Politics in C. S. Lewis’s Collected
Letters
A 2024 sequel to “C. S. Lewis in Times of Trump” (2020)
PDF
download
This anthology from C. S. Lewis’s Collected Letters
aims to encourage those who seek guidance from Lewis in matters politic to
recognize the complexity as well as the wisdom of such guidance as he actually
offers. In this respect the present selection of fragments is like its 2020
precursor.
It is different, though, in that this sequel has no
editorial comments or conclusions. And the selection is now restricted to
Lewis’s letters – a treasure trove of effective writing as rich as the rest of
his work. Only one item is a repeat from the 2020 anthology. As an extra, a
further set of politically relevant fragments from Lewis’s works follows at the end. Each set is given in chronological order.
The selection is based on a full re-reading of the
three volumes, but did not result from a special search or preconceived idea
and has no pretence to completeness. It has emerged gradually as one spin-off
from the much larger job of selecting letters and fragments for a
representative one-volume edition of Lewis’s letters in Dutch. This projected volume will, ideally, appear in
2025.
Arend
Smilde
September
11, 2024
* C. S. Lewis’s Collected
Letters, edited by Walter Hooper, were published in three volumes in the
years 2000, 2002 and 2006. They contain a total of 3,210 letters. Many hundreds
of further letters are available in archives, known to exist elsewhere, or
found in other publications, and still others keep emerging from unexpected
quarters. In 2022 the C. S. Lewis Correspondence Project was launched, aiming at
integral online publication of all published and unpublished letters. For an
integrated table of the three volumes’ contents, see
www.lewisiana.nl/cl-tableofcontents.
… a man called Brundrit
of Wadham. He is a frequent speaker in the Union and the editor of an
“advanced” magazine: that is to say he inclines to the Bolshevik left and
doubtless managed to make Optimism a political subject. I am very glad [in
having won an essay contest on the subject of “Optimism”] to have been able to
do even this much towards removing the common reproach that the revolutionaries
here have all the brains – indeed it is generally true: the real Tories have
nothing but beautiful voices and long banking accounts.
––– letter to
his father, 29 May 1921
Collected
Letters I, page 550
We also read
some Beowulf with a very remarkable young woman. She was a farmer’s daughter
who got a county scholarship and went up to London getting a good degree in
English. Then – and here’s the marvel – she settled down at home again and
divides her time between milking the cows & taking occasional pupils,
apparently contented in both. Thats what we want, isn’t it? Emigration from
the uneducated class into ours only swells the intellectual unemployed: but to
have education transforming people & yet leaving them with their roots in
the earth (which then they will be able to appreciate) is the way to
make class disappear altogether. She is “remarkable” only in this: otherwise
the adjective does her gross injustice for she is exquisitely ordinary – and
not at all pretty except with the bonny open air plumpness of her age &
class.
––– letter to
Arthur Greeves, 8 July 1930
Collected
Letters I, page 915
I begin to
see how much Puritanism counts in your make up (…) All I feel that I can say
with absolute certainty is this: that if you ever feel that the whole spirit
and system in which you were brought up was, after all, right and good,
then you may be quite sure that that feeling is a mistake (tho’
of course it might, at a given moment – say, of temptation, be present as the
alternative to some far bigger mistake). My reasons for this are 1. That
the system denied pleasures to others as well as to the votaries themselves:
whatever the merits of self-denial, this is unpardonable interference. 2.
It inconsistently kept some worldly pleasures, and always selected the
worst ones – gluttony, avarice, etc. 3. It was ignorant. It could give
no “reason for the faith that was in it”. Your relations have been found
very ill grounded in the Bible itself and as ignorant as savages of the
historical and theological reading needed to make the Bible more than a
superstition. 4. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Have
they the marks of peace, love, wisdom and humility on their
faces or in their conversation? Really, you need not bother about that
kind of Puritanism. It is simply the form which the memory of
Christianity takes just before it finally dies away altogether, in a commercial
community: just as extreme emotional ritualism is the form it takes on just
before it dies in a fashionable community.
––– letter to
Arthur Greeves, 6 December 1931
Collected
Letters II, page 23
You are right in supposing that this Sino-Japanese war
provides us at last with a political subject in which we are on the same side
(…) [M]y main feeling, and yours too, I expect, is an uneasy balance between
indignation and the restraining knowledge that we English have of all people
most deprived ourself, by our own imperial history, of the right to be
indignant. But I don’t know why I have let the whole dam thing waste even this
much of my letter.
––– letter to
his brother, 8 April 1932
Collected
Letters II, page 67
I might agree that the Allies are
partly to blame, but nothing can fully excuse the iniquity of Hitler’s
persecution of the Jews, or the absurdity of his theoretical position. Did you
see that he said “The Jews have made no contribution to human culture and
in crushing them I am doing the will of the Lord.” Now as the
whole idea of the “Will of the Lord” is precisely what the world owes to the
Jews, the blaspheming tyrant has just fixed his absurdity for all to see in a
single sentence, and shown that he is as contemptible for his stupidity as he
is detestable for his cruelty. For the German people as a whole we ought to
have charity: but for dictators, “Nordic” tyrants and so on – well, read the
chapter about Mr Savage in the Regress and you have my views.
