No Time Like the Present

The desire for order is a primary need of our nature, of our minds and bodies .... In the sphere of society man desires primarily a clear order, the deep satisfaction of knowing himself bound up with that which is moving to some defined end.'There is nowadays no dearth of writers whose theme is the condemnation of our modern chaos. They fall, usually, into one of two distinct classes: there is the pure satirist, mildly mocking or disgustedly slashing but with no positive advice as to how our Humpty Dumpty should be put together again; there is the perhaps more placid person whose solution is ready to hand and whose only difficulty lies in the apparent hopelessness of getting the world to accept that solution. Miss Storm Jameson belongs to neither camp. She does not mock, and though she hits hard it is, one feels, in real sorrow and not in righteous anger; and, on the other hand, while she sees in what direction the solution must lie, it is by no means cut and dried for her. Our trouble is that 'there is no end solution, no Good, no value greater than all the others, to which we can relate and subordinate our separate lesser values'; we know the evil of that disruption, that 'division between man's outer and inner life, which starts with the Renaissance.' But the modern world cannot 'turn back .... to the medieval supremacy of the Church'; 'formal religion' has collapsed. And meanwhile, we bow the knee to the 'bitch-goddess, Success,' and at the same time seem all too likely to turn renegade even to that religion by suicidally plunging into another war

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