The Prophetic C.S. Lewis
June 13, 2000
Deep political wisdom can be found in a
writer who took very little interest in politics: C.S. Lewis, a scholar
who achieved his greatest fame as a popular Christian writer.
Lewis was sometimes laughably
ignorant of current events. His friends were once amused to discover
that he was under the impression that Tito, the Communist dictator
of Yugoslavia, was the king of Greece. But the very distance he kept
from politics enabled him to see large outlines invisible to those
preoccupied with the daily news.
During World War II, Lewis
realized that both the Allies and the Axis were abandoning the
traditional morality of the Christian West and indeed of all sane
civilizations. The great principle of this morality is that certain
acts are intrinsically right or wrong. In a gigantic war among
gigantic states, Lewis saw that modern science was being used
amorally on all sides to dehumanize and annihilate enemies. When
peace came, the victorious states would feel released from moral
restraints.
Lewis cited an old theological
question: It has sometimes been asked whether God
commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain
things are right because God commands them. With Hooker [Richard
Hooker, the Anglican theologian], and against Dr. [Samuel] Johnson, I
emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to
the abominable conclusion ... that charity is good only because God
arbitrarily commanded it that He might equally well have
commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would
then have been right. It was dangerous to believe that sheer
will, even Gods will, can be the ultimate source of right and
wrong.
Lewis saw a parallel danger in
the modern theory of sovereignty, which holds that
the state can make right and wrong by sheer act of will: On
this view, total freedom to make what laws it pleases, superiority
to law because it is the source of law, is the characteristic of every
state; of democratic states no less than of monarchical. That
doctrine has proved so popular that it now seems to many a mere
tautology. We conceive with difficulty that it was ever new because
we imagine with difficulty how political life can ever have gone on
without it. We take it for granted that the highest power in the
State, whether that power is a despot or a democratically elected
assembly, will be wholly free to legislate and incessantly engaged
in legislation.
As a result of the theory of
sovereignty, Lewis observed, Rulers have become
owners. He added: We are less their subject than their
wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which
we can say to them, Mind your own business. Our
whole lives are their business. As the state offers us less
and less protection, at the same time it demands from us
more and more. We seldom had fewer rights and liberties nor more
burdens: and we get less security in return. While our obligations
increase their moral ground is taken away.
Lewis was alarmed by another
development we now take for granted: state control of education. He
wrote: I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way,
if he has the free-born mind. But I doubt whether he
can have this without economic independence, which the new society
is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not
controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs,
and asks, nothing of government who can criticize its acts and snap
his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; thats the voice of
a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and
turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the
State is everyones schoolmaster and employer?
The new society
was creating membership in a debased modern sense
a massing together of persons as if they were pennies or
counters. It was trying to drag the featureless
repetition of the collective into the fuller and more concrete world
of the family.
More clearly than even Huxley
and Orwell, Lewis saw that politics without morality could only end
in tyranny.
Joseph Sobran
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