In a day when truth is being redefined and wisdom is in short supply, the insights of C.S. Lewis are more needed than ever. In this collection, Dr. Spencer Klavan, a fellow Oxford scholar, dives into the beloved writer&#8217;s greatest works and examines how his ideas apply in modern times.

CS Lewis _ Collection Cover

The city of Kenosha, Wisconsin has been the latest to burn. After another harrowing but inconclusive video depicting a police shooting — and after Democrats, in what has become their standard practice, did everything in their power to stoke racial tension — violent “protests” broke out once again. All week, the country has watched rioters <a href="https://twitter.com/Rhamenator/status/1298212561930911744?s=20">burn cars</a> and beat their opponents <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1298293310734376960?s=20">senseless</a>.
In Washington, D.C., screaming mobs <a href="https://twitter.com/rawsmedia/status/1298078919527202816?s=20">demanded</a> that diners raise their fists in the black power sign or face vituperative abuse. It’s encouraging to see that some brave patriots are defying these demands. But to look in the deadened eyes of those who acquiesce is to feel their helplessness and know how it is that mobs and tyrants win.
Christians often find themselves in a curious position when the bad guys take to the streets. On the one hand, we are told to “turn the other cheek.” There are those who think this means we should forego violent resistance and live as pacifists. Others can’t imagine that the Christian thing to do is to let the most aggressive criminals overrun society for lack of physical opposition.
That was C.S. Lewis’s position. In his day, Christ’s injunctions to love the enemy and turn the other cheek weighed heavily on the two generations of British men who were forced in the World Wars to slaughter or be slaughtered.
But Lewis argued that to refrain from fighting against Hitler would be to pervert the relevant commandments. In a 1944 interview, he said:
<blockquote>You are told to love your neighbour as yourself. How do you love yourself?&#8230; I do not think that I love myself because I am particularly good, but just because I am myself&#8230;. You [may] dislike what you have done, but you don&#8217;t cease to love yourself&#8230;. You may even think that you ought to go to the Police and own up and be hanged. Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person&#8217;s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.</blockquote>
There is no good for criminals — no love — in letting them continue to terrorize others and mutilate their own souls. Certainly it is not love to leave the innocent at the mercy of strong and violent men.
Lewis made this argument most forcefully in 1940, in front of a society of pacifists in a speech called “Why I Am Not a Pacifist.” He pointed out that pure nonviolence, if carried to its logical conclusion by all men of fighting age, would leave the pacifist nations defenseless and the world at the mercy of totalitarians and Nazis.
Lewis hoped that the prospect of world domination by the Third Reich would make clear his point that to refrain from violence is hardly the most loving approach in every instance.
He knew his opponents would counter that pacifism, idealist though it was, represented humanity’s only shot at a world without war. But that notion, he responded, “belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me. It consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life might be curable if only we can find the right cure.”
Another Christian teaching — that sin and misery are permanent fixtures of a fallen world, capable of being alleviated but never escaped — warned Lewis against the alluring but disastrous temptation to cleanse the world of its imperfections.
Lewis did not imagine that the war he was urging upon the young men of Britain was anything other than an unspeakable horror. He had seen the war himself, and described it with ruthless detail in The Screwtape Letters, his fanciful rendering of Hell’s attempts to capture a human soul. The devils in Screwtape relish “the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosives on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching.”
No one should imagine that fighting comes without a terrible cost. No one should take lightly the need for self-defense on our city streets. And none of this justifies vigilantism — it’s self-defeating to fight lawlessness with lawlessness. But self-defense and the rule of law are hallmarks of a free society and perfectly consonant with Christian teaching.
No Christian should consider it his duty to roll over and die. “Love” is not another word for “nicety” or “passivity.” It is as fiercely aggressive as it is aggressively selfless — and sometimes, it means taking up arms.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-on-what-to-teach-your-kids">C.S. Lewis On What To Teach Your Kids</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of Books</a> and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

