb and flow of events several layers above them in society, requiring them to make it the main thing that they think about as they think about their relationship to the world. To be sure, just as Peter the Great's policies reached into the lives of every village and home, so some national and international events will reach into ours at some level. But even so, that in no way requires them to be the default and most prominent background to our thought-world.

This post has been long enough, but I'd like to end with a suggestion. God loves people, and after loving him with all that we have and are, our other great duty is to love our neighbour. God has made us physical beings, and during Covid we had the "opportunity" to be reminded of how fundamental and irreplacable embodied life is. When Jesus came in the flesh, it wasn't only a means to the end of offering himself in his death. It was also a statement about his love for us. He sat at the tables of tax-collectors and sinners, a whole assortment of complete "nobodies", because of his love. He showed the value that he had for all of those he visited, by visiting them. Surely this has implications for us? Just because someone can decide that he's called to broadcast to the world, does not mean that there's any indication that he should. If we understand the implications of Jesus' incarnation and manner of conducting his ministry, then I'd suggest that there must be very few people who truly are called to such a ministry. The vast, vast majority of us are called to love all the people whom God has placed us among. If 99% of those focussed upon the national scene withdrew themselves, there'd still be plenty of people to speak to that scene... but there'd also be vastly more people to minister in the way that we should, not by word only (whether online or offline), but by meaningful and sustained involvement in the lives of those that God has created.

No man can serve two masters. Meaningful, sustained involvement in the lives of people around us demands a lot of time. The time that we spend making the choice to live primarily as if the national level and conversation were where we should locate ourselves could instead be used for it. If we are to be honest with ourselves, isn't it very likely that the time would be used far, far better if we turned off the news and the Twitter feed and invited the lonely (but perhaps complicated) widower or widow a few doors away if they'd like to come around for tea and cake, or if we could mow their lawn?