––– letter to
Arthur Greeves, 5 November 1933
Collected
Letters II, page 127
Surely it is natural that I should
regard [T. S.] Eliot’s work as a very great evil. (…) And (you will forgive me)
it is further aggravated for an Englishman by the recollection that Eliot stole
upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war – obtained,
I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England – and became (am I
wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural
friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus omne,
the Parisian riff-raff of denationalised Irishmen and Americans who have
perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.
–––letter to
Paul Elmer More, 23 May 1935
Collected
Letters II, page 164
…
a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as men, is at least as good a
spur to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes
which tempt men to seek their realisation by breaking the moral law and prove
such dust and ashes when they are realised. If applied to individual life, the
doctrine that an imagined heaven on earth is necessary for vigorous attempts to
remove present evil, would at once reveal its absurdity. Hungry men seek food
and sick men healing none the less because they know that after the meal or the
cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them. I am not, of course,
discussing whether very drastic changes in our social system are, or are not,
desirable; I am only reminding the reader that a particular medicine is not to
be mistaken for the elixir of life.
Since
political issues have here crossed our path, I must make it clear that the
Christian doctrine of self-surrender and obedience is a purely theological, and
not in the least a political, doctrine. Of forms of government, of civil
authority and civil obedience, I have nothing to say. The kind and degree of
obedience which a creature owes to its Creator is unique because the relation
between creature and Creator is unique: no inference can be drawn from it to
any political proposition whatsoever.
––– The Problem
of Pain, 1940
chapter 7
Fascism and Communism, like all other evils, are
potent because of the good they contain or imitate. Diabolus simius Dei [“the devil is the ape of God”]. And,
of course, their occasion is the failure of those who left humanity starved of
that particular good. This does not for me alter the conviction that they are
very bad indeed. One of the things we must guard against is the penetration of
both into Christianity ((…)). Mark my words: you will presently see both a
Leftist and a Rightist pseudo-theology developing – the abomination will stand
where it ought not.
––– letter to Bede Griffiths, 17 January 1940
Collected Letters II, page 327
When you speak of the “colour and
creed nonsense” I want to distinguish. They have surely on both sides got over
the creed nonsense by getting over the creed? It is presumably not an unusually
charitable Christian and an unusually charitable Mussulman whom one
sees drinking together, but simply two men who have both abandoned their creeds
and cultures and are now two ordinary standardised, urban, cinema-fed,
materialistic, denationalised wops? I am very glad they should get over the
colour bar, of course, and I’d be glad if they got over the creed bar
leaving the creed intact.
Perhaps I’ve got the wrong picture;
what do you think? For instance when their wives meet, are the white ones
learning chastity and wifely obedience from the Indiennes, or are they teaching
them to be b–s and Mrs Hawksbees? Of course one might
be tempted to say that even if all this is so, the political and humanitarian
gains are very great. But will they be in the long run? I mean, won’t these
standardised wops (…) be just as open as Europe to the inroads of Fascism or Communism
or any other devil that comes along?
––– letter to his brother, 21 January
1940
Collected Letters II,
page 328
I have at last, if only for once, seen a university
doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom. And what a wonderful power
there is in the direct appeal which disregards the temporary climate of opinion
– I wonder is it the case that the man who has the audacity to get up in any
corrupt society and squarely preach justice or valour or the like always wins?
After all, the Nazis largely got into power by simply talking the old straight
stuff about heroism in a country full of cynics and buggers.
––– letter to
his brother, 11 February 1940
Collected
Letters II, page 346
“A pot is not
the less black because it is the kettle that calls it so” seems a
maxim which needs quoting very frequently in political and domestic arguments.
––– letter to his brother, 3 March 1940
Collected Letters II,
page 360-361
quoting from Dyson & Butt, Augustans
and Romantics (1940), page 97
About Spain –
after, first, Hitler’s, and, now, Mussolini’s, abandonment of anti-Communism I
am prepared for almost anything. There are people in Europe quite depraved
enough to stage that whole ceremony without having the slightest belief in
Christianity or the slightest intention of treating it as anything more than a
bait. Let us hope – and indeed pray – that Franco is not one of them. Even if
he is not, he might be sincere in a sense which bodes very ill for us. (…) Mind
you, I think the Pope is sound. Something might be done through him to persuade
France to put the Christian-Totalitarian issue first, at any rate for the
present, and the Papist-Protestant second. Of course I absolutely agree with
you that Papistry even of the most obscurantist and persecuting kind would be
better (I mean in terms of this world) than the great rebellion of the other
force not only against Grace but against Nature.
