The foundational Christian feast of Easter is upon us, followed, barely a week later (in this turn around the sun) by our own Anzac commemoration to honour New Zealanders who have served in wars overseas, including the two worldwide wars with their salutary taste of nuclear armament and an internationally crafted commitment to making them ‘the wars to end all wars’.
We now know that the half-life of that aspiration was 75 years (from 1949 to the 1980s), when the welfare and sociability of humanity as a whole was perhaps the most transformative in recorded history.
After that brief suspension of history’s usual trajectory; again in thrall to unimaginable wealth, intergenerational fortunes, reckless conquest and predatory emperors, warlords and oligarchs, it would not be overstating the world’s current news to say that we have lost our moral compass.
We lost the gentler morality of Christianity along the way, deeply missing its social blueprint for something better than brutish wars and slavery that currently manifests as ‘me first’ capitalist greed.
“When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything” was coined by G K Chesterton (1874-1936). He famously said something about everything (and said it better than anybody else) so it is worth retrieving in these turbulent first months of the second societal meltdown in the US.
Deepak Chopra, in his book How to Know God, argues that “God is as we are”, which is also useful as we orient ourselves to a world where the word itself has been relegated to primordial slime and authoritarian presidential maunderings, while the planet’s most wealthy and influential, creating a supreme being in their own image, appear to have run aground on Mammon by default.
“Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.”
These words were written by Charlie Chaplin in 1931, in the closing speech of his first film with dialogue, The Great Dictator, in which he played both a little Jewish barber living in the ghetto and the cruel dictator ruler of Tomainia.
Hitler’s Nazi Germany was already a clear and present danger and Chaplin – mirroring human choices through the competing lenses of good and evil – captured the plight of the “little man” in society as the ideas, sentiments and aspirations of the millions of struggling citizens were ground between the upper and the lower millstones of society.
“Now let us fight to free the world… to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!”
Chaplin quoted the apostle Luke: “The Kingdom of God is within man”.
“Not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
“Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!”
“Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people,” Chaplin said in the carefully honed speech he wrote for his unassuming character. “More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost,” he said.
The parallels with the world we are now wrestling with almost 100 years later are striking but Chaplin argued against despair.
“The misery was simply the passing of greed. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.”
(The clever little comedian may even have signalled a warning against the long-feared perils of AI that the carelessly greedy have forgotten to regulate.)
So, for what’s probably going to be a windy and wet Easter weekend nearly 100 years later – I suggest less of the omnipresent cartoon rabbits and glittery chocolate wrappings and more of mindful kindness and gratitude for each other. Chaplin’s “normal decent human beings” choosing to love and cherish others with real gratitude for life on what’s naturally the best of all worlds.
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
