Rhetoric

The historian Arthur Bryant wrote 'Our Notebook' for the ILN during the war years. It gave him a wonderful soapbox for his opinions. He may have been right of centre but he was probably, like Churchill, what was needed at the time. I was interested by a 1944 entry which focused on lessons that had been learned during the hard years, chiefly, he sees a loss of illusion:

"The biggest of all our pre-war delusions was the delusion of materialism. It was the belief held by men and women of the most varied kinds that the possession of things was somehow a desirable end in itself.... It entirely lost sight of the fact that men and women, being bodies animated by and dependent on souls, could not acquire virtue or happiness by the mere acquisition of things as things, for unless the latter could add something to their spiritual stature they were manifestly of no use to creaturs with such pathetically short and transient lives."

"Are we" he continues further along on his dissertation " going to do the work of reconstruction like mechanics or like craftsmen? - to follow set rules blindly and servilely or to fashions freely with the artists eyes God gave us fixed firmly on our fellow man, his needs, his capacities, his immortal soul? Are we going once more to allow any statistician to argue us, in the name of wholely illusory realsim, into accepting as inevitable the slum, unemployment, the slavery of an unthinking mass-production, the destruction of soil fertility, industrial conscription or any of the other vile and inhuman prctices which offend against the eternal laws of man's nature? The master machine on which all our other machines, laws, systems and institutions depend is man: starve or warp his intricate living nature for the sake of these inanimate and servient things and before long they will cease to work."

One of the laws of humanity seems to be that we never learn from experience unless the experience is directly our own - so, yes, we did once more plunge into an orgy of materialism - and how! I'm the last person to want to do without my creature comforts plus a few luxuries so no homily from me on this one, it's just rather depressing that there probably were thousands upon thousands of folk who had discovered what really matters, yet we still insist on going to war and spending unimaginable amounts of money and resources in so doing.