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Overview
Despite our material and technological advances, Western society is experiencing a deep malaise caused by a breakdown of trust. We’ve been misled by authorities and institutions, by businesses and politicians, and even by those who were supposed to care for us. The very cohesion of society seems tenuous at times.
The church is not immune from these trends. Historically, it has a dubious record when it has wielded power; personally, many of its members are as afflicted by our culture’s breakdown as anyone.
In A Wilderness of Mirrors author Mark Meynell explores the roots of the discord and alienation that mark our society, but he also outlines a gospel-based reason for hope. An astute social observer with a pastor’s spiritual sensitivity, Meynell grounds his antidote on four bedrocks of the Christian faith: human nature, Jesus, the church, and the story of God's action in the world.
Ultimately hopeful, A Wilderness of Mirrors calls Christians to rediscover the radical implications of Jesus’s life and message for a disillusioned world, a world more than ever in need of his trustworthy goodness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310515272 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zondervan |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2015 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Mark Meynell is a writer and teacher, as well as an associate director (Europe) for Langham Partnership, having spent nine years on the senior leadership team of All Souls, Langham Place, in London, UK. Previously he was the academic dean and then acting principal of Kampala Evangelical School of Theology (KEST) in Kampala, Uganda. Married to Rachel, with their two children, Joshua and Zanna, Mark lives in central London, where he is a committed culture-vulture and muso who loves crossing borders and building bridges.
Read an Excerpt
A Wilderness of Mirrors
Trusting Again in a Cynical World
By Mark Meynell
ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2015 Mark MeynellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-51526-5
CHAPTER 1
WHERE THE BUCK STOPS!
Rulers Have Failed Us
If hindsight offers the delusion of historical inevitability, the future offers the mirage of infinite possibility. We easily forget that while the past is now "fixed," it never was while options were weighed and choices made. The world then lives with the consequences. What our generation tends to overlook, whether willfully or not, is that our options are inevitably shaped by the past. History matters. Always.
Unfortunately, this gets ignored. Behind the closed doors of deliberations in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, a senior Middle East expert, Dr. Michael Williams, was briefing Prime Minister Tony Blair. He explained the generations-old tensions and deep divisions inherent within Iraqi society, as well as why occupying Westerners might not be altogether welcomed. "Blair casually brushed him aside: 'That's all history, Mike. This is about the future.'"
The major flaws in the Iraq War process were perhaps exposed at that very moment. The prime minister revealed not simply an ignorance but a spurning of history, as if an invasion (to bring "Iraqi freedom") could inaugurate a "Year Zero." A decade later, that sounds naive at best, culpably irresponsible at worst. How can we possibly imagine the past is irrelevant to our present or future? Even a cursory glance at foreign involvement in the Middle East suggests that the arrival of Western tanks might have less than propitious resonances. We despise history at our peril.
That is not to deny the appeal, however. The study of history is fraught with difficulty; its lessons are rarely comforting; it rarely serves simplistic sound bites or ideological agendas. So, as the German Hasselbacher says to his English friend Wormold, protagonist of Graham Greene's exquisite satire Our Man in Havana, "You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced."
Nevertheless, this chapter's purpose is to deliberately face that reality. Contemporary disillusionment with the powerful has not arisen spontaneously. What follows, then, is an arbitrary trawl of a few episodes from what Walker Percy described as "the most scientifically advanced, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history."
Intransigent Leadership: The Officer Class and the Trenches (1914-1918)
The last century dawned with many grounds for optimism. Scientific and technological advances, for example, were gaining momentum. Although United States Commissioner of Patents Charles Duell had reportedly claimed that "everything that can be invented has been invented," his opinion in 1902 was, in fact, very different: "All previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness."
Had he lived, he would not have been disappointed. Consider the wonders of eradicating smallpox, the might of microchips, and the triumph of the moon landings, to name but three. However, the ends to which even these technological innovations would be put were not always so benign.
In 1912, August Bebel, leader of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SDP), made a prophetic speech in the Reichstag:
"There will be a catastrophe ... sixteen to eighteen million men, the flower of different nations, will march against each other, equipped with lethal weapons. But I am convinced that this great march will be followed by the great collapse [at this moment many in the chamber began to laugh]—all right, you have laughed about this before; but it will come ... What will be the result? After this war we shall have mass bankruptcy, mass misery, mass unemployment, and great famine."
The record states that his words were drowned out by mocking laughter. A right-wing deputy called out, "Herr Bebel, things always get better after every war!"
Bebel died the following year. But as historian Frederick Taylor proceeds to comment, "Another year after that, booming, brilliant Berlin would be a city at war. A city of hunger. A city of despair." Bebel had seen that humanity, not just Germany, would suffer.