––– letter to his brother, 21 March 1940
Collected Letters II, page 368
I don’t know what to think about the present
state of the world. The sins on the side of the democracies are very great. I
suppose they differ from those on the other side by being less deliberately
blasphemous, fulfilling less the condition of a perfectly mortal sin.
Anyway, the question “Who is in the right” (in a given quarrel) is quite
distinct from the question “Who is righteous?” – for the worse of two
disputants may always be in the right on one particular issue. It is therefore not
self righteous to claim that we are in the right now. But I am chary of
doing what my emotions prompt me to do every hour; i.e. identifying the enemy
with the forces of evil. Surely one of the things we learn from history is that
God never allows a human conflict to become unambiguously one between simple
good and simple evil?
The
practical problem about charity (in our prayers) is very hard work, isn’t it?
When you pray for Hitler & Stalin, how do you actually teach yourself to
make the prayer real? The two things that help me are (a) A continual grasp of
the idea that one is only joining one’s feeble little voice to the perpetual
intercession of Christ, who died for those very men (b) A recollection, as firm
as one can make it, of all one’s own cruelty wh. might have blossomed, under
different conditions, into something terrible. You and I are not, at bottom, so
different from these ghastly creatures.
––– letter to his brother, 16 April 1940
Collected
Letters II, page 391
… Beyond Politics by Christopher
Dawson. The main argument is too complex to describe, but what
interested me was the clarity with wh. he distinguished between the ideal of
“Freedom” and the ideal of “Democracy”. He points out that strict Democracy as
envisaged by Rousseau and to some extent embodied in the French republic, is
the assertion of the “general will” or the community life against all
individual aberrations: the ideal of Freedom, in the English sense, asserts
individual conscience, honour and idiosyncrasy against the claims of the
community, and its real parents are English Nonconformity and English
Aristocracy. He draws the conclusion that modern Democracy in the strict sense and
modern Dictatorship are the twin children of the Revolution – both
asserting the community. It all seems to fit in quite well, doesn’t it?
That’s why there is no exemption for conscientious objectors or even priests in
France, while there is in England. Or again, the Whig alliance between great
aristocrats and dissenting tradespeople was not quite such a mariage de convenance as one used to suppose.
It also explains why people like us can feel so keenly about “freedom” (making
the world safe for “humourists”!) and much less so about Democracy.
––– letter to his brother, 21 April 1940
Collected
Letters II, page 398
I am also working on a book
sent me to review, Le Mystère de la poésie by a professor at Dijon, of which my
feeling is “If this is typical of modern France, nothing that has happened in
the last three months surprises me” – such a mess of Dadaists, Surrealists,
nonsense, blasphemy and decadence, as I could hardly have conceived possible.
But one ought to have known for, now that I come to think of it, all the
beastliest traits of our intelligentsia have come to them from France.
––– letter to his brother, 17 August 1940
Collected Letters II, page 437
“…the Church is in danger of confounding those who are also
opposed to the main enemy of the moment with her true friends, as the French
Catholics did when they clung too hard to the old régime,
and the Spanish and Italian Catholics when, out of hatred of Liberalism and
fear of Communism, they embraced the Fascists.”
– a passage
in George Every’s Christian Discrimination (1940),
endorsed by Lewis (“yes, I shd.
just think so”) in a letter to Every, 11 December 1940
Collected Letters II,
page 456
––– letter to Evelyn Underhill, 16 January 1941
Collected Letters II,
page 459
I said [in The
Problem of Pain, chapter 9, “Animal Pain”] that everything a man does to a
beast is either a lawful exercise or a sacrilegious abuse of an
authority by divine right. I didn’t say which of the things we now see men
doing to beasts fall into which class. The robin in a cage and the over-fed
Peke are both, to me, instances of the abuse of man’s authority, tho’ in different ways. I never denied that the abuse was
common: that is why we have to make laws (and ought to make a good many more)
for the protection of animals.
––– letter to Evelyn Underhill, 16 January 1941
Collected
Letters II, page 460
[On the
Abolition of Man] The relation between the Tao and Xtianity
is best seen from Confucius’ remark “There may be someone who has perfectly
followed the way: but I never heard of one.” Gaius and Titius were,
as you will not be surprised to learn, Australians. Singapore knows what comes
of Green Books now.
––– letter to Martyn Skinner, 4 March 1943*
Collected
Letters II, page 561
*conjectured year as published; should be 1944
The general law is Beneficence. Then come
the laws that give certain people a prior claim on your beneficence: people to
whom your beneficence is pledged by a promise (Justice), or who have already
benefited you (Gratitude), or who are specially weak and pitiable (Mercy) or
fellow-citizens (Patriotism) or relatives (Family Affection).
They are all perfectly sound, but
the last two must not be allowed to over-ride the others. What I meant in that
passage was that Racialism, setting up to be the supreme duty, is the rebellion
of one particular moral law against moral law in general.
