The Best of all possible worlds

 The Best of all possible worlds

The words of Pangloss came to mind as I was thinking about the hymn we sang at  primary school, more years ago than I wish to remember. I mentioned the hymn in a reply to a comment a few days ago and it became3 an ear worm which won't go away. Here are a couple of verses:

1.
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

2.
Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colours,
He made their tiny wings.

All things bright ...

3.
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.

Leaving aside that this was written by an Anglo-Irish poet in 1848,at the heart of the Irish potato famine, when the poor were dying by the thousands or escaping to America, every single line is a statement of stasis; that the world we have right now is ordained by god and is the best of all possible worlds. So the world I inhabited in the 1930s was the best of all possible worlds and every age is as god ordained it. So some would have us believe that the world of their childhood was a golden age.

Just think what some folk think of as a golden Age;

There were no poor people going hungry or suffering from cold because churches gave them food and paid their heating bill

There were no unwanted children because good Christians adopted them all, even the non-white and handicapped ones.

People had large families as nature intended because contraception was illegal.

There was no homosexuality because any man (women were OK) found indulging in it was banged up in jail (where homosexuality is rife) or chemically castrated.

There was no abortion because it was illegal and women went to great lengths to keep it a secret. A good few of them died from botched, unhygienic abortions.

There was no same sex marriage (see above!) This meant that the man/woman/children family was in no danger of destruction.

Everyone dressed in their best and went to church every Sunday, which meant that God smiled on that society.

Children were sent off to Sunday school every Sunday afternoon which gave Mum and Dad a quiet hour to add to the family.

There were no teenage single mother pregnancies because Dad made sure they had a teen age marriage.

There was none of this dangerous sex ed in schools, robbing children of their innocence and teaching them that different sexualities might be OK.

OK, I think I have said enough. I won’t get into the Depression, WWII, the Holocaust and other horrors of the past. I’ll just use the words of a late British prime minister, “You’ve never had it so good!”

Do you yearn for the “good old days? If so, why? What made them good for you, for society in general?



Posted by This style 10/6


 

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