About 115 years ago, G. K. Chesterton wrote What’s Wrong With the World. I think he would be shocked at how much greater in magnitude the problems are now than when he shared his insights and wisdom with the world. Maybe he wouldn’t. About 100 years after Chesterton’s book, John Horvat II wrote Return to Order. Together, they serve as elements of a lens that provides a clear view of the world now and of cures to its ills. The solutions they both cite can be found by looking back, not forward.
Chesterton speaks of modern society’s (remember, this was right after the dawn of the twentieth century) obsession with the future, describing how people are focused on writing the biographies of their great-grandchildren instead of learning from the lessons of their ancestors. C. S. Lewis, in his famous book Screwtape Letters (1941), has the main character, Screwtape – who is a demon training his nephew in the skills of their work — identify the future as the “thing least like eternity” and the “most completely temporal part of time,” making it the ideal focus for demonic influence. The devils’ goal is to keep humans “hag-ridden by the Future,” perpetually chasing an elusive “rainbow’s end” rather than living in the present moment. It has been said by many over the centuries, and found in the Bible, that God is found in the moment.
Was there ever a time when life was more in the moment and less distracted by chasing the impossible, that is, heaven on earth? Yes, but never mankind-wide. And, of course, never perfectly so.
As all three of the cited authors are known to espouse, it is not that many of the great movements in history were ineffective, but they were not fully implemented to rightly determine if they were effective, leading to a better world and better lives. They cite Christianity as one of several examples. What would the world be like if everyone lived exactly according to Jesus’ teachings? We don’t know because it has never been done, yet there are those (many!) who toss it aside because of the actions of sinners (which we all are). That doesn’t mean Jesus’ teachings are ineffective; it means we are terrible at living them out.
People seem convinced that the only good solutions to the problems of the day are things conceived anew and untried. The truth is that we can learn much from the lessons of those decades, centuries and millennia before us. Maybe then we can relish the moment instead of building a future. It is in that space that we are also most apt to find God.