When No Means Yes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 198, 9 April 1943, Page 3

When No Means Yes

E were not surprised to discover, when we set out to ask the questions discussed on Pages 4 and 5, that not many people wished to answer them. Even when answers were offered they were largely negative, and when they were positive they did not often tell us what we wanted to. know. But they told us something: first that most people are still more concerned with winning the war than with reconstructing the world afterwards; and in the second place that very few of those who are thinking about the future have yet reached clear decisions. We were of: course not so much thinking of the future ourselves as trying to find out if others were doing so; especially if they were doing so consciously. It was not a case of drawing maps but of testing reactions, and it is a healthy sign, all.in all, that very few of those we questioned had spent any time counting their heart-beats. People who do not know whether they are more worried than they use to be, or less, who have to think before they can say whether it is harder or easier to pray or sing or read or play, are not deeply worried about anything; and that, so long as it does not slip into complacency, is how healthy people ought to be. In other words, the answers to our questions indicate that most people are working and not worrying. They have passed out of the anxious questionings of the first few months of the war without realising what has happened to them, and to-day they can hardly recall those anxieties. It is only on the religious front that there are dark broodings about the future, and religion would be dead if believers were not disturbed. They are. They do not conceal, or wish to conceal their uneasiness. They know that victory for the Allies will present almost as grave problems for Christians as an indefinite prolongation of the unrest and misery of war. But the mood of the average man is. calm; certainly not fretful or alarmed. His answers about himself are negative because he is too busy to think about himself-or about anything continuously but the speediest delivery of the world from anarchy. His "No I am not aware of a change" means "Yes, I am getting on with my job."