Dorothy L. Sayers
Created | Updated May 9, 2011
"In 1954 in a piece on Dante's 'Inferno' Dorothy Sayers wrote:
"That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we are today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectability, we find it easy enough to recognise the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism: violence, sterility, and lack or reverence for life and property including one's own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercialisation of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people's minds by mass-hysteria and 'spell-binding' of all kinds, venality and string-pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidist mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kingship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance: these are all the too-recognisable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilised relations."
"That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we are today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectability, we find it easy enough to recognise the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism: violence, sterility, and lack or reverence for life and property including one's own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercialisation of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people's minds by mass-hysteria and 'spell-binding' of all kinds, venality and string-pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidist mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kingship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance: these are all the too-recognisable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilised relations."
