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Attention
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Economics
1 min read

Budgeting for discontent

The Chancellor can't please everyone, but is contentment possible?

Paul Valler is an executive coach and mentor. He is a former chair of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

A woman stands behind a lectern against a blue and red backdrop.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves speaks at a recent event.
HM Treasury.

As the Chancellor Rachel Reeves seeks to raise billions in this Autumn budget, the news media are all over the downsides.  Poor pensioners freezing during winter and businesses complaining of the tax burden are political headlines. Tough choices must be made, but we are rarely happy when it comes to money.  

Economic discontent is ironically a cultural norm in first world countries.  In the west we have become used to what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill – adjusting our expectations to any new benefits and finding ourselves wanting even more, to try to maintain the same level of happiness.  It’s a mentality that dooms us to discontent.   Socrates said, ‘He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.’    

Contentment seems to be a forgotten virtue today, and increasingly elusive in a society striving for happiness through wealth.  Yet being content in life is a more valuable form of wealth than money.  There is something enormously attractive about a tranquil state of mind and heart.  Contentment does not mean passive acquiescence; there is a noble side to being passionately discontented about something that is unjust – especially when we are fighting for others.  William Wilberforce demonstrated that with his campaign for the repeal of laws allowing slavery. 

Our personal challenge is to be content in ourselves, whatever the circumstances. Oscar Wilde said, ‘True contentment is not having everything, but being satisfied with everything you have.’   Practising paying attention to what we do have and being thankful for it.  That attitude of gratitude is a recognised way to lift our mood and strengthen our resilience.  But thankfulness doesn’t solve every problem.  Warm words may help warm hearts, but they don’t heat cold homes.  Although gratitude is proven to improve our wellbeing, it’s not enough to compensate for all the problems of life.  Because here’s the deal; life is tough and then you die, and there are many worse things than economic woes. 

Pain, grief and loss are all too common, and they can test our resilience beyond what feels like our ability to endure.  Chronic physical or mental illness for example; or being permanently disabled.  Or the life-sapping effort to parent children with special needs; or caring for a parent/partner with dementia - especially when it goes on and on.  Sometimes horrible events happen like violent abuse, or the deep grief of relationship breakdown or bereavement.  This level of suffering pushes us to the end of ourselves, to the place where something more than psychological self-help is needed.  What is the secret of contentment then? 

I don’t envy the Chancellor, and I do not trivialise the very real challenges raised by having to make tough economic choices.

This is where the secular and the Christian worldview are radically different. Secular philosophers call people to show their own self-sufficiency and superior reason when enduring suffering.  This can feel principled and stoic, but it lacks empathy and hope. Christianity accepts the reality of our own weakness and insufficiency, recognising that we can’t fix everything ourselves.  Instead of trusting in humanity, we choose to trust God both for this life and the life to come.  And this trust and hope is linked to a deeper form of contentment, which transcends pure rationality. 

Of course, sceptics say this is just psychological comfort from an imaginary friend, and it doesn’t make sense, because surely any good God would not allow us to suffer in the first place.  But any realist must acknowledge that a lot of human suffering comes from the damaging exercise of our own free will.  Wars and slavery are examples.  If God were to override our free will, we would be robbed of the authentic capacity to love, which makes us fully human.  The coexistence of free will, suffering and God is a complex issue. 

The experience of millions of Christ followers is that trusting God is much more than imaginary comfort.  God is real and prayer changes things; the most ordinary, natural and chance experiences can be affected by it.  And prayer changes us.  In our vulnerability, if we choose to trust God something changes, we begin to relax, things become a bit easier to bear.  In fact, the apostle Paul claimed that Christ’s power was perfected in his own weakness.   

Contentment is a strange peace that comes from trusting God in the middle of difficult circumstances.  One of the great old hymns was written by a man who lost his four daughters in an accident at sea, and also lost all his money in a fire.  The refrain says, ‘It is well, it is well with my soul.’   This isn’t denial or delusion, it is the inner sense of quietness that God can give.   Only an eternal perspective allows for that kind of contentment. 

I don’t envy the Chancellor, and I do not trivialise the very real challenges raised by having to make tough economic choices.  Britain is clearly in a place where some stringent fiscal discipline is needed, and that will inevitably cause some hardship and difficulties.  But in the face of all the discontent that is so freely shared in the news, there is another way to respond.  Instead of complaining about our flawed Government or moaning about our circumstances, we can change our perspective to put our trust in the ultimate Authority.  And in doing so can find a peace that the world cannot give.   Contentment is a treasure beyond the wealth of nations.   

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Belief
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Politics
6 min read

How to survive a culture war

Blaise Pascal shows us what really underlies our contemporary battles.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Two goats lock horns.
Maxime Gilbert on Unsplash.

We often say these days that we are more polarised as a society than ever before. But we're wrong. Maybe the USA is experiencing a particularly sharp divide right now, but they have had their own, much more violent troubles in the past. And in Europe, and especially in Britain, we know a fair bit about culture wars that were literally that – wars.  

In the 17th century, we English had our own civil war where we literally killed each other over religion and politics. We even killed a king. The French did something similar and even more vicious just over 100 years later. That is real polarisation. However spiteful Twitter/X arguments may get, I don't think Charles III or even Kier Starmer is quaking in their beds expecting to be put on trial for treason.  

