Sunshine, not tears. .(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Michael Casey ("Solving the Problem of Meaninglessness", March 2003) gives us his grim and pessimistic view of the consequences of a world without meaning. I suggest he study a bit of anthropology, history and statistics to cheer up. His black worldview--understandable for a Catholic when fewer and fewer people are turning to the Church for salvation--is reflected in Nietzsche's observation, "The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad, has made the world ugly and bad."

Casey skates very lightly over the evidence and, in any case, offers us no plausible solution for his problem of meaninglessness. His account of the horrors of the last century, which John Paul II refers to as the "century of tears", is wilfully misleading. Has he read no anthropology of tribal societies, nor history of any society for that matter, before the twentieth century? If he had, he might just have concluded that our era is a beacon of enlightenment. Attrition rates of adults in almost constant warfare and killing throughout history were anywhere between 20 and 60 per cent of the populations, with examples of mass genocide going back thousands of years. As for our twentieth century of tears, for the United States and the whole of Europe over that entire period, and including both world wars, the number of humans killed was less than 2 per cent of the population! In no century have more humans been safer and been more able to avoid violent death.

And things keep improving. "Murder as play", Casey posits? Elizabethan England had murder rates twenty to thirty times higher per 100,000 of the population than England today. Rather than Casey's Christian determination to find the world ugly and bad, the secular West has achieved social and political ...