by C. S. Lewis
We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism—the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good. But we have hardly yet begun what may be called Hedonics, the science or philosophy of Pleasure. And I submit that the first step in Hedonics is to knock the Jailer down and keep the keys henceforward in our own possession. He has dominated our minds for thirty years or so, and specially in the field of literature and literary criticism. He is a sham realist. He accuses all myth and fantasy and romance of wishful thinking: the way to silence him is to be more realist than he—to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity which the literature that he calls realistic omits. For the story which gives us the experience most like the experiences of living is not necessarily the story whose events are most like those in a biography or a newspaper.
XI
AFTER PRIGGERY—WHAT?
No doubt priggery is a horrid thing, and the more moral the horrider. To avoid a man’s society because he is poor or ugly or stupid may be bad; but to avoid it because he is wicked—with the all but inevitable implication that you are less wicked (at least in some respect)—is dangerous and disgusting. We could all go on to develop this theme at any length and without the slightest effort. Smug—complacent—Pharisaical—Victorian—parable of the Pharisee and the Publican . . . it writes itself. Upon my word, I have some difficulty in bridling the pen.
But the real question is what are we to put in the place of priggery. Private vices, we were taught long ago, are public benefits. Which means that when you remove a vice you must put a virtue in its place—a virtue which will produce the same public benefits. It will not do simply to cut out priggery and leave it at that.
These reflections arose out of the sort of conversation one often has. Suppose a man tells me that he has recently been lunching with a gentleman whom we will call Cleon. My informant is an honest man and a man of good will. Cleon is a wicked journalist, a man who disseminates for money falsehoods calculated to produce envy, hatred, suspicion, and confusion. At least that is what I believe Cleon to be; I have caught him lying myself. But it does not matter for purposes of the present argument whether my judgement of Cleon is correct or no. The point is that my honest friend fully agreed with it. The very reason why he mentioned the lunch party was that he wanted to tell me some more than usually foetid instance of Cleon’s mendacity.
That, then, is the position we are in after the expulsion of priggery. My friend believes Cleon to be as false as hell; but he meets him on perfectly friendly terms over a lunch table. In a priggish or self-righteous society Cleon would occupy the same social status as a prostitute. His social contacts would extend only to clients, fellow-professionals, moral welfare-workers, and the police. Indeed, in a society which was rational as well as priggish (if such a combination could occur) his status would be a good deal lower than hers. The intellectual virginity which he has sold is a dearer treasure than her physical virginity. He gives his patrons a baser pleasure than she. He infects them with more dangerous diseases. Yet not one of us hesitates to eat with him, drink with him, joke with him, shake his hand, and, what is much worse, very few of us refrain from reading what he writes.
It will hardly be maintained that this complaisance springs from a sudden increase of our charity. We are not associating with Cleon as a friar or a clergyman from a mission or a member of the Salvation Army might associate with the prostitute. It is not our Christian love for the villain that has conquered our hatred of the villainy. We do not even pretend to love the villain; I have never in my life heard anyone speak well of him. As for the villainy, if we do not love it, we take it as a thing of course with a tolerant laugh or a shrug. We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked—a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or the child. In a word, we have not risen above priggery; we have sunk below it.
The result is that things are a good deal too easy for Cleon. Even when the rewards of dishonesty are strictly alternative to those of honesty some men will choose them. But Cleon finds he can have both. He can enjoy all the sense of secret power and all the sweets of a perpetually gratified inferiority complex while at the same time having the entrée to honest society. From such conditions what can we expect but an increasing number of Cleons? And that must be our ruin. If we remain a democracy they render impossible the formation of any healthy public opinion. If—absit omen—the totalitarian threat is realised, they will be the cruellest and dirtiest tools of government.
I submit, therefore, that the rest of us must really return to the old and ‘priggish’ habit of sending such people to Coventry.1 And I am not quite convinced that we need to be prigs in doing so. The charge brought against us—Cleon himself will do it very well, possibly next week—will be that in cold-shouldering a man for his vices we are claiming to be better than he. This sounds very dreadful: but I wonder whether it may not be a turnip ghost?
If I meet a friend in the street who is drunk and pilot him home, I do, by the mere act of piloting him, imply that I am sober. If you press it this implies the claim that I am, for that one moment and in that one respect, ‘better’ than he. Mince it as you will, the mere brute fact is that I can walk straight and he can’t. I am not saying in the least that I am in general a better man. Or again, in a lawsuit, I say I am in the right and the other man is in the wrong. I claim that particular superiority over him. It is really quite off the point to remind me that he has qualities of courage, good-temper, unselfishness, and the like. It may well be so. I never denied it. But the question was about the title to a field or the damage done by a cow.
