Summarising ch 1 of The Jesus Hope, by Stephen Travis (1974)

Visions of the future

Most twentieth century prophets are prophets of doom, not of hope – we need think only of George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and Neville Shute’s On the Beach.’

‘People have been lamenting man’s decline for a long time.

It was Aristotle, before 300 B.C., who is supposed to have said, “When I look at the younger generation, I despair of the future of civilization.”

In 1806 William Pitt declared, “There is nothing around us but ruin and despair.”

And in 1892 the Duke of Wellington could write, “I thank God I shall be spared the consummation of ruin that is gathering around us.”‘

‘If we pause to ask where this rapid rate of change is leading us, the answer is not obvious. It is as though the human race were passengers in an accelerating jet airliner – with no one on the flight deck.’

The results of progress

• The arms race. ‘psychiatrist H.D. Laing has calculated that “normal men have killed perhaps a hundred million of their fellow-men in the last fifty years.”‘ ‘The stockpiles of the nuclear powers contain explosives equivalent to a hundred tons of T.N.T. for each inhabitant of the earth.’
• The world’s food resources.  ‘The fact that two-thirds of the human race are living below the breadline is so well known, so often repeated that it raises no more eyebrows than the news that a Hartlepool mid-field player is unfit for Saturday’s game.
• Other natural resources. Are being used up at an alarming rate. ‘In the United States a child is born every twelve seconds, a car every five seconds.’ ‘A car travelling^. 625 miles uses up as much oxygen as a man breathes in a year .•• Already the United States produces only 60% of the oxygen it consumes.’
• Pollution.  ‘In Japan, the Welfare Ministry estimates that some 340,000 people are still suffering from the lingering illnesses caused by atomic fall-out from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.’  ‘A 1,000 megawatt nuclear power station produces each year 150 gallons of radioactive liquid waste, which must be kept sealed for two or three hundred years.’

Robert McNamara: “All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a nearly infinite capacity for folly.  He draws blueprints for Utopia but never quite gets it built.'”

‘Creation in reverse’

‘Hope springs eternal’

Few men can live without hope. ‘Without something to look forward to our personalities disintegrate. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step onto the moon’s surface, suffered from mental depression in the year following his Apollo 11 moon mission. In his book Return to Earth he describes how he had spent most of his life competing for difficult goals. Now with nis moon walk – “the most important goal of all” – behind him, he suffered from “the melancholy of all things done”.’

Seven substitutes for hope

1. Despair
2. Bland optimism
3. Escapism
4. Self-indulgence
5. Astrology
6. The totalitarian state
7. Radical idealism