Pacifists

Why Christians Can’t Be Pacifists

C.S. Lewis

Guns

Readers Pass

Second Amendment

COVID-19 has hurt public schools in America terribly, and that is a good thing. Not everyone realizes this because, as usual at this point, our media is hell-bent on reporting anything but the truth. But the truth is: remote learning was thoughtlessly implemented during the lockdowns and is now being maddeningly extended well past its sell-by date as a result of senseless keening from Teachers’ Unions and insane posturing by Democrats. This has gutted public schools, whose enrollment numbers (as policy analyst Inez Stepman <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/get-your-kids-out-of-public-school/">reports</a>) are plummeting.
Good riddance. Our public school system was long ago <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/american-education/what-will-become-of-our-schools/">hollowed out</a> by leftist ideologues the likes of revisionist historian Howard Zinn and New York Times race-baiter Nikole Hannah-Jones. Many of our public schools have become government-sponsored machines for pushing the <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/children-and-transgenderism/">worst kinds</a> of abuse onto the children of unwilling parents. This system is a major engine of our national deformity and now is as good a time as any to grind its zombie corpse into the ground.
What will come in its place? That’s the question conservatives need to be asking right now — we can home-school, advocate for school choice and vouchers, form pods in which multiple families learn from one teacher — but what will we teach our kids?
C.S. Lewis had some answers.
I wrote in my <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-on-why-the-left-is-coming-for-your-children">last piece</a> about Lewis’s philosophy of education, which was classical in the deepest sense of the word. For Lewis — as for Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, and Aquinas before him — education was not just about memorizing facts but about shaping the soul.
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis deplored the relativist materialism which had become par for the course in early education. Students were being taught to discount such words as “sublime” and “beautiful” when they read them in works of literature, because all judgments of the merely aesthetic kind were considered “subjective,” by which was really meant “arbitrary.”
In Lewis’s view this was a travesty: it taught students to misunderstand and “debunk” everything that is of value in literature and indeed in life. “That is their day’s lesson in English,” concluded Lewis, “though of English they have learned nothing. Another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to understand.”
But if this is the case, then the reverse must also be true: there must be a kind of education which bestows the human heritage upon kids. This is the kind of education that was prescribed in classical antiquity: Plato advocated “gymnastics for the body, and music [meaning arts and sciences such as mathematics more generally] for the soul.”
After the classical era and during the medieval period this was developed into the “trivium” — the three basic subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric — followed by the “quadrivium”—the four advanced mathematical subjects of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
Lewis knew that this kind of discipline was not an imposition but a gift, a way to usher kids into the full inheritance of their humanity.
In his fiction and nonfiction, Lewis constantly returned to the idea that God communicates with us most intimately, most secretly, in the stories we’re taught as children. Over and over, his characters who make it to heaven find themselves surrounded by half-forgotten figures and stories from their earliest life.
When the main human character in The Screwtape Letters finally dies, for example, he is greeted by the angels of God who have accompanied him secretly “at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone.” In that bliss of recognition, “the dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained.”
Those childhood friends — the characters of nursery rhymes and fairy tales — had expressed to the boy, before he could have known it, all the majesty of heaven which he would one day see face-to-face. Like Lewis’s own Aslan, the great heroes of childhood legends enshrine in the backs of our minds the truths we will spend our whole lives trying to recover.
There are <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/to-save-america-reclaim-civics/">schools</a> out there — the Great Hearts academies, for example, and other schools in the classical education movement — which are working to shape kids’ souls to the good in the classical way. In the years to come, it will be more important than we can even realize to throw our whole efforts behind supporting these promising fledgling efforts. The time is now and the stakes are high — our lives on earth, and our communion with heaven, may depend on it.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-on-social-engineering-the-leftist-effort-to-reprogram-your-mind">C.S. Lewis On The Leftist Effort To ‘Reprogram’ People’s Minds</a>
 Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="http://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of Books</a> and <a href="http://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@spencerklavan</a>.

Teach Kids

C.S. Lewis On What To Teach Your Kids

Coronavirus

COVID-19

Education

Earlier this month, a judge in Dallas <a href="https://www.theblaze.com/news/save-james-">reversed</a> a decision in the case of James Younger, an 8-year-old boy whose mother believes he is trans and should be feminized through social and hormonal intervention. James’s father, who disagrees, has now lost control over his son’s upbringing and medical care.
Also this month, Netflix began promoting <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0O7lLe4SmA">Cuties</a>, the story of an 11-year-old girl who “<a href="https://nypost.com/2020/08/20/netflixs-cuties-slammed-for-explicitly-sexualizing-little-girls/">starts</a> to explore her femininity, defying her family&#8217;s traditions” by joining a provocative dance group. The promotional shots feature prepubescent girls in revealing clothes, twerking and staring sultrily into the camera. Netflix has since <a href="https://twitter.com/netflix/status/1296486375211053057?s=20">apologized</a>, though in a half-hearted sort of way and not even for the content of the movie itself.
These things can only be described as the perverted horrors of a sick society. You can swish the chardonnay in your glass and sputter about “nuance” all you like. But when a salivating media is parading sexualized children before the glazed-over eyes of a brainwashed public; when <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/be-a-man/">political operatives</a> are <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/children-and-transgenderism/">handing boys over</a> to be chemically castrated; something has gone horribly, satanically wrong. Why?
C.S. Lewis knew why. He focused intensely on, and worried obsessively about, the political implications of early childhood. This fact is the indispensable cornerstone of his greatest sociopolitical work, The Abolition of Man (1943).
It’s seldom noticed, but <a href="https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1272928721708580864">crucially important</a>, that Lewis began Abolition with an epigraph from the medieval Christmas carol, “Unto Us a Son is Born” (Puer Nobis Nascitur). “So he sent the word to slay,” goes the carol, “and slew the little [children].”
The “he” here is Herod the Great, client-king of Israel under Rome during the birth of Christ. The event referred to is what Christians call “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%202%3A16-18&amp;version=NKJV">the massacre of the innocents</a>”: Herod, paranoid and shaken by a murmured prophecy that some new King of the Jews had been born, sent his thugs to murder every newborn boy under two years old in and around Bethlehem.
Herod failed in his objective, of course, but Lewis wanted his readers to recall the episode and understand its significance: when tyrants want to snuff out the truth, they attempt to mutilate and destroy children.
This is because children, as Jesus would one day grow up to <a href="https://biblehub.com/matthew/18-3.htm">teach</a>, have the kind of mind that can enter the Kingdom of Heaven: they are impressionable enough to learn new ways of thinking and seeing the world. Those who have a child’s mind can be shaped anew again and again in the image of God.
The ancient Greek philosophers, whom Lewis studied carefully at Oxford, wrote in detail about this. The Socrates of Plato’s Republic advises in <a href="applewebdata://9F20BB51-BE9D-49F5-8C92-3C4FF3C7A082/we%20begin%20by%20telling%20children%20fables">Book 2</a> that the guardians of the ideal city should keep a careful eye on what songs are sung, and what tales are told, in the nursery.
Crucially, Plato is not thinking here of a distant bureaucracy which will dictate from on high that children should learn there is no such thing as gender (just, you know, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/13/california-wants-teach-kindergartners-about-gender-identity-seriously/">for example</a>). He is thinking about a self-contained community, something more analogous in America to a county or a state, deciding together what kind of early education is good for kids.
Plato’s student Aristotle agreed about this: it’s the young kids who will grow up to write the laws, and the laws that will shape the education of the next generation. Get this feedback loop right, and you have a healthy democracy. Get it wrong, and you are on a road to regime failure that is very hard to get off of.
And so education is much more than just learning facts by rote: it’s a shaping of the soul, a conditioning of the mind and heart to understand and welcome justice. Lewis, who knew this, believed that the health of a society and indeed the church could be made or broken in the earliest years of life.
It’s why he was such a successful children’s novelist in his own right. It’s why he told his goddaughter, in the dedication to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950): “some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Serious thinkers about politics can’t succeed without some attention to K-12 education.
As <a href="https://biblehub.com/proverbs/22-6.htm">Scripture</a> says: “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” This is what Lewis, in his politics as much as his faith, never forgot. The truths instilled in early life are often the profoundest ones, the ones that stick deepest in the soul.
America’s radical Left understand this: they want to destroy the republic, so they have set about deforming the souls of its children. We should take a note from Lewis, and fight back.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-tyranny-for-your-own-good">‘Tyranny For Your Own Good’: C.S. Lewis On The Philosophy Behind COVID Lockdowns</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="http://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of Books</a> and <a href="http://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@spencerklavan</a>.

