The four quotes below are intended to suggest a not unfamiliar possibility – mass complacency is the real enemy of the modern world. The harm done at a personal level is an old idea, but maybe it is also worth considering mass complacency in a lunatic world.
A problematic level of mass complacency could stem from both physical comfort and personal security, knowing we won’t starve if we are old, ill or out of work. We are very comfortable in both these senses when compared to the past.
The recent pandemic debacle could be one pointer to the problem. This quote from George Moore is a reminder of just one serious health threat our ancestors had to live with all the time without the lifeline of modern medical assistance.
At the end of the passage there were a number of girls in print dresses. The gaiety of the dresses led Esther to think that they must be visitors. But the little cough warned her that death was amongst them.
George Moore - Esther Waters (1894)
A number of my ancestors were carried off by TB. Then we have the complacency which can stem from physical comfort. It’s an old issue –
He was in the comfortable mood, following upon unusual indulgence of the appetite, in which the mind handles in a free and easy way the thoughts it is wont to entertain with unquestionable gravity; when it has, as it were, a slippery hold on the facts of life, and constructs a subjective world of genial accommodations.
George Gissing - A Life's Morning (1886)
He was in the comfortable mood, following upon unusual indulgence of the appetite, in which the mind handles in a free and easy way the thoughts it is wont to entertain with unquestionable gravity; when it has, as it were, a slippery hold on the facts of life, and constructs a subjective world of genial accommodations.
George Gissing - A Life's Morning (1886)
As he listened to her, with a full plate in front of him, he was affected, in spite of himself, by the prim comfort of his surroundings. The matting beneath his feet seemed very soft; the gleams of the brass hanging lamp, the soft, yellow tint of the wallpaper, and the bright oak of the furniture filled him with appreciation of a life spent in comfort, which disturbed his notions of right and wrong.
Emile Zola - The Fat and the Thin (1873)
Emile Zola - The Fat and the Thin (1873)
He was the incarnation of the commonplace, a comfortable middle-class sentimentalist, who patronized pacifism out of vanity, but was very careful not to dip his hands too far.
John Buchan - Mr Standfast (1919)
John Buchan - Mr Standfast (1919)
Dickens made much of comfortable complacency too, and the wickedness which can accompany it. The point to be made is that some people are not complacent when dishonesty and even evil pervade the public arena but most people are remarkably complacent.
Voting patterns tell us this if nothing else does - people vote for obvious lies and shameless liars. And for people who are by earlier standards evil.
Voting patterns tell us this if nothing else does - people vote for obvious lies and shameless liars. And for people who are by earlier standards evil.
2 comments:
I particularly like the Buchan quote. I think of him as a major minor novelist, if that makes sense.
It's possible that complacency was a luxury of the upper and upper-middle classes until mass affluence. Most people probably would have struggled to see how the concept could even make sense. It makes me wonder whether there are any new, emerging vices which we are only just beginning to discern.
Sam - Buchan as a major minor novelist seems about right. Very quotable and easy to read too.
That's an interesting observation about new emerging vices, although we tend to see plenty of old vices to be going on with. Maybe sceptics should be more robust about vice as vice. Worth a blog post I'd say.
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