––– letter to
Mrs Frank L. Jones, 16 January 1946
Collected
Letters II, page 699
I suppose,
like me, you often catch yourself grumbling about “this rotten government” and
realise we are talking just as our fathers talked.
––– letter
to Arthur Greeves, 13 May 1946
Collected Letters II,
page 710
I am pleased, to the point of being excited, by your
suggestion. I have said again and again that what we very badly need is a new,
frankly high-brow, periodical not in the hands of the Left. I have
usually added “If only we cd. find a right-minded capitalist.” Money, I take
it, is the first essential.
I
entirely agree that it shd. not be specifically
Christian, much less Anglican: the Tao (in that sense) is to be the ring fence.
In almost all existing periodicals one knows in advance how a certain book will
be reviewed: the personal and political bias is no longer even disguised. That
is what must be avoided.
––– letter to Laurence
Whistler, 9 January 1947
Collected
Letters II, page 757-758
Your Leftists
[in Italy] – your Sinisters, to put it like that – declare
their atheism. Even boast of it. Wolves they are and wolves they are seen to
be. We [in Britain] endure a pack of wolves, dressed in sheep’s
clothing. Of those who work injustice in politics many say they are building
the Kingdom of God. Nor do they merely say it, they perhaps believe it. For we
do not have the ability to read hearts, and Charity does not ascribe to malice
that which can result from simple foolishness and ignorance – it “beareth all things, believeth all things”. To me nothing in
this state of affairs seems more grievous than the struggle against hatred in
which we are daily engaged – I will not say the hatred of enemies but of our
own people.
––– letter (in
Latin) to Don Giovanni Calabria, 10 August 1948
Collected
Letters II, page 868
The “Daily Mail” has been conducting
a sort of poll on whether we should accept the Argentine terms or fight it out,
and got a thirty to one vote in favour of fighting it out: which I find
consoling from the point of view of our national morale.
––– letter to
Warfield Firor, 6 April 1949
Collected
Letters II, page 931
I too am
Irish, and entirely sympathize with you about dictation from what in the cant
of the day is called “the highest level”: but what do you happy [American]
people know about it after all? Try living in “free” England for a bit, and you
would realize what government interference can mean! And not only interference,
but interference in a “school marm” form which is
maddening. For instance, one of our rulers the other day defended rationing,
not on the only possible grounds, i.e. the economic, but on the ground that in
the old days housewives bought the food which they knew their husbands and
families liked: whereas now, thanks to the rationing, they are forced to
provide their households with “a properly balanced diet”. There are times when
one feels that a minister or two dangling from a lamp post in Whitehall would
be an attraction that would draw a hard worked man up to London!
––– letter to
Vera Mathews, 6 April 1949
Collected
Letters II, page 932
It isn’t easy to see a future
for a country which sprouted into a population far too large for it on the
strength of an immense overseas trade and an empire and has largely lost both –
just as it’s hard to see a future for Vienna with no Austrian Empire. But the
only certain thing about the future is that, whether for better or worse, it is
always quite different from what we expect.
––– letter to Vera Mathews, 11 July 1949
Collected Letters II, page
957-958
The only laugh in a deplorable
business is an interview between one of our Cabinet Ministers and your Mr.
Snyder [U.S. secretary of the Treasury]; the former is reported to
have said impressively that without a further big dollop of Marshall Aid, the
British government would fall – to which Mr. Snyder replied airily that the
fall of the present British government would produce no unfavourable repercussions
on any section of Congress, and would be hailed with relief by many. Curtain
and exeunt omnes!
We are so full of our own troubles
that we haven’t much time for following yours, and in any case I’m no great
newspaper reader; but I gather that my namesake, the miner’s leader [John L. Lewis], is a thorn
in your flesh. The fact is that only a return to
Christianity can save the world, and I’m sure you won’t think us ungrateful for
American aid if I say that golden ointment for Europe is merely a palliative
for the symptoms and not a cure for a deep seated disease.
––– letter to Vera Mathews, 5 August
1949
Collected Letters II,
page 963
The old Inegalitarian societies had at least this in
their favour, that at least some of their members
(the eldest sons of gentlemen living on inherited land, and the
agricultural labourers with no chance to rise and
therefore no thought of rising) were often really outside the competitive
struggle. I have an uneasy feeling that much of the manliness and toughness of
the community depended on them. I’m not idealising
such societies. The gentry were often bad, the peasantry often (perhaps nearly
always) ill treated. I mean only that we haven’t
solved the problem. Or, generalising this, I find the
social problem insoluble. It is “How to extend to all the good life which
unequal societies have (sometimes) produced for the few? For the good life as
(I suppose) you and I conceive it – independence, calling one’s house one’s
castle, saying “Mind your own business” to impertinent people, resisting bribes
and threats as a matter of course, culture, honour,
courtesy, un-assertiveness, the ease and elbow-room of the mind – all this is no
natural endowment of the animal Man, but the fine flower of a privileged class.