Now it seems to me that we can (and should) blackball Cleon at every club and avoid his society and boycott his paper without in the least claiming any general superiority to him. We know perfectly well that he may be in the last resort a better man than we. We do not know by what stages he became the thing he is, nor how hard he may have struggled to be something better. Perhaps a bad heredity . . . unpopularity at school . . . complexes . . . a disgraceful record from the last war but one still nagging him on wakeful nights . . . a disastrous marriage. Who knows? Perhaps strong and sincere political convictions first bred intense desire that his side should prevail, and this first taught him to lie for what seemed a good cause and then, little by little, lying became his profession. God knows, we are not saying that we, placed as Cleon, would have done better. But for the moment, however it came about—and let us sing non nobis loud enough to lift the roof—we are not professional liars and he is. We may have a hundred vices from which he is free. But on one particular matter we are, if you insist, ‘better’ than he.
And that one thing which he does and we do not do is poisoning the whole nation. To prevent the poisoning is an urgent necessity. It cannot be prevented by the law: partly because we do not wish the law to have too much power over freedom of speech, and partly, perhaps, for another reason. The only safe way of silencing Cleon is by discrediting him. What cannot be done—and indeed ought not to be done—by law, can be done by public opinion. A ‘sanitary cordon’ can be drawn round Cleon. If no one but Cleon’s like read his paper, much less meet him on terms of social intercourse, his trade will soon be reduced to harmless proportions.
To abstain from reading—and a fortiori from buying—a paper which you have once caught telling lies seems a very moderate form of asceticism. Yet how few practise it! Again and again I find people with Cleon’s dirty sheets in their hands. They admit that he is a rogue but ‘one must keep up with the times, must know what is being said’. That is one of the ways Cleon puts it across us. It is a fallacy. If we must find out what bad men are writing, and must therefore buy their papers, and therefore enable their papers to exist, who does not see that this supposed necessity of observing the evil is just what maintains the evil? It may in general be dangerous to ignore an evil; but not if the evil is on
e that perishes by being ignored.
But, you say, even if we ignore it others will not. Cleon’s readers are not all the half-heartedly honest people whom I describe. Some of them are real rascals like Cleon himself. They are not interested in truth. That, no doubt, is so. But I am not convinced that the number of thoroughgoing rascals is large enough to keep Cleon afloat. In the present ‘tolerant’ age he has the support and countenance not only of the rascals but of thousands of honest people as well. Is it not at least worth our while to try the experiment of leaving him and the rascals alone? We might try it for five years. Let him for five years be sent to Coventry. I doubt if you will find him still rampant at the end. And why not begin today by countermanding your order for his paper?
XII
MODERN MAN AND HIS CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT
Though we ought always to imitate the procedure of Christ and His saints this pattern has to be adapted to the changing conditions of history. We are not to preach in Aramaic because the Baptist did so nor to recline at table because the Lord reclined. One of the most difficult adaptations we have to make is in our methods of approaching the unconverted.
The earliest missionaries, the Apostles, preached to three sorts of men: to Jews, to those Judaising Gentiles who were technically called metuentes, and to Pagans. In all three classes they could count on certain predispositions which we cannot count on in our audience. All three classes believed in the supernatural (even the Epicureans, though they thought the gods inoperative). All were conscious of sin and feared divine judgement. Epicureanism, by the very fact that it promised liberation from that fear, proves its prevalence—a patent medicine can succeed only by claiming to cure a widespread disease. The mystery religions offered purification and release and in all three classes most men believed that the world had once been better than it now was. The Jewish doctrine of the Fall, the Stoic conception of the Golden Age, and the common Pagan reverence for heroes, ancestors, and ancient lawgivers, were in this respect more or less agreed.
The world which we must try to convert shares none of those predispositions. In the last hundred years the public mind has been radically altered. In producing that alteration the following causes seem to me to have been at work.
(1) A revolution in the education of the most highly educated classes. This education was formerly based throughout Europe on the Ancients. If only the learned were Platonists or Aristotelians, the ordinary aristocrat was a Virgilian or, at the very least, a Horatian. Thus in Christian and sceptic alike there was a strong infusion of the better elements of Paganism. Even those who lacked piety had some sympathetic understanding of pietàs. It was natural to men so trained to believe that valuable truth could still be found in an ancient book. It was natural to them to reverence tradition. Values quite different from those of modern industrial civilisation were constantly present to their minds. Even where Christian belief was rejected there was still a standard against which contemporary ideals could be judged. The effect of removing this education has been to isolate the mind in its own age; to give it, in relation to time, that disease which, in relation to space, we call Provincialism. The mere fact that St Paul wrote so long ago is, to a modern man, presumptive evidence against his having uttered important truths. The tactics of the enemy in this matter are simple and can be found in any military text-book. Before attacking a regiment you try, if you can, to cut it off from the regiments on each side.
