Is time out of joint? Yes. Can we do anything? Depends. Can we do anything inside our heads to make the invented world? Daily we do. We agree to many questionable realities. Social conditioning creates a psychotic humanity by intention. This is the post-Christian reality. And anticipating the argument how otherwise could be as men are not angelic beings?
Lewis’ words in December 1946 — which first appeared in the erstwhile Strand Magazine — warned that “post-Christian” thought, a way of thinking that rejects absolute rights and wrongs, leads to nihilism.
He wrote, in part:
As for the ideologies, the new invented Wrongs and Rights, does no one see the catch? If there is no real Wrong and Right, nothing good or bad in itself, none of these ideologies can be better or worse than another. For a better moral code can only mean one which comes nearer to some real or absolute code. One map of New York can be better than another only if there is a real New York for it to be truer to. If there is no objective standard, then our choice between one ideology and another becomes a matter of arbitrary taste. Our battle for democratic ideals against Nazi ideals has been a waste of time, because the one is no better than the other. Nor can there ever be any real improvement or deterioration: if there is no real goal you can’t get either nearer to it or farther from it. In fact, there is no real reason for doing anything at all.
The lengthy essay, written for readers in 20th century Britain, is eerily relevant in today’s culture, particularly in the wake of Hamas’ deadly attack against Israel on Oct. 7.
“There is no objective Right or Wrong: each race or class can invent its own code or ‘ideology’ just as it pleases,” Lewis wrote. “[N]ow if the post-Christian view is the correct one, then we have indeed waked from a nightmare.”
And if not? “Day after day the wind blows away the pages of our calendars, our newspapers, and our political regimes, and we glide along the stream of time without any spiritual framework, without a memory, without a judgment, carried about by “all winds of doctrine” on the current of history, which is always slipping into a perpetual past. Now we ought to react vigorously against this slackness—this tendency to drift. If we are to live in this world we need to know it far more profoundly; we need to rediscover the meaning of events, and the spiritual framework which our contemporaries have lost.”
—Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom (p. 138)
The luxury of the Romans was more shameless and dissolute in the reign of Theodosius than in the age of Constantine, perhaps, or of Augustus.”
– Edward Gibbon (Decline and Fall)
Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
The Journal of Lingering Sanity is a reader-supported publication. We are beholden to truth not party. “The time has come," the Journal said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings."
Do we change history by reinterpreting it. If not in the past (but what is time) certainly in the future which then becomes history too.
The power of keeping a diary, in some form, is often overlooked.