The statistics from just three key World War I battles prove the point:
• The First Battle of the Marne (September 1914) offered the bitter firstfruits of the reaping to come. Barbara Tuchman described how it had sucked up lives "at the rate of 5,000 and sometimes 50,000 a day, absorbing munitions, energy, money, brains, and trained men."
• The Battle of the Somme (July - November 1916) caused the "prodigal spending of lives by all the belligerents that was to mount and mount in senseless excess." On the opening day alone, the British army suffered its worst day in its history, with 60,000 casualties. By its conclusion, the Allies had suffered over 650,000 casualties and the Central Powers, 450,000.10 And the dividend from this exorbitant expense? An advance of roughly seven miles.
• Calculating the statistics for the Battle of Passchendaele (July – November 1917) is even more fraught than for other battles, but recent studies suggest both sides lost roughly a quarter of a million men.
The difficulty with such figures is that they leave us dazed and uncomprehending. More disturbingly, they even seem paltry compared to the horrors of the next world war: six million Jews killed in the Holocaust; perhaps as many as twenty-seven million perished in the Soviet Union (roughly ninety times the number of United States casualties). We might try to imagine the impact on individual families in order to personalize it a little (for example, members from both sides of my own family were cut down in the trenches). But ultimately, how can we ever grasp the colossal scale of this waste? Such is the horrifying legacy of warfare's industrialization. This slaughter could never have been accomplished by ships of the line and siege engines, let alone by arrows or muskets. Technological advances seemed merely to offer military strategists greater scope for carnage.
No wonder survivors spoke so vociferously against it. Any residual Victorian deference lay slain in the sea of Flanders' freshly dug graves. There genuinely was a sense that "lions had been led by donkeys," no matter how just the war aims might have been or how unfair the criticism.
Despite not leaving school until 1921, George Orwell sensed that the conflict's effect went far wider than on those (like him) on the political left. Because the war had been conducted mainly by "old men ... with supreme incompetence," everyone under forty was consequently "in a bad temper with his elders, and the mood of anti-militarism which followed naturally upon the fighting was extended into a general revolt against orthodoxy and authority ... The dominance of 'old men' was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity." D. H. Lawrence echoed him: "All the great words were cancelled out for that generation." The halcyon days of pre-1914 (such as they were) could never be retrieved.
Few articulated this disaffection more poignantly than the war poets. Some, like Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, had lived privileged lives prior to the war. Sassoon, for instance, had a private income sufficiently large to sustain a charmed lifestyle of hunting, cricket, and writing verse. As its beneficiaries, these were the men most likely to defend the status quo. Trench warfare, mustard gas, and shell shock shattered all that.
Here, Sassoon gazes back in his mind's eye from his trench to the lofty command posts. But he had the moral authority to write like this. He had been awarded the Military Cross for "conspicuous gallantry" in 1916 and then found himself in hospital the following year.
The General
(Denmark Hill Hospital, April 1917)
"Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack
* * *
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
How had it come to this?
All leaders shoulder formidable burdens. The higher they climb, the weightier they become. Many must rue the day their ambitions propelled them toward high office, and only those who have experienced similar burdens can understand it. A White House staffer for three presidents described the moment when "confident men realize what they've gotten themselves into."
When you get in, you discover nothing is what you expect, or believed, or have been told, or have campaigned on ... It's much more complicated. Your first reaction is: I've been set up. Second is: I have to think differently. Third is: Maybe they had it right. And it isn't long before they ask, who am I gonna talk to about this?
What is true of presidents is surely also true of all but the most conceited chief executives. And generals.
The complexity of warfare on a continental scale always makes it unpredictable (a good reason by itself for maintaining war as the last resort). Even Adolf Hitler recognized that. "The beginning of a war is always like opening a door onto a darkened room. You never know what's hiding in there," he apparently declared. Yet complexity hardly even begins to explain such catastrophic loss of life. One factor must surely have been the culture of leadership itself, which could be absurdly blimpish. For example, one World War I German general, Max von Hausen, simply could not comprehend "the hostility of the Belgian people," despite the occupation of their supposedly neutral country! He even assumed that aristocratic etiquette would trump national resentment, harrumphing when the hospitality at the D'Eggremont family château to which he was billeted was less than lavish.
Then, as the war progressed, commanders displayed a stubborn inability to learn from the experiences of 1914. Strategies ossified; the slaughter escalated. Yet still the French marshal Ferdinand Foch stuck rigidly to his tactics, because, "there is only one way of defending ourselves—to attack as soon as we are ready." So, "for four more years of relentless, merciless, useless killing the belligerents beat their heads against it." This was even after the Battle of Morhange (August 1914), which had "snuffed out the bright flame of the doctrine of the offensive. It died on a field in Lorraine where at the end of the day nothing was visible but corpses strewn in rows and sprawled in the awkward attitudes of sudden death as if the place had been swept by a malignant hurricane."
