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: “Elizabeth Warren’s Greatest Moments.” “Drag Queen Kyne Uses TikTok to Teach Math.”
In September of last year, NowThis released a particularly telling lecture from a chipper young authoritarian who demanded that we all “Stop Saying ‘Hey Guys,’” because it excludes women.
Halfway through her sinister monologue, the narrator mentions a few other goals modern feminists want to achieve: “reproductive rights…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: ‘Tyranny For Your Own Good’: C.S. Lewis On The Philosophy Behind COVID Lockdowns
Spencer Klavan is host of the Young Heretics podcast and assistant editor of the Claremont Review of Booksand The American Mind. He can be reached on Twitter at @SpencerKlavan.