As The World Burns

Hope and Despair on a Thursday Morning

File: Sodom and Gomorrah afire, by Jacob Jacobsz. de Wet d. J., probably Köln, c. 1680, oil on canvas - Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt - Darmstadt, Germany - DSC01149.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

I spent yesterday pondering the state of the world, as I am often wont to do. And the first thing I have to share is this:

I’ve been listening to clips on Instagram delivered to me by a friend and I am completely in love. The picture seems AI generated and is not a good representation of the voice that resounds when you listen to this amazing gift to humanity. Let everything I say next be in the context of admitting that sometimes people make good and beautiful things.

Nevertheless, the second thing for today is not any kind of gift, it is a great and terrible grief I feel about an entire American city burning to the ground. And part of my grief is a little bit of repentance, that I, however tepidly, believed in the myth of progress.

A few years ago—you must remember—I read a book called Feminism Against Progress. This book seriously changed my perception of the world. I loved it so much I wanted to do a book group with all of you. I even collected some emails of those of you who were interested, and then never got it off the ground first because I am not good at organizing things, and second because my life is so complicated with so many older children and so much church work and such a house as mine that needs so much management because it is such a wreck. But seriously, I wanted to know what all of you thought, because that book was—is—so illuminating.

Indeed, it is the title that jostles the mind into clarity. How can one be against something like progress? Isn’t the very nature of humanity to keep going up and up, to advance forward toward the beautiful and the good? Shouldn’t things always be getting better and better and better?