“There is a noise that is different to grief. Sadness wails and cries and lets loose a sound to the heavens like a baby calling for its mother. That kind of noisy grief is hopeful. It believes that things can be put right, or that help can come. There is a different kind of sound to that. Babies left alone too long do not even cry. They become very still and quiet. They know no one is coming.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power
T.S. Eliot once reproached society because in it, he said, blasphemy was becoming a very difficult thing to accomplish. Quite an assertion. And I don’t think that many “spiritually” minded individuals would agree. They might think that our age is more than ever one of blasphemy. After all, blasphemy, according to dictionary definition, is impious irreverence, or to profanely speak against God. If what we see and hear in our culture and media doesn’t contain heaps of impious irreverence, well, then the above-mentioned folks might assume we have a problem with definitions.
This, though, is precisely Eliot’s point – and it’s all in the definition. For Eliot, “blasphemy is not a matter of form but of right belief.” To blaspheme, and do it right, a person must “profoundly believe in that which he profanes.” Chesterton once said something like, “Try for a moment to seriously think profane thoughts towards Thor.” The point is made clearly enough: one must believe in something to properly profane it. Thus, for Eliot, “Where blasphemy might once have been a sign of spiritual corruption, it might now be taken rather as a symptom that the soul is still alive, or even that it is recovering animation: for the perception of Good and Evil – whatever choice we may make – is the first requisite of spiritual life.” This thought could go in a slightly different way though. What if we were to take blaspheming against God and turn it towards speaking against the ills in our society?
With the above in mind, what does Eliot’s talk of blasphemy have to do with sound and Naomi Alderman’s chilling quote on the sound of hopeful sadness? It is this, and I am leaning more on Eliot’s last comment about being alive to the perception of Good and Evil. Despite the tirade of sounds, often angry, resentful and filled with fury (whether those voices are crying against injustice in the form of inequality against race, defense of the unborn, or how democracy is not being realized), the sound of crying and wailing lets us know that many people recognize that things are not as they ought to be, but that things could be changed for the better. That’s an example of hopefulness. Our noisy grief is hopeful. And that so many share in a similar expectation of what this “better” is, speaks to, in part, the powerful foundations that Christianity has helped establish. This is something to celebrate, or at least take courage from.
Now, that last statement about Christianity is a contested one, since the expression of Christianity – being made up of people – isn’t perfect. But there have been some highly credible scholars who have been talking about Christianity’s definitive role in creating the many irrefutable rights that most people in societies call “human.” Tom Holland’s book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, for instance. As Holland asserts concerning human dignity from a historical perspective:
That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident a truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.
The point in all this is to show that the sound of grief is actually a sign that most of us know and believe in just what the ideal is, and want it to be evidenced. In our culture we do believe in the tenets that Christianity has gloriously laid down. Thus, the increasing volume of anger is a sign of belief. This is good. If we didn’t actually believe in rights and responsibilities and freedoms and democracy, there would be no uproar.
Matthew Steem is the editor of Radix Magazine