And because it is so fine a flower it breeds, within the privileged class
itself, a desire to equalise, a guilty conscience
about their privileges. (At least I don’t think the revolt from below has often
succeeded, or even got going, without this help from above). But then, the
moment you try to spread this good life you find yourself removing the very conditions
of it both from the few and from the many, in other words for all. (The
simplest case of all is when you say “Here is a beautiful solitude – let us
bring charabanc-loads of the poor townsmen to enjoy
it”: i.e. let it cease to be a beautiful solitude). The many, merely by being
the many, annihilate the goals as soon as they reach them (…)
Don’t
imagine that I am constructing a concealed argument in favour
of a return to the old order. I know that is not the solution. But what
is? Or are we assuming that there must be a solution? Perhaps in a fallen world
the social problem can in fact never be solved and we must take more seriously
– what all Christians admit in theory – that our home is elsewhere. (…)
––– letter to Warfield M. Firor, 12 March 1950
Collected Letters II, page 17-18
I don’t see how there could be institutions at all if
loyalty was abrogated the moment you didn’t like the personnel. Of
course in the case of temporary and voluntary institutions (say, this College)
there is no very acute problem. One is entitled to resign, and resignation of
course ends all the duties (and all the privileges) I had as a fellow of it. It
is much more difficult with an institution like a nation. I am sure you don’t in
fact regard all your duties to the U.S.A. as null and void the moment a party
or a President you don’t like is in power. At what point the policy of one’s
own country becomes so manifestly wicked that all one’s duties to it cease, I
don’t know. But surely mere disapproval is not enough? One must be able to say,
“What the State now demands of me is contrary to my plain moral duty.”
––– letter to Mrs
Frank L. Jones, 6 April 1950
Collected
Letters III, page 21-22
… If
“planning” is taken in the literal sense of thinking before one acts and acting
on what one has thought out to the best of one’s ability, then of course
planning is simply the traditional virtue of Prudence and not only compatible
with, but demanded by, Christian ethics. But if the word is used (as I think
you use it) to mean some particular politico-social programme,
such as that of the present British Govt., then one cd. only say after
examining that programme in detail. I don’t think I
have studied it enough to do that. As for the “planning” involved in your
social work I am of course even less qualified. It is certainly not wrong
to try to remove the natural consequences of sin provided the means by which you remove them are not in
themselves another sin. (E.g. it is merciful and Christian to remove the
natural consequences of fornication by giving the girl a bed in a maternity
ward and providing for the child’s keep and education, but wrong to remove them
by abortion or infanticide). (…) Where benevolent planning, armed with
political or economic power, can become wicked is when it tramples on people’s rights for the sake of their good. (…)
––– letter
to Mary Van Deusen, 7 February 1951
Collected
Letters III, page 91
About loving one’s country, you raise two different
questions. About one, about there seeming to be (now)
no reason for loving it, I’m not at all bothered. As Macdonald says “No
one loves because he sees reason, but because he loves.” Or say there are two
kinds of love: we love wise & kind & beautiful people because we need
them, but we love (or try to love) stupid & disagreeable people because
they need us. This second kind is the more divine, because that is how God
loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He
needs to receive but because He delights to give.
But the other question (what one is
loving in loving a country) I do find v. difficult. What I feel sure of is that
the personifications used by journalists and politicians have v. little
reality. A treaty between the Govts. of two countries is not at all like a
friendship between two people: more like a transaction between two people’s
lawyers. I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have
a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and is in
that way like love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place)
for anyone who once lived in one’s home town. The familiar is in itself a
ground for affection. And it is good: because any natural help towards
our spiritual duty of loving is good and God seems to build our higher loves
round our merely natural impulses – sex, maternity, kinship, old acquaintance,
etc. And in a less degree there are similar grounds for loving other nations –
historical links & debts for literature etc. (hence we all reverence the
ancient Greeks). But I wd. distinguish this from the talk in the papers. Mind
you, I’m in considerable doubt about the whole thing. My mind tends to move in
a world of individuals not of societies.
––– letter to
Mary Van Deusen, 25 May 1951
Collected
Letters III, page
118-119
This is the sort of thing that makes my blood boil.
The events at Rollins College [where a third of faculty members were dismissed,
presumably because they resisted an innovative teaching method] seem to me to
concentrate into one filthy amalgam every tendency in the modern world which I
most hate and despise. And, as you say, this kind of thing will put an end to
American scholarship if it goes on. Why then did I not cable to an American
paper as you suggested? My dear fellow, consider. What could unsolicited advice
from a foreigner do except to stiffen the Wagnerian party by enlisting on its
side every anti-British and every anti-God element in the state? You are asking
me to damage a good cause by what would, from an unauthorised
outsider like me, be simply impertinence. In a cooler moment (I don’t expect
you to be cool at present) you will be thankful I didn’t. God help us all. It
is terrible to live in a post-civilised age.
