When I was away at college in the late '70's and early 80's, my mother would send clippings from the newspaper which she thought I would enjoy, or from which I would benefit. Had she lived during the advent of the internet I am sure she would have sent me links to similar stories, or forward those multiply-already-forwarded emails that I used to receive from other older relatives. Sure, as a young man at the time I rolled my eyes on occasion; still, I have found recently that I have kept some of those clippings...and they were really, really good.
I came across the passage below while reading Malcolm Muggeridge's autobiography (part 2) this morning and thought it was something I would like to pass along to someone. If you've stumbled upon this post, I guess that's you. So, in some ways, I truly have become like my parents.
Watch out kids.
Anyway, I hope you'll find this at least partially as interesting as I did. Keep in mind, this was published back in 1974.
After returning to London in 1934 after 18 months working in Geneva at The League of Nations:
“Everything looked differently to me; especially the assumption on which I had lived from my earliest years, that such and such changes, brought about peacefully through the ballot-box, or drastically through some sort of revolutionary process, would transform human life; making it brotherly, prosperous and just, instead of, as it had always been, and still was for most people, full of poverty, exploitation and conflict. I no longer believed this, nor ever would again. The essential quality of our lives, as I now understood, was a factor, not so much of how we lived, but of why we lived. It was our values, not our production processes, or our laws, or our social relationships, that governed our existence.” ~Malcolm Muggeridge in The Infernal Grove
[Edited on 2/25 to add]
He also made the following statement which reminded me particularly of this last year:
"This was to be increasingly an age of polarized loyalties."
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