It’s difficult not to feel despondent about the state of the world most days.
Witnessing from afar the brutal butchery of civilians in Israel, while realising that the inevitable retaliation will result in further civilian deaths in Gaza, can’t help but engender a feeling closer to despair.
Observing those who can’t resist engaging in atrocity whataboutism to rationalise whatever ideology they’ve substituted for their basic human morality adds a sense of disgust to the mix.
A creeping existential dread is also far from an inappropriate response to what’s unfolding on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea because – beyond the senseless slaughter that will only beget the spilling of more and more blood in that small corner of the world – a rudimentary understanding of the various geopolitical interests at play in the Middle East suggests there’s a strong possibility this current conflict will spread beyond its current borders and ultimately spark a nuclear conflagration that touches every country around the globe.
All in all, the contemplation of such matters is not conducive to a particularly pleasant – let alone productive – day, especially when recognising they’re well beyond one’s personal control.
So, what to do?
Well, one could do worse than to consider the following words from an essay CS Lewis wrote in 1948, a time when humanity’s sense of powerlessness in the face of atomic Armageddon was still fearfully fresh:
“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’
“In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors – anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
“This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies [a microbe can do that] but they need not dominate our minds.”
