In his essay “What Can We Hope For in Society?,” Christian ethicist John C Bennett wrote for a Western, mid-century Christendom still measuring itself against the enlightenment idea of progress. Yet his central argument that sober hope must be distinguished from both utopian guarantee and fatalistic despair, reads with unusual sharpness when set against the Naga situation.
For generations, Naga society was shaped by mission Christianity in ways not unlike the liberal optimism Bennett describes. Conversion was widely experienced as an entry into a larger moral and social order, and education, literacy, and church institutions were treated as instruments of an assured advance. The identification of the kingdom of God with a coming social order, which Bennett criticizes as a distortion of biblical faith, is recognised in the way Naga Christian patriotism has sometimes been conflated with a promised political deliverance.
That expectation has been tested severely. Decades of armed conflict, ceasefires without resolution, and factional violence among Naga political groups themselves have produced precisely the disillusionment Bennett names - not a loss of belief caused by any single catastrophe, but the slow discovery that the ideals such as self-determination, unity and justice, can be turned into instruments of division. Bennett’s observation that the gravest social evils are found at “high levels of intellectual and moral advance” is illustrated starkly by a movement whose original moral clarity has been fragmented by internal rivalry, taxation disputes, and competing claims to legitimate representation. The idealism of a people is seen, here as elsewhere, to have been converted into the very machinery of prolonged tyranny over themselves.
Bennett’s rejection of inevitable progress and of guaranteed, secure gains is instructive for a society where each peace accord, each unification effort, and each electoral exercise has been followed not by cumulative security but by renewed uncertainty. His insight that spiritual gains are not dependably transmitted from one generation to the next is confirmed by the widening gap between an older generation’s memory of communal solidarity and a younger generation’s experience of corruption, unemployment, and disaffection with both church and underground authority alike.
Yet Bennett’s essay is not read merely as diagnosis. It neither is call to a “sober hope,” neither utopian nor despairing, but offers a more useful posture than either nostalgia for a lost unity or cynicism about the possibility of any settlement. His claim that every act of social justice remains a gain, even where no guarantee of its permanence can be given, is applied fittingly to the partial, contested achievements of Naga civil society’s peace initiatives, church-mediated reconciliation efforts and local moves toward electoral reform, each of which is fragile, none of which is secured, but all of which are treated by Bennett’s framework as authentic embodiments of a kingdom that transcends them.
What is most usefully borrowed from Bennett is the refusal to let disappointment with either the “freedom” movement or the machinery of federalism produce a swing toward the conservative extreme, a collapse into either uncritical loyalty to old structures or blanket cynicism toward all political effort. Instead, a distinction is drawn between the political aspiration and its repeated betrayal, and hope is grounded not in confident prediction but, in Bennett’s own ordering, in “faith and love, with hope” held as subordinate rather than primary. For a society exhausted by seven decades of an unresolved political question, that ordering is offered less as theology than as counsel for endurance.