Foch was certainly not the only stubborn commander. The Allies eventually won through some tactical advantages, through General Douglas Haig's deliberate policy of conquest by attrition, and through the arrival of the United States. But ultimately, it was because the Central Powers were exhausted and depleted first.
People tried to steer the strategists away, of course. Officers in the field tried to communicate their impressions to senior staff, but if reports did not conform to the prevailing military theories, they were routinely ignored. Even the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, failed to have Haig dismissed. After the Battle of Passchendaele, he remarked that "Haig does not care how many men he loses. He just squanders the lives of these boys." The general survived, largely because he had inveigled the full support of the king, George V. But for many, he personified the intransigence of the old guard.
Tuchman's observation that "the impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change" has been rightly applied to many different contexts. But when it results in carnage, it is a tragedy. Yet Flanders' fields would not be the last setting to witness it. The rubbled suburbs of Stalingrad and the sweltering jungles of Vietnam would reverberate with echoes of the same charge.
Popular perceptions were clear: Grand strategists think little of ordinary lives, and even when they do, they are too often reluctant or unable to modify plans to fluctuating circumstances.
You just can't trust them.
Secretive Leadership: Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations (1918-1920)
There is nothing quite like the frisson of being sworn to secrecy. It automatically grants status. In matters of state, the more secrets you know, the more powerful you are. It is also what motivates some to become spies or journalists (or both), with perhaps the primary difference being the size of intended audience. Secrecy is its own intoxicant.
There is no room for naivete here. Some secrecy is inescapable in leadership. One argument against total transparency is that it renders truth telling about politically toxic questions almost impossible. This was precisely why Tony Blair regretted pushing freedom of information legislation through Parliament. He regarded that as one of his two greatest errors (the other being the ban on fox hunting!). If every position paper or deliberation is subject to subsequent disclosure, Blair concluded that people will "watch what they put in writing and talk without committing to paper. It's a thoroughly bad way of analyzing complex issues."
Yet the drawbacks are obvious. Cynics quickly retort, "Well, he would argue that, wouldn't he?" Secrecy can become the locked door behind which illegal or immoral plots are hatched, as conspiracy theorists constantly remind us. Isn't this the reason that mature political systems seek to constitute checks and balances, even if these must occasionally be hidden from view?
Furthermore, voters are unnerved by the thought of hidden deals that will have calamitous consequences for them. For example, the details of a nation's foreign policy are rarely the subject of election manifestos (apart from vague commitments), and so they tend to be decided by a precious few. The First World War is again a case in point.
It seemed extraordinary then, and even more so a century later, that the assassination of an Austrian prince by a Serb in a Bosnian city would plunge the whole world into war. Yet because of an impenetrable web of international alliances, the various European powers were sucked in one by one—the Triple Entente (the series of agreements between France, Britain, and Russia that ballooned into an alliance incorporating the United States and others) on one side, and the Central Powers (the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires) on the other. It would entirely deserve the biting satire of this Horrible Histories school playground setting:
And so a Serbian gang known as the Black Hand (honest!) waited till the Emperor [or rather his heir] came to Bosnia ...
The first stone had been thrown. Austria declared war on Serbia, and Germany helped Austria so Russia helped Serbia so France helped Russia. Germany marched through Belgium to get to France so Britain helped Belgium.
The First World War had started. It was expected to last about four months but it lasted for four frightful years.
Having taken the United States into the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson felt responsible for fashioning the peace. Even before his 1916 reelection, he was analyzing how Europe had degenerated so fast. A leading cause was the secrecy of these alliances. He argued in May 1916 that this is why the war began "without warning to the world, without discussion, without any of the deliberate movements of counsel with which it would seem natural to approach so stupendous a contest."
It's not hard to sympathize. Surely, talking is better than killing, isn't it? This was what drove Wilson's passionate advocacy for the new League of Nations (for which he won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize), forerunner of the United Nations. "It will be our wish and purpose," said Wilson, "that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind." He went on to outline the famous fourteen-point program of peace, of which his first point was this: "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view."
It was a fine aspiration. Indeed, it was central to the founding philosophy of the United States itself. Thomas Jefferson feared that secrecy was detrimental to the republic's political health, because transparency enabled "the contest of opinion" in contrast to the secret mysteries of monarchy. During that same time period, English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued, "Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy ... It ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government."
Woodrow Wilson's idealism seems hopelessly naive today. Many might still strive for such goals. But the common perception is that decisions affecting entire populations are made by unaccountable people (with or without political leaders) in secret rooms. Isn't this what fans the flames of conspiracy theories? Without transparency, the likes of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or the Bilderburg Group, or Yale's Skull and Bones society are always going to fall under suspicion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Wilderness of Mirrors by Mark Meynell. Copyright © 2015 Mark Meynell. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
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