A moving speech delivered sometime ago by JB Pritzker, Governor of the state of Illinois, USA, at a graduation ceremony of Northwestern University, largely captures the core of Christmas and the revolutionary light Jesus, whose birth is being celebrated today, ignited in our dark souls in a violent world.

Pritzker told the audience that the best way to spot an idiot (a stupid person, a person of low intelligence) is to look for the person who is cruel. 

In the Hobbesian state of nature where life was solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short, evolution had conditioned us to fear and judge someone who does not look like us, act like us or live like us. We survived evolution by being suspicious of things that we were unfamiliar with. Now, we need certain mental capacity to step past our most primal urges. 

In order to be kind, says Pritzker, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. “Empathy and compassion,” he says, “are evolved states of being.” That is highly debatable, and where Jesus comes in. 

If empathy and compassion are evolved states of being, and not an instant spiritual change which Christ instills into us, Pritzker’s next assertion, which is true, would be a fallacy; that “somewhere along the way, in the last few years, our society has come to believe that weaponised cruelty is some part of well-thought-out master plan.” 

But nature hardly reverses evolution. So, man couldn’t have, at some point, returned to base instincts after evolving to the states of empathy and compassion.   

That cruelty is seen by some as an adroit cudgel to gain power, while empathy and kindness are considered weak in a world where many important people look at the vulnerable only as rungs on a ladder to the top, is nothing but the true state of mankind prior to the coming of the Lord Jesus. 

Pritzker was partially correct to say that “when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society.” 

Actually, cruelty should be one of the traits signposting an absence of Christ in us, not failure of the first test of an advanced society, because even in an advanced society, cruelty still persists in the hearts of men and women.    

Christ teaches us that loving God and loving our neighbour are the first and greatest commandments.  

Without Christ’s love, we will never be able to force our animal brain to evolve past its first instinct; we will never be able to forge new mental pathways to overcome our own instinctual fears that lead us to hate and be cruel. 

Love, therefore, is the good news Christ brings to us at Christmas – love God, love your neighbour as you love yourself. 

From Vanguard family, we wish all of you a happy Christmas and a prosperous 2024.