Children

The Left Is Coming For Your Children

NowThis is a progressive website whose cheery, snackable videos are designed to deliver leftist education to your newsfeed. You’ve probably thumbed past their content a couple times while doomscrolling: “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v_R1uRFvIE">Elizabeth Warren’s Greatest Moments</a>.” “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy7fF0gDjIQ">Drag Queen Kyne Uses TikTok to Teach Math</a>.”
In September of last year, NowThis released a particularly telling lecture from a chipper young authoritarian who demanded that we all <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Dbs55pKRI">“Stop Saying ‘Hey Guys,’”</a> because it excludes women.
Halfway through her sinister monologue, the narrator mentions a few other goals modern feminists want to achieve: “reproductive rights&#8230;LGBTQ rights, and the general reprogramming of most people’s minds” (emphasis added).
This last phrase — “the general reprogramming of most people’s minds” — sounds almost too Orwellian, too exactly on-the-nose, to be serious. But in fact it is in deadly earnest. Progressive social engineering — the attempt to nudge and drug humanity into a state of compliance with leftist ideals — is increasingly the explicit goal of the woke vanguard.
They aren’t hiding it. They don’t want to persuade you. They quite openly want to brainwash you.
C.S. Lewis predicted this development back in 1954 with crystalline precision in a remarkable essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.” Then, as now, a growing number of Westerners were becoming squeamish about the death penalty. They were disgusted with the idea of punishing criminals because they deserve it, rather than in order to rehabilitate them or deter others.
But, said Lewis, the very ideas of “deterrence” and “rehabilitation,” compassionate though they may seem, undermine the entire concept of justice.
Justice, argued Lewis, is nothing other than giving every person what he deserves. The only way we evaluate the justice of a punishment at all is by asking whether the person punished deserves it. Even the objection that “the death penalty is unjust” boils down to the argument that “no one deserves the death penalty.”
Deterrence and rehabilitation, on the other hand, are forms of social engineering: they use punishment as a tool for making people do what the punishers want. “Thus,” wrote Lewis, “when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.”
These two different governing ideas of punishment proceed along entirely separate tracks to very different destinations. Justice — though sometimes fearsome and always imperfect — treats the human being as a moral agent whose actions have weight and therefore consequences. By contrast, Lewis argues that “moral busybodies” (today we would call them “Karens”) are interested not in justice but in social engineering, “a dangerous illusion” which “disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end.”
Exactly as Lewis predicted, the logic of social engineering has now begun to careen toward its gruesomely logical conclusion.
Social engineering is based on the idea that human beings are effectively bags of meat and chemicals, pure matter to be therapeutically manipulated by “compassionate” and “progressive” healers.
But Lewis knew that those healers, however good their intentions, were in fact proposing to set themselves up as gods over men. “The things done to the criminal, even if they are called cures, will be just as compulsory as they were in the old days when we called them punishments,” he wrote. “If a tendency to steal can be cured by psychotherapy, the thief will no doubt be forced to undergo the treatment.”
Once Lewis describes this philosophy, you can see it everywhere in modern life:
In the endless classification of everything as mental illness, implying that the best way to fix emotional problems is simply with the right cocktail of medication.
In the insistence that gender and sexuality are mere social constructs, whose injustices can be rectified with surgery and hormone injections.
In the idea that religion is just a holdover from primitive tribal fantasy.
All of these ideas take it for granted that our enlightened leaders — presumably the ones best-versed in Critical Race Theory and intersectional politics — have a right to tinker with our brain chemistry until they reprogram our minds just right.
But, wrote Lewis, “this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being.”
This isn’t a bug in leftism. It’s not even a feature: it is leftism. Modern materialism philosophy has the potential to turn even well-intentioned people into coercive monsters. We were warned. Now we have to fight back.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-tyranny-for-your-own-good">‘Tyranny For Your Own Good’: C.S. Lewis On The Philosophy Behind COVID Lockdowns</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