(2) The Emancipation of Women. (I am not of course saying that this is a bad thing in itself; I am only considering one effect it has had in fact.) One of the determining factors in social life is that in general (there are numerous individual exceptions) men like men better than women like women. Hence, the freer women become, the fewer exclusively male assemblies there are. Most men, if free, retire frequently into the society of their own sex: women, if free, do this less often. In modern social life the sexes are more continuously mixed than they were in earlier periods. This probably has many good results: but it has one bad result. Among young people, obviously, it reduces the amount of serious argument about ideas. When the young male bird is in the presence of the young female it must (Nature insists) display its plumage. Any mixed society thus becomes the scene of wit, banter, persiflage, anecdote—of everything in the world rather than prolonged and rigorous discussion on ultimate issues, or of those serious masculine friendships in which such discussion arises. Hence, in our student population, a lowering of metaphysical energy. The only serious questions now discussed are those which seem to have a ‘practical’ importance (i.e., the psychological and sociological problems), for these satisfy the intense practicality and concreteness of the female. That is, no doubt, her glory and her proper contribution to the common wisdom of the race. But the proper glory of the masculine mind, its disinterested concern with truth for truth’s own sake, with the cosmic and the metaphysical, is being impaired. Thus again, as the previous change cuts us off from the past, this cuts us off from the eternal. We are being further isolated; forced down to the immediate and the quotidian.
(3) Developmentalism or Historicism. (I distinguish sharply between the noble discipline called History and the fatal pseudo-philosophy called Historicism.) The chief origin of this is Darwinianism. With Darwinianism as a theorem in Biology I do not think a Christian need have any quarrel. But what I call Developmentalism is the extension of the evolutionary idea far beyond the biological realm: in fact, its adoption as the key principle of reality. To the modern man it seems simply natural that an ordered cosmos should emerge from chaos, that life should come out of the inanimate, reason out of instinct, civilisation out of savagery, virtue out of animalism. This idea is supported in his mind by a number of false analogies: the oak coming from the acorn, the man from the spermatozoon, the modern steamship from the primitive coracle. The supplementary truth that every acorn was dropped by an oak, every spermatozoon derived from a man, and the first boat by something so much more complex than itself as a man of genius, is simply ignored. The modern mind accepts as a formula for the universe in general the principle ‘Almost nothing may be expected to turn into almost everything’ without noticing that the parts of the universe under our direct observation tell a quite different story. This Developmentalism, in the field of human history, becomes Historicism: the belief that the scanty and haphazard selection of facts we know about History contains an almost mystical revelation of reality, and that to grasp the Worden and go wherever it is going is our prime duty. It will be seen that this view is not incompatible with all religion: indeed it goes very well with certain types of Pantheism. But it is wholly inimical to Christianity, for it denies both creation and the Fall. Where, for Christianity, the Best creates the good and the good is corrupted by sin, for Developmentalism the very standard of good is itself in a state of flux.
(4) What we may call Proletarianism, in its various forms ranging from strict Marxism to vague ‘democracy’. A strong anti-clericalism has of course been a feature of continental Proletarianism almost from its beginnings. This element is generally said (and, I think, correctly) to be less present in the English forms. But what is common to all forms of it is the fact that the Proletariat in all countries (even those with ‘Right’ governments) has been consistently flattered for a great many years. The natural result has now followed. They are self-satisfied to a degree perhaps beyond the self-satisfaction of any recorded aristocracy. They are convinced that whatever may be wrong with the world it cannot be themselves. Someone else must be to blame for every evil. Hence, when the existence of God is discussed, they by no means think of Him as their Judge. On the contrary, they are His judges. If He puts up a reasonable defence they will consider it and perhaps acquit Him. They have no feelings of fear, guilt, or awe. They think, from the very outset, of God’s duties to them, not their duties to Him. And God’s duties to them are conceived not in terms of salvation but in purely secular terms—social security, prevention of war, a higher standard of life. ‘Religion’ is judged
exclusively by its contribution to these ends. This overlaps with the next heading.
(5) Practicality. Man is becoming as narrowly ‘practical’ as the irrational animals. In lecturing to popular audiences I have repeatedly found it almost impossible to make them understand that I recommended Christianity because I thought its affirmations to be objectively true. They are simply not interested in the question of truth or falsehood. They only want to know if it will be comforting, or ‘inspiring’, or socially useful. (In English we have a peculiar difficulty here because in popular speech ‘believe in’ has two meanings, (a) To accept as true, (b) To approve of—e.g., ‘I believe in free trade’. Hence when an Englishman says he ‘believes in’ or ‘does not believe in’ Christianity, he may not be thinking about truth at all. Very often he is only telling us whether he approves or disapproves of the Church as a social institution.) Closely connected with this unhuman Practicality is an indifference to, and contempt of, dogma. The popular point of view is unconsciously syncretistic: it is widely believed that ‘all religions really mean the same thing’.
