C.S. Lewis on Today's Issues
Some quotes and thoughts that are still relevant seventy years later.
C.S. Lewis once warned that even in his day, there was a tendency toward chronological snobbery—as he put it,
“The uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”
To put it in my own words, just because an idea is old does not mean it is wrong. When Lewis wrote this, he was referring to ideas from decades or even centuries before his time. Yet, ironically, the wisdom he imparted is often mocked or ignored today simply because of its age.
I recently read a collection of C.S. Lewis’s essays entitled Present Concerns, which consists of writings from his lifetime addressing the pressing issues of his day. The most fascinating aspect of the book is how prophetic his work is. Though most of these essays are over seventy years old, we are still wrestling with the same topics today:
Democracy
Fascism
Problems in Education
Censorship in Literature
National Security
The Nanny State
Naturalism/Materialism
Examining these topics considering Lewis’s historical context and considering how they relate to our own time made for an insightful and thought-provoking read.
I have included some fantastic quotes below.
On Equality
I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.
The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority.
Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
On Democratic Education
Democratic education, says Aristotle, ought to mean, not the education which democrats like, but the education which will preserve democracy.
A mild pleasure in ragging, a determination not to be much interfered with, is a valuable brake on reckless planning and a valuable curb on the meddlesomeness of minor officials: envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you’, is the hotbed of Fascism. You are going about to take away the one and foment the other. Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
Private Bates
The only people who are really the dupes of their favourite newspapers are the intelligentsia. It is they who read leading articles:
On Living in an Atomic Age
If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
If Nature is all that exists—in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature—then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return.
The important question is whether ‘Nature’—the thing studied by the sciences—is the only thing in existence. Because if you answer yes to the second question, then the first question only amounts to asking whether the inevitable frustration of all human activities may be hurried on by our own action instead of coming at its natural time.