Derek’s Reviews > Our Only World: Ten Essays > Status Update

But you can't run a landscape, any more than you can run your life, indefinitely in a state of emergency. To live your life, to live in your place, you have got to bring about a settlement that does not involve you continuously in worry, loss, and grief.

There is pleasure in the work of maintenance, the redemption of things worn or broken, that must go on almost continuously.

But there can be no balance between freedom and secret police, universal suspicion, and tyranny. There is only a choice. If we have the courage, we will choose freedom, and we will use it to oppose our government's frivolous and dangerous secrecy, which it imposes upon us under the claim of "security" but really to hide its abuse of power and shame.

We have been so thoughtless and careless of our freedom for so long that by now we cannot see that our assumed right to be limitlessly violent would finally bring us to a violence against freedom that may destroy it.

Why should we continue to believe that our government is uniquely to be trusted with our weapons of mass destruction, whereas other nations are not to be trusted with theirs?

In the accounting of our wars, we speak often of the "human cost" to our side, the lives of young people spent, as we say, in defense of "our way of life." We speak little of the "human costs" and "collateral damages" paid by our enemies...But surely, by now, the official rationalizations of our violence have become too obviously hypocritical to be ignored.

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking the heat and even the courage of a personal hatred. Categorical hatred is the hatred of the mob, which makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob overflowing with righteousness, as at the crucifixion, and before, and since.

Oversimplified moral certainties—always requiring hostility, always potentially violent—isolate us from mercy, pity, peace, and love and leave us lonely and dangerous. The only perfect laws are absolute, but perfect laws are only approximately fitted to imperfect humans. This is why we have needed to think of mercy, and of the spirit, as opposed to the letter, of the law.

Jesus taught that hating your neighbor is tantamount to hating God, and yet some Christians hate their neighbors as a matter of policy and are busy hunting biblical justifications for doing so.

For the necessary political changes will be made only in response to changed people.