Reprogram

C.S. Lewis On The Leftist Effort To ‘Reprogram’ People’s Minds

Conservatism

Progressivism

In April, the New York Times ran a breathless article praising Michigan&#8217;s Democratic governor. “Gretchen Whitmer Isn’t Backing Down,” said the headline. The authors celebrated Whitmer for insisting on rigid COVID-19 lockdown measures despite passionate criticism from many residents of her state.
Whitmer told the Times something interesting. “Honestly every ounce of energy I have is being put into protecting people and saving lives in Michigan,” she <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/us/politics/gretchen-whitmer-michigan-protests.html">said</a>. “I’m not thinking about politics.”
It’s possible that Whitmer — whose state is in <a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/06/01/lansing-police-sunday-riot-damage-buildings-businesses-cost-thousands-dollars/5306819002/">flames</a> and whose lockdown policies likely contributed to the <a href="https://twitter.com/byHeatherLong/status/1278321294396833795">spike</a> in suicides caused by unemployment — actually believes her own hype. She is a classic case of what C.S. Lewis might have called a benevolent tyrant: an oppressor who believes she is helping the oppressed. Whitmer might really think of herself as a saintly hero doing her part to save humanity.
This is the worst kind of tyranny. Near the end of his career, after World War II was done, Lewis wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
This line has been circulated recently as Americans have chafed under ever-more burdensome regulations based on ever-more tenuous arguments about COVID-19. It never seems to occur to people like Gretchen Whitmer that if their orders are in violation of the Bill of Rights, then the argument that they are “for the public good” is actually a shameless irrelevancy.
Lewis understood this, which is why he wrote that “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Well-meaning tyranny is not simply a misapplication of good principles. To the contrary: self-righteous, benevolent tyranny is based on fundamentally mistaken principles which contradict the most basic beliefs of every free society.
Free nations — the kind of nation that both Britain and the U.S. are supposed to be — are governed by popular sovereignty. This is the idea that what the people consider good is what the state will do. Benevolent tyrannies, on the other hand, are based on the idea that what the state deems good is what the people must do.
This concept, which stood at the center of Lewis’s political philosophy, even shaped his beloved children’s literature. Narnia’s famous White Witch is the ultimate tyrant, because she would rather rule over a kingdom of lifeless statues than lose her own grip on control: “I was the Queen,” she insists in The Magician’s Nephew. “They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”
COVID-19 tyranny has been a deadly disaster in terms of outcomes. Thousands are dead in New York nursing homes after Governor Andrew Cuomo&#8217;s administration ordered them filled with COVID-positive patients. Suicide rates are mounting at an alarming pace, and we have yet to feel the full force of economic devastation that will surely result from the lockdown orders.
But horrific as the financial consequences and death toll have been, they are not the real problem with Coronavirus tyranny. The real problem, as Lewis knew, is the premise of the thing: the presumption that “leaders” (many of them unelected, like Dr. Fauci) may determine which outcomes are righteous without accountability to the people whose good they claim to be seeking.
Even if the lockdowns have saved lives, which experts insist they have, they have undermined the very foundations of our republic. They were based on an idea that is antithetical to liberty: the idea that politicians, and not citizens, have the last word on what is good.
As Lewis also knew, once that idea is accepted there is no end to how far our benevolent tyrants will go in the interest of our own “safety.” For the world is fallen, and the death from which we are hiding will find us in the end.
Lewis said in “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948): “It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.”
If we let them, our benevolent tyrants will use our fear of that certainty to make us into stone statues, frozen in a paralysis of self-preservation, forever.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-on-social-engineering-the-leftist-effort-to-reprogram-your-mind">C.S. Lewis On Social Engineering: The Leftist Effort To Reprogram Your Mind</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a>Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

