1 October

One of the easiest reflexes of our time is to have a problem with ‘materialism’. But the love of comfort and well-being and new relationships is the healthiest instinct we have. We really don’t understand our own world. Those who re-built the world after the last world war knew this, and were often mocked by those who came after them, with their more ‘spiritual’ and idealistic bent. “Today I can measure the folly and malice of those who affect to despise money, that divine institution. Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that is both rational (measurable) and universal, since property reckoned in terms of money is accessible to all men. Venality is one of the cardinal virtues. The venal man suppresses his murderous and anti-social instincts - honor, self-pride, patriotism, political ambition, religious fanaticism, racialism - in favor of his need of his need to co-operate with others, his love of fruitful exchanges, his sense of human solidarity. The term, the Golden Age, should be taken literally, and I see now that mankind would swiftly achieve it were its affairs wholly in the hands of venal men. Alas, it is nearly always high-minded men who make history, and so the flames destroy everything and blood flows in torrents. The plump merchants of Venice afford us an example of the luxurious happiness possible in a state governed solely by the law of lucre, whereas the evacuated wolves of the Spanish Inquisition show us the infamy of which men are capable when they have lost the love of material well-being. The Huns would soon have checked their advance if they had known how to profit by the riches they acquired. Encumbered with their gains, they would have stayed to enjoy them, and life would have resumed its course. But they were disinterested savages. They despised gold. They rushed onward, burning as they went.” Michel Tournier. Friday, or the Other Island.