––– letter to Nathan Comfort Starr, 29 May 1951
Collected Letters III, page 121
I feel greatly obliged to the Prime Minister [Winston Churchill], and so far as my personal
feelings are concerned this honour would be highly
agreeable. There are always however knaves who say, and fools who believe, that
my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance
in the Honours List would of course strengthen their
hands. It is therefore better that I should not appear there. I am sure the
Prime Minister will understand my reason, and that my gratitude is and will be
none the less cordial.
––– Letter to
the Prime Minister’s secretary, 4 December 1951
Collected
Letters III, page 147
Your question about Communists-in-government really raises
the whole problem of Democracy. If one accepts the basic principle of Govt. by
majorities, how can one consistently try to suppress those problems of public
propaganda and getting-into-govt, by which majorities are formed. If the
Communists in this country can persuade the majority to sell in to Russia, or
even to set up devil-worship and human sacrifice, what is the democratic reply?
When we said “Govt. by the people” did we only mean “as long as we don’t
disagree with the people too much”? And is it much good talking about
“loyalty”? For on strictly democratic principles I suppose loyalty is
obligatory (or even lawful) only so long as the majority want it. I don’t know
the answer. Of course there is no question of its being our duty (the
minority’s duty) to obey an anti-God govt. if the majority sets it up. We shall
have to disobey and be martyred. Perhaps pure democracy is really a
false ideal.
––– letter to Mary Van Deusen, 21 February 1953
Collected Letters III, page 296
… let us
hope he [U.S. president Eisenhower] will not pursue the line of “Godliness for
the sake of national strength”. We can’t use God as a means to any end.
About Democracy and all that. Surely
we stand by equality before the Law? If no law disqualifies a man from office,
and if he has broken no law, are we entitled to exclude him because we dislike
his views? But I don’t really know the facts of your situation well enough to
apply this.
––– letter to Mary Van Deusen, 7 April 1953
Collected Letters III, page 322
About Reverence, you know, I believe all people like
us, all who come from a Western, decayed Protestant, liberal, commercial
background, have a lot of lee-way to make up. We have our own advantages over
those who come from a Latin, Catholic, decayed feudal background: our veracity,
manliness, energy. But we are spiritually ill-bred: raw & harsh
& crude like yokels in a drawing room. How much even of what we take for
democratic feeling is really gaucherie? i.e. we disapprove of “bowings
& scraping” partly because, not having had good dancing masters, we don’t
know how to bow gracefully. What a pity that the progress of democracy in this
country has meant that certain people who used to call me Sir now don’t: it
ought to have meant that I began calling them Sir. And we carry the same boorishness into spiritual
matters.
––– letter to Mary Van Deusen, 20 May 1954
Collected Letters III, page 477-478
You inflict, as well as suffering, the punishment of
Tantalus in your description of your new job. I can’t imagine what sort of
books that library contains. Is it titles like Seven Ways of Spoiling a
Landscape, The War Against Agriculture, Amenities are Bunk and
Liberty: Its Cause and Cure? But I expect you wd. commit the sin of
Tantalus if you told me.
––– letter
to I. O Evans, 10
December 1954
Collected Letters III, page 541
There was a grain of seriousness in my rally against the
Civil Service. I don’t think you have worse taste or worse hearts than other
men. But I do think that the State is increasingly tyrannical and you,
inevitably, are among the instruments of that tyranny –
The weight of Crichel Down
upon your backs,
The blood of Mr. Pilgrim on your heads.
This doesn’t matter for you who did most of your
service when the subject was still a freeman. For the rising generation it will
become a real problem, at what point the policies you are ordered to carry out
have become so iniquitous that a decent man must seek some other profession. I
expect you really feel at least as strongly as I do about it.
––– letter to I. O. Evans, 20 December 1954
Collected
Letters III, page 547
I don’t feel that “Sputnik” in itself is anything very
dangerous, but one doesn’t like the underlying implication, i.e. that its
existence proves that Russia is far ahead of your country in inter-continental
missiles. But what has alarmed me much more than Sputnik is an
article on the behaviour of the American troops in
Korea which appeared in a recent New Yorker. It is by an American doctor
who was out there, and contains some shocking facts; for instance that in the
prison camp the Americans threw their own sick comrades out to die in the snow.
Let us hope that it is much exaggerated.
––– letter to Vera Gebbert, 12 November 1957
Collected Letters III, page 895
The devil about trying to write satire now-a-days is
that reality constantly outstrips you. Ought we to be surprised at the approach
of “scientocracy”? In every age those who wish to be
our masters, if they have any sense, secure our obedience by offering
deliverance from our dominant fear. When we fear wizards the Medicine Man can
rule the whole tribe. When we fear a stronger tribe our best warrior becomes
King. When all the world fears Hell the Church becomes a theocracy. “Give up
your freedom and I will make you safe” is, age after age, the terrible offer.