Tyranny for Good

‘Tyranny For Your Own Good’: C.S. Lewis On The Philosophy Behind COVID Lockdowns

Gretchen Whitmer

Throughout his whole career, C.S. Lewis fought against one significant error which he believed would lead in the end to political catastrophe: the error of materialism. In this second part of a series on the politics of C.S. Lewis, I argue that Lewis saw to the heart of a philosophical mistake that would gradually unmake our civilization: in speeches, books, and essays, he argued that if you debunk the idea of God, then the government will one day become your God.
In an <a href="https://faculty.fordham.edu/klima/Blackwell-proofs/MP_C30.pdf">essay</a> on the nature of existence, Thomas Aquinas — the great Medieval philosopher of the Catholic Church — recalled a point made by his favorite pagan, the Athenian philosopher Aristotle: “A small mistake in the beginning grows enormous in the end.”
Aquinas noted this at the opening of his On Being and Essence, because he knew what we too often forget: that the most catastrophic social and political errors are always rooted, somewhere deep down, in a seemingly minor misunderstanding of the most basic things.
In the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-the-politics-of-c-s-lewis">introduction</a> to this discussion of the politics of C.S. Lewis, I talked about Lewis’s distinction between justice and social engineering. Justice, in Lewis’s view, is a calculus of rewards and retribution: it is “giving to each what he deserves.”
As Lewis was well aware, this is an ancient idea that dates back at least to Plato’s Republic (especially <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D4%3Apage%3D433">Book 4</a>). The notion of giving each his due, suum cuique, is foundational to the way we in the West think about ourselves and the societies we build.
Social engineering, on the other hand, is a different way of thinking about people altogether. In his essay on “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1954), Lewis argued that though it may seem humane to “rehabilitate” or “deter” criminals rather than punish them, it actually strips them of their humanity. To deny the moral character and consequences of a crime is to make both the criminal and his victims into something less than human: “instead of a person, a subject of rights,” wrote Lewis, “we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case.’”
The natural endpoint of social engineering is the worst kind of tyranny, the “tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims.” “Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end,” wrote Lewis, “for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
And so a small error at the level of first principles, so appealing on its face, leads to a massive error at the level of politics and social life. Only accept that human evil is not a spiritual defect of the will but a neurological disorder to be corrected, and you have traded the entire Western tradition of justice for a sinister new vision of limitless oppression and control.
In this second part of the series, I’m going to describe in more detail the nature of this “small mistake” and the cataclysmic errors to which it leads. It is my view that the foundational error in first principles against which Lewis fought for his entire career is the same one that continues to plague us today.
That tiny error is materialism, the belief that there is only the material world — no spirit, no soul and thus no inherent morality or universal truth. The great disaster to which materialism leads is bureaucratic tyranny. Insist that there is nothing beyond flesh and you will be led, bit by inexorable bit, to the oppressive conclusion that the government must rule over men as God.
Freud, Darwin, and Materialism
Though Lewis rarely made it explicit, in his political and sociological writing he was often shadowboxing with one of his great intellectual nemeses, Sigmund Freud. In 1938 — shortly before Lewis’s own career took off — Freud fled his native Austria to escape Nazi persecution in the United Kingdom. At that point he was already world-famous as one of the 20th century’s greatest minds, the inventor of an entirely new way to view mankind and his place in the universe.
Freud’s voluminous literary output rivals Lewis’s own. Over the course of decades, he developed his view that the human mind is something like a biological machine for producing fantasies. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud argued that our higher impulses — our desire to engage in practices like religion and art — have their origins in primal physical experiences like sex and violence.
Out of those material sensations — those animal forms of life — the mind constructs elaborate narratives about God and truth. “Consciousness is the surface of the mental apparatus,” Freud wrote in The Ego and the Id (1923), but beneath our conscious ideas about goodness and beauty lie half-forgotten encounters with our brute appetites.
As the Freudian outlook became fashionable in Europe, the intelligentsia came to assume that the “true” or “authentic” human person can be found by scraping away the ideas about truth and justice that our minds construct to cope with our neuroses. This is where we get our modern set of assumptions — so ubiquitous that we have ceased to notice them — that “society” is an artificial “construct” and can be altered or dismantled at will.
The evolutionary theories of Darwin, also hugely influential at this time, gave the psychoanalytic outlook something like a scientific veneer: if our origins are to be found in the animal kingdom, then maybe all our noble ideas can be boiled down to our flesh and blood. “You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals”: that is materialism exactly. It is the idea that only physical atoms, bouncing off one another in predictable patterns, are real. All else is illusion. Anyone who buys this view is a (probably unwitting) disciple of Darwin and Freud.
Lewis knew these arguments well, and he rejected them utterly. Freud had helped drive him away from religion in his youth, after his return from war in the 1920s: “the new Psychology was at that time sweeping through us all,” he wrote in his 1955 autobiography, Surprised by Joy. “We did not swallow it whole&#8230;but we were all influenced.”
The consequence was what Lewis called “almost a panic-stricken flight” from anything that looked like sentimentalism or superstition. Religion, fantasy, idealism: Freud was thought to have debunked them all. “I had (this was very precisely the opposite of the truth) ‘seen through’ them,” Lewis recalled. “With the confidence of a boy I decided I had done with all that.”
