Posted on 03/27/2021 5:30:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
“We now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.” -C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
A masterful piece of religious prose disguised as satire, C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is a series of messages from senior devil Screwtape to his protégé Wormwood on how best to corrupt mortals. Originally released during World War II, its tight 175 pages provide charming, timeless wisdom.
In an addendum released shortly before the author’s death in 1963 – Screwtape Proposes a Toast – Lewis pivots from dispensing universal wisdom to directly criticizing social trends of his day, trends which have gone from mere whispers on college campuses 60 years ago to become orthodoxy with the power of law today. Reading it today, it feels like the author was more prophet than professor.
In the 15-page essay – full text available here – the devil Screwtape outlines how the term democracy can be warped into destroying excellence, first in the halls of education then to society at large to make sure everyone stays “equal.”
“Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose,” Screwtape tells his fellow devils. “The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic.’”
Screwtape espouses the “significant benefits” of “ungrading” decades before Brown University ever led this race to the bottom, saying:
“At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not.”
Easy to see echoes of Screwtape in the demands of progressive demagogues, like when Bernie Sanders insisted that everyone should go to college so we have “the best-educated workforce in the world” – willfully ignoring that an education void of rigor has no value at all. Screwtape all but uses the word “triggered!” to describe children in self-esteem first, outcomes last schools.
“Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! — by being left behind.”
Screwtape must be grinning at headlines about public schools eliminating gifted programs, knowing how much this hurts the segment of society most likely to build it up: the middle class.
“The removal of this class, besides linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of the spirit that says I'm as good as you. This was, after all, the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. If ever there were a bunch of stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they.”
While liberal media outlets have been bemoaning the end of the middle class in America, they have been complicit in it by advancing agendas in the name of equity. A nation of dunces is far easier to rule over – especially a generation of snowflakes who were raised by teachers who thought gold stars for everyone are more important than As and Fs for some. Screwtape continues, with relevant hyperlinks inserted:
“For ‘democracy’ or the ‘democratic spirit’ (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be. For when such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible.”
Screwtape hangs a lantern on all of this, saying, “It is our function to encourage the behaviour, the manners, the whole attitude of mind, which democracies naturally like and enjoy, because these are the very things which, if unchecked, will destroy democracy.”
Easy to see the echoes of this in the right to assemble having, irrefutably, descended into mob rule. Screwtape even notes that hell has “philological experts” intent on the “corruption of human language” – apparently hell has internships for leftist reporters who describe mob violence as “peaceful protests.”
Screwtape’s whole toast is worth a read, and shouldn’t take more than half an hour, concluding with a beautiful throwaway line that Lewis couldn’t possibly have framed more perfectly:
“The great sinners seem easier to catch. But then they are incalculable. After you have played them for seventy years, the Enemy may snatch them from your claws in the seventy-first. … They are, if things take the wrong turn, as ready to defy the social pressures around them for the Enemy's sake as they were to defy them for ours. It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.”
Single-minded contrariness goes very quickly from vice to virtue depending on where it is aimed. The fact that the Republican symbol is the elephant is mere icing on the proverbial cake.
bkmk
Highly recommend The Screwtape Letters Narrated by John Cleese. Or just read it. It’s as relevant today as ever.
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That Hideous Strength
I had no idea! Adding to reading list. Astonish how some saw this all, and tried, oh they tried...Ayn Raynd, George Orwell...
One of my favorite books...I have the audiobook version narrated by John Cleese...:)
yes that too.
I took a second reading to get past the business about the talking head.
That book was my introduction to Lewis. It really opened my eyes to concepts foreign to me at the time but a part of my being today.
I think this one deals with what is happening this last year:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
~ C.S. Lewis
My wife and I listened to that audiobook while traveling several years ago & have attended a 1-man stage adaptation, also. There are always new moments of discovery with each telling. This article is the first time I have read of the “Toast” so I look forward to reading it.
I had read Chronicles of Narnia as a child, and Mere Christianity in my late 20’s, but I only discovered this gem about 10 years ago. I had a long drive ahead of me, and I downloaded the recordings for the trip. I had run across it by accident while looking for something else. They’re are now available on YouTube. I was amazed at how timeless it is. Cleese does a fine job of delivery, too.
I was doing my yard work. At one point my wife came out of the house and said, “What are you doing? You’ve been standing the same spot for 5 minutes.”
“I’m listening to Screwtape Letters.”
“Got it.”
It is something that I could not just read (listen to) I had to study each sentence. Truly a favorite.
Mere Christianity was my second. It’s my personal favorite book outside the Bible.
The Great Divorce is also a must read. It’s kinda like science fiction and he actually said he got one of the ideas out of a story in a science fiction magazine (a time traveler that could go back in time but not alter anything to the point that raindrops would fall through his body like bullets.
Bookmark
I will put The Great Divorce on the list. I might reread Mere Christianity first; it’s probably been 25 years. Lewis was a great writer and thinker.
And if you want to be able to solidly answer atheists that say, “why would your loving god allow so many innocent people in the world to suffer”, you need to read “The problem of pain.” :)
reward the losers & punish the best = ruin
reward the parasites & punish the producers = ruin
Excellen5 read, plus the PDF of “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”! Sooooo tempting to fwd to the SJW I work with, who told me only people being canceled are those who deserve it.
Thank you very much!
I feel this way about books written by the greats like C.S. Lewis (and Fulton Sheen and Frank Sheed, for that matter. You can insert your own favorite writer here). The heartbreaking beauty and the wisdom of these books are timeless, but it seems like you would have to pull a gun on someone to make them read them. And even if you got people to read them, it is increasingly doubtful they would accept, understand, or even care what they are saying. This goes especially for our poorly educated and morally malformed youth, but today's adults are increasingly intellectually lazy and morally compromised as well.
I do continue to recommend these books and others to those who can possibly benefit from them (to not do so when given the chance would be like refusing to medicine to a sick man even though he denies he's sick). But it is a shame these works are not made more accessible to the masses who in this time of universal deceit, need them more than ever.
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