Twelve Years, MaddAddam, Romans

We went to see Twelve Years a Slave, expecting not to enjoy it but knowing it was an amazingly well-told and moving story. Two things affected me the most: the cruelty of people to their own fellow human beings, and the strength of the will to live, partly through the ability to cling to a tiny shred of hope. Before we even see the way the plantation owners use and dehumanise the slaves, we see how two profiteers blatantly befriend and entrap a happy, normal family man and musician (the main character), and sell him to slavers, in full knowledge of what they are doing to him. What makes people able to misuse each other so baldly?

While I do sometimes feel like punching somebody (not saying who...!) out of anger or frustration, I'm not sure I could actually cause physical harm to another person cold-bloodedly, for my own gain. But we hear about this kind of cruelty and misuse of others all the time - young girls being trafficked, women held captive and raped for years on end in a suburban house, drugs cynically sold to teenagers, etc etc etc.

(But, what about the harm I cause others without seeing it? As when I buy a cheap T-shirt which was made by a child-labourer somewhere? Just because we don't see the effects of our actions doesn't mean they don't have that effect. I worry about that.)

I have just finished reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam, the third part of her brilliant MaddAddam trilogy. (The first book was Oryx and Crake, the second The Year of the Flood.) As with the film, this was an uncomfortable read, but giving some enlightenment. It is set in a dystopian future, where the human race has been almost entirely wiped out, through a drug hidden in a pleasure-pill called "Blyssplus". In this future world, people have become obsessed with leisure, self-image, and gain, and society is controlled by corporations who are developing more and more extreme ways of using technology to make money. Consumerism gone completely mad. For example, Paintball has become Painball where people literally fight to the death, watched online by any who want to. Corporations kidnap their rivals' employees and strip their brains of the information, rendering them brain dead. The depths of cruelty and cynicism in this world are phenomenal. But much of what the author imagines, has been done, or is now possible to do, and actually, the cruelty we see in our entire human history is only being projected into a more technologically able future.

Margaret Atwood does give a glimmer of hope, in that a very small group of humans survive, along with some human hybrids made by one of the corporation geniuses. The survivors are mostly former members of a quirky religious cult called The God's Gardeners. Whilst they are not really Christians, their religion is a hotch-potch of Christianity, Judaism, and conservationism. What I like is that it is the people of faith who still love the natural world and try to conserve it, who do recycling, grow their own food, avoid harming others. And they are the ones who survive, mostly (not taking the Blyssplus) and who know how to make a go of living in community, and without electricity or supermarkets. (By the end of the trilogy they are actually still using commodities raided from the falling-down malls. But there are some hints about them learning to make their own ink and paper for when those things run out.)

It is not as simplistic as I have made out here, the characters are complex and among the God's Gardeners there is all the nominalism, doubt and division that we see in our churches. I think it is the understanding of the deep-seatedness of faith in God, the wisdom of living his way, and as part of that, a hope for creation and a mandate to love it, that I really warm to.

Thinking about the cynicism and greed in our society, the terrible things that people do to each other in war or for financial gain, can make me pretty depressed, and sad in general for the world, and for God who must feel so let down, so disappointed. But reading the biblical book of Romans in our home group, I have been reminded that evil is nothing new, God knows and has always known what his people are capable of. And he is light. The light of goodness and love does shine, although sometimes it feels very small. But, it won't be overwhelmed. The hope we have is that evil practices will end, and that there will be justice, that God does reign. In the meantime, we have to hold on to the hope, not get too sad, and more importantly, keep doing our bits of goodness and kindness, being that light to others.