But of course Lewis would eventually discover that by tossing away everything except the physical world, he had lost everything that had any meaning to him, or to anyone.
Only if there are things we can’t see under a microscope that are nevertheless real — things like love, and courage, and imagination — do our lives make any sense. By contrast, if we are only animals, then there is nothing to stop us from behaving much less like men than we presently do.
<div id="attachment_135418" style="width: 1010px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-135418" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-135418" src="https://www.dailywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-5-681x576.jpg" alt="Irish-born academic Clive Staples Lewis (1898 - 1963), a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford. Original Publication: Picture Post - 5159 - Eternal Oxford - pub. 1950 Original Publication: People Disc - HG0145 (Photo by John Chillingworth/Getty Images)" width="1000" height="845" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-5-681x576.jpg 681w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-5-300x254.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-5-768x649.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-5-1536x1299.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-5.jpg 2000w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />John Chillingworth/Getty Images</div>
The Small Error
Lewis came to realize that materialism is the small error in first principles that leads to untold horrors in the end. Hence his argument in “On the Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”: it seems alluringly generous at first blush to think of criminals as mere patients, suffering from a mental imbalance in need more of cure than of retribution.
But to do so, Lewis argued, is to think of all human action as a consequence of chemical reactions in the brain rather than moral calculations in the heart and the mind. This leads not to kindness but to coercion, and to a tyranny of good intentions:
<blockquote>The things done to the criminal, even if they are called cures, will be just as compulsory as they were in the old days when we called them punishments. If a tendency to steal can be cured by psychotherapy, the thief will no doubt be forced to undergo the treatment. Otherwise, society cannot continue. My contention is that this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being.</blockquote>
Once Lewis describes this philosophy, you can see it everywhere in modern life:
The endless classification of everything as mental illness, implying that the best way to fix emotional problems is simply with the right cocktail of medication.
The insistence that gender and sexuality are mere social constructs, whose injustices can be rectified with surgery and hormone injections.
The idea that religion is just a holdover from primitive tribal fantasy.
All of these cultural trends are premised on the feeling — it is not even developed enough anymore to be called a philosophy — that our higher principles are just fanciful stories we tell ourselves about the way our bodies behave.
The Death of God and the Tyranny of Man
But of course, the very notion that it would be “good” to correct our fantasies or “liberating” to be rid of them is in itself an ideal: it is an abstract principle about what “should” happen. It comes from our principles and beliefs, not our physical urges.
Ideas such as “trans women are women” or “depression should be cured with drugs” are nowhere to be found in the physical universe or in our animal natures. They are ideals, every bit as abstract as “the Lord is God” or “thou shalt not kill.”
So the attempt to treat everything and everyone as mere physical matter turns out, in the end, to be an effort on the part of some people to treat other people as mere physical matter on the basis of their own abstract beliefs.
As Lewis saw, social engineers are not offering to rid the world of ideals. They are offering to clear the world of one set of ideals — those of piety, truth, and beauty — and install another set, chosen by themselves, in its place. And so materialism leads, by the implications of its own premises, to tyranny.
The Abolition of Man
Nowhere did Lewis articulate this argument more clearly than in a masterful three-part lecture series given at the University of Durham in 1943 and subsequently published as The Abolition of Man.
In those speeches, Lewis demonstrated that the scientific impulse to gain power over nature — to subdue the earth by gaining technological control of the material world — ends up making those with the best technology into masters of others who do not.
As a result, “what we call Man’s power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument&#8230;. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself.”
And yet, if we have already “debunked” or “seen through” all the old ideals — if there is no God or morality to tell us which developments we should prefer over others — then we have only the basic impulses of our flesh to guide us.
Those who wield technological power and psychiatric authority must make some decisions about how they will breed mankind, what outcomes they will select for and against. But “those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.”
In other words: materialism begins by promising a perfect state of nature in which all are equal. But by the very necessity of its logic, it ends by creating a boundless tyranny in which a very few rule arbitrarily over the rest of mankind — as if they were mere animals. Could there be a more consequential error?
Lewis saw directly into the heart of this false materialist premise and predicted all the evils it would produce. That is why his writing only becomes more powerfully affecting over time: he is more relevant, not less, now that materialism has entrenched itself securely as the going assumption of our sophisticates and ruling classes.
“The kings of the earth take their stand,” says Psalm 2, “and the rulers gather together, against the LORD and His Anointed One. ‘Let us break Their chains and cast away Their cords,’” they say. The central political fight of Lewis’s life was the same as our own: the fight against a materialism which looks like freedom but produces slavery.
From COVID lockdowns to the hideous practice of transgender hormone injections for minors, we are surrounded by the nightmarish consequences of this one seemingly small error, the error against which Lewis never stopped warning us: get rid of God, and you will be ruled by men.
Read more from this series: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-the-politics-of-c-s-lewis">The Politics of C.S. Lewis</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