In England the omnipotent Welfare State has triumphed because it promised to
free us from the fear of poverty.
Mind you,
the bargain is sometimes, for a while, kept. A warrior king may really save a
tribe from extinction: the Welfare State, at a cost, has come nearer than any
society ever did before to giving every man a square meal and a good house to
eat it in. The fears from which scientocracy offers
to free us are rational ones. We shall fairly soon hopelessly overpopulate
this planet and that population will be as defective in quality as excessive in
quantity. But we cannot trust these New Masters any more than their
predecessors. Do you see any solution?
A hundred
years ago we all thought that Democracy was it. Neither you nor I probably
think so now. It neither allows the ordinary man to control legislation nor
qualifies him to do so. The real questions are settled in secret and the
newspapers keep us occupied with largely imaginary issues. And this is all the
easier because democracy always in the end destroys education. It did so for
you sometime ago and is now doing so for us (see a
speech of Screwtape’s wh. will soon appear in the Sat. Evening Post).
I am, you see, at my wit’s end on such matters. Only a power higher than
man’s can really find a way out. Odd to compare humanity’s political
inefficiency with its wonderful success in the arts.
––– letter to
Dan Tucker, 8 December 1959
Collected
Letters II, page
1104-1105
… I’m glad
you liked the book [The Four Loves]. I quite agree with you about
Homosexuals: to make the thing criminal cures nothing and only creates a
blackmailers’ paradise. Anyway, what business is it of the State? But I
couldn’t well have had a digression on that. One is fighting on two
fronts: a. For the persecuted Homo. against snoopers and busybodies. b.
For ordinary people against the widespread freemasonry of the
highbrow Homos who dominate so much of the world of criticism and won’t be v.
nice to you unless you are in their set. (…)
––– letter to
Delmar Banner, 27 May 1960
Collected
Letters III, page 1154)
I doubt if I am a Tory. I am much more nearly a
political sceptic.
––– letter to J. B. Priestley, 18 September 1962
Collected
Letters III, page 1371
I loathed and loath Roy Campbell’s particular blend of
Catholicism and Fascism, and told him so.
––– letter to
the editor of Encounter, January 1963
Collected Letters III, page
1401
Some further political thoughts from C. S. Lewis
* from The Problem of Pain (1940), chapter
7:
…
a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as men, is at least as good a
spur to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes
which tempt men to seek their realisation by breaking the moral law and prove
such dust and ashes when they are realised. If applied to individual life, the
doctrine that an imagined heaven on earth is necessary for vigorous attempts to
remove present evil, would at once reveal its absurdity. Hungry men seek food
and sick men healing none the less because they know that after the meal or the
cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them. I am not, of course,
discussing whether very drastic changes in our social system are, or are not,
desirable; I am only reminding the reader that a particular medicine is not to
be mistaken for the elixir of life.
Since
political issues have here crossed our path, I must make it clear that the
Christian doctrine of self-surrender and obedience is a purely theological, and
not in the least a political, doctrine. Of forms of government, of civil
authority and civil obedience, I have nothing to say. The kind and degree of
obedience which a creature owes to its Creator is unique because the relation
between creature and Creator is unique: no inference can be drawn from it to
any political proposition whatsoever.
* from Dabney Hart, Through the Open Door: A New Look at C. S. Lewis (1984), page 81
(unpublished letter to Michael Lindsay Charlesworth, 9 April 1940):
The subject [political thought], after a little
reading, can be practised all day long. Start from your own political views and
regard every theory either as a welcome ally or an enemy you’ll have to
circumvent (that makes you remember them). When you hear people arguing
politics, listen, and try to see what
theories are unconsciously implied in their remarks (“that fellow is a pure
Aristotelian though he doesn’t know it”).
* from Charles Gilmore, “To the RAF”, in Como (ed.), C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (1992),
page 190, telling about his work with Lewis in the years 1943-1944:
[Lewis] thought
that if England survived, the Church of the Nation would survive but afterward,
that is, after we had won the war, “Can you keep a democracy armed in
peacetime?” he asked. No bad observation.
* from That Hideous Strength (1945), chapter 5/1, Miss Hardcastle speaking:
“Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce
Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the
other?(…).Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the
Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you
get each side outbidding the other in support of us – to refute the enemy
slanders. Of course we’re nonpolitical. The real power always is.”
* from Miracles (1947), chapter
6:
The state of affairs in which
ordinary people can discover the Supernatural only by abstruse reasoning is
recent and, by historical standards, abnormal. All over the world, until quite
modern times, the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the
philosophers percolated to the mass of the people by authority and tradition;
they could be received by those who were no great reasoners themselves in the
concrete form of myth and ritual and the whole pattern of life. In the
conditions produced by a century or so of Naturalism, plain men are being
forced to bear burdens which plain men were never expected to bear before. We
must get the truth for ourselves or go without it. There may be two
explanations for this. It might be that humanity, in rebelling against
tradition and authority, have made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not
be the less fatal because the corruptions of those in authority rendered it
very excusable. On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our
species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be
intended that the whole mass of the people should now move forward and occupy
for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages? Is
the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now
expected to become wise? If so, our present blunderings would be but growing
pains. But let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to
go back and become humble plain men obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready
to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. But the
man who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her himself is
fatal. A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society
where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass
is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only
superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we
must go; to stay here is death.
