Musing on Muggeridge

I am reading Hostage Lands with my son. He is assigned this for his 3rd grade reading in school. In the book, a Celt named Calum tells a Roman centurion, named Rusticus, about his conversion to Christ while a attending the games in the Coliseum. He tells him of Chirst’s kingdom and how it is truly eternal over and against the supposed eternal city of Rome. Calum mentions other empires that had fallen, such as the Persian, Syrian, and Assyrian, that once thought they were invincible.

This reminded me of a Malcolm Muggeridge quote that I have often heard Ravi Zacharias repeat in the past. So… off to Google I went to find this quote. Along the way, I found some others worth noting. Here’s the first:

Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.

Further:

On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing ‘Abide with Me’ in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates

Thoughts and quotes like this about television haunt me mostly because I believe them to be true. There may be good arguments for some redeeming qualities of television but I just have the sneaking suspicion that they are overwhelmingly overpowered by its deleterious effects. I have read Postman and somehow remain inactive, mostly due to football. Anyway, this is just my bent. I cannot help but think we’d be better off as a society without television.

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.

May God grant us ears to hear.

Here is the quote for which I was searching. It is long but well worth it.

We look back upon history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions. Wealth accumulated and wealth disbursed. Shakespeare has written of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon.

I look back upon my own fellow countrymen, once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world, most of them convinced, in the words of what is still a popular song, that the God who made them mighty, shall make them mightier yet.  I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I have seen an Italian clown say he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power. I’ve heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin, acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka. I have seen America, wealthier and in terms of military weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together, so that had the American people so desired, they could have outdone a Caesar, or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquests. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.  England part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running our of those precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring, and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixotes of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate.

All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.

Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ.