[Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer] were both very serious people. I have a feeling that there has been a pressure away from seriousness in much modern thought, as if we could sort of scale reality down to a size that we are more comfortable dealing with. That might be a prejudice, but I feel that we have not come up to the standards of seriousness that others have reached at earlier moments.
The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity was the sense of posterity, for example — a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore. People actually wanted to make the world good for people in generations that they would never see. It makes people think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try to eliminate slavery. Of course, we have recrudescence of slavery all over the world now. It’s sort of, “Well, we won’t think about that. It’s too bad.” I’m really disturbed by the degree to which I don’t hear people saying, “Are we leaving the world better than we found it?” I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.
Marilynne Robinson