*
from Miracles (1947), chapter 14:
This selective or undemocratic quality in Nature, at least in so far as
it affects human life, is neither good nor evil. (…) It permits, on the one
hand, ruthless competition, arrogance, and envy: it permits on the other,
modesty and (one of our greatest pleasures) admiration. A world in which I was really
(and not merely by a useful legal fiction) “as good as everyone else,” in which
I never looked up to anyone wiser or cleverer or braver or more learned than I,
would be insufferable. The very “fans” of the cinema stars and the famous
footballers know better than to desire that! What the Christian story does is
not to instate on the Divine level a cruelty and wastefulness which have
already disgusted us on the Natural, but to show us in God’s act, working
neither cruelly nor wastefully, the same principle which is in Nature also,
though down there it works sometimes in one way and sometimes in the other. It
illuminates the Natural scene by suggesting that a principle which at first
looked meaningless may yet be derived from a principle which is good and fair,
may indeed be a depraved and blurred copy of it – the pathological form which
it would take in a spoiled Nature.
*
from Miracles (1947), chapter 14
…The Nature-religions merely reinforce that
view of Nature which we spontaneously adopt in our moments of rude health and
cheerful brutality; the anti-natural religions do the same for the view we take
in moments of compassion, fastidiousness, or lassitude. The Christian doctrine
does neither of these things. (…) We shall be told that, in one sense, and
despite enormous differences, it is “the same all the way up”; that
hierarchical inequality, the need for self-surrender, the willing sacrifice of
self to others, and the thankful and loving (but unashamed) acceptance of
others’ sacrifice to us, hold sway in the realm beyond Nature. It is indeed
only love that makes the difference: all those very same principles which are
evil in the world of selfishness and necessity are good in the world of love
and understanding. Thus, as we accept this doctrine of the higher world we make
new discoveries about the lower world. It is from that hill that we first
really understand the landscape of this valley. Here, at last, we find (as we
do not find either in the Nature-religions or in the religions that deny
Nature) a real illumination: Nature is being lit up by a light from beyond
Nature. Someone is speaking who knows more about her than can be known from
inside her.
*
from Miracles (1947), chapter 16:
… the evil dream of Magic arises from finite
spirit’s longing to get that power without paying that price. The evil reality
of lawless applied science (which is Magic’s son and heir) is actually reducing
large tracts of Nature to disorder and sterility at this very moment.
* from Dymer (1926), 1950 Preface:
… I was [in my
mid-twenties] already critical of my own anarchism. There had been a time when
the sense of defiant and almost drunken liberation which fills the first two
acts of [Wagner’s] Siegfried had completely satisfied me. Now, I
thought, I knew better. My hero [Dymer] therefore
must go through his Siegfried moment in Cantos I and II and find in Canto IV
what really comes of that mood in the end. For it seemed to me that two
opposite forces in man tended equally to revolt. The one criticises and at need
defies civilisation because it is not good enough, the other stabs it from
below and behind because it is already too good for total baseness to endure.
The hero who dethrones a tyrant will therefore be first fêted and afterwards
murdered by the rabble who feel a disinterested hatred of order and reason as
such. Hence, in Canto IV, Bran’s revolt which at once parodies and punishes Dymer’s.
*
from Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter 9:
He
[Kirkpatrick] had been a Presbyterian and was now an Atheist ... I hasten to
add that he was a “Rationalist” of the old, high and dry nineteenth-century
type. For Atheism has come down in the world since those days, and mixed itself
with politics and learned to dabble in dirt.
* from An Experiment in Criticism
(1961), chapter 11, page 127:
We have learned from the political sphere that committees
of public safety, witch-hunters, Ku Klux Klans, Orangemen, Macarthyites
et hoc genus omne can become dangers as great
as those they were formed to combat.
* from Letters to Malcolm (1964), chapter
18
… about the mala mentis gaudia – the pleasures of the mind which are
intrinsically evil. The pleasure, say, of having a grievance. What a
disappointment it is – for one self-revealing moment – to discover that the
other party was not really to blame? And how a resentment, while it lasts,
draws one back and back to nurse and fondle and encourage it! It behaves just
like a lust. But … given the itch, one wants to scratch it. … The scratch is
not a pleasure simply, but only by comparison with the context. In the same
way, resentment is pleasant only as a relief from, or alternative to,
humiliation.
* from the same, chapter 22
A man who first tried to guess “what the public wants,” and then preached
that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty
mixture of fool and knave.