Article 6

The ‘Progressive’ Error That Looks Like Freedom But Leads To Tyranny

Charles Darwin

Sigmund Freud

C.S. Lewis is primarily known for his fictional works (most popularly the Chronicles of Narnia) and his faith-focused writing, including Mere Christianity. But Lewis believed that claims upon the soul are claims upon the whole of life. In other words, everything Lewis said and wrote about his faith had real-world implications — including political implications. Reading Lewis’s work with this in mind reveals profound political insights. The following, the first of a series, looks at the politics of C.S. Lewis as revealed in multiple works.
In December 1918, a young man of 20 returned to Oxford University after a year of service among the British forces on the Western Front of the First World War. Heartsick and demoralized, C.S. Lewis completed the degree he had put on hold to fight in the army. His academic performance — in Philosophy, Ancient History and Literature, and English — was dazzling. But he was an embittered, broken man. The carnage of the war had snuffed out whatever diffident faith remained from his Anglican upbringing: he would later describe himself in Surprised by Joy (1955) as having been both “very angry with God for not existing” and “equally angry with him for creating a world.”
No one who met this inveterate atheist then would have guessed that he would someday become one of Britain’s best-known Christians. Today, though, anyone who hears the name C.S. Lewis will immediately think of the celebrated Narnia novels, a fantastically successful series of allegories that have made the Christian outlook freshly compelling to millions of readers. Some also know that Lewis was England’s unofficial theologian throughout the 1940s: in broadcasts, in sermons, in scores of essays and books, he served as the councilor and guide to a nation harrowed by the ravages of yet another World War.
But even though he played a central role in British public life during a crucial moment in the country’s history, Lewis doesn’t register for most people as a political writer. He’s first and foremost a novelist and a Christian apologist, the winsome preacher of an ancient Gospel to a modern world. But everything Lewis said and wrote about Christian teaching had implications for his audience as citizens of a great nation in one of the 20th century’s most fraught moments. To revisit Lewis’s works from this perspective finds them threaded through not just with theological grace, but also with political wisdom. What follows is a consideration of six interwoven political themes expressed in multiple works by Lewis.
Tyranny For Our Own Good
Near the end of his career, after the war was done, Lewis wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
Like so many of his turns of phrase, this line is eminently quotable and ceaselessly quoted. It has had a bit of a moment recently in America, as governors selectively enforced increasingly nonsensical lockdown requirements, citing COVID-19 precautions as their rationale. It never seems to occur to such people that if their orders are in violation of the Bill of Rights, then the argument that they are “for the public good” is actually a shameless irrelevancy.
Lewis understood this, which is why he wrote that “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
He was arguing that well-meaning tyranny is not simply a misapplication of principles which might, if differently and more sensibly applied, govern a just state. To the contrary: self-righteous, benevolent tyranny is based on premises that are wholly antithetical to those which undergird representative democracies and republics.
Free nations governed by popular sovereignty — the kind of nation that both Britain and the U.S. are supposed to be — are based on the stipulation that what the people deem good is what the state shall do. Benevolent tyrannies, on the other hand, proceed according to the stipulation that what the state deems good is what the people must do. The final outcome of such an outlook is embodied in Narnia’s famous White Witch, who would rather rule over a kingdom of lifeless statues than lose her own grip on control: “I was the Queen,” she insists in The Magician’s Nephew (1955). “They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”
COVID tyranny is galling not because it won’t produce good outcomes, but because the whole presumption of the thing is that “leaders” (many of them unelected) may determine which outcomes are righteous without accountability to the people whose good they claim to be seeking.
Justice vs. Social Engineering
Lewis made this argument in his 1954 essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.” But he wrote that essay to address a debate which is also alive today: the debate over the death penalty. Then, as now, a growing number of Westerners were becoming disgusted with the idea of a merely retributive justice — one that metes out punishment because it is deserved by the criminal, rather than in order to deter or rehabilitate him.
Dispensing at the outset with questions about whether capital punishment can in fact effectively deter or rehabilitate, Lewis argued that all such questions are governed by a wholly different logic than the logic of justice. Justice, argued Lewis, is nothing other than what is deserved: the only way we evaluate the justice of a punishment at all is by asking whether the person punished deserves it. Even the objection that “the death penalty is unjust” boils down to the argument that “no one deserves the death penalty.”
Deterrence and rehabilitation, on the other hand, are forms of social engineering: they view punishment as a tool for making people do what the punishers want. “Thus,” wrote Lewis, “when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.”
These two different governing ideas of punishment proceed along entirely separate tracks to very different destinations. Justice — though sometimes fearsome and always imperfect — treats the human being as a moral agent whose actions have weight and therefore consequences. By contrast, Lewis argues that “moral busybodies” (today we would call them “Karens”) are interested not in justice but in social engineering, “a dangerous illusion” which “disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end.”
Confronting Evil
Lewis applied much the same reasoning to one of the central political questions of his life: can a Christian nation go to war? Christ’s injunctions to love the enemy and turn the other cheek weighed heavily on the two generations of British men who were forced in the World Wars to slaughter or be slaughtered.
But Lewis argued that to refrain from fighting against Hitler would be to pervert the relevant commandments. In a 1944 interview, he said:
You are told to love your neighbour as yourself. How do you love yourself?&#8230; I do not think that I love myself because I am particularly good, but just because I am myself&#8230;. You [may] dislike what you have done, but you don&#8217;t cease to love yourself&#8230;. You may even think that you ought to go to the Police and own up and be hanged. Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person&#8217;s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
To disregard a person’s moral character — to treat him as if his actions make no difference — is not love. It is indifference. Or worse, it is condescension.
Real Christian love — that devoted, terrifying, purifying care whose model is a jealous God and a crucified Christ — cannot shrug off the moral character of the beloved. For God to merely excuse us would be for him to dehumanize us, to lie about the nature of who we are.
