PEOPLE ARE NOT ALWAYS aware of their own hopelessness. That’s bad. Modern philosophy offers them no hope whatsoever, but to be unconscious of this state of hopelessness is worse than being distracted from it.

Frank Sheed, a mid-20th century author who had a brilliant way of summing up complicated phenomenon, wrote in his 1946 book Theology and Sanity:

An unhappy generation has of necessity to distract itself from its own emptiness. Since the beginning of the world, men have sought distraction in sin; our own world has found a further distraction, special to itself, in science. Take science first. It is incredible how long science has succeeded in keeping men’s minds off their fundamental unhappiness and its own very limited power to remedy their fundamental unhappiness. One marvel follows another— electric light, gramophone, motor car, telephone, radio, aeroplane, television. It is a curious list, and very pathetic. The soul of man is crying for hope or purpose or meaning; and the inventor says “Here is a telephone,” or “Look, television!”— exactly as one tries to distract a baby crying for its mother by offering it sugar sticks and making funny faces at it. The leaping stream of invention has served extraordinarily well to keep man occupied, to keep him from remembering that which is troubling him. He is only troubled. His sense of futility he has never got round to analysing. But he is half strangled by it.

Sheed, Frank (2015-03-17). Theology and Sanity (Illustrated) (Kindle Locations 5292-5296). Aeterna Press. Kindle Edition.

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