What will have changed? What will still be changing? How shall we cope? The after-lockdown questions cluster and congeal. None of us knows. We have had our fingers burnt when we have listened to pundits. We have learned to suspect soothsayers and forecasters. We may feel like dizzy pawns on a three-dimensional chess-board but who can blame us? We live in a complicated society with interlocking factors that defy analysis.
Our prized equipment – jumbo-jets and cruise-ships, etc – has been put aside as though such things had never been invented. Our daily routines – commuting, shopping, coffee-swigging – have been abandoned. Advertisers have been at their wits’ end with no scope for giving birth to new evasions and eye-catchers. Customers have not been buying. Sandwich-bars have gone bust while hungry travellers have stayed at home.
The tides still go in and out. The rain still falls on the just and unjust. But the framework of civilised life is not secure. What will become of us?
‘Methinks,’ wrote Milton, ‘I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.’ If only, we may think. We can shake our locks but the strong man must be somewhere else. We are, of course, not a noble and puissant Nation any longer. We no longer rule the waves. We no longer pray that our bounds will be set wider and wider. We know perfectly well that the balance has shifted, that two superpowers, China and the USA, will be ruling the roost while the southern hemisphere begins to flex its muscles. We know too that the manufacturing prizes will go to south-east Asia rather than the Black Country.
Like Babylon and Nineveh we shall watch others overtake us. We shall be strong on nostalgia and at best be a modern equivalent of Athens in a Roman world. We may comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we have given the world a common language. Is that all? Is there no more to say?
‘Naught for your comfort’ was a book about South Africa and apartheid. The seemingly impossible happened there. We may take heart from that. ‘Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’ The scientists have demonstrated that the flower is not in their gift. We must look elsewhere. And, unlikely though it may appear, the New Testament documents may hold the answer. We could do worse than follow the example of the people in Beroea: ‘… they received the message with great eagerness, studying the scriptures every day to see whether it was true.’ (Acts 17.11)
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