So maybe our history has something to teach us about how we navigate culture wars.  

The literary critic Terry Eagleton once wrote of our age:  

“the world is accordingly divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little. While some lack all conviction, others are full of passionate intensity.” 

 We tend to think our contemporary divide between left and right, progressives and conservatives is something new. But we can find echoes of this in previous times.  

A case in point was the mid-17th century – the time of many other upheavals in Europe. Part of the febrile atmosphere of the time saw fierce arguments between rationalists and sceptics.  

There were at the time, two broad strands of thinking about the human condition. On the one had there were the ‘Dogmatists’ who were sure that they knew everything through use of reason or the application of philosophical or scientific method (like René Descartes). On the other hand, there were the ‘Sceptics’ who thought everything was random, or custom, and there is no final Truth to be found (like a figure from the century before – Michel de Montaigne). 

Of course, our own time has its fair share of people with an overwhelming confidence in the power of human knowledge, and the physical sciences in particular, to unlock the secrets of life, the universe and everything. The ‘new atheist’ project of Richard Dawkins and friends was hugely confident in reason and its capacity to tell us all we need to know, dispatching religion to the dustbin of history and instead placing an unshakable faith in the empirical methods of science. It had - and has - definite similarities with this picture of human knowledge.  

Yet on the other hand we also have, in the progressive postmodern project, those who reject any kind of underlying rationality or sacred order either above us or beneath us. For them, there is no underlying Truth to be discovered, and they delight in revealing the instability and illusory nature of any claim to truth. It sounds very much like the culture wars of our time. 

One enigmatic 17th century figure charted a way through this dilemma - Blaise Pascal. When he looked at his century’s culture war, he thought both sides had a point. There is, he observed… 

…open war between men in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence…. Who will unravel such a tangle? This is certainly beyond dogmatism and scepticism, beyond all human philosophy. Humanity transcends humanity. Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven lying in the lap of God, to be known only insofar as it pleases him to reveal it. 

So far, he says, the sceptics, like Montaigne, are right. Truth is beyond our grasp, it does not reside here on earth, openly obvious and ready to be found. If it exists, it exists in some world above us, beyond our reach. How do we even know if we are asleep or awake, given that when we dream, we are as convinced that we are awake as we are when we are truly awake?  

And so, modern progressives, looking to dismantle the assumed results of previous understanding, due to its inherent colonial, patriarchal or abusive past, delight in showing how random and arbitrary is so much of what we take for granted from the past. And, Pascal would add, they have a point. Many of our legal, political and cultural assumptions are purely cultural and arbitrary, and sometimes simply serve to the advantage of the rich and powerful rather than the poor and marginalised. 

Yet on the other side, the ‘dogmatists’, like Descartes, have their strong point, which is that we cannot doubt natural principles. The acids of deconstruction can only take you so far. The most sceptical philosopher still puts the kettle on assuming that it will boil to make a cup of tea. She gets up in the morning assuming that the sun will rise and set again at the end of the day. Despite the corrosive effects of scepticism, Pascal wrote,  

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”  

Despite all our doubt, we still live in a world with order and predictability. Scepticism keeps bumping up against reality.   

So, modern conservatives point to a deeper ‘givenness’ to things, an order within the natural world that we did not create, and yet, mysteriously, seems to be prearranged before we got here. Scientific exploration does make sense. There is a regularity to nature that we can, indeed have to, depend on. Sexual differences exist and can’t be ignored. We are not entirely free to override the natural order of things - there is a deeper rhythm to nature and its capacity for renewal that we only mess with at our peril, as climate change has taught us. As a result, the age-old battle between rationalists and sceptics, progressives and conservatives, will never find resolution, as the arguments flow back and forth.  

Christian faith includes both progressive and conservative impulses. Christians are aware of the brokenness of the world and therefore long to see it changed. The progressive impatience with the way things are, and the yearning for a better world has its roots in Christian faith.  

Yet at the same time, Christianity discerns a divinely created order to the world, a rhythm to the natural world, that cannot be broken and needs to be respected. Therefore, an inherent conservatism is part of Christian faith as well. In other words, the Christian story can explain both and offer a bigger picture than either.  

For Pascal, Christianity offers a diagnosis for this mystery of the human condition, the complex mix of grandeur and misery, infinity and nothing, sceptic and rationalist, in the simple, yet endlessly generative idea that we humans are gloriously created, deeply fallen and yet offered redemption through Jesus Christ. Our sadness is heroic and tragic. In Pascal’s suggestive image, it is “the wretchedness of a great Lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.” 

“We show our greatness,” says Pascal, “not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.” For him, the very existence of such culture wars points to the truth of the Christian diagnosis of the human condition. 

Pascal offers us a way between the Scylla of Progressivism and the Charybdis of Conservatism – or perhaps better, to embrace the best of both. Culture wars are tricky to navigate. Yet they might find resolution if we allow them to point us to a deeper reality - our strange mixture of greatness and sadness. And not losing sight of either side of this enduring truth.  

 

Graham Tomlin is the author of Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World  (Hodder) £25.  

Watch Graham explain why he is fascinated by Pascal.

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