HOPE DIES LAST: Making a Difference in an Indifferent World
By Studs Terkel
Granta, £14.99; 352pp
ISBN 1 862 07705 3
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If the proper study of mankind is man we have an excuse for our navel-gazing, even though the realisation that this is the only study where the knower and the known are one may induce inertia worthy of Hamlet. In 1933 Jung avowed that modern man was in search of a soul, echoing Aristotle’s treatise of centuries earlier, while the most efficient search engine, the library, offers so many reflections on the human condition and its ending that the brain quails before its own questions.

The search for meaning is ancient and never ending: is there anything Richard Holloway can add? My answer is an unequivocal “Yes”. The former Bishop of Edinburgh follows Godless Morality (1999) with this series of reflections on what might be called Godless Spirituality. His approach is just “sitting in a chair” describing some of the conflicting things he has observed in his life, and the result is a deeply personal book that will speak to many people who share his disillusioned view of religion as “dangerously volatile stuff”.

Holloway defines them (and himself) in the precise terminology which guides the Radio 4 series I present, Devout Sceptics: “They may or may not ‘believe’ in God but they are no longer comfortable in any of the traditional religions . . . and they do not cease to be interested in spirituality or the inner life of the human community just because they are not members of any of the religions on offer in our society.” Such people, he says, are fascinated by science and psychology and inspired by art as well as by “the long human search for wholeness and healing”. There is pride in his assertion that this “is not a place of neutral agnosticism. It is a place of committed unknowing.” Many of us will recognise the landscape, chilly though it may sometimes be.

In the first of his four sections, “Looking”, Holloway delineates his own melancholy, the blues in the night which can quickly precipitate him into nihilistic despair. He expresses bewildered anger at the random cruelty of the Universe, but concludes with the inspirational statement: “We could pay the Universe a compliment it probably does not deserve by living as though its purpose were love.” Even if this is wrong, “Our lives . . . would have been an act of defiance against an indifferent power, and power is always worth defying.”

The great Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle thought it incumbent upon us to accept the Universe, since there is no alternative, yet the committed humanist finds a form of salvation in shouting “No” to its excesses, especially when they are characterised by human cruelty and greed. Yet how to confront injustice, inequality, pain? Studs Terkel’s long career (he is now 92) as an oral historian has left his admirers in no doubt about his humanitarian vigour, and his latest book is one long act of defiance, voiced by others — as its subtitle makes clear. His interviewees find meaning in doing, not reflecting; their “hope” is in the struggle to make the world a better place, rather than any born-again promise of Heaven.

He records more than 50 people from different backgrounds, from the folk singer Peter Seeger, through union organisers, teachers and military men, to the poor. What they have in common is their commitment to what they do, and a passionate energy. If occasionally his theme of hope appears slightly strained, and some of the interviews fall short of the promise, this in no way detracts from an absorbing collection of voices — which will confirm Richard Holloway’s own hopes for the future of the race. For example, Theodore Shaw, associate director of the NAACP Legal Defence Fund, says: “Martin Luther King was fond of saying that the moral arc of the Universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Very often I place myself in a long race of relay. We have to take the baton when it’s passed to us, and run as fast and hard as we can, and then pass it on to someone else . . . I’m very hopeful because to be anything else is to lay down and die.”

For Holloway spirituality is “engendered by and encountered in the world in which we find ourselves”. Yet, beyond the here and now, he understands what it is to fall silent in inexplicable awe, as well as to cry out in exultation at the sight and scents of a midsummer night. In his second section, “Speaking”, he discusses the stories we have told to make sense of the world, of which the Christian story and the epic of science are but two.

His assertion that: “We should identify the things that are really precious and fundamental to human flourishing and defend them against the odds”, leads on to a third section, “Listening”, in which he suggests ways of confronting ethical issues as diverse as drugs, the organ retention scandal and war.

This is exhilarating and inspiring stuff, but it is in his last section, “Leaving”, that Holloway hits the sweetest, highest, saddest notes on his trumpet. He writes about love and loss and the death we all face. Along the way towards that oblivion, facing change involves a thousand little feelings of loss which some — usually the elderly — find hard to bear. So life provides innumerable rehearsals for death, and it is incumbent upon us to learn how to cope and to accept change with benevolence.

What else is there? To return to the beginning, the questions we ask about ourselves are partly answered precisely because we ask them. That we can never know the answers is a source of existential misery, yet we are set above the animal world by the quest for understanding. The title of Gauguin’s greatest painting, Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going?, is symbolic of our duality — the human soul embracing ignorance and transcending it by its own act of creation. That, teetering next to the abyss, we still wonder indicates not pathos but a sort of grandeur; that we must inevitably fall is the cause of universal dread. In the world of Pascal: “Man knows that he is wretched. He is therefore wretched because he is so, but he is really greater, because he knows it.”

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