We do not really want excuses: we want forgiveness. And forgiveness means acknowledging that our evil is evil.
<div id="attachment_134305" style="width: 1010px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-134305" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-134305" src="https://www.dailywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-1-1800x1200.jpg" alt="25th November 1950: English novelist and scholar Clive Staples Lewis (1898 - 1963), a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford in his college rooms. Original Publication: Picture Post - 5159 - Eternal Oxford - pub. 1950 (Photo by John Chillingworth/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" width="1000" height="659" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-1-300x198.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-1-874x576.jpg 874w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-1-768x506.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-1-1536x1012.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/08/C.S.-Lewis-1.jpg 2000w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />John Chillingworth/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</div>
“Not A Pacifist”
This was not a stance Lewis took lightly or without accountability. In 1940, he had aired his arguments in front of a society of pacifists in a speech called “Why I Am Not a Pacifist.” He pointed out that pure nonviolence, if carried to its logical conclusion by all men of fighting age, would leave the pacifist nations defenseless and the world at the mercy of totalitarians and Nazis.
Lewis hoped that the prospect of world domination by the Third Reich would make clear his point that to refrain from violence is hardly the most loving approach in every instance.
He knew his opponents would counter that pacifism, idealist though it was, represented humanity’s only shot at a world without war. But that notion, he responded, “belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me. It consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life might be curable if only we can find the right cure.”
Another Christian teaching — that sin and misery are permanent fixtures of a fallen world, capable of being alleviated but never escaped — warned Lewis against the alluring but disastrous temptation to cleanse the world of its imperfections.
Lewis did not imagine that the war he was urging upon the young men of Britain was anything other than an unspeakable horror. He had seen the war himself, and described it with ruthless detail in The Screwtape Letters, his fanciful rendering of Hell’s attempts to capture a human soul. The devils in Screwtape relish “the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosives on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching.”
It was this unflinching, firsthand grasp of what war meant in the 20th century — hard-won by his own sacrifices and those of his friends in the trenches — that made Lewis’s support for the war so clear-eyed and persuasive, his defense of the British military so powerful and realist.
“What Lies Before Us”
Lewis could urge such self-sacrifice because he believed the rewards of courage would be far more joyous than the agony of service would be painful. That, too, was a hard-won belief. Lewis had to fight his way back to God with greater difficulty, and for longer, than he had to fight England’s enemies on the battlefield. His faith was one which did not rely on easy certainties: he had wrestled ferociously with every clause of it.
Once he had grasped it, Lewis’s Christianity — the richness of heaven in his telling — gave moral and emotional logic to the entirety of his political outlook. He could write unflinchingly in Screwtape about the brutalities of war because he believed in, and could describe with unmatched elegance, the delights beyond this world. In “The Weight of Glory,” preached as a sermon in 1942, he said:
The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountain-head that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. 
The sheer pleasure of heaven, which always glowed just outside the frame as Lewis wrote, was what he imagined the soldiers of the war would receive as the final reward for all their courage and consolation for all their misery. It was what gave coherence to his understanding of human justice on earth, and of the free civilizations which governments existed, in his view, to protect.
“On The Edge of a Precipice”
For these reasons Lewis understood the World Wars, horrific as they were, to be nothing other than an intensified version of the perennial human condition. “The war,” he told a group of Oxford students in 1939, “creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.”
That speech, published as “Learning in Wartime,” expresses Lewis’s conviction that the great aims of human life — family, art, scholarship, invention — have their meaning because they take place in a fragile world of imminent mortality, yet reach outward toward a heavenly horizon for which we were born but which we cannot yet see.
This outlook was pointedly not limited to wartime: indeed, in Lewis’s work the most eternally consequential things are those which happen out of sight of the world. Jesus said: “Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men” (Matthew 6:1). For Lewis, part of what this meant was that the eye of heaven itself was upon the mundane, the seemingly unremarkable, aspects of daily life.
In The Great Divorce (1945), Lewis imagines his narrator given a vision of the heavenly realms, where he sees a woman of incomparable loveliness and majesty. He feels certain she must have been a queen on earth, until his guide corrects him: “‘it’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’” But because of Smith’s immense warmth of heart and daily devotion to those around her, in the truer reality which is Heaven she is “‘one of the great ones.’”
In the conclusion to “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis said: “You have never met a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”
He viewed every moment of social and political life as minutely important, not because this or that government or program was important per se, but because the human souls participating in those governments and programs were, every one of them, beings of almost indescribable importance.
Lewis stood here in perhaps the oldest tradition of Judeo-Christian wisdom — the wisdom of Augustine’s City of God and the Gospel of John and the Prophecy of Isaiah — that though “all flesh is grass,” still it is our God whose word stands forever and our eyes that will see the redeemer at the end of days.
As Europe fell under the shadow of death, Lewis saw what Christian politics really means: he saw that the choices of England’s citizens and the decisions of her leaders, no matter how minute, would be of eternal consequence.
Read more from this series:<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-politics-of-c-s-lewis-the-progressive-error-that-looks-like-freedom-but-leads-to-tyranny"> C.S. Lewis: The ‘Progressive’ Error That Looks Like Freedom But Leads To Tyranny</a>
Spencer A. Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of both the <a href="http://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of Books</a> and <a href="http://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>.

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