But Laurens van der Post does not say what he believes is the solution to the failure of the Churches to fulfil their function, save by implication that the clergy should educate themselves out of their gothic intellectual sleep. My opinion, right or wrong, is that the solution is for the public of this country to see this world as created by God, because at this stage of the world’s history when everything is in the melting pot, it is the only way to re-establish the kind of community that people are thrilled to join. For any community to be a thriving one, it is essential that many people should be willing to work for it in a public-spirited disinterested way. Enlightened self-interest is all very well, but surely it is not enough. It is true that with many people, the most you can expect of them is that they will act with enlightened self-interest; and you have to accept that. But for a community to thrive for any length of time you need others, who will put the community before themselves. The notion of “Empire” worked for a time. And it is a great credit to Macaulay and the Council of the Governor-General at the time that English education was introduced into India in the 19th Century, which meant that there were enough able educated Indians to take over the proper administration of the country, from the British when the time came.
Anyway the Empire has gone, for better or worse; and with it the incentive in Britain to work for the benefit of the commonwealth. The “Big Society” is just a flabby alternative. Conquest is like a death-wish, with the presence everywhere of atomic weapons. So the only motivation left is the religious desire to work for the common-good, which was presumably the thought in the mind of the Creator from the very beginning: namely that when everything else had failed, Mankind would be driven back onto Himself! The alternative is for countries, one by one, to become failed-states as each in turn falls victim to senseless terrorism. Napoleon Bonaparte wrote, I think to a friend, “I’l n’y a que deux puissance dans ce monde, le sabre et l’Esprit. A la longue le sabre est tourjour battu par l’Esprit”; that there are two only powers in this world, the sword and the spirit; and in the long term, the sword is always beaten by the spirit. And he ought to have known! So what you need to defeat religious terrorism is a better religion. Bullets are very useful in the short term. But in the long term, they are no solution. The terrorist will win, if he can endure. But provide a better religion, and you cut the ground from under him. But how exactly do you provide a better religion?
My solution is to try to revive the idea of a world created by God, and within it a state invigorated by the optimism of true religion, in which we all have a part to play. But the clergy are now so divorced in public perception from the idea that they should make religion a sensible, practical guide through ordinary life, that the last thing you want is their assistance. There are always exceptions; but as a body their failure to preach a Gospel credible to the modern world is so complete, and they are so discredited in public opinion, that to invite their assistance is almost to invite failure. Instead you have to convince people that science, triumphant today, is essentially a religious subject. And you can only do this convincingly by showing that the simplest explanation of Evolution, which is the heart of science as we know it, is a religious one. This I attempt to do in my books, particularly in my Religious View of Nature & the Universe, in this website “Religion Rewritten”. I attempt to re-create the vision of a world created by God, in which we all have a part to play. What I do not say in any of my books is the nature of the real problem that I am attempting to solve. That is what I am trying to do now.
How can anyone hope to revive the public’s interest in religious ideas, when over the last few centuries the clergy, by their ineptitude, have virtually destroyed it? Are we not in the long run the doomed victims of fanaticism, however much we may arouse ourselves in the short term to fire millions of bullets at the fanatics? Will not the spirit, in the end, always prevail? Will not materialism always prove itself bankrupt?
Of course it will! So I see no other course to proceed upon, in the time that remains, than to seek to revive the public’s interest in the spiritual things in life, however forlorn the prospect of success may appear to be now. In other words, painstakingly to rebuild, what has been so needlessly destroyed.